Persecution of Jews during the Black Death significant event Strasbourg massacre
Persecutions and massacres
The first massacre directly related to the plague took place in April 1348 in Toulon, where the Jewish quarter was sacked, and forty Jews were murdered in their homes. Shortly afterward, violence broke out in Barcelona and other Catalan cities. In 1349, massacres and persecutions spread across Europe, including the Erfurt massacre, the Zürich massacre, the Basel massacre, and massacres in Aragon and Flanders. Around 2,000 Jews were burnt alive on 14 February 1349 in the "Valentine's Day" Strasbourg massacre, where the plague had not yet affected the city. While the ashes smouldered, Christian residents of Strasbourg sifted through and collected the valuable possessions of Jews that were not burnt by the fires. The following September, 330 Jews were burned alive in the Kyburg Castle, east of Zürich. Many hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed in this period. Within the 510 Jewish communities destroyed in this period, some members killed themselves to avoid the persecutions. In the spring of 1349, the Jewish community in Frankfurt am Main was annihilated. That was followed by the destruction of Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne. The 3,000-strong Jewish population of Mainz initially defended themselves and managed to hold off the Christian attackers. However, the Christians managed to overwhelm the Jewish ghetto in the end and killed all of its Jews.At Speyer, Jewish corpses were disposed in wine casks and cast into the Rhine. By late 1349, the worst of the pogroms had ended in Rhineland. However, the massacres of Jews was starting to rise near the Hansa townships of the Baltic coast and in Eastern Europe. By 1351, there had been 350 incidents of anti-Jewish pogroms, and 60 major and 150 minor Jewish communities had been exterminated.