Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women: Sweetening the Spirits, Healing the Sick (review)

Strictly, the Sephardim people are Jews whose lineage extends back to those exiled from Spain in the fifteenth century. Welcomed into the Ottoman empire—covering Asia Minor, the Balkans, and the Dodecanese Islands—their descendants have since spread further afield. Through the memories of informants in many communities within the former Ottoman Empire, as well as in Israel and the United States, Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women looks at aspects of this Jewish subculture, sustained by religion, folklore, language, and history.

From their extensive, albeit intermittent, fieldwork over forty years (1960s-1990s), detailed in full, anthropologists Lévy and Zumwalt focus on preventative and curative beliefs and practices that "for the most part span the years from the beginning of the 1800s to World War II" (pp. 2-3). Each open-ended interview began by asking if the informant could recall any "melezinas di kaza" (medicines of the house) (p. 63), a term referring to "folk medicine, folk beliefs, and folk religion" and generally readily understood by all Sephardim.

Full discussions, distilled from the data, cover the role of blessings as part of cures; various beliefs about the cause of disease: the evil eye, espanto (fright), echizo (witchcraft), and spirits; the use of a segula (a valued cure, perhaps marjoram, garlic, rosemary, rue, salt, sugar, and honey, to treat underlying causes of disease; the prekante (ritual prayer for the release of the evil eye, evil talk, and "all types of harm" [p. 151]); the saradura (a ritual of enclosure, a complex regimen centered around washing, limited and special diets, and particular medicines); and sundry other topics.

The book's title emphasizes that women were the key practitioners in providing care, and, in so doing, sustained what the authors call "domesticated religion"—a mélange of religious elements taken from Spain and Portugal, along with those of the Ottoman Turks and the Orthodox Christians. Such domesticated religion was frowned upon by many. In the mind of at least one Sephardic rabbi, it was "superstitious" (p. 6). Others saw shame that ancestors "could be so ignorant and follow beliefs that were so against the Jewish Law" (p. 61).

The gathering of the information was timely. As with so much of traditional knowledge and beliefs, Sephardic medical lore has virtually disappeared. As the authors say, they faced the "closing of an age" (p. 4): "The disruption and dwindling of a way of life is for the Sephardim of the former Ottoman Empire a historical reality" (p. 5), accelerated by Nazi atrocities during World War II.

In view of the tradition's being at the end of the road, and with so much information collected, this reader would have liked some discussion of the boundary between ritual care and treatments given without ritual intervention. Clearly the boundary was not sharp, for illness was seldom viewed as due to physical causes alone. Nevertheless, there is a hint that treatment of the common cold—by cupping, alcohol rubs, castor oil, quinine, and linden tea—was done without ceremony. Notwithstanding, Lévy and Zumwalt have provided richly mined data, well synthesized and ready for comparison with other traditions. Scholars of traditional medicine in Central and South America, for instance, can ponder with greater insight the legacies of Spanish/Catholic influences on native religions.