Well poisoning

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As well poisoning the deliberate contamination of vital refers to basic and drinking water with harmful pollutants and toxins of all kinds. This was true even in the ancient times , as potable water in towns and villages usually only fountain was accessible, as heavy, the general Affected by Crime and is punishable as water pollution in Germany . The false accusation of well poisoning has been one of the most popular anti-Semitic stereotypes since the Middle Ages and served to legitimize the persecution of Jews , especially during the Great Plague from 1347 to 1350 .

“Well poisoning” as an anti-Semitic stereotype

As an allegation, well poisoning is also an old stereotype used to defame certain ethnic groups. It was attributed to the Jews in the Middle Ages, especially during the spread of the plague (1347-1350), and triggered the persecution of Jews and pogroms across Europe with hundreds of thousands of deaths. The charge was the classic case of an anti-Judaist conspiracy theory .

middle Ages

In the Middle Ages , the suspicion of poisoning attacks with devastating epidemics that could not be explained was in the air. The fact that it was directed almost exclusively against the Jews as a minority was due to the images of Jews that had been created and widespread long before, which were, among other things, but not exclusively anchored in popular piety . They attributed insidiousness, harmful magic and conspiracies against Christianity to the socially excluded Jews . Sometimes, because of their religiously anchored hygiene regulations, Jews were hit by epidemics later than the rest of the city population. Jewish doctors also enjoyed a good reputation among the princes in the Middle Ages, while in the event of epidemics they were easily slandered as the originators of the disease because of their medical knowledge. The increasing isolation of Jews in ghettos since the 12th century did not protect them from the spread of epidemic pathogens.

As early as 1161 there was a pogrom of 68 Jews in Bohemia, which at that time was still isolated, whose doctors are said to have tried to poison the Christians.

In 1321, Jews in southern France were accused of poisoning wells. On the initiative of Muslims, they had incited Christians suffering from leprosy (called "lepers") to murder their fellow believers by using poisoned well water, allegedly delivering poison and paying money for it. This accusation of a conspiracy by the "enemies of Christianity" apparently contributed to the expulsion of the Jews from France. Philip V justified the mass murder of the defenseless in an edict of June 21. Since June 11th the Jews were already considered allies of the lepers and were in southern French cities and regions - u. a. Tours , Chinon , Anjou and Touraine counties - also persecuted and burned. One also referred to a letter from Philipp von Valois , Duke of Anjou: He quoted a letter that was discovered in a Jew from Bananias. He wanted to send it to all oriental rulers and in it affirmed an alleged pact between the Jews of France and the Muslims . He had arranged with them to extradite France in exchange for Jerusalem . Thereupon the lepers were bribed with enormous amounts of gold and silver to pour a powder prepared by the Jews into all wells, springs and cisterns.

Further letters , allegedly intercepted by the Moors , were supposed to confirm this fictitious conspiracy: Nobles put pressure on the King of France until he imprisoned all the Jews of his empire in July in order to appropriate their property. The Jews who were believed to be the perpetrators were burned in Paris , the surviving Jews were expelled in 1323 after a two-year trial. The accusation of lepers had not been upheld by then.

The large, as Black Death called pandemic , a time successful poisoning wells was accused again in the context of which the Jews began in 1347 in Turkey , reached in 1348 on Italy , Spain , France and Switzerland to Germany over and reached 1349 Northern and Eastern Europe. The previously unknown disease cost 25 million lives. After all the attempted measures - quarantine and banishment of the sick, antidotes, some evacuations - had proven unsuitable, there were large waves of pogroms in the second and third year of the plague. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were burned at stake or wheeled. A total of 350 Jewish communities were wiped out.

The prerequisites for this were:

  • the pre-scientific assumption that the plague can be traced back to a kind of contamination of water and air with a harmful toxin,
  • the ancient tradition of well poisoning as a military measure in war against hostile populations,
  • the social isolation and exclusion of Jews from the “honorable” professional groups, their stigmatization as usurers and murderers of God by the prevailing Christian anti-Judaism.

Jews have therefore long been believed capable of the worst crimes against humanity. This deep mistrust turned into acute aggression against them in the face of the impotence in the face of the plague.

