A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (18 page)

In September 1348, officials in Savoy, a town in southeastern France, became the first to formally accuse Jews of causing the plague by poisoning wells. Every Jew in the town was arrested and his or her property confiscated. Officials tortured the prisoners until they confessed to their “crimes.” After a trial based on those forced confessions, eleven Jews were burned alive.

In much of Europe, Christians blamed the Jews for the plague. In town after town, officials arrested Jewish residents and confiscated their property. The Jews were then burned at the stake.

As news of the murders spread, mobs in other cities and towns dragged Jews from their homes and threw them into bonfires. Pope Clement VI issued two bulls in an effort to stop the killing. He pointed out that people of all religions were dying from the disease. Jews were victims like everyone else; their death rate was about the same as that of Christians. But such arguments did nothing to ease the fears caused by the plague.

As the disease continued to spread north and east, a new Christian group, known as
flagellants
, suddenly appeared to fight the plague. Organized in bands of about 200 or more men, the flagellants traveled together for 33½ days before returning home. (The number reflects the traditional reckoning of Jesus’s age at the time of the crucifixion—one day for each year.)

The flagellants recited prayers as they marched from city to city. When they approached a town, church bells rang to announce their arrival. Once in the town square, the men stripped to the waist and then whipped, or
flagellated, themselves with heavy leather thongs tipped with metal studs. They were beating themselves to atone for the wickedness of the human race and to earn another chance from God. The flagellants believed that they alone—not priests or bishops—could save “all Christendom” from hell. Each tried to outdo the others in suffering, as townspeople looked on in amazement. Onlookers often sobbed and moaned as they recalled their own sins.

To join the group, a man had to confess his sins and agree to beat himself as the others did. He also had to vow not to bathe, shave, sleep in a bed, change his clothing, or have any contact with women during the length of his journey.

Many townspeople brought children to be healed by the flagellants; still others dipped cloth in the flagellants’ blood and preserved it in the hope that it would protect their families from the plague. When priests tried to stop the marches, they were stoned. Many people were convinced that only the flagellants were pure enough to cast out evil spirits.

In every town the flagellants entered, they murdered Jews as the “poisoners of the wells.” In Mainz, Germany, and in a few other places, Jews armed themselves in advance and fought back. Although they killed some of their attackers, they were hopelessly outnumbered by the crowds the flagellants attracted. Many Jews chose martyrdom. Like some Jews at the time of the first crusade (see
Chapter 4
), they killed themselves and their families in an act known as
Kiddush ha-Shem
, “the sanctification of the Name of God.”

No one knows exactly how many Jewish communities were destroyed between 1347 and 1351 or how many Jews were murdered. According to some sources, mobs destroyed as many as 60 large Jewish communities and 150 smaller ones. A rabbi in Spain in the late 1300s estimated the number of Jews who died in these attacks in Europe to be 16,000 out of a total Jewish population of approximately 450,000.

Although the pope and other religious leaders condemned the murders, neither they nor political rulers were able to stop the flagellants until the plague began to decline. By 1350, some town councils were closing the gates of their cities to the flagellants. At about the same time, emperors and kings were warning that they would put to death anyone who took part in the movement. The groups began to disband and eventually disappeared, “vanishing as suddenly as they had come like night phantoms or mocking ghosts” as one chronicler wrote.

Elsewhere, in the Middle East and North Africa, millions of people also died as a result of the plague, but few there placed the blame on Jews—or
on Christians. In these places, attacks on a minority group usually resulted from a local dispute or a culture clash, which rarely spread to other towns or regions. Why did Christians in Europe and Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East respond so differently to the plague?

One answer may lie in the difference between the way Christians and Muslims viewed nonbelievers in the fourteenth century. Muslims expected nonbelievers to obey the law, show respect for Islam, pay special taxes, and accept certain humiliations. As long as these requirements were met, they were left alone. Many Christians, however, saw the mere presence of non-believers as contaminating a community. They thought a community had to be united in a single faith to be acceptable to God. As a result, nonbelievers did not have to do anything to be considered a threat; the fact that they did not believe was reason enough to fear them and persecute them.

The Christian mobs in Europe were not carrying out a religious mandate. In fact, they were openly defying the pope and other religious leaders. They were also defying their own political leaders. For example, on February 9, 1349, the town council of Strasbourg, a city in present-day France, voted to protect local Jews from attack. That evening, the city’s guilds overthrew the council and put a new one in its place. The new councilmen promptly ordered the arrest of all Jews. Jacob von Königshofen described what happened next:

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. Those who wanted to baptize themselves were spared…. 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. The council, however, took the cash that the Jews possessed and divided it among the workingmen proportionately. 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. After this wealth was divided among the artisans, some gave their share to the Cathedral or to the Church on the advice of their confessors
.

