The Overthrow of Strasbourg’s Government and the…
February 1349 CE
The Overthrow of Strasbourg’s Government and the Persecution of Jews (February 1349)
In early 1349, as the Black Death loomed over Strasbourg, the city’s Jewish community faced rising hostility, even though the plague had not yet reached the city. Bishop Berthold II of Bucheck fueled the growing antisemitic sentiment, blaming the Jews for poisoning wells to spread the disease.
However, Strasbourg’s elected government, led by Mayor Kunze of Winterthur, Sheriff Gosse Sturm, and lay leader Peter Swaber, strongly defended the Jewish community, resisting calls for their persecution.
The Coup and Establishment of a New Government (February 10, 1349)
- On February 10, 1349, an angry mob overthrew Strasbourg’s government, installing a new populist regimethat was heavily influenced by anti-Jewish factions.
- The guilds of butchers and tailors took control, backed by local nobles eager to seize Jewish wealth and property.
- This unstable new government immediately arrested the city’s Jews, charging them with deliberately poisoning Christian wells to spread the plague.
Context and Consequences
- This event was part of a broader wave of anti-Jewish violence that swept across Alsace and the Holy Roman Empire during the Black Death persecutions of 1348–1351.
- The new rulers of Strasbourg aligned themselves with other regional leaders who had already carried out pogroms, particularly following the Benfeld Decree of early 1349, which had institutionalized anti-Jewish violence in Alsace.
- The fall of Strasbourg’s government marked the beginning of what would soon become one of the worst massacres of Jews in medieval Europe—the Strasbourg Massacre of February 14, 1349, in which thousands of Jews were burned alive or expelled.
Significance
- The overthrow of Strasbourg’s government showed how political instability, economic opportunism, and religious hysteria combined to produce violent persecution.
- It was one of the earliest documented municipal coups explicitly aimed at enabling anti-Jewish violence, reinforcing the widespread scapegoating of Jews during the Black Death.
- The Strasbourg Massacre that followed remains one of the largest single instances of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Europe, leading to the near-total destruction of the city’s Jewish community.
The coup of February 10, 1349, was a pivotal moment in medieval antisemitism, as it demonstrated how fear, political upheaval, and economic greed could lead to the destruction of entire communities under the guise of public health conspiracies.