How and why were Jews made scapegoats for the Black Death?

1. How and why were Jews made scapegoats for the Black Death?

2. Background: anti-Semitism

3. Scapegoat scapegoat (n.) 1530, "goat sent into the wilderness on the Day of Atonement, symbolic bearer of the sins of the people," coined by Tyndale from scape (n.) + goat to translate L. caper emissaries Meaning "one who is blamed or punished for the mistakes or sins of others"

4. How were Jews made scapegoats? • “... the Jewish pogroms that occurred in over three hundred towns and other communities and in primarily German-speaking lands from Switzerland, Alsace, and the Low Countries in the West to Poland, Bohemia, and Austria the east between 1348 and 1351. (Pogroms also occurred in northeastern Spain, Southern France and the Savoy between Spring and Autumn of 1348.)” (Aberth 2011: 53)

5. How were Jews made scapegoats? • “On Saturday - that was St. Valentine's Day - they burnt the Jews on a wooden platform in their cemetery. There were about two thousand people of them. Those who wanted to baptize themselves were spared. [Some say that about a thousand accepted baptism.] Many small children were taken out of the fire and baptized against the will of their fathers and mothers. And everything that was owed to the Jews was cancelled, and the Jews had to surrender all pledges and notes that they had taken for debts.”

6. A desperate attempt to end the Death • “... the Jewish massacres were really about a desperate attempt to end the Black Death, although certainly medieval Christian “anti-Judaism” helps explain why Jews were targeted. Instead of being a religiously based accusation bound up with the victim’s Jewishness, the charge of well poisoning that was leveled against the Jews during the Black Death was part of an entirely rational outlook that was grounded in contemporary medical and scientific theories about the disease that likewise viewed it as primarily caused in the human body by some kind of “poisoning.” The latter were usually interpreted in terms of a naturally occurring causation, such as a “poisonous vapour” ingested into the body from the surrounding air, but a few Christian doctors, such as the Spanish physician based at the medical school at Montpellier in southern France Alfonso de Cordoba, did admit of plague poisoning by human agency.

7. A desperate attempt to end the Death • These theories were then mutually reinforced by trials against Jews and poor men that charged them with poisoning wells or food in order to spread the Black Death amongst Christians; these trials first took place in the Languedoc, Provencal, Dauphine, and Savoyard regions of France and Switzerland, all quite close to Cordoba’s theatre of operations at Montpellier.” (Aberth 2011: 53)

8. God’s Will and Jewish Heresy

9. Economic Reasons • “The money was indeed the thing that killed the Jews. If they had been poor and if the feudal lords had not been in debt to them, they would not have been burnt.”

10. Economic Reasons “According to Mordechai Breuer, these ‘ordinary folk’ hated the Jews because they had ‘served the merchants and the aristocrats, and with their loans and with their capital, helped establish the urban economy and the city’s governing 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 privileged elite of Jewish creditors: ‘Those of the working classes’ confronted ‘Jewish rentiers and capitalists’ to cancel their debts and seize the Jews’ wealth.” (Cohn 2007: 13)

11. Flagellants • “It is not longer sufficient to say that Jewish pogroms in Europe were an outgrowth of the Flagellant movement, since the connections between the two were tenuous at best. In terms of timing, Flagellants often arrived in town long after a Jewish pogrom occurred, as was the case in Strasbourg, where two thousand Jews were burnt in February 1349, months before the Flagellants arrived later that year in June or July.” (Aberth 2011: 53)