IN MARCH 2014, an exhibit opened at the Museu Comarcal de l’Urgell in Tàrrega, commemorating a tragedy that had occurred in that Catalan town nearly seven hundred years earlier. This tragedy—the murder of a large number of the town's Jewish inhabitants—has been acknowledged for centuries. Reports of the events that transpired in the summer of 1348 reached the ruler of the Crown of Aragon almost immediately. Legal proceedings continued for several years thereafter, not so much to identify and prosecute the murderers as to restore property and financial instruments that had been destroyed or stolen in the rioting. Meanwhile, contemporary reports of the events in Tàrrega circulated among the Jewish communities of Catalonia. Stories of the event were also handed down among subsequent generations of Jews when they emigrated to Italy after their general expulsion from Spain in 1492. All of this, too, has been known for some time.

But written accounts tend to take on a certain abstraction, which is why the discovery of the Jewish cemetery in Tàrrega in 2007 occasioned such interest. Within it were found six communal graves that seemed to hold the victims of the 1348 uprisings (Muntané 2007b, 2009, 2012a). These graves are the only material evidence of the violent acts perpetrated against the town's Jewish minority. In the following essay, a team of archeologists, historians, and scientists lays out the evidence for the events of 1348 from a new perspective: first, we reassemble the historical documentation and examine it for evidence of the exact timing and circumstances of the events; then, we turn to the material evidence from the cemetery, examining it, too, to confirm the date of the events that produced these communal graves; and finally, in more detail, we look for evidence of the nature of the attack, the identities of the victims, and the circumstances in which they were laid to rest in this cemetery.

Part I: The Documentary Evidence

One of the acknowledged consequences of the plague epidemic of 1348–51 was an escalation in attacks on social minorities, including clerics, beggars, persons suffering from leprosy, and foreigners, who were blamed for the inexplicable mortality.