ייִדישע פֿאָלקסמעדיצין פֿון דעם בעל שם טובֿ צו אַנ-סקי און אַריבער/Jewish Folk Medicine from the Baal Shem Tov to An-sky and Beyond
Humanities
HIS 199-22, Independent Study, Jewish Studies
I co-authored this article with my professor, Nathaniel Deutsch, which is set to be published in the next issue of "Afn Shvel" [On the Threshold], a literary and cultural all-Yiddish journal.
This article surveys the history of Jewish folk medicine in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe over a period of three hundred years. It demonstrates that the charismatic leader of the Hasidic movement in its formative period, the Baal Shem Tov, was himself a folk healer, and that Jewish folk medicine was to a considerable degree an offshoot of "practical Kabbalah," the popular form of what had originated as esoteric Jewish mysticism. Surprisingly, however, the article shows too that Jews also sought the services--including exorcism--of both Christian sorcerers and, especially, Muslim Tatar healers. Moreover, it finds that women played a vital role in Jewish folk medicine, and continued to do so over a period that extended for centuries; and that not only the poor but also the more affluent members of Jewish communities sought their services. The article draws not only on the famous ethnographic questionnaire of the An-sky expedition through the Jewish Pale of Settlement before the First World War, but also on the Yizkor books that memorialized Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust.
