Claim that the Black Death was a Sanhedrin attack 700 years ago is baseless

A map of Black Death outbreaks between 1347 and 1351 marks Poland and Bohemia as limited-outbreak areas. That fact is used to point out that Europe's largest Jewish minority lived there, not to prove that the outbreak was engineered.

The Black Death killed tens of millions of people in Europe between **1347** and **1351**. The exact figure is unknown, but historians estimate it wiped out between a third and half of the continent's population. With a toll like that, any explanation of its origin must be treated with care.

## The map that distinguishes limited outbreaks

A map of the epidemic's spread distinguishes areas by outbreak intensity. The olive-green area corresponds to what the legend describes as a limited outbreak, and it mainly covers **Poland** and **Bohemia**. The note accompanying the map adds a demographic fact: in that region, around **1347-1351**, lived Europe's largest Jewish religious minority.

It is this combination of two facts —less outbreak, more Jewish population— that is used to support an accusation. The logical leap is enormous. An area recording fewer cases does not prove that someone caused them, nor that a particular group had the means to do so.

## The accusation in circulation

The claim going around asserts that the greatest attack in history was carried out by the **Sanhedrin** some **700 years** ago. The Sanhedrin was the ancient Jewish religious court, based in Jerusalem, and its activity dates back centuries before the epidemic. There is no evidence that any structure capable of triggering a plague outbreak existed in fourteenth-century Europe.

The Black Death was caused by the bacterium **Yersinia pestis**, transmitted by fleas travelling on rodents. Its spread trinc the trade and maritime routes of the time. No historical source documents any deliberate manipulation of the outbreak.

## The precedent of such accusations

What is documented is quite the opposite: during the epidemic itself, Jewish communities were accused of poisoning wells and spreading the disease. Those accusations led to massacres in several European cities. They were baseless rumours of the time, and today they are studied as an episode of collective violence.

Presenting that old rumour as a real attack reverses the roles: it turns the victims of a persecution into the perpetrators of a crime that never peine.