The claim I chose is the masses: The Jews are poisoning the wells. I felt that this claim is not reasonable in many ways. The most obvious one said that “the plague is died out in the winters and was resurrected in the springs.” What if Jews are poisoning the wells, then why they stopped poisoning the wells during the winter? It can only tell us that whatever killing the people are not by the poisonous water, but the toxic gas from the Italian ship on the black sea dock in Messina, Sicily. In addition, if Jews were jealous of Christians, why did they kill other races of people? Plague was spread throughout the whole Europe and not just a specific country. I don’t believe that Jews were planning to kill all the Europeans. It did not accord with the law of Jews. From what I know, most Jews did everything in accordance with the Bible, the Bible is their law. So it is not reasonable for them to kill. They must not allow to poison the wells and kill the people.
From my opinion, those four claims all have some mistakes. If I have to choose one, I would rather say that bad sanitation is one of the most reasonable causes that can spread the disease of Europe, because just as the article said that poor and anyone live in close quarters were having highest rate of death. People who lived in close quarters for some reasons must had worse sanitation than other areas. So it was much easier for them to spread germs of the plague.
Background Reading
In October 1347, Italian ships on the Black Sea en route to and from China dock in Messina, Sicily -- their crews are dead or dying. Whatever is killing them quickly spreads ashore. Within a month, it passes through Sicily and moves back out over water. By January 1348, it has penetrated France via Marseille and North Africa via Tunis, and by July 1348, it spreads through France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Eastern Hungary, and Southern England. This is all the more amazing given that at this time it took a person one to three months to travel from London to Rome. The plague died out in the winters and was resurrected in the springs. At the end of 1349, it had spread throughout the British Isles and Scandinavia and continued to move east.
The death toll was massive -- the "official" figure is one-third of Europe dead between 1348 and 1351, when it temporarily abated, but keep in mind that in some towns the death toll was 90 percent -- in others 10 percent. Further, the poor and anyone else living in close quarters (monks, for instance) died at a higher rate. Many monasteries were completely wiped out, but the death rates among the nobility and the nobility of the church were very low. Understandably, people wanted to know why this was happening to them. Here are the four prominent hypotheses of the day:
The claim of academics and physicians: The plague was the result of a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars on March 20, 1345.
The Roman Catholic Church's claim: God's wrath -- it was a punishment for the people's sins.
The claim of the mayors and town-controlling nobles: Poor sanitation. Dumping waste in the streets leads to sickness (a revolutionary claim at the time -- no one actually knew this to be true).
The claim of the masses (i.e., everyone else): The Jews are poisoning the wells.
Here is the "evidence" used by each group, respectively, to support its claim:
Medicine at the time was based on astrology and astronomy. Most physical sickness was attributed to poor alignment of the stars. The conjunction had happened, and it was a rare celestial event. Other events had been tied to celestial causes. Many were waiting to see what the triple conjunction would cause, and when the Black Plague occurred, they felt that they had found out.
The Church said, "Look around." Plunder, looting, rape, prostitution, war, and drinking were everywhere. God's wrath had shown itself in destructive ways before -- the people of Noah's time were hit with a flood, and the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed.
The sanitation workers were among the first to die, and other diseases were suspected to be related to poor sanitation.
Christians tortured "confessions" out of Jews. The Jews were believed to be "jealous" of the Christians (because, it was thought, the Jews knew "in their hearts" that they were damned). The lepers had been blamed for poisoning the wells and causing the typhus outbreak in 1320 (after the Black Plague, it was believed that the Jews set them up to it).
Here are some problems people at the time saw with the evidence:
Nobody but the academics and physicians believed their explanation!
If God's wrath already has descended, there's no reason to change one's behavior. The attitude was roughly, "If we're already doomed, why alter our behavior?"
Later sanitation workers appeared to be immune (unknown to the people, they'd been exposed and had developed a resistance). If it really was poor sanitation, why weren't they still dying? In fact, this immunity among sanitation workers caused many people to think the sanitation workers had magical powers. People followed them on their street-cleaning routes, trying to absorb some of the immunity. Others, more desperate, actually applied waste to themselves, thinking that it would keep the disease away.
So many Jews died too (Why would any community poison itself?). The other problem is that the plague was present in areas where no Jews lived.
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Have you noticed that this claim” Jews poison the wells” has some sort of relation with the church claim?
ReplyDeleteHere are some interesting stories that I found from Wikipedia. I think it could tell us some part of relationship about Jewish population and the Roman Catholic Church at middle age.
“Unlike lay Christians, most Jews were literate.In relations with the Christian society, they were protected by kings, princes and bishops, because of the crucial services they provided in three areas: financial, administrative and as doctors. Christian scholars interested in the Bible would even consult with Talmudic rabbis. All this changed with the reforms and strengthening of the Roman Catholic Church, especially the creations of the Franciscan and Dominican preaching monks, and the rise of envious and competitive middle-class, town-dwelling Christians. By 1300 the friars and local priests were using the Passion Plays at Easter time, which depicted Jews in contemporary dress killing Christ, to teach the general populace to hate and murder Jews. It was at this point that persecution and exile became endemic. 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.”
I assume that for ordinary people who lived in 1347, Jewish was a mysterious group and anti-Jewish was an increasing wave of society. When bad things happened, majority of the society would look for the reason. Jewish was the perfect candidate to be responsible for this tragic because everyone know “they were damned”. Bandwagon fallacy is the logical error here. Also, there is another term “the tyranny of majority” in political science. When everyone says the same thing to against one group, most likely, it is true.
Wikipedia's is in reliable because anyone can go in and change the information... hell it has been proven that jews do that all the time when something is exposing then and their true nature
DeleteI agree on the fact that this claim “Jews are poisoning the wells” is not reasonable in many ways. The examples chosen to support the ideas are pretty relevant, however I wouldn’t completely agree on the accordance with the law of Jews. It sounds really weird to me to read that Jew’s laws are based on the Bible. I would rather say that it is based on the TORAH which is the Jewish saint book. Moreover even if I find the argument (the Bible doesn’t want them to kill people, so they wouldn’t kill anybody) quite honest, I think it is also too optimistic. Indeed how many religious fights, wars have we heard about in our past History?
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