The Strasbourg Pogrom of Saint Valentine's Day, 1349

On Saturday, 14 February 1349 — Saint Valentine’s Day — the city council of Strasbourg ordered the entire Jewish population of the city, approximately two thousand people, rounded up and marched to the city’s Jewish cemetery on the south bank of the Ill River, just outside the city walls. There they were tied to wooden stakes that had been prepared the previous day and burned alive. The execution lasted, by the account in the Strassburger Chronik of the Dominican friar Fritsche Closener, “from the early morning until the day was past.” Those who agreed to convert to Christianity before the fires were lit were spared. The number who agreed is estimated, by the chroniclers and by modern historians, at perhaps a few hundred. The roughly 2,000 who refused were killed. Their children, in many cases, were taken from them in the hour before the burning and forcibly baptized. The baptized children were then distributed to Christian foster families. They were not allowed to inherit any of their parents’ property, which was seized by the city and used to pay off the city’s debts to the deceased Jewish moneylenders.

The Black Death had not yet reached Strasbourg. The plague would arrive in April 1349, two months later, and would over the following year kill approximately one-third of the city’s surviving population.

The massacre was not a response to the plague. It was a response to the expectation of the plague.

What the contemporary documents say

The principal source is the chronicle of Fritsche Closener, a Dominican friar of Strasbourg who finished his German-language history of the city around 1362, thirteen years after the events he described. Closener had been a young friar in the city in 1349; he had not been a direct participant but had access to the records and to people who had witnessed the events. His account, preserved in the city archive, runs to several thousand words on the 1349 massacre alone. It is the longest single contemporary description of any Black Death-era pogrom.

The account is precise about the political process. The Strasbourg city council in 1348 — the bishop of Strasbourg and the existing mayors Conrad of Winterthur and Peter Schwarber — had taken the position, in accordance with the papal bull Quamvis perfidiam issued by Pope Clement VI in Avignon in September 1348, that the Jews were not responsible for the plague (which had not yet reached the city, but had been reported devastating cities further south on the Rhine). The papal bull had pointed out, with what later commentators would describe as wearisome practicality, that Jews were dying of the plague in the same proportions as Christians, that the plague had reached cities with no Jewish population at all, and that the well-poisoning accusations being circulated against the Jewish communities of the Rhineland were therefore not credible. The bull threatened excommunication of anyone who killed Jews on these accusations.

The Strasbourg bishop and mayors had accepted the papal position and resisted demands from the city’s trade guilds to act against the Jewish community. They held this position through the winter of 1348-49. The guilds — which had been engaged in a long political struggle to break the bishop’s and patrician class’s monopoly on city governance — organized a coup on 9-10 February 1349. The bishop fled the city. Mayors Conrad of Winterthur and Peter Schwarber were deposed. A new council was constituted with guild representation. The new council’s first major policy decision, taken on 13 February, was the order for the massacre.

The massacre was therefore — as Closener’s chronicle makes explicit — both an antisemitic pogrom and an act of internal civic politics. The new council, having seized power on the promise of acting against the Jews, had to act against the Jews to consolidate its position. The plague threat was the pretext. The internal political coup was the actual driver. This pattern — pogrom as instrument of political consolidation against an outgoing patrician faction — is documented across the Rhineland in similar form. Basel had done it in January 1349. Freiburg im Breisgau had done it in January. Constance would do it later in 1349. The Strasbourg massacre was, in terms of the dead, the largest of these episodes.

The papal position

Pope Clement VI in Avignon repeated his protective position twice more in 1349, in bulls issued in July and again in October. He argued in these later documents that the Jewish persecutions were “instigated by that liar, the Devil, who deceives all men in many ways.” He ordered all Christian rulers to protect Jewish communities under their jurisdiction and threatened excommunication of any prince or city official who failed to do so. The threats were largely ignored. By the end of 1349, organized Jewish communities had been massacred or expelled in over two hundred German cities. The Strasbourg massacre was one of the early and largest of these.

The papal position, which would later be cited by historians as evidence that the medieval Catholic Church had on at least some occasions defended Jewish communities against popular violence, was politically motivated as well as doctrinally serious. The Avignon papacy had close fiscal ties to Jewish bankers in southern France and northern Italy and depended on Jewish moneylending networks for several of its operational functions. Clement was protecting an asset as well as a theological principle. The German Jewish communities, on the other hand, had no such institutional patron after the political coups deposed their local protectors. Their fate was decided locally.

The Strasbourg Jewish community had existed since at least the eleventh century. Its members had been documented in the city archive for over two hundred years. The community was completely destroyed in February 1349. The few survivors — those who had converted in the hour before the burning, plus perhaps a few who had fled the city in advance of the coup — did not reconstitute the community. There would not be a recognized Jewish community in Strasbourg again until the late eighteenth century, when the city was occupied by France and the disabilities on Jewish residence were lifted by the Revolutionary government.

What survived

The Jewish cemetery itself was deconsecrated in the immediate aftermath. The tombstones were removed and used as building material for the city walls, where some of them remained for several centuries. In the late nineteenth century, during repairs to the medieval ramparts, several intact gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions were recovered. They had been embedded face-inward in the wall masonry. They are now displayed in the Musée Alsacien in central Strasbourg.

The wooden stakes used in the burning are not mentioned by Closener as having been preserved. They were probably reused, in the practical fashion of medieval cities, as firewood.

The new Strasbourg council, which had assumed power in the coup of 10 February 1349, governed the city for another twenty years. The structural reforms it had achieved — opening city government to the guilds — persisted. The deposed mayors Conrad of Winterthur and Peter Schwarber retired to estates in the surrounding countryside; Schwarber, according to a brief later entry in Closener’s chronicle, died of plague in November 1349. The bishop returned to Strasbourg in the autumn after the plague had passed. He did not protest the massacre. The city paid him a substantial indemnity from the seized property of the murdered Jews.

The Black Death itself reached Strasbourg in April 1349. It killed, by the standard estimate, approximately ten thousand of the city’s thirty thousand inhabitants over the following twelve months. The members of the new council were affected in proportion to the rest of the population. The plague had been indifferent to the question of who had been killed in the cemetery two months earlier.

In 2010, during construction of a tram extension in central Strasbourg, archaeologists discovered the foundations of a small medieval synagogue beneath the modern street of the Rue des Charpentiers. The building had been recorded in pre-1349 documents and had been assumed destroyed in the massacre. The foundations are partial — about half the floor plan is preserved beneath the modern roadway — and have been left in place beneath glass paving. A small plaque in French and German notes the date and the building’s function. The plaque does not mention what happened to the building’s congregation.

The roadway above continues to carry tram traffic. The trams are well-used.