The painting above is from 1353, and it shows the citizens of Tournai burying victims of the Black Death, also known as the bubonic plague. However, the black death is now what I mean when I refer to the Medieval Holocaust, but it is directly linked to it.
Jews in Europe have been persecuted since the 11th century. It is a mystery to me why that is. Some say it is because Christians blame the Jews for the death of Jesus. As a Christian, this makes no sense. Firstly, if it had been the Jews who killed Jesus, it would have meant that Jews killed another Jew. However, it was the Romans who crucified Jesus, so really the Italians should be blamed.
The connection with the bubonic plague is that many Jews were killed as a result of it. Not because they fell ill but because they were blamed for it.
Pope Clement VI tried to protect the Jewish communities by issuing two papal bulls in 1348, on 6 July and 26 September. They stated that those who blamed the plague on the Jews had been “seduced by that liar, the Devil”. He went on to emphasize, “It cannot be true that the Jews, by such a heinous crime, are the cause or occasion of the plague, because through many parts of the world the same plague, by the hidden judgment of God, has afflicted and afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them”. He urged clergy to take action to protect Jews and offered them papal protection in the city of Avignon. Clement was aided by the research of his personal physician, Guy de Chauliac, who argued from his own treatment of the infected that the Jews were not to blame. Despite this, Jews across Europe were persecuted and murdered.
On 24 August 1349, six thousand Jews were killed in Mainz after being blamed for the bubonic plague.
On 14 February 1349, 900 Jews were burned alive in Strasbourg and a similar number were banned from the city after being blamed for the spread of the Black Death.
A few weeks later, on March 21, Between 100 and 3,000 Jews were killed in Black Death riots in Erfurt, Germany. The following day, the people of Fulda, Germany, massacred Jews, blaming them for the Black Death.
On 5 December 1349, 500 Jews of Nuremberg were massacred during the Black Death riots.
Stories circulated of a plot against Christianity originating in the Jewish community of Toledo in Spain. They were carried forward by Rabbi Peyret in Chambery, the capital of what was then Savoy (southeastern France). Local authorities and mobs depended on forced confessions as justification for attacks on Jewish populations. Typically, Jews were “put on the wheel and tortured” until they confessed to elaborate plots, often involving rabbis from far-away places instructing them by letter to poison wells to decimate Christianity. One such confessor said the poison had been formulated from frogs, lizards, spiders and “Christians’ hearts,” according to the Jewish Encyclopedia’s account. The poison was wrapped in cloth until it was about “the size of a large nut” and then deposited in wells or springs, the confessors declared.
Jews were herded into pits, fields or houses to burn them alive.
Escape was virtually impossible. Those who survived the flames were greeted by men wielding “cudgels and stones” who “dashed out the brains of those trying to creep out of the fire,” according to the account of Von Diessenhoven, a canon of the city of Konstanz.
In that city, Jews herded into a house specially constructed for their torching were “dancing, others singing and the rest weeping” as the flames engulfed them, Papal chaplain Von Diessenhoven wrote. Immediate conversion to Christianity provided an escape for some. Babies were wrested away and baptized as their parents burned.
As the plague made its way down the Rhine Valley, and even before the first victims perished in places like Brabant in the Netherlands, Jews began to pay the price for it in the southern Low Countries, being blamed for the calamity that was descending upon them all. Pogroms erupted in which Jews were rounded up and burned at the stake, drowned, or butchered violently. There was an emergence of a social narrative that Jews had caused the Black Death by poisoning wells with concoctions derived from baby blood and spiders. Some contemporary people noticed that, in fact, getting rid of Jews was a way of getting rid of debt, as well as taking possession of their wealth. The eruption of the plague had simply given an external reason for this to occur.
The widely assumed reason why the plague spread was in 1347, twelve Genoese trading galleys, bringing goods from the Crimea to Sicily, had also brought with them something called Yersinius Pestis, a bacteria that would become known to history as the Black Death. Originating in central Asia, it had been carried by fleas hitchhiking on and feeding off the backs of infected rodents who had made their way onto ships.
Sources
https://www.the-low-countries.com/article/when-jews-were-blamed-for-the-black-death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews_during_the_Black_Death
History of Sorts 
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