Spilled blood

From 1320 to 1348, does the shift in the narrative motifs of the accusation of poisoning the wells of lepers to Jews manifest the persistence of an archaic impulse? To get out of the dilemma between morphology and history, it's probably best to consider it from the point of view of the persistence of techniques of government, ensuring the sovereign's right to decide on the exceptional. However, the massacres and, above all, the forced conversions of 1391 were a major turning point: the post-plague world would redefine identity and otherness on the basis of racial categories of blood purity.

Contents

• Trials, pardons, restitutions: after the storm, a judicial sky of drag
• Provence after 1348: renegotiating the tallia judeorum
• "C'est un brandon sauvé du feu": Dayas Quinoni, witness and survivor (Joseph Shatzmiller, "Les Juifs de Provence pendant la Peste noire", Revue des études juives, 1974)
• "Il n'est resté que moi": testis et superstes (ÉmileBenveniste, Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 1969)
• From testimonium to testamentum : no one dies in another's place
• Testis unus, testis nullius : an inapplicable legal precept for historians
• From Guillaume de Nangis to Flavius Joseph: when the repetition of testimonies arouses suspicion of topos
• The extermination of the Jews and the principle of reality: Carlo Ginzburg, Hayden White and Jacques Derrida (Saul Friedländer ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution", 1992)
• Preserving the truth of fathers to affirm the truth of sons: "our conception of history has a bloody origin" (Carlo Ginzburg, "De près, de loin. Des rapports de force en histoire", in Un seul témoin, 2007)
• De 1348 à 9/11: itinéraires de la rumeur ("Le mythe des 4 000 Juifs absents du World Trace Center ", www.conspiracywatch.info)
• Clement VI's bull Quamvis perfidiam (September 26, 1348): the limits of rational refutation
• Conrad de Megenberg and his Utrum Mortalitas (1350): " I don't know if they poisoned the wells, but what I do know... " (Séraphine Guerchberg, "La controverse sur les prétendus semeurs de la 'Peste Noire', d'après les traités de peste de l'époque", Revue des études juives, 1948) ;
• Anthropological invariant and narrative function: rereading Carlo Ginzburg's Le Sabbat des sorcières (Giordana Charuty, "Actualités de Storia notturna", L'Homme, 2019)
• " In the wells, in the fountains, in the cisterns and in the rivers we poured powders made with bitter herbs and venomous reptile blood, to exterminate the Christians... " : the plot of the Jews, the lepers and the Sultan of Granada in 1320
• The "almost inevitable" assimilation of Jews and lepers (Carlo Ginzburg, The Witches' Sabbath, 1992): the murderous metaphor continues
• Letter from the Viguier of Narbonne to the jurats of Girona, April 17, 1348: when the poor and beggars also become poisoners (Christian Guilleré, "La peste noire à Gérone (1348)", Annals de l'Institut d'Estudis Gironins, 1984)
• "We must not believe those who have refused to believe the truth" (Yves de Chartres, quoted by Giacomo Todeschini, Au pays des sans-nom. Gens de mauvaise vie, personnes suspectes ou ordinaires du Moyen Âge à l'époque moderne, 2015)
• Histoire de l'esclave musulman qui, à Majorque, prenait trop de bains de mer (David Nirenberg, Violence et minorités au Moyen Âge, 2001)
• Persistence of a persecutory mentality or permanence of a governing technique? "The persecution of Jews took its place in the arts of government" (Valérie Theis, "Jean XXII et l'expulsion des juifs du Comtat Venaissin", Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2012)
• Expelling the Jews to establish the exception and impose his law (Juliette Sibon, Chasser les juifs pour régner, 2016)
• Servi regni camerae : Jews and the royal treasury
• Les juifs à Valence, expression et contestation de l'absolu du pouvoir souverain (David Nirenberg, "Le dilemme du souverain: génocide et justice à Valence, 1391", in Julie Claustre, Olivier Mattéoni and Nicolas Offenstadt dir., Un Moyen Âge pour aujourd'hui. Mélanges offerts à Claude Gauvard, 2010)
• Valence, 1391: the miracle and royal justice, two ways of suspending the law
• When Prince Martin is overwhelmed : " You must understand that this can only be God's judgment, and nothing else "
• Forced baptisms and conversos : historiographical vertigo, historical tragedy
• From the conversions of 1391 to the Toledo sentence-statute of 1449, or the new obsession with blood purity (Claire Soussen, La pureté en question : Exaltation et dévoiement d'un idéal entre juifs et chrétiens, 2020)
• Le monde d'après la peste noire: sociétés juives d'Europe et formation des catégories raciales (Jean-Frédéric Schaub and Silvia Sebastiani, Race and History in Western Societies [^{XVe-XVIIIesiècle} ], 2021)
• Another "brandon saved from the fire", in 1391: Reuben, son of Rabbi Nissim of Girona, and all those who "abandoned themselves to impurity" (David Nirenberg, "Une société face à l'altérité. Juifs et chrétiens dans la péninsule Ibérique 1391-1449", Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 2007)
• To disobey death: "the chronicle must be thrown like a stone under the wheel of history in order to stop it" (quoted by Georges Didi-Huberman, Éparses, 2020)