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.