The Plague Pogroms
(tw for antisemitism)
During the Bubonic Plague pandemic in 1346–1353, the Jewish communities of Europe were used as scapegoats and blamed for the mass deaths.
Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (1)

accusations spread that they had caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells (many Jews chose not to use the common wells of towns and cities). They were often coerced through torture to confess to poisoning wells. (2)

The first plague-related massacre took place in Toulon, Provence (1348), where the Jewish quarter was sacked, and forty Jews were murdered in their homes. the next occurred in Barcelona. By 1349, massacres and persecution spread across Europe. (3)

2,000 Jews were burnt alive on 14 February 1349 in the "Valentine's Day" Strasbourg massacre, where the plague had not yet affected the city. Christian residents of Strasbourg sifted through the ashes and collected the valuable possessions of Jews not burnt by the fires. (4)

Within the 510 Jewish communities destroyed in this period, some members killed themselves to avoid the persecutions. In 1349 the Jewish community in Frankfurt am Main was annihilated. Later the Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne were destroyed as well. (5)

The 3,000 strong Jewish population of Mainz initially defended themselves and managed to hold off the Christian attackers. But the Christians managed to overwhelm the Jewish ghetto in the end and killed all of its Jewish residents. (6)

At Speyer, Jewish corpses were disposed in wine casks and cast into the Rhine. By the close of 1349 the worst of the pogroms had ended in Rhineland. But around this time the massacres of Jews started rising near the Hansa townships of the Baltic Coast and in Eastern Europe. (7)

By 1351 there had been 350 incidents of pogroms - 60 major and 150 minor Jewish communities had been exterminated. The pogroms caused thousands of refugees from western and northern Europe to flee to Poland and Lithuania, where they remained for the next six centuries. (8)

The Erfurt Treasure is a hoard of coins and jewelry that is assumed to have belonged to Jews who hid them in during the plague pogroms. They were found in the wall of a house in a medieval Jewish neighborhood in Erfurt, Germany (9)

The Colmar Treasure was buried by Jews in Alcase, at the time of the plague pogroms. It was found in the wall of a house in the medieval rue des Juifs. It's believed that some of the items were sold by the discoverers before the full extent of the Treasure was recorded. (10) end.