Blamed for so many ills, this time they were held responsible for spreading the Bubonic plague. On August 24, 1349, 6,000 Jews were massacred in Mainz, Germany by being burned alive. During World War II, the anti-Semitic monster again reared its ugly head in Strasbourg as the Jewish population of the city was evacuated to the West to avoid persecution by the invading Germans.Īnother instance of European Christians blaming the Jews for the calamity of the Black Death occurred in Mainz, Germany, also in 1349, an event we also have previously discussed. And if that was not enough, a special tax was levied on Jews for any horse they brought into the city, supposedly for pavement maintenance. Incredibly, this policy lasted all the way until the French Revolution. curfew was sounded by a special horn to ensure compliance with this law. In 1349, only a year after an epidemic of Bubonic Plague (Black Death) had devastated Strasbourg, a tide of hatred swept over the city, and public hysteria blamed Jews for “poisoning the wells.” In “retaliation,” about 1,000 Jews were burned to death! The systemic and pervasive anti-Semitism that made such a massacre possible as if the mass murder was not enough, is evidenced by local laws that were then enacted that forbade Jews from being within the city after dark, and the 10 o’clock p.m. Lest you think anti-Semitism was something invented by the Nazi’s in World War II, pogroms against people practicing the Jewish faith go back a long time, even before the earliest settlement of Strasbourg in 12 B.C. Located near the French-German border in the region known as Alsace, Strasbourg was not a stranger to anti-Semitism. Valentine’s Day Massacre” in a previous article. The pervasive theme of blaming various catastrophes on Jews made the scapegoating of the Black Death an almost foregone conclusion! ( Note: Muslim and African American anti-Semitism is not discussed in this essay.) Digging DeeperĪn example of the blaming of the Jews for the woes of the population during the plague pandemic is the February 14, 1349, massacre of Jews in Strasbourg, France, an incident we referred to as “ The Other St. Panicked populations, desperate for answers and solutions to the deadly plague, took to blaming Europe’s Jewish population as the cause of the calamity, a scapegoating of Jews common throughout history. Today, as the United States and the rest of the world continues to be ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic, we look back to a previous pandemic of enormously greater proportions, the infamous Black Death of Bubonic Plague that ravaged much of the world in the 14 th Century.
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