Today is the minor festival of Lag ba’Omer, which marks the end of a period of mourning that follows Passover. While this period of mourning is traditionally associated with a 2nd-century plague, some modern scholars believe its origins in part lie with episodes of anti-Jewish violence in medieval northern Europe that took place during this time of year. Once such instance was the outbreak of the Rindfleisch massacres in 13th-century Germany. Michael Freund writes:

The torment began on April 20, 1298, after the Jews of the German city of Röttingen were accused of “desecrating the host,” a popular medieval slander according to which Jews stabbed and defiled the wafer used by Catholics in their Sunday services.

As the accusation spread, a knight named Rindfleisch whipped up Röttingen’s locals into a frenzy and vowed to wipe out “the accursed race of the Jews,” claiming he had a mandate from heaven. Together with a mob, he proceeded to attack the city’s Jews, viciously slaughtering them and burning many at the stake. The marauding thugs then went from town to town, and in subsequent months they attacked a total of 146 Jewish communities, many of which were completely destroyed. With rare exceptions, local authorities and church officials did nothing to stop the slaughter.

Historians differ as to the number of Jews who were killed, with estimates ranging from 20,000 to as many as 100,000 men, women, and children.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.