After the Black Death: Plague and Commemoration Among Iberian Jews (The Middle Ages Series)

238 Pages·2018·2.052 MB·English

by  Susan L. Einbinder

After the Black Death
The Middle Ages series
ruth Mazo Karras, series editor
edward Peters, Founding editor
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
After the Black Death
Plague and Commemoration Among Iberian Jews
Susan L. Einbinder
university of pennsylvania press
philadelphia
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. except for brief quotations used for purposes of
review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced
in any form by any means without written permission from the
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Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United states of America on acid-free paper
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library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: einbinder, susan l., 1954– author.
Title: After the Black death : plague and commemoration among
iberian Jews / susan l. einbinder.
Other titles: Middle Ages series.
description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania
Press, [2018] | series: The Middle Ages series | includes
bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lCCN 2017051661 | isBN 9780812250312 (hardcover :
alk. paper)
subjects: lCsh: Black death—iberian Peninsula—religious
aspects—Jews. | Black death—iberian Peninsula—religious
aspects—Judaism. | Jews—iberian Peninsula—history. |
Antisemitism—iberian Peninsula—history—To 1500. | Jewish
literature—iberian Peninsula—history—To 1500.
Classification: lCC rC178.s7 e46 2018 | ddC
616.9/2320899240366—dc23
lC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017051661
Contents
introduction 1
Chapter 1. Before the Plague: Anti-Jewish
Violence and the Pastoureaux 14
Chapter 2. emanuel ben Joseph:
Trauma and the Commemorative lament 32
Chapter 3. Abraham Caslari: A Jewish Physician on the Plague 57
Chapter 4. stones of Memory: The Toledo epitaphs 88
Chapter 5. Bones and Poems: Perpetrators and Victims 117
Appendix. The Toledo Plague epitaphs: Translations 148
Notes 163
Bibliography 211
index 225
Acknowledgments 231
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Introduction
He died of the plague in the month of Tamuz in 5109.
Just days before his death
He had married.
Then the voice of the bride and groom
Became a voice of weeping,
And a father is pained and pining.
God of the heavens, grant him consolation.
Restorer of souls, [grant him] progeny.
—From the epitaph of Asher ben Turiel, in Toledo
Wise and learned men asked of me that I inform them of my opinion
for treating these fevers, and that I write a tractate about this. I have
fulfilled their request. Let any learned man benefit from it concerning
these illnesses, whether the benefit is for the present [fevers] or as a
model for those to come.
—Abraham Caslari, Tractate on Pestilential and Other Types
of Fevers, in Besalú
The fourteenth century is known for its catastrophes, but among them,
the Black Death still stands out for its magnitude. As a result, it has merited out-
size attention in modern times. Even so, as a cursory scan of the literature reveals,
studies of the second pandemic, as it is more soberly known, have been experienc-
ing a renaissance.1 One of the most exciting aspects of the newer research is its col-
laborative, interdisciplinary nature. Geneticists and medievalists have combined
their talents to establish firmly the identity of the medieval plague b acillus, now
confirmed as Yersinia pestis (bubonic plague), and the route it took from Asia into
the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe.2 Among medievalists, the collabora-
tion of historians of religion, science, technology, and institutions has produced a
2 Introduction
more accurate picture of how medieval societies responded to the d evastating fe-
vers that swept across Europe from the time Genoan sailors returning from Caffa
set anchor in Sicily, and then in Marseilles. Within months, the pestilential fevers
that they brought with them had spread across continental Europe, reaching
Provence by the late spring of 1348 and continuing westward over the Pyrenees
down to Barcelona and across the Iberian Peninsula. At the same time, we now
know, a second plague vector crossed the Iberian Peninsula from the south, reach-
ing from Mallorca to Valencia and heading north and westward. By July 1348, pes-
tilence was devastating Aragon and Catalonia. Slowed by the aridity of higher
altitudes, the onset of winter, and patterns of human and animal traffic, it reached
Castile the next spring, tapering over the next year or two.3
Mortality figures for the plague’s impact in Europe generally hover between
30 percent and 66 percent. However, one yield of recent scholarship is the realiza-
tion that the effects of the pandemic were not uniform, a view confirmed by me-
dieval records and early local studies. The plague struck urban and rural settings
differently, mountains and lowlands, sometimes rich and poor. During winter
months, the disease also mutated into pneumonic, septicemic, and gastrointesti-
nal versions that were highly contagious, speedily transmitted, and almost al-
ways fatal. Some regions were further crippled by years of drought or rain, high
or low temperatures, cattle disease and crop failure—the erratic climate condi-
tions of what Bruce Campbell has called the “Medieval Climate Anomaly.”4
Some regions, like Aragon, were also in the grip of political turmoil that made
institutional responses to disease haphazard and ineffectual. These variable po-
litical, social, and environmental conditions all played a role in determining the
character of the pandemic in a particular locale. Forensic archaeologists, de-
mographers, and historians, with the help of new methods for extracting
aDNA, have also tapped the evidence of plague burial pits and cemeteries, in
order to understand the variable demographics of plague mortality; these stud-
ies suggest that bubonic plague had greater “success” among individuals already
weakened by famine and malnourishment.5 So, too, the familiar triad of flea-
rat-human has been modified considerably with evidence that many insects and
