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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.3 (2003) 478-479



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Medicine and the German Jews: A History. By John M. Efron (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001) 343 pp. $35.00

Efron's first book, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New York, 1995), showed how nineteenth-century Jewish anthropologists developed conceptions of race that were often at odds with those of Gentile scholars. He follows that book now with a much broader look at Jewish doctors in the formation of German medicine, both as agents and as objects. The temporal scope is refreshingly large, from medieval times to the Nazi era, including topics as diverse as medical finances, religious therapeutics, images of Jews as vampires and usurers, the rise and fall of bans on admission to universities, and the fate of Jewish doctors under Nazism.

Efron follows Veblen in suggesting that the entree of Jews into German science was assisted by what the institutional economists called their "skeptical frame of mind." 1 Jewish medical traditions were never doctrinal. So, "With their moorings to tradition cut loose, Jews were free to enter the intellectual world of science and medicine to an extent never before seen in Jewish history" (10). Efron also shows the complexity of this story, however, since Jewish doctors were both "highly regarded and deeply feared" (21). Jewish doctors were accused of poisoning their patients—as in Bohemia in 1161, when eighty-six Jews were burned at the stake. Jews were accused of poisoning the wells of Europe during the Black Death of 1348-1350, and fears of such poisonings were strong enough even in the seventeenth century that in Frankfurt, Jewish doctors were barred from preparing medicines at home.

The author also shows, however, that Gentiles often regarded Jewish doctors as the best kind of doctors. Jewish doctors tended to be less concerned with spiritual salvation than their Christian counterparts, making it easier for Christians who had fallen from grace to seek help from Jewish physicians. Knowledge of Hebrew was often thought to provide access to esoteric powers, and Judaism did permit the use of sorcery to combat illness, so long as it was thought to be caused by some kind of demonic possession. Witness such colorful treatments as "the milk and urine of humans and donkeys, hot animal bile, snake soup, and fresh animal blood obtained immediately after slaughter" (23).

This is a subtle and intelligent book, covering a great deal of ground. We find an admirable history of how such practices as circumcision or ritual slaughter were alternately praised or reviled—as healthful or dangerous, for example, but also as more or less cruel or even perverse. Efron notes that German antisemites in the 1920s protested the large number of Jewish gynecologists, insinuating a sexual transgression. But it also would have been interesting to know how antisemitism may have been differently expressed in fields with greater or lesser Jewish [End Page 478] representation—for example, in veterinary medicine, which never had many Jewish practitioners—or to know what kind of non-Jew tended not to view the Jewish body as pathological, and how and why this lack of prejudice changed over time.

Efron rightly takes a pluralistic view of the sources of medical antisemitism—theological, economic, etc.—using George Mosse's apt idea of racism as a "scavenger" ideology (107). He does, however, tend to homogenize Jewish culture and experience, as in his references to "the Jewish public" and the like. To name only one example, he pre-sents some interesting statistics on the longer life span of Jews (fifty-seven years for Jews in 1890 versus forty-one years for Christians), but he does not say to what extent it might have been due to differences in wealth. Did wealthy Christians live as long as wealthy Jews?

 



Robert N. Proctor
Pennsylvania State University

Notes

1. Thorstein Veblen, "The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Modern Europe" (1919), in Max Lerner (ed.), The Portable Veblen (New York, 1950).

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