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A Frog under the Tongue: Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe [Żaba pod językiem: Medycyna ludowa Żydów aszkenazyjskich przełomu XIX i XX wieku]

2024; Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America; Volume: 69; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/23300841.69.2.24

2330-0841

Natan M. Meir,

Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies

Marek Tuszewicki's landmark work on Jewish folk medicine in Eastern Europe is about far more than healing. In A Frog under the Tongue, translated into highly readable academic prose by Jessica Taylor-Kucia, we have what many students of East European Jewry have been waiting for these many years: a mapping of the complex contours of the mentality of the ordinary Jew in Eastern Europe. (The geographical focus here is essentially the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.) Every number held significance; every word had the potential to call the evil eye; every moment of the day could be beset by demonic forces threatening to cause spiritual or physical harm. Tuszewicki painstakingly charts the multiple layers of meaning that undergirded ordinary and sometimes extraordinary decisions Jews made about the actions that constituted their days. With a few exceptions, most scholars of East European Jewish culture have focused on the written legacy of that culture, but Tuszewicki states at the outset that "Jewish culture in eastern Europe developed along the line where orality met literacy [and] to a considerable extent its form was dependent not so much on the text itself as on its oral interpretation" (p. 36). To that end, he mines a remarkable set of sources in a wide array of languages for material on folk healing: handbooks of traditional healing (some extant only in manuscript form), ethical works, kabbalistic pamphlets, amulets, ethnographic literature, memoirs, and collections of folktales and proverbs. It must be noted that each of these genres requires its own specialized training if it is to be read and analyzed accurately, and Tuszewicki's mastery of this huge range of literatures is a feat of considerable scholarship. He notes that this study continues the ethnographic and folkloristic research pioneered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by scholars such as Regina Lilienthal. That fruitful line of scholarship, as with so many relating to East European Jewry, was cut short by the Holocaust, and Tuszewicki does us all a tremendous service by renewing it.The Jews of Eastern Europe drew on two sources for information on healing. They were heirs to the legacy of ancient and medieval Jewish teachings, including the Talmud, the Zohar, and an array of legal codes and ethical works. At the same time, they rarely hesitated (even if their rabbis sometimes did) to draw upon the magico-medical wisdom of their Christian neighbors. In theory, such magical practices were banned, but generation after generation of Jews embraced whatever methods of healing they perceived as effective.But Jews did not immediately turn to magic for healing. Most ordinary remedies and prophylaxes, such as the use of herbs and human saliva, were natural, and magical methods were called upon only when serious illness struck. If one had a health concern, one looked first to the immediate environment, that is, to home remedies that were usually the province of the women of the family; then, if those proved ineffective, to the community: the local healer, or sometimes the bikur holim, the religious confraternity for the care of the sick. The last resorts lay far beyond one's town: the big-city doctor or the Hasidic rebbe. Part I of the book ably charts these concentric circles in the medical terrain of East European Jewish society, starting with an introductory chapter on the value placed on health in normative Judaism and Jewish folk belief, then continuing with a chapter limning the biblical and Talmudic legacy, followed by chapters on home remedies, feldshers (medical paraprofessionals) and healers of various kinds, and Hasidic tsadikim and physicians. By the turn of the twentieth century, the book's chronological focus (though many of the practices catalogued here went back centuries), biomedicine had made significant inroads into traditional Jewish society. By 1900, feldshers often integrated modern treatments into their stock-in-trade of humoralism-based healing and many everyday Jews were willing to seek out professional doctors, though often they consulted their tsadik first to request permission to do so, since Jewish doctors were perceived as secular heretics and Christian medical institutions were visited only with great reluctance.Part II of the book explains the traditional Jewish worldview, ostensibly in relation to health and healing, though the Weltanschauung that Tuszewicki limns actually relates to many aspects of everyday Jewish life. In "Microcosm and Macrocosm," he effectively relates the reigning understanding that the human body was a microcosm of the cosmos, and thus remedies were often based on sympathetic magic ("like cures like"). Thus, for example, to encourage an easy birth one would open doors, windows, and drawers in the house. Tuszewicki devotes the following chapter to the ancient Galenic theory of the humors, which was still in wide currency in the late nineteenth century, as reflected in contemporary Yiddish terms such as mare-shkhoyre, the literal and figurative equivalent of the English melancholy, literally "black bile." Common Yiddish expressions also indicated the extent to which astrology suffused everyday Jewish life, the subject of the last chapter of Part II: even "mazel tov," known to many non-Yiddish speakers today as the equivalent of "congratulations," stems from an expression referring to an auspicious star or constellation. In addition to the signs of the Zodiac and the planets, which were said to have specific kinds of influence on various aspects of life, Jewish tradition had much to say about the role of the moon in human health. For example, a waning moon was said to be particularly effective in the treatment of warts and abscesses, since the attenuation of the moon was understood to stimulate the shrinking of the affected site.Parts III and IV shift the focus from medicine and folk healing to the spiritual dimensions of well-being, for "the two worlds [of folk medicine and religion] were closely entwined, each incomplete and unexplainable without the other" (p. 161). Sin, for example, was understood to elicit divine punishment in the form of ill health. Since "material form reflected spiritual faults" (p. 167) some illnesses were even understood to reflect the sins that had caused them, such as the so-called "great love spots" or "evil desire abscesses"—acne on the face or back understood as a symptom of lust. As I explored in my own study of disability in East European Jewish culture, people with disabilities were sometimes perceived as spiritually defective or even demonic in some way. One of Tuszewicki's most fascinating arguments, based on the writings of ethnologist Kazimierz Moszyński, is that Jewish prayer came in two varieties: the attitude of supplication and the attitude of injunction. These corresponded respectively to Hebrew/Aramaic prayer, which consisted mostly of praise of God, and to prayer in the Yiddish vernacular, which was much more daring in its tone, presuming to negotiate with God and even command Him.Part IV, "Unclean Forces," catalogues the many ways the realm of the supernatural could impinge upon the lives of ordinary Jews. Many ailments were understood to be caused by demonic beings, among the most common of which was the Plica polonica ("Polish plait," Pol. koltun, Yid, kolten), a condition—sometimes also known as Plica Judaica—in which the hair became extremely matted and tangled. Both Christians and Jews believed that the "plait" was the material manifestation of a supernatural creature dwelling inside the patient. Remedies for illnesses caused by demons often involved drawing the ailment out of the sufferer in some way, often by means of compresses and plasters. The inventory of supernatural beings is long, encompassing not only the familiar demons, witches, and mermaids, but also creatures that might be more familiar to readers from the world of Harry Potter: the lantukh (mischievous demon) and the shretele (sprite or house elf). The evil eye, of course, gets its own chapter, since it was in some sense a realm of the supernatural unto itself, with its own extremely complicated laws governing the interpretation of a possible evil eye, and many methods of prophylaxis and treatment.Here as elsewhere in the book, Tuszewicki's nuanced approach to the analysis of his data is evident. Rather than rigidly evaluating rituals or beliefs according to one or another interpretive system, he allows for the highly heterogeneous nature of the material; one might say that he allows the sources to speak for themselves. It is a testament to his intimate familiarity with the inner world of Ashkenazic Jewry that he is able to shape a huge corpus of sources into a work as legible and authoritative as this one.