Several large wedding ceremonies were held over the last weeks in New York City in the Orthodox Jewish Community, despite the city’s requirements of social distancing and federal recommendations to avoid large groups. As of last Saturday more than 240 participants registered as fallen ill, in three clusters in Borough Park and Williamsburg. Not only is this a tragedy for the families and neighborhoods involved, but the insistence on large communal events is also sparking fears of anti-Semitic reprisals.
Blaming the Jews is, of course, nothing new. (I am not endorsing holding mass weddings right now, mind you, even if religious laws are cited to justify them. Last I looked, a primary pillar of Judaism is the value of life, which allows all kinds of abandoning of rules associated with Shabbat, fasts, etc., when a life is to be protected.) I am more interested in the fall-out from irrationality and behavior in the face of looming, uncontrollable diseases.
Here are some of the historical facts. Jews were persecuted in huge numbers, whole communities, whenever epidemics broke out (and particularly through out the mid-1300s with the first wave of the Black Death), accused of malevolent well-poisoning. This was done by the local gentile populations even if the Church or the worldly rulers warned against it, partially driven by the convenient fact that the confiscated belongings of the murdered would be distributed among the villagers. Hundreds of Jewish communities were massacred, even though as a group they had been harder hit by the plague than most. Their constrained living quarters in ghettos and lack of access to clean water made them a sitting target for the fleas that brought the disease.
*
Blaming the Other is, however, not a preoccupation solely reserved for non-Jews. There is plenty of evidence of irrational accusations to be found in Jewish history as well. Natan M. Meir, the Lorry I. Lokey Professor of Judaic Studies at Portland State University, is about to publish a book that lays out in great detail how Eastern European Jewry resorted to fear management via scapegoating marginalized figures in their own communities. Stepchildren of the Shtetl, The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 will be published in July, 2020. Assuming we are still home-bound by then, it might be just the right thing to read when we need to convince ourselves that things could always be worse….(Having spent some time with Natan when we were both panelists discussing text and translations of Jewish sources, I can vouch for the passion and learnedness he brings to everything he tackles.)
It seems that during the 1866 cholera epidemic, some Hasidic communities “declared that Jewish women wearing crinolines and earrings were to blame for the epidemic,” with physical attacks on them following in short order. More generally, Rabbis blamed adultery as causal factors with some stories told that adulterers, reported by community members, were killed to help abate the disease.
And then there was the magical thinking tied to a completely different approach: the cholera wedding also known as the black wedding, believed to mitigate the impact of the scourge. (Excerpts from a review of the upcoming book here )
“The cholera wedding generally involved finding two of the most marginal residents of the town (whether orphans, beggars, or the physically handicapped) and forcibly marrying them, usually in the cemetery. The cholera wedding, also known as a shvartse khasene (black wedding) or mageyfe khasene (plague wedding) was presented as an ancient Jewish rite, but Meir argues, it was a newly invented, modern response to what was then a newly arrived disease. Because it was a late-developing belief and not textually based, the mechanism by which it was believed to work is open to interpretation.
The last one we know of over here, happened during the flu epidemic 1918, in Winnipeg, “at one end of the Shaarey Zedek cemetery in the city’s North End, a ceremony that drew more than a thousand Jewish and gentile guests, with a minyan of 10 Jewish men conducting a funeral for an influenza victim at the other end of the graveyard.”
The cholera wedding didn’t have one single interpretation. For example, some rabbis felt it was efficacious because helping to marry off a needy bride was a great mitsve that would please God, all the more so for the marginal of the community who were unlikely to marry in any case. However, what comes across in many of the appalling descriptions of the forcibly married, and their reactions to each other, is that the act was far more callous than charitable. But it was enabled by traditional attitudes around communal charity. Those who had relied on it were seen as being, quite literally, property of the townspeople and thus had no say when their (previously reviled) bodies were needed to protect the town.”
Who owns whom, and who owes what is a topic that really emerges in many contexts in these pestilential times, beyond issues of magical thinking, religious beliefs and despairing search for ways to ward off the worst. We’ll look into more of that during this week in the context of economy and power structures. At least that’s the plan.
Music from London-based She’Koyokh which will bring a spring into your step on another lonesome Monday.
If I could only visit to photograph you all dancing while liberally applying disinfectant to the surfaces of your homes….
