Loading summary
Transcript28 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
B
Welcome to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. My name is Julia Rothkoff. I'm the program associate at yivo. Today we have Mark Tushevitsky and Rahul Kafferson joining us for a discussion about a frog under the tongue, Jewish folk medicine in Eastern Europe. And this book recently came out on paperback and we are selling it in the YIVO store. For those who do not know yivo, we are a very special place for the celebration, contemplation and exploration of Yiddish Eastern European Jewish life and culture. We are located in New York City where our library and archive contain over 24 million documents and 400,000 books. These resources are used by researchers from all around the world. We also have lots of classes on Yiddish language and culture where, by the way, Marek and Rahul both met for the first time in one of our Yiddish classes. We also have exhibitions and public programs just like this one, where we aim to bridge the worlds of Jewish culture and our vast library and archival collections. Mark Tushevitsky is the Ariel and Joshua Wiener Family Fellow at the Katz center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Much of his research teaching. Sorry, much of his research and teaching focuses on the language and culture of Ashkenaz, particularly in the relation towards modernity. In 2014, he received a PhD in history from the Jagiellonian University and a year later published the book A Frog under the Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe. He has also authored numerous articles devoted to Ashkenazi popular medical culture, translations of Yiddish literature into Polish, including Mendele Perrot and Sutzkever, as well as his own book of Yiddish poetry from Beta Zeitgenspiegel and. Rahul Kaffersson is a journalist, teacher, playwright and director. 2022, winner of the prestigious Adrienne Cooper Dreaming A Yiddish Prize. Since 2017, Heroku's Golden City column has appeared monthly in Tablet magazine, covering the length and breadth of Yiddish culture. In October 2023, she taught her first class for the Yiddish Book Center, Between Heaven and Yiddish Women's Folklore, Rituals and Magic. Since then, her lectures and classes on everyday Ashkenazi magic become a favorite with students around the world. In September 2024, she will teach a new course, or she did teach a new course for the Yiddish Book center called Sacred Time and Liminal Ashkenazi Folk Magic at the Threshold. And now I will hand it over to Maruk and Rahul.
- [02:40]
A
All right, thank you so much, Julia. I am kind of blown away to see how many people are here this afternoon. And from all over the world. I don't think I've ever seen a crowd like this. It's pretty fantastic. So, wow. I mean, Mark's book is incredible, as I'm sure some of you already know. And Mark is an amazing. Excuse me, scholar. So I'm really happy to be here to talk about this. And, you know, I'm glad that I was asked to do this because Mark's book has really, you know, been a constant companion for me in many ways because I've been teaching these classes about what I call everyday Ashkenazi magic. And I'm constantly citing the book and telling people to buy it, of course. And I will say this about the book, which, you know, the title, if you're not really thinking, you know, you might think, okay, Folk Medicine. What is that? But I would say that it kind of creates or completes a trilogy of incredibly important books about Ashkenazi culture. So the trilogy starts with Dreams, Joshua Trachtenberg's Jewish Magic and Superstition, which came out, I think, in 38. And then we have this book right here, which is much less well known, but I think still amazing. It's Jewish Folkways in dramatic land, 1648-1806, by a gentleman named Herman Pollock, who nobody ever seems to talk about. But it's this incredible compendium of folk ways and sort of the texture of folk culture. And. And what Marx's book does is that it really completes this trilogy by bringing us into sort of more of the modern period and really focusing on Poland and Eastern Europe. Right. Trachtenberg is really thinking about, you know, Germany, Germanic lands, as is Herman Pollock. And Marek is bringing us the really juicy Yiddish language folk culture. And if you thought, oh, folk medicine, I don't know. What's that? That's probably just, you know, tea or. Or, you know, putting mercury in everything or something. You know, you're about to have your mind blowed. It's a lot wilder than that. So I want to just start sort of with some basics to, you know, get to know Mark a little bit. As Julia said, we met each other at the EVO Summer Program Refresher Course in 2008. Little did I know. So, Mark, can you tell us a little bit about your background, how you came to focus on Jewish history and Jewish folk culture and specifically. And then specifically talk a little bit about how you came to focus on healing and medicine. Did you have a medical or background or an interest in medicine? So, two related questions.
