The eleventh plague : Jews and pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19 /
"[This book] is a sweeping new history of the Jews, told through their encounter with plagues and pandemics. This work begins with the Hebrew Bible, showing how it contains many more plagues than the ten that were rained down on Egypt. Readers are then guided through the Talmudic discussions th...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Oxford University Press,
2022.
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "[This book] is a sweeping new history of the Jews, told through their encounter with plagues and pandemics. This work begins with the Hebrew Bible, showing how it contains many more plagues than the ten that were rained down on Egypt. Readers are then guided through the Talmudic discussions that address pandemics, and points to the key differences between Jewish and Christian attitudes toward care of the sick during the Middle Ages. Jews were double victims of the Black Death, first from the pandemic itself, and then from the anti-Jewish riots that followed, but were often portrayed as having a lower mortality, a claim that turns out to be entirely fictional. This work then takes us through the waves of smallpox and cholera that plagued the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, detailing for the first time how Jewish communities were affected by these outbreaks. It describes how Jewish immigrants were often and unfairly associated with diseases and explains why there is nothing very Jewish about the Jewish anti-vaxxer movement. The book details the many Jewish responses to COVID-19 and concludes by noting that pandemics were always part of the ordinary flow of Jewish life. The Eleventh Plague will leave the reader with a fresh understanding of Jewish history and an appreciation of how the dramatic way that pandemics have shaped Jews and Judaism." -- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource |
| ISBN: | 9780197607190 0197607195 9780197607206 0197607209 |