[00:00:01] Welcome to What's New, What's Next? Jewish studies in the time of pandemic. My name is Natan Meir, I'm the Lorry I. Lokey Associate Professor of Judaic Studies in the Harold Schnitzer Family Program in Judaic Studies at Portland State University in Oregon. My theme today is the history of Jewish responses to epidemics in the modern period. In his excellent and comprehensive overview of Jewish responses to epidemics through the millenia, Shaul Stampfer concludes that, quote "It seems that in many respects, Jews did not have distinctive responses to epidemics" end quote. Stampfer is absolutelly correct. And as Marek Tuszewicki's fascinating podcast in this series recently explained, the evidence bears this out for Jews in eastern Europe as well. When it came to folk practices, Jewish and Christian religious and magical responses to epidemic were usually variations on the same things. One good example is the magic circle, which both, Christians and Jews employed in various ways. The Christian practice of plowing a ring around the town to protect it from the scourge of disease was paralleled but the Jewish custom of processing around the town with Torah scrolls. During times of epidemic Jewish leaders almost always called for intensified religious practice, including prayer, study and heightened attention to ritual observance and to charity. As I discussed in my book "Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939", sometimes the discussion of charity for the poor went beyond the straight-forward assistance for the needy.



[00:02:02] Rather, it centred specifically on providing for those whom the community had forgotten, or neglected. During the 1841 cholera pandemic, the first of its kind in eastern Europe, a group of Warsaw' Rabbis urged that every community establish a charity fund for poor people who were too ashamed to beg. In the town of Prużane, today Pruzhany, Belarus, members of a special confraternity created to battle the epidemic, resolved not only to care for the destitute, who had been strickened by the epidemic, also as the archives record, quote "to have mercy upon the poor who are suffering from hunger, to whom we have turned a blind eye until this day. In merit of this, may Thee have mercy on us from heaven, to distinguish us, for life." end quote. This special attention to the neglected members of the community may be one of the contributing factors to the emergence of a peculiar, Jewish ritual that was unique to the Jews of eastern Europe. The cholera wedding, also known as the black wedding or plague wedding, in Yiddish "shvartze khasene". This was a magical ceremony in which the marginalized members of the Jewish community were wedded to each other in the town cemetery in a bid to end an epidemic. It seems to have first emerged during the 1841 pandemic and by the 1860's, when cholera next swept through the Russian empire, the ritual had developped into the form that it would take for the following half century and even longer. Two of the poorest and most vulnerable members of the community, often including beggers, poor orphans, and people with physical or developmental disabilities 


[00:04:06]  were matched with each other, often without their explicit consent, and married at the cemetery in an uproarious celebration attended by a good proportion of the town's residents. Here's a typical description, this one from the Yizkor book, memorial book,  for the community of Shumsk, today located in western Ukraine. The piece was written in the 1960's about a cholera wedding that took place during the pandemic of 1893-1894. "God blessed us with a groom, Parrots the idiot who was blind in one eye, limped on one side and a stutterer to boot. He was well over thirty and had a sick mother whom he had to support. Every Friday he would go to the shtetl with a sack, collecting hala and bread for the week. The bride found for him limped a bit on her left foot, her right hand was paralized,  she was a bit deaf and she had two red eyes. On the day of the wedding, everyone gathered in the marketplace, eating honey cake with schnapps. A klezmer band led the procession to the cemetery.  The whole town attended the wedding.". Did the cholera wedding work as it was supposed to? The author of this piece did not remember but he certainly remembered the wedding. Quote "I remember only that when it started getting colder, the epidemic lightened, and in any case it was a spectacle to remember." end quote. Such weddings took place across eastern Europe including the pale of settlement, Congress Poland and across the border in Austrian Galicia. Eventually, the ritual spread to Eretz Israel and north America, Though, it was never as widespread in those new areas of settlement as it was in Eastern Europe.



[00:06:17] Jews continue to practice the cholera wedding into the 20th century, even when cholera pandemic ceased. Now, there were new epidemics that had to be fought; typhus, influenza. The ritual seem to have disappeared by the early 1920s, but it made a comeback during the second world war, when Jews imprisoned in disease-ravaged ghettos decided to revive the cholera wedding as a desperate Last Resort. But, and this is always the question I am asked, why? Why in the world would this be considered an effective remedy to stop an epidemic? The ritual is rich in meaning and there are multiple explanations. None of which can stand on its own. I'll touch on a few here and you'll find additional explanations in the chapter on the cholera wedding in my book. Let's first consider the usual reason given by those who organized the cholera wedding, that it was a great Mitzvah, a great charitable deed that would serve to appease Divine Wrath.  And in a certain sense, it was true that the community was finally turning its attention to those whom it had usually neglected in the past and was now enabling them to marry. Marginalized people frequently did not or could not marry because they lack the material resources and or the physical characteristics necessary for a match. So this might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Since devouring the needy bride was already an age-old jewish charitable custom it stood to reason that the cholera wedding was a deed of great religious value. But altruism could not have been the only motivating factor. In some cases the brides and grooms were clearly reluctant to participate but the organizers compelled them to do so.



