Certainly they observed more careful sanitary rules and more
constant abstinence from dangerous foods than was usual among
Christians; but the public at large could not understand so
simple a cause, and jumped to the conclusion that their immunity
resulted from protection by Satan, and that this protection was
repaid and the pestilence caused by their wholesale poisoning of
Christians. As a result of this mode of thought, attempts were
made in all parts of Europe to propitiate the Almighty, to
thwart Satan, and to stop the plague by torturing and murdering
the Jews. Throughout Europe during great pestilences we hear of
extensive burnings of this devoted people. In Bavaria, at the
time of the Black Death, it is computed that twelve thousand
Jews thus perished; in the small town of Erfurt the number is
said to have been three thousand; in Strasburg, the Rue Brulee
remains as a monument to the two thousand Jews burned there for
poisoning the wells and causing the plague of 1348; at the royal
castle of Chinon, near Tours, an immense trench was dug, filled
with blazing wood, and in a single day one hundred and sixty Jews
were burned.
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