I was looking this up and found this from an article from a Samuel Cohn: "As with antiquity, so with the Middle Ages, a single episode, the Black Death, has fixed impressions of the social toxins aroused by a pandemic. Unlike Thucydides’ one-liner about possible biological warfare, however, accusations against Jews, beggars at Narbonne and Catalans in Sicily at the time of the Black Death fill hundreds of chronicles. Archival evidence points to over 1,000 Jewish communities annihilated between 1348 and 1350: men, women and children were burnt on islands or in synagogues, accused of poisoning wells to end Christendom. The enormity of the Black Death’s social toxins appears to be unique, not only to the Middle Ages, but to European, even world history. Yet historians have failed to mention just how short-lived these extreme reactions were. While waves of persecution against Jews continued through the late Middle Ages and early modern period, pre-modern plagues no longer triggered massacres of Jews or any other ‘others’. 
Beginning around 1530, however, a second wave of plague accusations arose in Toulouse, Geneva, Lyon, Nîmes, Rouen, Paris, Turin, Milan, Palermo and smaller towns and villages. Yet the trials, tortures and executions of supposed plague-spreaders that followed cannot compare in scale, numbers, murders, or destruction with those seen during the Black Death, or with the 19th- and early 20th-century riots sparked by cholera in Europe, plague in India or smallpox in North America. Moreover, these early modern plague persecutions do not follow the reputed patterns of governments, elites or the rabble hysterically victimising suspected populations of foreigners, Jews or the poor. From the surviving trial transcripts produced at Milan in 1630 and immortalised in Manzoni’s novel I promessi sposi, those initiating the charges were poor women and the accused were insiders rather than outsiders: usually native Milanese men, including property-owning artisans, wealthy bankers and aristocrats."