journal of law, religion and state 8 (2020) 152-178 brill.com/jlrs Plague, Practice, and Prescriptive Text Jewish Traditions on Fleeing Afflicted Cities in Early Modern Ashkenaz Moshe Dovid Chechik* Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel
[email protected] Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg** Harvard Society of Fellows, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
[email protected] Abstract This article studies the fate of a contradiction between practice and prescriptive text in 16th-century Ashkenaz. The practice was fleeing a plagued city, which contradicted a Talmudic passage requiring self-isolation at home when plague strikes. The emergence of this contradiction as a halakhic problem and its various forms of resolution are ana- lyzed as a case study for the development of halakhic literature in early modern Ashkenaz. The Talmudic text was not considered a challenge to the accepted practice prior to the early modern period. The conflict between practice and Talmud gradually emerged as a halakhic problem in 15th-century rabbinic sources. These sources mixed legal and non-legal material, leaving the status of this contradiction ambiguous. The 16th cen- tury saw a variety of solutions to the problem in different halakhic writings, each with their own dynamics, type of authority, possibilities, and limitations. This variety re- flects the crystallization of separate genres of halakhic literature. * Moishe Dovid Chechik is a historian of halakha in Medieval Ashkenaz. He re ceived his ma cum laude at the Talmud Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His thesis won the Polonski Prize for originality and creativity. He is currently writing his PhD at the Hebrew University, where he won the Dean’s Fellowship for outstanding students.