Rintfleisch massacres

The Rintfleisch or Rindfleisch movement was a series of massacres against Jews in the year 1298. The event, in later terminology a pogrom, was the first large-scale persecutions in Germany since the First Crusade.

It was set in the Franconian region during the civil strife between the elected King of the Romans, Count Adolf of Nassau, and his Habsburg rival Duke Albert of Austria, when Imperial authority, traditionally concerned with the protection of the Jews, had temporarily collapsed. Already in 1287 the death of Werner of Oberwesel in the Rhineland had been blamed on Jews and about 500 were killed in revenge, followed by a series of blood libels. When finally King Adolf was deposed and killed in the Battle of Göllheim on 2 July 1298, the Franconian nobility gathered at Albert's election in Frankfurt.

When at the same time the Jews in the Hohenlohe town of Röttingen were accused of having obtained and desecrated a consecrated host, one "Lord Rindtfleisch", who the sources refer to either as an impoverished knight or—more probably—a butcher (the term means "beef" in modern German spelling), gathered a mob around him and burned the Röttingen Jews on Sunday, April 20. Rintfleisch declared to have received a mandate from heaven to avenge the sacrilege and exterminate the Jews. The Colmar Dominican Rudolph refers to him in Latin as a , i.e. butcher or executioner, but it is not clear if Rudolph meant his original profession, or his behaviour as a slaughterer of the Jews. According to contemporary sources the Lord of Röttingen, Kraft von Hohenlohe, was encumbered with debts to Jewish lenders.

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