- [05:39]
C
Yeah, sure. Hello, and hello, everyone. Nice to have such A large audience. Let me start with the history of a short history or story about the institution where I come from. It's about 40 years already since the university in Krakow, together with the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, began a research project on Jewish autonomy in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. So mainly between 16th and 18th century. And the leading person in this project was Professor Khanash Mero, who was also a Yiddishist scholar in Yiddish literature. And he managed to convince Polish authorities, and it was still under communism to put together a permanent team of historians on the topic of Jewish history in Poland. And the idea fell on the frigid ground also because of the political changes taking place in Poland at the time time and the restoration of full freedom of research a few years later. So this group of historians mutated into the institute where I work now, the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Apollonian University in Krakow, the institute that produced already about thousand graduates, that includes about 30, 30 PhDs. And I'm one of them. I'm one of those graduates and I've been working at the institute for 11 years. And my personal interest in the medical culture of Eastern Ashkenaz began with the encountered. When I encountered popular hagiographies of Hasidic leaders. As I studied figures such as Halberstam from Sans, for example, my attention naturally turned to the role of healers that is ascribed to them. Of course, Hasidic tzadikim enjoyed great authority among Jewish masses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And we can see in the literary legacy and also in those studies of Kvitlev that still remained in the archives of the Evil, for example, that help was one of those crucial issues with which people used to undertake this kind of pilgrimage to the Rebbe's court. And not only Jewish people, but the entire population of Eastern Europe really undertook such pilgrimages. Even in my wife's family there are stories about their grandparents who in the 1930s, before the Second World War, also had encounters with the Tzaddik and were helped by the Rebbe of Bels, because they came from Volhynia, but modern miracles, amulets and anti demonic rituals. I was interested in how those religious leaders negotiated their place between ancient and modern medical cultures. Because Hasidus developed at the same time, exactly the same time as modern medicine. And this had some crucial consequences on how people reacted to both phenomenons and how much authority was described to them when it comes to health and healing. And my interest I intensified after I came upon a number of publications that came from Hasidic circles that included medical advice and those were texts of various characters. Some of them were copies taken from older medical books or kabbalistic books, like those books of Practical kabbalah of the 18th century. So some of those passages were simply taken from older traditions. Some other, however, resembled what I knew already from the ethnography of Eastern Europe, from the ethnography of Slavic peoples from Germanic lands. But there were also some passages that referred to modern doctors, and they were written in Hebrew script, but in Latin, and they provided full prescriptions of modern medicines. So I was impressed by the variety of advice and this was exactly what inspired me to see the reason why this material is so diverse and how is it possible that it contains both pre modern and very modern pieces of medical advice?
- [10:42]
A
Okay, so I want to come back to this piece about Hasidism and healing and healers a little bit later because it's so interesting and it's so kind of vivid and compelling and interesting and, and sort of, I think, unexpected again, you know, when you think, okay, healers, well, maybe, you know, you have like your wise woman on the edge of town or whatever. You're not. But you're not prepared for the role of the Rebbe, for example, or, you know, many different or, or the variety of kinds of hebes. Right, so we're going to come back to that in a little bit. And I just want to clarify. Marek mentioned that he found these collections of Kvitle. And this was in the Yivo archive.
- [11:28]
C
I believe that it was. Yes, it's not exactly mine work. It was done by Professor Marcin Bozinski from the, from the Wroc University.
