Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe

9.

Introduction

Glenn Dynner

Gone now are those little towns where the wind joined Biblical airs with Polish song and Slavic sorrow.

—Antoni Slonimski, Elegy of Jewish Towns (1947)

Dissent from eastern Europe’s state-sanctioned religions was often both mystical and Jewish. This held true not only for Jews themselves, but for a host of Judaizing Russian Christian sects, including Dukhobors, Molokans, Jumpers, Subbotniks, Stundists, and flagellants (khlysty).¹ That dissent assumed a mystical form is not surprising: the mystical enterprise tends to be trans-institutional since, as Steven Ozment has noted, the impulse to achieve a more direct, intimate communion with God often demands more than the normal institutional structures of the church can give.² But the pervasiveness of Judaizing tendencies in a region so often singled out for its anti-Jewish outrages is more puzzling. While most Russian Christian sectarians initially based themselves on a conception of Judaism in the abstract, that is, as portrayed in the Old Testament, many gradually made contact with living Jews and were profoundly shaped by the interaction.³ It would seem that Jews, by virtue of their exceptional, officially tolerated status and, paradoxically, their sporadic suffering at the hands of the state, had for many Russians come to epitomize dissent.

The way that east European Jewish mystics related to the dominant Slavic Christian culture seems counterintuitive, as well. Jewish popular medicine, folk rituals, and messianic and mystical movements may have been rooted in Kabbalah, an internal Jewish development, but they absorbed a great deal from a non-Jewish environment that is usually construed as aloof or hostile. Jewish mystics thus resembled Christian dissenters in their selective appropriation and nativization of a foreign, rival religious culture. One should not push the comparison too far—many Christian dissenters remained, in varying degrees, close to the dominant Christian culture and were less vulnerable to lethal physical violence. But an increasingly shared sense of victimization at the hands of the state led to convergence and, in certain cases, outright integration.

In other parts of Europe, this connectedness might come as less of a surprise.⁴ But the main strands of Jewish life in eastern Europe (a term used here as shorthand for eastern and east central Europe) seemed to form a knot of insularity. The region contained the largest concentration of Jews in the world by the eighteenth century, affording a sense of safety in numbers. The Jewish vernacular, Yiddish, a combination of German and Hebrew with some Slavic elements, divided the Jewish masses from their Christian neighbors socially, or was perhaps a symptom of social division. Rabbinic and mercantile elites cultivated an abstruse literature in medieval Hebrew. The increasingly distinctive modes of dress adopted by adherents of the emerging Hasidic movement only accentuated the exoticism of Jewish piety. Haskalah, a movement for Jewish enlightenment-based reform, made limited inroads outside of select urban centers.⁵ Residential restrictions in many Polish towns and cities, while never quite fitting the definition of ghettoes, ensured that the bulk of the Jewish population lived and worked in their own neighborhoods under the scrutiny of a traditionalist-oriented Jewish leadership. Russian Jewry was largely confined to the Pale of Settlement. Economically, Jews formed a kind of captive service sector, often as lessees of noble-owned enterprises. And in 1881, the first series of pogroms ripped through southern Russia and parts of the Congress Kingdom of Poland.⁶

Yet Judaizing tendencies among Christian dissenters and the heavy Slavic imprint on Jewish popular culture call into question the presumed binary nature of culture in eastern Europe. Evidently the shtetl—the Jewish small town settlement—was not so hermetically sealed after all. Evidently east European Jewish culture itself, so celebrated by early twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals for its authenticity, was not so impervious to influence. And perhaps the region’s infamous antisemitism was not quite so consistent and pervasive.⁷

The spread of Sabbateanism in the region only further destabilized the lines of demarcation. The sordid tales of Sabbatai Tzevi (1626–76) and his self-proclaimed Polish reincarnation, Jacob Frank (1726–91), have been retold many times. In brief, Sabbatai Tzevi, born in Izmir, was proclaimed Messiah by the renowned Kabbalist Nathan of Gaza in 1665. After a tour though major Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, Sabbatai arrived back in Izmir where, despite (or perhaps because of) his open flouting of Jewish law, scores of Jews fell to the ground in fits of prophetic vision, proclaiming him Messiah. The messianic fever spread throughout the Jewish world. But upon his arrival in Constantinople, Sabbatai was imprisoned by the sultan and, presented with a choice between conversion and death, converted to Islam. Sabbateanism, a movement whose radical adherents indulged in ritual violations of their own, nevertheless endured thanks to the continued efforts and apologia of Nathan of Gaza.⁸

The extent of the spread of Sabbateanism in eastern Europe is still debated by historians.⁹ But among the several Sabbatean messiahs who appeared after Sabbatai’s death in 1676, none proved as successful in amassing a following as the Polish adventurer Jacob Frank. After a stint in Thessaloniki as leader of the Doenmeh—Jews who had followed Sabbatai Tzevi into Islam—Frank returned to Poland in 1755 and presented himself as Sabbatai Tzevi’s reincarnation. Eastern and central Europe proved fertile ground for Frank’s radical form of Sabbateanism, which included ritual violations of a sexual nature. On the night of January 27, 1756, in Lanckoronie, Frank and his followers were discovered conducting orgiastic ceremonies. Frank fled to the Ottoman territories and converted to Islam while his followers, who admitted to ritualistic wife-swapping and harboring Sabbatean beliefs, were placed under ban (herem). But Bishop Mikołaj Dembowski extended his protection to the Frankists, who presented themselves as anti-Talmudists with Trinitarian beliefs. A disputation held in Kamieniec Podolski from June 20–28, 1757, resulted in a victory for the Frankists. Their rabbinic opponents were fined and flogged, and copies of the Talmud were burned.

