The Black Death полностью

But though such crude suspicions might have been acceptable to the mob, they can hardly have been taken seriously by the intelligent and better educated. Dr Guerchberg has analysed the attitude of the leading plague tractators.^{188} The most remarkable feature is how few references there are to the guilt or innocence of the Jews. Konrade of Megenberg brusquely dismissed the accusations: ‘Some say that this was brought about by the Jewish people, but this point of view is untenable.’ In his Buch der Natur he cites as evidence Jewish mortality in Vienna which was so high that a new cemetery had to be constructed. Gui de Chauliac was equally categoric. Alfonso of Cordoba considered that, by all the rules of planetary action, the Black Death should only have lasted a year and that any subsequent extension must be the result of a wicked plot. But he did not specifically accuse the Jews of being responsible. The ‘Five Strasbourg Physicians’ warned against poisoned food and water but it is doubtful whether they believed that the poisoning was done deliberately by man.^{189} No other tractator paid any attention to the possibility that some human agency was involved in the spread of the plague, still less that such villains must be identified as the Jews.

On the whole this reticence on the part of the tractators must be taken to indicate that they did not believe the accusations. It is impossible that they did not know what had been suggested and, if they had really thought that a principal cause of the plague was the poisoning of the wells by Jews, then they could hardly have failed to say so in their examination of the subject. Their silence might imply that they thought the idea too ridiculous to mention but it is more likely that they shrank from expressing publicly an unpopular view on an issue over which people were dangerously disturbed.

For it took considerable moral courage to stand up for the Jews in 1348 and 1349 and not many people were prepared to take the risk. The first cases of persecution seem to have taken place in the South of France in the spring of 1348, and, in May, there was a massacre in Provence. Narbonne and Carcassone exterminated their communities with especial thoroughness. But it is possible that the madness might never have spread across Europe if it had not been for the trial at Chillon in September 1348 of Jews said to have poisoned certain wells at Neustadt and the disastrous confessions of guilt which torture tore from the accused.^{190} Balavignus, a Jewish physician, was the first to be racked. ‘After much hesitation’, he confessed that the Rabbi Jacob of Toledo had sent him, by hand of a Jewish boy, a leather pouch filled with red and black powder and concealed in the mummy of an egg. This powder he was ordered, on pain of excommunication, to throw into the larger wells of Thonon. He did so, having previously warned his friends and relations not to drink the water. ‘He also declared that none of his community could exculpate themselves from this accusation, as the plot was communicated to all and all were guilty of the above charges.’ Odd scraps of ‘evidence’ were produced, such as a rag found in a well in which it was alleged that the powder, composed largely of ground-up portions of a basilisk, had been concealed. Ten similar confessions were racked from other unfortunates and the resulting dossier sent to neighbouring cities for their information and appropriate action.

So incriminating a confession settled the doubts or perhaps quietened the consciences of many who might otherwise have felt bound to protect the Jews. On 21 September 1348 the municipality of Zurich voted never to admit Jews to the city again. In Basle all the Jews were penned up in wooden buildings and burned alive.^{191} ‘In the month of November began the persecution of the Jews,’ wrote a German chronicler.^{192} Henry of Diessenhoven  has recorded the movement of the fever across his country. In November 1348 the Jews were burnt at Solothurn, Zofingen and Stuttgart; in December at Landsberg, Burren, Memmingen, Lindau; in January, Freiburg, Ulm and Speyer. At Speyer the bodies of the murdered were piled in great wine-casks and sent floating down the Rhine. In February it was the turn of the Jews at Gotha, Eisenach and Dresden; in March, Worms, Baden and Erfurt.