Pulkau persecutions
The alleged desecration of the Hosts by Jews from Pulkau triggered a wave of persecution in 1338 . These persecutions were the first long and supraregional excesses that produced violence against Jews in Austrian areas.
The accusation of desecration of the host
In April 1338 , according to Christian annals, between the coinciding Easter and Passover feasts (April 12), Jews in Pulkau stole a host and hid it in the house. However, the host was discovered in front of the house of a Jew - only one source mentions his name: Marquard, i.e. Merchlin, who had lived in Pulkau for ten years - and, at the request of the people, was carried by the Pulkau pastor to the church, where it was immediately venerated. Thereupon all of Pulkau's Jews were slain and robbed.
Until the 12th century, hosts, their alleged desecration and the subsequent miracles performed by these miracles were mostly miracles of conversion, in whose narrative patterns Christians who had fallen away from the faith or who doubted it , but also Jews were converted through the miraculous activity of the host. Through the coursing of numerous myths and hiking legends, the motif of the desecration of the host was already a significant part of Christian legends when the focus began to shift permanently in the 13th century . As early as the middle of the 12th century , the legend of William of Norwich began to spread the ritual murder accusations from England. The accusations that Jews would either steal hosts or buy wafers from dishonorable Christians in order to desecrate them, that is to say “reenact” the death of Jesus, began in Paris , where the first accusation of host sacrilege was made in 1290 . From the beginning, Jews were accused of wrongdoers and evildoers. In today's Austria, the first persecutions due to alleged host desecration are relatively small, local and short, but can be proven very early and from the beginning remarkably numerous. For example in 1294 in Laa an der Thaya after an alleged host robbery, in Korneuburg (1305) and 1306 in St. Pölten .
Their dependence on the ducal protection of Jews brought the Austrian Jews into an increasingly precarious situation with the onset of persecution at the turn of the 14th century. The first persecution of the Jews in Austria was not initiated by a spiritual or secular person, but came from the population. The ducal reaction to this depended on the current situation and could therefore be very different. There was no ducal punishment for the citizens of the princely town of Korneuburg, who murdered the Jews there in 1305 after a host desecration staged by the local priest. However, when a similar persecution of Jews took place in St. Pölten, ruled by Passau , in the following year , Duke Rudolf III. a heavy fine against the citizens and thus reported power claims against the city rule of the Bishop of Passau .
Outbreak of the waves of persecution and consequences
So when a Jew in Pulkau was accused of desecrating the host at Easter 1338, the population killed the local Jews. This triggered a real wave of persecution of Jews, which claimed numerous victims not only in Lower Austria , but also in Bohemia and Moravia . Smaller, rural settlements were particularly affected, while the Jewish communities in the larger cities remained protected, even if, as in Vienna , they had to buy this protection through financial concessions to the citizens.
The Jewish communities of Vienna , Wiener Neustadt and Krems survived the waves without damage. However, when naming these places hit by the rioting, the Christian sources become very vague. The Continuatio Mellicense and the Annales Novimontense , for example, speak of “numerous places” where Jews were killed by Christians or killed themselves in view of their fate, but without making any direct reference to Pulkau. Only the Annales Zwetlense report on specific places, namely Retz , Znaim , Horn , Eggenburg , Klosterneuburg and Zwettl , where the Jewish population was murdered. Thanks to Bohemian historical sources, such as the chronicles of Abbot Neplacho from Opava and Franciscus Pragensis, persecution in the Bohemian-Moravian area could also be proven.
So Christian sources gave little information, in contrast to the precise list of the Hebrew martyrology . The so-called “ Nürnberger Memorbuch ”, created in 1296, lists the places in which the Jewish inhabitants fell victim to the persecution from Pulkau and which brutally ended the Jewish settlement in the villages in the Austrian-Bohemian border area: Pulkau, Eggenburg, Retz, Znaim , Horn, Zwettl, Raabs , Erdberg, Jamnitz, Fratting , Trebitsch, Feldsberg, Falkenstein , Hadersdorf , Gars , Rastenfeld , Mistelbach , Weiten , Emmersdorf , Tulln , Klosterneuburg, Passau, Libisch , St. Pölten, Budweis , Laa, Tschaslau , Prichowitz , Neuhaus , Drosendorf and Villach . The work, which is called by its author himself as Sefer sikkaron , i.e. Book of Remembrance, is the oldest known of these commemorative books, which belonged to the inventory of the Ashkenazi communities in the Middle Ages and modern times and contains, among other things, a martyrology with the names of thousands of Jews, the majority of them from German-speaking countries who were murdered during the persecutions between the First Crusade and the plague epidemic in the middle of the 14th century .
In view of this first supra-regional persecution in the Duchy of Austria , Duke Albrecht II turned to the Pope. Benedict XII. thereupon commissioned the Bishop of Passau to investigate the matter and to punish the Jews if the accusations of host desecration were justified. But if found innocent, those who instigated the persecution should be severely punished. It is striking that even contemporary Christian sources saw economic motives as the real reasons for these anti-Jewish outbreaks of violence, even if the persecutors tried to justify their actions with alleged desecration of the host. Most of the heavily indebted aristocrats, citizens and peasants wanted to burn their debts or get their pledged belongings back, mostly they slew the Jews in order to more easily destroy their debts.
In the Duchy of Austria, the Pulkau persecution made the limits of the ducal protection of Jews obvious - especially in the more distant small settlements in the countryside, where direct ducal intervention was hardly possible. This led to a sharp decline in the number of Jewish settlements in Lower Austria: while the large communities persisted, many of the smaller settlements disappeared entirely, or at least for several decades. As a result, the Jewish settlement evidently concentrated more and more on the surroundings of the large places, where one was better protected in an emergency, even if in the second half of the century there were more Jewish residents in rural areas.
The Pulkau waves of persecution were by no means an isolated event. In the European context, the bloody Armleder persecutions originated in 1336 and until 1338 brutal waves of murder and looting raged through southern German communities. The alleged host miracle in Pulkau was the reason for the establishment of the branch church .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chronicon Zwetlense Recentius . In: Hieronymus Pez (ed.): Scriptores rerum Austriacarum veteres ac genuini , Tomus I / 28, Vienna 1743, column 539. Online: Permalink ; Direct link to column 539 .
- ↑ a b c d Eveline Brugger: From settlement to displacement / contacts and conflicts; in: History of the Jews in Austria . S. 123-227 .
- ↑ a b c d The alleged desecration of the Host in Pulkau 1338 and its reception in Christian and Jewish historiography- Birgit Wiedl In: medaon. Magazine for Jewish Life in Research and Education 6 (2010)