Tzafrir Barzilay
senior lecturer of medieval history in the Department of General History at Bar Ilan University.
Tzafrir Barzilay is a senior lecturer of medieval history in the Department of General History at Bar Ilan University. His work focuses on the social history of western and central Europe in the High and late Middle Ages (1000-1500). He is interested in the history of European minorities, the social implications of environmental and geographical factors, and religious movements in high and late medieval Europe. Barzilay has also published articles on movement and communication in medieval Europe, on violence and its meanings, and on Jewish-Christian relations. He is the author of Poisoned Wells: Accusation, Persecution and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422 (Philadelphia, 2022) and coeditor, with Elisheva Baumgarten and Eyal Levinson, of Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Northern Europe, 1000-1350: A Sourcebook (Kalamazoo, 2022).
Read moreFields of Interest
European minorities in the High and Late Middle Ages
Environmental history and the social implications of geographical factors
Movement and communication in medieval Europe
Violence and its meanings
Jewish-Christian relations
Poisoned Wells: Accusation, Persecution and Minorities in Medieval Europe, 1321-1422
Between 1348 and 1350, Jews across Europe were accused of poisoning wells to spread the Black Death, and hundreds if not thousands were killed. These charges were not unique: the first wave, in France and Aragon in 1321, had targeted lepers, before later expanding to implicate Muslims and then Jews. In Poisoned Wells, Tzafrir Barzilay traces the origins of these accusations, why they spread and took hold where they did, and why they faded by the fifteenth century — arguing that the conditions behind them were already forming in the thirteenth century.