The Black Death and The Burning of Jews

The Past and Present Society
The Black Death and the Burning of Jews

Author(s): Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Source: Past & Present, No. 196 (Aug., 2007), pp. 3-36
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25096679
Accessed: 06-05-2017 06:13 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Oxford University Press, The Past and Present Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,
preserve and extend access to Past & Present
This content downloaded from 149.105.1.54 on Sat, 06 May 2017 06:13:07 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
THE BLACK DEATH AND THE BURNING
OF JEWS*
Over the past forty years, studies of the period from the First
Crusade at the end of the eleventh century to the rise of the men
dicant orders in the early thirteenth century have dominated
research into anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages.1 Curiously, far
less attention has been devoted to the most monumental of medi
eval Jewish persecutions, one that eradicated almost entirely the
principal Jewish communities of Europe ? those of the Rhine
land ? along with many other areas. Coupled with mass migra
tion that ensued, they caused a fundamental redistribution
of Jewry.2 These persecutions were the burning of Jews between
* I gave versions of this essay as a paper to the Jewish Historical Society, London, to
the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and to the Jewish History Seminar at Vanderbilt. I
have benefited from the criticisms of Rudolph Binion, Lisa Geuther-Sharp, Marion
Kozak, Pierre Monnet, David Nirenberg, Debra Strickland, Bernard and David
Wasserstein, Chris Wickham and others.
1 For this rich literature, see the many recent works by Robert Chazan, Jeremy
Cohen, R. I. Moore and Kenneth Stow (several of which are cited below), and the
review by David Berger, From Crusades to Blood Libels to Expulsions: Some New
Approaches to Medieval Antisemitism (New York, 1997).
2 For instance, an article search in the International Medieval Bibliography (Brepolis,
Jan. 2006) on Jews produced 1,945 hits of which 15 supposedly concern Jews and the
Black Death (one title is repeated). For most of these, however, the Black Death
appears only as the reference point for beginning or ending an investigation or as an
aside for an examination of the persecutions of 1320-1. Hence, less than a handful of
the titles actually examine the massacres of 1348-9. A recent symposium on medieval
Jewry that focused on Western Europe, Christoph Cluse (ed.), The Jews of Europe in the
Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries): Proceedings of the International Symposium
Held at Speyer, 20-25 October 2002 (Turnhout, 2004), confirms this impression. Of its
thirty-five articles, less than two pages of one article Qorg Mulier, lErez gererah ?
"Land of Persecution": Pogroms against the Jews in the regnum Teutonicum from
c.1280 to 1350', 256-7) addresses the Black Death pogroms, motivations and con
sequences. Similarly, recent surveys of anti-Semitism give only scant (if any) attention
to the Black Death massacres. See, for instance, Edward H. Flannery, The Anguish of
the Jews: Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, 2nd edn (New York, 1985); Rosemary
Radford Ruether, Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism
(New York, 1974); Barnet Litvinoff, The Burning Bush: Anti-Semitism and World
History (London, 1988); Gavin I. Langmuir, Toward a Definition of Antisemitism
(Berkeley, 1990); Graham Keith, Hated without a Cause? A Survey of Anti-Semitism
(Carlisle, 1997); Albert S. Lindemann, Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise
of the Jews (Cambridge, 1997). For earlier studies on the consequences of plague and
persecution on Jewish communities and population, see, for example, Salo W. Baron,
(cont. on p. 4)
Past and Present, no. 196 (Aug. 2007) ? The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2007
doi: 10.1093/pastj/gtm005
4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 196
1348 and 1351, when in anticipation of, or shortly after, out
breaks of plague Jews were accused of poisoning food, wells and
streams, tortured into confessions, rounded up in city squares or
their synagogues, and exterminated en masse.3 From the numer
ous surviving German chroniclers, who described and often tal
lied the numbers murdered, and from the Hebrew Memorbuch and
martyrologies, historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centu
ries listed and mapped the sequence of these persecutions in great
detail. In the past several years, German scholars have added fur
ther details to these maps of Jewish destruction.4 The social char
acter of that persecution (who ordered and led the massacres, who
were its initial targets, and what were the motives?), however,
remains hypothetical, often based on unexamined assumptions
about the character and reasons for the killing of Jews. These
derive from generalizations about Jews and their killers that are
(n. 2 com.)
A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 2nd edn, 18 vols. (New York, 1952-83), xi,
160-4, 365-7; Joseph Shatzmiller, 'Les Juifs de Provence pendant la Peste Noire',
Revue des etudes juives, cxxxiii (1974), esp. 471; Kenneth R. Stow, Alienated Minority:
The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 299. On the 1348-51
pogroms as the largest murder of Jews before the Holocaust ofthe twentieth century,
see Klaus Bergdolt, Der Schwarze Tod in Europa: die Grosse Pest und das Ende des
Mittelalters (Munich, 1995), 119; Jorg R. Mulier, 'Judenverfolgungen und -vertrei
bungen zwischen Nordsee und Siidalpen im hohen und spaten Mittelalter', in Alfred
Haverkamp (ed.), Geschichte derjuden im Mittelalter von der Nordsee bis zu den Siidalpen,
kommentiertes Kartenwerk, 3 vols. (Hannover, 2002), i, 213; Michael Toch, Diejuden
im mittelalterlichen Reich (Munich, 1998), 12-13, 57, 61-2.
3 By contrast, Robert Chazan, 'From the First Crusade to the Second: Evolving
Perceptions ofthe Christian-Jewish Conflict', in Michael Signer and John Van Engen
(eds.), Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe (Notre Dame, Ind., 2001), esp.
48, has argued that the persecutions of 1096 hardly altered demographic realities;
instead they proved to be a positive watershed for Jewish communities in the
Rhineland with subsequent demographic, economic and cultural flourishing through
the twelfth century, if not later.
4 For example, see the detailed summaries of these persecutions, city by city, in
[Joseph Jacobs], 'Black Death', in Isidore Singer (ed.), The Jewish Encyclopedia: A
Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People
from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, new edn, 12 vols. (New York, 1925), iii, 233-6;
the meticulous reconstructions by Frantisek Graus, Pest? Geissler?Judenmorde: das
14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit (Gottingen, 1987), 159-67, 249; the maps drawn in
Mulier, 'Erezgererah ? "Land of Persecution"', 252-3; the survey of 1,029 commu
nities across German defined widely from parts ofthe Low Countries to Austria, the
Tyrol and large tracts of Eastern Europe, Germania Judaica, ii, Von 1238 bis zurMitte
des 14. Jahrhunderts, ed. Zvi Avneri, 2 pts (Tubingen, 1968); and, most recently, the
'dynamic' maps ofthe spread ofthe pogroms in Alfred Haverkamp, 'Zur Chronologie
der Verfolgungen zur Zeit des "Schwarzen Todes"', in Haverkamp (ed.), Geschichte
derjuden im Mittelalter, i, 223-42.
THE BLACK DEATH AND THE BURNING OF JEWS 5
Detail from Hartmann Schedel, Liber cronicarum cumfiguris etymaginibus ab inicio

mundi [the Nuremberg Chronicle] (Nuremberg, 1493), fo. 230v, Sp. Coll. Euing
BD9-a2. By permission of the Librarian, Department of Special Collections,
Glasgow University Library.
taken as near timeless over the course of the European Middle

Ages, to the Holocaust of the twentieth century and beyond.5
Were the Jewish massacres around the time of the Black Death
popular insurrections spurred on by Jewish exploitation, princi
pally in their role as moneylenders? This essay investigates the
5 Even with the exemplary research and close attention to sources seen in Leon
Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, i, From Roman Times to the Court Jews
(1955), trans. Richard Howard (London, 1974), such assumptions seep between
the lines: he saw the scourge of Black Death and by implication its consequences for
Jews as coming from 'simpler minds' (p. 109). See the historiographical discussion
below as well as recent surveys of anti-Semitism such as the otherwise well-researched
volume attentive to historical detail, Lindemann, Esauys Tears, 37: 'During the times of
the most notorious attacks on Jews, such as the crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, the episodes of Black Death in the fourteenth century, and the religious wars
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the attackers were generally the lawless and
desperate elements of the population, over whom the church ? or any other author
ities ? had little control'. He then goes on to claim that the Jews 'were tempting
because they were often relatively wealthy'.
sources of the 1348-51 persecution in the context of popular
rebellion in Europe during the later Middle Ages and compares
the Black Death massacres with those later in the century, arguing
that the two differed in the social composition of perpetrators and
victims and in their underlying psychological causes. Such com
parisons show that transhistorical explanations of violence to
wards Jews ? even ones that argue for fundamental changes in
anti-Semitism with the birth of Christianity, the later Christian
ization of Europe in the fourth century, or the rise of a more
aggressive Church and states in the twelfth century6 ? fail to
do justice to the sources or account for the vagaries of history.
External events such as the unprecedented mortalities of the
Black Death could rapidly transform the face of hatred, and after
wards, within a generation or less, the perpetuators and motives
for violence could shift fundamentally yet again.7
6 For such transhistorical theses, see Benzion Netanyahu, The Origins of the
Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (New York, 1995), and David Nirenberg's criti
cism of it in his 'Enmity and Assimilation: Jews, Christians, and Converts in Medieval
Spain', Common Knowledge, ix (2003), 138-9; Judith Gold, Monsters and Madonnas:
The Roots of Christian Anti-Semitism, 2nd edn (Syracuse, NY, 1999), who asserts that
from ad 394 to the Nazis, Jew hatred was motivated by fear of incest; or Flannery,
Anguish of the Jews, who turns to Freud and advises that 'we must leave the plane of
history' to understand Jewish hatred and look 'to the inner sources ofthe soul... from
all angles it was an anti-religious one' (pp. 292-3). For others who see Christianity's
competition with Judaism as the source and explanation of modern and contemporary
anti-Semitism, see Keith, Hated without a Cause?; Ernest L. Abel, The Roots of Anti
Semitism (London, 1975); Charles Y Glock and Rodney Stark, Christian Beliefs and
Anti-Semitism, 2nd edn (Westport, 1979), 32, 147-9. For the twelfth century as the
crucial break, creating a new anti-Semitism based on 'chimerical fantasies' that would
define and lead inexorably to the Holocaust, see Langmuir, Toward a Definition of
Antisemitism. For a critique of his claims from the perspective of ancient history, see
Peter Schafer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge,
Mass., 1997), 200-3. For the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debate on
whether economics or religion was the prime mover of anti-Semitism across the
Middle Ages from the First Crusade to the Reformation, see Guido Kisch's historio
graphic survey in his The Jews in Medieval Germany: A Study of their Legal and Social
Status (Chicago, 1949), 322-31.
7 It has recently even been argued that the massive destruction of Jewish commu
nities bore no relation to the anxieties sparked by the Black Death: Iris Ritzmann,
'Judenmord als Folge des "Schwarzen Todes": ein medizinhistorischer Mythos?',
Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte: Jahrbuch des Instituts fur Geschichte der Medizin
der Robert Bosch Stifung, xvii (1999). See also the strong refutation of this thesis by
Karl-Heinz Leven, 'Schwarzer Tod, Brunnenvergiftung und Judenmord ? nur ein
medizinhistorischer Mythos?', Praxis, lxxxix (2000). But this critique also pitches the
Jewish burning on a transhistorical plane that extends from Thucydides to the modern
period.
In recent work I have argued that the Black Death realigned the
trajectories of social conflict north and south of the Alps.8 From
two separate paths before 1348, the experience of plague unified
trends north and south, despite the lack of any evidence of joint
co-ordination or communication linking such distant insurgents
across the Alps. First, for the Black Death and its immediate after
math, 1348-52, social movements with concrete aims to redress
economic grievances, challenge political authority or question
prevailing social hierarchies are difficult to find either north or
south of the Alps. In Tuscany, the Black Death abruptly termina
ted workers' newly acquired zeal to topple governments or protest
against burgeoning capitalist exploitation as in revolts of artisans
and disenfranchised workers in Siena, Florence and Bologna earl
ier in the fourteenth century. By 1345, such insurgents had
formed working men's associations with strike funds, attempted
to overthrow merchant oligarchies, created (even if only moment
arily) their own guilds, and claimed rights as citizens. From the
outbreak of pestilence in 1348 to around 1355, by contrast, the
chronicles and archival sources ? judicial records, town council
deliberations and decrees ? give few signs of popular revolt.
In France, revolts, even minor skirmishes, are more difficult to
find between the Black Death and Etienne Marcel's movements
against the regent Charles and the Jacquerie of 1358, despite an
older pre-plague tradition of insurgence by the menupeuple, espe
cially in the north of France and Flanders, that reached back to at
least 1245. From my sampling of nearly three hundred chron
icles, less than a handful of popular revolts appear for the years
immediately after the Black Death, and the most prominent of
these were initiated by elites rather than artisans or peasants.9
8 Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe: Italy, France, and Flanders, ed. and trans.
Samuel K. Conn (Manchester, 2004); Samuel K. Conn, Lust for Liberty: The Politics of
Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425. Italy, France, and Flanders (Cambridge,
Mass., 2006); Samuel K. Cohn, 'Popular Insurrection and the Black Death: A
Comparative Perspective', in Christopher Dyer, Peter Coss and Chris Wickham
(eds.), Rodney Hilton*s Middle Ages (Past and Present Supplement no. 2, Oxford,
2007).
9 Cohn, Lust for Liberty, ch. 9. From exhaustive research into the secondary litera
ture, Bernard Chevalier finds even less evidence of popular insurrection in this period:
see his 'Corporations, conflits politiques et paix sociale en France aux XTVe et XVe
siecles', in Bernard Chevalier (ed.), Les Bonnes Villes, Vetat et la societe dans la France de
la fin du XVe siecle (Orleans, 1995), 285.
Despite the rarity of such social revolts, the Black Death none
theless gave rise to mass movements and violence: flagellant
groups and the burning of Jews swept across German-speaking
areas, Spain, France and the Low Countries from September
1348 to 1351.10 Italy may have been somewhat exceptional,11
but even here the Jewish communities of Mantua and Parma
were attacked, and these may not have been isolated cases.12 In
Sicily, Catalans took the place of the Jews as widespread mas
sacres of these foreigners spread in 1348 from Palermo to
Agrigento, Trapani and most of the Val de Mazara.13
The abbot of Tournai, Gilles li Muisis, recorded daily the emo
tions that swung from free love to competing forms of ritualistic
purging and devotion. These hardly show the immediate post
plague period as peaceful, even in Flanders, where mass persecu
tion and the burning of Jews was not nearly as widespread as in
Germany, southern France, and Spain.14 This violence, however,
differed markedly from the organized protests of peasants, labour
ers or bourgeois against city councils, counts or kings seen before
the plague. First, although these ritual groups with their distinctive
garb and penitential practices could not have sprung forth spon
taneously, or 'literally [have] had no head', as Henry of Hervodia
and other German chroniclers claimed,15 the sources give little
10 On the geographical dimensions of the Black Death pogroms, see Germania