Bishop Dembowski’s death on November 9, 1757, deprived the Frankists of their protector. But as potential converts to Christianity, the Frankists were given another opportunity to engage in a disputation by King Augustus III himself. This time, they charged that Jews used Christian blood for ritual purposes. The dangerous disputation, held from July 17 to September 19, 1759, in Lwów, was prematurely halted by the Vatican, and Frank was baptized along with around 3,000 of his followers. Suspicions about the sincerity of Frank’s conversion resulted in his imprisonment in a Częstochowa monastery. Freed by the Russians in 1772, Frank moved to Brünn (Brno) in Moravia and resumed his activities until his death in 1791.

TOWARD A NEW METHODOLOGY

It is therefore more useful to think in terms of a permeable border zone than a sharp borderline dividing eastern European Jews and Christians. This conceptual shift is indebted to several recent scholarly developments. First is the flourishing discourse on cultural hybridity, which underscores the cross-fertilization that inevitably occurs among variant cultures as they come into contact with one another. Scholars now doubt whether it is ever advisable to use terms like authentic when describing cultures or religions.¹⁰ Second is the dawning recognition of the need to bridge the artificial divide between theology (i.e., text) and social history (i.e., context). Steven Ozment drew attention to this divide back in 1973: That history which views men as only thinking minds and immortal souls without bodies and involvement in time must be protested. But that history which preys upon the past with grand ‘scientific’ models and typologies, summarizing whole centuries with a handful of statistics, must also be reminded of its overweening modern bias.¹¹ Historians have since come to realize that capturing the multivalence of religious culture requires a reintegration of theology and praxis into their original context, conceived broadly as outside ideas, customs, rituals, socioeconomic and political realities, and so on.¹² A generation of scholars of eastern and east central European religion has meanwhile emerged with almost unfettered access to archival sources, thanks to the revolutionary events of 1989, as well as the linguistic tools necessary for undertaking this project.

On May 18–19, 2008, Professor Matt Goldish and the Melton Center of Jewish Studies at Ohio State University hosted a Thomas and Diann Mann Distinguished Symposium entitled Jewish Mystical and Messianic Movements in Their Social and Religious Contexts: The Eastern European Case. This symposium constituted an unprecedented gathering of historians of Judaism and Christianity in eastern Europe interested in the encounter between Jewish and Christian mystics in the region. Wary of the reductionism that so often bedevils comparative religious approaches, participants made an effort to focus on well-substantiated, if more modest, instances of inter-connectedness and remain sensitive to cultural specificities.¹³ Their papers—enhanced by fruitful exchanges that occurred during the symposium—form the basis of this volume. Chapters in the volume’s first part examine the impact of the eastern European context on Jewish mystics who remained within the Jewish fold. Chapters in the second part address more thoroughgoing border transgressions among Jewish and Christian mystics alike. The overall focus on religio-cultural exchange in this volume is intended to help overcome a stereotyped, diachronic conception of Jewish life in eastern Europe and uncover multiple levels of ambiguity.

JEWISH MYSTICS IN A CHRISTIAN WORLD

While mystics are often associated with insularity, even misanthropy, Jewish mystical praxis in eastern Europe reveals a high degree of external influence. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern illustrates the extraordinary intercultural exchange inherent in magic, folk medicine, and healing. Mystical practitioners known as ba‘alei shem, though well versed in Kabbalah, did not hesitate to consult Christian doctors or borrow remedies and incantations from other Christian sources; and their Christian counterparts borrowed from them. Jewish and Christian healers also drew upon a common, earlier source, the Renaissance physician-philosopher Paracelsus (Phillip von Hohenheim, 1493–1541), and both depended on a single institution—the pharmacy—for filling their often bizarre prescriptions. A similarly complex interplay is described by Hanna Węgrzynek in her study of Polish Jewish black weddings, cemetery ceremonies held in hopes of persuading the dead to intercede with the divine to halt epidemics. Slavic Christian, pan-European, and earlier Jewish ritual alike resonated in those ceremonies.

The several chapters on Hasidism depart in significant ways from the extensive historiography of the popular mystical movement. Since the field’s inception, social historians have been preoccupied with Hasidism’s alleged class basis: Jews were attracted to Hasidism because they were poor and disenfranchised or because Hasidic gatherings offered the hope of business opportunities.¹⁴ Such explanations were probably driven less by romanticization, as is often assumed, than by a more intractable functionalist understanding of religion that rejects the significance and quality of religious belief and practice as such in favor of a totalizing view of economic pragmatism. But the social history of Hasidism need not be burdened with such skepticism. Revisionists have shown that Hasidism’s charismatic leaders enjoyed the sanction and support of elites, that they usually derived from the elite themselves, and that they appealed to Jews along the entire socioeconomic spectrum.¹⁵ Contributors to the present volume attempt to move the social history of Hasidism beyond socioeconomic characterizations, so prone to overgeneralization, by exploring the ways in which the movement’s crucial theology and institutional development was shaped by contextual realities like geography, space, and the surrounding non-Jewish population.

