The pogrom of frenzy which we have just examined succeeded in imprinting on the Nordic mind the image of the Abominable Jew. Jew-baiting accordingly became a medieval pastime, a mixture of fun and blood to take its place with the tournaments.
No less than ten times between 1120 and 1250 successive Popes emphatically reiterated and endorsed the Constitution for Jews, in which violence towards them was expressly prohibited.
Papal prohibitions had little effect. Within fifty years of Pogrom III a mad monk named Rudolph pursued his shadow among the Rhineland towns preaching to the Nordic mind of its duty to carry out vengeance on the enemies of God. The terrible cry of HEP—an abbreviation for “Jerusalem is lost”—rang through the cobbled streets of Cologne and Strasbourg. This was the password for pogrom, for making better the world by slaying Jewish babies, the murderers of Christ.
By 1254 the Great Outsider was branded as an outlaw with the rouelle. The rouelle was a piece of blue or yellow cloth worn on the front and back of the Jew’s garments. Centuries later Hitler’s thugs were to use the same distinguishing cipher in the last of the great Nordic efforts to exterminate the race. By 1267 the Jew was wearing the statutory cap, with twin horns to indicate his conscription into the army of Antichrist. All that was now needed was a pogrom to imprint his demonic nature on the medieval mind. Such a pogrom came with the Black Death.
This plague broke out in 1348 and it slew in one year one-third of the population of Europe. It travelled along the great trade routes, so that its coming was expected.
For the average man, so totally at the mercy of a cruel environment, it was terrifying to hear from travellers that Death was near and sharpening his scythe, that one hundred miles away the dead were so thick on the streets that none could bury them. Death assumed a real character. He was around the corner presiding at the chess-board on which Christ and Satan played for the soul of man. Man was living in the last days and the end of the world was near. Was there a talisman to save him, to send Death away from his door, to arrest the game of chess—to rescue bishop, knight, queen, king and pawn from the dance of death?
Wave after wave of fear rolled along the afflicted trade routes of Europe. Phantom faith declared that in these Last Days it was God’s wrath descending upon His wicked world. Phantom logic stepped in and completed the lunatic syllogism of pogrom.
Christians who drank from wells died in agony from plague. The Jews did not. Therefore the Jews were poisoning the wells. Exterminate them and the knights and pawns would be saved.
Like the knight’s move in chess the crooked story moved and spread. Spanish Jews had dreamed up the master plan and were sending the poison out by special messengers to the wells of Christian Europe. Toledo was the Kublai Khan of this phantom world. There Jewish sorcerers compounded the poison from the dough that was used in the baking of Hosts mixed with blood from the hearts of captured Christians. The lepers were the messengers, the agents. And so in Languedoc there was a pogrom of lepers, who under torture revealed what the Gentiles wished to know. A giant web of intrigue was uncovered—a Grand Orient of Moslem Kings based on Tunis who were bribing the Jews to poison all Christendom so that the green banner of the Prophet could be planted on the Rhine. (The similarities here with Nazi propaganda are obvious enough—simply write Rosenberg words into the medieval myth and you will recognise the stream of hate that poured out from the Nazi machine in the ’thirties.)
The pattern of pogrom was soon to be made clear. It was not of frenzy this time when Jews were slain en route to the golden spires of the New Jerusalem at whose feet the emancipated poor would happily crouch. It was a pattern of frenzy, of self-preservation in a world of the apocalypse in which bright sun shone on death and corruption. Nothing pushes us so deeply into the phantom world as the elemental, contagious, primitive fear that we call panic. Nothing heightens our suggestibility quite so much and our credibility too. In this dimension of depression the Jew, the Great Outsider, was the natural bouc émissaire, the scapegoat tailored for the occasion. So pogrom began and might have slowed to its bitter end, for it was noticed that the plague continued in places where Jews had been exterminated. But there came upon the scene the Flagellants.
The Flagellants had first appeared in Italy, significantly enough one year after a terrible plague in 1259. Then, as at the time of the Black Death, ignorance of secondary causes prompted men to see in the plague yet another punishment from on high. Clergy, laity—men, women and young children—formed processions of sometimes ten thousand strong and wandered across Italy, scourging themselves as they went in reparation for the sins of the world. The movement crossed the Alps into Teutonic countries where strong civil and ecclesiastical pressure forced it underground, and there it slumbered until the panic of the Black Death furnished an occasion for bloody resurrection.
When it appeared the movement was highly organised. Members swore unconditional obedience to their group leaders, called “Masters”. They were required to possess an income of fourpence a day for their support. They were given a habit and a white mantle on which was embroidered a red cross, and they were required to remain with the organisation they had joined for not less than thirty-three and a half days.
Twice a day they marched to the principal church or square of the plague-fearing town into which they had come. Stripped to the waist they lay in a circle, indicating by their posture the nature of their sins. They were beaten by the Master and then they rose and stood in a circle and scourged themselves for the sins of the world until they were covered with blood.
They cried that they were scourging themselves at the express command of Christ. Their blood mingled with His, and, in these last days, they too were saviours of the world.
To those who watched, the exhibition of five hundred half-naked scourgers streaming with blood communicated its own hysteria and cruelty. Their suggestibility grew, fostered by fear and awe of the paranoid sob-leader who urged the Flagellants to greater efforts because in this way the plague would be averted and God would spare the people.
The scourging and the sobbing slowly abated and then the Master read to the frightened crowd a letter reputed to have been brought by an angel to St. Peter’s in Rome. This letter stated that Christ would spare from the plague those who joined the brotherhood for thirty-three and a half days.
Thousands would then enrol themselves and great processions would stream out to the next town. They marched three or four abreast, bearing crosses, lights and banners, singing melancholy hymns, despairing people who had been given hope and the talisman of the scourge.
All the phantom dogmas were there—the plague, the wrath of God; the letter from the Angel, the message of hope; the brethren of the Cross, the saviours of the world; the mystic thirty-three and a half days, the scourge, the blood upon them like blood on the doors of Egypt saving them from the angel of wrath at the time of the Exodus. There was phantom faith, too, from which emerged a dreadful syllogism of pogrom in which the Flagellants swore that unbelievers must die because in that way God was appeased.
Repeated clerical condemnations of the Flagellants made no difference to them. This was their hour, as wave upon wave of fear was borne by the Black Death along the trade routes of Europe. It was the twilight of the mind under total stress. It was the world that Hieronymus Bosch painted in which there was so much death that men lost the hope of resurrection.
As people watched them, the phantom image of the Jew became uppermost in their minds, partly because of the things the prophets said, and partly because the blood of five hundred saviours reminded them irresistibly of what the Jews had done to the Christ of the Passion.
At Mainz in Germany the effect of this spectacle was such that the people suddenly and without premeditation butchered twelve thousand Jews.
Even by Belsen reckoning Pogrom IV is frightening. Two thousand Jews were burned alive at Strasbourg for supposedly poisoning wells.
At the chateau of Chinon in the Loire country they dug a great pit and filled it with blazing wood and in one day cremated alive one hundred and sixty Jews. Erfurt in Germany burned three thousand.
At Frankfurt scourgers and townspeople tore the entire Jewish community to pieces. The largest community in Europe was at Mainz. Not a new-born baby escaped. Twelve thousand Jews were burned alive in Bavaria.
Throughout Flanders and the Low Countries the scourgers wandered like wolves killing all Jewish communities they encountered by burning or by drowning.
In defence they said that they thought to please God in this way—the voice of phantom faith. Pope Clement VI spoke with the voice of authentic faith when he condemned the scourgers “for shedding the blood of Jews whom Christian piety accepts and sustains”.