In the Wake of the Plague

by Norman F. Cantor

  This immigration continued into the sixteenth century. Like many Western European rulers of the early Middle Ages (700–1000), the Polish duke and his successors saw the Jews as an economic asset, bringing credit facilities and long-distance trade to the country.

  By 1500 the Jews had been assigned an additional role of importance in Polish society and the frontier Ukrainian lands also ruled by the Polish nobility. They were widely employed as estate agents for the Polish nobility, supervising thousands of peasants forced into serfdom and managing the exploitation of the rich Polish and Ukrainian soil. Jewish males became trilingual—Hebrew for liturgy and rabbinical learning, a Slavic language for business, and Yiddish, a late medieval German dialect written in Hebrew characters, for everyday life in their own communities (most Jewish women knew only Yiddish).

  By the mid-sixteenth-century Jews were rewarded for their services as estate agents with a lucrative monopoly in selling liquor to the peasants. This is the origin of the Yiddish folk song “a Gentile is a drunkard.” Jews also prospered as lumber and fur merchants. Great schools of rabbinical learning, many still in existence when night descended in September 1939, emerged in Poland and the Ukraine. By the early seventeenth century half of the Jewish world population of 3.5 million lived in Poland and the Ukraine.

  The Jews came to love the Polish and Ukrainian physical environment and in the nineteenth century (if not much earlier) wrote poetry lavishly praising the farmland, forests, and climate of Eastern Europe. The rise of the great Jewish communities in Slavic Europe, remarkable for their enterprise and traditional learning, and also innovative in religious and literary expression, was a direct result of the Black Death.

  The prosperity and security of the Polish and Ukrainian Jewish communities reached their height in the first half of the seventeenth century. In 1648 the first great reversal of Jewish fortune occurred. A Cossack and peasant rebellion against the Polish landlords directed itself against the nobility’s Jewish estate agents.

  In the second half of the eighteenth century a long-term deterioration of Jewish living standards began that in effect was never reversed. The problem of overpopulation in the Jewish villages and towns, now often controlled by reactionary Hasidic rabbinical families, was exacerbated by the incapacity of the Polish nobility to maintain their economic status and political independence.

  In the 1790s, with the partition of Poland, 75 percent of the Eastern European Jewish population passed under the rule of the czarist Romanov empire. Infected by the intense anti-Semitism of the Greek Orthodox Church, the czarist government and the Jewish rabbinical leadership were not able to work out a modus vivendi that could forestall increasing Jewish poverty. The Romanov government divested Jews of their liquor monopoly and made it very difficult for them to migrate eastward into Russia.

  In the thirty years before World War I there were some improvements in Jewish economic conditions with the penetration of the Industrial Revolution into Jewish cities in Poland, the Ukraine, and Belarus. A secular Yiddish culture of extraordinary intellect and vitality emerged in Odessa and other centers. But this progress was arrested by the war and the postwar hostility of the Soviet commissars, many of them initially products of the Jewish revolutionary left, to Jewish religion and identity.

  The new Catholic state in postwar Poland was hostile to Jewish prosperity and civil rights. Then came the Nazi invasion and the Holocaust of the Jews with extensive assistance of Poles and Ukrainians.

  Since 1945, because of the centrality of what in 1948 became the State of Israel in Jewish life almost everywhere, Jewish history has been written through the prism of that little strip of sandy land on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean that has also variously been called Canaan, Judea, and Palestine. With the extermination of the 3.3 million strong Jewish community in Poland and decimation of the Jewish populations in Lithuania, the Ukraine, and Belarus during the Nazi occupation, the use of Zionism and Israel by the rapidly assimilating American Jews to latch on to a dissolving transgenerational identity has become ever more pronounced in recent years. The disappearance of a generation of Yiddish speakers has mightily contributed to this development, even though a handful of Jewish studies programs have made marginal efforts to resurrect Yiddish language and culture.