After a few homeless beggars were picked up and executed in Narbonne , Carcassonne and Avignon who were supposed to have strewed a powder in watering holes and houses, the first attacks against Jews took place in northern Spain, Provence and Italy. In Dauphiné ( Savoy ), the accusation of well poisoning was expressly voiced for the first time. As the plague continued to spread, it was said more and more often that Jews were infected by it less often than Christians. The fact that, for religious reasons, hygiene , healthy nutrition and medicine played a greater role among Jews than among other city dwellers, and that famous doctors were often Jews, further reinforced their distrust of them.

In Lausanne and Chillon on Lake Geneva , the first Jews were arrested and tortured from September 15 to October 18, 1348 , until a Jewish doctor confirmed the suspicion of a large-scale conspiracy of all Jews to destroy Christianity: he "confessed", a Spanish Jew and a French rabbis had concocted a secret poison and sent it to Jewish communities in all countries in order to poison the wells there. He also claimed that such alleged poisons could have been found at any time when other Jewish doctors searched the house.

The Bailli of Lausanne transmitted the confession, extorted under torture, as a sensation to Freiburg im Breisgau and Strasbourg . His actions against the local Jews were exactly imitated in Zofingen in Aargau and from there adopted as a model from other places:

  • House searches, "poison" finds,
  • Arrests, torture
  • Confessions, further arrests
  • Burning of all Jews in the place
  • Reports about it to neighboring cities.

In this way, the allegation of well poisoning spread rapidly across Europe in parallel with the plague. Often city councils took action against Jews on their own initiative and only found confirmation of their suspicions in reports from other cities. In November 1348, for example, the Jews in Bern and Stuttgart were burned with no direct communication between these cities. Pogroms followed, often without legal process, in the Allgäu , Augsburg , Nördlingen , Lindau (→ History of the Jews in Lindau (Bodensee) ), Esslingen am Neckar and Horb am Neckar .

In some cities like Solothurn , baptized Jews were first spared, but then also executed if the plague did not subside after the cremation of the non-baptized Jews. In Basel at first the rumors from Bern and Zofingen were not believed and some knights who had committed acts of violence against Jews were banished from the city. The guilds protested and instead demanded that all Jews be removed from the city. The council gave in to this and in January 1349 banished all 600 Jews in the city to a specially constructed wooden building on a sandbank in the Rhine . 130 Jewish children were torn from their families and forcibly baptized . Baptized Jews were also later executed after torture forced them to confess that they had poisoned butter and wine in addition to the well water.

The Strasbourg council first requested a sample of the poison from Zofingen, whereupon Zofingen refused and offered to demonstrate the testing on site. Then the Strasbourg forced a group of their Jewish citizens, as a taster to drink water from allegedly poisoned wells. After three weeks, when no one died from it, they stopped the experiments. But the fact that they had the other wells guarded was seen in the surrounding areas as evidence of the guilt of the Jews. Only the Cologne council held back and wrote to the Strasbourgers that they should prevent excesses against Jews as long as they were convinced of their innocence, since revolts against Jews could easily turn into revolts against the authorities.

But in both cities armed craftsmen forced the removal of city councils who wanted to protect the Jews and the cremation of all unbaptized Jews in early 1349. The Strasbourg chronicler named their actual motives: All mortgage bonds had been returned to the Jews before they were murdered. The council took their cash and distributed it among the craftsmen: there was also poisoning those who dote the Jews. ("That was also the poisoning that killed the Jews.")

In March 1349 the large Jewish community in Erfurt was wiped out, in July that in Meiningen . Frankfurt am Main and Oppenheim followed in the same month . Mainz , Koblenz and Cologne followed in August : There the Jews were burned in their houses and their synagogue destroyed. Elsewhere, the synagogues were converted into church buildings or chapels , for example in Nuremberg and Überlingen . There the cathedral began to be built with tombstones from the Jewish cemetery.

