e crying of children, the scolding of women,
and the lowing of cows. These walls were once proud and strong, and
these lanes were alive with fresh, free life, power and pomp, joy and
sorrow, much love and much hate. For Bacharach once belonged to those
municipalities which were founded by the Romans during their rule on the
Rhine; and its inhabitants, though the times which came after were very
stormy, and though they had to submit first to the Hohenstaufen, and
then to the Wittelsbach authority, managed, following the example of the
other cities on the Rhine, to maintain a tolerably free commonwealth.
This consisted of an alliance of separate social elements, in which the
patrician elders and those of the guilds, who were subdivided according
to their different trades, both strove for power; so that while they
were bound in union to resist and guard against outside robber-nobles,
they were, nevertheless, constantly having domestic dissensions over
disputed interests. Consequently there was but little social
intercourse, much mistrust, and not infrequently actual outbursts of
passion. The ruling governor sat in his lofty castle of Sareck, and
swooped down like his falcon, whenever he was called, and often when not
called. The clergy ruled in darkness by darkening the souls of others.
One of the most forsaken and helpless of the social elements, which had
been gradually bound down by local laws, was the little Jewish
community. This had first settled in Bacharach in the days of the
Romans, and during the later persecution of the Jews it had taken in
many a flock of fugitive co-religionists.

The great oppression of the Jews began with the crusades, and raged most
furiously about the middle of the fourteenth century, at the end of the
great pestilence, which, like all other great public disasters, was
attributed to the Jews, because people declared they had drawn down the
wrath of God, and, with the help of the lepers, had poisoned the wells.
The enraged populace, especially the hordes of Flagellants, or
half-naked men and women, who, lashing themselves for penance and
singing a mad hymn to the Virgin, swept over South Germany and the
Rhenish provinces, murdered in those days many thousand Jews, tortured
others, or baptized them by force. There was another accusation which in
earlier times and all through the Middle Ages, even to the beginning of
the last century, cost much blood and suffering. This was the ridiculous
sto