Strasbourg
City on the upper Rhine, in Alsace. On 14 February 1349, as the plague approached, its Jews were burned in their cemetery, after the city’s deputies, who had spoken for them, were shouted down.
The Strasbourg chronicler Jacob of Königshofen tells that the towns of Bern and Zofingen wrote to Strasbourg, Freiburg and Basel urging them to burn their Jews, and that the governments of the three cities at first saw no reason to harm them. At a meeting at Benfeld the deputies of Strasbourg said that they knew no evil of their Jews, and were shouted down; the bishop of Strasbourg, the lords of Alsace and the cities then agreed to do away with them. On Saint Valentine’s day the Jews of Strasbourg were burned on a wooden platform in their cemetery, about two thousand by the chronicler’s figure. The plague reached the city that summer, and he estimates that about sixteen thousand died. The city resolved to admit no Jew for a hundred years, he says, and readmitted them in 1368 (Königshofen, Chronicle, on the plague and the burning of the Jews, 1349). See the Black Death.
What happened here
- 1347 to 1351, estimated dateThe Black Death
Plague spreads through Europe, reaching Florence, Avignon and Paris in 1348. Priests and friars die with the rest or flee. Jews are accused of poisoning the wells and burned, though Pope Clement VI calls the charge false. In 1349 he bans the flagellants.