Hasidism’s spiritual founder, R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov (the Besht), is usually assumed to have been born and raised in Okopy, a small town in Podolia (present-day Ukraine). Moshe Idel exposes the frailty of this assumption, arguing that a more likely setting for the Besht’s early formative years is a region in the northern Moldavian portion of the Carpathian Mountains known as Walachia during that period. This region was then under the influence of hesychastic asceticism, a movement whose techniques for attaining calmness (Hesychia) and communion with God in a state of seclusion bear a striking resemblance to the Besht’s earliest phase of mystical praxis.

As Hasidism blossomed into a full-fledged movement during the nineteenth century, its charismatic leaders, known as tzaddikim (or rebbes in Yiddish), established full-fledged courts. My own chapter introduces the case of an aspiring tzaddik named R. Abraham Elkhanan (Chuna) Unger (d. 1883). Unger’s choice of the town of Pia$tek as venue for his fledgling court is representative of a wider phenomenon: when establishing their courts, most tzaddikim tended to eschew cities and villages in favor of small urban settlements with a pronounced Jewish presence known popularly as shtetls, where it was much easier to both dominate the local Jewish community and regulate interactions with local Christians. Paul Radensky analyzes the rise and decline of the opulent court of the Tolner Rebbe (Rabbi Duvid Twersky of Tal’noye). In accounting for the court’s extravagance, Radensky points not only to the tzaddik’s charisma but to external factors as well: placed under house arrest by the tsarist government as a result of his overzealous expansionist initiatives, R. Duvid made a virtue of necessity and transformed his court into a thriving pilgrimage center. At its peak, the Tolner court was a town unto itself.

CHRISTIANIZING JEWS, JUDAIZING CHRISTIANS

Some mystics ventured further into the border zone or traversed it altogether. Elliot Wolfson provides an arresting view of the kabbalistically inspired messianism of Immanuel Frommann, a Jewish convert to Christianity. Frommann’s spiritualized approach to commandments not only resembles that of Sabbateans, but also bears an uncanny resemblance to the messianic gnosis that would be developed by the first Hasidic leaders a generation later. Wolfson shows that, while early Hasidim resisted Frommann’s hypernomian extremes, they drew upon the same kabbalistic clusters of symbols to emphasize inward spirituality as the key to redemption.

The most famous case of Christianizing Jews is the messianic movement that emerged around Jacob Frank, discussed earlier. But Pawel Maciejko finds that Frankists were not the only ones to seek a Jewish-Christian rapprochement. Their chief adversaries, led by Jacob Emden, urged Christian leaders to join ranks with them in combating the Frankist heresy, an effort that forced Emden to recognize certain positive aspects of Christianity. Marsha Keith Schuchard examines the Frankist phenomenon from the Christian perspective, taking us on a tour of the erotically-charged mystical underground in mid-eighteenth century Europe and uncovering a whole web of relations between Frankists or other Sabbateans and prominent Christian mystics like William Blake, Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, and Baron Emanuel Swedenborg. Harris Lenowitz provides a first analysis of the aspirations of Frank’s daughter, enabler, and messianic successor, Ewa (pronounced Eva). The messianic pretender had much to gain from Ewa: her gender allowed him to project female religious identifications onto her; and her education and manners gained him entry into aristocratic court life. Lenowitz describes Ewa’s struggle to break free of her narcissistic father’s hold, if only in her dreams.

As mentioned earlier, several Russian Christian dissenting sects embraced overt Judaizing. Eugene Clay portrays the career of the Spiritual Christian prophet Maksim Gavrilovich Rudometkin (d. 1877), who ordered his followers to observe Old Testament festivals, founded an apocalyptic movement based on Christian and Jewish sources, and consequently suffered lifelong imprisonment. Sergei Zhuk shows how members of the evangelical dissenting sect known as Stundists found common cause with Jewish revolutionaries like Iakov Gordin and Iosif Rabinovich, combining evangelical ideals of social justice with communist utopianism and in some cases converting Jewish revolutionaries to evangelical Christianity. The volume closes with Nicholas Breyfogle’s study of what was perhaps the most extreme Judaizing case, that of Subbotniks. Members of this sect adhered to the tenets of Judaism in varying degrees, actively sought out Jews to teach them, and in certain cases joined the Jewish community outright. Breyfogle uncovers a messianically inspired form of Zionism among Subbotniks, with some members claiming a preeminent place in the new messianic order on the logic that they—in contrast to Jews by birth—were voluntary converts to the true path.

The publication of this volume owes a great deal to the efforts of Matt Goldish, who conceived and organized the initial conference at Ohio State University and offered his continual guidance and encouragement throughout the volume’s preparation. We are indebted to the crucial logistical support provided by the Melton Center of Ohio State University and the Thomas and Diann Mann Distinguished Symposium. Thanks are also due to Terrie Bramley and the Institute for Advanced Study, and to Sarah Lawrence College. Finally, mention must be made of the late Richard Popkin, whose copious scholarship provided a reference point for symposium participants and undergirds the studies collected in the present volume.

