Okay, I found this weird.

First, a very quick history lesson. Around the year 1348, the bubonic plague started to sweep across Europe. The Jews, of course, were blamed for it. In the Upper Rhine Valley, the persecution of the Jews was particularly vicious. In Strasbourg, Freiburg, and Basle, nearly every Jew was “tried", convicted, and burned to death.

Under torture, many of the Jews had confessed that they had planned to poison the wells in the aforementioned cities so that all the Christians would die of the Plague (the current thinking being that poison caused the Plague). This special poison was supposedly being sent on a ship from Jerusalem to Europe, and had luckily been intercepted by Christians, which thwarted the Jewish plan.

So yesterday I was reading a German paper, and I came across an article about 2 Jewish men in their seventies. The men were members of a German Jewish resistance group during World War II. They are now being convicted in absentia by a German court for having attempted to murder SS men during the war.

Reading about this ludicrous situation was enough to make my jaw drop. But what really bowled me over was this. Apparently, this resistance group had several plans for killing Nazis, one of them being the following (the translation from the article is mine):

“Initially, the drinking water of the population of Nuremberg was to be poisoned. The poison for doing this [arsenic] was already underway by boat from Palestine, but the couriers were intercepted by the British.”

I’m always seeing connections between the Middle Ages and the present, but a bizarre historical coincidence like this is almost too much.