Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe

“You Will Find It in the Pharmacy”

“You Will Find It in the Pharmacy” Practical Kabbalah and Natural Medicine in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1690–1750 Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern Twobasictendenciesseemtocharacterizescholarly analyses of Slavic-Jewish contacts in the field of popular magic. The first is an essentially binary framing of mutual influence: either Slavic culture is understood to reflect a Jewish impact, or Jewish culture to reflect a Slavic one. The second tendency is to scrutinize Jewish-Slavic contacts through the prism of linguistics, anthropology , sociology, or philology, while eliding specific historical contexts. Typical in both of these respects is Olga Belova and Vladimir Petrukhin’s Jewish Myth in Slavic Culture, the latest and perhaps most exhaustive study of the Slavic-Jewish interface. The authors correctly depict popular magic as a field “particularly open to cultural contacts,” emphasizing that Jews and Slavs “cooperated intensively in the sphere of demonology,” and amass manifold examples from data collected by ethnographers over the span of three centuries. But they construe this cooperation exclusively as “Slavic borrowings from Jews” or “Jewish reflections of Slavic influences”; and they present it as a uniform longue durée without historical specificities and local dynamics.1 Useful as their compilation may be, we are thus left with some vexing questions. Was the Judeo-Slavic encounter a strictly back-and-forth dynamic? Did the intensity of those contacts perhaps vary according to 14 Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern geographic region or proximity to prominent Jewish communities? And in a broader context, to what extent did the attested Slavic-Jewish interaction in the sphere of magic differ from Christian-Jewish analogous encounters in other countries of Europe? This paper assumes that it is misleading to conceive of a three-hundredyear period of Slavic-Jewish contact in a homogeneous, bilateral manner. Rather than Slavic influences on Jews or vice versa, I argue that a common source—early modern pharmacology—was responsible for the fascinating proximity of magical beliefs and natural medical remedies. What follows is a foray into shared realities and values by Jews and Slavs within a precise historical context, namely, eastern Poland during the last decade of the seventeenth century through the first half of the eighteenth century, a period marked by the belated discovery of Paracelsus and the nexus he posited between medicine, human health, and chemistry. Our discussion thus begins at a time when Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Jewish paramedics created a shared culture based on the medicine and alchemy of Paracelsus, and ends with an assault on that shared culture by proponents of Enlightenment.2 A special effort is made to reconstruct non-Jewish eastern European natural medicine, the often neglected context of Jewish magic and practical Kabbalah .3 It is my hope that the paradigm of shared culture presented here will help free the historiography from the dominant binary of cultural separateness /mutual influence. BA‘AL SHEM AS SHAMAN, HEALER, AND PARAMEDIC Relations between Jews and Slavs (Catholics and Russian Orthodox) in eastern Poland at the end of the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth centuries, although strained in certain instances, were usually characterized by a fertile symbiosis in a variety of spheres within the borders of shtetls— private magnate-owned towns and, to a lesser degree, royal towns, where Jewish presence was more limited. There were intensive contacts between Jewish lease holders and the szlachta (Polish gentry), between Jewish artisans and Polish city dwellers, between peasants and Jewish grain traders, and between Jewish households and the Christian servants they employed as cooks and wet nurses. Of course, this was still the case as late as the late nineteenth century, yet the period in question is marked by a number of distinctive features: the rise of the subculture of ba‘alei shem (practical Kabbalists ); the spread of natural medical knowledge; the development of an early hasidism—ascetic pietism among scattered elitist groups of mystics Practical Kabbalah and Natural Medicine 15 from whose midst emerged the spiritual founder of a new Hasidism, Israel ben Eliezer (Ba‘al Shem Tov, ca. 1700–60); and the establishment of pharmacies and pharmacists in shtetls. Both Italy and Germany witnessed the phenomenon of itinerant herbal healers and alchemists during this period, yet Tobias Cohen (1652–1729), a medical doctor with firsthand knowledge of eastern Europe, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire, observed that amulets, practical Kabbalah, and magic were nowhere as popular as in his contemporary Poland.4 Sebastian Sleszkowski...