In contrast to 1321, other groups only played a marginal role: in some places mendicant monks, herb collectors and other outsiders were suspected of being poisoners . In a small town on the Rhine on the way from Konstanz to Schlettstadt, the Dominican Heinrich Seuse only narrowly escaped a lynching. But the Jews were considered to be the main culprit everywhere, even where they did not live and the disease had not yet broken out. In many cases their persecution or murder preceded the outbreak of the plague by months, for example in Fulda . In the German-speaking area, all Jewish communities were persecuted and a large part destroyed; Regensburg and Goslar were the only exceptions. Nationwide pogroms against the Jews also took place in other European regions; only parts of Austria and Bohemia were spared. From then on, survivors were forced into ghettos and separated from the rest of the city's population by walls and gates. By 1519, these tolerated remaining communities were also expelled from almost all cities.

The persecution of the Jews during the plague years of the 14th century - in contrast to the ritual murder and host sacrilege legends - did not originate from the church clergy , but was the first wave of pogroms of the Middle Ages initiated and supported by secular authorities. Pope Clement VI Issued a bull that resolutely but largely unsuccessfully opposed the fable of the Jewish poison conspiracy and pointed out that Jews were as victims of the plague as Christians. But well poisoning was a popular excuse in many localities to get rid of the Jewish creditors who had been forced into the money and pawn business. Likewise, in some places (as in Ulm, Augsburg or Strasbourg) Jewish communities were drawn into regional or Reich-wide political disputes, in that one of the conflicting parties specifically used the Jews or murdered them to achieve their political goals.

In the decades and centuries that followed the plague pandemic, Jews were often accused of having poisoned wells. B .:

Only with further epidemics, which also struck cities from which all Jews had long been expelled and murdered, did this conspiracy theory lose its credibility in the Christian majority of the population. At the same time, around 1350 a restrictive exclusion of the remaining Jewish communities began through discriminatory dress codes and ghettoization, which now implemented the resolutions of the 4th Lateran Council of 1215 and thus laid the foundation for later new persecutions of the Jews.

Modern times

In the 19th century, the medieval stereotypes about Jews who poisoned wells continued to have an impact, often combined with other clichés such as child murder or robbery.

In 1812, Jews in Prussia were admitted to all legal trades. But in 1822 this emancipation was limited: Friedrich Wilhelm III. wanted absolutely to exclude the Jews from the profession of pharmacist . The ministries argued in a highly contradictory manner in favor of this subsequent professional ban : sometimes they should be kept away from civil service in general, sometimes their religious customs were supposedly an obstacle to practicing the pharmacist profession. Freiherr vom Stein indicated the real reason by calling it “an unreasonable harshness” to force “the entire population of a district to entrust their health to a Jew against whom they harbor the utmost suspicion precisely because of his Judaism”. - The debate about the admission of Jews to the pharmacy profession continued until 1843; In the end, the exclusion could not be legally enforced, but the delaying tactics of the ministerial bureaucracy actually brought about exactly this exclusion.

  • 1822 came in the Bavarian Lower Main circle on a rumor that the Jews to the beer coming hop had poisoned. The authorities feared attacks on them and tried to protect them.
  • In 1825, a rumor in the same area claimed that Jews were distributing poisoned sugar confectionery to children to murder them and poisoning wells here and there.
  • In 1831 a severe cholera epidemic took place across Europe , in the course of which accusations of well poisoning or direct epidemic infection were again raised against Jews. Military General Grolman, for example, quarantined Jews traveling to the cities of Posen . In Hamburg and Leipzig , too , “pack, bundle and junk Jews” were placed under special supervision by the medical police because it was assumed that they posed a risk of infection.
  • In Lower Bavaria it was said at the time that a butcher's clerk had murdered a Jew near Deggendorf . The victim was found to have a package with four pounds of Mercurius poison ( mercury ) and a letter in which a Polish Jew asked the recipient and other Bavarian Jews to use it to poison the salt springs of Bad Reichenhall .
  • In the same year, two Jewish peddlers allegedly reported themselves for poisoning the wells of a school in Straßkirchen . A district judge then asked the government of the Isar district whether special attention should be paid to Jewish travelers. He was reassured by the reply that no poison had been found in the Strasbourg Jews and that nothing was known of the murder of a Jew in Deggendorf; however, regulatory attention was recommended. Rahel Varnhagen also heard of such rumors in Berlin .

