Order in Crisis: Jewish Relief Workers during the Prague Plague of 1713

Abstract:In the autumn of 1713, as plague ravaged the city of Prague, the offices of the Habsburg monarchy drafted a list of the salaries of Jews working to ameliorate conditions within the Prague ghetto, which the monarchy had sealed off from the rest of the city. The list reveals the state of plague response in this premodern Jewish ghetto—of barbers, nurses, care for the sick and the dead, as well as study and prayer—and its financial cost to the community. The production and archival maintenance of the list may also hint at the tensions between Jewish self-governance and state administration. Its creation, an act of budgeting and good order, may not simply have been the product of Jewish compliance with Habsburg record-keeping, but may even have been a barter of information on paper for practical non-interference in affairs of the Jewish community.