The Black Death of 1348-50 devastated Europe. With mortality
estimates ranging from thirty to sixty percent of the population,
it was arguably the most significant event of the fourteenth
century. Nonetheless, its force varied across the continent, and so
did the ways people responded to it. Surprisingly, there is little
Jewish writing extant that directly addresses the impact of the
plague, or even of the violence that sometimes accompanied it. This
absence is particularly notable for Provence and the Iberian
Peninsula, despite rich sources on Jewish life throughout the
century. In After the Black Death, Susan L. Einbinder uncovers
Jewish responses to plague and violence in fourteenth-century
Iberia and Provence. Einbinder's original research reveals a wide,
heterogeneous series of Jewish literary responses to the plague,
including Sephardic liturgical poetry; a medical tractate written
by the Jewish physician Abraham Caslari; epitaphs inscribed on the
tombstones of twenty-eight Jewish plague victims once buried in
Toledo; and a heretofore unstudied liturgical lament written by
Moses Nathan, a survivor of an anti-Jewish massacre that occurred
in Tarrega, Catalonia, in 1348. Through elegant translations and
masterful readings, After the Black Death exposes the great
diversity in Jewish experiences of the plague, shaped as they were
by convention, geography, epidemiology, and politics. Most
critically, Einbinder traces the continuity of faith, language, and
meaning through the years of the plague and its aftermath. Both
before and after the Black Death, Jewish texts that deal with
tragedy privilege the communal over the personal and affirm
resilience over victimhood. Combined with archival and
archaeological testimony, these texts ask us to think deeply about
the men and women, sometimes perpetrators as well as victims, who
confronted the Black Death. As devastating as the Black Death was,
it did not shatter the modes of expression and explanation of those
who survived it-a discovery that challenges the applicability of
modern trauma theory to the medieval context.
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