Review of Junk-style unoriginal pseudo-history   John Kelly - The Great Mortality .. BLACK DEATH

Trivial book which is little more than a series of copied anecdotes 11 Sept 2013

16 May 2023: Article on non-existent stats is The Black Death ... killed 50% of the population (or perhaps none). Good run-through. To be compared with the next item, looking at actual words from the time ... or at least sources ...

26 August 2022: I noted Unwin Books no 21 is the title Johanned Nohl THE BLACK DEATH. I've never seen this book, but archive.org has a partial copy, which says its English translation is abridged. Unwin Books of course was a Jewish propaganda source, so it's very likely this book was listed as a counter to lingering doubts around Jews and the Black Death.
      Johannes Nohl appears to have lived 1882-1963, and survived WW2; my best guess is that he was a Jew who moved east into 'Communist' Germany.
      The Black Death. A chronicle of the plague from 1348 to 1720. Using contemporary sources. Kiepenheuer, Potsdam 1924.
      Translated from Nohl's own introduction, according to Unwin Books:
      Of more modern authors I have referred particularly to the following: J. F. E. Hecker ('The Black Death in the Fourteenth Century', Berlin, 1832), Georg Sticker ('The Plague', Giessen, 1908-1910), Wilhelm Sahm ('History of the Plague in East Prussia', Leipzig, 1905), Hermann Schoeppler ('History of the Plague at Regensburg', 1914), Heino Pfannenschmidt ('Contribution to the History of the German and Dutch Flagellants', Leipzig, 1900), Paul Runge ('Songs of the Flagellants', 1900), Paul Gaffarel et Marquis de Durant ('La Peste de 1720 a Marseille', Paris, 1911).

21 June 2020: Andrew Joyce piece, below

27 Oct 2018: I found the site of Jorma Jormakka, which includes a good piece on the absence of plague in Poland. I've placed it below; Click to find it.


2005 book by Kelly which has almost nothing to recommend it. There are trots through accounts of various towns and cities and people, but of course records are sparse and there's no evidence Kelly made any attempt to identify sources or point out where information comes from, or how detail might be filled in deductively. I don't think he even refers to the problems of the calendar.

The medical stuff is inconsistent: sometimes victims have 'buboes' in glands in their neck, groin, whatever; sometimes they're covered with infections. Sometimes they die, sometimes they (for example, people digging graves and hefting corpses around) unaccountably live. Ships full of dead sailors manage to sail into ports. There seem to be no accounts of people bitten by fleas, despite this being the supposed transmission method. Some apparently serious research which puts the death rate much lower than (perhaps) alarmist accounts is simply swept aside.

DNA analysis in late 2020 of remains of slaves suggests some showed sign of Yaws, which seems to be a disease of tropical (i.e. hot) parts of the world. This seems to be similar to syphilis. Possibly the Jew owners of slave ships had a policy of including sick slaves, presumably not to sell, but as biological warfare agents. - RW

Picturesque or sensational detail rules, with no attempt at assessment. How important, for example, were 'the flagellants'? It's a sort of National Enquirer view of history. Conversely, the possibilities of food contamination, or some novel poison conveyed deliberately or otherwise along trade routes, or what have you, are underplayed—surely a bit unreasonably in a book of its title.

It's typical of the oddity and/or overwhelming Jewish propaganda of our times that Jews are focussed on: maybe half Europe died, but Kelly comments on Jews. Interestingly, it seems highly possible that Jews were responsible perhaps for poisoning people, or poisoning wells, or otherwise spreading disease; Kelly's map at the beginning shows almost no deaths in the eastern European area, for example. Such material, for example of a Jew asked to distribute poison, must have been censored by Kelly. And it's well known now, when Jewish junk US academics state openly how desirable white extermination would be, that Jews largely have that outlook, and in the superstitious days of the Middle Ages would presumably have held it more strongly.

