Quarantine in the Prague Ghetto
Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations of Saint Joseph’s University
Large Lapsley Room, Haub Executive Suite
5th Floor of McShain Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19131
Quarantine in the Prague Ghetto: Jewish-Christian Relations in a Time of Plague
Update: video of this program is available here.
When plague ravaged the city of Prague in 1713, claiming the lives of a third of its inhabitants, Christian authorities designed drastic measures to limit its spread, many of which targeted the Jewish population as particularly suspect. This lecture will explore how natural disaster heightened existing concerns about difference, and how neighbors of different faiths still found ways of cooperating despite official disapproval—points that are as salient as ever in our age of interreligious strife and new threats of global contagion.
Featuring
Joshua Teplitsky
University of Pennsylvania
Joshua Teplitsky is the Joseph Meyerhoff Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History and the Ruth Meltzer Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Penn. His research focuses on the history of Jewish life in early modern Central Europe within the wider context of Jewish/Christian interaction and minority experience. He is also a codirector of the digital humanities project, “Footprints: Jewish Books through Time and Place.” This ongoing collaborative project traces the movement of Jewish books between 1450 and 1800.
Teplitsky received his Ph.D. in Hebrew and Judaic studies from NYU in 2012.
Cosponsors
