Plague, Jews and Fascist Anti-Semites: ‘The Great Incurable Malady’

Abstract

In her small but influential book Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag observes how plague is perceived as a disease which afflicts a whole community not, like cancer or tuberculosis, as a force which isolates and sets the individual aside from society.¹ This perception is rooted in plague’s historical and cultural legacy, as much as stemming from a specific symptom profile. Each different disease carries its set of unique meanings, forged from the official and unofficial responses they provoke, and these associations become even more complex when the disease in question, like plague, has a mysterious aetiology for those it afflicts. As Sontag outlines:

Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning — that meaning being invariably a moralistic one. Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance. First, the subjects of deepest dread (corruption, decay, pollution, anomie, weakness) are identified with the disease. Then, in the name of the disease (that is, using it as a metaphor), that horror is imposed on other things. The disease becomes adjectival.