I'd like to suggest a project: look at the evidence for outbreaks; correlate them with other historical events, for example in Rome when Jewish writings were being forced into Rome; or about 1666, when Jews were forcing Cromwell and the (((Bank of England))) into London. If plague, or plagues, was something to do with the lymphatic system, some method(s) for spreading plague might be identifiable. As a relatively easy introduction, I'd suggest Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes, which were first published in 1768-1771, and European medical publications, and (if you read German) Eisenmenger. These perhaps may have been free from Jewish editorial control. Articles in any case list books in Italian, German, Greek and so on, many of which are claimed to be detailed surveys and/or eye-witness summaries. In view of 20th century Jewish viciousness I'd expect serious evidence to be discoverable or rediscoverable. [Note added 1 March 2018]

Amusingly, Kelly takes 'the AIDS virus' seriously, and, also amusingly, compares the deaths with the 'flu epidemic' after the First World War (when huge numbers of deaths due to weakness, starvation, lack of care, lack of medical materials and cleanliness, were routinely ascribed to influenza). Connoisseurs of crap will be amused also that he compares parts of Black Death Europe to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Kelly has endnotes, but no bibliography, and judging by the acknowledgements, must have been pretty much instructed what to read, or more likely what passages to quote from. He seems to have had no special methodology, to e.g. trace the way the accounts of the 'Black Death' (and its relatively late name). I doubt if the books listed (incidentally one is by Norman Cohn) form a useful guide.

I would guess this book was an attempt at a routine update, maybe of once-famous books, popular in their time; perhaps Zinsser's Rats, Lice and History (1935) and maybe Ziegler's Black Death (first published 1969, I think). The time separation seems about right. It occurs to me that Zinnser and Ziegler may have intentionally distracted from biological warfare implications in Europe in the past.


This is from Andrew Joyce in the Occidental Observer June 21 2020-
Most interesting among the self-sacrificial acts of the past are, in my opinion, that of the flagellants of the Black Death, derisively and scathingly labelled “the gashers” by the Jewish historian Ben-Zion Dinur. The masochistic flagellants, officially known as “Brethren of the Cross,” or “Brotherhood of the Flagellants,” were radical lay Catholics of both sexes (segregated in processions) who first made a major impact in thirteenth-century Germany during the Black Death. Travelling from town to town, they would hold prayers meetings and processions that would culminate in a massive spectacle where they would whip their flesh until the blood flowed, seeking, through this form of self-sacrifice, to avert a broader national calamity.

Although initially supported by the Church, it soon became clear the flagellants were anti-establishment dissidents in every respect. They rejected the authority of priests and clerics, who were regarded by the flagellants as sunk in sin and therefore intrinsic to the problem. The flagellants rejected the Eucharist, asserting that their blood sacrifice was a more authentic communion with Christ. Finally, they revealed their role as populist social revolutionaries by turning against all established elites, including the very wealthy, the nobility, the city leaders and, most interesting of all, the Jews. In fact, everywhere the flagellants went a violent reaction against the Jews followed. In Frankfurt, in July 1349, the flagellants stormed the Jewish neighborhood themselves, and set it on fire. Occasionally, such as in Mainz, when the Jews heard the flagellants were nearing a town or city, the Jews would launch a pre-emptive assault on Christians, with one chronicler reporting the Jews of Mainz slaughtered 200 Christians before the flagellants finally entered and eliminated the Jewish population. Unsurprisingly, the flagellants were quickly denounced as heretics by the existing elite power structure, and were ruthlessly suppressed to extinction throughout Europe.

Note: 'Andrew Joyce' doesn't seem to consider that the flagellants may have been a psy-op, funded by Jews, to blackwash the belief that Jews took part in spreading disease. Set them up, then abandon the once they'd been useful.


Why Did the Black Death Miss Poland?

by Jorma Jormakka, February 15, 2018 In Messianic plan

This is taken verbatim from
http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2018/02/15/why-the-black-death-omitted-poland/

This is the website of Jorma Jormakka in Finland (Docent of Aalto University, Department of Communications and Networks).

His short CV is here: http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/short_cv_jj.pdf

pieni salaliitto tutkimus translates roughly as the small conspiracy trial

Let’s go to the Black Death. It spread to almost whole of Europe. Everybody knows from the school that the Black Death was spread by black rats. Rats have fleas and fleas spread the disease. We also know that in the Middle Ages people blamed the Jews for spreading the disease, but that was wrong since the disease was spread by rats.

How did the teacher know all this?

