judaism and health

The debate that began in the eighteenth century over the emancipation
and integration of the Jews into the modern nation-state was infused
with the language of medicine and science. The historical reconstruction
of “the Jewish Question,” as the debate over Jewish integration
came to be called, tends to focus on the negative representation of Jews
and Judaism. For even the most sympathetic advocates of Jewish legal
and civic equality, individuals such as Christian Wilhelm von Dohm in
Germany and the Abb´e Gr´egoire in France, conceded that the Jews were
degenerate and diseased – even if such terms were used as much in the
moral as in the physical sense.7 Judaism was inferior, the cause, together
with Christian oppression and persecution, of the contemporary degeneracy
of the Jews. Emancipation and integration would, so it was argued,
free the Jews of the negative influences of both rabbinism and Christian

oppression. The transcendence of both traditional religion and historical
experience would produce a healthy Jew. This was a view held by Gentile
advocates of Jewish emancipation and also by a significant proportion
of Jewish elites who entered into these debates.
The interpretive tradition I analyze in this book is different in significant
ways from the emancipatory discourse that emerged in the late
eighteenth century around the question of Jewish civic rights and the
place of the Jews in the newly emerging nation-state. The story of Moses
and hygiene that grows in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is, I
argue, a repudiation, at least implicitly, of the idea that the Jews and
Judaism are degenerate and that they require Europe to civilize them. As
we shall see, the thrust of the discourse explored here is that the Jews
were civilized thousands of years ago; they helped to civilize Europe; and
they could be of assistance again if Christians would only follow the
Jewish model of preventive medicine. While the anti-Semitic image of
“the dirty Jew” is well known, it is not so well known that an alternative
set of images circulated of a clean and healthy Jewry, living amidst the
dirt and disease of European Christendom.
Moreover, the interpretive tradition of Moses and hygiene was a
response to, and a transcendence of, the Enlightenment’s thinking about
Egypt and Israel, Europe and the Jews, “civilization” and Judaism. The
Enlightenment repudiated what Jan Assmann has called the “Mosaic
distinction,” the notion that “Israel embodies truth, Egypt symbolizes
darkness and error. Egypt loses its historical reality and is turned into
an inverted image of Israel. Israel is the negation of Egypt, and Egypt
stands for all that Israel has overcome.” One of the central components
of the Enlightenment’s arsenal, Assmann argues, was the “deconstructive
memory” that challenged this Mosaic distinction.8
If, as is well known, the primary target for Voltaire and others was
the Church, Jews and Judaism were nonetheless objects of ridicule and
hostility. But “the Enlightenment,” of course, was hardly a monolithic
movement, and the ideas and opinions generated by philosophers and
publicists about Jewry were varied and complex. Enlightenment thinkers
were profoundly ambivalent about Judaism and Jews.9 Though Jewish
history and religion could not be tolerated, a philosophy rooted in notions
of universal tolerance could not articulate a principled intolerance of
Jews. Philosophes used Judaism to articulate key ideas, but they could

