But though the economic causes for the persecution of the Jews were certainly important it would be wrong to present them as the only, or even as the principal reason for what now happened. The Jew’s role as money-lender predisposed many people to believe any evil which they might hear of him but the belief itself was sincere and had far deeper roots. The image of the Jew as Antichrist was common currency in the Middle Ages. It seems to have gained force at the time of the First Crusade and the Catholic Church must accept much of the responsibility for its propagation. The vague enormity of such a concept was quickly translated into terms more comprehensible to the masses. In particular the more irresponsible priests spread rumours that the Jews kidnapped and tortured Christian children and desecrated the host. They were represented as demons attendant on Satan, portrayed in drama or in pictures as devils with the beards and horns of a goat, passing their time with pigs, frogs, worms, snakes, scorpions and the horned beasts of the field. Even the lay authorities seemed intent on fostering public belief in the malevolence of the Jews; in 1267, for instance, the Council of Vienna forbade purchases of meat from Jews on the ground that it was likely to be poisoned.
Today such fantasies seem ludicrous. It is hard to believe that sane men can have accepted them. And yet Dr Norman Cohn{182} has drawn a revealing parallel between anti-Semitism in the fourteenth century and under the Third Reich. On 1 May 1934 Der Stürmer devoted a whole issue to alleged murders of Christian children by the Jews; illustrating its text with pictures of rabbis sucking blood from an Aryan child. Most Germans were no doubt revolted by such vicious propaganda but Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Belsen live vividly enough in the memory to save this generation from any offensive sense of superiority to its ancestors. Nor do the still more recent Chinese accusations that American airmen, in 1952, showered the countryside around Kan-Nan Hsien with voles infected with Pasteurella pestis, the bacillus of bubonic plague, suggest that man’s infinite capacity for thinking ill of man is in any way on the wane.{183}
The Black Death concentrated this latent fear and hatred of the Jews into one burning grievance which not only demanded vengeance but offered the tempting extra dividend that, if the Jews could only be eliminated, then the plague for which they were responsible might vanish too. There was really only one charge levelled against the Jews; that, by poisoning the wells of Christian communities, they infected the inhabitants with the plague. The Polish historian, Dlugoss, claimed that they also poisoned the air{184} but this view does not seem to have been at all widely shared. Some of the more fanciful reports alleged that the Jews were working under the orders of a conspiratorial network with its headquarters in Toledo; that the poison, in powdered form, was imported in bulk from the Orient, and that the same organization also occupied itself in forging currencies and murdering Christian children. But these were decorative frills, the attack on the sources of drinking water was the central issue.
The emphasis on this accusation is surprising. With the exception of the Faculty of Medicine at Paris, which suggested that a minor contributory cause of the epidemic might be the pollution of the wells as a result of earthquakes, none of the contemporary experts seem to have tried to link infection with the drinking of tainted water. There were other ways of spreading the plague which must have seemed at least as plausible to medieval man. Alfonso of Cordoba’s vision of the infection of air by the release of a ‘certain confection’ into a ‘strong, slow wind’ has already been mentioned{185} and in subsequent epidemics Jews were accused of passing around clothes taken from the dead or smearing walls and windows with an ointment made from the buboes of plague victims.
A partial explanation may be that many wells in built-up areas were polluted by seepage from nearby sewage pits. The Jews, with their greater understanding of elementary hygiene, preferred to draw their drinking water from open streams, even though these might often be farther from their homes. Such a habit, barely noticed in normal times, would seem intensely suspicious in the event of plague. Why should the Jews shun the wells unless they knew them to be poisoned and how could they have such knowledge unless they had done the poisoning themselves? This theory is supported by Tschudi who, in the Helvetian Chronicle, records not only that the Jews knew the wells to be contaminated by ‘bad, noxious moistures and vapours’ but also that, in many places ‘they warned the people against them.’{186} If they did, the warnings seem to have gone unheeded and certainly those who received them were little disposed to feel gratitude to the Jews for their consideration.
There can be little doubt that the majority of those who turned on the Jews believed in the literal truth of the accusations against them. It might be thought that this certainty would have been shaken by the fact that Jews died as fast as Christians; probably faster, indeed, in their crowded and unhealthy ghettoes. But the Christians seem simply to have closed their eyes to reality. Since the Jews caused the Black Death it was ridiculous to suppose that they could also suffer from it. Any appearance to the contrary was merely further evidence of their consummate cunning:
But though such crude suspicions might have been acceptable to the mob, they can hardly have been taken seriously by the intelligent and better educated. Dr Guerchberg has analysed the attitude of the leading plague tractators.{188} The most remarkable feature is how few references there are to the guilt or innocence of the Jews. Konrade of Megenberg brusquely dismissed the accusations: ‘Some say that this was brought about by the Jewish people, but this point of view is untenable.’ In his Buch der Natur he cites as evidence Jewish mortality in Vienna which was so high that a new cemetery had to be constructed. Gui de Chauliac was equally categoric. Alfonso of Cordoba considered that, by all the rules of planetary action, the Black Death should only have lasted a year and that any subsequent extension must be the result of a wicked plot. But he did not specifically accuse the Jews of being responsible. The ‘Five Strasbourg Physicians’ warned against poisoned food and water but it is doubtful whether they believed that the poisoning was done deliberately by man.{189} No other tractator paid any attention to the possibility that some human agency was involved in the spread of the plague, still less that such villains must be identified as the Jews.