NOTES

1. The case of the Towianists in the Kingdom of Poland and their relationship to Jews and Judaism is not treated in this volume, but has been covered extensively by Abraham Duker. See, for example, his Wladyslaw Dzwonkowski, an ‘Enlightened’ Towianist, on the Jewish Problem, 1862, in Meyer Waxman Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1966), 57–75; Duker, The Tarniks (Believers in the Coming of the Messiah in 1840), in Joshua Starr Memorial Volume (New York, 1953), 191–201; and Duker, The Polish Great Emigration and the Jews (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1956).

2. Steven Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 8.

3. For a summary of early east European Judaizing trends and government reprisals, see John Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the Jewish Question in Russia, 1772–1825 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 25–28.

4. See the studies on scientific interactions among Jews and Christians in western and central Europe in David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). For an application of models of cross-cultural exchange and connected histories to Jewish history, see Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), esp. 223–25.

5. The most convincing case for a Haskalah movement in eastern Europe is made by Mordecai Zalkin in Ba‘alot ha-Shaḥar (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2000). By focusing on institutions, patrons, subscribers, students, and entire families, as opposed to a narrow stratum of celebrity authors, and by mapping Haskalah-oriented schools in key geographical centers, Zalkin uncovers a few hundred foot soldiers in the movement. But Zalkin’s efforts still create the impression of a comparatively small movement.

6. For an overview of many of these themes, see Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). On pogroms in particular, see John Klier and Sholomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms and Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

7. See, for example, Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Eastern European Era in Jewish History, in Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science, vol. 1 (New York: Yiddish Scientific Institute-Yivo, 1946), 86–106.

8. The definitive biography is still Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, trans. R. J. Tzvi Werblowsky (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), and is retold with concision and slight revision by David Halperin in Sabbatai Zevi: Testimonies to a Fallen Messiah (Oxford: Littman Library, 2007), introduction. See also crucial revisions with respect to Sabbatai Tzevi’s followers by Matt Goldish, in The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Ada Rapoport-Albert, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666–1816 (Oxford; Portland: Littman Library, 2011). On Jacob Frank, see see Meir Balaban, Toward the History of the Frankist Movement (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1934), 1:23 (Hebrew); Alexander Kraushar, Frank i frankiści polscy (Cracow, 1895), 1:70–73, trans. as Herbert Levy, ed., Jacob Frank: The End to the Sabbatarian Heresy (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001); Bernard Weinryb, The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972), 236–61; and Harris Lenowitz, The Jewish Messiahs: From Galilee to Crown Heights (New York: Oxford, 2001), 167–98. A more sanguine view of Frank and Frankism is found in Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

9. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 153–56; and Michal Galas, Sabbatianism in the Seventeenth-Century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: A Review of the Sources, in The Sabbatian Movement and Its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbatianism and Frankism: Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 17, ed. Rachel Elior (Jerusalem, 2001), 51–63. Jacob Barnai argues that the Chmielnicki massacres in the Ukraine were an important impetus for Sabbateanism. See The Outbreak of Sabbateanism—The Eastern European Factor, Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 4 (1994): 171–83.

10. For the application of this approach to Jewish history, see Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford: Littman Library, 2007), esp. chapter 5, and Adam Teller and Magda Teter’s introduction to Polin 22 (2010): Borders and Boundaries in the Historiography of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 3–46.

11. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, xi.

12. Examples within the present scope include Matt Goldish and Richard Henry Popkin, eds., Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001); Richard Henry Popkin, James E. Force, and David S. Katz, eds., Everything Connects: In Conference with Richard H. Popkin: Essays in His Honor (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets; Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Jewish Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); Arthur Green, Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Its Historical Context, AJS Review 26 (2002): 1–52; Harvey Hames, Like Angels on Jacob’s ladder: Abraham Abulafia, the Franciscans and Joachimism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007); Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, esp. 176–79; and Adam Teller, Hasidism and the Challenge of Geography: The Polish Background to the Spread of the Hasidic Movement, AJS Review 30 (2006): 1–29. For pioneering studies on medieval Jewish culture, see Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). See also the observations about Judaizing sects by Bernard Weinryb in The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972); and Mark Steinberg and Heather Coleman, eds., Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), on the impact of the modernization process.

13. On the dangers of an overgeneralized comparative religious approach, see Steven T. Katz, Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism, in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 22–73.

14. Simon Dubnow, Toldot ha-Ḥasidut (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1975), 8–9 and 36; Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, vol. 1, trans. I. Friedlaender (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1916), 220–34; Benzion Dinur, The Origins of Hasidism and Its Social and Messianic Foundations, in Gershon Hundert, Essential Papers on Hasidism (New York: New York University Press, 1991), esp. 136–37; Joseph Weiss, Some Notes on the Social Background of Early Hasidism, Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Littman Library, 1985), 3–26; Raphael Mahler on the plebeian origin of tzaddikim in Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, ed. Eugene Orenstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985), 7–10. The first claim about Hasidic business connections was made by Klemens Junosza, in his Nasi ydzi w miasteczkach i na wsiach (Warsaw, 1889), 67.

