It was charged that the Spanish Jews, supposed to be in possession of great power and influence over the congregations of Europe, had hit upon this diabolical scheme; that they had dispatched messengers far and wide with boxes containing poison, and by threats of excommunication had coerced the other Jews to aid in carrying out their plans, and that these directions issued from Toledo, which might be viewed as the Jewish capital. The infatuated populace went so far as to name the man who had delivered these orders and the poison. It was Jacob Pascate, said they, from Toledo, who had settled in Chambery (in Savoy), from which as a center he had sent out a troop of Jewish poisoners into all countries and cities. This Jacob, together with a Rabbi Peyret, of Chambery, and a rich Jew, Aboget, was said to have dealt largely in the manufacture and sale of poisons. The poison, prepared by the Jewish doctors of the black art in Spain, was reported to be concocted from the flesh of a basilisk, or from spiders, frogs and lizards, or from the hearts of Christians and the dough of the consecrated wafers. These and similar silly stories invented by ignorant, or, perhaps, malicious people, and distorted and exaggerated by the heated imagination, were credited not alone by the ignorant mob, but even by the higher classes. The courts of justice earnestly strove to learn the real truth of these rumors, and employed the means for confirming a suspicion used by the Christians of the Middle Ages with especial skill--torture in every possible form. As far as can be ascertained, these tales concerning the poisoning of the brooks and wells by Jews first found credence in southern France, where the Black Death as early as the beginning of the year 1348 had obtained many victims. In a certain town of southern France, on one day (the middle of the month of May), the whole Jewish congregation, men, women, and children, together with their holy writings, were cast into the flames. From that place the slaughter spread to Catalonia and Aragon. In these provinces, in the same year, anarchy was rife, because the nobles and people had revolted against the king, Don Pedro, in order to secure certain of their privileges against the encroachments of the monarch. When the tales of the poisoning of the wells had taken firm root in the minds of the people of these countries also, the inhabitants of Barcelona gathered together on a Saturday (towards the end of June), slew about twenty persons, and pillaged the Jewish houses. The most distinguished men of the city received the persecuted people under their protection, and aided by a terrible storm, loud thunder and flashes of lightning, they made a successful attack upon the deluded or plunder-seeking assailants of the Jews.