" Anno 1349 : when the Jews were stunned

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By comparing archaeological data, sources from the royal archives and Jewish memory of the attack on the call of the Catalan city of Tàrrega in the summer of 1348, and then comparing it with other examples of the killing of Jews in times of plague in the Crown of Aragon, but also in Strasbourg, Provence and German cities, we come up against the enigma of a murderous metaphor that cannot be reduced to the structuralist model of the virulence of a persecutory mentality.

With Susan Sontag, facing the pain of others
Cancer, tuberculosis and violence: still murderous metaphors
"The aim of my book was to appease the imagination, not to stimulate it. Not to confer meaning, the traditional goal of all literary endeavors, but to take meaning away from something" (Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors, 1988)
"Not a curse, not a punishment, not a shame. Just a disease
Back to the Black Death: deflationary readings, not disappointments
There is the plague
There is anti-Semitism (Stéphane Habib, 2020)
An existent that evades all sense, all determination: the historical experience of " il y a "
"The present, welded to the past, is entirely the legacy of that past; it renews nothing. It is always the same present or the same past that endures" (Emmanuel Levinas, Le temps et l'autre, 1979)
Back to time undone: Petrarch writes after the Black Death, Guillaume de Machaut composes after the Black Death
There is the plague, there is the death of the Jews, between the two there is nothing
The imprint of time on matter and the archaeological method: can we topographically wedge mute objects into lines of discourse?
It was Tàrrega in 1348
Identification and archaeology of six mass graves in the Jewish cemetery (Anna Colet et al., "Les fosses communes des Roquetes à Tàrrega", in Paul Salmona dir., L'archéologie du judaïsme en France et en Europe, 2011)
What did they die of? Pit 164, individual UE 1215: 22 traces of blows (Anna Colet et al., "The Black Death and Its Consequences for the Jewish Community in Tàrrega: Lessons from History and Archeology", The Medieval Globe, 2014)
Muyren los traydors : l'attaque du call de Tàrrega dans les archives de la Couronne d'Aragon (Josep Xavier Muntané, "Au carrefour des documents: la Peste Noire à Tàrrega (Catalogne) et ses conséquences pour les juifs de la ville", in François Clément dir. in Epidemics, epizootics : Des représentations anciennes aux approches actuelles, 2017)
'Emeq ha-bakhà: the memory of the event in Joseph Ha-Cohen's Valley of Tears (Susan L. Einbinder, After the Black Death: Plague and Commemoration among Iberian Jews, 2018)
Salo Baron: the ghetto, emancipation and the "lachrymal conception" of Jewish history (Pierre Birnbaum, The Tears of History, 2022)
The stakes involved in dating and counting the dead: a desire to exterminate
"The common people, on the day when some plague or famine occurs, make the earth tremble, shouting: All this is because of Jacob's sins!" the taqqanot of 1354 (Mario Macias, "Responding the violence: the haskamot of Barcelona and the Jewish political tradition", Journal of Catalan Intellectual History, 2019)
In 1361, it started all over again: "they feared that, because of the mortality that had occurred and was still occurring in several parts of our kingdom, people would start harming, pillaging and killing them again as before" (Amada López de Meneses, Documentos acerca de la Peste Negra en los dominios de la Corona de Aragón, 1956)
Anti-Judaism in the "age of faith", anti-Semitism in the "age of science" (Léon Poliakov): but do we really need two words to describe hatred of the Jews? (Jeanne Favret-Saada and Josée Contreras, Le Christianisme et ses juifs, 2004)
As before, but since when? The precedent of 1096 (Elsa Marmursztejn, "1096, dans la vallée du Rhin. Les massacres de la première croisade", in Pierre Savy dir., Histoire des Juifs, 2020)
Qiddush ha-shem : liturgy, martyred violence (Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God. Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade, 2004)
All those who defile the purity of christianitas (Robert Moore, Persecution: Its Formation in Europe, ^10th-13th^century, 1991)
Divine vengeance and the messianic imaginary: "rationally approaching the history of unreason" (Israel Jacob Yuval, "Two peoples in your bosom". Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages, 2012)
Societies shoulder to shoulder, and yet, " if this proximity sustains anything, it's rather mutual misunderstanding, suspicion and animosity "
How can we separate ourselves from this past? David Nirenberg against the "structuralist consensus" of the persecutory mentality(Violence et minorités au Moyen Âge, 2001)
The stylized violence of the stoning ritual in Jewish quarters during Holy Week: a " antiroyal clerical carnival "
Barcelona 1348: de-ritualization and violent outbursts
Back to Tàrrega: the continuation of private warfare by other means
The 1349 Valentine's Day pogrom in Strasbourg: political change and the killing of Jews (Alfred Haverkamp, "Die Judenverfolgungen zur Zeit des Schwarzen Todes im Gesellschaftsgefüge deutscher Städte", in Zur Geschichte der Juden im Deutschland des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, 1981)
In the Holy Roman Empire, the virulence of an exterminating impulse? Economic modeling and historiographical prejudice (Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, "Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany", Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2012)
When Strasbourg's city council inquired about the existence of poisoners (Samuel Cohn, "The Black Death and the Burning of Jews", Past & Present, 2007)
The surgeon Balavigny, his magic powders and the order from Toledo: here's the Jewish plot
How to keep the disease away from its metaphors? Jacme d'Agramont's Regiment de preservacio de pestilencia lesson, April 24, 1348