- [11:37]
A
So I just want to clarify to the audience, if people don't know what a kvital is, Kvitle is our plural. So Kvitl is a like a note, a prayer petition that would be written and handed to. If you went to consult a Rebbe on something, you would hand it, well, maybe to their gabai or you would hand it to them. But also a Kvitl could be laid at the grave of a Rebbe. Right. So it was multi purpose. And if you couldn't write your own, there were specialized people who could write them for you. So if you Kvitlech very, very important, a practice we still see today, you know, go to the Rebbe's oil in Queens, there's a blizzard of Kvitle, right. Covering the graves there. All right, so I'm going to go on to my next question. We're going to come back to Hasidism in a little bit. You chose this Image of a frog under the tongue as the title of your book. And it's so wonderfully evocative and, you know, the title tells you this is no ordinary book about health and medicine. All right. And also I just want to note that if you're very online or terminally online like I am, you know that frogs are extremely zeitgeisty and memeable. I mean, just think of, you know, Lehavdal, you know, Pepe the frog, but also toad and frog. And, you know, there's so many different kind of frogs all over the place, of course, Kermit the OG frog. But anyway, you know, there was something that was both like the frog under the tongue captures something that's both kind of old timey and also incredibly modern and zeitgeisty. So can you tell us exactly actually what it means and how frogs figure into the story of folk medicine?
- [13:22]
C
Yeah. So it started with my interest in those medical texts, but the choice of title only happened when I was having a conversation with my colleagues from Warsaw, especially with Professor Johanna Nalevaikokulikov, who is a historian of 20th century, so historian of Yiddish Press. And we were, during the lunch break, during the conference, we sat over a pizza and discussed various things that I have found in my sources. And I told my colleagues about this disease that is called ranula in Latin, which means little frog, which was known in Jewish sources as the frosh under the song or Zefardea Tachata lashon. And this concept is also known in Polish and German sources because it has much older genealogy, dates back to the ancient medicine. And my colleague proposed to use this name for the title book because it is intriguing. It has so much connection with the topic, but it doesn't say anything at once. People sometimes think that it's about using frogs as the direct medicine that you should eat or put under your tongue. And this is not exactly the case. So the term maranula itself refers to a cyst that sometimes forms under the tongue and mouth and is filled with saliva that has leaked from the gland, the matched salivary gland and such cysts usually looks. It can grow. It can grow as large as a tennis ball and it looks cracked and slippery. So it resembles a frog. And yeah, I think that the name frog under the tongue is a great example how medical folklore was connected with this ancient medical knowledge or science, this early philosophy of the ancient era and later of the medieval and early modern times. However, it is not exactly clear what are really the origins because, you know, even though Medicine drew a lot from simple observations, from similarities just to simple symbolics. And in the case of frog under the tongue, it seems so intuitive that it can emerge in various cultures without any connections or traditions. But it is very much possible that there was tradition, and I will show you why. So frogs also appear quite frequently in folklore studies when it comes to folk medicine, in the specific role of creatures that are capable of sucking various types of fluids of the body. They resemble sponges of things that are able to take the fluid from other body into itself, which is why they were placed, for example, on the head of people that suffered from headaches, because people believed that headaches may be provoked by the excess of phlegm, one of those fluids existing in people's bodies, one of the humors. And this phlegm was supposed to be created in brain. Exactly. So there was strange symptoms of this excess of flaking, for example, sneezing, but also headaches. So the application of the frog may have consisted in bandaging the head with the frog together underneath the bandage, and waiting it to die as a proof that it was effective. But I have also come across application of frogs in a processed form, for example, in the form of an ointment, which was actually made of rock, or a special stone that is called krapaudina, or also a little frog. And this stone is even more interesting because of the fact that its name was also popular in Old English medical literature. It was translated as a toadstone or buffonite, because buffon is Latin toad as well, and it was supposed to be able to suck out. Venoms from snakes, snake bites, or from when someone was bitten by a rabbit, dog, for example. So probably those stones were in fact teeth of a different species of a fossil shark rather than a frog. They are black and very round, the texture is very smooth. So they are quite interesting as objects. But Even in the 17th century in Europe, this European medicine believed that they are acquired from toads, that you have to go into the forest or into the swamps, in the middle of the forest, middle of the night, find an old toad and take those stones out of the toad's head. And I have accounted one story or a case. It was a court case of a Jewish healer and non professional practitioner who used this kind of crapaldina stone to heal people that were bitten by a dog or a snake. And this stone, it was not his exactly. He borrowed it from a Christian peasant who acquired it from a trader that brought it from Rome. So there was another, this sacral element to this story. So, yeah, when you think about Ranula, about the role of the toads and frogs in the medieval culture, it is very specific and it suits to the title.
