Susan Einbinder laments that academic Jewish studies have lagged behind recent research into the Black Death that ravaged European society in the mid-fourteenth century. Einbinder attempts to fill this scholarly lacuna through an exploration of Iberian Jews’ individual and collective response to the deaths occasioned by this devastating plague and the subsequent attacks by Christians who blamed them for the pandemic. Undaunted by the paucity of literary responses, Einbinder has assembled a variety of sources, including medical tractates, tombstone epitaphs, and physical remains, to understand how Iberian Jews experienced the plague and its associated violence. While Einbinder's valiant efforts are to be lauded, the sources gathered do not provide sufficient data to help answer the questions about Iberian Jews that readers would have hoped.
Einbinder's efforts to provide the most useful context for the limited material at her disposal begins with an extended analysis of liturgical writings Iberian Jews composed in the wake of the Pastoureaux's deadly attacks in 1320 on Jews in southern France and the Crown of Aragon. Einbinder suggests that this literature, written three decades before the pandemic, might well serve us as a model for the Jews' attempts midcentury to understand and memorialize the catastrophic events that befell them. She persuasively argues that the goal of the earlier literature was to regulate Jewish communal responses, but recognizes that these texts do not contain historical data about these murders or even preserve traumatic memories of actual events. These laments were not fashioned to perpetuate memory but rather to embed the particulars of the events within familiar thematic constructs. Einbinder theorizes that these poems, sung to preexistent melodies, were fashioned in anticipation of their continued use and were designed to comfort survivors, regardless of their personal experiences, by stressing group solidarity and shared values.
While Einbinder's assertions about liturgical writing seem plausible, her contentions with respect to other sources are decidedly speculative. For example, Einbinder interprets the purchase by a Christian of property that had been owned by a Jewish friend and fronted a Toulouse synagogue as an act of resistance against the behavior of his Christian coreligionists who more commonly expropriated Jewish holdings. Likewise, Einbinder construes the request of two clerics for pardons for their participation in assaults on Jews in Arbois and Nuits-Saint-Georges as an act of contrition, given the many Christians who received remissions for their violent acts.
Even after concluding that the Pastoureaux laments provide us with a limited understanding of the Jews’ reactions, she devotes much of the first chapter on the Black Death to Emanuel ben Joseph's kinah “ʾAkonen be-marah ve-ẓom” (Let me lament in bitterness and fasting), which only survives in a fifteenth-century Sephardic liturgical codex. Einbinder provides us with a generous introduction to the lament even while acknowledging that Emanuel's verses do not possess literary merit. In the midst of her discursive remarks, Einbinder offers the following methodological rumination that illustrates the challenges that she faces:
No one can definitely say that it is or it is not a poetic response to the great plague of 1348. Emanuel wrote in response to some episode combining illness and violence, although it could have been a later outbreak of plague or some other disease. Nevertheless, I believe that the historical details that the poem embeds, as well as its plaintive depiction of illness accompanied by a level of violence not associated with later outbreaks, make possible and even plausible its identification with the 1348 pandemic. If I am wrong, the hymn still illustrates what such a text might look like, what conventions it would utilize, and what message it would seek to convey. If its genesis lay in a slightly later event, the poet relied on earlier models for inspiration and guidance, in which case the great pandemic still lurks behind his text. (38)
Einbinder's arresting honesty suggests that her act of explication and interpretation is circular. These remarks undermine any attempt to extract information about time and place even as she concludes that the poem was theologically conventional and written to buttress communal norms.
Nevertheless, Einbinder tries her best to have the available sources talk history. She explicates the pestilential tractate of the Besalú physician Abraham Caslari against the background of Abraham's experience of the plague and in dialogue with other pestilential tractates written by both Christians and Jews. Einbinder notes Abraham's apparent disinterest in psychological and emotional factors and attempts to make sense of this tentative finding. When Einbinder investigates the tombstones of Toledo Jews that have drawn the attention of visitors since the sixteenth century, she admits that some of the deaths recorded may not have been plague related and that many of the inscriptions are formulaic and even clichéd. Undeterred, she proclaims twenty-eight inscriptions relevant to her project and focuses on eight representative epitaphs. (An appendix houses her translations.) Einbinder intrepidly seeks out idiosyncratic and revealing details, but in the end concludes that the epitaphs reveal no break with funerary convention.
Similarly, Einbinder tries valiantly to have the bones associated with the Black Death that have been recently unearthed in Tàrrega tell us who killed these Jews, what weapons they might have used, and which classes or professions would have owned such instruments. The bodies were found without legs, and Einbinder speculates whether Christian butchers had severed the appendages. She generously records her wide-ranging thoughts, but many of her associations remain unproven and, after much consideration, irrelevant.
In the absence of richly resonant sources, Einbinder deploys a wide array of theoretical methodologies to aid her in the extraction of meaning from the extant evidence. Consequently, she draws on recent developments in trauma theory and evaluates whether its ideas have relevance for her project. At the same time, she assesses whether the medieval example can advance our understanding of the theory itself. While already in the introduction, Einbinder concludes that the “theoretical literature on trauma is poorly equipped to describe collective … distress” (12), she continues to explicate the theory and to raise it in later chapters to test its applicability.
Ultimately, Susan Einbinder has produced a welcome volume, even though it may fall short of what the author wishes to have discovered. The inadequacy of the sources, despite a noble attempt to explicate them, remains a stumbling block. Yet, as a result of her exertions, we now possess some sense of how the deaths caused by the pestilence and the attacks on the Jewish population might have taken place, and how the Jews and the perpetrators of the violence may have responded to these events. We do learn much as Einbinder muses about sources, ponders ideas embedded within the texts, and reflects on the individuals and the society that produced these literary compositions. We also are the wiser about how and how not to think about poetry and other written sources, and what we might glean from them. Thanks to our author we can now consult fine editions of these texts and engage the thoughtful translations. For all that, we are grateful.
