destructive pestilence the common people at first attribute the
mortality to poison. No instruction avails; the supposed
testimony of their eyesight is to them a proof, and they
authoritatively demand the victims of their rage. On whom, then,
was it so likely to fall as on the Jews, the usurers and the
strangers who lived at enmity with the Christians? They were
everywhere suspected of having poisoned the wells or infected the
air. They alone were considered as having brought this fearful
mortality upon the Christians. They were, in consequence, pursued
with merciless cruelty; and either indiscriminately given up to
the fury of the populace, or sentenced by sanguinary tribunals,
which, with all the forms of the law, ordered them to be burnt
alive. In times like these, much is indeed said of guilt and
innocence; but hatred and revenge bear down all discrimination,
and the smallest probability magnifies suspicion into certainty.
These bloody scenes, which disgraced Europe in the fourteenth
century, are a counterpart to a similar mania of the age, which
was manifested in the persecutions of witches and sorcerers; and,
like these, they prove that enthusiasm, associated with hatred,
and leagued with the baser passions, may work more powerfully upon
whole nations than religion and legal order; nay, that it even
knows how to profit by the authority of both, in order the more
surely to satiate with blood the sword of long-suppressed revenge.

The persecution of the Jews commenced in September and October,
1348, at Chillon, on the Lake of Geneva, where the first criminal
proceedings were instituted against them, after they had long
before been accused by the people of poisoning the wells; similar
scenes followed in Bern and Freyburg, in January, 1349. Under the
influence of excruciating suffering, the tortured Jews confessed