Jewish Healers and Yellow Fever in the Eighteenth-Century Americas

One of the many side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has been the proliferation of riffs on the antisemitic "happy merchant" meme featuring "a Jewish man with heavily stereotyped facial features who is greedily rubbing his hands together."¹ While some COVID-19 happy-merchant memes focus on Jews as spreaders of disease who enter cities hidden in a Trojan horse, others show the happy merchant holding a syringe with a yellow warning sign "Get Your Coronavirus Shot." The trope of the self-serving Jewish doctor (or researcher) populates white nationalists' threads, even as it also haunts the tweets issued by the Nation of Islam's Research Group suggesting that "Israel may have developed the coronavirus as a weapon for assassinations."² In such portrayals, Jews are both modern (they manipulate science) and retrograde (they wear kipot [skullcaps] and Jewish men do not shave their beards). While journalists have been quick to note that antisemites have long associated Jews with disease, I argue that the trope shows how pandemics have the potential to exacerbate long-standing phobias about Jews and citizenship.³

In this article, I focus on three Jewish healers who worked in Philadelphia and New York during two yellow fever epidemics that plagued the United States during the eighteenth century (one in 1793 and another in 1798): David Cohen Nassy (1747–1806), Matthias Nassy (ca. 1770–?), and Walter Jonas Judah (1778–98). For each, I focus not only on their actual roles as healers but also on different people's portrayals of "Jewish" approaches to healing at the time. While white Protestants sometimes portrayed Jewishness and professionalism as at odds, all three men and their communities emphasized the ways that their medical service benefitted the state. In the 1790s, Jewish enfranchisement was a relatively new phenomenon, with Jews having only received the vote in Philadelphia in 1790, and Jews having lost and regained the vote in New York in the eighteenth century.⁴ Thus, these Jewish medics' self-fashioning took part in the larger—and still ongoing—debates over emancipation: could Jews in general, and Jewish medics in particular, heal the young nation or would their distinctiveness fester like a raw wound?

Yellow fever illuminates the way racism, capitalism, and epidemics have long been intertwined, not just in the United States but in the Americas more broadly. Contagious diseases were part of the daily lives of medical professionals (Jewish and non-Jewish alike) throughout the eighteenth century. Yet, the yellow fever outbreaks of the 1790s stood apart not only because the disease was relatively new to the region but also because of the fear it provoked and the ethical questions it raised. The disease was brutal and it progressed very rapidly, sometimes taking just ten days between the appearance of the first symptoms and death.⁵ Over 10 percent of Philadelphia's population died of yellow fever in 1793 alone, and the treatments people paid doctors to give were commonly useless.⁶ Yellow fever was also uniquely tied to the ethical problems of capitalism. The same doomed ships that brought enslaved Africans also brought the infected Aedes aegypti mosquito to the Americas and Europe. Eventually, yellow fever plagued each of the European empires that relied on slavery.⁷ In the Americas, the disease spread wherever the slave trade prospered. Jews in the eighteenth century were often enmeshed in the triangle trade that brought enslaved people from Africa, raw materials from the Americas, and manufactured goods from Europe. Christians harped on how yellow fever seemed to follow Jews, specter-like, around the Atlantic World. The first American epidemic of the disease was in 1648 in Mexico City.⁸ The same year, the Inquisition "uncovered" what its representatives called la complicidad grande (the great conspiracy) of the city's conversos and began to dissolve the "main network" of crypto-Jews.⁹ As both Jewish communities and the slave trade became entrenched in the West Indies, so too did the virus.¹⁰ By 1668, yellow fever arrived in New York City, just 42 years after the first enslaved Africans and 14...