The Jewish Diaspora

Flight from persecution

Flight eastward after the Black Death massacres

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1348–1400 CERhineland (Ashkenaz — the ShUM cities) → Poland (Crown lands)

Why it happened

The Black Death (1347–1351) triggered mass scapegoating: Jews were falsely accused of causing the plague by poisoning wells,1 and in 1349 massacres swept the Holy Roman Empire — Erfurt, Zürich, Basel, Fulda and beyond.1

The migration

Some 510 Jewish communities were destroyed in this period, with many taking their own lives rather than face the mobs.2 The attacks led to the eastward movement of Northern European Jewry to Poland and Lithuania,3 a migration reckoned among the Black Death's most significant long-term consequences.2 German-speaking refugees fled to the more hospitable cities of Poland,3 where King Casimir III the Great allowed Jews to settle in great numbers and protected them as 'people of the king,'3 confirming on 9 October 1334 the Jewish privileges first granted in 1264.4 That charter, the Statute of Kalisz, gave Jews freedom to worship, trade and travel,5 contrasting with the expulsions from England (1290), France (1306) and Spain (1492).3 Poland thus became a shelter for the persecuted3 and, by the mid-16th century, home to roughly three-quarters of world Jewry.6

Genetic corroboration

  • autosomalWhole-genome data infer a severe bottleneck of a few hundred people about 25–32 generations ago7 and an approximately even mixture of European and likely Middle Eastern ancestry.7 The broad genetic date overlaps the medieval period but does not locate the bottleneck or attribute it to Black Death-era migration.

Sources

  1. ACohn SK Jr. 2007. The Black Death and the Burning of Jews. Past & Present 196 3–36. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtm005
  2. CWikipedia contributors. 2026. Black Death Jewish persecutions. Wikipedia link
  3. BWeinryb, Bernard D.. 1973. The Jews of Poland: A Social and Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland from 1100 to 1800. Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia link
  4. BDubnow SM. 1916. History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Vol. 1: From the Beginning until the Death of Alexander I (1825). Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia (trans. I. Friedlaender)
  5. BPogonowski IC. 1993. Jews in Poland: A Documentary History. Hippocrene Books, New York
  6. CWikipedia contributors. 2026. History of the Jews in Poland. Wikipedia link
  7. ACarmi S, Hui KY, Kochav E, et al.. 2014. Sequencing an Ashkenazi reference panel supports population-targeted personal genomics and illuminates Jewish and European origins. Nature Communications 5 4835. doi:10.1038/ncomms5835