Plague, Politics, and Pogroms: The Black Death, Rule of Law, and the Persecution of Jews in the Holy Roman Empire

Abstract

This paper explores the institutional determinants of persecution by studying the intensity of the Black Death pogroms in the Holy Roman Empire. Political fragmentation exacerbated competition for the rents generated by Jewish moneylending. This competition made Jewish communities vulnerable during periods of crisis. We test this hypothesis using data on the intensity of pogroms. In line with our model, we find that communities governed by Archbishoprics, Bishoprics, and Imperial Free Cities experienced more intense and violent persecutions than did those governed by the emperor or by secular princes. We discuss the implications that this has for the enforcement of the rule of law in weak states.

Negative shocks and mass persecutions: evidence from the Black Death

“…Charles IV, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire denounced the well poisoning libel. However, the authority of the Emperor was weak and local authorities had the leeway to perpetrate persecutions against their Jewish community (see Finley and Koyama, 2015). The individual coefficient of the Holy Roman Empire dummy is 0.491** (not shown), thus indicating that the overall level of persecution was higher in the Holy Roman Empire (consistent with scapegoating effect being stronger in German-speaking Europe).…”

“…This reflects the position of the Papacy and higher clergy across all of Europe. In the Holy Roman Empire, where archbishops and bishops were also secular rulers able to profit from expropriating Jewish wealth,Finley and Koyama (2015) find that persecutions of Jews were more severe overall.…”

“…3 Researchers find that women have made greater gains in terms of political rights and employment opportunities in Lastly, we contribute to the literature on antisemitism, the bulk of which has focused on its economic consequences (Waldinger, 2010(Waldinger, , 2012(Waldinger, , 2016Acemoglu et al, 2011;Grosfeld et al, 2013;D'Acunto et al, 2014;Pascali, 2016). There are then several papers on the determinants of premodern era pogroms, studying Germany (Finley and Koyama, 2015;Becker and Pascali, 2016), or Russia (Grosfeld et al, 2016), and across Europe (Anderson et al, 2016). In a seminal paper on the legacy of medieval antisemitism, Voigtländer and Voth (2012) use data on the Black Death pogroms (but not on Black Death mortality rates) to explore the local persistence of antisemitic cultural traits from the 14th century through to the 20th century in Germany.…”

The Temporal and Spatial Structure of Medieval Expulsions of Jews

“…Although the general norm in medieval Germany was non-expulsion, city rulers did have reasons to ignore it, based on what meaning they put on having Jewish residents. One view of Jews was that they were a financial asset to be exploited and manipulated to maximize rulers' incomes (Levi 1983;Olson 1993), including via contributing to the commercial and fiscal health of polities (Finley and Koyama 2018;Ries 1995;Scholl 2015). Understanding Jews as a financial resource is the dominant explanation in economic history for expulsions (Barzel 1992;Koyama 2010;Stacey 1997;Wenninger 1981).…”

Religion, Division of Labor, and Conflict: Anti-Semitism in Germany over 600 Years

“…The theory is that in periods of political and economic distress, politicians find it useful to deflect blame to the Jewish minorities. A large body of empirical literature has documented how anti-Semitism in European history responded to adverse climatic shocks (Anderson et al 2017 and Grosfeld, Sakalli, and Zhuravskaya forthcoming) and major outbreaks of the Black Death between 1348 and 1350 (Cohn 2007, Breuer 1988, and Finley and Koyama 2018. 6 Kuznets (1960) and Baron and Kahan (1975) provide descriptive evidence on the economic history of Jews and reflect on how discrimination might have affected it, but they provide no econometric evidence.…”