August 24: Poisoning the Wells

As the bubonic plague continued to rip its way across the Rhineland, some six thousand Jews were killed in Mainz, Germany on this date in 1349, based on accusations that they had poisoned the city’s drinking water. (See https://jewishcurrents.org/jewdayo/february-13-black-death-696/.) In self-defense, the Jewish community killed two hundred of their attackers. Mainz was an important medieval center of Jewish life, with a centuries-old yeshiva that introduced the Talmud to Western Europe, but killings and persecutions of Jews there began with the First Crusade (1096) and continued for nearly four centuries. Mainz was also the city where first Gutenberg Bible was printed — completed on this date in 1456 — and the printing-press revolution began. Within half a century, major Jewish print-houses would be operating throughout Europe.

“Without centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, Hitler’s passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed.”
—Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury