In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Learning from Disasters Past:The Case of an Early Seventeenth-Century Plague in Northern Italy and Beyond
• Dean Phillip Bell (bio)

Natural disasters are a regular feature of our news feeds. Deadly earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis, devastating flood waters, widespread animal infestations, and significant climate shifts all form part of our living memory. And this does not even take into account COVID-19 and other epidemics and pandemics that have reared their heads over the past couple decades.

Natural disasters have a real impact, affecting more than 200 million people annually—seven times as many people as are affected by warfare each year.¹ At times, natural disasters lead to loss of property and life; at other times, they upend normal routines and rituals, impede travel, lead to increasing prices or shortages of food, or exasperate political disaffection. They often also have significant effects on the perceptions of those who live through them—leading to calls for religious reform, the marginalization of certain social groups, interreligious tensions, and shifts in cultural expression, for example.² Natural disasters can literally change the course of history, suddenly challenging received ideas and social and political conditions or escalating extant or latent tensions and conflicts in a given society, regionally, or even globally.³ [End Page 55]

As an early modern historian who has explored some of these events in the past, I have investigated their impact on the people who experienced them and their connection with, or amplification of, other upheavals, both natural and social. These events have provided opportunities to peer into communal structures and tensions, as well as the complexity of the relations Jews had with their non-Jewish neighbors and authorities alike, pointing both to overlaps in how Jews and non-Jews understood the world around them and to more subtle differences that reflected differentiation as well.⁴ As we experience successive natural disasters in our own day, I have increasingly found myself asking what, if anything, we can learn from the past. In what follows, I turn to a brief case study related to Jewish responses to an early modern plague outbreak in northern Italy to consider possible lessons we might draw from history for understanding and responding to natural disasters today. First, a few words of context are in order.

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Natural disasters have the potential to provide us with insights into Jewish life and experiences, as well as the broader social, cultural, religious, economic, and political environments that shaped them in different periods. I have previously written about a fire that devastated the Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main in the early eighteenth century and about floods that affected Jews and Jewish communities along the Rhine River some 70 years later. Sources left behind during each moment teach us a great deal about life in Jewish communities both before and as they were impacted by such natural disasters, including socio-economic hierarchies, local authority structures, community customs, and the various resources people had—or did not have—at their disposal, for example. The available accounts of both events—produced by Jews and Christians alike—also provide opportunities to see the connections between different Jewish communities and to uncover the complex and often nuanced relationships that existed between Jews and non-Jews⁵—from legal prescriptions related to Jewish quarters, business, and construction to religious stereotypes, debates, and polemics. They also illuminate the coordination of responses between Jewish and non-Jewish authorities and the development of policies related both to the crisis at hand and to longer-term political and social concerns. At times, Jews met with persecution or found their property damaged or destroyed as they returned to their homes after having fled the plague.⁶ At others, they appeared to be [End Page 56] part of the broader civic community and were treated accordingly. During the Frankfurt fire of 1711 Jews found lodgings with Christians across the city, in some cases for an extended period of time (some hosted, some rented)—much to the chagrin of Christian religious authorities who believed that Jews might corrupt the religious sensibilities of their Christian hosts with their religious practice or introduce what they saw as Jewish blasphemies into Christian...

中文翻译：

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从过去的灾难中学习：意大利北部及以后的17世纪初期瘟疫的案例

代替摘要，这里是内容的简要摘录：

• 从过去的灾难中学习：意大利北部及以后的17世纪初期瘟疫的案例
• 迪恩·菲利普·贝尔（生物）

自然灾害是我们新闻源的常规功能。致命的地震，飓风和海啸，毁灭性的洪水，广泛的动物侵扰以及重大的气候变化都是我们生活记忆的一部分。而且，这甚至都没有考虑到过去几十年来一直抬头的COVID-19和其他流行病和大流行病。

自然灾害具有真正的影响，每年影响超过2亿人，是受战争影响的人口的七倍。¹有时，自然灾害会导致财产和生命损失；在其他时候，他们颠覆了正常的常规和礼节，阻碍了出行，导致价格上涨或食物短缺，或激化了政治上的不满。它们通常还对生活在其中的人们的看法产生重大影响，例如，呼吁进行宗教改革，某些社会群体的边缘化，宗教之间的紧张关系以及文化表达方式的转变。^2个自然灾害可以从字面上改变历史的进程，突然挑战既定的观念，社会和政治状况，或者在给定的社会，区域乃至全球范围内加剧现存或潜在的紧张局势和冲突。³ [结束第55页]

作为早期的现代历史学家，过去曾探索过其中一些事件，我研究了它们对经历过事件的人们的影响，以及它们与自然和社会其他动荡之间的联系或放大。这些事件提供了机会，可以窥探社区结构和紧张局势，以及犹太人与非犹太人邻居和当局之间关系的复杂性，这表明犹太人和非犹太人如何理解他们周围的世界有重叠之处，以及更细微的差异也反映出差异化。⁴当我们经历一天中接连不断的自然灾害时，我越来越发现自己在问我们可以从过去中学到什么（如果有的话）。接下来，我将对一个简短的案例研究进行研究，该案例研究与犹太人对意大利北部早期现代鼠疫暴发的反应有关，以考虑我们可能从历史中汲取的经验教训，以了解和应对当今的自然灾害。首先，上下文中的几个词是按顺序排列的。

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自然灾害有可能使我们对犹太人的生活和经历以及形成于不同时期的更广泛的社会，文化，宗教，经济和政治环境有更深入的了解。之前，我曾写过关于18世纪初期毁灭了美因河畔法兰克福犹太人社区的大火，以及大约70年后洪水影响了莱茵河沿岸的犹太人和犹太人社区的报道。每时每刻留下的资源使我们对犹太人社区的生活有很多了解，包括他们在遭受自然灾害之前和受其影响时所经历的自然灾害，包括社会经济等级制度，地方当局结构，社区习俗以及人们拥有或曾经拥有的各种资源。没有-例如，他们可以支配。^5-从有关犹太人住所，商业和建筑的法律规定到宗教成见，辩论和辩论。它们还阐明了犹太人和非犹太人当局之间对策的协调以及与当前危机以及与长期政治和社会关切有关的政策的制定。有时，犹太人在逃离瘟疫后返回家园，遭到迫害，或发现其财产遭到破坏或破坏。⁶在其他情况下，他们似乎是[End Page 56]公民社会的一部分，并得到相应的对待。在1711年的法兰克福大火中，犹太人在整个城市发现了与基督徒的住处，在某些情况下住了很长时间（有的被托管，有的被租用），这极大地激怒了基督教宗教当局，他们认为犹太人可能会破坏犹太人的宗教敏感性。他们的基督徒主持人通过宗教活动或将他们所看到的犹太亵渎神灵介绍给基督徒...