← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
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- [00:00]
Anthony Delaney
Hi, we're your hosts Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling and if you would like After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal ad free and get early access.
- [00:10]
Maddy Pelling
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- [00:21]
Anthony Delaney
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
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- [02:00]
Maddy Pelling
Hi everyone, it's Maddie here. Before we begin our episode on the Black Death and the persecution of Jews, I want to let you know that this episode contains a graphic description of mass murder. We begin as a false rumour. An anti Semitic and baseless lie is swirling around Europe. In 1348, the Black Death was was rampant in Europe and fear was spreading at the heart of society. But another evil was spreading. Ahead of the disease, something even more insidious. In August of that year, the city councillors of Strasbourg sent out letters to Their counterparts in other cities across modern day Germany, France and Austria. They wrote, urgently requesting evidence to back up a rumour that had already gripped their own city, that the disease destroying Christendom was being created and spread by Jews. The replies poured in, affirming these whispers. Tales of individuals accused, captured and tortured under suspicion of murderous intent. Proof, the letter writers claimed, of a Jewish conspiracy spreading from Basel to Zoffingen. One letter read. All the confessions were made with two public notaries present, along with many other notable persons. And their reports have been officially transcribed and redacted. You should know that all the Jews living in Villeneuve have been burnt by due legal process. Almost no Jewish community was untouched. Over and over again, Jews were rounded up, found guilty of spreading the plague and killed. This is After Dark, and in this episode, we're talking about the Black Death and the persecution of the Jews.
- [04:21]
Anthony Delaney
Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony.
- [04:25]
Maddy Pelling
And I'm Maddie.
- [04:26]
Anthony Delaney
Now, if you've been listening, you probably know that we've been looking at the history of the Black Death on After Dark recently, and we have discovered many interesting facets. And if you haven't listened to those episodes, do go back and listen to them before you head into this one. But one thing which may or may not come as a surprise to hear is that during the years of the Black Death, people across Europe eventually started to look for something or someone to blame. They blamed the planets, they blamed God, they blamed, well, their own sinfulness at times, but they also blamed the outsider people they positioned as other, resulting in, amongst other things, the persecution of the Jews en masse throughout Europe. So today we're going to discover more about Jewish life in Europe at the time of the Black Death and ask how fear of disease led to violent antisemitism. And here to take us through this history is Dr. Joshua Teplitzki. And Joshua studies the history of Jewish life in early modern Central Europe and is currently working on a book looking at the history of plague in a Prague ghetto in the early 18th century. He studied and lectures on the history of Jews in the Black Death and how it is remembered. Remembered. Joshua, thank you so much for joining us today.
- [05:40]
Ryan Reynolds
Thank you both for having me on.
- [05:42]
Anthony Delaney
So before we dive in, because this will be a new history for a lot of people. So before we get into the nitty gritty of it in the conversation, give us an overview of what this history is and what we're about to learn.
- [05:53]
Ryan Reynolds
The history that we're about to investigate together is a story of double tragedy. Once of epidemic catastrophe and again sometimes even preceding the outbreak of the epidemic itself, interreligious persecution of Jews by Christian majority. While it's difficult to ascertain precisely the size of the violence, we know from memorials, we know from record keeping that well over 350 separate communities of Jews in villages, towns and cities, ranging from places in what is now modern Germany, and still more cases in Spain, France, Switzerland, parts of Ital, and in later decades Poland as well, that Jewish communities were rounded up en masse and massacred, often by burning of the entire Jewish population. The lucky ones that survived were expelled or fled in advance. But we see a near total decimation of what was once a thriving and vibrant set of Jewish communities across the European continent.
- [07:04]
Anthony Delaney
This all arises, of course, from the conspiratorial belief slash, more accurately, I suppose, the lie that Jewish people were spreading the Black Death.
- [07:14]
Ryan Reynolds
That's correct.