- [20:12]
A
You just reminded me that there's a scene in Yosef Opetoshu's book, A Day in Regensburg, where there is a sort of snake oil salesman, if you will, that's, you know, sort of from our modern American context, a healer, a purveyor of healing things. And he comes to town with a. Assortment of stones. In this case, I think Steren Schies, which is a different kind of stone and you know, different people have different opinions on what it actually was. But again, it's the same kind of theory that the stone can perhaps remove a malady or perhaps aid pregnancy, for example, or labor. But this, this idea of stones, especially, you know, if the stone resembles an animal, as, you know, perhaps with a toad, they have this kind of power. I also want to go back to something you said that, you know, frogs kind of figure in various ways, sort of allegorical, metaphorical, but also literal. Right. That you said there was there might be an ointment made out of a frog. Correct. Yeah. And, you know, this raises, you know, one of the many kind of sort of jarring aspects of this history. Jarring for us as modern people in that, you know, many of these practices involve first of all, things that seem quite cruel to animals in various ways and also things that are kind of horrifying, like consuming, you know, burned pieces of animals, doing terrible things to animals, um, perhaps consuming their excrement. It's pretty gnarly. So. But can you just talk a little bit about like the ways that to frogs might be used quite literally, Because I think it gives us a flavor of some of these practices.
- [22:03]
C
So with those kind of dirty things that people sometimes applied as. As folk medicines. It's not exactly that they were on the way use regular basis or with people had temperature always sneezing. It was sometimes they were used exactly to provoke vomiting. They were so connected with dirt that had all those negative implications that. Well, this medical. This medical tradition believed that it will be enough to use those kind of objects even if they are already burned. And you really drink with wine only some remnants of it that it will provoke vomiting, which is also important to regulate the level of humorous body. So yeah, even the. It is. Even the circumstances in which this frog is acquired are maybe important to give this particular animal some magical potency, because it's not enough to go outside of your home and find the frog on the like lying around on the courtyard, sometimes you have to go in the middle of the night when the moon is full, to exactly the place where frogs are usually found. Or it is in this specific liminal space, like on the crossroads, and wait until the frog shows up just to catch it. And then you should bring it also, without saying a word, to keep this magical potency untouched by civilization and apply it also with special ingredients, like water that was taken from a well at a specific time and taken from another place, from a river or from a lake. So, yeah, it's not only about the animal itself. It's also about those other circumstances. And when we think about healing, maybe not with frogs, but with herbs, they seem to us very natural, and they were, obviously. But on the other hand, those other elements that usually add the real potency to the. To the medicine are so important that we really cannot think about medical tradition without them and try to find the reasoning, what was the logic behind using those herbs and no others. But the problem is that those circumstances are usually not. You won't find them in the herbarium books. You won't find it in old literature about plants. It's more like this woman knowledge, this tradition that is passed orally from generation to generation. So sometimes you really have to search through different kind of sources. For example, read people's memoirs about how this healing happened to them when they were children, to see that there were other elements of this procedure.
- [26:07]
A
Okay, so you bring up a bunch of things which I want to hit on. First of all, that this topic of folk healing and medicine involves many different logics, I would say. And again, this is something that, you know, is. Is immediately apparent and that makes the topic so interesting. Right? So you have this humoral logic, right. This theory, which I believe goes back to the Greeks, right. To Galen. So we're talking thousands of years continuity of the system of the humors, right? This idea that you have phlegm and bile and blood and
- [26:48]
C
cholera, like black piles.