Judaica, ed. Avneri, ii, pp. xxxvii-xxxix.
11 England may have been exceptional as well, since it had few Jews to attack, having
expelled them in 1290: see Christopher Harper-Bill, 'The English Church and English
Religion after the Black Death', in W. M. Ormrod and P. G. Lindley (eds.), The Black
Death in England (Stamford, 1996), 107. However, according to Raymond Crawfurd,
Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art (Oxford, 1914), 125, 'In England the Black
Death served to revive the perennial charges brought against the Jews'.
12 Cecil Roth, The History of the Jews of Italy (Philadelphia, 1946), 142.
13 Michele da Piazza, Cronaca, ed. Antonino Giuffrida (Palermo, 1980), 92.
14 Mass executions of Jews occurred in neighbouring Hainault and Brabant: see
Roger Kohn, Les Juifs de la France du Nord dans la seconde moitie du XIVe siecle
(Louvain, 1988), 10; Germania Judaica, ed. Avneri, ii, 100, 140. For cities in
France and Spain, see Bergdolt, Der Schwarze Tod in Europa, 143, 240.
15 See translation in The Black Death, ed. and trans. Rosemary Horrox (Manchester,
1994), 150-3: 'They suddenly sprang up in all parts of Germany... They were said, as
if in confirmation ofthe prophecy, to be without a head either because they literally had
no head ? that is to say no one to organize and lead them ? or because they had no
head in the sense of having no brain and no judgment' (p. 150). This source then
describes the violence between the flagellants and the clergy, the Dominicans in par
ticular. Other sources, moreover, referred to the flagellants as 'the headless sect'
('die kopflose Sekte' and 'acephala gens'), which, according to Klaus Arnold,
'Pest ? Geissler ? Judenmorde: das Beispiel Wurzburg', in Dieter Rodel and
Joachim Schneider (eds.), Strukturen der Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: interdisziplinare
(com. on p. 9)
indication of prior planning, assemblies or elected leaders, if elec
tions in fact took place.16 None appears even in a chronicle as
meticulous as that of the abbot of Tournai, who devoted most of
an entire second chronicle to the flagellants and other penitent
movements based on eyewitness reporting in his city. Secondly,
few names of individual leaders emerge from the chronicles, con
demnations or other official documents, and those few who do
emerge were members of the Church or the aristocracy.17 Further,
while mendicants and various penitent groups battled among
themselves, the violence that fills the chronicles for 1348-50
reveals little hint of class cleavages. Rather than struggling for
concrete goals or redressing specific political, economic or social
grievances, this violence targeted forces outside political and eco
nomic hierarchies to resolve anxieties, fears and anger. In the
case of accusations of well-poisoning, it was outsiders ? Jews,
Catalans, foreign beggars or simply the poor ? who served as
scapegoats. Or, pitched further afield, other outside forces were
blamed ? God's wrath or the configurations of stars. Some
times these outside causes were combined, as by a burgess of
Narbonne, deputy of Aymer, Vicomte of Narbonne: after report
ing the torturing and sentencing to death by hot pincers, disem
bowelling, and burning of many poor ? beggars accused of
poisoning rivers, churches and foodstuffs in April 1348, he con
cluded, 'we believe that it is certainly the combined effects of the
planets and the potions which are causing the mortality'.18
(n. 15 cont.)
Mediavistik in Wurzburg (Wiesbaden, 1996), 367, was a standard name for the flagel
lants. On the religious belief of the flagellants, see, most recently, Mitchell B. Merback,
'Living Image of Pity: Mimetic Violence, Peacemaking and Salvific Spectacle in
the Flagellant Processions of the Later Middle Ages', in Debra Higgs Strickland
(ed.), Images of Medieval Sanctity: Essays in Honour of Gary Dickson (Leiden, 2007),
151-9.
16Graus, Pest? Geissler?Judenmorde, 49-51, emphasizes the flagellants' organ
ization, given their detailed dress and rituals, but points to no elected leaders, assem
blies or social programmes. In fact, he maintains the opposite: the flagellants of 1349
did not constitute a social movement; nor did they have any social or political agenda
(pp. 54-5). See also Bergdolt, Der Schwarze Tod in Europa, 107-19.
17 According to Kervyn de Lettenhove, Histoire de Flandre, 6 vols. (Brussels, 1847
50), iii, 358, Tournai had three leaders: two were knights and the other a canon of
Saint-Nicolas-des-Pres, but he does not indicate that they were named in the sources.
18 Black Death, ed. Horrox, 223. Beggars were also attacked as plague spreaders at
Carcassonne and Grasse, and the same happened to pilgrims in Catalonia: see Jean
Noel Biraben, Les Hommes et la Peste en France et dans les pays europeens et mediterraneans,
2 vols. (Paris, 1975-6), i, 59.
I
I have argued elsewhere that this chronological development
violence and social protest followed tracks traced by other avenue
of thought and action, such as with changes in approach toward
and attitudes about plague seen in doctors' tracts and chron
cles.19 In plague tracts written in the immediate aftermath oft
Black Death, doctors turned either to the stars and other 'remot
causes' of plague or in utter despondency to God, claiming th
human intervention was of little use. As the Montpellier doctor
Simon de Couvain lamented in 1350, the Black Death had le
medicine in confusion; 'the art of Hippocrates was lost'. Chro
clers faced the Black Death with similar pessimism about the ef
cacy of human action to combat it (apart, that is, from an appeal
God's mercy?sin had brought on God's scourge, and only pray
could calm it). These writers showed even less confidence in doc
tors and science. As the Sienese Agnolo di Tura and the Florenti
Matteo Villani saw it, doctors either ran off with plague patients
money or hastened their deaths. Further, these writers pictured
the plague's origins in apocalyptic fantasies of black snows meltin
mountains, floods of snakes and toads, and eight-legged worm
that killed with their stench.
These are the images that historians have tended to remember
and, many have assumed, that filled the plague-ridden years ofth
later Middle Ages and the early modern period, but what is extr
ordinary is just how quickly these explanations and images d
appeared. By the 1360s and increasingly towards the end ofth
century, doctors and chroniclers turned about-face. From utter
despondency, doctors began to boast of the number of plagu
patients they now claimed to have cured with their newly devis
surgical interventions and medical recipes. With experience a
experimentation, they claimed to have gone beyond the ancients
in understanding epidemics and in the art of healing; their gen
eration of doctors had triumphed over plague ? and even ov
nature herself. Similarly, the chroniclers turned from anti-docto
diatribes to include doctors' plague recipes within their chron
cles, and advised their readers to seek out valiant doctors fo
19 What follows summarizes data drawn from over five hundred chronicles and tw
hundred plague tracts discussed in Samuel K. Cohn, The Black Death Transforme
Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (London, 2002); and from 1,1
revolts and popular movements analysed in Cohn, Lust for Liberty.
protection against plague. Natural causes ? war, overcrowding
and poverty?replaced the 1348 tales of toads and black snows to
explain the repeated bouts of plague.
Why the sudden shift? As the pope's doctor Raymundus de
Chalmelli recalled in 1383, mortality and morbidity had declined
steeply and steadily with each successive plague from 1348 ? a
trend that surviving documents such as last wills and testaments,
necrologies and burial records can now largely corroborate. Along
with other contemporaries, both medical and lay, Chalmelli saw
this steady improvement not as a function of bodily immunity or
natural selection, but as the consequence of conscious human
intervention ? political, legal, administrative and principally
medical. I argue that the same about-face in attitudes occurred
with populations more generally. From 1348 to 1350, wide groups
of people faced the plague with little hope and turned inwardly
against the self in ceremonious expiation, or outwardly beyond
society to God or against the outsider ? the beggar, the foreigner
and the Jew. Afterwards, however, from the mid 1350s to the
1380s, and in most places on to the early fifteenth century,
social violence changed. Quiescence, flagellant purging, and the
mass murder of beggars, Catalans or Jews disappear from the
records. With increasing regularity peasants, artisans and bour
geois now directed their misgivings and frustration against those
in power within society. They organized themselves to oppose
royal and town taxes, economic exploitation, legal and social
injustice. Above all else, they sought rights of citizenship to par
ticipate in government and determine the broad contours of their
daily affairs. Like the plague doctors and chroniclers, they now
possessed a new confidence in their abilities to change society, the
here and now, in concrete, practical ways.
II
But did the violence of 1348-51 lack a class dimension and an
economic rationale? According to the historiography, we should
have our doubts. A historian of the Black Death has even pro
claimed: 'One of the most important effects of the Black
Death was its role in the provocation of popular rebellion'.20
The flagellants have been seen by Norman Cohn and others as
20 Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval
Europe (London, 1983), 97. Although Gottfried goes on to describe the big three
revolts of the late fourteenth century (the Jacquerie, Ciompi, and English Peasants'
(com. on p. 12)
a movement ofthe poor, composed of peasants, weavers and co

