Identifying perhaps more with the plague-ridden Egyptians than with liberated Israel, the scribe of the prized Wolff Haggada referred readers to his epic testimony concerning the horrors of the Black Plague and how he reconciled them with his faith

Seldom can any individual distill the defining events of his sojourn in this world into a single sentence. Yet sometimes a few words from a familiar, seminal text can evoke just such a sense of identification and déjà vu.

As Umberto Ecco commented in his Name of the Rose, “ […] this explains why we often find in the margins of a manuscript phrases left by the scribe as testimony to his suffering.”

Such is the heartbreaking marginal note recorded during the last decade of the 14^th century in the illuminated Passover Haggadah handwritten by Yaakov ben Shlomo Ha-tzarfati. One can easily picture him weeping over the page in his haggada on which he’d carefully inscribed the names and mnemonic of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, including that of dever (pestilence), which in the Exodus narrative killed only cattle but in the 14^th century denoted the Black Plague.

Within months, the “Black Death” had consumed three of Yaakov’s progeny, leaving him inconsolable. Unable to complete his handiwork without some mention of how he, too, had been stricken by one of the plagues of Egypt, Yaakov ben Shlomo referred readers to the end of his magnum opus, Yeshuat Yaakov (Jacob’s Salvation).

Whoever wishes to truly know, without dissembling, why Rabbi Yehuda gave this mnemonic and none other [for the Ten Plagues – detzakh, adash, be-ahav], the answer is given in a book I authored, which I called Jacob’s Salvation. (Wolff Haggada)

There, in a treatise entitled Evel Rabbati (Great Mourning), he’d recalled his children’s tragic, painful deaths during the resurgence of the Black Plague in Avignon in the autumn and winter of 1382-3.

 

Plague after Plague

Evel Rabbati records the final moments of Yaakov ben Shlomo’s daughter Esther (Trina), in the spring of 1383. Only a few months earlier, Yaakov himself had almost died of the Black Plague. He’d recovered only to find that his son Yisrael (known in French as Monriley) had also been infected. Yaakov buried Yisrael amid the holiest days of the Jewish year, in Tishrei 5143 (October 1382). Shortly afterward, a second child, Sara, whom her father described as possessing “wisdom of the heart, intelligence and knowledge,” succumbed on her first wedding anniversary, roughly a week before Purim, on 5 Adar (February 8, 1383). Esther’s death was the last straw. Thus, the note found in the Wolff Haggada, as Yaakov’s masterpiece has become known (see Lost, Found, and Fought Over, pp. XX), obliquely refers us to the devastation of the Black Plague as the story of his life.

I tell everyone that because of this plague, all my days are pain. Even on Sabbaths and holidays, I sigh and weep with grief, and even now I write in tears […]. (Evel Rabbati, p. 84)

Yaakov ben Shlomo had been born into the chaos accompanying the first outbreak of the pandemic known as the Black Plague, in 1348-9. Little is known of his early years or of the traumatic events he surely experienced. Europe plunged into darkness as Church control slipped and religious movements such as the Flagellants overran the continent, seeking scapegoats and massacring Jewish communities. In all likelihood, Yaakov’s parents found refuge in the papal states of southern France. A contemporary chronicle describes the devastation:

In this and the following year [1348–9] there was a general death of people throughout the world. It began first in India, then it passed to Tharsis, thence to Saracens, Christians and Jews in the course of one Easter to the next […]. In one day there died 812 people in Avignon according to [a] reckoning made by the pope. […] 358 Dominicans died in Provence in Lent; in Montpellier only seven friars were left from 149 […]; at Marseilles only one Franciscan remained of 150 […]. (Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin [Oxford University Press, 1995], p. 94)

The plague can indeed be traced to Mongol invaders and caravans of merchants sweeping across Asia, who transmitted the disease via rats and fleas. Before succumbing themselves, these men resorted to one of the first instances of biological warfare at its most literal, catapulting their dead over the walls of the besieged Black Sea port of Caffa. Sailors and refugees fled in Genoese trading vessels, bringing the scourge to the Sicilian port of Messina in October 1347.

