Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies between Magic and Science by Jason Sion Mokhtarian (review)

Reviewed by: Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies between Magic and Science by Jason Sion Mokhtarian Monika Amsler Jason Sion Mokhtarian. Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies between Magic and Science. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. 260 pp. Jason S. Mokhtarian is the first talmudist to have written a book-length monograph on the medical content of the Babylonian Talmud (BT). His predecessors—most notably Julius Preuss (Biblisch-talmudische Medizin, 1911) and his English translator Fred Rosner, but also Abraham Stern (Die Medizin im Talmud, 1909), Wilhelm Ebstein (Die Medizin im Neuen Testament und Talmud, 1903), and most recently, Ariel Toledano (La médecine du Talmud, 2014)—approached the topic from their education as physicians. The publication dates of these monographs may suggest stagnation in the field, but this is not the case, as the subject has garnered more interest outside of this literary form. The reputable series Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (Stephen Newmyer and Samuel Kottek), for example, has two entries on "talmudic medicine." Feminist scholars such as Tal Ilan or Charlotte Fonrobert have repeatedly addressed topics in the realm of female healthcare. In the last decade, Mark Geller and Lennart Lehmhaus have advanced the field with the BabMed project (FU Berlin) that has sponsored numerous conferences and publications, many of which are still in press. Most recently, Julia Watts Belser and Shulamit Shinnar have engaged with disability studies to shed new light on the subject. Mokhtarian's monograph further differs from his predecessors' in that it is (mostly) focused on the BT alone, while at the same time it is broader in considering the cultural context of the material, its linguistic features, medical and magical elements, or emic and etic viewpoints. The book has five chapters, each of which treats a certain aspect of medicine in the Talmud. While neither the book as a whole nor the individual chapters pursue a thesis, they offer an insightful panoply of the questions that have been posed and that could be posed to the medical sections in the Talmud. In that vein, the first chapter discusses three reasons why what scholars have termed the "Gittin book of remedies" (B. Gittin 68b–70b) may have been included in the Talmud, and five reasons why alternative therapies may exist. In the same chapter, the author also discusses two other talmudic passages with a high density of medical instructions, B. Avodah Zarah 27a–29a and B. Shabbat 108b–111b. Other topics are the literary form of some recipes, their Jewish character, their reception in the Middle Ages, Sabbath laws and medicine, and the relationship between rabbis and physicians. The second chapter discusses past and, briefly, current trends in talmudic medicine before turning to questions of method (i.e., is there evidence for an emic category of medical healing? Is it, from a modern perspective, better analyzed as End Page 202 medicine or magic?), and the difficulty of identifying ancient diseases and drugs. The next chapter looks at "precursors of talmudic medicine," which include, of course, the Hebrew Bible and the Mishnah; the Wisdom of Ben Sira (although the latter does not appear to have influenced the BT directly); Jubilees; the Testament of Solomon; and the book of Tobit, which "describes sickness in natural and supernatural terms in a manner analogous to the Bavli" (55). The chapter also offers some comparisons between the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmuds, upholding a binary between Greek and Babylonian medicine, which, at least for late antiquity, has been dismantled by scholars of ancient medicine. The two systems, which always overlapped, were to be conflated further during the Hellenistic period. Mokhtarian gets repeatedly tangled up in such outdated categorizations. Some of it may result from the fact that the book's core categories—medicine, magic, empiricism, efficacy—are not properly defined, neither in an emic nor in an etic sense. The author discusses his notion of "medicine" in an endnote, for example, where he states that he prefers the term "medicine" over "healing … because I want to make a distinction between the so-called magical healing therapies versus empirical ones" (145). This is an important methodological decision that deserves more explanation...