In the fall of 1337*, the inhabitants of the Bavarian Town of Deggendorf butchered the entire local Jewish community in order to avoid paying debts. Later, they justified their pogrom by an absurd tale of Host Desecration, creating an annual pilgrimage franchise which netted the town hefty revenues over the next centuries.
It began on September 30th, the day after Michaelmas, which in the Medieval calendar was a day upon which rents, bills and loan payments were due. Jews, it will be remembered, were forbidden by the European authorities from owning land, farming or participating in other professions, restricting them to commerce and to the hated role of moneylenders. In the year 1337, a plague of locusts had damaged the harvest, leaving many local citizens unable to pay their debts to the Jews.
In an organized riot signaled by the ringing of the church bells on September 30, townspeople and farmers from the vicinity launched vicious attacks against the Jews of Deggendorf, dragging families from their homes and slaughtering them (as commemorated in the antique print on the left). They then burned down the Jews' houses, killing any Jews left behind and also - no less importantly - destroying any written records of the money they owed.
Within a single day, the townspeople had eliminated the entire Jewish community, as with it their entire monetary debt. Looting of the murdered Jews’ homes and possessions was an additional benefit.
The local duke was upset, as the pogrom represented a serious loss of income for him. Medieval rulers used local Jews as a money-making asset: They granted the Jews the right to live in their fiefdom in return for hefty annual payments, along with occasional extortion. The lion’s share of the money owed to the Jews of Deggendorf was supposed to be paid by the community to the Duke. However, in view of the destruction of all records (and apprehensive of the mob’s power), the Duke quickly applauded the townspeople and declared that all of their debts to the Jews were legally forfeit and all of the loot they had plundered from their murdered neighbors was now theirs to keep. The Duke was quite popular after this announcement, and similar massacres of Jews ensued that year in other parts of Bavaria, these also going unpunished. The good folk of Deggendorf built a church on the site of the destroyed synagogue, paid for with some of the money they had seized from the Jews.
In the years after the bloodbath, local stories evolved justifying the massacre of the Jews. By the Fifteenth Century, these had developed into a very detailed accusation of “Host Desecration”, claiming that the local Jews had managed to obtain some of the consecrated host - the sacred bread used in the Catholic Mass – and had attempted to desecrate and to destroy these. Medieval European Christians were deeply ingrained with the belief that the Jews had killed Christ, a belief that was formally repudiated by the Catholic Church only in the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Since these Christians also fully believed that the sacred bread was literally the body of Christ, accusations of Host Desecration were seen as an attempt by the Jews to repeat the killing of Jesus, based on a perceived eternal enmity of the Jews to Christ. The accusation resonated well, especially the stories that evolved about the miraculous manner in which the consecrated host managed to overcome the Jews and call the townsfolk’s attention to their supposed crime: Unable to destroy the holy bread, the Jews threw it into a well. The well’s water became poisonous, and this, in turn, lead to an investigation which found the consecrated host hidden in the well.
Such a miracle, together with the downfall of the despised Jews, was a highly attractive story, and an annual week-long pilgrimage to Deggendorf was instituted, the Deggendorf Gnad. At its heart was a view of the holy relics, in this case the "true remains" of the consecrated host which the Jews had tried and failed to destroy, surrounded by statues re-enacting the outrageous event for the visitors.
These tens of thousands of pilgrims were a boon to local commerce, a source of revenue to the local church, which sold them countless indulgences, and to local lords who collected taxes on all of the proceedings. At the height of the Deggendorf Gnad’s popularity, some 150,000 visitors were estimated to arrive every year in the small town.
It was only in the second half of the 20th century that the Deggendorf Gnad began to loose its allure, but it exists to this day to a limited extent.
Deggendorf offers two key lessons to us today.
The first is that deeply-ingrained myths and negative stereotypes, even if they appear silly or absurd, can be the fuel that leads to an instant conflagration. In 14th century Deggendorf, it was the widely held belief that Jews were collectively responsible for the death of Christ and that they had an innate hostility to the Christian church which served to justify mass murder when conditions were right.
This is why we must fight the contemporary slanders of the Jews, ridiculous though they are. Crackpot conspiracies have a surprising way of becoming ingrained in the human mind: today hundreds of millions of Muslims throughout the world are convinced that “the Mossad” engineered 9-11, and it is frightening to think of how many in the West believe that Israel is engaged in a genocidal war against the Palestinians, not to mention the brand new libel of organ harvesting which has surfaced in recent months in the USA, the Ukraine, and the Middle East. As absurd as these false accusations are, once they take hold they can serve as the justification for very real acts of malice.
The second lesson of Deggendorf is that anti-Semitism is often a useful cover for real world objectives, such as the ‘debt reduction program’ the townspeople engaged in. It is not uncommon today in many parts of the world to see it employed by politicians as a tool against their opponents (in the USA or the Ukraine this past year), or by governments in an effort to deflect public criticism away from them - notably the state-sponsored anti-Semitism that prevails in the Middle East.
*some sources claim that the year was actually 1338