- [07:15]
Maddy Pelling
I suppose the place that I want to start actually is not thinking about the death and violence that we know is to come. And we will get to that. And it's an incredibly important history. But I want to start first of all, Joshua, with thinking about what Jewish life was like in Central Europe in this period before the Black Death came along. How integrated were Jewish communities with Christian communities at this time? What did life look like for a Central European Jew?
- [07:42]
Ryan Reynolds
The Black Death itself, like any epidemic outbreak, was a crisis that disrupted all kinds of patterns and norms of life, but was also informed by those patterns and norms. The way people responded to it were built on pre existing relationships. Jews had a long history of life in Europe. Although originally a Mediterranean people, we have evidence of Jewish settlement in Europe from already the early Middle Ages or the later years of the Roman Empire and Jewish settlement. Jewish populations dotted the European countryside and city side and townscapes across the continent. One of the most famous charters granting Jews residency has survived from about the year 1084 from the German town of Speier by its bishop, who actively invited Jews to come and dwell there as a way of developing the town or village rather into a larger city with bustling commerc. In towns and cities and even in villages, Jews and their Christian neighbors often lived side by side. Jews may have had a denser population in one quarter in one part of the town, but they were very seldom located in walled off ghettos. And that means that they often had all kinds of daily interactions with their neighbors. Whether it was in the markets or moving through city streets, whether it was seeing buildings, hearing sounds, smelling smells of the city. They had much in Comm. But Jews also were distinctive. As the quintessential outsiders, they lived a life that was in some ways different than the larger majority of the city. Jews would have had their own house of worship, a synagogue. They would have had their own distinct cemetery. They would have had their own ritual baths. If the community was lucky enough, they might have hired a butcher to produce kosher meat, or separate midwives or healthcare professionals, teachers, and the list goes on. The relationship between Jews and Christians in many ways mirrored the relationship between Judaism and Christianity itself. And if I had to boil it down to one word, I think I would call it ambivalence. Jews were a tolerated minority, but that toleration was always dependent on them accepting and being written into law as having an inferior status. Whether this was in theology or in the way people practiced or made policies, and as I said, in law itself. Jews were understood as being tolerated yet subjugated. And for many years, this, although it sounds so foreign and strange to us, provided a stable set of arrangements for Jewish life to flourish so long as Jews were relegated to a place of inferior status. Over the course of the 13th century, some of those relationships began to decline. Powerful new accusations were created that charged Jews with stealing religious objects or tormenting young Christian children. Christian images and perceptions of Jews shifted from an idea of an ancient people of the Bible who had mistakenly refused to accept the divinity of Christ and had even been responsible for his crucifixion, to thinking about their own Jewish neighbors as an inherent danger to society and its members.
- [10:59]
Maddy Pelling
Joshua, it's fascinating that you're building this picture of this integrated set of communities, but that are living, I suppose, within the boundaries of these rules and regulations that are being applied specifically to Jews. And that I do know about this period is that some Jews in some areas were made to wear yellow badges in order to be marked out as separate. How widespread was that as a practice?
- [11:23]
Ryan Reynolds
The imposition of the badge was not something that accompanied Jewish life from the earliest years of the Middle Ages, but rather was imposed precisely in this century of decline. In the 13th century, the badge was imposed at the Fourth Lateran Council, Church Council from the year 1215, which sought to consolidate and organize various aspects of church doctrine, but also worked harder to separate those who were outside from those who were inside. And that goes for Muslims as well as Jews. And it's from that council that we have the largest imposition of the badge. It might even be worth using the instance of the badge, though, to tell us about the intimacy and the interconnectedness of people, because in the absence of such a badge, it was in many cases virtually impossible to tell Jews and Christians apart. The efforts that were made from the top, from the offices of the papacy and the highest offices of the church, were precisely a recognition of how entangled and intertwined Jewish and Christian lives were with one another. So they tell us at once about efforts at separation and the realities of integration.