never either fully repudiate Jews and Judaism, or integrate them into their
own visions of an ideal society. What is relevant here is the emergence
within Enlightenment thought of an “originary” Judaism,10 a Judaism
believed to be equivalent to natural religion that had not been corrupted
by priests and useless ceremonies. This originary Judaism was
contrasted with papal Christianity, and also with rabbinic and contemporary
Judaism. As Adam Sutcliffe has persuasively demonstrated, thinkers
such as John Toland and Voltaire, among others, posited an ancient purified
“Judaism” that was later negated by degenerate Jews and Judaism.
Moses, in this view, was an Egyptian, and all true wisdom derived from
Egypt and Chaldea. The purity laws and other barbaric superstitions
(like circumcision) associated with Moses were in fact introduced by the
cultic priests, and were the surest sign of Jewish degeneracy.11 This held
true as well for many Maskilim or Jewish enlighteners, who believed
that Jewish religious rituals and customs were in large measure responsible
for whatever physical and mental ills plagued their co-religionists.
As John Efron has argued with regard to the eighteenth-century Jewish
physician, “there existed a certain strain in Haskalah thinking that held
that Jews had ceded control of their bodies to nothing less than Judaism
itself.”12
The narrative of “the healthy Jew” challenged this older Enlightenment
view of Moses, Jewish ritual and law, and the status of the Jews. It
repudiated the notion of an originary Judaism distant and distinct from
the Mosaic laws and the later rabbinic tradition. In the texts I explore
here, rabbinic and medieval Judaism are natural extensions of the healthy,
positive laws and ceremonies that originate with Moses. If in the eighteenth
century and beyond a chasm was posited by some between an
idealized and purified Judaism that had existed before the priests and
rabbis, and contemporary Jews and their institutions, others sought to
close that gap in the nineteenth century. And that gap was closed, as we
shall see, by Christians as well as by Jews. These physicians and medical
writers did not seem to accept the Enlightenment (and Maskilik) rendering
of Judaism and the Jews. Religion, in the guise of Jewish law, was
not something that needed to be transcended if Jews – or Christians for
that matter – were to be healthy, either individually or as a collective.
Yet “religion” did require translation, a reinterpretion in terms of public
hygiene and preventive medicine. Nor did the historical experience of the

Jews under Christian rule necessarily result in debility and degeneration:
rendered through the prism of Darwinism, the historical experience of
isolation and oppression, suffering, violence and death could be seen
to act as a natural selection process, removing the weak and leaving a
stronger, more vital Jewish people. What I hope to bring into stronger
focus here is a discursive tradition that developed among Christians and
Jews that shared important components of other discursive traditions
(i.e., Enlightenment and Maskilik, anti-Semitic and anti-modern) but was
nonetheless distinct and, in important ways, oppositional.
To be sure, texts dealing with Jews and health can be highly ambiguous
as to the messages they convey. To take at the outset one of the major
textual or narrative traditions explored in this book: when hundreds of
writers celebrate Moses and his law code as the foundation of hygienic
knowledge and practice, do they mean to suggest that Jews as a collective
are indeed a healthy people? Or are they pointing up just the opposite, the
degree to which Jews “today” (whenever that might be) have fallen away
to a significant degree from their ancient health and purity? It is possible
to find both of these judgments in the medical literature of the past two
centuries. Yet overall, I argue that for most of those who participate in
this interpretive tradition, Judaism and the Jews are indeed healthy. And
since far more attention has been paid in the scholarly literature to the
nexus of Jews and disease, this book will dwell almost completely on the
alternative, positive image of the Jews and Judaism.
Anti-Semitic literature oftentimes represented modern Jewry as degenerate
while allowing that ancient Hebrews, or even premodern Jews, were
or at least could be healthy, as long as they followed their own laws and
lived lives separate from their Christian neighbors. Degeneration of the
Jewish body and soul occurred because of modernity, that is, emancipation
and assimilation, and the freedoms from traditional observance that
had characterized pre-emancipatory communal life. On the other hand,
the equation, in anti-Jewish literature, of ancient and modern Jews was
also quite common. In particular, racialized texts collapsed both time and
space in the depiction of “Jews” as physically and spiritually distinct, and
in one way or another inferior and corrupt.
However, this collapsing of time and space did not necessarily have to
work to the disadvantage of Jews; that is, positive depictions of Jews and
Judaism also relied on this technique. The healthy Hebrews of the past