15. See Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba‘al Shem Tov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Yeshayahu Shahar’s systematic analysis of Hasidic attitudes toward wealth actually finds less concern for social justice in Hasidic literature than in its non-Hasidic counterparts. See Bikoret ha-ḥevrah ve-hanhagat ha-tzibor be-sifrut ha-musar ve-ha-drush be-Polin ba-meah ha-shmonah asar (Jerusalem: Merkaz Dinur, 1992). Mention should also be made of Ignacy Schiper’s recently discovered manuscript, published as Przyczynki do dziejów chasydyzmu w centralnej Polsce, ed. Zbigniew Targielski (Warsaw: PWN, 1992), esp. 62.

I

JEWISH MYSTICS IN A CHRISTIAN WORLD

You Will Find It in the Pharmacy

Practical Kabbalah and Natural Medicine in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1690–1750

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Two basic tendencies seem to characterize scholarly analyses of Slavic-Jewish contacts in the field of popular magic. The first is an essentially binary framing of mutual influence: either Slavic culture is understood to reflect a Jewish impact, or Jewish culture to reflect a Slavic one. The second tendency is to scrutinize Jewish-Slavic contacts through the prism of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, or philology, while eliding specific historical contexts. Typical in both of these respects is Olga Belova and Vladimir Petrukhin’s Jewish Myth in Slavic Culture, the latest and perhaps most exhaustive study of the Slavic-Jewish interface. The authors correctly depict popular magic as a field particularly open to cultural contacts, emphasizing that Jews and Slavs cooperated intensively in the sphere of demonology, and amass manifold examples from data collected by ethnographers over the span of three centuries. But they construe this cooperation exclusively as Slavic borrowings from Jews or Jewish reflections of Slavic influences; and they present it as a uniform longue durée without historical specificities and local dynamics.¹ Useful as their compilation may be, we are thus left with some vexing questions. Was the Judeo-Slavic encounter a strictly back-and-forth dynamic? Did the intensity of those contacts perhaps vary according to geographic region or proximity to prominent Jewish communities? And in a broader context, to what extent did the attested Slavic-Jewish interaction in the sphere of magic differ from Christian-Jewish analogous encounters in other countries of Europe?

This paper assumes that it is misleading to conceive of a three-hundred-year period of Slavic-Jewish contact in a homogeneous, bilateral manner. Rather than Slavic influences on Jews or vice versa, I argue that a common source—early modern pharmacology—was responsible for the fascinating proximity of magical beliefs and natural medical remedies. What follows is a foray into shared realities and values by Jews and Slavs within a precise historical context, namely, eastern Poland during the last decade of the seventeenth century through the first half of the eighteenth century, a period marked by the belated discovery of Paracelsus and the nexus he posited between medicine, human health, and chemistry. Our discussion thus begins at a time when Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Jewish paramedics created a shared culture based on the medicine and alchemy of Paracelsus, and ends with an assault on that shared culture by proponents of Enlightenment.² A special effort is made to reconstruct non-Jewish eastern European natural medicine, the often neglected context of Jewish magic and practical Kabbalah.³ It is my hope that the paradigm of shared culture presented here will help free the historiography from the dominant binary of cultural separateness/mutual influence.

BA‘AL SHEM AS SHAMAN, HEALER, AND PARAMEDIC

Relations between Jews and Slavs (Catholics and Russian Orthodox) in eastern Poland at the end of the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth centuries, although strained in certain instances, were usually characterized by a fertile symbiosis in a variety of spheres within the borders of shtetls—private magnate-owned towns and, to a lesser degree, royal towns, where Jewish presence was more limited. There were intensive contacts between Jewish lease holders and the szlachta (Polish gentry), between Jewish artisans and Polish city dwellers, between peasants and Jewish grain traders, and between Jewish households and the Christian servants they employed as cooks and wet nurses. Of course, this was still the case as late as the late nineteenth century, yet the period in question is marked by a number of distinctive features: the rise of the subculture of ba‘alei shem (practical Kabbalists); the spread of natural medical knowledge; the development of an early hasidism—ascetic pietism among scattered elitist groups of mystics from whose midst emerged the spiritual founder of a new Hasidism, Israel ben Eliezer (Ba‘al Shem Tov, ca. 1700–60); and the establishment of pharmacies and pharmacists in shtetls. Both Italy and Germany witnessed the phenomenon of itinerant herbal healers and alchemists during this period, yet Tobias Cohen (1652–1729), a medical doctor with firsthand knowledge of eastern Europe, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire, observed that amulets, practical Kabbalah, and magic were nowhere as popular as in his contemporary Poland.⁴ Sebastian Sleszkowski, court doctor and secretary of King Zygmunt III Waza, concurred, to judge by the idiosyncratic, derogatory manner in which he referred to the abundance of Jews acting as itinerant healers in eastern Poland.⁵

