The Archbishop of Cologne Who Tried to Protect the Jews of His City and Was Overruled by the Mob

Walram von Jülich (c. 1304–1349) had been Archbishop of Cologne since his election in 1332. He was the second son of the Count of Jülich (the substantial Lower Rhenish noble family whose territory bordered Cologne to the southwest) and had been substantively groomed for the substantial Cologne archbishopric from his ecclesiastical adolescence; the position was simultaneously the spiritual leadership of the largest German diocese and a temporal princedom — the Cologne archbishop was one of the seven prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire.

He had functioned as a competent senior German prelate through the previous decade and a half: administrative reform of the diocesan revenue system, cathedral-construction patronage (Cologne Cathedral was still substantively under construction; substantive medieval phases would continue for another 530 years), and diplomatic engagement with the Avignonese papal court under Pope Clement VI.

In the last year of his life he tried to protect his Jewish community against the Black Death well-poisoning libel. He failed.

The protective effort

Cologne in 1349 had a Jewish community of approximately 500 households (perhaps 2,500 individuals), concentrated in the defined Judengasse quarter just southeast of the cathedral. The community had been continuously present in Cologne since approximately 321 AD — the earliest documented Jewish community north of the Alps. It had economic significance (the Cologne textile and banking trades depended on Jewish merchant and credit networks) and political relationships with the archiepiscopal authorities.

Walram had received Pope Clement VI’s protective papal bull Sicut Judaeis (issued at Avignon in September 1348) and had circulated it through the Cologne diocesan network in early 1349. The bull explicitly condemned the well-poisoning libel, explicitly forbade Catholic clergy and laity from any violence against Jewish communities, and explicitly threatened ecclesiastical sanctions against Catholic authorities who failed to enforce the protective rule.

Walram extended the papal protection with his own ordinance of approximately March 1349 — a archiepiscopal letter to all Cologne parish priests instructing them to substantively preach the Sicut Judaeis doctrine from their pulpits and to substantively suppress any popular movement against the Jewish community. The Cologne city council, which was substantively distinct from the archiepiscopal authority and was substantively split between protective and anti-Jewish factions, substantively passed parallel protective resolutions in spring 1349.

The protective effort was substantively unsuccessful.

The night of 23 August

The Cologne Black Death outbreak reached epidemic intensity in summer 1349. The city was losing perhaps 100–200 inhabitants per week to the plague through July and August. The accumulated popular pressure on the municipal authorities to find a scapegoat overwhelmed both the archiepiscopal protective ordinances and the city-council resolutions.

On the night of 23 August 1349 — Saint Bartholomew’s Eve, traditionally a Catholic feast-day associated with popular processions — a mob assembled in the Judengasse quarter and substantively attacked the Jewish community. The fighting continued through the night and subsequent day; portions of the community were substantively killed in their homes or substantively burned alive in the main synagogue (which was substantively set on fire with the -trapped congregation inside); the surviving fraction of the community was substantively expelled from the city under threat of further violence over the following days.

The overall mortality was substantively perhaps two-thirds of the community. The survivors substantively fled to the smaller Rhineland communities (Bonn, Andernach, Koblenz) that substantively had not yet experienced equivalent massacres; the subsequent waves of regional anti-Jewish violence through autumn 1349 substantively reached most of these refuge communities within a few months.

What had happened to Walram

Walram had been substantively ill with the plague himself through the preceding several weeks. He died on or about the same night as the massacre — the precise date of his death is substantively recorded inconsistently across the Cologne chronicles, with dates ranging from 14 August to 26 August 1349. The accumulated weight of evidence is that Walram was substantively unconscious or substantively dying through the night of 23 August and substantively had no operational ability to substantively intervene against the mob action.

His successor as Cologne archbishop, Wilhelm von Gennep, was substantively confirmed by the cathedral chapter in October 1349. Wilhelm substantively continued the protective ordinances on paper but substantively had no operational ability to reverse the destruction of the Cologne community that had substantively already taken place.

What survives

The medieval Cologne Jewish community substantively did not recover. A smaller community returned to the city in the 1370s under different archiepiscopal protective arrangements but was substantively itself expelled in 1424; continuous Jewish settlement substantively did not return to Cologne until the Napoleonic period.

The Walram tomb survives in the completed Cologne Cathedral, in the Lady Chapel. The archiepiscopal seal he had substantively used on the 1349 protective ordinances survives in the Cologne cathedral archive — substantively the physical document of the protective effort that substantively did not save the community.