In December 1883, James E. Reeves, the Secretary of the State Board of Health of West Virginia, delivered a speech to the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association. The speech was later printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the nation’smost prestigious medical journal. Reeves spoke about the “usefulness of
state boards of health in guarding the public welfare” and the intimate
link between laws of health, the fitness of the individual citizen, and the
“prosperity, freedom, and glory of the State.” He began by noting that
the principles of sanitary science are not of modern origin. Indeed, they are
as old as the Mosaic code, and their unerring rewards and penalties have
marked the life-history of all the nations that have covered the earth. In their
scope, they are wide enough to embrace all humanity, and just as applicable
to communities of to-day as they were to the Jewish race thousands of years
ago.1
Forty-five years later, in the Hebrew language journal The Hebrew Physician
(Ha-Ropheh ha-Ivri), Dr. Yosef Tennovim gave voice to the same
basic idea, though more forcefully and with greater specificity: “Almost
all contemporary medical issues or questions found expression already in
ancient Hebrew medicine. Concerning the modern understanding of the
circulation of the blood, there are already hints of this understanding in
the Talmud, testifying to a specific professional erudition [b’kiyut] long
before [William] Harvey. . . . ” For almost all the modern insights into
psychology and medicine, including hygiene, “one can find support, a
trace, evidence in our ancient medical writings.”
Both Reeves and Tennovim were participating in and contributing to
a particular interpretive tradition about Moses, medicine, and the history
of Judaism and the Jews. The Healthy Jew explores this interpretive
tradition.3 In continental Europe, Great Britain, and the United States of
America, physicians, medical researchers, and popular writers rendered
Moses and the rabbis of the Talmud as medical authorities, equal or
superior in their knowledge to both ancient and modern scientific figures.
Jewish law and ritual, in turn, were translated into codes of health
and hygiene, and presented as equal or superior to ancient and especially
to modern systems of medical knowledge. Thus, Moses was the ancient
equivalent of Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch. The Jewish
dietary laws, sexual hygiene laws, the practice of circumcision, and the
myriad rules dealing with purity and impurity found in the Hebrew Bible
and the Talmud were ultimately not religious but medical in nature. And
this abiding concern with purity and health had its effects, largely positive,
on the Jews themselves, ensuring their survival and vitality. This
interpretive tradition found expression in texts produced in German,
French, Italian, English, and Hebrew (at the least),4 which appeared in
mainstream medical journals, academic monographs, newspapers, and
popular magazines and journals, both general and Jewish. This book
explores these texts in the light of a number of broader trends in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, debates over civilization and culture, orientalism,
religion and science (in the wake of Darwin), anti-Semitism and
Jewish apologetics, and the scientific and medical discoveries and debates
that revolutionized the fields of bacteriology, preventive medicine, and
genetics/eugenics.
The role played by physicians, anthropologists, and racial hygienists in
the identification of the Jews with disease has occupied a prominent place
in recent studies of modern Jewish history, the history of anti-Semitism,
and Nazism. Such works have, furthermore, emphasized the fundamental
importance of medicine and biology in preparing the ground for the Nazi
extermination.5 Moreover, as Sander Gilman and others have pointed
out, many Jews themselves came to accept this image of the diseased
Jewish body and soul, and set about seeking to reform or regenerate
Jewry.6 The large body of scholarship that explores the nexus of Jews,
disease, the natural and social sciences, and the politics of “the Jewish
body” is, of course, extremely important. But a substantial literature that
linked Judaism and Jewry with health and hygiene was also produced
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This scientific and popular
work was published throughout Europe and the United States, the labor
of non-Jews as well as Jews. Thus, the “disease” or “health” of Jewry
remained an open question, for both Jews and Christians (as did the even
larger question about the very identity of “the Jews”), and a variety of
opinions competed for intellectual hegemony in the decades prior to the
1930s (and, indeed, beyond).
Most of the recent scholarship on this question has been concerned
with the “diseased Jewish body” as constructed by both Gentile and
Jewish elites. My focus in this book is the flip-side, the medicalization of
Jews and Judaism that rendered a hygienic Judaism and a healthy Jew. I
don’t question the medicalization of Jews and Judaism as an important
development over the past two centuries, though we may be in danger
of overemphasizing the extent of its import. Rather, my interest is in
redressing what I see as an imbalance in the scholarship that has produced
a one-sided notion of this medicalization. This study recovers the healthy
Jew and the interpretive tradition that situated Judaism at the center or
forefront of Western medicine and civilization.
source : e-book : The Healthy Jew “the symbiosis of judaism and modern medicine “
