I choose to discuss the last claim which is: “The Jews are poisoning the wells” There are many reasons to prove that this statement is totally false. I will demonstrate only two reasons:
Firstly, according to the documents cited above this problem occurred during the spring and disappeared in the winter. Therefore, this statement proves the water was not poisoned; it was a seasonal infection caused by other factors such bad sanitation, another fluid or animals.
Secondly, I believe that any social groups which are facing any adversities always make another group or ethnicity of their society responsible of their problems. At this era, maybe the Jews were the most hated groups of this society; therefore the people of this community wanted to eliminate or expel them. Thus, they emotionally accuse them to poison the water.
This claim is totally false because as I illustrated above, the water was not poisoned by the Jews. Those accusers who probably hated this group used this calamity to force them to leave the community or to make their life more difficult.
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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ReplyDeleteWhen major catastrophies take place, it is human nature to seek out the root cause of the disaster and place blame, or rationalize, why it happened. Up until the eleven century, much of the Christian world was engaged in fighting Crusades, or Holy Wars. What we are dealing with is a population that had been, for generations, raised to fight, and kill, in the name of Christ. Naturally, because Jews were seen as non-believers, they were an easy scapegoat.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the second part of this post because I feel that during this time period there was tension between the Jews and Christians due to different religious beliefs and that the Catholic church used it's power to get everyone to blame the Jews for this catastrophe, therefore turning everyone against them even more so. Also, it would be ridiculous to think that the Jews would poison the same water that they drink out of risking infecting themselves with this deadly disease.
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