blers; but Cohn does not cite his sources, and I have not found any
documents to back his claims.21 The German chroniclers instead
described the flagellants emphatically as lacking any class basis.
To quote the principal chronicle of Mainz, Chronicon Mogunti
num, they included 'those of great wealth and lesser wealth as
well as paupers; the old along with the young, circulated every
where cruelly whipping themselves'.22 Gilles li Muisis describe
various penitent groups ? and not just flagellants ? who
marched through his town in 1349: from lashings with cattle
prong whips to foot washing, their penitent performances an
search for followers erupted in violent conflicts for ritual space
in front of Tournai's principal churches. Judging by these near
daily accounts, none of the penitent groups was made up of the
poor or the rabble. Just the opposite: even though the flagellants
at times defied the local clergy and eventually the city councillors
of Tournai, noblemen and noble ladies filled their ranks. Inspired
by the penitents' example, women ended their open adultery and
put aside their jewels and slinky gowns to join the flagellants
which hardly suggests destitution.23 Further, as other contem
porary chroniclers such as Closener of Strasbourg and Matthia
of Neuenberg make clear, 'the flagellants were certainly not
movement ofthe underclass'.24
Jewish historians, thinking along similar lines, have charge
that artisans and peasants comprised the 'mobs' who accused
(n. 20 com.)
Revolt of 1381), he sees them as stemming from the collapse of law and order set off in
1348.
21 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and
Mystical Anarchists ofthe Middle Ages, 2nd edn (London, 1970), 128,137: 'The move
ment always consisted in the main of peasants and artisans'.
22 Chronicon Moguntinum 1347-1406 und Fortsetzung bis 1478, in Die Chroniken der
mittelrheinischen Stadte: Mainz, ed. K. Hegel, 2 vols. (Die Chroniken der deutschen
Stadte, xvii-xviii, Leipzig, 1881-2), ii, 158; see also ContinuatioMellicensis, ed. Ludwig
Konrad Bethmann (Monumenta Germaniae Historica [hereafter MGH], Scriptores,
ix, Hannover, 1851), 513, says much the same. For Graus, Pest ? Geissler ?
Judenmorde, 49, 53-4, it was a wide movement that cut across social groups but was
hardly one dominated by the 'rabble' or lower classes. Farm labourers even needed the
permission of their lords to join the movement. Richard Kieckhefer, 'Radical Tenden
cies in the Flagellant Movement of the Mid Fourteenth Century', Jl Medieval and
Renaissance Studies, iv (1974), 160, even questions whether the flagellants had any
lower-class constituency in German-speaking areas and the Low Countries.
23 Chronicon Aegidii Li Muisis, abbatis Sancti-Martini Tornacensis alteram, in Corpus
Chronicorum Flandriae, ed. J.-J. de Smet, 4 vols. (Brussels, 1837-65), iii, 341-2.
24 Graus, Pest ? Geissler ?Judenmorde, 53.
Jews of well- and food-poisoning in attempts to end Christendom
and then retaliated by murdering the Jews by mass conflagration.
Carlo Ginzburg, for instance, has seen a sharp break between the
persecutions of 1321 that began with the lepers but finished with
blaming Jews and those movements that, twenty-seven years later,
spread across great tracts of Europe following the plague. In 1321:
the political and religious authorities . . . directed the latent hostilities of
the populace against precise targets. In 1348-9 those who wielded power
had taken very different positions toward the supposed conspiracy: some
had been opposed, some had yielded to the pressures of the mob,
some had possibly anticipated them. But this time the pressure from
below carried much greater weight. One gets the impression that in the
space of thirty years, in a generation, the obsession with conspiracy had
formed a thick sediment in the popular mentality. The outbreak or, more
often, the mere imminence of the plague had brought it to the surface.25
Others have portrayed the Black Death pogroms in still starker

terms as a class struggle against elites, who were protecting Jews
against 'the ordinary folk'. According to Mordechai Breuer, these
'ordinary folk' hated the Jews because they had 'served the mer
chants and the aristocrats, and with their loans and with their
capital, helped establish the urban economy and the city's gov
erning political and territorial independence'. Further, the Jews
had exploited artisans 'with loans at usurious rates'.26 Others
have pushed the case for class struggle further still, seeing the
massacres as the revenge of impoverished debtors against a priv
ileged elite of Jewish creditors: 'Those of the working classes'
confronted 'Jewish rentiers and capitalists' to cancel their debts
and seize the Jews' wealth.27 Certainly, earlier waves of Jewish
25 Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, trans. Raymond

Rosenthal (Harmondsworth, 1992), 68. Before him, Benedicte Bauchau, 'Science
et racisme: les juifs, la lepre et la peste', Stanford French Rev., xiii (1989), 24, concluded
the opposite about 1320-1: 'Ce soulevement populaire est le premier, dans l'histoire
des relations judeo-chretiennes, a manifester clairement la composante populaire et
profane de l'antisemitisme'.
26 Mordechai Breuer, 'The "Black Death" and Antisemitism', in Shmuel Almog
(ed.) and Nathan H. Reisner (trans.), Antisemitism through the Ages (Exeter, 1988),
145. For a similar view, see Biraben, Les Hommes et la Peste, i, 57-65.
27 Despite recognizing the heroic stance of the guild government headed by Peter
Swaber to protect the Jews and the overthrow of that government by Bishop Berthold
aided by patricians and the rural aristocracy, Max Ephraim, 'Histoire des Juifs
d'Alsace et particulierement de Strasbourg depuis le milieu du XIIIe jusqu'a la fin
du XTVe siecle', pt 1, Revue des etudes juives, lxxvii (1923), 154; pt 2, ibid., lxxviii
(1924), 50-2, claimed that the underlying cause of the 1349 auto-da-fe of the Jews
at Strasbourg and elsewhere derived from 'popular passion' and an economic drive
(com. on p. 14)
persecution can point to the participation of artisans and peasants
and may have had economic motives;28 but what is the evidence
for the Black Death massacres?
It is true that some at the pinnacle of power, such as Duke
Albrecht of Austria (at least initially) and especially Pope
Clement VI, seem to have risen above the hysteria, seeing the vio
lence against the Jews as irrational and dangerous to Christian
society. Early on, Clement promulgated Sicutjudeis (26 Septem
ber 1348), which argued that Jews were dying in numbers as great
as the Christians, and that they would not have been so stupid
as to poison themselves. Moreover, Christians were victims of
plague in places such as England where there were no Jews.29
Duke Albrecht appears to fit more or less Ginzburg's second
category ? those who initially opposed killing the Jews but who
eventually bent under 'mob' pressure and capitulated.30 In the
(n. 27 com.)
among the lower classes to seize Jewish property and cancel their debts. For later
arguments that advanced this idea, elevating it to a class struggle between 'proletariat'
debtors and privileged Jews who were their creditors, see the review of the literature
by Alfred Haverkamp, 'Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes im
Gesellschaftsgefuge deutscher Stadte', in Alfred Haverkamp (ed.), Zur Geschichte
der Juden im Deutschland des spdten Mittelalters und der fruhen Neuzeit (Stuttgart,
1981), 31-5, and especially the study of Erfurt by Werner Magdefrau, Der Thuringer
Stddtebund im Mittelalter (Weimar, 1977). Earlier, Giinter Franz, Der deutsche
Bauernkrieg (Munich and Berlin, 1933), 74, soon to join the National Socialists,
had come to the same conclusions as the later Marxist Magdefrau about the Jewish
persecutions ofthe Black Death. According to Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 478,
Franz produced no evidence for these 'hypothetical assertions'. Still, more recent
historians such as Graus, Pest ? Geissler?Judenmorde, 360-1, have speculated that
exploitation of peasants and the poor by Jewish moneylenders was an underlying cause
ofthe Black Death persecutions. As with previous historians on both the right and the
left, he gives no evidence of it.
28 The literature on the Jewish massacres spurred on by the religious zeal ofthe First
Crusades in 1096 is vast. For subsequent attacks on the Jews at the end ofthe thir
teenth and early fourteenth centuries in German-speaking lands (regnum Teutonicum)
such as the 'Rintfleisch' Persecutions (1298), perhaps led by a butcher, and other
pogroms stirred by claims of the desecration of the Host, see Mulier, 'Erez gererah
? "Land of Persecution'". He maintains that for these 'the persecutors themselves
were mostly craftsmen and wage labourers' (p. 253) and the Jewish pogroms in
Franconia during the summer of 1337 'were committed primarily by roving farm
labourers', even though they were probably led by the nobility, who were the ones
heavily indebted to Jewish moneylenders (p. 255).
29 See The Apostolic See and the Jews: Documents, 492-1404, ed. Shlomo Simonsohn
(Studies and Texts, xciv, Toronto 1988), 397-8. According to Biraben, Les Hommes et
la Peste, i, 60, Pedro IV 'the Ceremonius' also intervened to protect the Jews in Aragon
and Catalonia.
30 Earlier, Duke Albrecht had successfully interceded with Pope Benedict XII
against the perpetrators ofthe 'Pulkau' Host desecration on Easter Day, 1338: see
(com. on p. 15)
town of Zofingen (diocese of Constance), the Jewish community

