Q&A: Katz Center Fellow Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim Vastly Expands the Map of Medieval Jewish Knowledge Transfer

Natalie Dohrmann (NBD): Ronit, tell us a bit about your broad scholarly interests, what drew you to them, and what especially excites you about them personally and/or intellectually.

Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim (RY-T): Since early childhood, I was fascinated by Tibet. Before becoming an academic, I was a journalist, and at some point in the late 1980s, found myself in Tibet. The experiences I had there, the people I met, the stories they told me, made such a deep impression that I decided I must learn more about this fascinating culture. It took me some years to find my way back to graduate school—I was already a mother by then—but finally, I was able to pursue a Ph.D. in Tibetan Buddhism at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. 

The text I was studying for my doctorate—the Kalachakra Tantra—formed the basis for several different, but increasingly interlacing, interests. First, the text’s mentions of Islam got me intrigued to explore the links between Tibetan culture and Islamic culture. And so, after finishing my Ph.D., I initiated the “Islam and Tibet” project at the Warburg Institute in London, which ran from 2005 to 2009, funded by the AHRC. The Kalachakra Tantra also talks about the connection between the microcosmos and the macrocosmos. While at the Warburg Institute I realized that similar connections are also found in many other cultures. This exploration led to the Astro Medicine workshop and book, where this theme is explored. The third major topic that has its basis in the Kalachakra Tantra is medicine. 

Around this same time, I took a class on the history of Ayurvedic medicine. Shortly after, I was hospitalized for a short while and was deeply moved by the endless compassion of the nurses who took care of me. This led me to decide that I want to do more research on medicine. I was very fortunate to get a research fellowship from the Wellcome Trust and was based at the legendary Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL (which, sadly, no longer exists). While I was there, I was researching the Tibetan medical manuscripts from Dunhuang. Dunhuang was an important nexus on the Silk Roads, where about one hundred years ago, a cave with several tons (!) of manuscripts were found. Those manuscripts were sealed in that cave for about a thousand years, for reasons that are still debated by scholars. Most of the manuscripts from Dunhuang are Buddhist texts and are in Chinese, but there are also other topics represented (such as medicine, history, literature), and other languages, some of which were not known at the time when the cave was opened. While at the Wellcome Trust Centre, I started working on the Tibetan medical manuscripts from the Dunhaung library cave. More generally, it got me thinking about transmissions of medical knowledge across Eurasia. 

While working on the Tibetan medical manuscripts from Dunhuang, I came across the Hebrew Book of Asaf (Sefer Asaf). I read an article by Elinor Lieber about it, where it was suggested that Sefer Asaf was based on Tibetan medicine. I was captivated. I found the text and read it. I realized that it was not based on Tibetan medicine but was blown away by the many references to India and Indic medical knowledge, and so I decided I should do some work on it. I then got another Wellcome grant and started working on the many enigmas of this fascinating text. 

NBD: What is Sefer Asaf? Your contextualization of this book in the entangled world of Silk Route knowledge transfer pulls the field’s gaze to paths that are relatively untraveled in medieval Jewish studies. Can you give an example of how this Eurasian orientation alters the history of medieval medicine in general and the history of Jewish (scientific) thought in particular? 

RY-T: Sefer Asaf is an extensive medical compendium, which is considered to be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, Hebrew medical texts. It begins with an absorbing account narrating the history of medicine as a multicultural enterprise, followed by sections on anatomy, embryology, diagnosis based on pulse and urine, a seasonal regimen, a medical oath, and a long materia medica section. Sefer Asaf is a very important text not only in the history of the Hebrew medical sciences, but also for global history of medicine. It has long been one of the greatest mysteries of Hebrew science with regards to fundamental questions such as the date and place of its composition, and the identity of its author or authors. It has been dated anytime between the third and the eleventh centuries, and its composition located anywhere between Persia and southern Italy. In an article I published in the journal of Hebrew sciences Aleph, I argued that at least the core part of the text derives from Syriac material of the Church of the East (formerly known as the Nestorian Church) in Persia, dating to the eighth century. This provenance helped to explain, among other things, the many references to India.

