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  • 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...

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