ABSTRACT
In two different instances, and one year apart, Jewish men were sentenced for fighting back over insults and injustices they felt they had endured. Both cases occurred during the last decades of the seventeenth century, that is, at a time when Jews were increasingly and disproportionally sentenced for crimes, especially under the infamous Verdachtstrafe, a punishment for being suspicious. Out of a total of 26 such sentences 13 were handed down to Jews—as clearly documented. It was also during the same period that Jews experienced increasingly unfair judicial treatments as crime victims, as so clearly demonstrated in the previous chapter. Their living conditions in the segregated and cramped Judengasse, the Jewish street, could only have accentuated their desperation. Possible pent-up anger, turned inward for too long, might partly explain the highly emotional character of these two cases of Jewish physical and verbal reactions.