Deriving from a Persian cultural milieu from ca. the eighth century and transmitted to Hebrew via Syriac, Sefer Asaf is an important reminder that paths of transmission were varied and multidirectional, and that the role of Hebrew within those is important to explore. The compiler(s) of Sefer Asaf were in conversation with a breadth of foreign ideas, situating its knowledge as deriving from the medical systems of India, of the Syrians, the Persians, and the Greeks. Sefer Asaf subsequently arrived in southern Italy, where apparently more sections were added to it. Beyond Italy, it circulated in central and northern Europe, locations where we now find its many extant manuscripts. Sefer Asaf was widely used in Ashkenaz and was known both to Jewish and non-Jewish European medieval authors. 

Sources in bridging languages help us to reconstruct paths of translations and transmissions beyond what is generally termed “the translation movement.” Within this overall approach, Hebrew medical literature has been viewed predominantly as part of this movement, whose main trajectory has been seen to be the Greek-Arabic-Latin path. Hebrew, like Syriac, has been mostly treated in its auxiliary role in this path: primarily as an intermediary to and from Arabic and useful especially when the Arabic or Greek are not extant.

Within the study of history of medicine, there has been a tendency to “look under the lamppost”: an emphasis on studying Greek and Latin and lack of support for languages that allow the study of sources that will ultimately bring a more global approach to medical history. Beyond Hebrew, these include obvious languages such as Arabic, Persian, and Syriac, but also more precarious, less known, Eurasian “bridging” languages, such as Tocharian A & B (Agnean and Kuchean), Khotanese, Tibetan, Uighur, and Sogdian. The less known paths of these languages reveal more varied and multidirectional “translation movements,” which have hitherto not received the attention they deserve in the historiography of medicine. A text like Sefer Asaf demonstrates the importance of Hebrew for uncovering some of these lesser-known transmission paths. In this way, Sefer Asaf re-orients (pun intended) our view of the history of medieval medicine in general, and the role of Hebrew within that in particular.

NBD: Your training is in Tibetan Buddhism and at the Katz Center you are among Jewish studies scholars. Can you talk about some differences between the two scholarly fields? How might one of these fields learn from the central approaches/questions of the other?

RY-T: My Ph.D. was within the field of the study of religions, and essentially, I see more links than differences. Having moved increasingly to the field of history of medicine, though, I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationships between the fields of the study of religion and history of medicine. We tend to think about these two as separate, but the interactions are very rich and have taken many paths and angles throughout history. I have been dealing with these connections with regards to Buddhism and medicine, but they are all certainly very relevant for this year’s topic of medicine at the Katz Center.

One key issue, for example, are views of the human. Throughout history—certainly in the past, but today too—the human body has been understood to consist of more than what can be seen under the knife or, today, under the microscope. Paul Unschuld, in his book What Is Medicine? termed this as the “body plus X” issue, with X standing for that part of the human which we cannot see, the immaterial. We may call it: soul, spirit, ru’ah, qi, psyche. This immaterial aspect has been deeply linked with religion and philosophy and has defined perceptions of the human body, and hence of medicine. I’ve been very interested in this link between medicine and religion. I’ve written about the Tibetan aspect of this question and am now working on this aspect as it manifests in Sefer Asaf—in its view of the ruhut. 

NBD: Is there a particularly compelling conception of a disease or a cure in the texts you study that you might tell us about?

RY-T: I think there is a lot of very valuable knowledge in these ancient medical texts: their emphasis on preventive medicine, a more holistic view of body-mind-spirit, a more integrated view of the place of the human within nature. This is not knowledge that contradicts science, but knowledge that complements it. In these days of assault on the humanities in many places around the world, it is important to remember that we have much to learn from these treasures of wisdom. This, in fact, is the focus of my next project, on which I am about to embark after I leave the Katz Center. It will bring key takeaways from all the traditions I have studied in the last two decades to a wider audience. Stay tuned.