On February 14, 1349 – St. Valentine’s Day – the Jewish residents of Strasbourg, in Alsace, were burned to death by their Christian neighbors. Estimates of the number murdered range from several hundred to more than 2,000.
The Strasbourg massacre was one of a string of pogroms that took place during this period in a number of towns in Western Europe – 30 alone in the Alsace region, bordering the Rhine River, in what is today France.
Ostensibly, the reason for the pogroms was the widespread belief that Jews were responsible for the Black Death pandemic that swept across Europe in 1348-1350, killing between one-third and two-thirds of the continent’s population. (Black Death has been identified as Yersenia pestis, one of whose forms is bubonic plague.)
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