It is an explanation, which came to be accepted as a fact, but it may not be a fact. The explanation was developed from observations how the plague spread in our time. The third plague pandemic started in the 19th century and it still continues. In this pandemic plague is spread by fleas of black rats. The disease spread word wide from Hong Kong by rats. The actual mechanism was carefully studied: not all fleas spread the plague. The black rats have fleas which react to the plague bacteria Yersinia pestis in a special way. When a flea drinks blood from an infected rat, the bacteria creates a blockade in the guts of the flea. Then the flea vomits infected blood to the next victim that it sucks. Other flea species do not have this reaction and therefore fleas of gray rats do not spread the plague. When the gray rat largely replaced the black rat in Europe, plague epidemics disappeared.

This was a good and reasonable explanation, but starting around 2000 some researchers started questioning it. At that time it was already possible to get DNA snippets from remains of people, who died of the plague in the past. The problem with the above given explanation is that it takes 30 days from the time that the flea drinks infected blood to the formation of the blockade when the flea starts to infect others. Comparison of the speed how fast the third pandemic spreads and how fast the Black Death, the second pandemic, spread, shows clearly that the Black Death spread very fast and much faster that what the formation of the blockade required.

Later it has been found that fleas may also infect directly before the blockade forms, but this alternative method of infection does not change the conclusion that the Black Death probably did not spread because of rats. This is so since the alternative way of infection is as possible today as it was in the Middle Ages. Today rats spread the disease slowly and mainly by the blockade method if infection. The same must have been true in the 14th century, unless the method of transmission of the disease was different or the disease was different. There were proposals that the disease causing the Black Death was not plague, but since 2010 it is known for sure that it was Yersinia pestis and there were two different clones of the bacteria [1]. Additionally, it is known that the Justinian plague was also Yersinia pestis and the different clones. A clone tree has been constructed in [1]. The two clones that caused the Black Death were ancestors of modern strains of plague. They are on the paths to the two main strains of modern plague. Neither one of the two main strains of plague differs in the way rats and fleas spread the disease, thus the transmission mechanism via rats and fleas was the same for the plague clones of the Black Death as they are today. This implies that if the Black Death was caused by rats and fleas, it would have spread with the same speed as the third pandemic spreads today. The conclusion is that it was not spread by rats and fleas.

The plague can spread by air, but medieval descriptions of the symptoms do not support this possibility. Symptoms fit to plague carried by fleas. The fleas had to be fleas of rats since human fleas do not develop the blockade. Now comes the puzzle: how can humans get rat fleas without being close to infected rats? It is not a very difficult puzzle. One documented way is that a merchant sends a pile of textile to a town and in the pile are live fleas, which infect the town. Fleas stay alive in textile for a long time. They get very hungry and jump on people, who touch the textile. This case happened in England in the time of the Black Death. Practically all town people died. The pile of textile was sent from Continental Europe. Clearly, in this case the plague was not carried by rats.

Another way to get these fleas is that people put on clothes of those, who had died in plague. This is also based on a document, but the event happened somewhere around 1750, it still belonged to the second pandemic of plague. This is told in the Words of the Lord by Jacob Frank [2]. It is a collection of saying and stories of the Jewish messiah Jacob Frank.

“47. Traveling with Jakubowski from Salonika to Poland, there prevailed at that time a pestilence in Podolia. We came to one township where the plague was felling the people, and we lacked food, wine, bread, cheese etc. Then remembering that from those contaminated with plague one does not take money, I told him the opposite, You go there, purchase everything but don’t give them money. He did just that. He came to the baker, bargained for bread, put it in his sack, but when he had to pay the baker fell down and died. He went to the shopkeeper where he bargained for cheese. He put the cheese away and the shopkeeper died. He went on to the store to buy vodka. The same happened with the owner. In a word, just wherever he went he bought everything without money, because the plague was sweeping the sellers away. Coming [back] then to me, where I was waiting for him, a rider on horseback knocked him down with his horse. What are you doing? shouted Jakubowski? Are you going to ride right over me! He didn’t even finish saying it when the rider toppled over and fell to the ground. This is how it is. I did all this because it was promised to me that no plague, nothing at all, could get at me. Therefore all my orders were carried out successfully by the hand of the one whom I assigned, and so should you be.”

