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The Medieval Holocaust: The Approach Of The Plague And The Destruction Of Jews In Germany, 1348-1349, Albert Winkler

Faculty Publications

When the Black Death approached the German Empire in 1348, civic authorities in Germany tried to prevent the disease from striking their cities. No one knew what the Plague was, but there were unfounded rumors that the contagion was caused by Jews who were poisoning the water sources. Civic authorities soon tortured Jews for confessions, and the largest single persecution of Jews in Germany before the 1940s broke out. Jews were attacked in more than three hundred communities, their wealth was plundered, and many thousands were burned to death. The pogroms in Strasbourg and Basel are well-documented examples of what …