present

On June 23, 2016, the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas , claimed before the European Parliament in Strasbourg that rabbis had announced that they would poison drinking water: “Certain rabbis in Israel have clearly, very clearly urged their government to poison our water to kill Palestinians. What is that, if not a glorification of violence and a call for ... a genocide ? "

Well poisoning as a military tactic

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Well poisoning, for example by means of animal carcasses or faeces , has been used as a military tactic since ancient times. In addition to the secret or non-obvious poisoning, which is said to lead to illness or death, the obvious one during retreat ( scorched earth ) serves to delay the advance of invaders who are unfamiliar with their location in particular. With long-lasting sieges of fortresses, both sides tried to poison the enemy’s drinking water supply, for example by catapulting a carcass into a pond or into an open cistern. Wells were still being poisoned in the 1940s, for example during the Finnish Winter War . Modern armies can carry their own supplies or examine and treat water, so civilians and livestock are the main victims.

literature

  • Johannes Heil : The conspiracy of the wise men of Narbonne. Continuity and change in the construct of the Jewish world conspiracy . In: Wolfgang Benz (Hrsg.): Anti-Semitism as a Paradigm Studies on Prejudice Research. Metropol, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-936411-09-3 , pp. 40–48, ( series of publications by the Center for Research on Antisemitism ).
  • František Graus : Plague - Geissler - Murder of Jews. The 14th century as a time of crisis. 3. Edition. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1994, ISBN 3-525-35622-6 ( publications of the Max Planck Institute for History. 86).
  • Alfred Haverkamp : The persecution of the Jews at the time of the Black Death in the social fabric of German cities. In: Alfred Haverkamp (Ed.), Alfred Heit (Red.): On the history of the Jews in Germany in the late Middle Ages and early modern times. Lectures given at the International Colloquium at the University of Trier from October 12 to 14, 1977. Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1981, ISBN 3-7772-8112-3 , pp. 27-93, ( monographs on the history of the Middle Ages. 24).
  • Karl Höll, Andreas Grohmann: Water. Use in the cycle. Hygiene, analysis and evaluation. 8th edition. de Gruyter, Berlin a. a. 2002, ISBN 3-11-012931-0 .
  • Sources on reform of criminal law and criminal procedure law. Section 2: Nazi Era (1933–1939) - Criminal Code. Volume 2: Jürgen Regge , Werner Schubert (Ed.): Protocols of the Criminal Law Commission of the Reich Ministry of Justice. Part 2. 1st reading: Jürgen Regge (Ed.) General part (penalty framework, undertaking a criminal offense). Special part (continuation and conclusion of discussions). de Gruyter, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-11-011729-0 .
  • Stefan Rohrbacher , Michael Schmidt: Images of Jews. Cultural history of anti-Jewish myths and anti-Semitic prejudices. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1991, ISBN 3-499-55498-4 , pp. 194-202.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Concepts, theories, ideologies . Walter de Gruyter, 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-023379-7 ( google.de [accessed on July 25, 2018]).
  2. ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Cultural history of anti-Jewish myths and anti-Semitic prejudices. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1991, ISBN 3-499-55498-4 , p. 198.
  3. ^ Stefan Rohrbacher, Michael Schmidt: Judenbilder. Cultural history of anti-Jewish myths and anti-Semitic prejudices. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1991, ISBN 3-499-55498-4 , p. 202.
  4. ↑ Diaa Hadid, Mahmoud Abbas Claims Rabbis Urged Israel to Poison Palestinians' Water, in: New York Times, June 23, 2016 ( http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/world/middleeast/mahmoud-abbas -claims-rabbis-urged-israel-to-poison-palestinians-water.html? _r = 2 ); European Parliament Audiovisual Services for Media EU - Palestine. EP Plenary session: Formal sitting - Address by Mahmoud ABBAS, President of the Palestinian National Authority ( http://audiovisual.europarl.europa.eu/Package.aspx?page=2750&id=46272&pid=314&mediatype=V&parentpackagetype=D ); Monika Schwarz-Friesel, When anti-Semitism becomes normal. Anti-Jewish resentments are also expressed in the European Parliament - to sustained applause, in: Jüdische Allgemeine from July 7, 2016 (Jüdische Allgemeine: http://www.juedische-allgemeine.de/article/view/id/25972/highlight/schulz ).