The Catholic Historical Review

After the Black Death offers a compassionate cultural history of the plague and its influence on the Iberian Jewish community. Despite the centrality of the event in European history, it is one of the few studies that takes on seriously an examination of its emotional reverberations. Guided by the question “what mark did the second pandemic leave on the Iberian Jewish community?” Einbinder analyzes a diverse set of sources written by Iberian Jews during the years of devastating death and violence against their communities which this plague engendered.

Each of the five chapters of the book is devoted to a distinct genre of texts within a particular context: Chapter 1 considers the commemorative conventions of lament liturgy written before the plague, during the Pastoureaux riots; Chapter 2 looks at the lament written in the years of the plague by Emanuel ben Joseph and compares it with more private accounts of the events; Chapter 3 is devoted to Avraham Caslari’s medical treatise on pestilential fevers and his scientific analysis of disease and therapy; Chapter 4 shows the sustained “individuality and elegance” of tombstone epitaphs from Toledo; and Chapter 5 reads the archeological evidence gathered from the burial site of the victims of the 1348 assault on Tàrraga’s Jews alongside the liturgical lamentation of one of its survivors, Moses Natan. [End Page 412]

Through close readings of the Hebrew texts, which are rendered with beautiful translations, Einbinder ponders on ritual performance, the power of communal prayer, collective and transplanted memories, the structure of scientific language, and scientific Hebrew in particular, the diversity of experiences across Iberia, and more. Einbinder’s findings run against the current of traditional and popular historiography. The plague, she argues, was not the singular cataclysmic event that shaped Iberian Jewish community. Fourteenth-century Jews were well acquainted with loss, mourning, and distress. They suffered previous anti-Jewish riots, endured famine and sickness, and had seen their livestock ravished by infectious diseases. Natural and socio-political sorrows were an expected facet of life, and the communities developed certain internal mechanisms of making sense of their harsh experiences, by virtue of the lament and the burial epitaph. Einbinder posits that the stability of these structures through the turbulence of the mid-fourteenth-century epidemic testifies to the accumulative approach to hardship. The events surrounding the plague were incorporated into the history of Jews in exile; in some sense, it became another episode in the age-old story. In turn, this reasoning enabled private suffering to be subsumed in a comforting collective narrative and guaranteed that language would not shatter even in the face of trauma.

The concept of trauma and its relevance to plague studies is another anchor in the book. Avoiding the pitfall of anachronism, Einbinder uses trauma and modern psychological theory of trauma as a thinking tool for exploring the response to plague in the sources, acknowledging for example, the possibility that the sources encompass lapses in memory, or that institutional commemorations are a way to accommodate personal suffering. But for Einbinder thinking with “Trauma” appears to include another significant dimension—an ethical commitment. Inspired by contemporary discourse Einbinder wonders, often knowing that no factual answer may be found, how did the violence shape the life of the perpetrators and bystanders? What was the emotional weight of collective complicity? How did individual sufferers cope and how did their experience resonate in their communities and their communities’ past? Although much is left unknown, it is the awareness to the complex reality of living with the plague and its consequences that Ein-binder invokes.

As such, After the Black Death contributes methodologically to the analysis of emotional attitudes and the manner in which modern psychological concepts may be used in historical analysis. It also contributes a thought-provoking test case for the enduring question of how to identify continuity and change in emotional...