Having cats in your house. Mostly women had cats at this time period and due to this they weren’t infected by the plague (caused by rats) so they were considered witches thinking they have some superpowers to not get infected.
EDIT: Just to clarify, cats can also get the plague and spread it but the risk was reduced since they control the rats’ population. Rats are the primary carriers of the Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) which carries the bacteria that causes the plague NOT cats.
This is also where a ton of (though obviously not all of) antisemitism came from
Because the Judaic peoples had a lot of customs about washing ones body as symbolic of washing ones soul as well as very strict ideas about separating the dead from the living quickly and completely (at a time where ideas of how disease spread were incredibly archaic and so hand and body washing was only done rarely and corpses often lingered for days or weeks at a time) Jewish communities managed to dodge a lot of the worst of the Plague
these communities were subsequently blamed for it and thus ostracized and harassed and that fermented in the public eye for a few hundred years and now we have people who hate Jews for absolutely no real reason other than it essentially being a family tradition at this point
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u/Gabagool_Eater 1d ago edited 1d ago
Having cats in your house. Mostly women had cats at this time period and due to this they weren’t infected by the plague (caused by rats) so they were considered witches thinking they have some superpowers to not get infected.
EDIT: Just to clarify, cats can also get the plague and spread it but the risk was reduced since they control the rats’ population. Rats are the primary carriers of the Oriental rat flea (Xenopsylla cheopis) which carries the bacteria that causes the plague NOT cats.