had been accused of poisoning wells, but only two Jews had been
tortured and killed on the wheel because the duke had intervened
and ordered an end to the persecution. In January 1349, however,
local rulers in Winterthur and Diessenhoven challenged the duke's
protection of the Jews, demanding that he burn the Jews or they
would do the job for him. The duke capitulated, and by an order
from his own judges, he burned the Jews throughout the counties
under his protection.31 On the other hand, the 'enlightened'
Emperor Charles IV of Bohemia, known for his cultural develop
ment of Prague and central Europe, was less equivocal and hardly a
beacon of rationality when it came to Jews. Instead of protecting
them, in advance of the persecutions he made arrangements for the
disposal of Jewish property and granted immunity to leading bur
ghers, bishops and knights at Nuremberg, Regensburg, Augsburg
and Frankfurt so that they could direct and engage in the execution
of Jews there. Further, after the massacres, he cancelled debts
owed to Jews by local elites in many other towns across German
speaking territories.32
Similarly, German chroniclers, who represented a cross-sec
tion of intellectual elites, both secular and ecclesiastical, show a
wide spectrum of attitudes and beliefs concerning the question
of Jews poisoning wells; but on the whole they did not side with
the Jews, nor were they repulsed by the anti-Semitic hysteria
and mass murder. Matthias of Neuenberg was one of the few to
sympathize with the 'unfortunate' plight of the Jews, and clearly
(n. 30 com.)
Mulier, 'Erez gererah ? "Land of Persecution"', 256. Similarly, in 1348 in the
Dauphine and in Savoy, the dauphin and count initially resisted the persecution of
the Jews but afterwards conducted the massacres themselves: Biraben, Les Hommes et
la Peste, i, 60.
31 Black Death, ed. Horrox, 209-10.
32Among others, see Graus, Pest ? Geissler ? Judenmorde, 221-Al; Joshua
Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its
Relation to Modern Antisemitism (1943), 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 1983), 105;
Haverkamp, 'Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes', 65; Mulier,
lErez gererah ? "Land of Persecution"', 257; Bergdolt, Der Schwarze Tod in Europa,
136-9. For Charles's pardon to those in Strasbourg who burned the Jews, see
Urkunden und Akten der Stadt Strassburg: Urkundenbuch der Stadt Strassburg, v,
Politische Urkunden vom 1332 bis 1380, ed. Hans Witte and Georg Wolfram
(Strassburg, 1896), no. 217; for other towns in Alsace, see Ephraim, 'Histoire des
Juifs d'Alsace', pt 1, pp. 137-8; pt 2, p. 55. For Augsburg, Colmar, Memmingen,
Nordlingen, Sankt Gallen, Schlettstadt, Strasbourg and LTberlingen, see Germania
Judaica, ed. Avneri, ii, 36, 418, 535, 595, 734, 745, 803, 840.
disbelieved the rumours of well-poisoning and the confessions
ofthe soon-to-be-burned Jews made under torture.33 Henry of
Hervodia narrated the horrific suffering ofthe Jews, 'cruelly slain
... women with their small children cruelly and inhumanly fed to
the flames'.34 Most ofthe German chroniclers, however, simply
reported that the Jews were burned in 1349, gave the saint's day
of the burnings,35 and occasionally, as in the town chronicle of
Nuremberg, named the square where they had been herded and
massacred. Most repeated the charges of Jews poisoning rivers
and wells, noting them down as cold facts without casting any
doubts on their veracity and without any outcry against the mass
executions of men, women and children that ensued.36
Still other chroniclers were more vehement in their condemna
tions ofthe Jews as plague spreaders. While they dispassionately
tallied the numbers of Jews exterminated in one city after another,
they reported the rumours and justified them as historical facts.
Instead of recording the cries of women and children as they were
thrown into the fires, chroniclers such as the 'World Chronicler'
33 Die Chronik des Mathias von Neuenburg, ed. Adolf Hofmeister (MGH, Scriptores
rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum, new ser., iv, Berlin, 1924), 264-9.
34 Liber de rebus memorabilioribus sive Chronicon Henrici de Hervodia, ed. August
Potthast (Gottingen, 1859), 277, 280. The chronicler Conrad von Megenberg
reported the poisoning of wells by the Jews as fact, but then at least questioned its
logic in Vienna where Jews were dying in such numbers that they had to enlarge their
cemetery: Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, i, 113.
35 On the pattern of days when the massacres occurred, see Haverkamp, 'Die
Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes', 50-9.
36 See, for instance, Chronik des Dietrich Westhoff von 750-1550 (Dortmund), in Die
Chroniken der westfalischen und niederrheinischen Stadte: Dortmund und Neuss, ed. K.
Hegel (Die Chroniken der deutschen Stadte, xx, Lepizig, 1887), 213; Kolner
Jahrbiicher des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts: Recension A, in Die Chroniken der niederrhei
nischen Stadte: Coin, ed. K. Schroder, 3 vols. (Die Chroniken der deutschen Stadte,
xii-xiv, Leipzig, 1875-7), i, 22; Recension B, ibid., 36; Recension D, ibid., 131;
Koelhoffiche Chronik, ibid., iii, 686; Die Chroniken der Stadt Niirnberg [Ulman
Stromer], in Die Chroniken der frdnkischen Stadte: Niirnberg, ed. K. Hegel, 5 vols.
(Die Chroniken der deutschen Stadte, i-iii, x-xi, Leipzig, 1862-74), i, 25; Chronik
des Hector Mulich, in Die Chroniken der schwabischen Stadte: Augsburg, ed. Friedrich
Roth, 9 vols. (Die Chroniken der deutschen Stadte, xxii, Leipzig, 1865-1929), iii, 1;
Anonyme Chronik von 991-1483, ibid., 459. See also the chronicles ofthe Franciscan
Herman Gigas of Franconia and Heinrich Truchess von Diessenhoven, a canon of
Constance, who had been Pope John XXII's chaplain; Black Death, ed. Horrox, 207
10. Neither doubted that the Jews had poisoned wells or that they were conspiring to
bring an end to Christendom. Heinrich welcomed the mass killing of the Jews that
ensued: 'And blessed be God who confounded the ungodly who were plotting the
extinction of his church' (p. 208). For other chronicle descriptions that narrated the
Jewish slaughter 'with astonishing coldness', see Bergdolt, DerSchwarze Todin Europa,
133-5, which he calls the moral depths of German historiography.
of the monastery of Albert in Cologne stressed the 'horrible
means by which the Jews wished to extinguish all of Christendom,
through their poisons of frogs and spiders mixed into oil and
cheese'.37 In two poems, Michael de Leone, a contemporary
chronicler of Wurzburg and the protonotary of the region's
bishop, agreed with the accusations that the Jews had poisoned
streams, and thus 'the Jews deserved to be swallowed up in the
flames'.38 Still other chroniclers reported contemporary opinions
that anticipate Holocaust denials of the twentieth century. A
chronicler of Frankfurt doubted that the extermination of the
Jews had taken place. He reported that some residents had
pointed to Frankfurt's Jewish neighbourhood as burned to the
ground with all its inhabitants gone and without a single building
left standing, but the chronicler backed claims that the destruc
tion had resulted from an accidental fire and was not the conse
quence of any Jewish massacre.39 In short, chroniclers' attitudes
do not show a rational elite above the fray, sympathetic towards
the Jews in the face of their mass execution; Clement's Sicut Judeis
was far from being the rule.
Ill
What about the actors: were those who forced Duke Albrecht's
hand into burning the Jews 'a mob' of artisans and peasants? Or,
throughout the Rhineland, was it a rabble stricken with fear and
anxiety in the face of plague, who rose up against the Jews while
the elites sought to protect them? Hardly. Few, if any, chroniclers
pointed to peasants, artisans, or even the faceless mob as the
perpetrators of the violence against the Jews in 1348 to 1351. A
chronicler of Strasbourg, Jacob von Konigshofen (1346-1420),40
who wrote a generation after the event, was one of the few to claim
that any from the lower classes played even a minor role in the
37 Die Weltchronik des Monchs Albert, 1273177'- 1454/56, ed. Rolf Sprandel (MGH,
Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum, new ser., xvii, Munich, 1994),
109.
38 Cited in Arnold, 'Pest ? Geissler ? Judenmorde: das Beispiel Wurzburg', 368:
'Iudeos digno proprio consumpsit in igno [sic]'.
39Iohannes Latomus, Acta aliquot vetustiora in civitate Francofurtensi. . ., in Fontes
rerum Germanicarum, ed. Johannes Friederich Bohmer, 4 vols. (Stuttgart, 1843-68),
iv, 415-16.
40 On von Konigshofen, see The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315-1791,
ed. Jacob Rader Marcus, 2nd edn (Cincinnati, 1999), 50; Haverkamp, 'Die
Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes', 30-1.
plague massacres. He reported the burning of Jews 'in many
cities', adding that, once expelled, 'they were caught by the peas
ants and stabbed to death or drowned'.41 But this passage fol
lows his description of the conference held at Benfeld on
8 February 1349, organized and led by the bishop of
Strasbourg, Berthold II von Bucheck, and was attended by 'all
the feudal lords of Alsace' and patrician representatives of three
imperial cities. They gathered to overthrow the decisions of the
more popular guild-based government of Strasbourg, one ofthe
few to express doubts in late 1348 about Jews being guilty of
spreading the plague with their poisons. Earlier, the guildsmen
had resisted Berthold's demands to prosecute and burn the Jews.
Thus, before any peasant might have stabbed or drowned any
escaping Jew, the Jewish community had first to have been sen
tenced to mass death, and that sentence and its execution came
from the top of society: Bishop Berthold's conference, backed by
the military might of the Alsatian nobility. As von Konigshofen
admitted: 'So finally the Bishop and the lords and the Imperial
cities agreed to do away with Jews'.42 Moreover, the principal
source for these events was the contemporary chronicler
Friedrich Closener, who reported nothing about peasants
adding their hands to the aftermath of the mass conflagration,
killing the few who managed to slip through the net.43
The idea that the attacks against the Jews in 1348-51 came
from the blind fury of 'mobs' comprising workers, artisans and
peasants derives almost exclusively from the musings of modern
historians, not from the medieval sources.44 Patrician-dominated
city councils did not disbelieve or deny the rumours ofthe Jewish
41 Chronik des Jakob Twinger von Konigshofen, in Die Chroniken der oberrheinischen
Stddte: Strassburg, ed. K. Hegel, 2 vols. (Die Chroniken der deutschen Stadte, viii-ix,
Lepizig, 1870-1), ii, 759-65; translated only in part in Jew in the Medieval World, ed.
Marcus, 52-3. See also Graus, Pest ? Geissler?Judenmorde, 242.
42 Jew in the Medieval World, ed. Marcus, 50. On Berthold and the 14 February 1349
auto-da-fe, see Ephraim, 'Histoire des Juifs d'Alsace', pt 1, pp. 143-5; pt 2, pp. 39-40.
3 Fritsche (Friedrich) Closener's Chronik, 1362, in Die Chroniken der oberrheinischen
Stadte: Strassburg, ed. Hegel, i, 104. See also Urkunden undAkten der Stadt Strassburg,
v, ed. Witte and Wolfram, no. 205. On Closener and the history of the Jewish mas
sacres in Strasbourg taken from Closener and the contemporary chronicler Matthias
von Neuenberg, see Haverkamp, 'Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen
Todes', 63-5.
44 For such assumptions that anti-Semitic violence originated from the lower
classes, and that Jewish moneylending was its cause, see Johannes Nohl, The Black
Death: A Chronicle of the Plague, Compiled from Contemporary Sources, trans. C. H.
Clarke (London, 1926), 116, 122; Jew in the Medieval World, ed. Marcus, 49-50;
(cont. on p. 19)
well-poisonings, and when cities such as Basel or Strasbourg did

