The Doctor Who Battled Ignorance
Tuvya Cohen and the new scientific thinking
Part of an occasional series on Jewish doctors
In 1707, Doctor Tuvya Cohen travelled from Constantinople to Venice to arrange the printing and publication of his medical text book, Ma’aseh Tuvya (The Work of Tuvya). An instant success, Tuvya’s book was reprinted four times in the 18th century, and repeatedly over the next 300 years. It was in fact much more than just a medical book. Written in five parts, it began with chapters on theology, cosmology, astronomy, false messiahs and the existence of multiple worlds, before settling into a sustained discussion of medicine.
Tuvya came from a medical family. His grandfather, a physician in Jerusalem, had moved to Poland around the beginning of the 17th century where his son Moishe, Tuvya’s father, followed in his medical footsteps. When the Khmelnitsky uprising broke out in 1648, in which thousands of Jews were massacred, Tuvya’s father fled westward, settling in the French city of Metz, where Tuvya was born in 1652.
As a young man Tuvya spent a few years at a yeshiva, or rabbinical seminary, in Cracow. He must have shown exceptional promise because in 1678 the Duke of Prussia insisted that Tuvya and his friend, Gabriel Felix of Brody, were to be admitted to study medicine at the University of Frankfurt, an institution which up to now had not admitted Jews. The Duke even provided Tuvya with a stipend.
Tuvya’s experience at the Frankfurt University was not pleasant. He and Gabriel were subjected to unrelenting anti-Jewish hostility from the students and teaching staff. Despite the Duke’s orders, the faculty refused to award them medical degrees and the two young men soon left Frankfurt, travelling south to resume their studies in Padua.
The medical school at Padua University had a long history of educating Jewish students. Although the Catholic Church generally excluded Jews and Protestants from higher education, the Venetian Republic, in which Padua was sited, prided itself on its independence from Rome. When it came to secular matters, Rome could not tell the Venetians what to do and Padua University was known for its tolerance and open mindedness. A century earlier the astronomer Galileo, who was soon to be charged with heresy by the Pope, had spent 18 uncontroversial years as the university’s professor of mathematics.
Tuvya and Gabriel flourished in Padua. The rabbi and physician, Solomon Conegliano took them under his wing, tutoring them in both medicine and Jewish studies. Years later, when Tuvya was ready to publish his book, Ma’aseh Tuvya, it was Conegliano who introduced him to a printer and wrote an enthusiastic preface to the book, praising Tuvya fulsomely and ensuring that it caught the eye of scholarly readers just as soon as it appeared.
Tuvya graduated in 1683, with doctorates in both philosophy and medicine. He worked as a doctor for a short while in Poland, until he received a call from the royal household in Turkey. For the next twenty years or so he served as personal physician to one sultan after another, flour altogether, relocating with them as their courts travelled between Adrianople and Constantinople.
Unfortunately, no full account of Tuvya Cohen’s life was ever written. The little information that is known about him comes from his book, and, other than the portrait of himself that the printer inserted, the details that he tells about his life are sketchy at best. He finished writing the book around 1701 but it wasn’t until 1707 that he travelled to Venice to have it printed.
Ma’aseh Tuvya was written at a time when modern science was beginning to emerge, leaving Tuvya torn between his loyalty to the traditional religious understanding of the workings of nature and the new ideas that were circulating. In his section on astronomy he graphically illustrated Copernicus’s theory that the earth revolved around the sun by drawing a series of concentric circles, each labelled with the name of a planet and with the sun at the centre. Even though Copernicus’s theory was now 200 years old, Tuvya’s diagram was the first time it had been set out and explained in a Hebrew book.
But illustrating Copernicus’s theory was one thing. Acknowledging that Copernicus was right was something else altogether. Tuvyah was a traditionally educated Jew who subscribed to the Talmud’s understanding of the earth as the centre of the universe. he concealed his appreciation of Copernicus’s theory by lashing out, writing a chapter refuting him and calling the astronomer the firstborn of Satan. Tuvyah was interested enough in Copernicus’s theory to illustrate how it worked, but he refused to acknowledge that he might have been persuaded by it.
Yet Tuvyah realised that the new science was superseding the old beliefs. He was offended by accusations he heard that Jews were ignorant, that they clung stubbornly to the old ways and were not prepared to acknowledge the changing times. He said that he wrote his book in response to the taunts he had heard when studying in Frankfurt, from those “who vex us, raising their voices without restraint, speaking haughtily with arrogance and scorn, telling us . . . that our knowledge and ancient intelligence have been lost.” A response to those who accused the Jews of ignorance, Ma’aseh Tuvyah was intended to show the world that Jewish thinkers were just as up to date with modern scientific thought as everybody else.
That, at least, is how he presented the book but it was more complicated than that. The book may have succeeded in showing the world that the Jews were up to date in their thinking if he had written in Latin, German or French. But he didn’t. Tuvyah spoke several languages, he was by no means ignorant of European tongues. Yet he chose to write Ma’aseh Tuvyah in Hebrew. And, as David Ruderman, whose work is one of the sources for this article, has pointed out, this can only mean one thing. He wasn’t really writing for those who criticised Jewish ignorance. Rather, he was writing for the minority of people who read Hebrew. He was writing for Jews.
What Tuvya really meant, according to Ruderman was that his book “containing the latest and most serious scholarship in the medical sciences, would serve to demonstrate to Jews themselves that they had not fallen so far behind, that at least some educated Jews like the author could . . . produce a tome equal to and even surpassing any among the languages of European civilisation.” In other words, Tuvyah was trying to reassure educated Jews that the charges of ignorance laid against them were false, that there was no contradiction between the way in which they understood the world and modern science.
Ma’aseh Tuvyah was not an easy book to understand. It could only be appreciated by those who were prepared to take the time and effort to study it seriously. But that too demonstrated that Jewish readers were no more ignorant than anyone else. Medicine and science required serious intellectual engagement.
Most of Ma’aseh Tuvyah is dedicated to the study of medicine. For centuries medical theory had been based on the ancient views of the Greek physician Galen, that illness was caused by imbalances of humours, or fluids, in the body. But for the last 200 years Galen’s theories had gradually been displaced by those of the Swiss philosopher Paracelsus, who argued that diseases came from outside the body, from contact with contaminating agents and chemicals. Tuvyah was enthusiastic about these theories, writing of the “new medicine which dwells in the bosoms of the physicians of our time.” One of his main reasons for writing Ma’aseh Tuvyah was to bring this new medicine attention of those Jewish doctors who were still unaware of it. But his respect for Paracelsus did not extend as far as mentioning his name in the book; the man was rabidly anti-Jewish and particularly dismissive of Jewish doctors. Tuvyah had no intention of affording him any honour.
Nevertheless, there was a limit to the amount of time Tuvyah was prepared to spend treating Turkish royalty. The success of Ma’aseh Tuvyah elevated him to a new level of fame, one from which he could leave the Sultans behind. In 1715 he retired and moved to Jerusalem, where he lived until his death in 1729.