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The Black Death, now there was a plague. It killed perhaps 200 million people in only seven years, at a time when humanity had way fewer people than it does now. And all that death made people crazy, and angry. What did they do? They blamed the Jews.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 9, 1349--
Basel is a nice little city in northwest Switzerland on the banks of the Rhine River. And like many places over the entire fucking planet because humans are awful, it has a dark history. In the late 12th century a small Jewish community formed in Basel. In 1346 the plague began to ravage Europe, and people, being superstitious and hateful idiots, decided it must have been the Jews who were the cause. Antisemitism had been a thing since forever, and Jewish people were always a favorite scapegoat. Across Western Europe a rumor spread that Jewish people were poisoning wells with the plague to kill all the good little Christians. Because . . . reasons?
In December 1348 the plague still had not reached Basel, but the townsfolk decided fuck those Jews and destroyed the Jewish cemetery. Some of the Jewish population then fled, but most remained. Then on January 9, 1349, a mob formed in Basel and went in search of the Jewish people in their town. They were always easy to find, because in 1215 the pope had decreed that Jews had to wear a yellow badge at all times to identify themselves. Hitler didn’t invent that shit.
Speaking of popes, a different pope said the previous year that hey it’s probably not the Jews spreading the plague, so fucking chill out people. But the people did not fucking chill out.
The mob in Basel captured all the Jewish people who remained in the town. They decided not to kill the children, but only kill their heritage by forcefully baptizing them into Christianity and placing them in monasteries. The townsfolk constructed a specially made wooden hut on an island in the Rhine and they forced all the adult Jewish people inside, approximately 70 human beings, then set it on fire.
The massacre of Jews in Basel was only one of many such mass murders. A month later in the city of Strasbourg, about 80 miles north of Basel, several hundred Jewish people met a similar fate.
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