  Yet it was in Poland and its frontier territory of the Ukraine in the period from about 1480 to 1640 that Jewish thought and culture as it flowed into the early twentieth century was truly molded. It was a world whose language, communal organization, and religious movements were a legacy of late medieval Germany from which the Black Death and its attendant pogroms had impelled the Jews eastward into Slavic domains.

  Only in America and Canada at the end of the twentieth century would Jews again attain the level of security, prosperity, and learning that they enjoyed under Polish monarchy and nobility in 1600. Poland was for them the golden medinah (country). There they created a distinctive thought world and behavior pattern that was still central to Ashkenazi (European, Western) Jewry in 1900. The casings and reverberations and genetic base of this post–Black Death Jewish world of Eastern Europe endures without the Yiddish language base and with much of its history forgotten in Anglophone North America and Hebrew-speaking Israel today.

  The huge migration of Jews from the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and 1990s to Israel and the United States has subliminally and genetically reinvigorated this bond with the Slavic past of the sixteenth century even though under Stalinist repression the Soviet Jews lost much of their linguistic and cultural identity. Perhaps if we wait long enough history will surprise us.

  PART III

  HISTORY

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Serpents and Cosmic Dust

  IN THE OUTBREAK OF A pandemic there is, as Richard Evans, the historian of disease in nineteenth-century Hamburg, has suggested, a common dramaturgy. This involves flight to supposedly safe areas, usually in the putative bucolic countryside, and a conspiracy theory blaming the disease on strangers and unpopular minorities. As late as 1831, an outbreak of cholera in Poland, caused, as always, by polluted water, was attributed to Jews.

  Modern medical science has reached a consensus that the Black Death was mainly bubonic plague spread by parasites carried by rodents, chiefly rats. Another infectious disease, anthrax, a cattle epidemic (murrain) was also involved, spreading from very sick cattle to humans. A consensus can be wrong. Over the years explanations of the Black Death have varied greatly and passed in and out of style. The earliest medieval explanation for the Pestilence was reptiles; one of the most radical contemporary ones is cosmic dust.

  Today the animals associated with the plague are rats and fleas, but these did not figure strongly in the medieval imagination. Neither of them feature in English medieval bestiaries or animal encyclopedias, though mice and ants do. Although William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1380) portrays the rat as an undesirable creature, this is because it devoured men’s food supplies, not on the grounds that it spread disease. The absence of references to rats as a necessary prelude to a human epidemic may arise from contemporaries’ failures to notice or attach any significance to the rat plague. There were, however, contemporary suggestions that domestic animals, such as cows, could fall sick of the plague.

  Contemporary society looked toward less familiar beasts dwelling in remote areas that could be identified as the sources or the companions of virulent poisons that had allegedly contaminated the entire atmosphere. Much emphasis was placed on the sea as the source of the infection. Louis Sanctus of Beringen, writing from Avignon on April 27, 1348, says that the infection arrived in Europe by three galleys that arrived at Genoa “carrying horrible disease from the East.” Expelled from Genoa after locals fell sick, the ships went from port to port carrying disease wherever they went, until one of them reached Marseilles.

  This story may of course be the literal truth, but the story has powerful resonances with literary motifs, such as the ship of fools and the ship of the damned.
Beringen goes on to say that people refused to eat spices, which might have arrived on infected galleys, and also certain sea fishes, presumably because they were thought to come from the contaminated oceans.

  A more important theory about the origins of the plague’s poison, and one that must be considered in the context of the more widespread concept of poisoned air or miasma, concerned exotic reptiles in general and snakes or serpents in particular. Beringen recounts how in September 1347 in a certain province in the Orient, there had been three days of calamities that had terrified the whole country. On the first day there had been a rain of frogs, serpents, lizards, scorpions, and many other kinds of venomous animals. All of these are frequently illustrated in English bestiaries where, interestingly, the scorpion is represented as a kind of lizard. Other contemporary writers make very similar reports, speaking of rains of fire and of venomous creatures, including plagues of snakes and scorpions that had supposedly occurred in countries between Persia and China. It was also suggested that the reptiles had been released from below ground by earthquakes along with the corrupt air that caused the disease.

