Jewish Social Studies Pub Date : 2020-12-04 Joshua Teplitsky
- Heroes and Victims Without Villains:Plague in Early Modern Prague
- Joshua Teplitsky (bio)
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. [End Page 67] 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...
中文翻译:
没有反派的英雄和受害者:早期现代布拉格的瘟疫
代替摘要,这里是内容的简要摘录:
- 没有反派的英雄和受害者:早期现代布拉格的瘟疫
- 约书亚(Joshua Teplitsky)(生物)
1713年夏末,瘟疫出现在布拉格市。这是三十多年来第一次大规模流行病影响了这座城市。然而,整个区域的警告标志预示着该区域的到来,同年3月在维也纳和部分哈布斯堡(Habsburg)世袭土地上爆发了较早的疫情。当布拉格大学医学院召集讨论是否有警报和大规模行动的原因时,布拉格的成员忍不住注意到,在该城市的犹太人地区,病例正在迅速增加。1个瘟疫迅速占领了这座城市,7月底,哈布斯堡王朝当局召集了一个特别委员会,以协调布拉格各个郊区的行动:旧城区(犹太城镇所在的城镇),新城区,以及隐约可见的皇宫的“小面”。该委员会的主要任务之一是在流行病之中对城市的犹太人进行监督,包括采取措施监视他们的行动,封锁他们的邻居并禁止他们与该市的基督徒接触。2个
在接下来的五个月中,该流行病夺走了该市12,000多名居民的生命,其中3,400至3,700名犹太人丧生,而在该疾病发作之前,该人数已超过40,000。3这是一次大规模逃亡,经济动荡以及社会和政治混乱的时期。这一集还引发了一系列的皇家和市政法规,犹太人的公共指示,拉比式回应,意第绪记叙事和pen悔祈祷。[完第67页]更重要的是,在疫情暴发期间,民事当局隔离和隔离犹太人的努力留下了犹太人与该市非犹太人日常接触的档案痕迹。总而言之,瘟疫在城市中蔓延的原始档案记录使该流行病的范围和速度得以重建,提供的统计数据将使现代的接触示踪剂羡慕不已。
瘟疫的历史学家指出,瘟疫的故事通常分为两类之一:英雄和受害者。4但他们也警告说,完全了解瘟疫是无恶棍的受害者之一,也是其艰难抉择受到限制和痛苦的英雄之一。该方法为评估流行病学灾难时期的犹太人生活提供了重要的注意事项。从1713年的布拉格流行病中幸存下来的资料表明,尽管该城市的犹太人在流行病中面临歧视,但他们既没有遭受直接暴力,也没有受到有针对性的指责。到近代早期,许多人认为犹太人在不将其当作故意或恶意手段的情况下,在一定程度上助长了传染病的传播。5对犹太人的这种间接而非本质化的方法允许州政府采取相对灵活的方法。此刻对犹太人的地方和帝国政策还远远没有定下来:它们从最近的先例和布拉格实地局势的变化中汲取了灵感。就城市而言,犹太人经历危机的方式有所不同,具体取决于他们的社会地位,获得资源的方式以及他们做出的特定选择。从那一刻起,遗留下来的各种各样的资料,从国家文件到拉比响应和纪念诗歌,证明了布拉格犹太人在其城市瘟疫暴发期间所遭受的苦难,但他们也揭示了更多的东西,
犹太人在布拉格城市景观中占有重要地位:该城市是基督教欧洲最大的犹太人城市社区的所在地,其根源可以追溯到中世纪,并且定居的连续性在过去几个世纪中一直未曾中断。1700年代初,犹太人约占城市人口的11,000,人口总数几乎不超过40,000。布拉格的犹太人社区在近代早期的过程中扩展到了...