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Hand Washing: Plagues
Contributed by Sophia + Jacob

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

   

The profiling and racism revealed by this pandemic are not new. As we prepare to wash our hands -- not just a public health measure, but also a sacred ritual -- let us not wash our hands of the responsibility to combat the noxious blame game all too present in society today. We've edited some of Henry Abramson's comments on this topic:

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I can’t help feel uneasy with the amount of attention the New York Jewish community is receiving because of the first confirmed cases of the coronavirus. We are hardly first: Asians around the globe already faced prejudice because of the epidemic’s origins in Wuhan, China....  [This ominous fearmongering] makes me think of the "hidden hand" propaganda of the 1940s — and also the long, horrible history of anti-Semitic charges that Jews spread disease. I’m sure it’s nothing — I’m just starting to feel a little queasy, that’s all.

Given Jewish history, it’s vital to avoid anti-Semitic [ and other racist ] tropes about the spread of disease — and sobering to know the consequences when we don’t. 

Manetho, an Egyptian priest who lived 2,300 years ago, was probably the first to level this charge against Jews. He retold the Exodus with rather creative flair, arguing that the Jews weren’t redeemed from slavery with signs and wonders — they were, he claimed, expelled by the Egyptians because they were a source of contagion. Not unlike the Nazis, who justified the walling off of the ghettos as a prophylactic against the spread of typhus, Manetho sought to associate Jews with the silent spread of the dreaded plague, as invisible as it is unstoppable.

Manetho’s ethnocentric, sour-grapes reading of Jewish history might have had some credibility if there were any reason to assume that Jews were less susceptible to disease than non-Jews. This widely held myth is especially associated with stories of the Black Death, the horrific plague that ravaged Europe from 1348 to 1351. 

I’ve read all kinds of wishful thinking on this topic: Some hold that Jews dodged the plague because they were inherently cleaner (they do wash their hands sans soap before eating bread, but bathing in the 14th century was at most a weekly affair). Also, since there’s an assumed historical tradition for Jews not keeping dogs as pets, the Jewish cats kept the rats away, along with their plague-bearing fleas. These are wonderful, heartwarming theories. It’s just too bad there’s no historical evidence to support them.

If anything, Jews tended to suffer from plagues at a greater rate than the population at large, particularly because they were far more urbanized than the peasantry.... But that hardly stopped anyone from blaming the Jews for the Black Death, notorious for its fatality rate approaching 50% of the infected. On the contrary, unhinged conspiracy theories circulated widely, building on centuries-old charges that Jews were poisoning wells out of a deep-seated misanthropy.

...it’s not always about the virus itself. It’s what might happen after the virus.

Why do so many seem to blame others and other groups of people for pandemics? What's the best way to combat this?

WE NOW WASH OUR HANDS
haggadah Section: Urchatz
Source: Henry Abramson (JTA)

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