Moshe Rosman has explained that in the eastern European Jewish community, ba‘alei shem performed a shamanic function: to restore social order or provide personal security, they mediated between empiric reality and divine realms, this world and the netherworld, spirits and living beings. They employed magical remedies and mystical devices, Lurianic and popular Kabbalah, local folk herbal remedies and traditional Hebrew acronyms, encrypted biblical verses (gematriah) and amulets (kameya‘).⁶ In order to restore communal order, prevent natural disasters (floods, fires, epidemics), or provide a patient with personal security, ba‘alei shem manipulated holy names (shemot ha-kedushah), including divine and angelic names, and also the names of evil spirits and Satan (shemot ha-tumah). The ba‘al shem acted as a magician and hypnotist, but also as a therapist, pediatrician, urologist, obstetrician, psychiatrist, homeopath, parapsychologist, and family doctor. Jews and gentiles from all walks of life (the wealthiest Polish magnates included) turned to ba‘alei shem to cure infertility, sexual disorders, and seminal emissions, to ensure safe childbirth, control epidemics, protect a person or personal habitat from a disaster like murder, fire, robbery, or the evil eye, predict fate, reveal suppressed desires or read dreams, banish Lilith or other demons (mazikim), treat depression, and exorcise evil spirits (dybbuks).⁷

Contemporary witnesses such as Pinḥas Katznellenbogen (1691–ca. 1760) attest to the enormous popularity of the ba‘alei shem and magic among the various strata of eastern European Jewish society. While pietists such as Isaiah Horowitz rearticulated everyday Jewish practices (halakhah) along the lines of Lurianic Kabbalah, ba‘alei shem cast the entire Jewish worldview and Jewish self-perception in a kabbalistic mold. Those who acted as ba‘alei shem included prominent communal leaders (Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz from the Triple Community, Rabbi Seckel Wormser from Michelstadt, Rabbi Elijah from Chelm, and Rabbi Hirsch Frankel from Ansbach), reputed preachers (Jacob Pesakh ben Yitzhḥak, maggid meisharim ółkiew), community-sponsored mystics and healers (Israel ben Eliezer from Międzyboz[, the Besht), self-employed non-itinerant healers (Joel Heilperin from Zamość), and itinerant Kabbalists (Binyamin Beinish ha-Cohen from Krotoszyn). Non-itinerant ba‘alei shem, such as Ephraim Reisher, dayan (judge) from Rzeszów, or Joel ben Uri Heilperin from Zamość, called themselves indiscriminately ba‘al shem or ba‘al shem tov, but itinerant ba‘alei shem apparently did not add tov (good) to their name. Revisionist historians thus maintain that a number of ba‘alei shem possessed status and attended to various strata of the eastern European population, including members of the Polish gentry and other Polish Catholics, entire Jewish communities and communal leaders, and Russian Orthodox peasants.⁸ According to one scholar of Polish medicine, Christians in Poland considered shepherds, smiths, millers, gypsies, cabmen, and Jews to be healers (znachory).⁹

Although ba‘alei shem shared many common features and practices with the shamanic figures of various cultures and cults, ba‘alei shem differed in their use of practical Kabbalah devices, which originated from magical manipulations of mystically conceived Jewish rites.¹⁰ Unlike most of their Christian colleagues, who relied on the magical power of religious texts, images, and relics, ba‘alei shem drew their inspiration from the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.¹¹ The widespread belief in the power of textual amulets among gentiles stemmed from the popular belief in the holiness of Christian texts;¹² but the power of Jewish amulets stemmed from the popular belief in Hebrew letters as primordial forms that shaped the world and nurtured its creative energy.¹³ According to the plain meaning of the Mishnah, Hebrew letters were created before the sunset of the first Sabbath (Avot 5:8); however, kabbalistic tradition situates the creation of the letters before the creation (Sefer Yetzirah 1:2–3, 2:4). The letters were claimed to have functioned as the very instruments of creation: they stood in immediate proximity to the source of creative energy, and by virtue of their origin possessed supernatural qualities. The use of Hebrew letters on an amulet (segulah) therefore ensured its effectiveness. Since the Kabbalists perceived Torah as a universal set of codes and keys that helped release the hidden energy of Hebrew letters and channel it toward a certain end, ba‘alei shem utilized Torah verses in their healing remedies. In addition, they drew heavily upon the local popular oral traditions and additional aspects of the written corpus (both published and unpublished) of practical Kabbalah.

At the same time, contemporary medicine, which scholars have hitherto overlooked as a source of knowledge for ba‘alei shem, provided them with a key reservoir of meanings, ideas, values, and remedies. Written and printed sources on early eighteenth-century practical Kabbalah widely quote the remedies and methods of "the famous (mefursam) Doctor Simhḥah."ółkiew and Lwów, next to a newly emerging center of kabbalistic printing and in close proximity to Zamość, the hometown of Joel Ba‘al Shem (Joel ben Uri Heilperin), author of a number of popular books on practical Kabbalah.¹⁵ Another medical authority who was cited frequently in kabbalistic treatises was doctor Yakov Zahalon, rabbi and therapist, graduate of the department of medicine of the University of Rome, who lived and worked in Rome and earned fame for his popular medical tractate Otzar ha-hayim (Venice, 1683).¹⁶ Moshe de Campos, a Jewish doctor from Portugal, arrived at the prominent Zamojski court with a letter of recommendation in Latin written in Amsterdam by Doctor Joseph Bonus; it is plausible that he also had contacts with Polish Jewish healers.¹⁷

