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"Changing Bodies": Nature, Practical Kabbalah and the New Medicine in the Early Modern Period

Sun, December 16, 12:30 to 2:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Amphitheater

Abstract

In the introduction to the book of medications and remedies "Mif'alot Elokim" (Zółkiew 1724), whose author was most likely Rabbi Yoel Ba'al Shem the Second, we can find the following statement: "It is well known that since the generations [of the ancients] the ways of nature concerning human beings have changed…" The author continues and argues that because of this change, medications from the books of Hippocrates and Galen are not valid anymore, and declares that his book contains only medications from doctors "who are close to this generation, which we can trust".

The idea that the human body is changing through the generations and that the ancient medicine is not appropriate to the current body of the 18th century is rooted in different sources within and outside of the Jewish culture. On the one hand, in the Halacha, since the days of the Tosafot, we can find the concept of "the changing of natures", that originally was used to explain the gap between the knowledge of nature in medieval Ashkenaz and the one of the sages of the Talmud. On the other hand, we see similar ideas in the house of thought of the Swiss doctor Paracelsus (1493-1540), who was the first to reject the classical medicine that dominated the medical world for centuries.


In this lecture, I would like to trace the occurrences of this statement regarding the changing nature of the human body in the early modern Jewish sources, and to reconstruct the cultural and intellectual atmosphere that made such a daring claim possible. This discussion can teach us a great deal of the long process in which the new medicine and modern science in general, entered the Jewish discourse, and to emphasize the religious tension that was involved in it. Farther more, analyzing this remarkable argument can function as a key hole, allowing us a glance into a complex reality that was consistently changing, that many times integrated the "old" and the "new", Kabbalah and science, and shaped new perceptions and knowledge, and sometimes even created "new bodies".

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