- [12:31]
Anthony Delaney
So what changes then, Joshua, once we get to the Black Death, we see that massacres start to become quite widespread. Is the persecution that we're talking about in this episode, is it mostly violent? Is there different anti Semitic ways that it's coming through apart from violence? Or is it mostly categorized by violence? Gives a little bit of insight into this clash that we then see in the 14th century.
- [12:59]
Ryan Reynolds
Violence is certainly the watchword of the day. But that violence was the product of shifting forms of discrimination against Jews, increased pressures against Jews that took the form of law and of policy. Indeed, in the half century that preceded the outbreak of the Black Death, Jews increasingly felt pressure from the lands in which they lived, in some cases facing complete illegalization of their presence there. Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France in 1306. They were briefly readmitted here and there into parts of France. But we can already see a heavy increase in pressure on Jewish life taking its toll on their well being, on their presence, and certainly on their economic well being as they were expelled from place to place. That is already very much on the rise in the half century that precedes the outbreak itself.
- [13:56]
Maddy Pelling
Joshua, is there a distinction being made in terms of class within these Jewish communities? Is it just, if you are a Jew, you are liable to be targeted in this way during the Black Death? Or is there a focus on people of higher status? I'm thinking in particular, I suppose about somewhat sort of cliche really, the idea of money lending and Jewish communities in this period and that being a cause for tension, a cause for anti Semitism, Are there particular groups of Jews who are targeted? Or is it simply that the Black Death is spreading and therefore Jews as a whole are being blamed?
- [14:33]
Ryan Reynolds
The association between Jews and money lending certainly created popular hostility and certainly also created powerful motivations for rulers to be willing to expel them, to seize all of their assets. But Jews weren't the only money lenders in European society. And in many places in Western Europe, the expulsion of other money lenders often preceded the expulsion of Jews. Which tells us quite a bit about how discrimination and persecution work. We're not talking about isolated persecution against just one group, but rather these are often interconnected. What begins as the persecution of one group can certainly turn quickly into the persecution of another. But when it came to the violence of the Black Death, Jews were targeted en masse in the locales in which they were affected. There was little, I should say, actually no distinction between the classes of Jews, but rather entire Jewish populations of cities and towns were either expelled or massacred in their entirety, with no distinction at all between where they fit in the wider class structure of the population.
- [15:42]
Anthony Delaney
But there was an attempt to fabricate a conspiracy theory, wasn't there, in order to somewhat justify some of these violences and persecutions that were happening. Tell us a little bit about the well poisoning conspiracy.
- [15:58]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah. A powerful set of myths, rumors, probably most accurately described as lies against the Jews, circulated beginning in the summer of 1348. We have evidence from it from August, if not before, and moving rapidly across the continent. Often the evidence or the documentation that we have tells us about the pace of rumor flying faster than the epidemic itself, creating a sort of double panic amongst people who were anticipating the worst and seeking to avert it. Well poisoning allegations had preceded the Black Death by decades as well. We have examples from the year 1321 from the regions in Spain of well poisoning accusations that were focused against Jews, but not solely or even primarily against Jews, but also against the poor and against lepers. Yet another example of that intertwined persecution. But this powerful myth took on an ever greater resonance when the ravages of epidemic struck fear into the hearts of any European, Mediterranean person, Eurasian even, that faced the ravages of these diseases. The myth went something like this. In varying ways, the myths suggested, or the rumors and these myths suggested that a conspiracy of sorts had taken place amongst Jews of a local town. One after another, the myth was replicated that had somehow conspired to poison the water supply. The poison had, the rumors said, come from somewhere far off and was small, no larger than the size of an egg, some kind of form of a powder, and that only a small number of Jews had deposited this poison in either a well, a spring, a lake or a reservoir that was designed to harm the population as a whole.
- [17:55]
Maddy Pelling
You can understand, on the one hand, people's anxiety around their water supply. And of course, we know from our modern perspective that that was often the way in which certain diseases would spread and continue to do so today. And you can also see, I suppose, where fear can turn to existing tensions, existing fears, existing hatreds. We heard in the introduction, Joshua, how in many instances, across many cities in Europe. It was the authorities who sought to, yes, on the one hand, interrogate these rumors, but also often actually to give them seed and to let them grow and to, I suppose, find a scapegoat. Do we find instances of people in authority rejecting these rumours? Or is this something that, as you say, spreads as quickly as the Black Death and really takes root?