raise questions, patricians ? not the rabble ? marched on the
town halls and 'compelled more broadly based guild councils to
take an oath that they would burn the Jews'.45 Moreover, archival
sources allow us to go beyond the chroniclers in identifying more
closely who initiated the accusations, tortures and mass execu
tions. A remarkable source survives from the municipal archives of
Strasbourg. As early as August 1348,46 before Bishop Berthold's
conference at Benfeld, the guild-based city council of Strasbourg
sent letters to principal cities across the Rhineland, Savoy, and
into the Swiss cantons ruled by Duke Albrecht of Austria. From
Cologne to Lausanne, the councillors sought evidence of Jews
poisoning wells, springs and food supplies.47 At least nineteen
letters from sixteen cities or their noble lords survive. Several con
tain detailed descriptions ofthe individuals accused and tortured
by patrician city councils; under duress, many of them revealed
networks of supposed accomplices. Only one city council ? that
of Cologne ? questioned whether Jews had poisoned wells and
food supplies.48 The rest ? city councils, mayors and noble cas
tellans from Basel, Bern, Breisach am Rhein, Chillon, Colmar,
Freiburg im Breisgau, Kenzingen, Lausanne, Mainz, Miinsingen,
Obernehenheim, Offenburg, Schlettstadt, Villeneuve, Waldkirch
and Zofingen ? supplied 'proof that Jews had been found guilty
in these cities' tribunals of causing the plague through poisoning.
Notaries registered the accusations, and their courts duly exam
ined the evidence and delivered their verdicts.49 Moreover, several
of these letters, such as one from the castellan of Chillon, included
accusations and trial inquests from more than one city (in this
case, Bern and Villeneuve), and included summaries of reports
from these cities that Jews had been arrested for such poisoning 'in
(n. 44 cont.)
Breuer, '"Black Death" and Antisemitism', 139-51; Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe
after the Black Death, trans. Andrea Grover (Berkeley, 2000), 16; and discussion above.
45 Jew in the Medieval World, ed. Marcus, 52.
46 Urkunden undAkten der Stadt Strassburg, v, ed. Witte and Wolfram, no. 173. The
first surviving letter answering Strasbourg's request for evidence on the alleged Jewish
poisonings came from Cologne on 10 August 1348.
47Ibid, nos. 179, 185, 190; Black Death, ed. Horrox, 219-20.
48 Urkunden undAkten der Stadt Strassburg, v, ed. Witte and Wolfram, nos. 173,175,
178, 181, 190; Black Death, ed. Horrox, 210-20.
49 Urkunden undAkten der Stadt Strassburg, v, ed. Witte and Wolfram, nos. 179, 180,
182-9, 196,208,209,212.
many other places'. The letter from Chillon then listed Evian,
Geneva, Hauteville and La Croisette.50
Reflecting on previous massacres of Jews, the aldermen of
Cologne raised concerns that pursuing such accusations might
ignite commoners to revolt, and the latter could spread violence
down the Rhineland. Yet these fears were hypothetical: they were
not reports of 'the populares9 actually whipping up anti-Jewish
hysteria in their regions or initiating the massacres. Indeed, not
a single letter written by these town mayors, councillors or cas
tellans pointed to mobs of peasants or artisans as the accusers of
the Jews, nor as forcing reluctant patrician city councillors to
murder the Jews. Instead, either patrician elites or the nobility
(as in Strasbourg) first circulated the rumours, then rounded up
the Jews, and tortured them in order to make them confess and
name their supposed accomplices in the manufacture, transport
and distribution of the poisons. On the basis of such investiga
tions and legal proceedings, these patrician leaders or rural cas
tellans went on to burn the Jews in their cities and regions. As a
letter from Chillon put it: 'All the confessions were made with two
public notaries present along with many other notable persons
and [their reports] have been officially transcribed and redacted
. . . You should know that all the Jews living in Villeneuve have
been burnt by due legal process'.51 Of those making accusations,
none descended further down the social hierarchy than a notary,
and they ranged from patrician aldermen and castellans to rulers
as illustrious as Lord Amadeo VI, Count of Savoy.52
Of course, these elites did not always abide by the niceties of the
law: in Basel, without any judicial sentence, they locked up the
Jewish community, separated 130 children from their parents,
baptized them by force, and burned the six hundred adults alive
50 Ibid., no. 185; Black Death, ed. Horrox, 211-19. Other cities which found the Jews
guilty of well-poisoning listed in these letters include Brisac, Endingen, Munich,
Tubingen and several places in the duchy of Bade; see also Ephraim, 'Histoire des
Juifs d'Alsace', pt 2, p. 51.
51 Black Death, ed. Horrox, 219. Also, chroniclers such as Lorenz Freis of Wurzburg
reported that 'secular courts had adjudicated the sentences that condemned the Jews'
to mass execution by burning: cited in Arnold, 'Pest ? Geissler ? Judenmorde: das
Beispiel Wurzburg', 361-2.
52 Urkunden undAkten der Stadt Strassburg, v, ed. Witte and Wolfram, no. 185. This
is one of three letters translated in Black Death, ed. Horrox, 216. See also Ephraim,
'Histoire des Juifs d'Alsace', pt 2, pp. 48-9.
on a sandbank on the Rhine.53 Beyond the scope ofthe surviving
Strasbourg letters, guild governments and their members were
involved in the Jewish accusations and executions at Basel, Erfurt,
Nuremberg and Wurzburg. According to Alfred Haverkamp,
however, 'the initiative and decisive impulse' came from the
gentry (Junkers) and patricians or even the regional prince in
these towns. Support may have reached into the middle ranks
of the guilds as at Basel, but did not (according to Haverkamp)
involve artisans.54 In Erfurt, the city aldermen and sons of patri
cians were accompanied by only 'a few artisans' in their 1349
round-up and burning of their Jews.55 As with the guild govern
ment in Strasbourg, the Wurzburg city council was sceptical
about the accusations and sent letters to many cities asking
what to do with their Jews, while the city's bishop, who was re
sponsible for protecting the Jews, was concerned only with getting
his hands on their assets once they had been murdered.56 Of
1,029 towns, villages and regions surveyed in the volumes of
Germania Judaica for the Black Death period, citizens and peas
ants (but even here not the rabble) appear to have carried out
Jewish persecutions against the will of ruling elites in only one
case ? the town of Halle. The source for that claim, however,
comes from the archbishop's own Gesta.51
IV
As we have seen, historians have attributed an economic ration
to these acts of hysteria and hatred.58 The poor, they claim, w
53 Alfred Haverkamp, '"Conflitti interni" e collegamenti sovralocali nelle c

tedesche durante la prima meta del XTV secolo', in Reinhard Elze and Gina F
(eds.), Aristocrazia cittadina e ceti popolari nel tardo Medioevo in Italia e in Germ
(Annali dell'Istituto storico italo-germanico, xiii, Bologna, 1984), 162; Germ
Judaica, ed. Avneri, ii, 53.
54 See Haverkamp, 'Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes',
61-8; Bergdolt, Der Schwarze Tod in Europa, 141; Germania Judaica, ed. Avner
51-5 (Basel); 215-24 (Erfurt); 598-613 (Nuremberg); 928-36 (Wurzburg).
55 Germania Judaica, ed. Avneri, ii, 220.
5t Ibid., 932.
57 Ibid., 320-1.
58 See above. For long-term explanations that see Jewish usury as fundamental to
anti-Semitism from the twelfth century onwards, see the historiographical summary of
Berger, From Crusades to Blood Libels to Expulsions, 12-13. Certainly, earlier persecu
tions of Jews had economic rationales. For instance, the pogrom at York in 1190
culminated in a bonfire of the records of loans made by Jews. It would be wrong,
however, to assume that the mob always, or even usually, comprised the lower classes;
(corn, on p. 22)
opportunists: by murdering Jews, they could steal their property
and cancel their debts. As with other periods of Jewish history,
these historians have assumed transhistorically that Jewish wealth
and Jews as usurers inflamed the wrath of artisans and peasants,
and that Jews had ruthlessly exploited these groups with exorbi
tant rates, taking their pound of flesh.59 Did the working classes
universally despise Jews and their usury as is so often assumed?
First, Stuart Jenks has shown that in certain German-speaking
regions, such as the territory of Wurzburg (where the Jews were
slaughtered in 1349), Jews made few loans to peasants or to the
urban proletariat during the first half of the fourteenth century,
and although some loans were made to merchants, mostly they
went to noblemen in the countryside: 'The typical Jewish debtor
was an aristocrat'.60 This pattern has been confirmed elsewhere
in German-speaking areas ? even if in places such as Speyer and
lower Bavaria, the ranks of Jewish debtors also included urban
elites.61
(n. 58 com.)
instead, at York and Lincoln in 1190 it was made up of citizens and country landlords.
See Edward Miller and John Hatcher, Medieval England: Towns, Commerce and Crafts,
1086-1348 (London, 1995), 388.
59 For this image and its refutation for the early fourteenth century in Marseille, see
Joseph Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered: Jews, Moneylending, and Medieval Society
(Berkeley, 1990).
60 Stuart Jenks, 'Judenverschuldung und Verfolgung von Juden im 14. Jahrhundert:
Franken bis 1349', Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, lxv (1978),
esp. 331-2,345. He concludes that a long-term resentment between Christian debtors
and their Jewish creditors as a cause ofthe Black Death massacres is insupportable:
there was no connection between debtors and persecutors (p. 346).
61 In Speyer, where Jews had greater privileges than elsewhere, they were involved in
the high finance of the bishop and the Holy Roman Emperor; Ernst Voltmer, 'Zur
Geschichte der Juden im spatmittelalterlichen Speyer', in Haverkamp (ed.), Zur
Geschichte derjuden, 102 ff. For lower Bavaria, Michael Toch, 'Geld und Kredit in
einer spatmittelalterlichen Landschaft: zu einem unbeachteten hebraischen
Schuldenregister aus Niederbayern (1329-1332)', Deutsches Archiv fur Erforschung
des Mittelalters, xxxviii (1982), esp. 509-13, finds that those who took loans from
Jews also came predominantly from the ruling classes, but unlike in Franconia
included patricians, judges, bourgeois and some artisans from cities such as
Straubing. Toch also argues in his 'Between Impotence and Power ? the Jews in
the Economy and Polity of Medieval Europe', in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.),
Poteri economici e poteri politici, secc. XIII-XVIII: atti della 'trentesima settimana di
studV, 27 aprile - 1 maggio 1998 (Florence, 1999), 242, that only during the fifteenth
century were Jewish bankers in Germany 'forced to relinquish moneylending to the
rich and powerful and confine themselves to dealing with the lower middle classes and
the poor'. By contrast, Graus, Pest ? Geissler?Judenmorde, 360-1, asserts that Jews
made loans at high rates of interest to the peasants and the poor 'because no one else
would do it'. He also maintains (pp. 370, 382) that economic competition between
(com. on p. 23)
Secondly, studies of Jews in Marseille and other places in

