The Slaughter of the Jewish Community in Mainz

The Slaughter of the Jewish Community in Mainz

      Today marks the anniversary of the tragic event in the year 1349. In the midst of what was then referred to as the Great Mortality and is today referred to as the Bubonic Plaque, the Jewish ghetto in Mainz, Germany was attacked. To modern ears, the basis for the attack is ludicrous, including the notion that the Great Mortality was God’s punishment upon the Catholic community for permitting the Jewish community to live amongst them and the assertion that the Jews themselves started the plaque by poisoning wells. The fact that the members of the Jewish community were dying with the same frequency as others did not seem to hinder this latter rationale.

      On the first day of the attack the Jewish community fought back, and some 200 of their attackers were killed. The next day, whose anniversary is today, an augmented force attacked the ghetto, killing all of the approximately 6000 Jews who lived therein. See Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe at 74.