The First Jewish Doctors
When Medicine became a Jewish Profession
A story is told about King Francis I of France, who was suffering from an interminable illness. His doctors could do nothing for him and in despair he sent a message to King Charles V in Spain, asking him to send him a Jewish doctor. The Spanish king was perplexed, he couldn’t understand why Francis might want a Jewish doctor rather than a Christian. He couldn’t help anyway, because this was in the early 1500s and a few years earlier all the Jews had been expelled from Spain. So Charles sent Francis the best Christian doctor he could find.
When the doctor arrived in France he and the king started to talk about religion. It didn’t take long for Francis to realise that the man was not a Jew. He was furious. He told him to go back to his country “for I have Christian physicians enough in my own court and house. I took you to be a Jew, who in my opinion are those who have a natural ability for cures.” Francis then sent to Constantinople for a Jewish doctor, who cured him with a few doses of donkey’s milk.
The story may not be completely true but it does show that, even in an age where Jews were generally reviled and persecuted, Jewish doctors were respected as being able to cure illnesses that nobody else could. The reason has much to do with the extremely long tradition of Jewish medicine, a tradition that was already well established by the 10th century and quite possibly long before. Even the Talmud, completed around the year 500, contains remedies for certain illnesses, and although they tend to be of the ‘eye of newt and toe of frog’ variety, it is clear that the Talmudic authors knew of a few surgical operations, like amputations and a primitive form of caesarean section.
The earliest Jewish medical treatise, The Book of Healing was written by someone whose life story is unknown, he is called simply Asaf HaRofeh, or Asaf the Healer. Dated somewhere between the 7th and 10th centuries and written in Hebrew, it is a sort of medical encyclopaedia, covering every aspect of ancient medicine, other than surgery. As we would expect from a book so ancient there is a lot of mythical content; the author begins by explaining that Noah was taught medicine by the angel Raphael (the name means God heals), and that the Jews then passed medical knowledge on to the Indians, Babylonians and Egyptians. Although he tries to show that medical knowledge in his time was based on Talmudic medicine, the content of The Book of Healing is almost exclusively based on ancient Greek teachings; it even contains a version of the Hippocratic Oath that doctors still take today when they qualify.
The Book of Healing is a historical curiosity, but it doesn’t explain why there have been so many Jewish doctors throughout history. The person who really began the story of Jews in medicine was Shabbetai Donnolo who, fortunately, tells us quite a bit about himself. Born in 913 in the Apulian town of Oria, on the heel of southern Italy he was taken captive at the age of 12 after an invasion by the Fatimid caliphate. Eventually ransomed by his family he learnt Latin and Greek and studied astronomy, astrology and medicine, seeking out non-Jewish teachers who could help him expand his knowledge of those topics not typically taught in a Jewish environment. Around the year 970 he wrote The Book of Remedies, a treatise on pharmaceutics that was designed, he said, to instruct Jewish physicians in the art of dispensing medicine according to the wisdom of Byzantium and Israel. Written in Hebrew, it was one of the earliest books not to be written in a monastery and the first medical treatise to be written in Southern Italy. Showing signs of Arabic, Latin and Byzantine influences, the book may well be responsible for the legend that Donnolo, together with a Catholic, a Greek Orthodox Christian and a Muslim was one of the four founders of a medical school in Salerno.
In ancient times healing was regarded as a miraculous process and doctors were assumed to have mystical and spiritual powers. Donnolo was as much a mystic as he was a medical man, including among his works a commentary on an early mystical treatise, the complicated and obscure Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation.
It was the belief that the ability to heal reflected one’s spiritual and religious qualities which explains why so many Jewish doctors, all the way through medieval and early modern times, were also rabbis. At that time rabbis did not earn salaries and therefore anyone learned in religious matters needed a profession. Since Jews were excluded from most professions apart from medicine, it made sense for those who were ordained as rabbis to become doctors. And whatever anyone thought of Jews, nobody was in any doubt that they were heirs to an ancient tradition of wisdom. So a medical doctor who was also a rabbi was regarded as someone possessed of valuable and unusual healing powers. This explains why Francis I of France was so insistent on being treated by a Jewish doctor.
From around the mid-8th century, Muslim scholars started translating Greek works into Arabic, among them the works of Hippocrates and Galen, the most important of all medical writers in ancient Greece. Jews living in Islamic lands, who spoke both Hebrew and Arabic, were not slow to take advantage of the new texts now circulating, improving their knowledge and kicking off the next phase in the Jewish relationship with medicine. The names of three Jewish physicians from this period have survived: Masarjuwayh, his son Isa, and Furat ben Shahnatha. They are all quite obscure characters, all that has survived is their names. Unlike their contemporary, Isaac Israeli, who was born around 855 in Egypt and died in Kairouan in North Africa, well into his 80s.
Isaac Israeli wrote several medical treatises, among them the Book of Urine, On Simple Remedies and Foodstuffs, a book on the philosophy of medicine, The Book of the Elements and On Theriac, about an old Greek pharmaceutical preparation, used as an antidote to just about everything. His most important work was the Book of Fevers. It was the first ever written on the subject and became very popular among Jewish and Arabic physicians, was widely read and frequently quoted. In 1087 it was translated into Latin by Constantine the African (who didn’t bother to attribute it to Israeli), becoming perhaps the first example of Jewish scientific scholarship to be studied in Christian Europe. The Book of Fevers was later translated back into Hebrew, both from the Latin version and from the Arabic original. It was quoted as late as 1621, in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
It was not easy for Jews to study to become doctors. Medical schools were few and far between in those days and even where they existed Jews would have been excluded (Padua was probably the first university to admit Jews and that wasn’t for several centuries). In order to become a doctor a student would train with a master, usually another physician. Jews and Muslims studied and taught together. Isaac Israeli trained the North African physician Ibn al-Jazzar, he too would go on to carve out a successful career for himself as a doctor and medical authority.
It is impossible to say how many Jewish doctors there were in Islamic lands by the 12th century. Donnolo and Isaac Israeli were just the first of several Jewish medical writers and, given that the number of practising doctors is likely to have greatly exceeded that of technical authors, we should assume that by the time the most famous of all medieval Jewish doctors came along, the great Maimonides, he was already one of many.
Maimonides, who like so many others was both a rabbi and a doctor, is far more famous as a philosopher and for his expertise in Jewish law than he was for his medical abilities. He only trained as a doctor because his brother, a merchant who supported him, was drowned in a shipwreck. But as a doctor, Maimonides was no slouch. Born in Cordoba in Spain, he was forced by persecution to flee, first to Morocco and eventually to Egypt where he was appointed as a physician to the royal court, eventually ending up as the sultan, Saladin’s, personal doctor. Also the head of the Jewish community in Cairo, he complained that the combination of his communal duties and medical practice left him permanently exhausted, with no time at all for himself. It didn’t stop him writing though. Apart from his works of law, philosophy and the many epistles he sent as a rabbi, he wrote 10 medical works. He summarised the works of Galen and Hippocrates to help young doctors to study, explained the origins and cures of various illnesses and composed a book of 1500 short pieces of medical instruction and advice, based on Greek and Persian writers. Maimonides’s reputation and influence ensured that medicine was now accepted as a profession of particular interest to Jews.
The greatest days of Jewish doctors however were still to come. It is a subject we may return to in future weeks. If you would like to read more about the history of Jewish doctors, please indicate this in the short poll below. Likewise, please tell me if you wouldn’t!