- [26:50]
A
Black bile. Oh, right. Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood. And that they have to be in balance. Right? So why were people always so, you know, obsessed with. Obsessed with bloodletting, right. This. Well, when you hear about blood, letting you know that you're. That. That you're talking about a system or a logic, right. That goes back thousands of years, you're talking about this humoral system. Okay, Then Mark also mentioned another kind of logic which is very important to Jewish folk healing, which surprises many people today, which is astrology. Right. That, you know, you mentioned that you can't just use a frog that happens to be sitting on your windowsill. It has to be, for example, you know, the moon has to be full or maybe the moon has to be new. Whatever it is that the timing, the heavenly timing is crucial to the cure. And knowledge of the movement of the heavenly bodies is a. An important and an esteemed knowledge. Right again. You know, Jews are often, American Jews are often very surprised how much astrological knowledge is woven throughout everyday Jewish life, or was. And that in fact, you would even find astrological tables of various kinds within a, you know, a machs or some kind of a kolbo, you know, a compendium. So we've got our humoral logic, we've got our astrological logic, we've got our sort of more universal logics of, you know, well, this, this stone looks like a toad, so therefore it's got the powers of a toad, for example, Right?
- [28:23]
C
Yes. The similarity is extremely potent as the provocateur of our way of thinking. It links things that are. That have no other physical or any connections, but in our minds, they start to resemble each other and influence each other. So we sometimes use something instead of something else just because it looks so.
- [28:50]
A
Somebody posed a really great question, I think a very obvious question, which is that if we are using things like frogs, for example, and other ingredients in our medicines and things that are to be ingested, and these are clearly things that are not kosher, how did the folk, Jewish folk understanding kind of deal with this contradiction? How are we integrating clearly trey animals into our ingestibles, as we might say?
- [29:19]
C
Yeah, so first of all, we have to understand that medicine as a separate system was absolutely accepted by the rabbis, at least in the post Talmudic era. Even if the Talmud says that every good doctor will go to hell, it doesn't translate into what was really the relationship between doctors and the Jewish community. Because every Jewish community, every Jewish town had to have this kind of practitioner. And it was also imposed on those communities by the religious law. So there was only one condition, of course, that those practitioners will heal people according to the laws of nature. They won't be witches and any kind of sorcerers, but exactly natural doctors. And by the natural doctors, rabbis usually meant those people who cured, who healed people on the basis of this early science that had its roots in Greco Roman world, but also in the area of Mesopotamia when it comes to astrology and this part of tradition of the old World. So we know that applying medicines is important even from the religious point of view. And obviously not every medicine can be kosher. But in case of health, it's not that important. Because when it comes to healing, when it comes to saving people's lives, Kashrut is less an issue. It's not on the first, it's not on the first page. People or doctors are not the specialists that should think about what kind of medicine should they apply and if it is in accordance with the religious law, in case that there is this situation when they are saving saving lives. But when I've studied my sources, or the sources from the central and Eastern Europe, 19th century, the 20th century, you still wouldn't find that much examples of medicines that would contradict the rules of kashrut very plainly. For example, yes, Jewish people were using fat that was not kosher, like fat acquired from pigs. But they used it mostly mostly for the usage on skin, for example, or to use it. As a soap or any kind of external application and not internal medical usage. However, this also happens sometimes. And you know how it's when you put borders of your culture that strictly as rabbis usually did, you also provoke people to cross the bias and to seek help on the other side. Because this other side, even if it is presented as being not kosher or being demonis and being, well, simply strange, it also created this kind of image in human. Usually it creates this kind of image in human minds that it is also very powerful in sense of magic. And yes, it is usually harmful because those others are usually the demons, the vampires that are endangering our being and human settlements. But there are also some individuals among them that can come to help you in case there is this health issue. So yeah, I believe that kashrut itself is important. We can see even in the remedy books that they try not to offer other Jewish readers medicines that are based on non kosher elements, but it doesn't mean that they do not exist. And the things like the frog that are being important to the Jewish culture from the surrounding come with everything they got. All the symbolic baggage is there. It's not important that it contradicts really the religious law. But to add to this also, we have to remember that the presence of those free logics in our sources, in the medical culture of Eastern European Jewry, was also possible because of substantial backwardness of this part of Europe. Mainly because since the 18th century the eastern US was in a permanent crisis. Since the Ukrainian uprising in the 17th century, since the worst that the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth fought against Swedes and Russians, it was always a crisis. And this crisis also reinforced Those ideas about health and healing that already existed and couldn't. The people weren't able to acquire new knowledge that already appeared in Western Europe at the time. So we think about this old tradition that is thousands years old of astrology or humoral pathology, and it is true, it is thousand years old tradition. But when we think about Jewish ethnographers doing fieldwork at the end of the 19th century and finding those kind of items, those kind of rationale when they were speaking with people, we have to understand that those kind of theories only disappeared from universities in those lands a hundred years earlier. It's only a matter of two or three generations that they cease to be part of the mainstream science or mainstream philosophy. And we understand that things of this kind do not disappear that easily from people's culture, that they are really passed on the descendants. And they imprint on the culture so strongly that even after several generations, you still talk about various things. We still do. We still speak about love as an emotion concentrating in the middle of our chest, although we know that it is a psychological emotion and it's usually located somewhere in.
