The Black Death and the Massacres of 5108

In 5108 plague reached Europe and killed, by various estimates, a third to a half of its people. Victims died within three days, towns emptied, physicians understood nothing. Then a rumour spread: the Jews had poisoned the wells.

The first 'confessions' were extracted under torture at Chillon on Lake Geneva in the autumn of 5109 (September 1348), and the transcripts were circulated through Germany as proof. After that the catastrophe outran the disease itself. Strasbourg burned some two thousand Jews in February 5109 — before the plague had even reached the city. Basel shut its community in a wooden house on an island and set it alight. Mainz, Cologne, Worms, Speyer, Erfurt, Nuremberg, Frankfurt; in some towns the Jews fired their own houses rather than wait for the mob. Hundreds of communities were destroyed in two years, and the surviving memorial books list them by name.

Pope Clement VI twice issued bulls stating plainly that Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else and that the charge was false; under his protection in Avignon no one was harmed. It did not stop the killing.

The consequence was not only the death toll. Survivors moved east, to Poland and Lithuania, where kings offered charters and invited them to settle towns. Ashkenazi Jewry, born on the Rhine, shifted almost entirely to Eastern Europe over the next two centuries.