Medicine8

“The third said that the Jews had poisoned all the wells and were killing Christians [wollten]; and bags of poison were found in many wells, and [deshalb] countless numbers of them were killed on the Rhine, in Franconia and in all German lands. Truly, whether some Jews did that, I don’t know. […] However, I know very well that there were more Jews in Vienna than in any other city I know of in Germany, and that they died there (…) in large numbers (…)”

Bernd Schneidmüller (2012): Catastrophic memory: Great plague and Jewish pogroms 1348 to 1352. Volume 2, p. 399

Konrad von Megenberg (1309-1374) was a clergyman and author. The quote comes from his book "The Book of Nature". It is expressly written for laypersons and not for experts.

During the so-called burning of the Jews in the middle of the 14th century, many thousands of Jews were persecuted, expelled and murdered. The pogroms were not only a consequence of the raging plague at the time, as the pogroms often preceded the plague. Jewish communities were accused of poisoning wells and thus causing the plague. Mergenberg represents one of the few critical voices of the time, writing that Jewish people died equally from the plague. Some rulers, such as Emperor Charles IV (1316-1378), guaranteed the perpetrators impunity (document of June 25, 1349, see Schneidmüller 2012: 399): "The plague thus not only seized people's bodies, but also their minds (...) People, mortally threatened by microorganisms in their own bodies, sought their salvation in the eradication of the seemingly alien from their habitat" (ibid. 400).

*Ruth Kinet (2020): With the Plague Came the Progoms (from the podcast "From the Jewish World") *František Graus (2002): Jewish progroms in the 14th century: The Black Death *Haverkamp, Alfred (1981): The persecution of Jews at the time of the Black Death in the social fabric of German cities