could also be the healthy Jews of the present. Both Jewish and Christian
medical writers who participated in the interpretive tradition of
the healthy Jew sought, in the first place, to demonstrate the positive
effects of ancient Jewish law on the Jews themselves; moreover, and at
some level more significantly, these authorities suggested that these laws
remain valid and practical, and not only for the Jews. A number of writers
believed that the world would be a healthier place if all governments instituted
– and all citizens followed – at least some of the hygienic practices
laid out by Moses; and these authors explicitly urged their governments
to undertake appropriate measures.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, medicine and race coalesced
around nationalism to produce a coherent anti-Semitic ideology
that cast the Jew as essentially different from and dangerous to civilization
and culture. The medical images utilized by modern anti-Semitic
writers are familiar: parasites, germs, plague, cancer, pathology, abnormality.
Judaism and Jews were often, though certainly not universally,
represented as pathological and pathogenic, as diseased and as the cause
of disease. The diseases of the Jew and the diseased Jew were racialized
over the course of the nineteenth century; the pathology and abnormality
of the Jew was heritable and immutable.
The effort to represent Judaism and Jewry as healthy, as linked in
multiple ways to the history of western medicine and science, was one
clear and forceful response to a medicalized and racialized anti-Semitism.
And, without doubt, this anti-Semitism and the response to it reached
their apogee in Central Europe. However, it was not the case that the only
extensive or systematic engagement of Jewish thinkers and writers with
the issues of race and medicine occurred in Central Europe, as a response
to German-speaking anti-Semitism. If we link causally the emergence of
a discourse on Jews and health, or Jews and disease, with the political
struggles over emancipation or civic rights – and the anti-Semitism that
accompanied this – then we are bound to focus on the German-speaking
countries of Central Europe, for it was there, as is well known, that
this struggle was most protracted and uneven, and ultimately fraught.
However, such a focus on the political or emancipatory drama cannot
explain why a medicalized discourse about the Jews also emerged in such
countries as Great Britain and the United States, and to a lesser extent
France, in which the ‘path to emancipation’ was either notably different

(Great Britain and France) or nonexistent (the United States). Rather than
focusing on the narrower political struggle over emancipation, I would
argue that we need to understand the medicalization of the Jews and
Judaism as linked to multiple intellectual, political, and cultural forces,
and ultimately as part of an ongoing ordeal of civilization and civility, to
borrow John Murray Cuddihy’s felicitous phrase.13
Thus, I draw on scholarly and popular work produced in Europe,
Great Britain, and the United States. This book is in part an attempt
to demonstrate just how international, or transnational, the tradition of
the healthy Jew and hygienic Judaism was; there was a vigorous borrowing
and exchange of ideas across national and linguistic boundaries.
It was not only Jews who produced this literature, nor was it produced
for an exclusively Jewish audience. Much of it certainly was intended
for Jewish readers. Surely this was so for the abundant popular medical
literature written in Yiddish and published in Poland and the United
States (and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain). These books, pamphlets,
and articles were meant to educate the Jewish masses about all manner
of things related to health and hygiene. The texts produced by Jews and
non-Jews in English, German, and French were written with a different
audience in mind, and with a different purpose. The articles published
in general journals such as the Lancet, Journal of the American Medical
Association (JAMA), Hygienische Rundschau, and Soziale Hygiene were
intended for a religiously and ethnically heterogeneous audience.14 Once
we go looking, we encounter in journals, books, and newspapers produced
around the world a significant number of studies concerned with
aspects of the Jewish body and mind, and infused with the same images,
concepts and questions that impelled those in Central Europe. This
engagement, moreover, was overdetermined. It was a result in part of
anti-Semitism. But it also emerged because of dramatic developments
in medicine and science, particularly in the realms of bacteriology and
microbiology; intellectual and cultural tensions between the realms of
religion and science; and the instability of the social status of doctors.
The interpretive tradition of the healthy Jew was thus a product in part of
anti-Semitism and apologia; but it also testifies to the truth that discourses
emerge through an engagement with multiple forces, including the challenge
of new discoveries and technologies, new ideas and methods, as
well as developments in the political and social realms. In addition, the

discursive tradition of Moses and hygiene was built upon and directly
engaged with older intellectual traditions that only indirectly or tangentially
had anything to do with contemporary Judaism and Jewry.
The medical narratives produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
were linked intellectually with earlier narratives, even if later
authors did not explicitly mention these earlier works. All these texts
constitute a particular delimited discourse because they are working over
and coming to terms with a common set of themes, ideas, and images.
They share a language, even if written in many different languages,
and a set of questions. What is the ultimate nature and purpose of the
Mosaic laws? What is the relationship between these laws and the nature
and condition of the Jews? What was the relationship between Moses
and Egypt, between the Jews, Judaism, andWestern civilization: Greece,
Rome, Europe, America?