![]() 11 Yet, such findings did not ignite incidents of mass violence against Jews, even within the Counter Reformation’s rekindled climate of religious prejudice. ![]() 10 In fact, chroniclers and physicians traced plague to Jews who had violated quarantine by transporting their supposedly infected goods from one town to the next. 9 Given the means of transmitting plague through items of clothing (at least as understood by contemporaries), Jews who specialized in the second-hand clothing trade could have been the ones accused and then persecuted. 8 Instead, a wide variety of insiders and outsiders from high-ranking officers and doctors to the lowest levels of health workers – plague cleaners, cartmen and gravediggers (the monatti of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi) – were singled out, accused of perpetuating the disease for a variety of reasons including self-interested gain. 7 Even when plague in the second half of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries once again sparked rumours of malicious plague spreaders, neither Jews nor other ethnic minorities were the usual targets. ![]() 6 Yet, subsequent strikes of Black Death in late medieval and Renaissance Europe did not set off waves of hatred against Jews or any other minorities. And these images overwhelmingly have shaped our memory of the socio-psychological consequences of medieval plague. Coolly and cruelly, courts of justice convicted Jews collectively of poisoning wells and food supplies. Far more than any earlier pogrom against Jews in the middle ages or during the early modern period, this craze fundamentally reshaped Jewish civilization. 5Ĭertainly, Europe’s most deadly and devastating disease, the Black Death of 1347–51, unleashed mass violence: the murder of Catalans in Sicily, and clerics and beggars in Narbonne and other regions and especially the pogroms against Jews, with over a thousand communities down the Rhineland, into Spain and France, and eastward across large swathes of Europe eradicated, their members locked in synagogues or rounded up on river islands and burnt to death – men, women and children. 4 And most recently, from earthquake wrecked, cholera–hit Haiti, Paul Farmer has proclaimed: ‘Blame was, after all, a calling card of all transnational epidemics’. 3 Roy Porter concurred with Susan Sontag: ‘deadly diseases’ especially when ‘there is no cure to hand’ and the ‘aetiology … is obscure … spawn sinister connotations’. According to Carlo Ginzburg, “the prodigious trauma of great pestilences intensified the search for a scapegoat on which fears, hatreds and tension of all kind could be discharged”? 2 By the reckoning of Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman: ‘Blaming has always been a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible and therefore possibly controllable’. Are a disease’s mortality rates, its fatality rates and rapidity of dissemination, or fear of a new and mysterious disease or a strain of it the critical factors that determine whether an epidemic will trigger hate and violence? Or does the pandemic-hate nexus depend less on the character of the disease and more on underlying social and political conditions already in existence at a particular time and place? Or do any of these explanations work? To what extent were scapegoating, violence against victims and the innocent, or ‘the hate of class in times of epidemics’, to cite René Baehrel, universal or near universal aspects of big epidemics? 1 More recent historians of mentalities and medicine have thought much the same as Baehrel: hate has been the normal consequence of pandemics. Perhaps had mortality rates soared, the spectre of racial, class and religious prejudice may have loomed large, as with certain pandemics in the past. antipathies towards Mexicans crossing borders and competing for jobs in a recession, this absence may strike us as especially surprising. Given the climate of mounting Mexican drug wars and U.S. In 2009 the so–called Mexican swine flu fuelled widespread fear of contagion but, contrary to expectation, failed to spark hatred and violence.
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