From Athens to Jerusalem: Medicine in Hellenized Jewish Lore and in Early Christian Literature (review)

Samuel Kottek, Manfred Horstmanshoff, Gerhard Baader, and Gary Ferngren, eds. From Athens to Jerusalem: Medicine in Hellenized Jewish Lore and in Early Christian Literature. Pantaleon Reeks, no. 33. Papers of the Symposium in Jerusalem, 9-11 September 1996. Rotterdam: Erasmus, 2000. 279 pp. Ill. Dgl. 90.00; E 40.80 (paperbound, 90-5235-135-X).

The fourteen contributions to this volume were delivered as part of a conference held in Jerusalem in 1996; other papers from the same conference were published in the journal Korot, vol. 13, 1999. The authors range far wider than the title suggests, beginning with Babylonian medicine and continuing into the Latin Middle Ages, but the main focus is on texts--Jewish, Christian, and pagan--from the first three centuries of our era. This allows for some interesting comparisons between, for example, ideas on the effects of maternal imagination, or reactions to eunuchs and androgynes, in different societies. Those familiar with only one of these literatures will profit greatly from the information here provided.

The level of scholarship is very high, and there is a refreshing willingness to challenge traditional interpretations. Gary Ferngren shows how exaggerated are the claims that in the New Testament disease is regularly viewed as caused by demons (however much some later Christians believed they were). Jürgen Helm in a nuanced survey picks his way through the minefield of studies on medicine in the New Testament, rightly emphasizing that descriptions of diseases often deliberately avoid discussions about their cause, and that healing narratives are rarely told for their medical significance and content. Yet the story of Cleopatra's embryological experiments (p. 42), reported in the Talmud, is hardly likely to be true: it should be linked with other stories about Cleopatra the legendary physician and experimental pharmacist. Similarly, evidence for pregnancy tests in the Talmud should be treated with a certain caution, and at least compared with other views in Greek or Egyptian writings.

But the overall message of this volume may not be that precisely intended by the conference organizers, who wished to examine Jewish aspects of the history of medicine. If, as is argued here, the best parallels for a medical vademecum in the Talmud are to be found on Akkadian tablets, and if the writings of the second-century Christian Clement of Alexandria are as illuminating on many Jewish topics as are those of his Jewish predecessor Philo, a century earlier, one is led to question the validity of the term Jewish as applied to medicine. It is true that there is a specifically religious element in Jewish medicine, not least because it is often mediated through religious sources, both biblical and nonbiblical--but equally, as this volume shows, discussion of that medicine without the wider context is also liable to produce distortions. Rather, as the best essays here reveal, we are dealing with one segment of a Mediterranean society, to borrow Goitein's description of a later Judaism, in which many features of everyday life, including medicine, can be found elsewhere around the shores of the Mediterranean--in Alexandria, Rome, or Ephesus. Such a perspective has two advantages: not only does it place the Jewish evidence in a broader context, but it also encourages those whose expertise lies principally in Greek and Latin to make use of that evidence in ways that have rarely been tried before.

 

Vivian Nutton
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at
University College London

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