Black Death exhibition

An interesting little exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London. It goes by the name of Treasures of the Black Death, and features Mediaeval jewellery and coins found at Erfurt in Germany in the 1990’s and at Colmar in France in the 19th Century. They were almost certainly buried by Jewish families at the time of the Black Death.

This pestilence was perhaps the worst disaster ever to afflict humankind – killing off maybe a third of the population of Europe. In the panic, the Jews often got the blame, and there were massacres at Frankfurt, Narbonne, Carcassone, Basel, Mainz and many other places. (In a variation on this theme, the islanders of Cyprus murdered their Arab slaves instead.)

As for the places featured in the exhibition – the city council at Colmar announced on December 29, 1348 that the cantor of the Strasbourg synagogue had admitted to sending someone to poison the wells at Colmar (this was a fairly standard accusation). The townspeople then burned the Jews outside the city gates.

More than 100 Jews were massacred at Erfurt in March 1349, and the rest were driven from the town. Later the town council invited them to return, though they added that they could not guarantee their safety. However, some clearly were brave enough to come back. In 1357, they built a new synagogue and by the following century, Erfurt had one of the most important Jewish communities in Germany.

The exhibition runs until May 10.

Massacres by lone gunmen + Cardiff air crash

Two massacres by lone gunmen in the space of a day. A small town in Germany named Winnenden was the scene of one of them. Seventeen year old Tim Kretschmer walked into the secondary school he used to attend dressed in combat gear, and started spraying bullets around. He killed 8 girls, one boy and three women teachers. Then he left the school and shot three more people, before killing himself.

Earlier a 28 year old American shot dead his mother and burned down the house they had lived in in Alabama, and then went on a killing spree that left another 9 dead before he too shot himself.

We are used to hearing about mass shootings in the USA. The worst happened at Viginia Tech in Blacksburg on April 16, 2007 when Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 teachers and students before committing suicide. As usually happens in America, the massacre was followed by a great deal of hand-wringing then a bit of minor tinkering with the gun laws.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel pronounced the Winnenden shootings “incomprehensible.” Perhaps, but not unique. In April 2002, a 19 year old student who had been expelled from a school in the German city of Erfurt returned to kill 13 teachers, two students and a police officer before killing himself.

In Britain, we had the Hungerford massacre of 1987 in which Michael Ryan murdered 16 people, before killing himself. Then nine years later, Thomas Hamilton killed 16 small children and a teacher at Dunblane Primary School before turning one of his guns on himself. The tennis star Andy Murray, then aged 8, was one of the survivors. Both of these events were followed by severe tightenings of Britain’s gun laws.

On this day...59 years ago what was then the world’s worst civil aviation disaster happened close to the village of Sigingstone in South Wales. Eighty people were killed on a charter flight bringing home Welsh rugby fans from an international against Ireland. The full story is in A Disastrous History of Britain.