#haskalah

"Judaism boasts no exclusive revelation of eternal truths that are indispensable to salvation, of no revealed religion in the sense in which that term is usually understood. Revealed religion is one thing, revealed legislation, another. The voice which let itself be heard on Sinai on that great day did not proclaim, 'I am the Eternal, your God, the necessary, independent being, omnipotent and omniscient, that recompenses men in a future life according to their deeds.' This is the universal religion of mankind, not Judaism; and the universal religion of mankind, without which men are neither virtuous nor capable of felicity was not to be revealed there... Among all the prescriptions and ordinances of the Mosaic law, there is not a single one which says: You shall believe or not believe. They all say: You shall do or not do. Faith is not commanded, ofr it accepts no other commands than those that come to it by way of conviction. All the commandments of the divine law are addressed to man's will, to his power to act. In fact, the word in the original language that is usually translated as faith actually means, in most cases, trust, confidence, and firm reliance on pledge and promise... Commandment and prohibition, reward and punishment are only for actions, acts of commission and omission which are subject to a man's will and which are guided by ideas of good and evil and, therefore, also by hope and fear. Belief and doubt, assent and opposition, on the other hand, are not determined by our faculty of desire, by our wishes and longings, or by fear and hope, but by our knowledge of truth and untruth. Hence, ancient Judaism has no symbolic books, no articles of faith. No one has to swear to symbols or subscribe, by oath, to certain articles of faith. Indeed, we have no conception at all of what are called religious oaths; and according to the spirit of true Judaism, we must hold them to be inadmissable. Maimonides was the first to conceive of the idea of reducing the religion of his fathers to a certain number of principles, in order that, as he explains, religions, like all other sciences, would have its fundamental conceptions, from which all the others are deduced...Thank God, they have not yet been forged into shackles of faith... In truth, everything depends here also on the distinction between believing and knowing, between religious doctrines and religious commandments. To be sure, all human knowledge can be reduced to a few, fundamental concepts, which are laid down as the bases. The fewer these are, the more firmly the structure will stand. But laws cannot be abridged. In them everything is fundamental; and in this regard we may rightly say: to us, all words of Scripture, all of God's commandments and prohibitions are fundamental. Should you, nevertheless, want to obtain their quintessence, listen to how that great teacher of the nation, Hillel the Elder, who lived before the destruction of the second Temple, conducted himself in this matter. A heathen said: 'Rabbi, teach me the entire law while I am standing on one foot!' Shammai, whom he had previously approached with the same unreasonable request, had dismissed him contemptuously; but Hillel, renowned for his imperturbable composure and gentleness, said: 'Son, love thy neighbor as thyself. This is the text of the law; all the rest is commentary. Now go and study!"

"Reader! To whatever visible church, synagogue, or mosque you may belong! See if you do not find more true religion among the host of the excommunicated than among the far greater host of those who excommunicated them."

Many Jewish physicians trained during this era—with the occasional exception of those from feldsher [from the German feldscherer meaning field shearer. A military paramedic specializing in haircuts, barbering, and medical knowledge] families—disassociated themselves from the Jewish masses while climbing the professional ladder, enhancing their social status by converting to Christianity, or joining the “assimilationists, declaring themselves Poles or Russians of Israelitic faith, changing their names to sound more Slavic, or refusing to speak Yiddish, instead speaking Polish or Russian only.“ (Kossoy and Ohry).

When the Russian government opened the doors of medical schools to Jews in the 1850s, Ashkenazim took advantage of this opportunity in significant numbers. It wasn’t long before they were very much overrepresented (proportionally) in all branches of certified medicine: clinical medicine, pharmacology, nursing, midwifery, dentistry, and feldsher practice. While Jews, both men and women, were drawn to medicine for a variety of reasons, the groundwork for this entry into the professions was clearly laid by the assimilationist efforts of the maskilim [proponents of the Haskalah, Jewish Enlightenment].

Women in particular were targeted [by maskilim reformers, proponents of the Haskalah, Jewish Enlightenment] because they were more open to discussing such issues as contraception, sex education for adolescents, school hygiene, venereal disease, and their own health.

Physicians with Western academic training, together with health care reformers emerging from the nascent Jewish middle classes of Eastern Europe, attempting to reshape popular attitudes toward health care (along with reforms to education, culture, political and social engagement, etc.) as part of the new movement. By the end of the eighteenth century, as formal training and education became more accessible to Eastern European Jews, traditional healers—who lacked certifications and relied on the natural world for their remedies—attracted the scrutiny of the new Jewish scientific elites. The maskilim, proponents of the Haskalah, launched an offensive to reform the daily, intimate habits and customs of Jews throughout the Pale. Now traditional healers found themselves targeted by the new reformers.

Trained physicians in the early modern period (roughly 1609-1800) offered consultations or oversaw surgeries, but mostly they served as private doctors or university instructors. Whatever advantages their formal education provided them socially or financially, the main contribution of early modern Jewish physicians toward the advancement of medicine was in their role as translators, bringing the writings of Islamic medicine (often via Hebrew) to a wider European audience.

Early Jewish Physicians