September – November 1348
The poison accusation, September 1348
In September 1348 the plague reaches the shores of Lake Geneva, in the lands of Amadeus VI, count of Savoy. The count’s officers arrest the Jews of the towns on the lake and hold them in the castle of Chillon. Under torture they confess to poisoning wells. On 15 September Balavigny, a Jewish surgeon of Thonon, confesses that a rabbi from Toledo sent him poison and that he put it into a well at Thonon. In October Agimet, a Jew of Geneva, confesses that he poisoned wells at Venice and in southern Italy while he travelled there on business. Clerks write the confessions down, and the castellan of Chillon sends copies to other towns, among them Strasbourg.
The written confessions pass from town to town, and the killings move north with them. Jacob Twinger von Königshofen, the chronicler of Strasbourg, wrote that Jews were tortured at Bern and at Zofingen until they confessed to the same crime, and that Bern then wrote of it to Strasbourg, Freiburg and Basel. In November 1348 the killings reach Solothurn, the first German-speaking town. Over the winter towns across the Empire act on these letters, and the next chapter follows the burnings of 1349.
In France lepers and Jews were accused of poisoning wells in 1321, and the killings have a longer past. In 1096 crusaders killed the Jews of the Rhineland towns, among them Mainz. In 1298 bands led by a man called Rintfleisch killed the Jews of more than a hundred places in Franconia, starting at Röttingen. From 1336 to 1338 the bands called the Armleder killed Jews in Franconia and Alsace, and in 1338 the Jews of Deggendorf in Bavaria were burned on a charge of desecrating the host. In the spring of 1348 Jews have already been killed at Toulon on 13 April and at Barcelona on 17 May.
Pope Clement VI answers the accusation in two bulls, in July and September 1348. The first page of the next chapter gives them.
The castle of Chillon on Lake Geneva, where the Jews of the lake towns were tortured in 1348Wikimedia Commons, Benjamin Gimmel, CC BY-SA 3.0
Jews burned on a charge of desecrating the host, a woodcut in the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493Wikimedia Commons, Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff, public domain
Sources
- Confessions of the Jews of Savoy, September – October 1348, trans. in Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World (1938).
- Jacob Twinger von Königshofen, Chronicle of Strasbourg (about 1400), trans. in Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World (1938).
- Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death (2000).
- Germania Judaica, vol. 2, ed. Zvi Avneri (1968).
- Rosemary Horrox (ed.), The Black Death (1994).
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