France,62 Assisi,63 and Perugia,64 along with my own research
in the territory of Florence, should cause us to question the stereo
type forged by modern historians of supposed enlightened elites
protecting Jews against the hatred unleashed by masses of peas
ants and workers exploited by Jewish usury. Instead, the expulsion
of Jewish moneylenders, who more often than not lent money at
lower rates of interest than Christians,65 could create serious pro
blems for small townsmen and peasants. In January 1406,
for instance, the Florentine patrician government passed a law
expelling Jewish usurers from the towns and villages of its hinter
land. The city's rationale was twofold: the killers of Christ were
'polluting' the countryside, and their usurious loans were detri
mental to these countrymen. After a period of peasant wars in the
Florentine territory against steep rises in taxes to pay for the city's
wars against Milan, Florence presented itself as acting with char
itable foresight on behalf of its impoverished subjects of the coun
tryside (contado).66 But Florence's contadinisaw things differently
(n. 61 com.)
Jews and Christians was one of the underlying causes that led to the pogroms of 1348
51. However, he supplies no concrete evidence of any such loans or of this economic
competition. (In addition, see Bergdolt, Der Schwarze Tod in Europa, 120, 143.) As
early as 1949, however, Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 225, argued persuasively: 'In
the entire source material. . . reaching up to the fifteenth century, there is not even a
single instance providing or even indicating indebtedness of peasants to Jews'. For
Jewish moneylenders' involvement in high finance and even international loans
before the Black Death, see Franz-Josef Ziwes, 'Zum judischen Kapitalmarkt im
spatmittelalterlichen Koblenz', in Friedhelm Burgard et al. (eds.), Hochfinanz im
Westen des Reiches, 1150-1500 (Trier, 1996); Gerd Mentgen, 'Herausragende judische
Finanziers im mittelalterlichen Straflburg', ibid.
62 Shatzmiller, Shylock Reconsidered; Kohn, Les Juifs de la France du Nord, 213.
63 Ariel Toaff, The Jews in Medieval Assisi, 1305-1487: A Social and Economic History
of a Small Jewish Community in Italy (Florence, 1979), 150-1.
64 Ariel Toaff, Gli Ebrei a Perugia (Perugia, 1975), 19.
65 See nn. 62-4 above. Moreover, for the right to settle within the city walls of
Florence, Jews had to agree first to charge rates no higher than 15 per cent per
annum in 1396 and by 1430, 20 per cent, while Christian bankers were allowed to
charge 25 per cent: see Michele Luzzati, 'Florence against the Jews or the Jews against
Florence?', in Stanislao G. Pugliese (ed.), The Most Ancient Minorities: Thejews of Italy
(Westport, 2002), 63-5.
66 See Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Prowisioni registri, no. 94, fos. 232v-233v, 24
Jan. 1404; Umberto Cassuto, Gli Ebrei a Firenze nelVeta del rinascimento (Florence,
1918), 362-3; Anthony Molho, 'A Note on Jewish Moneylenders in Tuscany in the
Late Trecento and Early Quattrocento', in Anthony Molho and John A. Tedeschi
(eds.), Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Florence, 1971); Anthony
Molho, Florentine Public Finances in the Early Renaissance, 1400-1433 (Cambridge,
(cont. on p. 24)
and failed to appreciate their city lords' affectation of noblesse
oblige. Over the next twenty years Arezzo, Pistoia and San
Gimignano with their hinterlands, along with scattered villages
in the Valdelsa and Castiglion Aretino, wrote threatening petitions
to the town council of Florence describing the inconveniences
created by the central government's interference in their econ
omies and most emphatically by the removal of their Jews. They
demanded that their Jews be allowed to resettle and once again
make loans within these communities. If the ruling councils
refused, they threatened to withhold their taxes.
The Florentine government expelled Jews in some communi
ties more than once between 1406 and the rise ofthe Medici
in 1434.67 After Volterra successfully petitioned for the return
of its Jews in 1420, it was deprived of them again as a punishment
for its abortive revolt in 1429. In 1432, the town petitioned a
second time and won its appeal to have the Jews return. In
early Renaissance Florence the elites were the ones to preach
anti-Semitic doctrines and pass laws expelling Jews, while 'the
rabble' of impoverished peasants and small-townsmen burdened
by Florence's excessive taxation supported their local Jews and
valued their instruments of credit.68 Other places in central Italy
show similar sides in the support and condemnation of Jewish
communities. As late as the end of the fifteenth century, com
moners lived in harmony with Jews: they granted them rights of
citizenship and honoured their credit operations, while patricians
were the first to be stirred by anti-Semitic Franciscan preaching,
to condemn Jewish moneylenders, and eventually to expel them
from their lands.69
(n. 66 com.)
Mass., 1971), 38-9; Luzzati, 'Florence against the Jews or the Jews against Florence?',
62.
67 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Prowisioni registri, no. 110, fos. 104r-105r, 28 Nov.
1420; no. 123, fo. 5r_v, 29 Mar. 1432. Jews settled within the city walls of Florence
only by 1437.
68 For a discussion of these petitions, see Samuel K. Cohn, Creating the Florentine
State: Peasants and Revolt, 1348-1434 (Cambridge, 1999), 224, 241, 243.
69 Daniel Bornstein, 'Law, Religion, and Economics: Jewish Moneylenders in
Christian Cortona', in John A. Marino and Thomas Kuehn (eds.), A Renaissance of
Conflicts: Visions and Revisions of Law and Society in Italy and Spain (Toronto, 2004),
finds that in Cortona, patrician families were the ones to respond to the new wave of
Franciscan preaching against the Jews, to pass laws against them, and to fund a monte di
pietd (i.e. a pawn bank that made cheap loans to the poor in order to drive Jews from the
money market) in 1494. Similarly, in Spoleto, Perugia and other cities of central Italy,
(com. on p. 25)
Reread in this context, Strasbourg's letters not only show that it
was the elites and not workers and peasants who initiated the
burnings ofthe Jews in 1348-9, they give little hint of resentment
over Jewish moneylending or economic privilege as the motiva
tion behind the massacres that spread across cities and regions of
the Rhineland and beyond, even if, in towns such as Worms
and Speyer, Jews held special privileges from the bishop and
emperor.70 None of the Jews caught and tortured into confessing,
nor any of the Jews whom they revealed under duress as part of
their supposed nefarious networks of poisoners, was a tax col
lector or a wealthy financial supporter of the duke of Austria,
the emperor, or of any other figure of authority; and, more to
the point, not one ofthe Jews singled out for torture was labelled
a usurer.71 Instead, with the exception of one merchant who was
tortured because he was a community leader with extensive con
tacts, and two who were called 'rich',72 the victims were doctors,
women, students, cantors and, most often, rabbis.73 The letters
do not point to any immediate economic advantages for the per
secutors, even if after the massacres some may have profited from
the death of Jews, confiscation of their property, or seizure of
property simply left vacant because of their extermination.74
Furthermore, it was the rich and privileged who afterwards
(n. 69 com.)
Jews enjoyed privileges as citizens and rights that were the same as those of Christians
until the mid fifteenth century. Moreover, Christian masses in other areas of Europe
were not the first ones to respond to the new wave of Jewish hatred preached by
Franciscans during the mid fifteenth century; instead it was patricians and noblemen.
See Alfred Haverkamp, 'Jews and Urban Life: Bonds and Relationships', in Cluse
{cd.),Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages, 55-69; Toaff, Gli Ebrei a Perugia, 59-127, esp.
62. Finally, unlike Jewish moneylenders in German-speaking areas, Jews in central
Italy made small loans largely to rural and small-town artisans, soldiers and peasants:
see the one surviving Jewish account book from the early fifteenth century, Daniel
Carpi, 'The Account Book of a Jewish Moneylender in Montepulciano (1409-1410)',
Jl European Econ. Hist., xiv (1985).
70 On Speyer, see Voltmer, 'Zur Geschichte der Juden im spatmittelalterlichen
Speyer'; Haverkamp, 'Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes'; and
for Speyer and Worms, see Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 72, 101, 267.
71 In a letter from Offenburg to Strasbourg noblemen were mentioned, who owed
loans to Jews; Urkunden undAkten der Stadt Strassburg, v, ed. Witte and Wolfram, no.
196.
72Ibid., no. 189.
73 The most extensive list of tortured Jews and accomplices is found ibid., no. 185;
see also no. 183.
74 For Brussels, see, for instance, Kohn, Les Juifs de la France du Nord, 10.
fought over and divided the spoils, not workers and peasants.75
But even among the elites the overwhelming motivation appears
to have been religious hatred and not opportunistic economic
gain.76
V
The passing ofthe Black Death certainly did not
Jews. Such attacks, however, did subside for thirty
Across wide swathes of German-speaking lands
rulers and communities recoiled from their bruta
the Jews. As early as 1350, Charles IV reinstat
privileges and protection to attract Jews back to A
April ofthe same year, the margrave of Brandenbu
exemptions for a year to any Jew who would settl
In 1352 Duke Ludwig offered Jews special protect
in Bavaria.79 In the same year Speyer and the arch
offered special incentives to attract Jews back to
communities. Such efforts continued in parts of G
as 1372.80 In 1360 Duke Rudolph of Austria an
granted Jews permission to resettle in his territo
Swabia.81 Further, new laws such as those of t
Rechtsbuch promulgated in the years after the Bla
cutions dealt with Jews more favourably than tho
earlier medieval German law books: Jews were tre
Christians, and Christian authorities recognized
Jewish courts.82 In 1355 King John II of Franc
privileges to Jews in order to allow them to acqui
houses and residences, and exempted them from s
In 1361 he extended these privileges througho
75 Graus, Pest ? Geissler ?Judenmorde, 243-8, 385.

76 Haverkamp, 'Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwa
shows that the burning of Jews across a number of cities occu
religious feast days and argues that these attacks followed religio
77 Germania Judaica, ed. Avneri, ii, 36.
78 Ibid., 104.
19Ibid., 59.
80 See ibid., 166 (for Dinkelsbiihl), 173 (for Dortmund).
81 Ephraim, 'Histoire des Juifs d'Alsace', pt 2, p. 58; for other towns that reversed
their policies in the 1360s and 1370s to allow Jewish resettlement and offer protection,
see ibid., pp. 55-6.
82 Kisch, Jews in Medieval Germany, 41-4, 101,251.
83 Kohn, Les Juifs de la France du Nord, 14.
attract Jewish immigration.84 Following the Black Death, Jews in

Spain gained prestigious governmental positions and patronage
ofthe crown, which, according to Angus MacKay, eventually led
to Christian jealousy and was a reason for the persecutions ofthe
Jews in 1391.85 Moreover, further strikes of plague did not
unleash repeat performances of hatred and mass executions
against the Jews in the Middle Ages. Not until the late sixteenth
century did authorities once again arrest people suspected of
spreading the plague through poisons and tampering with food;
these later waves of fear, however, did not target Jews as the prin
cipal suspects; instead, witches or hospital workers were now
persecuted.86 The only major exception for the later Middle
Ages was for parts of Poland around Miechow in 1360, areas
that had escaped the first wave of plague in 1348-51. The
plague of 1360 was in effect for these regions their 1348.87
84 Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, i, 113; Voltmer, 'Zur Geschichte der Juden im

spatmittelalterlichen Speyer', 102; for the 1361 legislation in France, see Kohn, Les
Juifs de la France du Nord, 14-28.
85 Angus MacKay, 'Popular Movements and Pogroms in Fifteenth-Century
Castile', Past and Present, no. 55 (May 1972), 39-40.
86 William G. Naphy, Plagues, Poisons and Potions: Plague-Spreading Conspiracies in
the Western Alps, c. 1530-1640 (Manchester, 2002), chs. 4-5. Even when health offi
cials and other authorities asserted that plague had been carried to their towns by
Jewish second-hand clothiers as had happened in Milan and Mantua during the
plagues of 1576-7, no mass Jewish persecution ensued: see, for instance, Ascanio
Centorio degli Ortensi, / Cinque Libri degVavvertimenti, ordini, gride et editti fatti, et
osservati in Milano, ne' tempi sospettosi della peste: ne gli anni MDLXXVI et LXXVII
(Venice, 1579), 2.
87 The author of the Annales Mechovienses, ed. Wilhelm Arndt (MGH, Scriptores,
xix, Hannover, 1866), 669-70, discusses in detail the Black Death of 1348, giving
reports of the number of funerals per diem in places as far away as Avignon and of the
consequences of 1349 with the Flagellant movements that marched from Hungary
across Germany, but he mentions no plague within his own region until 1360, when he
claims that hardly a third of the population of this region remained after the plague,
and it was even worse for Krakow. He claims 'the death' was spread by the Jews' poison
and that in Krakow and other places the Jews were burned (p. 670). Another possible
exception may have been Zurich in 1400, when Jews were rounded up, put in sheep
pens, and burned alive, but although plague struck many parts of Europe in 1400, the
Zurich chronicler does not specify that it hit Zurich in that year and, more importantly,
does not draw any connection between plague and the Jewish burnings: Chronik der
Stadt Zurich, ed. Johannes Dierauer (Quellen zur Schweizer Geschichte, xviii, Basel,
1900), 161. O. Dito, La storia calabrese e la dimora degli ebrei in Calabria dal sec. Valla
seconda metd del sec. XVI (Rocca S. Casciano, 1916), 271 ? cited in Ariel Toaff, Love,
Work, and Death: Jewish Life in Medieval Umbria, trans. Judith Landry (London,
1996), 124 ? mentions that Jews were suspected of poisoning wells and causing a
plague in 1422, but no pogrom against them followed.
Attacks on Jews returned to haunt Europe by the early 1380s.
These were not spurred on by plague, however, and they differed
markedly from the mass burnings of 1348-51. Unlike the Black
Death massacres, these showed signs of economic and political
motivation on the assailants' part, and class divisions between the
assailants and their adversaries. In 1384 Jews were rounded up in
Augsburg, Nuremberg and surrounding small towns, and re
leased only after payment of a sizeable ransom. In the following
year delegates from thirty-eight German-speaking cities met in
Ulm to proclaim a general cancellation of debts owed to Jews.88
By contrast, in 1348-9, the chronicles and archival sources hardly
mention even the pillaging of Jewish property;89 death and des
truction alone were the principal, if not the sole, aims ofthe Black
Death hatred. When the persecutors burned anything other than
the Jews themselves, their homes or synagogues, it was their books,
and these were not account books, tax ledgers or letters of credit
but, instead, the Torah and other sacred writings. Religious moti
vations behind the Black Death pogroms can also be seen in ac
companying allegations of Host desecration and ritual murder.90
Further, the anti-Semitic incidents that reappeared in France
in the early 1380s ? two in Paris (1380 and 1382) and one in
Rouen (1382) ? were phases within much larger tax revolts
against the king by journeymen and artisans. Class divisions
clearly delineated these later conflicts: artisans and the poor chal
lenged the authority of the crown and merchant elites, even if,
according to the Religieux de Saint-Denis (Michel Pintoin,
Charles VI's official historian), the nobility incited the crowds
'to further and more beastly action' in order to cancel their own
debts. Furthermore, these attacks against Jews erupted after the
major thrust of social revolt had already run its course: the chron
iclers stress the economic and political goals of the insurgents.
To quote Pintoin:
Not content with the tax concessions that Charles VI had made to the
Parisian crowd in 1380, they forced open the coffers containing the tax
88 Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, i, 118-19. Such actions can be spotted also in

