The Book of Women, or: Jewish Medical Women and their Books

• In Event: Bookish Bodies in Early Modern Ashkenaz

Abstract

While printed books contain ample material concerning Jewish medical men in the early modern period, they offer scant information about the women who worked alongside them as healers, likely because women did not often pen their own works. In contrast, female Jewish medical practitioners pervade manuscript and archival records relating to the early modern medical marketplace, particularly in western Europe. This paper explores the limitations of books as resources on Jewish medical women through a close study of one such practitioner, the Dutch Jewish midwife Rachel Salomons, who resided in Amsterdam in the first half of the eighteenth century. Salomons’ career is known to us solely through records of the medical college and through one precious Yiddish manuscript which contains evidence of her training and practice. Among the miscellaneous components of this compendium, entitled SEFER HA-NOSHIM, is a treatise for midwives translated into Yiddish from Dutch, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the only text translated explicitly for an early modern Jewish midwife. Although this work reveals significant information about efforts to circulate midwifery knowledge among Jewish women in the eighteenth century, and about the engagement of Jewish women in the surrounding medical culture of the day, it tells us little about the actual day-to-day training and practice of midwives. The craft of midwifery was still primarily transmitted through apprenticeship and hands-on training, despite the emergence of books as a new vehicle of education. An investigation of SEFER HA-NOSHIM(1709) therefore demonstrates that manuscript, print, and oral transmission were intertwined systems for the production and dissemination of knowledge. Furthermore, studying Salomons’ manuscript compendium alongside archival materials from the Amsterdam medical college (Collegium Medicum) illustrates the necessity of connecting a range of sources in order to develop a more complete picture of female medical expertise in the early modern era.

Author

• Jordan R Katz, University of Massachusetts Amherst