Hillel Ba‘al Shem, to believe the autobiographical digressions in his kabbalistic manuscript Sefer ha-Hùeshek (1739/40), studied medicine privately with Avraham Isaac Fortish (or Fortis, also known as Avraham Hazak), a medical doctor from a Polish-Italian Jewish family and most likely a graduate of the University of Mantua and a disciple of Moshe Zacuto (1620–97). Fortish was active in Lwów and Rzeszów, where he served as court doctor for the Lubomirski and the Potocki families of magnates.¹⁸ Hillel Ba‘al Shem repeatedly refers to Fortish’s authority, particularly on issues of hygiene, epidemiology, diseases, balsams, and herbs.¹⁹ According to Hillel:

Above all we need to be careful and make sure that all the houses and rooms will be cleaned, particularly the latrines, from any rubbish and reeking and from any garbage, dirt or refuse. This was the statement made by the doctor from Rome [Zahalon], and the expert who told me about it was the famous doctor, our Rabbi, renowned in all the Polish lands, a great man full of perfection, of blessed memory, whose name was Yitzhḥak Ayzik Fortis(h) in the Latin language.²⁰

Joel Ba‘al Shem from Zamość also quotes Fortish, although infrequently. Even if ba‘alei shem did not have such direct contacts with medical doctors, they still had access to their recipes, prescriptions, and books. Otherwise it is inexplicable why their language should have duplicated that of Polish paramedics and professional doctors so precisely.

MEDICAL SLANG OF THE BA‘ALEI SHEM

Zeev Gries has referred to books as the agents of culture, a metaphor that deftly captures the meaning of the kabbalistic subculture created during the proliferation of printed and handwritten books on practical Kabbalah in the eighteenth century.²¹ But it is also important to stress that kabbalistic books, written in Hebrew in central and eastern Poland, had a mediating function, introducing the Jewish reader to elements of Slavic popular beliefs, Slavic popular medicine, and Slavic healing practices.

Although western and central European Jewish printing presses did publish books on practical Kabbalah (for example, Sefer Raziel ha-Malakh, Amsterdam, 1701; Amtaḥat binyamin, ółkiew printing press produced more than those in Lublin and Cracow (even the Council of Four Lands could not save these two from bankruptcy), and attained an absolute monopoly on eastern European Jewish printing by the early 1700s.²² In the first half of the eighteenth century, Aaron and David, the grandsons of the founder of the printing press, published such popular works on practical Kabbalah as Sefer karnayim (1709), Zevaḥ pesaḥ (1722), Shem Ya‘akov (1711), Toldot adam (1720), Mifa‘alot ‘elokim (1710; 1724; 1725), Divrei ḥakhamim (1725; 1730); Lashon ḥakhamim ve-lashon paz (1747), Shem tov katan (1750), and a number of more traditional Kabbalah books like Keren ohr (1721), Kitzur shnei lukhot ha-berit (1725; 1740), and Tikuney ha-Zohar (1740).²³

Many practical Kabbalah books appeared as pocket-size (octavoółkiew books offered their readers a variety of magical amulets, recipes, and natural medical remedies, employing sophisticated kabbalistic acronyms (rashey and sofey tevot, ółkiew publications drew heavily from eastern European popular medicine and folk beliefs.

To introduce medical remedies, kabbalistic and rabbinic books on practical Kabbalah would filter Latin, German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian notions through the Yiddish vernacular. Hillel Ba‘al Shem, who traveled in the 1730s through eastern Galicia, Podolia, Volhynia, and Belarus, resorted to both general Polish pharmacological terminology in his kabbalistic discourse—plaster, kwarta, litr, wanna, syrop, funt, belladona, walerjana (plaster, quart, liter, bath, syrup, pound, belladonna [plant], valerian [root])—and to the popular Slavic terminology designating various healing remedies, local professions, and artifacts—majewij barszcz, krapiwa, gorczyca, woronii koren, piawki, kowal’, stal’ (May Borscht [plant], nettles, mustard, Raven Root, leeches, smith, steel).²⁴ Joel Ba‘al Shem, active as a practical Kabbalist at the end of the 1690s and early 1700s in Zamość, used in his recipes tzibulia (onion), the seeds of the plant ognennaia kost (fire bone), ruta (rue), malwa (mallow), smetana (sour cream), petrushka (parsley), and a wide array of Slavic herbs (all words of Ukrainian or Polish origin). He also used medical vocabulary extensively, most likely borrowed from the pharmacological lexicon, such as myrrh, elixirs, balsams, plasters, camphor, and Artemisia.²⁵