Those gathering at the docks to meet the incoming ships were horrified at the sight of the dead and dying. Though the Sicilian authorities hastily drove the ships away, the damage had been done. Plague spread throughout Europe within the year, killing over a third of the population – some twenty million people. Both clergy and laymen desperately attempted to liquidate the purported source of the outbreak: the Jews. Herman Gigas, a Franciscan friar from the German region of Franconia, recorded both the hearsay and its horrific consequences:

In 1347 there was such a great pestilence and mortality throughout almost the whole world that in the opinion of well-informed men scarcely a tenth of mankind survived. The victims did not linger long, but died on the second or third day. The plague raged so fiercely that many cities and towns were entirely emptied of people. In the cities of Bologna, Venice, Montpellier, Avignon, Marseilles, and Toulouse alike, a thousand people died in one day, and it still rages in France, Normandy, England, and Ireland.

Some say that it was brought about by the corruption of the air; others, that the Jews planned to wipe out all the Christians with poison and had poisoned wells and springs everywhere. And many Jews confessed as much under torture: that they had bred spiders and toads in pots and pans, and had obtained poison from overseas; and that not every Jew knew about this wickedness, only the more powerful ones, so that it would not be betrayed.

As evidence of this heinous crime, men say that bags full of poison were found in many wells and springs, and as a result, in cities, towns, and villages throughout Germany, and in fields and woods too, almost all the wells and springs have been blocked up or built over, so that no one can drink from them or use the water for cooking, and men have to use rain or river water instead.

God, the Lord of vengeance, has not suffered the malice of the Jews to go unpunished. Throughout Germany, in all but a few places, they were burnt. For fear of that punishment many accepted baptism, and their lives were spared.

This action was taken against the Jews in 1349, and it still continues unabated, for in a number of regions many people, noble and humble alike, have laid plans against them and their defenders, which they will never abandon until the whole Jewish race has been destroyed. (Chronicle of Herman Gigas [1349], quoted in Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death [Manchester University Press, 1994], p. 207)

 

Panic and Chaos

The initial outbreak of the Black Plague in Yaakov’s early years caused wholesale panic, depopulating entire towns. Crops were left to rot unharvested, resulting in famine and starvation. Those infected were isolated, often locked within their sealed homes to die painfully alone. A letter written by one Louis Sanctus of Yaakov’s native Avignon and dated April 27, 1348 provides graphic illustration:

It has come to pass that, for fear of infection, no doctor will visit the sick (not if he were given everything the sick man owns), nor will the father visit the son, the mother the daughter, the brother the brother, the son the father, the friend the friend, the acquaintance the acquaintance, nor anyone a blood relation – unless, that is, they wish to die along with them at once. And thus an uncountable number of people died without any mark of affection, piety, or charity – who, if they had refused to visit the sick themselves, might have escaped. […]

To be brief, at least half the people in Avignon died; for there are now within the walls of the city more than seven thousand houses where no one lives, because everyone in them has died, and in the suburbs one might imagine there is not one survivor […]. (ibid., p. 43)

The last rites – and particularly confession – could no longer be administered by the Church. Ralph of Shrewsbury, bishop of the English town of Bath, documented the extent of this calamity in his diocese:

We understand that many people are dying without the sacrament of penance, because they do not know what they ought to do in such an emergency […] if, when on the point of death, they cannot secure the services of a properly ordained priest, they should make confession of their sins […] to any layperson, even to a woman, if a man is not present. (ibid., p. 271)

Dying a “good death” is of paramount importance for a Christian. A person’s last moments in this world are considered a crucial test, passed only when the departing soul has been prepared for the next life by a priest. Prolonged illness or old age allow ample time for the confession and penance that secured salvation. The souls of those who die suddenly, on the other hand, with no priest to administer the rites of penitence, the Eucharist, and Extreme Unction (Final Anointing), are doomed to everlasting torment in Hell. The Black Plague thus left the masses terrified of being deprived of the rituals safeguarding their ascent to Heaven.

Our scribe’s depictions of his daughter Esther’s last moments, in the pandemic of 1383, could not paint a starker contrast.