- [37:40]
A
So, you know, it's funny when you say that you know about these ideas both kind of, yes, they can be superseded, but also they persist. And, you know, you can't help. But, you know, when you start to read your book or dive into the history of this kind of folk medicine, you see that it is, in fact, it feels very modern because on the one hand, we think of medicine as being like, you know, people in white coats and science and, you know, doctors in. In sterile labs. But if you shift that a little bit to wellness in the wellness area, you know, this stuff is all old news, right? You know, cupping, bonkes, right? Like, this is, you know, you can't get more sort of old world than. Than cupping and leeches. PIs, right? In Yiddish and in Polish, PIs bankis. You know, it's so funny, when I go to Poland now, I'm. I'm. I'm always very proud, like, of my. The five Polish words. I know, PIs. Bunk is right? Like, how do I. Why do I know the word for leeches and not bathroom, you know, but because these things are important. And also, you know, I have Polish friends and they're like, well, you know, leeches. Yeah, that's. That's like, that's good, you know, wellness, wisdom. And that's. It's also. It's not just Poland, it's la. You know, it's these. These things still have currency in a way that is so fascinating, but also speaks to their persistence in the very, very deep layers of our cultures.
- [39:18]
C
Yeah. It's so much present in our language on the everyday basis. And when we compare different languages from this European mosaic, it is even more obvious. For example, the very word for remedy or medicine in Polish is lak. So the word lek has exactly the same root as the word lich. It's something that brings the disease out of the body. Yeah.
- [39:49]
A
Amazing, amazing. So I want to talk a little bit because we have to. We have to talk about cultural exchange. You know, cultural interchange is such an important theme in a book like this. And I'm always saying, you know, when I teach, I always want to emphasize that cultural exchange and interchange, cultural contact goes both ways. I think you mentioned earlier, you know that you had of course Jews going to Arabic bringing fitlach. You also had non Jews going to Rebbe's. Right. So it's. There's not just this exchange of beliefs and practices among Jews and Christian Poles, but other peoples too, such as Tatars, who had a reputation as healers among Yiddish speakers. And you go into that quite a bit in your book. Can you talk a little bit about important areas where Jews and Christians shared health related beliefs and practices, but also perhaps give us an example where they diverged significantly.
- [40:46]
B
Yeah.