mammals can transmit plague from animals to humans. Greater attention is
now focused on the plague as an endemic disease, hosted more or less perma-
nently in the ecosystem and periodically transmitted to humans. Marmots, rab-
bits, black as well as brown rats, and other mammals can harbor it, and lice as
well as different varieties of fleas can deliver it to human hosts.6 At the same
time, scholars are beginning to look closely at the ways later (human) plague
outbreaks, which would occur at intervals of five to ten years for the next five
Introduction 3
centuries, reshaped and distorted the ways the initial outbreak was perceived by
those who were unfortunate enough to encounter it in 1348.7 To these investiga-
tions, scholars of literature, liturgy, religion, and art have begun to make their
own contributions.8 All these stories find sharper focus almost daily, and with
them an ever richer picture of how individuals and communities responded to
crisis continues to unfold.
In all this, Jewish studies has lagged behind. As a topic in Jewish social,
cultural, or literary history, the Black Death has hardly been treated as an epide-
miological event, scholars having focused almost exclusively on the violence
against Jews that often accompanied its journey across European lands. Jews
were active in mercantile and medical arenas, both of which were profoundly
affected by the pandemic. Yet I know of no studies addressing the activities of
Jewish merchants, middlemen, or lenders during the plague. Jewish physicians
have garnered more interest, especially in the last decade and with regard to a
substantial corpus of Hebrew plague tracts; but most of the primary texts are still
unpublished, and much work remains to be done. With respect to anti-Jewish
violence, the publications have been few but sobering. The early essay in the
1906 Jewish Encyclopedia is still the one that naive Googling may turn up most
quickly. The authors recount the plague’s arrival in Europe from the Crimea to
ports in Sicily and Marseille. But the plague itself does not interest them so
much as the accusations of Jewish responsibility for maliciously spreading it.
The essay concludes with a grim list of Jewish communities that succumbed to
violence in the wake of these accusations, a memorial litany that consists en-
tirely of central and eastern European towns, mostly German, with representa-
tion from the Lowlands, Cracow, and Trent.9 A very few early studies focused
on individual attacks, such as Adolphe Crémieux’s study of plague-inspired vio-
lence against the Jewish communities of Toulon and Hyères, and local studies
continue to appear that detail the eruption of violence in settings characterized
by different degrees of earlier tension or harmony.10 More recent decades have
also seen a trend to synthetic overviews, again mostly focused on Germany and
central Europe. Joseph Shatzmiller’s 1974 survey of violence against Jewish
communities in Provence, František Graus’s or Alfred Haverkamp’s surveys of
anti-Jewish attacks in Germany, David Nirenberg’s measured attempt to con-
textualize episodes of violence in Aragon as expressions of antiroyalist resent-
ment—all these works, to some extent, grapple with a need to establish and
understand the scope of the violence while resisting essentializing explanations.
Samuel Cohn’s 2007 essay, auspiciously titled “The Black Death and the Burn-
ing of the Jews,” returned to the familiar geography of Germany and eastern
4 Introduction
Europe. Rejecting the case for class or economic-based motives for the out-
breaks, Cohn simultaneously rejected “transhistorical explanations” while in-
voking recurring motives of “religious hatred.” The fury and sheer punch of this
now-classic essay have undoubtedly given it traction despite the unease that its
conclusions may engender.11 I have surely omitted other studies, and most sur-
veys of medieval Jewish history include some reference to the plague as one more
harbinger of persecution, expulsion, and slaughter. Anti-Jewish violence, in
sum, has been the overwhelming focus of modern scholarship on Jewish experi-
ence during the Black Death.
Surprisingly, especially given the recent surge in interest and publications on
the second pandemic, a study of individual and collective responses of Iberian Jews
to the Black Death has yet to appear. While this book is by no means a comprehen-
sive account, I hope that it will begin to fill a gap in the scholarly literature. As the
most visible minority of the European Christian kingdoms, the Jewish men and
women who lived and died in the shadow of the plague years have something to
offer to more general studies of this period, as well as to studies of Jewish literature,
thought, institutions, and relations with the Christian majority.
* * *
In theory, at least, the commemorative corpus in Hebrew should be rich—and
not merely because of the rapacious pandemic. Anti-Jewish libels and the at-
tacks that they precipitated were the stuff of traditional commemorative chron-
icles and laments and what twentieth-century anthologies excelled in finding.
Nonetheless, with the exception of a handful of laments from central and east-
ern Europe, Jewish history books and anthologies cite almost no commemora-
tive and contemporary writing that responds to the plague, especially from
Provence and the Iberian Peninsula, the focus of this study.
Among other claims, I argue in this book that this is not because tradi-
tional forms of commemoration ceased to be meaningful in a shattering mo-
ment of crisis. Some of those traditional forms were grappling with challenges
of relevance, along with competition from vernacular and extra-liturgical genres
that are not the subject of this study but that surely existed alongside the He-
brew texts that I examine here. Yet the evidence of the few liturgical laments
that are extant suggests that this most conventional of genres remained a viable
form of expression after the pandemic, even if today it is not so easy to identify
which hymns served that end. Significantly, the very ordinariness of this corpus,
which continued to rely on familiar tropes, techniques, and sentiments, suggests