- [18:45]
Ryan Reynolds
Even as I've studied this, as scholars who've preceded me have studied this work, have shown, it really is often surprising that this work isn't the outcome of mass hysteria and it's not the result of spontaneous violence, but rather is calculated violence that's carried out by institutions and authorities. But I'm glad you asked that question, Mattie, because at the very top of the realms of spiritual authority, from the offices of the papacy itself, powerful statements came from the Pope aiming to dispel these rumors. Acknowledging that rumors about the Jews had been swirling about and causing violence against them, Pope Clement VI more than once issued warnings and bans opposing people who were violent against the Jews. He noted that this powerful rumor had accused Jews of poisoning wells, but argued that it cannot be possible. He had two bits of evidence for dispelling this rumor, he argued. First, the Jews were dying in the same number as their Christian neighbors, and so clearly there cannot be some kind of broad Jewish conspiracy that is protecting all of the Jews and harming all of the Christians. And the second was a still more powerful piece of evidence, which was that there are many, many places in which the plague rages in which no Jews are present at all. We know that they had been expelled from many parts of the western half of the continent. And so, using these two pieces of evidence, the Pope aimed to condemn this mass violence that was taking place at the hands of local authorities against the Jews.
- [20:22]
Maddy Pelling
Gosh. A leader in a position of power who rejects conspiracy theories and clarifies the truth. How extraordinary. I mean, this is. This is quite an interesting moment, I suppose, then, in terms of the Pope issuing, and it's an official papal bull, isn't it a kind of public decree that he issues to say this? Does that suggest, then, that it is primarily Christians meting out this violence to Jews? So much so the Pope, the leader of Christendom, feels he has to take this upon himself. Or are the Jews targeted by other religious groups as well? Is it a divide in Europe, at least, between Christianity and Jews?
- [21:02]
Ryan Reynolds
In this case, it certainly is a divide between Christians and Jews. Regrettably, Christianity was the dominant religion in Europe at this time, with Muslims, really, as a very small presence on the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa. But the divide amongst or between populations in Europe at this time was of the Christian majority to the Jewish minority. And this is a sad chapter in that history, a history that is not always one of persecution by any means, but this is a dark chapter in that long history of intertwined relations.
- [21:56]
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- [24:12]
Anthony Delaney
Let's look then, Joshua, at a specific example, because what we need to remember, I suppose, is that what we're talking about here, these well poisonings, it's implicitly saying that the Jewish people are behind the spread of the Black Death. That's what these poisonings infer, which of course we know is nonsense. But let's look at a specific example of how that unfolds in a particular place. Talk us through the events in Strasbourg.
- [24:41]
Ryan Reynolds
Strasbourg is a really good example for us to think with first, because a good number of documents have survived in the Strasbourg archives that historians draw upon. I'll add that they've also been translated into English. Listeners can look them up and see these documents for themselves. But Strasbourg is also an important place to look at because of its positioning, its relationship to many neighboring towns and cities. In the late summer of 1348, the magistrates of Strasbourg undertook a fact finding mission to try to discover what was happening. And in so doing, they reached out to towns and villages far beyond them to conduct local inquiries. And so Strasbourg becomes this kind of entrepot where we receive letters from multiple other places and therefore are able to aggregate and collect the experiences not just of Strasbourg on its own, but also of its wider environs. Letters from around the region of Savoy arrived in Strasbourg from the autumn of 1348 well into the winter of 1349. We might think, for example, about a letter that ARR on 10 August from Cologne, which actually sends something of an open ended inquiry and in some ways prompts the Strasbourg investigation itself. The Cologne magistrates write genuinely wanting information, and they actually worry about incorrectly implicating Jews, perhaps in some ways not that different than the Pope's worry, although perhaps with a bit more self interest. The letter from Cologne worries that if there is a miscarriage of justice or if there is popular mob violence, that massacre of Jews might erupt into ever greater chaos in the city itself. And it's questions of this nature that prompt Strasbourg to reach out to wider populations and wider countryside. Some 11 replies pour into Strasbourg as the city authorities seek to investigate the claims of these whale poisonings. Virtually all of those letters that come involve confessions that are extracted through torture. They tell tales of people who are broken on the wheel or subjected to other forms of judicial torture in order to extract confessions from them. And each of them told a variation of the same story. Those stories which we had begun to hint at before, usually involve the receipt of Some kind of powder or poison that is surreptitiously placed in a water supply. And the story as well tells us about what is an alleged conspiracy. Sometimes the conspiracy takes place only amongst a small cabal of local Jews, sometimes it's imagined as a widespread one. But in any, each, every case, the Jews are implicated as hostile neighbors, hostile enemies of the Christian population as a whole.
