Yiddish Medicine in Times of Epidemics

When epidemics struck early modern Europe, people reached for every remedy available — practical and spiritual, natural and supernatural. This lecture explores how Jewish communities in central and western Europe responded to epidemic disease, through vivid examples drawn from books and pamphlets written in Yiddish, the everyday language of European Jews.

Long before modern medicine, healing was never purely physical. Across religions, illness was understood as both a bodily and a moral event — a disruption of the order between humanity and God. Jewish healers and rabbis navigated this world with remarkable creativity, combining herbal recipes, dietary advice, quarantine rules, and prayer into a single, practical system of care.

We will encounter amulets prepared by Jewish mystics — rooted in ancient Greek medicine and shared across Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions.

A Yiddish plague treatise that offered rules for surviving an outbreak, weaving hygiene, community solidarity, and spiritual discipline into one coherent guide. And a Jewish physician’s war against smallpox, in a frightened early modern European community struggling to see that protecting life was not a challenge to faith — it was its fulfilment.

Together, these stories reveal a world in which prayer and medicine, faith and science, were not opposites — but partners in the urgent, deeply human work of survival.