Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics by Philip Alcabes Philip Alcabes has taught at Hunter College and the Yale School of Nursing. He has written extensively about historical epidemics and how societies have reacted to them. This excerpt focuses on the bubonic plague, which spread from Asia to Europe in the 14th century, ultimately resulting in widespread death as well as social, political, and economic disruptions.

Secondary Source
When plague arrived in the region...it served to crystallize fears of diabolical (evil) corruption. As plague advanced and rumors of its origins were connected to Jewish knowledge of poisons and conspiracy to undo Christian society, a series of attacks left Western Europe nearly devoid (without) of Jews.

The violence against Jews began in Toulon, France, on Palm Sunday 1348. Just as plague arrived there, townspeople assaulted the Jewish quarter, killing forty people. Violence against Jews during Easter week was not unusual in that era, but subsequent events made clear that the attacks of 1348 were a direct response to fears of the advancing wave of plague mortality. Attacks on Jews continued in Avignon and Grasse later that April, and spread to other towns in Provence and then Catalonia. Assaults on Jews continued through parts of Spain, the Savoy, the Vaud, the Black Forest, Bavaria (Munich, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Regensburg), Baden-Wurttemberg, and then the Rhineland, before moving east.

Jews were accused of well poisoning, the indictment commonly leveled against suspected enchanters. With no experience of plague in human memory in the region and no focused concept of disease as the result of real-world causes, fear that the onset of plague was evidence of spiritual contamination likely motivated some of the attackers. But if so, their base fears let them be manipulated by leaders who planned to use plague for their own ends.

In Basel, mobs burned several hundred Jews in January 1349. In Strasbourg, the guilds deposed the ruling city council when it refused to persecute Jews, and elected a more compliant one. The Bürgermeister of Strasbourg pled for reason, but in February 1349, before plague had even reached the city, inhabitants burned the city’s Jews at stakes posted in the cemetery. . . . In the German city of Mainz, 12,000 Jews were burned to death. By July 1349 the pogrom (mass killing of Jews) had reached Cologne. The last slaughters were in Antwerp and Brussels in December of that year; all the Jews of those cities were killed. Within three years of the arrival of the plague in Europe, Jews had been exterminated in or hounded out of hundreds of towns and cities.

These events were not, or at least not all, spontaneous outbursts. In the case of Nuremberg, Regensburg, and Frankfurt, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, had guaranteed ahead of time that the mobs could attack Jews with impunity (freedom from consequence). In Dresden, the Duke of Meisen instructed the townspeople to attack Jews in early 1349 and promised that there would be no sanctions brought against them for doing so. Presumably, those who most believed that the outbreak expressed God’s punishment, i. e., the devout poor, were easily persuaded to attack Jewish scapegoats. Meanwhile, the burghers, secular office-holders, and petty ecclesiastical officials could profit by taking over the property and valuables that Jews abandoned when they fled or died.

THE ARTICLE IS ABOVE TO ANSWER THIS QUESTION BELOW IN ONE TO TWO PARAGRAPHS

What role did conspiracy theory play in driving hatred and violence toward Jews in Europe during the Black Plague?