periods before the Black Death; for instance in 1337 the city council of Deckendorf,
Bavaria, cancelled its debts to Jews at a stroke: see Cecil Roth, A Short History ofthe
Jewish People . . . Revised and Enlarged Illustrated Edition (London, 1959), 231.
89 Breuer,' "Black Death" and Antisemitism', 150, claims that 'a number of chron
iclers . . . emphasized that the main cause was the lust for Jewish possessions', but he
fails to note a single one.
90 Mulier, 'Erez gererah ? "Land of Persecution"', 257.
monies, seized the records of the royal tax receipts, tore them to pieces and
destroyed them. Then, still driven by the same impetuous spirit for
change, they entered with fury into the quarter that the king had granted
to the Jews, comprising forty houses. Pressing on, they abandoned all
individual traits of human character, age and other distinctive qualities.
Some forced open the doors of the Jews' houses, searching them thor
oughly to plunder and steal anything that appeared useful. Others took
necklaces, rings, belts and other feminine ornaments, which were easy to
carry off. They searched greedily for silk cloaks and other expensive cloth
ing. They threw from the windows silver vases, which they took to their
homes. Others preferred to cancel their debts to nobles and bourgeois,
believing this to be more lucrative. Several nobles, who had joined them,
incited them to go further.91
Letters of remission issued by the king to those who molested

individual Jews during the riots corroborate Pintoin's observa
tions. No letter gives any evidence of murder during the 1380
revolt; instead, individual theft and profit were the predators'
objectives.92 Finally, unlike the earlier chroniclers of the Black
Death massacres with their tallies of numbers killed in one city
after another, the meticulous Pintoin does not give any inkling of
mass round-ups and extermination of Jews, or even of the murder
of a single Jew. Similarly, the other principal chronicler of these
revolts, an anonymous nobleman from Normandy, also described
the pillaging of Jewish movable property but not Jewish murder at
the hands of Christians or the senseless destruction of their prop
erty. Only one Jew, a rabbi, was noted as a victim of the Parisian
revolt of 1380.93 On the following day the king gave the Jews
protection to enable them to return to their homes and decreed
that all their stolen goods be returned ? an edict the people de
fiantly disobeyed in order to pour scorn on the king, who had
broken his pledge and levied new taxes.
The Parisian revolt of the hammer men (Maillotins), which
erupted in the vegetable market of Les Halles two years later,
followed the same pattern. Attacks against Jews came only at
the end of the revolt, after the insurgents had risen against tax
91 [Michel Pintoin], Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys, ed. M. L. Bellaguet, 6

vols. (Paris, 1839-52), vi, pt 1, bk 1, ch. 7, pp. 53-6; Guillaume Cousinot I, Geste de
Nobles, ed. Vallet de Viriville (Paris, 1859), 106-7. Others, such as Jean Froissart, do
not even mention these attacks against the Jews.
92 See the letters of remission published by Leon Mirot, Les Insurrections urbaines au
debut du regne de Charles VI (1380-1383): leurs causes, leurs consequences (Paris, 1905),
35-6, 112-13, 116-17, 119-20; Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Cohn,
nos. 156-7, 160.
93 Chronique des quatrepremiers Valois, ed. Simeon Luce (Societe Histoire de France,
cix, Paris, 1862), 291-2.
collectors, murdered them, and stolen the hammers kept in the
Parisian prison and royal citadel of Chatelet. As Pintoin relates:
No doubt, provoked by shouts from the most abject of them, as before, the
most wicked went after the Jews, whom the king protected; they killed
some and stole their most valuable possessions. Adding to their infamy,
they felt no shame in violating the house ofthe king, incurring for a second
time the crime of treason.94
Here, explicitly, the attack on the king's protected Jews was an

insult and a means of challenging the king. Further, the letters of
remission tell of officers ofthe crown and members ofthe bour
geoisie of Paris intervening to save Jews, giving them refuge in
Chatelet.95
Pintoin and chroniclers of Normandy report even less about
any damage that may have been inflicted on Jews during the tax
revolt in Rouen ? the Harelle ? that erupted the week before
the Maillotins in Paris. As with the Parisian revolt, the Harelle cen
tred on protests against Charles VTs new taxes; there were
attacks against Rouen's wealthy bourgeois, and the great abbeys
were stripped of their secular privileges over the city. In colourful
and lengthy descriptions of this tax revolt, neither Pintoin nor
the principal local chronicle, Chronique des quatre premiers Valois,
mentions any attacks against Jews. Only a later Norman chronic
ler, Pierre Cochon, reports anti-Semitic violence. To his surprise,
'given all the mayhem', only one Jew was killed. Furthermore,
Cochon makes it clear that the butt ofthe crowd's anger was not
the Jews but the city's ruling bourgeois and their previous mayors
who had 'treated the artisans so badly'. The journeymen broke
into their palaces, tore them asunder, and dished out their wine to
the populace in the streets and squares of the city. Cochon adds
that moneylenders were also robbed, but these included priests
and Christians along with Jews.96 Property, not bodies or even
conversions, was the object of these insurrections.
Archival documents ? letters of remission ? confirm the
impressions related by chroniclers. In none ofthe published let
ters were the insurgents of Rouen accused of anti-Semitic attacks,
and those which allude to such attacks during the revolts in Paris
in 1380 and 1382 concern theft of Jewish property by those
94 [Pintoin], Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys, ed. Bellaguet, i, 128-43.

95 Mirot, Les Insurrections urbaines au debut du regne de Charles VI, 119-20.
96 Chronique Normande de Pierre Cochon notaire apostolique a Rouen, ed. Ch. de
Robillard de Beaurepaire (Rouen, 1870), ch. 11, pp. 162-6.
rioting against the king's taxes. The primary objectives of the in

surgents were political and economic, not religious: in the first
instance, the revolts and violence had not been spurred on by anti
Semitic hatred.97 Only one case suggests that religious differences
played a strong role: after attending a neighbourhood assembly
against royal taxes during the Paris revolt of the hammer men in
March 1382, a group of journeymen and soldiers 'came upon a
Jew and told him he should become a Christian and renounce his
false faith'. Allegedly, the Jew refused and spat in the face of those
who ridiculed his religion. Incensed, the group 'beat the Jew sav
agely'; later, he died.98 But none of the other letters points to
religion per se as a reason for any of the insurgents' assaults.
Moreover, unlike the interregional, even international, massacres
of the First Crusade in 1096, the Shepherds' crusades in 1320,
the attacks on lepers and Jews in 1321, and especially the exter
mination of entire communities across wide swathes of Europe in
1348-51, the attacks of the 1380s against Jews in Paris and Rouen
did not spread to neighbouring towns; they failed even to spread
beyond city walls into the countryside.99
VI
Certainly, the 1391 persecutions of the Jews in Spain diffe
from the minor attacks that spilled over from the tax revolt
decade earlier in Paris and Rouen. In Spain, they swept fr
city to city, across Catalonia and Valencia to Perpignan in
north and to the Balearic islands in the east. From rich archiv
sources, Philippe Wolff charted their rapid spread, what he c
their 'contagion'.100 The casualties were much higher than
northern France. The year 1391 was in effect Spain's 134
in that these events sealed the demographic fate of Spanish Je
for centuries to come, though the result came more from ma
conversion than mass murder as happened in 1348-9.101 But w
97 Mirot, Les Insurrections urbaines au debut du regne de Charles VI, 35-6, 112-
116-17, 119-20.
98 Ibid., 112-13; Popular Protest in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Cohn, no. 157.
99 See Kohn, Les Juifs de la France du Nord, 50.
100 Philippe Wolff, 'The 1391 Pogrom in Spain: Social Crisis or Not?', Past
Present, no. 50 (Feb. 1971), 17.
101 On the persecutions of 1391, see ibid.; Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews
Christian Spain, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1966), ii, ch. 10; Claude Carrere, Barce
centre economique a Vepoque des difficultes, 1380-1462, 2 vols. (Paris, 1967), ii, 675
(com. on p. 32)
1391 in other ways a carbon copy of 1348-9 ? mass hysteria o

elites and not a class confrontation of lower classes seeking eco
nomic, political or social ends? On these questions, Wolff studied
the revolts in Barcelona and Gerona, not only from the perspec
tive ofthe chroniclers but from the vantage point of town records
and royal letters of remission. His findings show that the social
and political context and character of these revolts differed rad
ically from the massacres of Jews through the Rhineland, Savoy
and other parts of Europe in the wake ofthe Black Death. First,
since the Black Death, Jews had done well in Spain under the
protection and patronage of the crown. Men such as Yussaf
Pichon became chief financial advisers to kings, and, more gen
erally, Jews had become the crown's principal tax farmers.102
Furthermore, the revolts of 1391 in Spain, like those in northern
France in the early 1380s, were tax revolts. Again, as in France,
the insurgents' anger stemmed not only from the amount they
were forced to pay but also from taxes that they now saw as unfair
they demanded that the king charge a tallage or tax based propor
tionately on wealth and cancel regressive taxes based on the sale of
commodities.
The archival sources confirm the impressions of the chronic
lers: these were revolts ofthe lower classes, even if a scattering of
nobles appear among the arrested. The leaders were artisans an
those who later received pardons were mainly from this leve
of society or below ? slaves, weavers, mariners, cobblers and
(n. 101 com.)

