Erfurt massacre (1349)

Erfurt massacre
Part of Black Death persecutions
LocationErfurt
DateMarch 1349 (1349-03)
TargetJews
Attack type
Massacre, pogrom
Deaths100+
MotiveAllegations that Jews were responsible for the Black Death

The Erfurt massacre was a massacre of the Jewish community in Erfurt, Germany, on 21-22 March 1349.[1] Accounts of the number of Jews killed in the massacre vary widely from between 100 and up to 3000.[2][3] Any Jewish survivors were expelled from the city. Some Jews set fire to their homes and possessions and perished in the flames before they could be lynched.[4]

The many Black Death persecutions and massacres that occurred in France and Germany at that time were sometimes in response to accusations that the Jews were responsible for outbreaks of the Black Death, and other times justified with the belief that killing the local Jews would prevent the spread of the Black Death to that locale.[5] Although these beliefs, and the accompanying massacres, were frequently encouraged by local bishops or itinerant Flagellants, the Catholic Church, including Pope Clement VI under whom the Flagellants and the Black Death began, and his successor, Innocent VI, were firmly against it. In a papal bull condemning the Flagellant movement in late 1349, Pope Clement VI criticized their "shedding the blood of Jews".[6] Erfurt later suffered the ravages of the Black Plague, where over 16,000 residents died during a ten-week period in 1350.[7]

Among those murdered was prominent Talmudist Alexander Suslin.[8]

A few years after the 1349 massacre, Jews moved back to Erfurt and founded a second community, which was disbanded by the city council in 1458.

  1. ^ Other records attest that the massacre occurred on 2 March 1349 or in August of that year.
  2. ^ Jewish Encyclopedia. 1901–1906. Black Death.
  3. ^ Heinrich Graetz (31 December 2009). History of the Jews, Vol. IV (in six volumes): From the Rise of the Kabbala (1270 C.E.) to the Permanent Settlement of the Marranos in Holland (1618 C.E.). Cosimo, Inc. p. 109. ISBN 978-1-60520-946-3. Retrieved 22 April 2011. In Erfurt, out of a community of 3000 souls, not one person survived.
  4. ^ Encyclopaedia Judaica: Jews in Erfurt.
  5. ^ Julia Weiner. The golden age that the pogroms couldn’t destroy, Jewish Chronicle, February 5, 2009. "The resulting hysteria led to pogroms such as the one that took place in Erfurt, the capital of the German state of Thuringia, where 1,000 Jews were killed in a single day of violence on March 2, 1349."
  6. ^ Philip Ziegler (1969). The Black Death. Harper Collins. p. 96. ISBN 9780061315503.
  7. ^ George Christakos (2005). Interdisciplinary public health reasoning and epidemic modelling: the case of Black Death. Springer. p. 129. ISBN 9783540281658.
  8. ^ Marvin J. Heller (2004). The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book: an abridged thesaurus. Brill. p. 615. ISBN 978-90-04-13309-9. Retrieved 22 April 2011.