After the Black Death: Plague and Commemoration among Iberian Jews by Susan L. Einbinder (review)

The great pandemic that swept across Europe in the fourteenth century and killed millions, earning itself the grim name of ‘the Black Death’, has been the object of many studies in recent decades. Those historians who have examined the effects of the plague on the Jewish communities scattered across Western Europe have tended to focus on the antisemitic accusation that Jews caused the plague by poisoning wells, and the massacres and trials that it provoked. The actual impact of the epidemic on Jewish communities has been neglected, and it is this significant oversight that Susan Einbinder endeavours to address in this book by using a variety of sources of information: documentary, literary, medical, and archaeological.