The Black Death and the Poisoned Wells
The Black Death was a fresh disaster for the Jews of Christian lands. In Asia the same heavenly scourge killed Mongols, Muslims and Jews alike, without anyone blaming the Jewish people. In western Europe, however, crowds worn down by the plague's ravages accused the Jews of poisoning the wells in order to destroy Christ's people. Inflamed minds worked out the details, and soon it was widely said that the Jews of Toledo had sent agents with boxes of poison, made of lizards and Christian hearts, to every Jewish center in Europe to poison wells and springs.
Emperor Charles IV called the charge baseless, as did Pope Clement VI, and many local governors and city councils voted to confirm that view, but none of this had any effect. A false belief spread among Christians that the Jews were rarely struck by the plague. In some cities, perhaps because of differences in sanitary rules and in the treatment given by Jewish physicians, the disease did kill fewer Jews than Christians. But in many other cities, such as Vienna, Regensburg, Avignon and Rome, Jews died as heavily as Christians. Even so, a number of Jews were forced by heavy torture to confess to putting poison in wells and springs. Christians blocked up their own wells and springs and drank rainwater and melted snow.
Planned massacres of Jews spread cruelly through France, Spain and Germany. In one city of southern France the entire Jewish community was put to death. The Jews of Savoy, all those around Lake Geneva and those of Bern, Freiburg, Basel, Nuremberg and Brussels were likewise killed. Clement VI condemned these accusations and this savagery for a second time, declared the Jews innocent, pointed out that the plague raged as fiercely in places with no Jews as in every other city, rebuked the clergy for their cruel conduct and excommunicated all who had stained their hands with Jewish blood or their tongues with the charge.
Even so, the bishop of Strasbourg joined the accusers and forced the city council, against its will, to expel all Jews from the city. The common people judged this too mild and friendly, removed the council and installed another that ordered every Jew in the city arrested. Some Jews fled to the surrounding villages and were killed by peasants. Two thousand who remained in the city were imprisoned and pressed to accept baptism. Half yielded, and the other half, who refused to submit, perished (14 February, given in the book as 1439, and so out of its place in the chronology). In all, as a result of these persecutions across Christian Europe, five hundred and ten Jewish communities were wholly emptied, and more cities lost most of their Jews. At Saragossa, for instance, only one Jew in five remained after the abuse that followed the plague.
Henry Charles Lea estimates the Jews killed at 3,000 in Erfurt and 12,000 in Bavaria. At Vienna, at the urging of Rabbi Jonas, all the Jews gathered in the synagogue and took their own lives. Similar mass suicides took place at Worms, Oppenheim and Krems. In panicked flight thousands of Jews left western Europe for Poland and Ottoman Turkey. Before modern times, among all the records of historical savagery, it is hard to find an act more savage than the mass killing of Jews during the Black Death.
Expulsions from German Cities
Later the surviving Jews of Germany slowly returned to the very cities that had destroyed them and rebuilt their synagogues. In 1385 all thirty-six cities of the Swabian League imprisoned their Jewish residents and announced they would free them only if they gave up collecting the loans they had made. The deal was especially pleasing to Nuremberg, which had borrowed 7,000 pounds from them. In 1389 a number of Jews were killed on the charge of desecrating the host, and in 1399, at Poznan, fourteen Jews were put to death on the same charge.
For various reasons the Jewish residents were expelled from Cologne (1424), Speyer (1435), Strasbourg and Augsburg (1439), Würzburg (1453), Erfurt (1458), Mainz (1470), Nuremberg (1498) and Ulm (1499). Maximilian I called their expulsion lawful, saying that "they have multiplied excessively and by their usury have seized the property of honest citizens and brought them down to humiliation and disgrace."
In 1446 all the Jews of Brandenburg were imprisoned and their property seized. Stephen, bishop of Brandenburg, called the accusations against the Jews a pretext to hide the greed of the ruling class: "Those princes who, in their unbridled greed and without legal cause, have thrown groups of Jews into prison and refuse to return the property they took by force have acted tyrannically."
In 1451 Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, one of the most enlightened men of the fifteenth century, required the Jews of his diocese to wear a badge so as to be recognized. Two years later John of Capistrano began his missions as representative of Pope Nicholas V in Germany, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Poland. In his powerful sermons he accused the Jews of killing children and desecrating the host. The dukes of Bavaria, alarmed by the danger of the "Jewish plague," drove all Hebrews out of their duchy. Godfrey, bishop of Würzburg, who had earlier given the Jews of Franconia full freedom, now banished them. In city after city Jews were imprisoned and the debts owed to them were burned.
At Breslau, at Capistrano's request, a number of Jews were jailed so that he himself could press them under torture into confessing what he wanted, and as a result of these confessions forty Jews died (2 June 1453). The rest of the city's Jews were banished, but their children were taken from them by force and baptized. Capistrano was canonized in 1690.
