TY - JOUR AU - Voigtlaender, Nico AU - Voth, Hans-Joachim TI - Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 17113 PY - 2011 Y2 - June 2011 DO - 10.3386/w17113 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17113 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17113.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Nico Voigtländer Anderson School of Management University of California, Los Angeles 110 Westwood Plaza C513 Entrepreneurs Hall Los Angeles, CA 90095 Tel: 310/794-6382 E-Mail: nico.v@anderson.ucla.edu Hans-Joachim Voth Department of Economics U of Zurich Schoeneberggasse 1 CH-8001, Zurich Switzerland E-Mail: joachimvoth@gmail.com AB - How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the 'Night of Broken Glass' in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. ER -