Medicine and the German Jews: A History (review)

John M. Efron. Medicine and the German Jews: A History.New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. viii + 343 pp. Ill. $35.00 (0-300-08377-7).

"Jewish physicians and medicine" is a topic that has been extensively explored. Yet no previous publication has been able to do what John Efron has done in this book: to "teach us much about the culture and values of German Jewry, the relationship of Jews to German culture, and the special ways Jews contributed as major producers and consumers within the German medical community" (p. 3) in "a longue durée approach. . . to identify innovations and changes, but . . . also continuities and reemerging themes and patterns" (p. 5).

Throughout the book, the strength of Efron's discussions lies in his emphasis on trends in historiography, especially concerning the history of the body. He explores "the ways modern German Jews increasingly expressed themselves in terms of their own bodies, and how by the eighteenth century being Jewish meant having not just a spiritual identity, but a physical one as well" (p. 4). Following the path established by Sander Gilman's book The Jew's Body (1991), Efron elucidates the creation in the Middle Ages of the anti-Semitic stereotype of the dirty Jew, the Jew as carrier of diseases, and, especially in Germany, "an indelible image . . . of the Jewish doctor as murderously charlatan, a professional incompetent, an introducer of evil to Germany, a vice-ridden, depraved, criminal locked in ruthless competition with German physicians" (p. 46). Because national identity in Germany had a markedly physical dimension to it, the denigration of Jews was based on the fundamental premise of their racial otherness.

Efron's thesis is that the growth of this stereotype coincided with a breakdown of traditional Jewish society in general after the Enlightenment, as the Jewish physician became a harbinger of modernity—a promulgator of scientific authority, which replaced religious authority at the apex of society. "Consequently, Jewish doctors . . . helped to create modern forms of Jewish identity" and "were instrumental in the vast project that called forth a refashioning of Jewish mentalités" in the period of "enlightenment, incipient secularization, religious reform, occupational diversification, political emancipation, and nationalism" (p. 62).

In the modern period, which is the main focus of Efron's study, Germany was home to more Jewish physicians than any other country. Their sheer number made them central to the medical culture of modern Germany. "In this capacity," writes Efron, " they were both greatly valued but also rendered highly vulnerable to attack because of their ubiquitous presence" (p. 3). Although the tragic end of Jewish physicians in Germany is not the central topic of Efron's study, his final chapter is a concise overview of the relationship between them and their German counterparts in the Kaiserreich and the Weimar Republic.

The author succeeds impressively in showing that medicine was a catalyst in the advancement of modernity for both Germans and the Jews. It promoted the Jews' upward mobility, their embourgeoisement, their ability to live a German Jewish dream. At the same time, medicine provided the Germans with a medical paradigm of the otherness of minorities which ended, in the case of the Jews, with the obliteration of centuries of prolonged and intense German Jewish involvement with medicine.