Gerard Leval
To Americans, a reference to a St. Valentine’s Day massacre immediately conjures up an image of the 1929 gangster shoot-out in a garage on Chicago’s North Side that led to the deaths of seven mobsters.
But St. Valentine’s Day has yet another massacre of significantly more dramatic proportions to its credit. In 1349, in the then German (although today, French) city of Strasbourg, in the midst of the Black Death, an angry mob entered the city’s predominantly Jewish neighborhood and hounded the Jews into their cemetery. The mob falsely accused the Jews of poisoning the local wells and causing the spread of the disease that was decimating the population. Once the Jews had been forced into the cemetery, the mob created a large pyre and some 2,000 Jews — men, women and children — were consumed by the raging fire that ensued.
This European St. Valentine’s Day massacre was not a purely random act. It was the product of accusations that had been lodged against various European Jewish communities over the course of many years. Although the then current accusation related to the false assertion that Jews were the source of the Black Death, plenty of other equally fallacious accusations had targeted the Jews.
For centuries, the Church had wrongly castigated Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus and denigrated their refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah. Periodically, it was alleged that Christian children had been killed by Jews in order to use their blood for the baking of Passover matzah. Forced into a very few commercial activities by reason of endless restrictions, Jews were reproached for conducting those activities. There were endless reasons to persecute Jews — the reported poisoning of wells was just the then most convenient of those reasons.
I was prompted to recall the terrible event of St. Valentine’s Day 1349 in the context of recent news emanating from Strasbourg. Today, Strasbourg is the principal seat of the European Parliament, the legislative body that is supposed to represent the citizens of all 27 European Union nations and help promote peaceful coexistence among the diverse people that make up Europe. Deliberations on issues of importance to Europeans are regularly debated within the confines of the dignified modern circular building which houses the Parliament in Strasbourg.
In the last few weeks, however, certain members of the Parliament have chosen to initiate a debate about the state of Israel. Under the rubric “Stopping the Genocide in Gaza: Time for EU Sanctions,” members of the Parliament have been addressing accusations and threats against Israel in the guise of protesting the war in Gaza. In particular, representatives from Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have been leading the effort to falsely charge Israel with genocide. And they have been happily supported by EU bureaucrats and members from a variety of other EU nations.
Unlike the venom that was spread in Strasbourg in the fourteenth century, the invective echoing through the halls of the building in Strasbourg is not overtly anti-Jewish. It is not even couched in anti-Zionist terms, the current formulation of anti-Jewish rhetoric. But its tone is, nonetheless, vile and antisemitic.
There is a tragic irony that this debate is taking place in Strasbourg. That city, sitting as it does at the confluence of two very disparate and antagonistic cultures, the Germanic and the French, has been the site of endless violent conflicts. Repeated wars, prompted by religious or territorial motivations, have raged in and around Strasbourg, costing countless lives. Beyond the horrors of that terrible St. Valentine’s Day in 1349, the violence that has periodically scarred the region should have taught those who sit in Strasbourg that they should refrain from fanning the flames of ethnic and religious hatred.
Bandying about false allegations that Israel is committing genocide or that it is actively pursuing a policy of committing atrocities is especially dangerous. Disregarding the reality of the events that have forced Israel to take steps to free the civilians that were barbarically taken from their homes by the same Islamist terrorists who are devoted to the destruction of Israel and the death of its Jewish citizens is nothing short of criminal.
Doing so with the pretense of protecting human rights adds to the charge of hypocrisy.
It was inflammatory rhetoric that led the Strasbourg mob to wantonly slaughter innocent people on St. Valentine’s Day 1349, just a short distance from where the EU Parliament building sits. Now, it is inflammatory rhetoric expressed within that building that may engender yet another round of antisemitic violence.
Interestingly, Church leaders in Strasbourg actually tried to stop the mob from pursuing its anti-Jewish rampage in 1349; however, they were powerless to do so. The anger that had been nurtured by decades, if not centuries, of false accusations against the Jews had so inflamed the populace that those leaders were unable to prevent a massacre. The seeds of hatred had been so strongly planted by vile sermons and teachings that efforts to halt a spiral of destructive violence were useless.
Today, regardless of whether it is to assuage a bad conscience resulting from historical misdeeds or to placate certain elements of their populations, too many European nations are yet again unleashing the virus of antisemitism couched in a sanctimonious pretense of promoting human rights.
The leaders of Europe should give careful consideration to the endless and incendiary accusations that they have been launching against Israel and by implication against Jews.
They should remember the lessons of that terrible St. Valentine’s Day when the harvest of years of hateful rhetoric brought about one of the worst anti-Jewish events prior to the Holocaust.
Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of a national law firm.