[00:08:35] Sometimes reminding them that they have been supported for years by communal charity and it was now time to pay it back as it works. And in theory, the couple was supposed to continue to receive community support after the wedding, but in some cases we hear of the cholera bride and groom continuing to beg even afterwards sometimes with the children that the match eventually produced. The fact that the wedding took place in the cemetery is a good clue as to its symbolic function. From an anthropological perspective, the cemetery is a liminal place between the world of the living and the world of the dead and the cholera wedding attempted to draw a clear line of boundary between those two realms by enacting a ritual associated with life and reproduction, a wedding in the heart of the dominion of death, a cemetery filled with the fresh graves of townsfolks felled by cholera Of course it helped that the cemetery had a long history in Judaism of serving as a place of prayer for ordinary Jews during times of trouble. We must also understand the cholera wedding as a kind of distraction at a time of calamity. For much of the 19th century, it was widely accepted that fear or malaise could make one more susceptible to cholera and in 1830 the Russian government even advised its citizens, quote, "to repress all tendency to depression and chagrin and preserve cheerfulness and tranquility of mind". End quote. The cholera wedding which was marked not only by celebration but was frequently accompanied by carousing and wild reveling serve to distract the townsfolks from the catastrophe 


[00:10:42] unfolding around them, and to lift their spirits even for a few brief hours. It may even have played the role of a theatrical performance or a circus sideshow. Especially if we consider that the cholera bride and groom with their physical and mental differences were often perceived as freaks. The cholera wedding may also have served as a kind of sacrificial offering. As Marek Tuszewicki indicated in his podcast. We don't have to look too deeply into East European Jewish culture to find the trope of the marginalized individual serving as a scapegoat for the larger collective. For example, there was a well known Purimshpil, a traditional folk play performed on the carnival holiday of Purim entitled "The beggar's farce". Display included a mock wedding ceremony of two beggars which ended with the master of ceremonies proclaiming to the couple, quote, "May you both be punished (language not found) instead of me and all Israel". End quote. In a moving fictional account of a cholera wedding written by the Yiddish writer Joseph Opatoshu in the 1930s, an old beggar woman chanting incantation during the wedding. "May it pass from me to you, from me to you". It seems quite clear that the idea here is to magically transfer the evil of the epidemic from the community at large to the bridal couple. Finally, there's some evidence that the cholera wedding, at least at an early phase may have served as a kind of rebellion of the common folk against the Jewish Elite. Shaul Stampfer noted that when there was unrest during periods of epidemic the targets of violence were often governing Elites and medical professionals. 


[00:13:01] But why were these people not attempting to fight the epidemic and assist ordinary people? The masses frequently did not see it that way. As far as they could tell, public health measures like quarantine did more harm than good and officials might even be using the epidemic as an excuse for tyrannical measures. Such attitudes may have had some traction among Jews as well. During the 1866 cholera epidemic Jewish communal and religious leaders sometimes attempted to stop the organizers of the cholera weddings from carrying out their plans, to no avail. Believers in traditional folk practices were determined to move forward with what they perceived as an efficacious remedy against the cholera, public health measures be damned. Things haven't changed much in a hundred and fifty years. Last few months have shown us that people hungry for a cure to a terrifying disease are still often all too ready to discount expert advice and reach for quack cures that cause more harm than good. When I was writing my chapter about the cholera wedding in "Stepchildren of the Shtetl" I treated it as a historical phenomenon that had had its last gasp during the Holocaust. I assume that the beliefs, you can call them superstitions If you want, that underpinned it had disappeared with the destruction of traditional East European Jewish culture by the Nazis and their accomplices. But I was wrong. In March this year, a wedding was performed between two orphans at a cemetery in the ultra-orthodox community of bnei Brak in Israel as a remedy to stop the COVID-19 epidemic. And you can be sure that that won't be the last one. 


[00:15:11] For although we now understand the cholera wedding as a degrading ritual that shamed and demeaned poor people and people with disabilities, at the same time there is no denying itss incredible symbolic power. Thank you for listening to what's new. What's next Jewish studies in the Time of Pandemic. Check out POLIN Museum's website for new podcasts in this series. For regular updates email GEOP at POLIN dot P, L. That's GEOP G,E, O, P at POLIN dot P, L. This podcast series is a part of the Global Education Outreach Program supported by Taube Philanthrophies, the William K. Bowes Junior Foundation and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.