Q&A: Katz Center Fellow Magdalena Janosikova on the History of Medicine in Early Modern Ashkenaz

Natalie Dohrmann (NBD): Magdalena, tell us a bit about your scholarly interests. What drew you to them originally? What especially excites you about them personally and/or intellectually?

 Magdalena Janosikova (MJ): Empathy. Challenge. Desire to see beyond the stories we tell about ourselves and our immediate communities. I grew up in post-communist and post-partition Slovakia. In the 90s, people were obsessed with creating the national story of their peoplehood. It was impossible not to experience it as limiting and based on omissions and blatant erasures and the Jewish historical experience was no exception. My early encounters with “history” were a hard lesson in how history can do us a disservice. Little did I know that it would be far more challenging to express what history ought to be.  Not everyone seeks to endorse (hi)stories that are incomplete, uncertain, unsettling, and, at times, futile attempts at human connection across time, values, and identities. But that is the reason why historians are here. To persuade you of the value of cultivated historical thinking.

NBD: Your current project is titled Odd Man Out: Jewish Physicians, Medical Labor, and Text. What does the title mean and, in a nutshell, what is its intervention?

MJ: The book manuscript examines the role of text in the production and circulation of medical knowledge in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. It is a critical evaluation of the place of Jewish medical labor in the archive and, primarily, in the library. Earlier approaches focused on presenting Jewish physicians as the intellectual equals of the majority elites despite cultural distinctness. In my book manuscript, I rather examine their “oddities”—that is, elements not rooted in their religious identity but in the very experience of living as a minority with different, often limited, resources. Odd Man Out is a social history of knowledge as much as a history of cultural creativity investigated. By means of a focus on medicine, it seeks to adjust the lenses through which comparisons between the majority and minority cultures are being made.

Historians often turn to textual sources to study medicine in its past iterations. Yet there is nothing self-evident about the idea that medical knowledge would preferentially circulate in the form of text. That is the case for Western medicine, which puts great emphasis on data-making and the technologies enabling it. Yet disease and illness are embodied states; healing, even that guided by a learned and highly literate physician, rests on observation and much tacit knowledge put into practice. The written archive about the body and its maladies, therefore, represents secondary evidence that calls for investigation into its relationship with practice. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this relationship rapidly transformed. We see it through the changing genres and scholarly practices that informed the physician’s office.

Research into these “paper-driven” practices through the prism of Jewish physicians and healers offers a unique glimpse into the history of European medicine and the Jewish minority. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are often identified with the increased academization of Jewish healers. Yet this did not translate into their adoption of printed publications—at least, not as authors. The picture is paradoxical: scholarly Jewish physicians are increasingly less represented in scholarly sources. This invites further analysis into how Jewish physicians communicated their medical knowledge, what its relationship was with daily practice, and how it traveled in the world of letters and books. My study of these knowledge itineraries offers two main insights. First, Odd Man Out shows that the authority of oral and tacit knowledge, inalienable for the practitioner, remained far more central than suggested by historians following only the growth of the medical book. Second, Odd Man Out shows that Hebrew, with its long history as a language of medicine, changed its character after 1500. It transitioned from the medieval language of the archive to the premodern language of a minority health discourse.

NBD: Your work traces the gaps between competing knowledge regimes in the field of early modern, especially Jewish, healthcare in Ashkenaz. Can you give an example? How do epistemic conflicts manifest in practice? 

MJ: I am interested in the period before the clash of authorities over the Jewish body in the Enlightenment and beyond. At that time there were no Jewish physicians systematically fighting with the rabbis over bodily matters; on the contrary, there was much affinity between the two groups. My book sheds light on how the late epistemic clash took shape by investigating Jewish physicians’ gradual alignment with city/state medical policies. This process shaped the medical culture of Jews not only by bolstering the position of the Jewish physician but, interestingly, also by weakening the position of the individual patient.

