conspiracy to have spread the plague via well-poisoning. But facts still don’t slow down conspiracy theories, and the long history of anti-Semitism in Europe predisposed people to believing in even the most absurd stories of poisoning. Pope Clement VI pointed out, “It cannot be true that the Jews . . . are the cause or occasion of the plague, because through many parts of the world the same plague . . . afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them.” Still, in many communities, the torture and murder continued, and anti-Semitic ideas about secret international conspiracies proliferated.
That is a human story. It is human in a crisis not just to blame marginalized people, but to kill them.
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But to say that times of plague only bring out the bestial and diabolical side of human nature is too simplistic. It seems to me that we are making up “human nature” as we go along. “Very little in history is inevitable,” Margaret Atwood wrote. To accept the demonization of the marginalized as inevitable is to give up on the whole human enterprise. What happened to the Jewish residents of Stuttgart and Lansberg and so many other places was not inevitable. It was a choice.
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Amid the horrors of the Black Death, Ibn Battuta tells us a story of people coming together in the city of Damascus. He says that people fasted for three consecutive days, then “assembled in the Great Mosque until it was filled to overflowing . . . and spent the night there in prayers. . . . After the dawn prayers the next morning, they all went out together on foot, holding Qurans in their hands, and the amirs barefoot. The procession was joined by the entire population of the town, men and women, small and large; the Jews came with their Book of the Law and the Christians with their Gospel, all of them with their women and children. The whole concourse, weeping and seeking the favor of God through His books and His prophets, made their way to the Mosque of the Footprints, and there they remained in supplication and invocation until near midday. They then returned to the city and held the Friday service, and God lightened their affliction.”
In Ibn Battuta’s story, even the powerful went barefoot in a statement of equality, and all the people came together in prayer regardless of their religious background. Of course, whether this mass gathering really slowed the spread of the plague in Damascus is unclear—but we see in this account that crisis does not always bring out the cruelty within us. It can also push us toward sharing our pains and hopes and prayers, and treating each other as equally human. And when we respond that way, perhaps the affliction is lightened. While it is human nature to blame and demonize others in miserable times, it is also human nature to walk together, the leaders as barefoot as the followers.
The residents of Damascus left us a model for how to live in this precedented now. As the poet Robert Frost put it, “The only way out is through.” And the only good way through is together. Even when circumstances separate us—in fact, especially when they do—the way through is together.
I am highly suspicious of attempts to brightside human suffering, especially suffering that—as in the case of almost all infectious diseases—is unjustly distributed. I’m not here to criticize other people’s hope, but personally, whenever I hear someone waxing poetic about the silver linings to all these clouds, I think about a wonderful poem by Clint Smith called “When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before.’” The poem begins, “all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones / of those who did not make it.” As in Ibn Battuta’s Damascus, the only path forward is true solidarity—not only in hope, but also in lamentation.
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My daughter recently observed that when it’s winter, you think it will never again be warm, and when it’s summer, you think it will never again be cold. But the seasons go on changing anyway, and nothing that we know of is forever—not even this.
Plague is a one-star phenomenon, of course, but our response to it need not be.
WINTRY MIX
THERE’S A KAVEH AKBAR POEM that begins, “it’s been January for months in both directions,” and it really has been. I can remember in the abstract how it feels to wear a T-shirt, to feel