Joaquim Nadal Farreras and Philippe Wolff, Histoire de la Catalogne (Toulouse, 1982);
Jaume Riera i Sans, 'Los tumultos contra las juderias de la Corona de Aragon en 1391',
in La mutacion de la segunda mitad del siglo XIV en Espana (Cuadernos de Historia,
Anexos de la revista Hispania, viii, Madrid, 1977); David Nirenberg, Communities o
Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1996), 244 ff.; David
Nirenberg, 'Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians i
Fifteenth-Century Spain', Past and Present, no. 174 (Feb. 2002), esp. 9-10; Antoni
Furio, Historia del Pais Valencia (Valencia, 1995), 145-51. On conversions and force
baptisms, see, especially, the documents published by Riera i Sans, 'Los tumultos
contra las juderias', 220-1, 223-4. In Valencia, the insurgents' cries against Moors
and Jews were 'Muyren o-s facen christians' and 'Muyren los juheus o-s facen chri
tians!' (pp. 220-1,223).
102 Abraham A. Neuman, The Jews of Spain: Their Social, Political, and Cultural Life
during the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1944-8), ii, 237-8,256-60; Wolff, '1391
Pogrom in Spain', 12; David Romano, 'Les Juifs de la Couronne d'Aragon avant
1391', Revue des etudes juives, cxli (1982), 178; David Romano, 'Los funcionario
judios de Pedro el Grande de Aragon', Boletin de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras
de Barcelona, xxxiii (1969), 9-10.
carpenters. The most elite of any to be granted a pardon because
of these riots at Barcelona was a notary. In addition, the targets
were not just Jews. According to the chronicler Mascaro, the insur
gents 'threatened to kill all clerics and forced them to pay taxes
and other contributions as if they were laymen. Silversmiths, mer
chants and other rich people were threatened with death'. Finally,
despite some executions, Barcelona's revolt largely succeeded:
taxes were lowered.103
Similarly, letters of remission at Gerona show that the rank and
file ofthe rebels were artisans, of whom typically the weaver Joan
Torayles, the tailor Pere Planell and the cobbler Pere Beto were
not condemned for attacking Jews alone but for demanding lower
taxes and that they be changed from regressive commodity taxes
to ones proportionate to the 'faculties' of those charged.104 In
addition, at Gerona, peasants from the surrounding countryside
joined the artisans and laid siege to the city's royal citadel. In the
territories of both cities, as well as in other regions, peasants 'ag
itated against the newly-imposed evil customs (malos usos), a new
form of serfdom'.105 On the other side ofthe barricades stood
not only royal troops but also urban elites seeking to suppress the
rebels, who this time comprised anti-Semitic lower classes in the
main.
More recently, Jaume Riera i Sans has published more letters of
remission and other archival documents confirming that 'the
struggle between classes' during the anti-Jewish tumults of 1391
was not exclusive to Gerona or Barcelona. In Valencia, where it is
more difficult to pin down the perpetrators to particular indivi
duals or occupational groups, 'the people' (poble) confronted
agents ofthe crown who protected the Jews.106 Although knights,
citizens, officers and churchmen joined the crowds, the riots were
initiated by forty to fifty adolescents and comprised mainly vaga
bonds, criminals and the poor (homens depoca epobra condicio). On
the other side, despite their small numbers, the Jews of Valencia
had become major figures in commerce, finance and other eco
nomic activities. Already during the war with Castile (1356-76),
103 Wolff,' 1391 Pogrom in Spain', 12. He adds that the town minutes of Barcelona
(the book of the Council) confirm these observations.
104 Ibid., 15.
105 Ibid., 16.
106 Riera i Sans, 'Los tumultos contra las juderias', 223; Furio, Historia del Pais
Valencia, 147.
Valencia's wealthiest Jew, Jafuda Alatzar, 'practically controlled'
all the region's finances.107 In addition, the perpetrators in
Valencia, as in Barcelona and Gerona, were not bent simply on
killing or converting non-Christians; they went after their wealth
along with that of the crown.108
In short, post-plague attacks on Jews paralleled the course of
violence in general during and immediately after the first wave of
the Black Death to the early fifteenth century. The evidence
shows no signs of violence against Jews percolating up from 'a
thick sediment in the popular mentality' in 1348-51, as Ginzburg
claimed, nor of a class struggle of impoverished debtors intent on
butchering their wealthy Jewish exploiters, as others have
asserted. Black Death fears and realities had not moved frenzied
mobs of artisans and peasants to initiate the pogroms, nor sud
denly to redress economic grievances against a supposed usurious
Jewish elite. As with the flagellants, the perpetrators of violence
may have stretched across social barriers, but, judging by the
archival records and the chronicles, patrician city governments,
rural castellans, regional dukes and the Holy Roman Emperor
himself initiated, organized and carried out the Jewish massacres.
Neither usurers nor property were the prime targets of these
anti-Semitic exterminations; rather, their instigators sought to
seize and torture the leaders of Jewish communities, principally
rabbis. Afterwards, the elites realized that these massacres had
redounded to their own economic detriment.
By contrast, the battlegrounds of riots in Paris and Rouen in the
early 1380s and in Spain in 1391 were drawn along class lines.
Not only kings but also local bourgeois and city councils strove to
protect their Jews, while artisans and peasants comprised the bulk
of the anti-Semitic crowds. Further, these revolts were not simply,
or even primarily, attacks on Jews but were part of larger rebel
lions against taxation and the crown. Along with Jews (who often
now possessed political and economic power), tax officials,
Christian merchants and royal officials became the targets of
these uprisings. While a residual hatred of Jews may never have
been far from the surface, in northern France these tax and anti
royal protests spilled into anti-Semitic rioting only at the margins
107 Furio, Historia del Pais Valencia, 145-51.

108Riera i Sans, 'Los tumultos contra las juderias', esp. 218, 225; Furio, Historia
del Pais Valencia, 149.
THE BLACK DEATH AND THE BURNING OF JEWS 3 5
and during the last stages of these revolts. Moreover, acquisition

of property and cancelling debts, not racial or religious hatred,
appear to have been the chief motives.
Anti-Semitic rioting in German-speaking lands followed the
same pattern from the last decades of the fourteenth century
until at least the 1430s. Peasants and artisans may have supplied
the rank and file, but they were not bent primarily on forcing
conversions or on killing the Christ-killers. Instead their sights
were fixed on seizing Jewish property, cancelling debts and char
ging ransoms to free captured Jews.109 By the 1420s the religious
climate of Hussite Europe and a new anti-Semitic zeal preached
by Dominicans such as St Vincent Ferrer and Franciscans such as
John of Capistrano would change the face of anti-Semitism once
n~n;~ no
again.
The various episodes of anti-Semitism and the massacres of
Jews throughout the late Middle Ages cannot all be tarred with
the same brush. It did not always seep forth transhistorically from
embedded stereotypes ofthe Jew as vicious usurer or from 'a thick
sediment' of envy and resentment on the part of lower classes
against Jews.111 Nor can it be explained rationally as the conse
quence of a class struggle driven by Jewish commercial success
and against their supposed exploitation of subaltern classes. The
evidence from the late Middle Ages shows that the principal
perpetrators and protectors of Jews could change rapidly even
over the course of a generation. Unlike previous assaults on
109Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, i, 113-21. Perhaps, further studies on

Valencia and elsewhere in Germany will temper these conclusions. Wolff, '1391
Pogrom in Spain', 16, suggested that at Valencia, 'the pseudo-religious element
stands out: violence directed against the Jews predominates, committed moreover
by persons from the most diverse social backgrounds; everything happened in an
atmosphere of exaltation in which rumours of miracles were easily accepted'. But
Wolff never completed research into the archives of Valencia. Although the sources
do not reveal the social position of the actors and promoters of the pogroms as clearly
as those from Barcelona and Gerona, the documents and commentary published later
by Riera i Sans, 'Los tumultos contra las juderias', 217-25, show a similar confronta
tion between 'the people' and the bourgeois and agents of the crown, who protected
the Jews, in the towns of Valencia in 1391.
110 For Vincent Ferrer, see, for example, Nirenberg, 'Enmity and Assimilation',
142-5; Nirenberg, 'Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities', 11-12. For
the anti-Semitism of Capistrano, Giacomo della Marca, Alberto da Sarteano,
Bernardino da Fletre and other Italian Franciscans of the mid and later fifteenth
century, see, most recently, Bornstein, 'Law, Religion, and Economies', 246.
111 On whether anti-Semitism sprouted 'bottom up' or seeped 'top down', see
Berger, From Crusades to Blood Libels to Expulsions, 22-4.
the Jews between the First Crusade and the accusations of Host
desecration fanned by Franciscan preaching in the 1330s and
1340s, the Black Death persecutions fundamentally transformed
the Jewish population across Europe for the next five hundred
years ? their numbers and their settlement patterns.112 The
sources of this most severe persecution of Jews before the twenti
eth century do not point, however, to mass 'hysteria' or a sudden
unleashing of hatred from peasants, artisans and workers against
the archetypal Jew ? the moneylender ? as is often assumed.
Instead, elites, from urban oligarchs and rural knights to the Holy
Roman Emperor himself, were the ones so suddenly threatened
by Europe's most monumental mortality into believing that Jews
wished to destroy all Christendom,113 and, as a result, they insti
gated and carried out the horrific massacres. They did so, more
over, with cold calculation and in actions sanctioned by due legal
process. In this fashion, the contours of anti-Semitism followed
the larger waves of class struggle and violence during the later
Middle Ages.
University of Glasgow Samuel K. Cohn Jr
112 The literature on the resettlement of Jewish populations from German cities to
Italy, Eastern Europe, and smaller towns and villages in German-speaking lands is
vast: see, among others, Ariel Toaff, 'Gli insediamenti askenaziti nell'Italia settentrio
nale', in Corrado Vivanti (ed.), Storia dTtalia: Annali, xi, pt 1, DalValto Medioevo alVeta
dei ghetti (Turin, 1996), 157-9; Michele Luzzati, 'Banchi e insediamenti ebraici
nell'Italia centro-settentrionale fra tardo Medioevo e inizi dell'Eta moderna', ibid.,
188-9.
1 x 3 Among many other places for expressions of the fear that Jews were plotting with
their poisons to destroy all of Christendom, see the letter of 30 June 1349 from
Schlettstadt in Alsace: Urkunden und Akten der Stadt Strassburg, v, ed. Witte and
Wolfram, no. 208.

The Black Death and The Burning of Jews

Uploaded by

Document Informationclick to expand document information

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Black Death and The Burning of Jews

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Black Death and The Burning of Jews

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Past and Present Society

The Black Death and the Burning of Jews

Detail from Hartmann Schedel, Liber cronicarum cumfiguris etymaginibus ab inicio

taken as near timeless over the course of the European Middle

10 On the geographical dimensions of the Black Death pogroms, see Germania

a movement ofthe poor, composed of peasants, weavers and co

Others have portrayed the Black Death pogroms in still starker

25 Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath, trans. Raymond

town of Zofingen (diocese of Constance), the Jewish community

well-poisonings, and when cities such as Basel or Strasbourg did

53 Alfred Haverkamp, '"Conflitti interni" e collegamenti sovralocali nelle c

Secondly, studies of Jews in Marseille and other places in

75 Graus, Pest ? Geissler ?Judenmorde, 243-8, 385.

attract Jewish immigration.84 Following the Black Death, Jews in

84 Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, i, 113; Voltmer, 'Zur Geschichte der Juden im

88 Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, i, 118-19. Such actions can be spotted also in

Letters of remission issued by the king to those who molested

91 [Michel Pintoin], Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys, ed. M. L. Bellaguet, 6

Here, explicitly, the attack on the king's protected Jews was an

94 [Pintoin], Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys, ed. Bellaguet, i, 128-43.

rioting against the king's taxes. The primary objectives of the in

1391 in other ways a carbon copy of 1348-9 ? mass hysteria o

(n. 101 com.)

107 Furio, Historia del Pais Valencia, 145-51.

and during the last stages of these revolts. Moreover, acquisition

109Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, i, 113-21. Perhaps, further studies on

University of Glasgow Samuel K. Cohn Jr

You might also like