The Regensburg Affair
The persecution of the Jews at Regensburg shows the conditions of the time well. A Jewish convert to Christianity named Hans Vogel declared that Israel Bruna, a seventy-five-year-old rabbi, had bought a Christian child from him and killed it to use the blood in a Jewish rite. The people believed the charge and demanded death for the rabbi. To save the old man from the mob, the city council imprisoned him. Emperor Frederick III ordered his release, but the council did not dare carry out the order and instead arrested Vogel and threatened him with death while inviting him to confess his falsehood. Vogel testified that Bruna was innocent, and the old rabbi was freed.
Later news reached Regensburg that at Trent some Jews had confessed under torture to killing a child. Vogel's accusation was raised again, with more confidence in its truth. The council ordered all the Jews arrested and their property confiscated. The emperor intervened and fined the city 8,000 gulden for this act. The council told the Jews that it would free them if they paid this fine plus 10,000 gulden as security. The Jews replied that 18,000 gulden was more than all the property they had left and that they could not raise such a sum. For two more years the Jews were kept in prison, and then, after swearing not to leave Regensburg and not to seek revenge, they were released. Even so, the clergy did not stop agitating for their expulsion and threatened any shopkeeper who sold them goods with excommunication. About 1500 only twenty-four Jewish families remained at Regensburg, and in 1519 they were banished.
The Inquisition in Portugal
The expulsion of the Jews from Spain, as noted above, was of vital importance to that country. In Portugal persecution revived when Pope Clement VII, at the urging of Charles V, allowed the Portuguese primate to establish the Inquisition (1513) in order to force the "New Christians," most of whom were Jews baptized by compulsion against their will, to observe Christian rites. The strict code of Torquemada was applied, spies were placed everywhere to report any lapse by the New Christians from full observance of Christian practice, and thousands of Jews were imprisoned. Emigration was forbidden, since the Jews were still useful to the country's economy. To prevent their flight, Jews were barred from buying property from Christians, and hundreds were burned for trying to leave Portugal.
Clement, who felt disgust at these cruelties, or perhaps was swayed by gifts from the Jews, abolished the unlimited power of the Portuguese Inquisition and ordered Jewish prisoners freed and their seized property returned. His bull of 17 October 1532 set out new humane principles for the newly baptized Jews:
Since they were baptized by force, they should not be counted full members of the church, and to punish them for breaking Christian practice or for returning to Judaism is contrary to justice and fairness. The sons and daughters of the first converts are in a different position, since they are voluntary members of the church. As for the first group, who were raised by their parents among the Jews and grew accustomed to Judaism, it is the height of cruelty to punish them under holy Christian law for returning to the Jewish faith. They should instead be kept in the church's arms with tolerance and kindness.
Clement's sincerity is shown by the fact that when, on his sickbed, he felt death near, he sent a formal letter on 26 July 1534 to the pope's representative in Portugal, ordering him to hurry the release of the imprisoned converted Jews.
Pope Paul III likewise continued to protect the Jews of Portugal, and as a result 1,800 imprisoned Jews were freed. But when Charles V returned from his apparently successful campaign against Tunis, he demanded as a reward for his victory the establishment of the Inquisition in Portugal. Paul III agreed reluctantly (1536), but on terms that, in the view of John III, made the agreement almost ineffective: in the Inquisition's courts the accused must be confronted with the accuser, and those condemned in the first court had the right of appeal to the papal court.
One zealous convert caused a new uproar by posting on the walls of Lisbon cathedral the provocative words: "The Messiah has not yet come; Jesus was not the Messiah; Christianity is nothing but a lie." Since this was plainly meant only to stir public feeling against the Jews, Paul appointed a commission of cardinals to examine the workings of the Portuguese Inquisition, and received this report:
When someone is accused of disbelief in Christianity, often without proof or honest witness, the Inquisition's officers arrest him, throw him in a stifling prison and forbid him to see earth and sky, or above all to talk with acquaintances who might comfort him. They accuse him on baseless testimony without naming the time and place of the offense charged. He is later allowed a defense lawyer, who, instead of defending him, does what brings him nearer the stake. If a truly faithful but unlucky Christian firmly denies the charges against him, he is condemned to death and his property is seized. If he submits and admits all the charges, he is ruined and thrown into a dark prison for life, and this is when they claim to have treated the condemned with Christian mercy. Even those who manage to prove their innocence are fined at least, so that it will not be thought they were arrested for no reason. Prisoners are pressed with every kind of torture to admit the sins attributed to them. Many die in prison, and those who regain their freedom bear a permanent mark of shame on the brow, as do their relatives.
Paul III, though caught in great political changes and in danger of losing Spain and Portugal as Leo had lost Germany and Clement England, did all he could to soften the severity of the Inquisition. But killing and persecution grew daily, until the Portuguese Jews, in utter despair, found a way to flee their hosts. They joined the Jews of Spain in a search for some safe corner of Christendom or Islam where they might live by the laws of the Jewish faith.