  These stories recalled the biblical pharaonic plague, preceding the deaths of the firstborn. The magical significance of the snake is also reflected in Moses’ transformation of Aaron’s staff before pharaoh.

  From a practical point of view, the most significant feature of the snake’s supposed power was that it was curative as well as infective. Snake poison, blood, and roasted, dried snake meat are still important ingredients in Eastern medicine. In medieval Europe theriac, or treacle, was the most prized and the most expensive of all medicines, and although the recipes for it are numerous and various, the common content was always mashed snake’s flesh, which had often been skinned and roasted before being left to mature for a year or more.

  In England, where most theriac arrived in prepared pots carried on Mediterranean galleys, the Grocer’s Company guild kept a careful eye on what was a lucrative luxury trade that was especially open to abuse. The disruption of trade by war and the increased demand in southern Europe may have caused a shortage of the drug in England in 1349, at the very time when it was most sought after.

  The basis of theriac’s efficacy was commonly held to be homeopathic—one of its primary uses was as a remedy for snake bite. In his book on medicine (a book about spiritual remedies for sin that sheds interesting sidelights on medical practice), Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster, who would himself fall victim to the plague of 1361, wrote that “the treacle is made of poison so it can destroy other poisons.”

  Grosmont also thought of theriac as a moral curative. It was the medicine “to make a man reject the poisonous sin which has entered into his soul.” Since the plague was held to be a disease imposed by God as punishment for sin and had its origins in poison associated with snakes and reptiles, theriac was a particularly appropriate remedy or prophylactic.

  One fifteenth-century English book of medical advice suggested that during times of pestilence theriac should be taken twice a day dissolved in clear wine, clear ale, or rosewater, but well before meals so that it had time to take effect.

  During the initial outbreak of the Black Death, the greatest advocate of theriac was the eminent physician of Bologna and Perugia Gentile of Foligno, who himself died in June 1348 of the plague. In his plague treatise Gentile stressed that the theriac used should be at least a year old. Children, he thought, should not ingest it but should have it rubbed on them instead.

  Gentile also counseled other remedies for these reptilian poisons. One of his cordials incorporated emerald, a stone he believed would crack the eye of any toad that looked at it. In addition, he recommended the use of an amulet ring, the specifications of which had descended from the kings of Persia. An amethyst was to be inscribed with the figure of a man bowing girded with a serpent whose head he holds in his right hand with the tail in his left. The stone was to be set in a gold ring with the root of the serpent encased beneath it.

  Despite the popularity of theriac, it was a controversial medicine because of its almost universal application, magical associations, and the difficulty of producing a rational analysis of its efficacy consistent with the current intellectual system. This was important because the snake was the symbol and alternative shape of Asclepius, the pagan god of healing whose cult, the most enduring of those of the ancient gods, had been bitterly opposed by St. Augustine in the early fifth century. This tradition is still reflected in the Hippocratic staff, the symbol of the medical profession.

  Nicholas of Poland (fl. 1270) spent twenty years at the medical school of the University of Montpellier, where attempts to find rational causes for the value of theriac were among the chief preoccupations. In the end Nicholas rejected this theorizing and returned to Poland professing its irrelevance. But he was utterly convinced of the therapeutic value of snake, toad, and lizard meat. He thought that kings and noblemen, who could afford it, should eat it at every meal. God, according to Nicholas, had conferred marvelous virtues on all of nature. “The more filthy abominable and common things are,” Nicholas argued, “the more they participate in these marvelous virtues.”

