The Cholera Wedding

And other scenes from Jewish modernity

Welcome, creatures! This is just a book note.

I recently finished Natan M. Meir’s 2020 Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800 – 1939. It’s about the ways that marginalized and oppressed communities create their own margins, and how they understand the people who live on those margins. It’s also, centrally, about the coming of the modern era: an age of science, institutionalization, strength and the idolatry of strength; an age of newspapers and nostalgia, the dawn of traditionalism in the twilight of tradition.

There’s very little evidence of how people in the vanished world of the shtetl (the Eastern European Jewish village) treated their poorest or strangest members. Meir relies on fictional accounts and post-Holocaust remembrance books as well as contemporary statistics and reports, but also, contemporary statistics and reports incorporate their own biases, so we’re all just groping in the dark here. I don’t have a real thesis to present about the book, so I will just offer some scattered notes; if they intrigue you, you should definitely check out the work itself. Among other things, it’s a reflection on whether madness*, disability, and begging are distortions of the human condition or in some way distillations of what it means to be human—to be mortals.

* Meir notes that he often but not always uses premodern terms like “madness,” in order to preserve the categories his sources recognized. He does hint that a lot of what was called madness, especially in the later period of the study, was PTSD.

# One of this book’s narrative arcs is very similar to the arc of Poor Relief in England, 1350 – 1600. That book explores the changing legal and social approaches to beggars before, during, and just after the English Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries. I wrote up my take on Poor Relief here so I’ll just say that it was interesting to see the same trajectory at the other end of Europe, three centuries later: the increased suspicion that many beggars are just lazy (what in England were called “sturdy beggars,” definitely the name of my next band), the increased pressure to institutionalize and regulate the poor.

Both books are also about a period of population growth in spite of (in England) poor harvests and (for the Jews) pogroms and expulsions. I don’t know enough to draw real conclusions from that fact, but I will say it’s easy to talk about “modernity” as a bunch of ideas and I wonder if it is also a pattern of adjustment to population increases.

The premodern way often left people in more unstable conditions, but the modern way was more judgmental and punitive, and less free. The premodern world invested poor people with supernatural power—their prayers were more powerful than the prayers of the comfortable. The modern way is more concerned with eliminating poverty and other forms of suffering. Modern attempts at amelioration lacked both the open cruelty of some of the old ways (Meir describes how better-off Jewish families would sometimes treat the local hostel for the poor and disabled as a freak show for their Sabbath entertainment) and the hints of awe.

The subjects of Meir’s study stood, in the eyes of the larger community, on the borderland shared by life and death. A lot of the book is about that tilting perspective in which those seen by the community as less than fully human also bear some power that is more than merely human.

# Maybe the most striking example of this is the cholera wedding. Cholera devastated the shtetls multiple times—in part because, you’ll understand why I make this point, Jewish communities mistrusted doctors and believed modern medicine to be an opponent of their religion and way of life. Cholera only came to the Pale of Settlement in the modern age, and Meir argues that the “cholera wedding,” though presented as a venerable tradition, was a modern innovation.

For a cholera wedding you get the ugliest, poorest man and woman you can find and you take them to the cemetery, where you marry them to one another, whether they like it or not. Sometimes this was explained as an act of charity, which would please the Lord and cause Him to spare the community further suffering. Meir is fair to that perspective but builds a stronger case that this is a scapegoat ritual, although no specific harm is done to the couple beyond, you know, the humiliation and forced marriage.

# The cholera wedding touches on two differences between the Jewish transition to modernity and the Christian. One is that premodern Jewish ways didn’t really have, afaik, an alternative to marriage. Marriage, and the difficulty of life if you can’t marry, come up again and again in Meir’s book; marriage is life, it is membership, it is humanity. For Christians this is closer to the Reformation or modern worldview than to the premodern world of monasteries and (in the West) the celibate priesthood and the mendicant orders.

And Jews were already defined by the Christians around them as embodiments of weakness, disease, beggary, and death. There was therefore extra pressure to cast these elements out, both out of the community and out of one’s own internal sense of self. Meir opens with a quotation from the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld, describing an editor’s reaction to a short story he wrote featuring a “retarded child” named Bertha, a beggar with “something magic in her blood.”

“And the editor said, what are you trying here, why Bertha? We came to Israel to forget Bertha.”

Meir describes all the reasons Jewish escapees wanted to forget the days when they were defined as a nation of Berthas. But his book is an attempt neither to forget nor to fetishize her: neither to treat her as a magic talisman of Jewish identity, nor to dismiss her as an unfortunate accident on the way to the prosperous and healthy future. Meir sees the beauty as well as the cruelty in the old mystical view of the marginalized person. He cites queer theory a couple of times; there is a mysticism of the freakish, which is sour consolation for oppression but also makes possible a powerful critique that normalcy is constituted by its unacknowledged lack. But ultimately he hopes to restore to his subjects not their premodern mystery, but their common humanity.

Jewish beggar at the Wailing Wall reading via jenikirbyhistory/Picryl under a Creative Commons license.