- [27:37]
Maddy Pelling
What's striking me, as you're talking, Joshua, is that this is, of course, an incredibly violent and dark history. But the surprising element, I suppose, is the bureaucracy of it, that there's this concern amongst the authorities that if mob rule takes over and Jews are attacked without organisation, that chaos will reign. And yet we know that Jews are rounded up. We know, as you say, they're being tortured into a confession, an unreliable confession, of course, and we know that they are killed en masse. There's this line that I keep coming back to, which we heard in the opening narrative there, which is from one of these letters that says, all the Jews were burned by due legal process. And I think those three words there, due legal process is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, because it seems that in amongst all this panic, this terrible fear, this tension and this hatred, that there is a legitimising of it and an organization of it, a mechanising of it, I suppose, at an authoritarian level that is so chilling. And that sort of tension, I suppose, between the authorities and between the mob, so called. It's very fascinating and sort of, I'm interested. I suppose what I'm trying to get at, in a very roundabout way, is where is that power balance? Where is the boundary between chaotic murder of a particular group of people, chaotic targeting of a particular community and legitimized authority going after them? Who gets to decide what is legal and what's not when it comes to the massacre of groups of people, this.
- [29:23]
Ryan Reynolds
Really is judicial violence at its worst. And your question about which is leading, which is one that continues to puzzle historians who explore episodes of persecution and violence from the Middle Ages, I would say, to the present as well. And I might say, as an aside, the very survival of these documents, the production of these documents, is itself evidence of the careful institutional basis of the making of this persecution itself. When we look at documents of this nature, we really get a sense of the push and pull, the negotiations between magistrates that are afraid of the pressure of the mob, but also magistrates who lead the mobile. We see, although calls are coming from the papacy to cease the violence. We see bishops and clerics who whip mobs up into a frenzy with narratives and images of anti Jewish stereotypes, anti Jewish fears, and raise the ire of the mob setting them out, working. We might even say that they are media experts who are using their media platforms to create mass responses. And so there really is something of a dialectical relationship, a back and forth, a push and pull between the mob and power itself, neither fully independent of each other. But also, we can't just blame mass hysteria. Rather, there are very careful measures that are taken by leadership. Leadership matters quite a bit. Those leaders stood to benefit at times from this violence. Expelling or massacring Jews could result in enriching the coffers of a town. And sometimes the violence had very little to do with actual Jews themselves and was much more the product of different political factions that were vying for power in a particular town or village. The Jews as an unfortunate pawn caught in the crossfire violence enacted upon their bodies over struggles that had nothing to do with them at.
- [31:45]
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- [32:54]
Anthony Delaney
I'm wondering if it serves as an illustrative example to talk about examples of what you're just saying there. In terms of our case study, in terms of Strasbourg, say, how does that finally manifest itself? Is the Jewish population there violently persecuted? I assume they are. How does that come to fruition?
