The Black Death in Jewish Sources: A Second Look at Mayse Nissim

T H E JE W I S H Q UA R T E R LY R E V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 3 (Summer 2004) 471–489 The Black Death in Jewish Sources A Second Look at Mayse Nissim LUCIA RASPE UNLIKE THE MASSACRES of the Jewish communities in the Rhineland which occurred during the early stages of the First Crusade in 1096, the persecutions at the time of the plague that ravaged Europe between the years of 1348 and 1350, while certainly no less fatal for medieval Ashkenaz , have left hardly a trace in Jewish sources.1 Although the various Memorbücher that have been preserved list more than two hundred communities that were destroyed, for only a few of these cases do we have records of the victims’ names.2 There are qinot, there are selih .ot, there is a note here and a comment there in the halakhic literature of the fifteenth century—all of which convey barely a glimpse of the catastrophe itself. Narrative materials of the kind commonly called ‘‘the Hebrew Crusade chronicles’’3 do not exist for the later tragedy. Those brief narratives on 1. Mordechai Breuer, ‘‘‘Ha-mavvet ha-shah . or’ ve-sin’at yisra’el,’’ Antisemitism through the Ages: A Collection of Essays, ed. Shmuel Almog (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1980), 169; František Graus, Pest—Geißler—Judenmorde: das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 86 (Göttingen , 1987), 250; cf. idem, ‘‘Historische Traditionen über Juden im Spätmittelalter ,’’ Zur Geschichte der Juden im Deutschland des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Alfred Haverkamp, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 24 (Stuttgart, 1981), 14, 25. On the persecutions themselves, see Alfred Haverkamp , ‘‘Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes im Gesellschaftsgefu ̈ge deutscher Städte,’’ Zur Geschichte der Juden im Deutschland, 27–93. 2. Siegmund Salfeld, ed., Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches, Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 3 (Berlin, 1898), 69–70, 81–85 (lists of communities), 61–65 (the victims at Nuremberg), 73–77 (those at Worms). For a recent survey, which gives an estimate of no less than 400 communities touched by the persecutions, see Michael Toch, Die Juden im mittelalterlichen Reich, Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte 44 (Munich, 1998), 61. 3. Adolf Neubauer and Moritz Stern, eds., Hebräische Berichte über die Judenverfolgungen während der Kreuzzüge, Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 2 (Berlin, 1892); repr. in A. M. Habermann, ed., Sefer gezerot ashkenaz ve-tsarfat (Jerusalem, 1945; repr. 1971). The Jewish Quarterly Review (Summer 2004) Copyright 䉷 2004 Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. All rights reserved. 472 JQR 94:3 (2004) the persecutions of the Black Death that we do have are few and far between; they have generally been deemed late and bordering on the legendary.4 It is the implication that generally goes with this diagnosis, that these texts are useless for serious historical study, that this article intends to challenge. Our discussion will focus upon one of the better-known of these narratives : the tenth tale in the collection of some twenty-five stories from Jewish Worms that was printed as µysn hç[m rps, or Mayse nissim, in Amsterdam in 1696. Its author, Yiftah . Yosef ben Naftali Hirts Segal Manzpach , had served as shammash and scribe of that community for the greater part of his life. By the time his Mayse nissim appeared in print, Yuzpa Shammes, as he was commonly known, had been dead for eighteen years.5 His collection, the fruit of an apparently intense interest in local legendry, does not seem to have been intended for publication. It was evidently the destruction of the city of Worms during the French invasion of the Palatinate in 1689 that prompted Yuzpa’s son Eliezer Liberman to translate his father’s Hebrew manuscript into Yiddish6 and to have it printed as a monument to a community no longer in existence.7 4. See, e.g., Graus, Pest, 272: ‘‘Die recht bescheidenen jüdischen Spätberichte leiten eher in folkloristische Bahnen über.’’ 5. For biographical sketches, see Abraham Epstein, ‘‘Die Wormser Minhagbu ̈cher,’’ Gedenkbuch zur Erinnerung an David...