A good example of this process is the increased medical policing of Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto. In the late sixteenth century, Christian physicians, increasingly involved in the city’s policy-making, attacked Jewish physicians for being out of step with the approved modern ways of learned healing. This rhetorical attack, however, did not translate into a policy that would target Jewish physicians. Ongoing medical reform focused on controlling the practices and spaces of healing associated with other types of healers and their access to people’s homes. The reform shaped the whole urban landscape, subjecting the ghetto to a higher degree of supervision by targeting practices and circulation of remedies. This development reduced the patient’s options. The Jewish physicians’ negotiation of expertise and power, therefore, had to rely on soft skills and patiently harnessed social and cultural capital. 

The tables turned in the late eighteenth century when Jewish physicians were recognized as city (state) servants. Jewish physicians suddenly became loci of previously unrecognized state oversight in the midst of the ghetto. Neither their healing methods nor the sources of their medical knowledge changed. It was the power structure that gave Jewish physicians’ actions a new  meaning.

NBD: In your seminar you called for increased attention to materia medica. Can you tell our readers what this means and what focusing on it can add to the discussions of Jews and medicine that is missing now?

MJ: Jewish studies has a very unresolved relationship with the material world. Jewish history is often told via a cultural and social lens; it addresses inner communal dynamics and interactions across the majority-minority divide. Such is the case of other historical subfields. Yet the focus on the human comes at the expense of capturing the interactions with the material environment. This historiographic lacuna is rooted in earlier iterations of historical materialism, which tended to erase the cultural distinctiveness and agency of minorities. It is no surprise that one of the critiques of such approaches comes from Walter Benjamin. A byproduct of this disengagement with the material is a disembodied and dematerialized narration of the Jewish past. I am not talking about the history of Jewish objects and mercantilism. I rather think about the failure to capture the degree to which Jews molded the environment, in Europe specifically. This detachment continues to inform public opinion and histories that underemphasize how Jews, for centuries, shaped the spaces and landscapes that we live in. 

Jews, for instance, played a major role in the urbanization of Eastern Europe. The famed “shtetl” is not only a construction of the modern literary imagination. Many towns, with Jews making up a third of their population, were sites of infrastructure building and upkeep. The roads, forests, and wells were serviced and kept by Jews. Indeed, nature and environment played a great role in Hasidism. Historians tended to read it as riven with mystical symbols, to be juxtaposed with modern proactive and exploitative approaches to the environment. But even in this enchanted reading, Eastern European Jews had to care for their houses, communal property, and surrounding environment. Historians have yet to connect the economic and urban histories of Jews with their spiritual and environmental thinking. Doing so, they will reconnect the histories of words and those of bodies and their actions. 

Clearly, we are shaped by the world around us as much as we shape it. Current historiographic approaches such as my own are more sensitive toward the interplay between nature and culture, the human and non-human. I try to show that expertise, such as that associated with health work, was rooted in knowledge of substances, local herbs, and environments. Moreover, I trace how medical materials as health imaginaries (objects whose production and use offer us clues to a wider knowledge system) generated new meanings as they circulated among different (Jewish and non-Jewish) experts. My goal is to study these imaginaries to understand how the changing technologies of remedy productions engendered a change in the societal concepts of health as much as danger and risk. 

To stay in early modern Frankfurt, the aforementioned medical reform rested on the thorough knowledge of remedy production and distribution and the risks such processes engendered. Jewish healers could not only be viewed as potential murderers acting with intent to harm Christians, they were also prosecuted for the lack of knowledge and negligence that could lead to manslaughter. The greater expert medical oversight, therefore, both generated more safety and expanded the repertoire of dangers that negatively afflicted Jews in particular.

NBD: How does being part of a residential fellowship impact your scholarship?

MJ: Tremendously! It showed me how difficult it is to discuss a shared topic across the field. The most valuable moments were the disagreements. They shed light on the different methodologies, historiographic traditions, and habits of thought that shape the discussions about the body, health, and medicine in different periods and disciplines. These differences are often so ingrained in our presentation that we have to exorcise them as spirits in debate. That is hard work, but it is a necessary step toward the advancement of the field. I am grateful for this opportunity to participate in these conversations in and outside the seminar room. Last but not least, the fellowship gave me the space to understand where and for whom my intervention may be relevant and where my next steps should lead me. Hopefully, they will bring me to the Katz Center once again.