Ulysses Essay 24 (41:40)
Chapter 3 (Proteus) Note 10
“Famine, plague and slaughters”

Looking out on the Irish Channel from Sandymount Strand, Stephen is reminded of successive seaborne invasions of Ireland: first, the early medieval rampages of the country by Norwegian and Danish fighters – the latter clad in impenetrable armor emblazoned with tomahawks – and then the later (1314-1318) Scottish invasion of Ireland by the Bruce dynasty, inflicting indiscriminate mass “slaughters” on the Irish population in an (eventually unsuccessful) attempt to wrest Ireland from the English throne. Stephen’s thoughts then move to another “invasion” from the sea – he recalls that when Dublin was stricken in 1331 by one of Ireland’s periodic famines, the Dubliners’ hunger was assuaged when “a school of turlehide whales” was cast up onto Sandymount Beach. According to Gifford, quoting Thom’s  Directory of Great Britain and Ireland for 1904, apparently there were more than two hundred of these creatures, each thirty to forty foot long, and each thicker than a man’s height, although their exact zoological identity is nowhere clearly defined. The episode recalls the flock of exhausted quails that provided meat for the starving Israelites and which the Tanach describes (with the manna) as the divine response to the people of Israel in the Sinai wilderness, who, remembering the overflowing “fleshpots of Egypt” with sudden nostalgic longing, had accused God for having brought them out of Egypt “into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death” (Exodus 16:3; 16:12-13).

To this litany of Irish disasters, Stephen adds “plague”, obviously referring to the “Black Death” (bubonic plague) that ravaged Europe between 1334 and 1351. Thom states that Dublin, like its counterparts on the European mainland, was decimated by this highly infectious and frequently fatal pestilence. Bubonic plague, caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium, is spread to human by the bite of infected fleas, who in turn pick up the germ from small animals, mainly rats. The fleas, infesting shipboard rates, were brought to Europe from Asia on Italian merchant vessels, and from Italy the disease spread rapidly throughout Europe, eventually wiping out a third of the population of the continent, with major economic consequences. The rise of the middle class was a probable outcome of the Black Plague, resulting from an increased demand for labor consequent to the massive drop in the population. Currently, antibiotic treatment, if given early, is highly effective in treating bubonic plague, although it is still a greatly feared disease.

The epidemiology of the disease was unknown in medieval times and plague was believed to spread directly between humans. This is rarely the case, but such beliefs led to attempts to isolate plague victims (living and dead) from the unaffected population, a step which had only limited success as the fleas obviously did not always cooperate with these arrangements. However, it was noted that the disease was less frequent in the Jewish quarters of the cities of Europe, possibly due to the fact that the Jewish areas were generally isolated, and also perhaps because Jewish law required washing of the hands before eating and after using the bathroom, as well as bathing in a mikveh (ritual bath) before Shabbat for men, and after menstruation for women, and especially because of the Halakhic requirement that dead bodies had to be thoroughly washed, thus contributing towards the removal of infected fleas from the immediate environment. The fact that the Jews were affected less than the rest of the population aroused anti-Semitic ire, and there were repeated accusations that the Jews were causing the disease by “poisoning the wells”, with resultant persecution and slaughter of Jews throughout Europe, of which the massacres in Erfurt, Basel, Aragon, Flanders and Strasbourg are the most well-known. In all, it is believed that some five hundred Jewish communities were destroyed during the period of the “Black Death” There were, however, some voices to the contrary, especially that of Pope Clement VI (Pierre Roger) who issued two papal bulls condemning Catholics who blamed the Jews for the plague, stating that they had been “seduced by that liar, the Devil”, and including in the bulls a plea to the Catholic clergy to protect the Jews. This entreaty was apparently without much effect, partly because Charles IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, gave civic authorities a financial incentive for ignoring the attacks on the Jews by making the property of Jews killed in the riots forfeit to the local jurisdictions.


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