Defining danger – Talmudic concepts of health risks and perilous illness

• In Event: The Body and Its Material Environment in Ancient Judaism

Abstract

Rabbinic literature which emerged between (Graeco-)Roman Palestine and Sassanian Persia (Babylonia) throughout the first seven centuries of the Common Era discussed a variety of scientific issues or knowledge related subjects; prominently among them figured medical ideas. In comparison to Graeco-Roman medical literature, rabbinic engagement with the healing arts appears to have been more oriented toward pragmatic aims. Accordingly, besides discussions of specific illnesses or even elaborated disease taxonomies, one finds frequently recipes, sometimes within longer sequences or clusters, that provide a great variety of treatments or cures in which pharmaceutic, dietary and ritual approaches to health and illness often intersect. This paper seeks to parse how within this rather practical genre(s), the Talmudic authors marked and navigated potential or actual dangers to one’s health (and life) through conceptualization and categorization of grave illnesses (or conditions) and strategies to either maintain a status of well-being or to safeguard the process of recovery. The case studies presented will address the material dimension and availability of proposed cures as well as the role(s) of experts, healers and patients (and the rabbis) as reflected in those texts. Moreover, I will address the socio-cultural imagery, concepts and practices, often with a special emphasis on religious and mythological dimensions, that shaped rabbinic ideas about health risks displaying both various similarities to other late antique medical traditions and genuine Jewish dimensions. The paper applies trans-cultural and comparative perspectives that combine classical methods of Talmudic studies (philology, literary and editorial studies) with innovative approaches from fields such as ancient history of medicine and knowledge, medical Humanities, and material culture.

Author

• Lennart Lehmhaus, The Katz Center (UPenn, Philadelphia) & University of Tuebingen, Institute for Jewish Studies