This is quite clear. Frank told his men to rob everything from people, who have plague, and to sell it further consciously spreading the plague. This way of transmission would have spread the Black Death as fast as is documented. Of course now you present objections. Maybe Frank was just inventing a story. Why would Frank not have done what he tells? He was a Jewish king messiah and the task of the king messiah is to lead the people to the homeland and to kill and enslave their enemies, meaning Christians for cabbalists such as Frank. To propose that Frank would not have intentionally spread the plague is the same as to propose that guerillas are not intentionally killing people and destroying bridges. That is exactly what they try to do. In his youth Jacob Frank was the leader of a band of robbers. Then he invented that he is the messiah. His sect was excommunicated from Judaism because of rumors that Frankists practiced the night of turned of lights rite, where you change wives and have sex. It is extremely likely that they did so. Frankists converted to the Catholic fait but were found insincere and plotting.

The case of the first division of Poland is interesting and I suspect Frank had a role in it. Frank predicts the division in [2]. One of the three planners of this division was Frederic the Great of Prussia. He was the head of German Freemasonry. Frankists had close connections to Freemasons. When Jacob Frank and a large number of Frankists converted to Christianity, they got noble ranks and the right to vote because of a Lithuanian rule that if a Jew converts to Christianity he immediately gets a noble rank (because they were treated as rich half-nobles even before conversion). In the Polish voting system no decision could be made without a unanimous support from nobles. This means that Jacob Frank could disable Polish military decisions if he so desired. The term Baalakaben in [2] apparently means Freemasons. According to [2], Frank got orders from Baalakaben and did nothing without their order. Frederic the Great could have ordered Frank to disable Poland. Maybe he did not do so, but why not?

Jacob Frank thought he was the biblical Jacob. It is fitting, since Jacob is the crook and so was Frank. In the same way Jesus was Messiah ben Joseph. That means, he was like Joseph, who is thrown to a well and thought to have died, but raises to be the second man next to the living god, the Pharaoh. Any person thinking he is Messiah ben David, the king messiah, is also like Moses. That means that he should cast ten curses against the enemies. Practical cabbalists, like Jacob Frank, were no Talmud scholars. They knew biblical stories of patriarchs and exodus and applied these stories to themselves. Frank lived much after the Black Death, but there were earlier practical cabbalists who had messiah aspirations. Could any one of them had done the same as Frank, consciously spreading plague? Of course they could have, but are there proofs of it?

So far I have mentioned only one proof: the speed of the spreading of the Black Death implies that it was not spread by rats. I gave a very possible explanation how it could have been spread.

The second proof is that according to [1] there were two different clones of plague in the Black Death. One of them can be tracked from Crimea through Italy to France and to England. This clone derives from the bodies that Turks threw over city walls in Crimea. Notice, the disease transmission was by catapults and not by rats. Rats are not always guilty. The second clone is mysterious. It appears in the Netherlands. It might have got there from Norway or from Hansa towns, only how did it get to Norway or to Hansa towns? Plague is not endemic in higher latitudes. Even if the second clone did come from Norway or Hansa towns, how did it happen to come at the same time as the other unrelated plague clone? In reality, what [1] is saying is that there were two pandemics of plague at the same time. That stretches imagination: two unrelated rare events happened at the same time. The natural conclusion is that one or both of the clones were introduced to Europe on purpose by humans.

The third proof has finally something to do with the topic of this post. Why the Black Death did not spread to Poland? There were three areas where the disease did not spread: one was in the Basque land in the Pyrenees between Spain and France, the second one was around Milan in Italy, and the third one was almost whole of Poland.

Milan was protected by strict guarantee rules: people with symptoms were not allowed to enter the city gates and infected people, who were found from the city, were immured in their homes. Plague devastated Milan just ten years later, so the city did not have any natural protection and guarantee rules do not help very long.

The Basque country actually has protection from the mountains and from population, which may be quite hostile to outsiders. This area even managed to keep the old language. If any area in Europe avoided the Black Death, it is not strange that it would be this area.

