Jews & Plagues: A Long History with Surprises

Description

Samuel Cohn’s talk will survey more than two millennia of history, over the course of which Jews were targeted as perpetrators of plagues. Instances of these accusations extend from inversions of the Exodus story that concentrate in the first century BCE to the Nazis’ framing of typhus as Judenfieber (“Jewish disease”). Part of the Mondays at the Museum Spring 2022 Lecture Series, “Jews, Plagues, and Pandemics.”

Samuel Cohn received his PhD in medieval history from Harvard University under supervision from David Herlihy. He has taught at Wesleyan University, Brandeis, and the University of Glasgow with visiting appointments at Brown University, the University of California at Berkeley, Antwerp University, L’Università degli studi di Milano (where he was the first “Federigo Chabod Visiting Professor”), and Aarhus University (scheduled for May 2022). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Edinburgh. Since 1995, he has been Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow. From the late 1990s, he has taught and published on two broad themes: popular insurrection in Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the history of plague and other diseases from antiquity to the present. His most recent books include Epidemics: Hate & Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS (Oxford University Press, 2018); Paradoxes of Inequality in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge Elements: The Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2021); and Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy (December 2021).