Professor Susan Einbinder Speaks at the Humanities Institute

Humanities Institute Fellow and Professor of Hebrew & Judaic Studies and Comparative Literature and Susan Einbinder took the podium at the Humanities Institute on Thursday, February 25th to discuss her work related to trauma in medieval Jewish communities. Professor Einbinder offered an analysis of poetic epitaphs inscribed onto a number of giant gravestones dating from the years 1349-50 in Toledo, Spain. These stones marked the graves of important and wealthy Jewish citizens of the Kingdom of Castille, some of whom were casualties of the mid-XIV century plague of the Black Death. Einbinder explained that these epitaphs, whose verses are engraved in such a way as to compel the reader to circumambulate the graves in the act of contemplation, are among the non-traditional sources she is currently working with in examining the medieval context through the lens of trauma studies. Noting that these particular gravestones are unique among Jewish burial markers, Professor Einbinder says of these material remains and inscriptions they bear that, in short, “this genre poses problems.” The stones adorn only the graves of upper-class and otherwise noteworthy people, and the epitaphs are careful to omit embarrassing details of the lives of the privilaged deceased that they describe – they leave much unsaid about the more general climate in which they were created. Their poetics demonstrate little originality, and their repetition of traditional clichés underlines a sense that the engravings contribute little towards an understanding of the lives of ordinary Spanish Jews in the medieval era. Nevertheless, Einbinder asserted, the absolute absence in these epitaphs of allusions to violence against Jewish people during the Black Death – signs of which are unmistakeable in material remains found elsewhere in Spain – may provide evidence of the peaceful coexistence of the Christian and Jewish faiths in XIV century Castille.

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