Strasbourg burned its Jews on Valentine's Day 1349

On 14 February 1349, St Valentine’s Day, the authorities of Strasbourg burned the city’s Jews on a wooden platform in their own cemetery. The town chronicler Jacob von Königshofen put the dead at about 2,000. The plague had not yet reached the city. It arrived that summer and, by his estimate, killed some 16,000 people.

The massacre followed a political defeat for the people who tried to prevent it. Rumours that Jews had poisoned wells were spreading up the Rhine, fed by confessions extracted under torture in Savoy and Switzerland. At a meeting at Benfeld in Alsace on 8 February, the bishop of Strasbourg and the lords of the region demanded to know what the city would do with its Jews. Strasbourg’s deputies replied that they knew no evil of them. Within two days the council that had protected the community was deposed, and the new council had the Jews arrested on Friday the 13th.

Those who accepted baptism were spared, by some accounts about a thousand people. Many small children were taken out of the fire and baptised against their parents’ will.

Why the money mattered

Königshofen was blunt about the motive. Every debt owed to the Jews was cancelled, their pledges and promissory notes were surrendered, and the council shared out their cash among the working men.

“If they had been poor and if the feudal lords had not been in debt to them, they would not have been burnt.” — Jacob von Königshofen, chronicle of Strasbourg

Some artisans later gave their share to the cathedral on their confessors’ advice. Strasbourg’s burnings were one of many that year in the cities of the Rhine, part of the persecutions that ran alongside the Black Death. The city also decided that no Jew should enter for a hundred years. That ban lasted less than twenty: Jews were readmitted in 1368.