page_title: Persecution of Jews
section_title: Western and Christian antisemitism
hierarchical_section_title: Persecution of Jews / Western and Christian antisemitism
context_page_description: Persecution of Jews has been a major part of Jewish history, prompting shifting waves of refugees throughout the diaspora communities.
context_section_description: In the Middle Ages antisemitism in Europe was religious. Although it is not part of Catholic dogma, many Christians, including members of the clergy, held the Jewish people collectively responsible for killing Jesus. As stated in the Boston College Guide to Passion Plays, "Over the course of time, Christians began to accept … that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for killing Jesus. According to this interpretation, both the Jews present at Jesus Christ's death and the Jewish people collectively and for all time, have committed the sin of deicide, or 'god-killing'. For 1900 years of Christian-Jewish history, the charge of deicide has led to hatred, violence against and murder of Jews in Europe and America."
  During the High Middle Ages in Europe there was full-scale persecution of Jews in many places, with blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and massacres. An underlying source of prejudice against Jews in Europe was religious. Jews were frequently massacred and exiled from various European countries.  The persecution reached its first peak during the Crusades. In the First Crusade (1096), flourishing communities on the Rhine and the Danube were utterly destroyed, a prime example being the Rhineland massacres. In the Second Crusade (1147) the Jews in France were subject to frequent massacres. The Jews were also subjected to attacks by the Shepherds' Crusades of 1251 and 1320. The Crusades were followed by expulsions, including in 1290, the banishing of all English Jews; in 1396, 100,000 Jews were expelled from France; and, in 1421 thousands were expelled from Austria. Many of the expelled Jews fled to Poland.
  As the Black Death epidemics devastated Europe in the mid-14th century, annihilating more than a half of the population, Jews were taken as scapegoats. Rumors spread that they caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed by violence in the Black Death persecutions. Although Pope Clement VI tried to protect them by papal bull on July 6, 1348 - with another following later in 1348 - several months afterwards, 900 Jews were burnt alive in Strasbourg, where the plague hadn't yet affected the city.
  One study finds that Jewish persecutions and expulsions increased with negative economic shocks and climactic variations in Europe over the period 1100-1600. The authors of the study argue that this stems from people blaming Jews for misfortunes and weak rulers going after Jewish wealth in times of fiscal crisis. The authors propose several explanations for why Jewish persecutions significantly declined after 1600:
  (1) there were simply fewer Jewish communities to persecute by the 17th century;
  (2) improved agricultural productivity, or, better-integrated markets may have reduced vulnerability to temperature shocks;
  (3) the rise of stronger states may have led to more robust protection for religious and ethnic minorities;
  (4) there were fewer negative temperature shocks.
  (5) the impact of the Reformation and the Enlightenment may have reduced antisemitic attitudes.
  In the Papal States, which existed until 1870, Jews were required to live only in specified neighborhoods called ghettos.  Until the 1840s, they were required to regularly attend sermons urging their conversion to Christianity.  Only Jews were taxed to support state boarding schools for Jewish converts to Christianity.  It was illegal to convert from Christianity to Judaism.  Sometimes Jews were baptized involuntarily, and, even when such baptisms were illegal, forced to practice the Christian religion.  In many such cases, the state separated them from their families, of which the Edgardo Mortara account is one of the most widely publicized instances of acrimony between Catholics and Jews in the Papal States in the second half of the 19th century.
caption: Jews from Worms, Germany wear the mandatory yellow badge. A money bag and garlic in the hands are an antisemitic stereotype (sixteenth-century drawing).
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