Managing Vulnerability or Opting-Out? Jews in Post-Black-Death Ashkenaz

From the late-thirteenth century on, Jews in Ashkenaz suffered increasing pressures from their Christian neighbours, continuously endangering Jewish life and the lives of Jews. The crisis reached a peak in the calamitous pogroms of the Black Death period (1348–51). Most Jewish communities were were wiped out and their members killed or dispersed. Nonetheless, Jewish communities resurfaced after 1350 and experienced a phase of reorganization. This paper deals with how Jewish survivors of the Black Death were trying to manage the vulnerabilities still prevalent during this reorganization phase. The focus will be on the information offered in chronicles and archival sources. The means Jews employed to ensure their physical well-being, economic sustenance, and religious practice include negotiating with Christian powers and migration within Ashkenaz. However, it is also necessary to keep in mind the strategies of individuals who chose to ‘opt out’, that is, to convert to Christianity or to emigrate from Germany. On a theoretical level it will be argued that on both the collective and the individual levels, Ashkenazi Jews after 1350 went through ‘adaptive cycles’ that both preserved and changed aspects of their identities.