Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/454

438 a cause, and jumped to the conclusion that their immunity resulted from protection by Satan, and that this favor was repaid and the pestilence caused by their wholesale poisoning of Christians. As a result of this mode of thought, attempts were made in all parts of Europe to propitiate the Almighty, to thwart Satan, and stop the plague by torture and murder of the Jews. Throughout Europe during great pestilences we hear of extensive burnings of this devoted people. In Bavaria, at the time of the "black death," it is computed that twelve thousand Jews thus perished; in the small town of Erfurt, the number is said to have been three thousand; in Strasburg the Rue Brulée remains as a monument to the two thousand Jews burned in it for poisoning the wells and causing the plague of 1348; at the royal castle of Chinon, near Tours, an immense trench was dug, filled with blazing wood, and in a single day one hundred and sixty Jews were burned. Everywhere in continental Europe this mad persecution went on; but it is a pleasure to say that one man, Pope Clement VI, stood against this mass of popular unreason, and, so far as he could bring his influence to bear on the maddened populace, it was exercised in favor of mercy to these supposed enemies of the Almighty.

As to witches, the reasons for believing them the cause of pestilence also came from far. This belief, too, had been poured into the early Church from Oriental sources, and was strengthened by a whole line of church authorities, fathers, doctors, and saints; but, above all, by the great bull, "Summis Desiderantes," issued by Pope Innocent VIII, in 1484. This utterance from the seat of St. Peter infallibly committed the Church to the idea that witches are a great cause of disease, storms, and various ills which