nated thousands of years
before in Egypt, and had been handed down through Jewish lawgivers and
statesmen. Certainly they observed more careful sanitary rules and
more constant abstinence from dangerous foods than was usual among
Christians; but the public at large could not understand so simple a
cause, and jumped to the conclusion that their immunity resulted
from protection by Satan, and that this protection was repaid and the
pestilence caused by their wholesale poisoning of Christians. As a
result of this mode of thought, attempts were made in all parts of
Europe to propitiate the Almighty, to thwart Satan, and to stop the
plague by torturing and murdering the Jews. Throughout Europe during
great pestilences we hear of extensive burnings of this devoted people.
In Bavaria, at the time of the Black Death, it is computed that twelve
thousand Jews thus perished; in the small town of Erfurt the number is
said to have been three thousand; in Strasburg, the Rue Brulee remains
as a monument to the two thousand Jews burned there for poisoning the
wells and causing the plague of 1348; at the royal castle of Chinon,
near Tours, an immense trench was dug, filled with blazing wood, and
in a single day one hundred and sixty Jews were burned. Everywhere in
continental Europe this mad persecution went on; but it is a pleasure
to say that one great churchman, Pope Clement VI, stood against this
popular unreason, and, so far as he could bring his influence to bear on
the maddened populace, exercised it in favour of mercy to these supposed
enemies of the Almighty.(331)

(331) For an early conception in India of the Divinity acting through
medicine, see The Bhagavadgita, translated by Telang, p. 82, in Max
Muller's Sacred Books of the East. For the necessity of religious
means of securing knowledge of medicine, see the Anugita, translated by
Telang, in Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East, p. 388. For ancient
Persian ideas of sickness as sent by the spirit of evil and to be cured
by spells, but not excluding medicine and surgery, and for sickness
generally as caused by the evil principle in demons, see the
Zend-Avesta, Darmesteter's translation, introduction, passim, but
especially p. xciii. For diseases wrought by witchcraft, see the same,
pp. 230, 293. On the preferences of spells in healing over medicine and
surgery, see Zend-Avesta, vol. i, pp. 85, 86. For healing by magic in
ancient Greece, see, e. g., the cure of Ulysse