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The Cholera Wedding: A Magical Jewish Ritual

Sun, December 16, 12:30 to 2:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Amphitheater

Abstract

This paper investigates the cholera wedding, a curious ritual that originated among the Jews of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. In a last-ditch attempt to stop the advance of a raging epidemic, the Jewish community married its cast-offs-beggars, orphans, disabled people-to each other in the town cemetery. The ritual, a departure from a number of Jewish marital norms, became a subject of often fiery debate within Jewish society, with some condemning the custom as superstition and magic and others defending it as a pious rite with deep roots in Jewish religious principles. For their part, Jewish progressives made clear their disdain for the cholera wedding as a symbol of all that was backward about East European Jewry and in need of enlightenment and reform.

My research explores the nature and meaning of the cholera wedding from its emergence during one of the Russian Empire's first cholera pandemics in the 1830s through later resurgences of the ritual in the 1860s and the 1890s and down to its last hurrah in the 1910s. Carefully parsing the extant accounts of the cholera wedding in the press, memoir literature, rabbinic works, and fiction, I attempt to understand how the ritual developed over time and what it can tell us about the changing place and role of the marginal individual in the Jewish community of imperial Russia. The manifold roots of the cholera wedding can be found in established religious, magical, and folkloric archetypes; acute anxiety about the body often elicited by cholera; and an established association of marginal folk with death and demons. However, the fundamental aim of the ritual was to create a scapegoat out of the societal Other onto whom the evil of the epidemic could be transferred. Moreover, while the advocates and practitioners of the cholera wedding claimed that it was a traditional response to crisis, I argue that the ritual was instead a traditionalist phenomenon-an ostensibly hoary rite masking a modern, popular religious response to the far-reaching transformations that Jewish society in the tsarist empire experienced in the modern period.

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