- [33:14]
Ryan Reynolds
The Jewish community of Strasbourg comes to a tragic end. The fact finding and judicial process in Strasbourg lasts for about six months and at the end of that process on 14 February 1349. According to best estimates, hundreds of Jews, anywhere between 250 and 1500 Jews are rounded up into a structure in the Jewish cemetery. Recall, we had noted early on that Jews had their own distinctive places and spaces in the city. And Strasbourg Jews had their own cemetery where there was erected a wooden building into which the Jewish population of the city was herded and burned alive. One chronicle that reports on the events tells us that the burning itself lasted for a full six days because of the large number of people who were institutionally, judicially massacred in a purging fire that destroyed their entire community. And sadly, chronicles of this nature report similar episodes across many of the lands that now encompass modern German Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and other places. One report expresses an additional cruelty in the city of Basel, in which prior to the massacre of the Jews of the city, all of their babies were confiscated and baptized into Christianity, a way of robbing the Jews of any posterity at that and almost effacing them entirely from history.
- [34:51]
Maddy Pelling
I went to university in York here in England, and there is a medieval tower that still exists in the city. And the Jews were similarly rounded up there and burned, I believe. And it's a strange landmark in the city even today, that because of the nature of the structure itself still exists and is an important reminder of that history, actually. And what's, what's so interesting hearing you speak, Joshua, is especially what you just said about the babies being converted to Christianity and their Jewishness stripped from them, stolen from them. I'm just thinking about the ways that we might remember and recall this history. And you talk about how so many of the primary sources are only in existence because they were part of this bureaucratic system. And so therefore we have a very one sided view of this history and only certain voices survive. And the visibility of the violence itself is largely lost to us today. And I just wonder, do you see this moment in history as genocidal? Is this a move to eradicate Jews from Europe? Do you see it as being explicitly tied to the Black Death and therefore more nuanced than that? Can it be both? How do you view this? As a historian?
- [36:10]
Ryan Reynolds
That's a difficult and challenging question, particularly because I think applying a label like genocide is not necessarily a useful one for helping us understand an event. A covering term like genocide does not necessarily advance the way we analyze or understand something. It much more is used to affect our judgment, our feelings, our perceptions of an event, rather than the way that we make careful sense of it.
- [36:39]
Maddy Pelling
It.
- [36:40]
Ryan Reynolds
But that said, I think the question is a valuable one insofar as it offers us an opportunity to contrast the events of the late Middle Ages with the horrors of the 20th century. The black Death massacres of the Jews were motivated by a number of causes, some of them structural, some economic, some political, some religious, and some in just the hatred of neighbors who have had the opportunity to build animus over years. But to my mind, unlike the Nazi attempted genocide of the Jews during the Second World War and the Holocaust, this was not an attempt to eradicate a population out of a total conviction that the entire planet needed to be rid of Jews everywhere. A kind of redemption of the world from Jews when children were baptized. I take this much more as a kind of religious opportunism and notice even the case of the baptizing of children. This is not a racialized vision of Judaism that believes that there is a stain inherent in Jewish blood, or really in anyone's blood that makes them a species other in the world population. There is still, even in the process of baptizing, the notion that there is a fluidity of boundaries between people and that people exist on a continuum with each other, rather than being radically distinct or different. Of course, not applying the word genocide to these massacres doesn't make them any less horrific. They don't need to be genocidal in scope or scale for them to be terribly tragic. But not every case, to my mind, of mass death is best understood as a genocide, even as each in their own way, are tragic and painful.
- [38:24]
Anthony Delaney
That's a really pertinent reminder, I think, Joshua, and something we can take away. This is the final in our four episodes covering the Black Death. I think it's such a great place to finish in terms of people taking away something they may not have known about the Black Death before. Certainly this will be a history that's not known to as many people as are familiar with the Black Death. So I really want to say thank you very much for sharing that with us. But as it's our final episode, it's also our duty to point out that the plague does not end in 1348-1351. And you, Joshua, have studied the history of diseases in the centuries that follow. So you are the perfect person to help us take this forward in a final kind of conversation to round out this mini series that we've been looking at. What happens when the plague does return? Then in the centuries that follow, does society react in the same way as it does in the 14th century? Is there more fear and violence that that comes back again? And say, the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, do we see a totally different reaction? Have people learned from what happened in the 14th century?