  This contrasted with the employment of medication based on gold, advocated by doctors who favored alchemy. Nicholas believed that these doctors were quacks who were robbing their patients of their money and hastening their deaths. Of course, most doctors at the time of the plague, like Gentile of Foligno himself, used gold as well as theriac in their treatments. But for Nicholas the difference was that he believed that theriac had been proven effective by experience.

  The historian of early medieval medicine Peregrine Horden adds more to the snake theory. He says that in the medieval mind mythical snakes, serpents, and dragons are to a large extent interchangeable, and that dragons are characterized by poisonous, pestilential breath.

  Bishop Gregory of Tours recounted that in November 589 the Tiber had flooded the city of Rome. “A great school of water snakes swam down the river to the sea and in their midst was a tremendous dragon as big as a tree trunk, but these monsters were drowned in the turbulent waves of the sea and their bodies were washed up on the shore.” There then followed a plague epidemic of which the first victim was the pope, Pelagius. Gregory the Great, his successor, then led the Roman populace in penitential processions. What else could the new pope do?

  Gregory of Tours noted torrential rains as a sign of the arrival of plague in Gaul. Gregory of Tours’ account resonates with the recent book Catastrophe, by David Keys. In this version a tremendous volcanic eruption in Java in 535 had extremely disastrous results all over the globe, generating monstrous rainstorms and flooding that was somehow connected to the outbreak of plague in the sixth century.

  Gregory of Tours may have been on to something, and the medieval connection of the plague with sea serpents could have been a memory of what had occurred in the sixth century. Today there continues to be association of floods with infectious disease on the epidemic scale. When we are shown devastating floods on the TV news, whether they occur in North Carolina or Mozambique, the TV reporter intones that not only have these poor people lost their homes and their lives, but there is now widespread fear in the flooded area of aggravated infectious disease.

  What may be happening in these instances, operative in the world today as in the Middle Ages, is the impact of a Jungian archetype. Flooding equals serpents equals a pandemic. The TV anchors are functioning within the same universal archetype as was Bishop Gregory of Tours in the late sixth century.

  Diseases coming to earth from outer space can be viewed as another Jungian archetype, in modern times worked into redundancy by science fiction writers. But this banality does not rule out a real scientific basis for the idea of diseases from outer space.

  The theory that the Black Death originated in outer space dates back to a book published in 1979, Diseases From Space, by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. Since then the two authors have published a series of books, one as
recently as 1993 (Our Place in the Cosmos), in which they have responded to new developments in research and, to some extent, to criticism of their thesis. Hoyle is a renowned Cambridge astrophysicist and Wickramasinghe is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Astronomy in the School of Mathematics in the University of Wales, Cardiff.

  Hoyle and Wickramasinghe argue that contrary to what is usually believed, conditions on primeval earth were not suitable for the production of life. It is far more likely that life arrived on earth from somewhere beyond it.

  Darwin’s theory of evolution works up to a certain point, say the two scientists, but there are worrying inconsistencies. Plants and animals show evolutionary characteristics that bear no obvious relation to their chances of survival. Some bacteria exhibit resistance to high levels of radiation and cold far more extreme than that experienced anywhere on earth—the qualities that would equip them for survival in space.

  Interstellar space is full of seeds or grains that have the characteristics of hollow dehydrated bacteria. The conditions of interstellar space could not permit the replication of organic material but this is not true of comets, which contain large quantities of water and, due to evaporation, expel large quantities of dust when they pass close to stars.

  Experiments conducted when Halley’s Comet passed close to the earth in 1986 showed that the materials it expelled closely resembled the “organic” grain found in interstellar space. The result of this emission of matter from comets is that “an immense number of bacteria and viruses of all kinds fall each year from space onto the terrestrial ensemble of plants and animals.”

  For Hoyle and Wickramasinghe the history of human disease is a kind of “pathogenic test” of this rain of organic matter from space. In their view all diseases ultimately have an extraterrestrial origin, what they call “vertical transmission.” They do not rule out, however, the further passing of an illness from person to person, “horizontal transmission.”