9 - Meeting on the Road: Encounters between German Jews and Christians on the Margins of Society

Summary

In many ways the years of the Black Death, from 1348 to 1351, greatly affected the Jews of central Europe. First and foremost was the demographic impact. Not only did Jews suffer directly from the plague, like everyone else - by common estimate between one-quarter and one-third of the population of central Europe perished - but Jews were also widely blamed for the plague and subsequently persecuted, burned at the stake, and expelled from towns. As a result, by the second half of the fourteenth century only approximately seven thousand Jewish families, that is, between 25,000 and 30,000 Jewish individuals, were left in the realm of the Holy Roman Empire. The demographic figures remained stable until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when, for economic reasons, the natural surplus of the Jewish population emigrated to the south and to the east.

Second, the legal status of the Jews was decisively weakened in the course of the fourteenth century. This development was apparently hastened and intensified in the aftermath of the persecutions. As a rule, Jews were not readmitted to the towns collectively but only individually; moreover, Jews were permitted back in the towns for only a given period of time, forcing every family to renew its conditions of residence every few years. The authorities also continually revised the conditions of that privilege. Consequently, two classes of Jews came into being.