Surveying Talmudic Medicine

The first thing I did after reading this book was to order a copy for my brother, a retired physician with a life-long interest in the Talmud. For someone interested in both Talmud and medicine, this book is a good read as an introduction to the topic, since it poses appropriate general questions about Talmudic medicine without overwhelming the reader with too many technical details. The endnote – rather than footnote – format spares the casual reader too much data which may interrupt the narrative, and the lack of any Hebrew or Aramaic citations from the Talmud, in either original script or in transliteration, points to a 'trade' book, intended for a popular readership. This point is not a criticism, since there is a general need for monographs which make academic research accessible to a wider public.

The book neatly divides the topic of Talmudic medicine into five chapters with descriptive titles. The first of these, 'Medicine on the Margins', highlights three key passages in the Babylonian Talmud containing clusters of medical recipes, but at the same time points out how later medieval Jewish scholars, such as Maimonides, generally marginalized Talmudic medicine as mostly ineffective, irrational, and unscientific by the standards of their day. The key question, however, is how Talmudic medicine measured up with contemporary medicine of Late Antiquity, and to this end Mokhtarian refers to the somewhat ambivalent relations between rabbis and the few physicians actually mentioned in the Talmud. The book takes the position that while the rabbis were aware of the professional practice of medicine, their own interest in therapies was intended to bolster their communal authority and status but not to compete as medical practitioners.

The second chapter, devoted to 'Trends and Methods in the Study of Talmudic Medicine', offers a brief but illuminating survey of the Forschungsstand of Talmudic medicine, reviewing previous studies of the topic. As Mokhtarian correctly points out, until recently most studies of Talmudic medicine were undertaken by physicians with sincere interests in medical history but without philological training in editing and translating ancient texts. The most egregious example is the monumental work of the Berlin physician Julius Preuss, which still serves as a useful compendium of sources but makes no distinction between Talmudic sources reflecting Western and Eastern medical traditions (see below). Mokhtarian moves on from this point to defend the character of Talmud therapies as constituting actual 'medicine', referring to technical terms for diseases and materia medica in the Bavli as well as rabbis being cited as medical authorities. This chapter, however, also refers to more controversial topics such as surgery, bloodletting, and trial and error testing of remedies in the Talmud, all of which are subject to serious challenges as doubtful.

Chapter three, on the 'Precursors of Talmudic Medicine', argues against looking for antecedents of Bavli medicine in either the Bible of Mishnah, or other works from Greco-Roman Palestine. Instead, Babylonian rabbis avoided pious or moralizing assumptions of disease associated with sinful behavior or divine punishment but opted instead for etiologies based upon natural causes (e.g., wind) or alternatively, the influence of demons or the evil eye. This chapter then contrasts rabbinic medicine from Palestine and Babylonia, pointing out that Western recipes are less elaborate and less associated with magic in comparison with Eastern traditions from Sasanian Babylonia. What is omitted from the discussion is why such differences existed in the first place and whether they represent fundamental influences from surrounding cultures rather than preferences or predilections of the two communities responsible for producing their respective texts, the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds.

The fourth chapter, 'Empiricism and Efficacy', addresses the perennial question whether any of the remedies in the Talmud might be deemed in modern terms to be effective, or why they may have been deemed to be effective in antiquity. Mokhtarian makes a bold attempt at identifying rational remedies indicated by multiple instructions for administering materia medica, or warnings regarding side-effects. The discussion of brain surgery (p. 80...