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A disastrous century

Date

1298CE

1298 to c. 1350approximate date

In 1298 and the 1330s waves of violence swept Bavaria and Alsace; during the Black Death Jews were accused of poisoning wells and hundreds of communities were hit.

Antisemitism and persecutionDiaspora communities48.8544°N 2.3462°E
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Under the Cross: each bar is an event of the period; this one is in coral.

Sourced narrative

Each block is a verifiable statement. The number opens the cited page; amber or coral blocks flag tradition or contested interpretation.

9 statements

01Before the plague

03

Traumatic as the First Crusade surely was, the violence stayed relatively local and subsided fast, and attacks on Jews remained the exception until the close of the thirteenth century.

01

The Rindfleisch massacres, named for the leader of a mob that ran amok for five months in 1298 and ravaged more than 40 communities across Bavaria, left at least 3,400 victims according to the memorial books.

04

The Armleder massacres of the 1330s likewise began with a host-desecration accusation. They covered a wider area, including over a hundred Jewish communities in Alsace, and turned partly on Christians as well.

02The Black Death

02

In the late 1340s, with Europe staggered by bubonic plague, the Black Death, which by some estimates killed as much as a third of its people, Christians again rounded on the Jews, accused of poisoning wells and believed by many to have drawn down God's anger by living among Christians.

05

In Provence and Catalonia, the account goes, the massacres killed more victims than the epidemic did, and the violence rapidly engulfed much of Western and Central Europe, hitting hundreds of communities from France and northern Spain through the German Empire to northern Italy and Hungary. It was undoubtedly the worst anti-Jewish persecution the medieval world had yet witnessed, though oddly it did not draw from Jews a literary outpouring on the scale of the Crusades.

06

Once the massacres subsided, many towns that had driven out their Jews during the plague took them back to help restore normal life, yet violence against Jews remained a factor at a comparatively high level, in how often it occurred and how widely it spread.

03A century between two disasters

The fourteenth century was framed by great disasters: a decade before 1300, all Jews were banished from England; a century later, in 1391, Spain's Jews were struck by massacres and compulsory baptisms that left behind a gravely shaken community. In the middle decades, chiefly amid the plague, widespread persecution struck the greater part of Europe's Jewish communities. None of this means Jewish life across the century and everywhere was an unbroken tale of woe, but the fourteenth century did witness the unraveling of the older medieval order, and Jewish life in Western Europe needed a long time to recover, a process belonging to the early modern period (Chapter 8).

Context

When the Black Death struck, Jewish life in most of France and in England was already over: in 1290 King Edward banished the Jews from England under pressure from the landed nobility, the chief debtors of Jewish moneylenders.

§ 01Geography

Where it happened

Gazetteer coordinates (Pleiades for ancient places; Natural Earth and Wikidata for modern ones) over modern physical geography (Natural Earth). Coastlines and the Dead Sea have changed since antiquity.
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§ 02Museum

Objects and images

Each item states whether it is an ancient object, a modern photograph or a later artistic interpretation.

§ 03Historiography

What scholars debate

Positions shown side by side, unranked, as the source reports them. The source’s own assessment appears separately.

Scholarly debate · 01

Was the First Crusade a turning point in medieval Jewish history?

2 positions · no single answer · take a seat →

  1. A

    Turning point

    Many historians

    The First Crusade would have been a turning point in medieval Jewish history.

  2. B

    No permanent break

    The authors of the book

    Rhineland communities recovered quickly, the violence was localized and later attacks remained exceptional until the late thirteenth century; the larger impact lies in memory and the ideology of martyrdom.

§ 04Network

Connections

§ 05Bibliography

Further reading

  • David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

    Persecution of minorities in the Middle Ages · recommended in Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 212

§ 06Apparatus

Sources on this page

  1. 01Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 198; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 198inspect
  2. 02Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 198; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 198inspect
  3. 03Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 198; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 198inspect
  4. 04Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 198; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 198inspect
  5. 05Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 198; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 198inspect
  6. 06Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 198; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
  7. 07Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
  8. 08Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
  9. 09Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199; Efron, Lehmann and Weitzman, p. 199inspect
  • Documented evidenceAttested by contemporary evidence: texts, inscriptions, coins, papyri or archaeology.
  • Scholarly reconstructionHistorians' inference from indirect evidence.
  • Tradition or narrativeA literary, traditional or religious account; significant in itself, but not independently verified.
  • Contested interpretationScholars explicitly disagree; see the positions in the debate.
  • Illustrative reconstructionA hypothesis or visual scheme to guide reading; not a historical claim.