La citation du jour - Barbara W. Tuchman (27)

Dans A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century, la grande historienne américaine Barbara W. Tuchman écrit au sujet de la Grande Peste du 14e siècle:

"On charges that they [les Juifs] were poisoning the wells, with intent "to kill and destroy the whole of Christendom and have lordship over all the world", the lynchings began in the spring of 1348 on the heels of the first plague deaths. The first attacks occurred in Narbonne and Carcassonne, where Jews were dragged from their houses and thrown into bonfires. [...] The accusation of well- poisoning was as old as the plague of Athens, when it had been applied to the Spartans, and as recent as the epidemics of 1320-21, when it had been applied to the lepers. At that time the lepers were believed to have acted at the instigation of the Jews and the Moslem King of Granada, in a great conspiracy of outcasts to destroy Christians. Hundreds were rounded up and burned throughout France in 1322 and the Jews heavily punished by an official fine and unoffial attacks. When the plague came, the charge was instantly revived against the Jews:

... rivers and fountains
That were clear and clean
They poisoned in many places ..."

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