Heroes and Victims Without Villains: Plague in Early Modern Prague

In the late summer of 1713, plague appeared in the city of Prague. It was the first time in over thirty years that a full-scale epidemic had affected the city; yet, warning signs across the region had portended its coming, with earlier outbreaks in Vienna and parts of the Habsburg hereditary lands in March of that year. When the medical faculty of Prague's university convened to discuss whether there was cause for alarm and widescale action, its members could not help but observe that cases appeared to be multiplying most rapidly in the Jewish area of the city.¹ The plague swiftly overtook the city and by the end of July the Habsburg imperial authorities convened a special commission to coordinate the actions of the various sub-municipalities of Prague: the Old Town (within which the Jewish Town was housed), the New Town, and the "Little Side," which stood in the shadow of the looming imperial palace. Among the commission's principal tasks was the oversight of the city's Jews in the midst of the epidemic, including measures monitoring their movement, sealing off their neighborhood, and prohibiting their contact with the Christians of the city.²

Over the course of the next five months, the epidemic claimed the lives of over 12,000 residents of the city—which numbered over 40,000 before the disease struck—among them between 3,400 and 3,700 Jews.³ It was a time of massive flight, economic upheaval, and social and political disarray. The episode also generated a flurry of royal and municipal regulations, Jewish communal instructions, rabbinic responsa, Yiddish commemorative narratives, and penitential prayers. What is more, civil authorities' efforts to sequester and segregate Jews during the outbreak left archival traces of Jews' daily contacts with the city's non-Jews. All told, the surviving archival records of the plague's spread across the city permit a reconstruction of the epidemic's scope and speed, offering statistics that would make a modern contact-tracer envious.

Historians of plague note that plague stories often fall into one of two categories: of heroes and victims.⁴ But they also caution that a full reckoning with the experience of plague is one of victims without villains, and of heroes whose hard choices are constrained and painful. This approach offers an important note of caution for assessing Jewish life during moments of epidemiological catastrophe. The surviving sources from the Prague epidemic of 1713 suggest that, while Jews in the city faced discrimination during the epidemic, they experienced neither direct violence nor even targeted blame. By the early modern period, many understood Jews to be circumstantially contributing to the spread of infectious disease without targeting them as intentional or malicious agents.⁵ This circumstantial, rather than essentialized, approach to Jews allowed state authorities to adopt a relatively flexible approach. Local and imperial policies toward Jews during this moment were far from fixed: they drew inspiration from both recent precedents and the evolving situation on the ground in Prague. The city's Jews, for their part, experienced the crisis in different ways, which varied according to their social standing, access to resources, and the particular choices they made. The broad assortment of sources left behind from this moment—ranging from state documents to rabbinic responsa and commemorative poetry—attest to the ways that the Jews of Prague suffered during the plague outbreak in their city, but they also reveal much more, including the rhythms of daily life and the points of contact between Jews and their neighbors that the disease both interrupted and reshaped.

Jews occupied a significant place in the Prague cityscape: the city was home to the largest urban community of Jews in Christian Europe, with roots stretching back to the Middle Ages, and a continuity of settlement that had remained largely uninterrupted for centuries. At the start of the 1700s, Jews represented approximately 11,000 of the inhabitants in a city with a total population scarcely larger than 40,000. Prague's Jewish neighborhood had, over the course of the early modern period, expanded to a...