Valentine of love, hate and death

Beginning in kindergarten, our teachers in yeshiva implanted and nurtured within each of our little minds a tiny virus, known as HAS, or Halloween Aversion Syndrome. If gestated successfully (and it often wasn’t) this virus programmed the mind it inhabited to utterly reject the dastardly thirty first day of October, to see it as muktzeh, a form of idol worship, evil witchcraft, and to always remember that this day was a special time for desecrators of Jewish cemeteries.

A similar virus was implanted to do the same for St Valentine’s Day. As a result I instinctively recoiled since the age of 5 from anything remotely Valentinian. My future wife was horrified upon discovering that I was infected with the anti-Valentine virus. After all she grew up in a goyishe suburb, where everyone was appropriately amorous on St Valentine’s, an evening of romantic dinners and perhaps even gifts (bribes?) of roses, jewelry or lingerie. One time she scolded me for failing to make reservations at some French restaurant she had eyed. Lucky for me though: nothing for a non-religious orthodox Jew to eat in the joint, with all those horrible treifeh entrées filling the menu.

FYI -- there were actually three Saint Valentines, all martyred in the latter years of the Roman empire. The current legends that characterize Saint Valentine were invented in 14th century, notably by Geoffrey Chaucer and his circle, when the feast day of February 14 first became associated with romantic love.

I’m too scared to tell my wife, but there is a fine reason for Jews not to celebrate St Valentine’s. For it was on this day that the Massacre of Strasbourg took place in 1349, perhaps the worst of the terrible series of outrages which took place at the time of the Black Death. The city council was favorable to the Jews, and resisted efforts to harm them. The populace however blamed Jews for the fluctuation in the price of corn, and felt that the council was conspiring to protect them.

On Febrary 14, a mob barricaded the Judengasse and drove the whole Jewish community to the cemetery where they built a huge pyre. About 2000 Jewish men, women and children were burned to death. A new council took over and declared that Jews shall be barred from the city for a century, but this kherem was eased 20 years later.

Among the spoils of that day was a shofar the mob had found in the shul. This find confirmed the suspicions of the townsfolk: it was, they said, prepared by the Jews in order to betray the city. By blowing it, the Jews would be able to inform their allies lurking outside the city walls.

For many years after, the so-called ‘Judenblos’ was blown each evening on a ‘grusselhorn’, an imitation shofar, as a warning to any Jews to depart the city limits before nightfall, and also as a reminder to the townspeople of their miraculous escape from the devious of the Jews in 1349!

Happy Valentines!