- [40:46]
C
It obviously derives from the fact that Jewish people participated in the life of the medieval society or really modern society, just as other estates. It was a separate estate at the time. They were the separated state. This is how defined by the majority of the society. And just as they participated in the wider economy of Eastern European lands, they also were part of the wider medical culture. And of course that some of them were doctors and they were present at royal courts or at the courts of the magnates. But it's not really important. They were emerging because there were not so many doctors at all in Eastern Europe. Mainly because those medical faculties in Polish universities were on very, very low level and were quite terrible. They were still discussing Galen and Hippocrates. And most of the doctors were really. And Jewish and Christians alike were really studying at the universities in Padua and in Salerno and sometimes even in Germany or in the Netherlands. But there were other practitioners. And when we think about cities as the centers of health practice, it is understandable that among the town dwellers we had also a substantial group of Jewish barbers or specialists, not exactly in healing, but in this basic surgeon thing, like basic dealing with what is happening on human skin, but also applying bloodletting, bleaches and cupping and There is still not much of a scholarship about this topic, but from what I've seen in the sources, Jewish barbers particularly were extremely valuable in the eyes of the Christian population. And I believe it was possible mainly because for Christians, they were part of the same medical world, the same medical worldview. And if these practices were in fact based on the same tradition of Greek, Roman and then medieval and early modern medicine, it is understandable that there was no barrier, there was no psychological barrier, and people understood exactly what is the reasoning of this bleeding on leeches. But we can also take religion and see that, yes, it is true that Judaism was the most important binding agent for the Jewish community in the Diaspora, that religion laid down the rules of daily life, but it also protected the Diaspora from the influence from outside world. But the fact is that it was such a central component of the Jewish culture because exactly the extent of common heritage this religion has with Muslims and Christians. And what's more, those are very important parts of heritage, the fundamental parts that are describing the origins of the world, the origins of the humankind that translate into simple words the forces of elements, but also the forces that are invisible, the ghosts, the angels, the angelic beings, the demons of of any kind. And yes, it is true that when a peasant from somewhere in Eastern Europe would visit a tavern and he or she had a need to philosophize a bit, they would probably not discuss Plato or Aristotle, but there was always this Jewish innkeeper with whom they could talk about Garden of Eden, about the Original Sin, about the Flood and the Noah's Ark, about angels, about demonic beings. So, yeah, and we also have to remember that this biblical text also is enriched by later exegesis that also shows various reasons why people before Noah's used to live that, that long, and why people had no experience of illness before this illness was sent to Jacob when he wanted to be warned before he will die and give the last advice to his sons. So this kind of additional exegesis can be acquired from literature, but you can also people used to learn about it from stories, from sermons they heard in church, but also in the tavern. And this Jewish tavern keeper was also an intermediary of this kind of knowledge. And it's not only that he was an intermediary of knowledge, but he could also be a practitioner, because in the tavern there was usually tea, there was usually mint or other kind of infusions. Probably there was also a tavern keeper's wife that was trained by her family in this basic of nursing. So, yeah, so if you think about tavern somewhere in the middle of East European countryside as center of culture where people organized weddings, where people used to spend their free time on Sundays during the mass. It's obvious that the stubborn keeper was an important person for spreading knowledge about health and healing and some ideas and some myths and vice versa. This person was also hearing what was popular among those people in the villages. And Jews living in the villages usually knew the local language quite well. It was extremely important to be able to speak with the clients. So this was also the transmission, the perfect transmission of various ideas from this popular culture in the villages that was predominantly Christian into Jewish sources that we later find. And sometimes we find, and it's quite often that we find a handwritten manuscript that is devoted to have and has various prescriptions, and they are sometimes taken from old kabbalistic texts, and sometimes it's more modern medicine. But usually like 5 to 10% of the content is written in the local Slavic dialect. It's not always written in Slavic, in Latin or Cyrillic letters, but sometimes even it's a Slavic text. It is written with Hebrew letters, with the Kodoch to. To be able to read it. And you can also see that those texts, either they are natural or magical, they taking root in this culture. They are being part of, not only of interactions between Jews and non Jews, but also part of this, of this treasury of, of health ideas about health and healing among Ashkenazi jury.
- [49:50]
A
So basically what you're saying is that the Yiddish tavern keeper in Poland and his wife were the original health influence influencers. And I, I think, I mean, I'm being a little bit cheeky, but I think it's very true that we can. It's not that difficult to analogize to the way, you know, that there is this today, this whole parallel system of alternative health and influencers and the way that that knowledge is disseminated and created really does hearken back to this earlier period of, of more informal medical advice and healing. We're running out of time, so I want to get to some of these questions now. This is a great question I think that, you know, everybody comes to. Michelle asks, are there any Eastern European Ashkenazi folk remedies that we now know to have scientific basis? Do any of them work?