Thus were the Jews burnt at Strasbourg, and in the same year in all the cities of the Rhine…. In some towns they burnt the Jews after a trial, in others, without a trial. In some cities, the Jews themselves set fire to their own houses and cremated themselves.
⁴

Why did artisans and other workingmen in many cities feel differently about Jews than their city councils did? After all, they lived in the same place, shared the same religion, and feared the same plague.

The mobs were made up of people who were often deeply in debt. When they needed money for their businesses, family emergencies, or taxes, the only place they could get a loan was from a moneylender. And by the fourteenth century, in most European cities, that moneylender was almost always a Jew. Many Jews became moneylenders partly because many other occupations were closed to them and partly because Christians did not want to take on this “sin” themselves.

Then, as now, a lender and a borrower came to an agreement. The lender agreed to give the borrower a sum of money in exchange for the borrower’s promise to repay the debt with interest. In most cases, the borrower also had to provide security for the loan—property or other assets that the lender could claim if the borrower failed to pay the debt. The item offered as security had to be something of at least equal value to the loan itself—a piece of land, a building, a horse, a gemstone, or some other asset.

A German farmer in the 1400s approaches a Jewish moneylender. The drawing is one of the very few to show Jews in a realistic manner.

In many cities, including Strasbourg, Jewish moneylenders aroused hatred because they charged 30 percent to 50 percent interest or more for many loans. They felt that the high rates were justified because the risks were equally high. But such high rates infuriated many people, and Strasbourg’s councilmen were not the first to give in to a mob by canceling all debts to Jewish lenders.

Despite the high interest rates, most people were able to pay their debts when times were good. However, when times were hard—as they often were in the fourteenth century—many borrowers lost everything they owned. They rarely blamed their losses on the drought that destroyed their crops, the wars that devastated much of Europe, the plague, or just bad luck. It was easier to direct their anger at the person who had loaned them the money and was now demanding repayment. The moneylender was not a big impersonal bank with hundreds of employees but a real person—someone the borrower knew by name and saw in the market or on the street. The loan was personal, and so was the anger when the moneylender asked for repayment with interest.

Although most moneylenders were Jews, most Jews were not moneylenders. To earn a living by lending money, you need to have money you can afford to risk, and most Jews did not. Why did those who did become moneylenders? Probably because they saw an opportunity to get ahead or make extra money. As trade in Europe expanded in the twelfth century, so did the demand for loans. As long as lenders could minimize their losses, they had the potential to earn large sums of money. (Of course, not all of them were successful.)

There was another reason some Jews became moneylenders around the end of the 1100s: they had few other ways of earning a living. Jews were no longer allowed to own land in many places, so they could not farm for a living. Only Christians could join guilds, so most crafts were closed to Jews. They could trade, but in many places their ability to compete was restricted. For instance, in some cities, they were allowed to sell goods only at certain hours. They also had to pay a special tax whenever they entered or left the market. Christians did not have such limitations.

City councils had protected Jews over the years because their members understood that borrowing was essential to the growth of their communities and their own businesses. Loans made it possible for cities to build roads and churches and to carry out other public projects. To some degree, then, a council’s support for local Jews was a matter of
self-interest—though standing up to an angry mob took courage, as it does today.

City councils got their power from a king or noble, and those rulers also needed money. Many of them not only borrowed from Jews but also taxed them heavily—far more heavily than they taxed their other subjects. When Jewish communities were established in Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries, Jews were free to move from place to place. By the fourteenth century, however, they were considered “serfs of the exchequer.” In earlier centuries, that term had meant that Jews received the protection of a king or noble in exchange for paying taxes. Now Jews were increasingly considered the property of kings or nobles.

Jewish lenders, no matter how wealthy they might become, could lose everything at a ruler’s whim. For example, in 1286, Rudolph I of Germany confiscated the possessions of Jews who were about to move out of his kingdom. Before they left, he declared that they were “serfs of the king’s exchequer in their body and their possessions,” and therefore their property belonged to him. In 1343, King Ludwig of Bavaria canceled the debts owed to Jews in Nuremburg by telling them, “You belong to us and the kingdom in your body and possessions and we are free to deal with you howsoever we wish.”

As money lending became an increasingly risky business, Jews found themselves isolated. They could count on protection only when a ruler’s interests matched their own and when that ruler was willing to risk the wrath of the mob. Most rulers were not willing to take such risks.

Why did Christians find it easy to hate Jews and to believe cruel lies about them? To people without money, it may have seemed as if Jewish moneylenders did no “real” work and yet were richer than their hardworking neighbors. And people who could not read or do arithmetic (an overwhelming majority of the population at that time) no doubt suspected that they were being cheated when the moneylender told them how much interest they owed. When a Jewish moneylender demanded repayment of money he had loaned, he may have seemed to be adding to the burdens of a family that was already in deep financial trouble. People who are deeply in debt sometimes see the money they owe as a sign of failure; they feel ashamed that they were unable to manage their affairs better. Such embarrassment or shame may have led Christian borrowers to blame the lender, and this was easier when that lender was an outsider. And because many believed that charging interest for a loan was a sin, their blame was particularly intense.