Pioneering Jewish Women Doctors in Eretz Israel, 1900–1918 by Zipora Shehory-Rubin (review)

“To review the fascinating biographies of the pioneer women doctors, some of whom were integrally linked with the history of Jewish settlement in the first towns and farming villages and who give us a glimpse into life in late Ottoman Palestine,” is one of the announced purposes of Zipora Shehory-Rubin’s Pioneering Jewish Women Doctors in Eretz Israel (p. 17). By presenting a structured and systematic description of the activities of sixteen women doctors who settled in Palestine between 1900 and 1918, the book aims both to describe their contributions to the medical field in Palestine and to various Jewish and Arab public settings, and to correct a historical injustice by elevating them to the stature they deserve in Israeli historiography. Notably, these pioneering women physicians, along with eight women dentists, accounted for more than 30 percent of all the doctors in Palestine at the time (p. 16). This alone makes the study and its dissemination significant from the perspective of the history of medicine in Israel.

“This book is important, because it commemorates the place of the first women doctors in Palestine’s medical system and their role in laying its foundations,” writes Prof. Rivka Carmi, President of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in her foreword (p. 10). The wish to commemorate—an act meant to dispel forgetfulness—raises some questions. A main one concerns the role of books such as this in the enterprise of commemoration, which includes, among other things, the construction of monuments, the installation of memorial plaques, the awarding of scholarships in a person’s name and the holding of workshops on the history of an individual or group. Another question relates to the book’s principal target readership. Is it for professionals who might be expected to defend their legacy (given that legacy plays a role in defining a profession), or for the public at large, as part of the shaping of its collective and national memory? Either way, the book at hand does not discuss the reasons for its presumed readers’ forgetfulness.

One reason that the public may not have made the effort to remember these early women physicians is that they served not on the battlefield (of World War I, in this case) but among civilians, whose doings are considered less heroic. They did engage in such matters of national importance as improving fertility and developing the “new Jew” and the future warrior. However, the book originates in its author’s humanist sense rather than out of any adulation of militarism. In general, I find it regrettable that the commemoration of military events so far outweighs that of events relating to civilian society and culture. For example, a recent study of the commemoration of Canadian nurses in World War I, though it emphasizes the preservation of their image as groundbreakers in the areas of both gender and class and as promoters of the role of nursing in peacetime, goes on to define them as war heroines who ought to be remembered in order to reinforce the unifying legacy of Canadian nationalism.¹

A definitive aspect of historiography is the creation of a fascinating story that involves the reader emotionally. By retelling the stories of its heroines, this book sheds light on doings of unique significance in the health services field. It concerns itself with exceptional women who dared to choose an occupation that remains complex and difficult to attain and perform to this day; for them, it also often entailed unaccompanied migration and challenging conditions of study in foreign countries. The book highlights the motif of travel in the lives of these women as they mastered their specializations and went about their work. Additional difficulties arose in relation to the diseases typical of Ottoman Palestine, licensing problems with the Turkish administration (e.g., pp. 88, 150), and resistance to the influence of the dominant enterprise in the medical field—the American Zionist Medical Unit...