The Black Death and the Burning of Jews

Cohn, Samuel

doi:10.1093/pastj/gtm005

Cited by 93 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…A wave of Jew-burning swept through much of Western Europe when the Black Death arrived in 1348-50 (Cohn 2007). Germany is a particularly useful setting for our purposes due to 8 From the 19 th century onwards, Jews resettled in Germany in large numbers.…”

Section: Our Principal Indicator For Medieval Violence Against Jews Imentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1 Germany's persecution of Jews during the early 20 th century has been a topic of intense research interest. While some have argued that it can never be rationally explained (Levi 1979), others have pointed to underlying economic and political causes (Glaeser 2005, Arendt 1994, Cohn 2007. That a deep-rooted history of anti-Semitism was ultimately responsible for a wave of hatred has been argued by Goldhagen (1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…12 In some areas, peasants and unruly mobs set upon the Jews who had been expelled or tried to flee (Gottfried 1985). The case is disputed (Cohn 2007). Another famous example of elites shielding Jews involves the Duke Albrecht of Austria.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany

2011

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How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the 'Night of Broken' Glass in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

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Section: Our Principal Indicator For Medieval Violence Against Jews Imentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany

2011

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“…Others argue that Jews were expelled in response to heightened religious fervor in the late medieval period (Grazel, 1966;Langmuir, 1990;Stow, 1992;Menache, 1997;Bell, 2001) or as part of a project of constructing a religiously or ethnically homogeneous state (Baron, 1967a;Katznelson, 2005;Barkey and Katznelson, 2011); or to a confluence of these factors as Moore (1987) argued in his Formation of a Persecuting Society. Alternatively, Poliakov (1955) attributed the decline in the fortunes of European Jewry in the fourteenth century to the series of calamities that befell Europe from the Great Famine of 1315-1322 to the Black Death and numerous individual accounts of specific persecutions or pogroms cite that the role played by economic hardship, natural disasters and bad weather in triggering particular persecutions or expulsions (Barber, 1981a;Cohn, 2007;Slavin, 2010;Voigtländer and Voth, 2012). (Cohen, 1994).…”

Section: ) 12mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A large number of expulsions and persecutions in the fourteenth century arose as a result of the social upheavals which attended the Plague (Cohn, 2007;Voigtländer and Voth, 2012). The fact that the Black Death triggered antisemitic violence is entirely consistent with our hypothesis and theoretical model.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

From the Persecuting to the Protective State? Jewish Expulsions and Weather Shocks from 1100 to 1800

2013

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What factors caused the persecution of minorities in medieval and early modern Europe? We build a model that predicts that minority communities were more likely to be expropriated in the wake of negative income shocks. We then use panel data consisting of 785 city-level expulsions of Jews from 933 European cities between 1100 and 1800 to test the implications of the model. We use the variation in city-level temperature to test whether expulsions were associated with colder growing seasons. We find that a one standard deviation decrease in average growing season temperature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was associated with a one to two percentage point increase in the likelihood that a Jewish community would be expelled. Drawing on our model and on additional historical evidence we argue that the rise of state capacity was one reason why this relationship between negative income shocks and expulsions weakened after 1600.

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Comprehending Covidiocy Communication

Spitzberg¹

2021

Communicating Science in Times of Crisis

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The Black Death and the Burning of Jews

Cited by 93 publications

References 31 publications

Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany

Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany

From the Persecuting to the Protective State? Jewish Expulsions and Weather Shocks from 1100 to 1800

Comprehending Covidiocy Communication

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