After the Black Death: Plague and Commemoration among Iberian Jews by Susan L. Einbinder (review)

The great pandemic that swept across Europe in the fourteenth century and killed millions, earning itself the grim name of ‘the Black Death’, has been the object of many studies in recent decades. Those historians who have examined the effects of the plague on the Jewish communities scattered across Western Europe have tended to focus on the antisemitic accusation that Jews caused the plague by poisoning wells, and the massacres and trials that it provoked. The actual impact of the epidemic on Jewish communities has been neglected, and it is this significant oversight that Susan Einbinder endeavours to address in this book by using a variety of sources of information: documentary, literary, medical, and archaeological.

The first chapter (pp. 14–31) provides historical context that will be useful to readers unfamiliar with the history of medieval Jews in the fourteenth century prior to the outbreak of the plague in 1348, especially attacks on Jews in the 1320s. The following four chapters all focus on a different type of primary evidence and seek to highlight what it can reveal about the impact of the plague on various Iberian Jewish communities. The second chapter (pp. 32–56) analyses the commemorative liturgical lament (qinah) of Emanuel ben Joseph, comparing it with other extant laments and noting the absence of calls for revenge and its emphasis on faith and penitence. Moving on, the third chapter (pp. 57–87) focuses on writings of a very different nature: a medical tractate on the plague authored around 1349 by Abraham Caslari. Beyond its medical nature, Einbinder argues that aspects of the work offer important evidence on religious and social reactions to the epidemic. Contrasting the work with similar Christian ones, Einbinder notes the absence of expressions of communal trauma in the work. The fourth chapter (pp. 88–116), appropriately entitled ‘Stone of Memory’, examines surviving tombstone epitaphs related to plague mortality in Toledo (Castile, central Spain). It notes the absence of evidence in these texts of anti-Jewish violence in Toledo itself and argues that ‘the range of imagery and narrative formats’ in them ‘maintain an individuality and elegance even as they grapple with multiple deaths among families and friends’. Once again, we are left not so much with a sense of a collective trauma but ‘a range of religious and cultural outlooks’. Finally, the fifth chapter (pp. 117–47) analyses the grisly evidence of an attack on the Jewish community of the town of Cervera (Catalonia) in 1348 found in a mass grave and self-perception in the ‘survivors’ literature’ that was produced in the aftermath of the outbreak of anti-Jewish violence. The book ends not with a conclusion but with a useful appendix, containing translations from Hebrew into English of the epitaphs carved in the tombstones of Jewish plague victims in Toledo.

In this volume, Einbinder has sought to argue that the great plague of the late 1340s was not as cataclysmic for the cohesion of Iberian Jewish communities as it might have been thought. Anti-Jewish violence was not a general phenomenon (it occurred in Aragon but not in Castile) and it did not cause a ‘crisis of faith’ amongst Iberian Jews. The variety of sources studied constitutes not only one of the major strengths of this book but also its principal weakness, since the quantity of evidence remains limited and this correspondingly limits the scope of Einbinder’s conclusions. The absence of a concluding chapter underscores the fact that this volume reads more like a collection of independent articles than an integrated work or monograph. Overall, the argument seems to remain tentative and more research will be needed to buttress it. Nevertheless, this book offers a valuable scholarly contribution to our existing knowledge of the impact of the Black Death on Jewish communities in the Iberian Peninsula. As the coronavirus pandemic...