- [39:33]
Ryan Reynolds
I think the one thing that historians know is that things change. Very seldom do we see an exact repetition of history again and again. And that means that human agency, the possibility for doing things differently the next time around, are possible. You're also correct that whereas the Black Death struck with great ferocity in the middle of the 14th century, and that's almost often the most famous epidemic that people think about, the bubonic plague, which was the disease at the heart of the Black Death, recurred in Europe and other parts of the world virtually every single generation well into the 18th century. Historians of epidemic call this the second pandemic period that lasts from the Black death till the mid-1700s. Hardly a memoir exists that doesn't tell the story of someone crossing paths with the Black Death, or rather with the bubonic plague somewhere in their lives. But you're also absolutely correct that things do change and responses are different. Whereas it's understandable that the shock of the Black Death prompted forms of scapegoating, by later centuries, and even by later decades, civil authorities, medics, and even ordinary householders began to work towards taking preventative and treatment measures to either avert or ameliorate the plague. And those lasting measures have left large archival footprints in many places that allow us to tell the stories of ordinary people and of creative responses in the process. Sometimes those creative responses are the composition of poems and prayers and stories. Sometimes they are creative new workings of law to accommodate people's lives. Sometimes they're creative reworkings of religious rituals and practices. I'm thinking of an instance from rome in the 1650s in which we have a record of a Jewish preacher who found the city under sanitation measures that called for forms of what we would now recognize as social distancing, where churches and synagogues were closed down. And the preacher tells us that on weekends, on the Jewish Sabbath, he would stand instead at the window of his home, of his apartment flat, and preach his sermon out into the streets, where passersby would gather below at a safe distance from each other in order to still live out their religious lives, rather than shutting everything down. I work on a later century, primarily on the early years of the 18th century, where I'm currently researching an outbreak of the plague in the city of Prague, the year 1713. This was a six month long epidemic that ultimately claimed something like a third of the city's total population. Regardless of religious identity. A catastrophe on a similar proportion to the ravages of the Black Death itself. What's so interesting to me about the archives and the records that this moment has left behind is that it often shows us not unlike the imposition of the badge from 1215, efforts at separation of people who are purportedly different from each other. That shows us just how interconnected they were, whether it was at the top of the economic class or its bottom rungs. To turn back to a point you'd made earlier, Matti, we have evidence of interaction and cooperation. An edict that comes from the imperial offices in Vienna to the city of Prague chastises Christians for safeguarding the possessions of Jews who have the means to flee the city. This means that Jews trusted their Christian neighbors to leave their belongings with them, and conversely, the Christians trusted their Jewish neighbors to hold onto their objects without fear that their objects might be the very vectors of disease itself. These are stories for people of means who have large enough spaces in their flats to store possessions or have the means to flee to somewhere else. But at the opposite end of the economic spectrum, we also see an edict that comes from the imperial offices chastising washerwomen who do their laundry side by side at the river, who must, going forward, be separated from each other across religious lines. Each of these are instances of stories that tell us about the daily interactions with people that had to have a forceful stop put to them because they otherwise would have continued. It tells us about the ties of normalcy that bind people to each other. And to my mind, there's at least a small redemptive message in those stories stories as well.
- [44:22]
Maddy Pelling
I think that's a perfect place to end our conversation today. And thank you, Joshua. You've brought so much nuance to this conversation, a history that I was excited and nervous to talk about, and you've brought so much life to it and so much depth. So thank you so much. If you have enjoyed this episode of After Dark, you can email us@afterdarkhistoryhit.com we welcome all your comments and suggestions for future episodes and we also welcome a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. It helps people to find the show and to spread the word. So see you next time.
- [45:04]
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