Then there is Poland. The plague went around Poland and affected Russia. There are no natural barriers that can stop the plague from spreading to Poland and later epidemics reached Poland. The king of Poland imposed rules on the borders, but if the plague was spread by rate it could not be stopped by rules: rats ignore the rules. If the plague was not spread by rats, then we have to ask how it was spread and why it did not spread to Poland. When the Black Death started in 1346 Jews had been expelled from Wales (1290), England (1290). In France Jews were expelled in 1306 and 1321 but they returned and only 1396 they were completely expelled. The expulsion affected Jews of northern and central France. Jews of Provence were expelled later, in 1430. In Germany Jews were accused of spreading the Black Death, there were local persecutions and expulsion in 1348. Expelled German Ashkenazi Jews resettled to Poland. Hungarian Jews were expelled in 1349 and they also resettled in Poland. Crimean Jews were expelled in 1350. They resettled to Lithuania. The Sephardic Jewish communities in Spain, Portugal, Provence, Sardinia and Sicily were expelled only in the end of the next century. Italian Jews were expelled in the 16th century

Jews were accused of spreading the Black Death first in Toulon, France (1348), then in Barcelona (1348), then in Erfurt, Germany (1349), Basel, Switzerland (1349), Freiburg, Aragon, Flanders and Strasbourg. The reasons for these persecutions seem to have been that Jews were less affected by the plague.

One explanation given for lower Jewish infection rate is that Jews were cleaner. They were obliged to wash hands and many washed their body weekly. The Black Death was bubonic plague and spread by fleas. Fleas are not so removed by washing hands or body weekly. The best protection at that time was from flea saunas, but plague spread even to areas where people went to saunas. The Jewish custom of washing a dead body before burial would have exposed them to fleas. These kinds of explanations are not correct. The different infection ratio of Jews and non-Jews must reflect different exposure to the bacteria. Jews and Christians had different wells. A natural conclusion at that time was that Christians got the plague from their wells. Consequently, Jews were accused of having poisoned the wells. Now we know that cholera is spread by water but plague is spread by fleas. Wells were not the source of plague. As the source of fleas was not rats, it must have been goods, like clothes, that were obtained from people, who had plague. What Jacob Frank tells in his sayings sounds very probable.

Jews of Toulon in Provence and Barcelona in Aragon would usually have been Sephardic, while in German speaking areas (Erfurt, Basel, Freiburg, Strasbourg) and in Dutch speaking Belgium (Flanders) the Jewish communities would have been Ashkenazi. The distinction between Sephardic and Ashkenazi does not seem important. What seems more relevant is that all these areas there were cabbalistic Jews. Early cabbalism has two roots: German practical cabbalism and Spanish theoretical cabbalism, meaning roughly curses and spells versus Zohar. This division is not of the type that is would separate cabbalists to two groups. There was only one group: Messianic cabbalism. Jacob Frank was a perfect representative of this group. Jews, who moved from Germany to Poland, included cabbalists. In the later centuries these German Jews expanded to the large Eastern European Ashkenazi community, and among them the cabbalistic tradition continued, and it still continues in Hasidism.

Jews in the above mentioned towns were accused of spreading the Black Death. Were they accused as believers in the established religion of Judaism, which at that time was based on the teachings in the Torah, the Prophets, the Talmud and the Tosafot, or were they accused as members of a new sect: cabbalists or zoharists, Zohar not being older than 62 years when the Black Death started. A new Messianic and occult sect is not above suspicions.

So, what is the answer to the question in the topic? King of Poland welcomed Jews when they were expelled in many countries. The Black Death omitted Poland. There may not be any connection between these two facts. As always, there is no way to prove anything in history in the same sense as what is understood as a proof in exact fields. History is a story and it is propaganda. Somebody decides that let us blame the Black Death on rats. And so it will be and questioning it is forbidden.

References:

[1] S. Haensh et al., Distinct Clones of Yersinia pestis Caused the Black Death, 2010, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951374/

[2] Full text of Collection of the Words of the Lord by Jacob Frank.
https://archive.org/stream/TheCollectionOfTheWordsOfTheLordJacobFrank/TheCollectionOfTheWordsOfTheLordJacobFrank_djvu.txt

-Added by Rae West   11 Feb 2021 from an archive copy I think Sept 2020.