The eighteenth-century historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr once wrote, “Times of plague are always those in which the bestial and diabolical side of human nature gains the upper hand.” In Europe during the Black Death, the pestilence was widely blamed on Jewish people. Wild conspiracy theories emerged that Jewish people were poisoning wells or rivers, and after confessions were drawn out through torture, many thousands of Jews were murdered. Entire communities were burned to death, and the emotionless, matter-of-fact accounts of these murders are chilling. Heinrich Truchsess wrote, “First Jews were killed or burnt in Solden in November, then in Zofingen they were seized and some put on the wheel, then in Stuttgart they were all burnt. The same thing happened during November in Lansberg . . .”

It goes on like that, for paragraphs.

Many (including Guy de Chauliac) recognized that it was utterly impossible for a vast Jewish conspiracy to have spread the plague via well-poisoning. But facts still don’t slow down conspiracy theories, and the long history of anti-Semitism in Europe predisposed people to believing in even the most absurd stories of poisoning. Pope Clement VI pointed out, “It cannot be true that the Jews . . . are the cause or occasion of the plague, because through many parts of the world the same plague . . . afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them.” Still, in many communities, the torture and murder continued, and anti-Semitic ideas about secret international conspiracies proliferated.

That is a human story. It is human in a crisis not just to blame marginalized people, but to kill them.

But to say that times of plague only bring out the bestial and diabolical side of human nature is too simplistic. It seems to me that we are making up “human nature” as we go along. “Very little in history is inevitable,” Margaret Atwood wrote. To accept the demonization of the marginalized as inevitable is to give up on the whole human enterprise. What happened to the Jewish residents of Stuttgart and Lansberg and so many other places was not inevitable. It was a choice.

Amid the horrors of the Black Death, Ibn Battuta tells us a story of people coming together in the city of Damascus. He says that people fasted for three consecutive days, then “assembled in the Great Mosque until it was filled to overflowing . . . and spent the night there in prayers. . . . After the dawn prayers the next morning, they all went out together on foot, holding Qurans in their hands, and the amirs barefoot. The procession was joined by the entire population of the town, men and women, small and large; the Jews came with their Book of the Law and the Christians with their Gospel, all of them with their women and children. The whole concourse, weeping and seeking the favor of God through His books and His prophets, made their way to the Mosque of the Footprints, and there they remained in supplication and invocation until near midday. They then returned to the city and held the Friday service, and God lightened their affliction.”