Community Lecture Series "Bones, Poems and Texts: Anti-Jewish Violence in Tàrrega during the Black Death" Susan Einbinder, University of Connecticut

This talk surveys Jewish responses to the Black Death before focusing on a community in Catalonia that was nearly annihilated by plague-related violence. The 2007 discovery of mass graves in Tàrrega returned attention to the victims of the worst episode of anti-Jewish violence during the Black Death.  Drawing on the work of forensic archaeologists, archival records, and a previously unnoted liturgical lament, we will ask what this episode tells us about Tàrrega’s victims and perpetrators, and about the ways pandemic plague might reignite old tensions. What can we learn from the ways that Targarin Christians and Jews reacted, and from how they chose to remember or forget?

Susan Einbinder is Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut.She studies late medieval Jewish writing in Europe, martyrdom, persecution and exile, the scientific and belles-lettres of physicians, liturgical poetry, questions of late medieval identity and affinity, and medieval manuscripts and translation. She is the author of After the Black Death: Plague and Commemoration Among Iberian Jews.

Cosponsored by: Center for Medieval Studies

Co Hosted by: Adath Jeshurun Congregation, Bet Shalom, Beth Jacob Congregation, Beth El Synagogue, Mayim Rabim, Mount Zion Temple, Shir Tikvah Congregation, St. Paul JCC & Sabes JCC, Temple Israel, Temple of Aaron