- [50:51]
C
Oh, this is not exactly what I studied. I had to take caution and, and distance to the. To.
- [50:59]
A
To my sources, not medical advice.
- [51:01]
C
Yes, because, yeah, I believe in modern medicine, it's not perfect, but it still helped us prolong our lives and change our attitude to even how we react to Epidemics? How? We do not believe in epidemics anymore. Yeah, so, yeah, but I also believed that not everything that was part of this common knowledge was just a matter of some tradition. There wasn't experimenting, but people tried those prescriptions, those medicines. And even if you don't gather herbs in the middle of the night at the beginning of the moon, it still has some attributes that can affect your body. For example, it can help you get rid of toxins. So, yeah, there are obviously some elements of it that work. What I would not recommend is, for example, organizing weddings on the cemeteries in case of epidemic, which also happened during the recent pandemic in various places where this ultra Orthodox communities live.
- [52:35]
A
Yeah, so Marek is referring to the Shvartze Hasana, the Black Wedding, or the Schwartze Chuppah, which evolved or came about basically in the modern period with the arrival of cholera to Europe, or specifically to Eastern Europe, and is a really fascinating and quite deep subject which you touch on quite a bit. All right, we've got very little time left. Let's see. Peter asks, does the comparative approach help to understand the mechanisms of the healing power of Jewish folk medicine? For example, comparing with Chinese or Tibetan traditional medicine?
- [53:16]
C
Well, again, it's difficult to discuss its healing power really, but obviously comparison was absolutely fundamental for me, especially in the context of Central and Eastern Europe. It is almost impossible to discuss Jewish sources without taking into account how much was also gathered among Germans or Slavic people from this region, and how much it is, how much it resembles the same ideas. And sometimes we have even the same magical formulas, the same magical incantations that are only translated in other languages, but are the same, the same symbolics, the same formulas at the beginning and at the end appear in them. So, and even if they are in different languages, they still address the same passages from the Bible or the same protagonists of the Bible. So in this sense, it is obviously very important to study the sources in the comparative way. But let me just add in the context of Far Eastern influences that obviously are not that visible. And we know about Tata influences that are very vague, that are visible because of those folk healers were usually called tatas, but also because of the introduction of some herbs and plants to Eastern Europe, only with the Tata invasion in the Middle Ages. And they were also used in healing practices. Maybe there are also some other influences. They're not exactly from China or Tibet, but from. From Persia, for example, with some books that were later translated into Hebrew and also circulated already in the Middle Ages in Europe. But that's it. If it was more or less powerful. It is hard to say.
- [55:50]
A
All right, well, it's exactly. Excuse me, I was just thinking we say a frog in the throat. I just had a frog in my throat. Speak of the devil. It's exactly 2 o' clock now it's 2:01. So I know we need to wrap it up and I apologize, we are not able to get to the rest of your questions. This is such a huge topic and Mark's book is so dense and you know, you could spend a year just reading it and you know, looking at the citations and there is so much information. Margot writes, I'm disappointed you didn't go into curing herbs that were used. Again, a huge subject. You've got to get Mark's book, also the book Ashkenazi Herbalism and there's going to be a sequel to Ashkenazi Herbalism, which is coming out very soon. I highly recommend that book also by Deandra Cohen and Adam Siegel. We could, I could talk to you, Mark, for three hours. This is such an incredible topic. I'm. Thank you so much to everybody who came today. Sorry, you know, there's so much more to get to we didn't get to. But maybe there, there will be future opportunities. And I know, Mark, you're in the United States for the, for the rest of the semester, the school year. Excuse me. So perhaps you'll be giving other talks too. In fact, I'm sure you will be. Check the Cat center website for that where he's a fellow now.