“I, the widow, do solemnly swear...:” Plague, survival, and domestic material culture in early modern Prague

• In Event: Works-in-Progress Group in Jewish Studies

Abstract

In the months after a devastating plague in 1713-14, the leadership of Prague’s Jewish community embarked on a process of rebuilding and reordering community. Death and devastation had also brought disorder, flight, and looting. Among those seeking to restore normalcy to their lives were some seventy-eight widows, whose husbands had perished in the outbreak, some of whom as medical personnel bringing aid to their neighbors. Each of these widows appeared before a Jewish commission of elders to offer sworn testimony in declaration of the household items that had once been their property, and to return to claim these items once more. Their claims included cash and luxury items alongside more mundane, yet no less significant, items of commercial and domestic value. Mingling material culture with economics and gender, statecraft with cultures of inventorization and record keeping, all set against biological and environmental crisis and coping, the story of these widows and their affidavits offer a rare glimpse into multiple spheres of Jewish life in early modern Prague, home to Christian Europe’s largest urban Jewish population of the early modern period.

Author

• Joshua Teplitsky, Stony Brook University