Consider one of the characteristic prescriptions by Hillel Ba‘al Shem: You should not give your patient any laxatives even if he does not defecate for ten days; there is no reason to worry. And afterwards you should give him an enema with milk, sugar, and butter.²⁶ Similarly, a collection of seventeenth-century medical recipes composed, most likely, by and for Christians prescribed enemas with natural substances, such as a handful of dry rose petals diluted in cream and honey.²⁷ Kabbalists quite often resorted to non-Jewish vocabulary to convey more accurately the meaning of this or that disease, which, they maintained, had arisen due to laxity in fulfilling commandments. Thus, for example, a person who engaged in excessive gossiping, drunkenness, and sexual promiscuity was more likely to develop podagra (gout).²⁸ Jewish healers routinely prescribed natural medical remedies, as attested in extant eighteenth-century Polish Hebrew manuscripts. For example, an anonymous and untitled manuscript on practical Kabbalah—a collection of segulot and refu’ot in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw—suggested the following measures to improve one’s memory and retain what one has learned: take some grass called the tongue of the bull (lashon shor) and eat it every morning or drink the liquid from the moss. To secure procreation and prevent impotence, the same manuscript prescribed taking the spleen of a newborn colt, frying it in a frying pan, and eating it with eggs over three consecutive days—or hanging the head of a female mouse around one’s neck.²⁹ Along similar lines, a popular late seventeenth-century Polish primer on natural remedies advised: to heal a wound, take a dead dog’s head, dry it, burn it to ashes, and apply it to the wound; to cure fevers and aches, use birds’ nests as bandages, and to reduce fever, take a piece of horse manure, put it in a kerchief, squeeze the juice out of it, mix it with wine or beer and feed it to the sick person.³⁰ Both Jews and Poles reckoned that the best way to prevent epidemics was to shut the windows and burn (smoke) incense, manure, bones, and dirt in a house with the doors firmly closed, believing that Satan, associated with the plague, would be unable to tolerate the smell.

Hillel Ba‘al Shem, Sefer ha-ḥeshek, 1739–1740, ff. 17b–18. Chiromantic diagrams displaying the role of kabbalistic abbreviations in fortunetelling. Source: Pavel Fishel, Jewish Calendar, 5766 (2006–07) (Kiev: Dukh i Litera, 2006).

Despite obvious religious differences, Jews and Slavs thus partook of a single popular culture. In both Jewish and Christian sources one finds a prohibition against urinating before the New Moon (to avoid inadvertently causing the death of a newborn child) or looking intensely at a rainbow (to avoid blindness), the advice to drink one’s urine before an arrest (to avoid a guilty verdict) or hang a dog’s tooth around one’s neck (to avoid talking in one’s sleep). Jakub Haur (more on his books below) advised eating dried and crumbled otter or hedgehog to cure koltun, a hair disease (Plica Polonica). Polish historians mention that in eastern Europe some placed wormwood in houses to scare away demons. Pharmacists sold dead or mummified doves and frogs for medical treatment, and even the most illustrious doctors prescribed rue, camphor, and children’s urine to battle epidemics.³¹ A Ukrainian scholar of witchcraft describes the use of knots, nails, dead man’s bones and teeth, excrement, sand and rubbish, and especially pieces of hangman or churchbell ropes for magical purposes.³² But if those measures proved ineffective, Polish healers—Jews, Lutherans, Russian Orthodox, Uniates, and Catholics alike—resorted to the magic of words, seeking to cure their patient with incantations. As we shall see momentarily, Jewish shamans resorted to Slavic incantations and Slavs turned to Hebrew ones—emphasizing the practical and magical aspects of incantations and avoiding, as much as they could, but not always very successfully, their theological aspects.

HEALING IN A SLAVIC KEY

In 1921, the Jewish Historical Commission at the Narkompross (People’s Commissariat of Education) received for temporary use a three-hundred-page, early eighteenth-century manuscript in octavo from the town of Smilovichi in Belarus. It was a Hebrew composition on practical Kabbalah containing not only Hebrew-language explanations of kabbalistic prayers and descriptions of mystical practices, but also Belarusian-language names of trees, roots, and flowers used for healing purposes, healing remedies, and incantations against various diseases. Most likely the manuscript was lost in the 1920s; yet a number of fragments of its Slavic incantations, recorded in Hebrew transliteration, were preserved in the sole scholarly article to discuss its contents. Consider the following incantation aimed at banishing a disease with the help of God’s name: "Pryshla shuda da tago Ploni tsi ad khvaroby ad palakhni tsi ad paddyman tsi ad charavan’ne zakazue ia tabe Boskim imiam shto nebo i zemlia iztvaryl…pashla gidze tebe pan Bog tvaryl da pupa ne da glavy ne da sertsu ne da boku…ne dykhu i vystupai z tykh mestsa gedze tabe ne naleze Bozhim imiam omeyn navek."³³ The seven-hundred-page Sefer ha-Hùeshek, started most likely in Podolia or Volhynia, and finished somewhere around Słuck, contains similar incantations recorded in a mixture of Polish and Ukrainian in Hebrew transliteration by Hillel Ba‘al Shem: "Verby verbitze voz’mi ot tego Ploni ben Ploni propashitzi iak ty sotriasai nad vodoiu, tak tebe sotriasla propashnitzi ot Ploni ben Ploni, ot iago bialogo tila, ot ego chervona krev."³⁴

Such incantations represent a curious amalgam of Jewish and Christian beliefs, an amalgam whose meaning cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. Judaic tradition understands the Almighty as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as the God of the Chosen People and as the God associated with the exodus from Egypt and redemption of His nation from Egyptian bondage (Deut. 5:6). According to the medieval Spanish Jewish poet Yehuda Halevy, if for Christians God is the Creator of Heaven and Earth, for Jews God is the God of their national history (Kuzari 1:25). Unlike the traditional Jewish conception of the divine, amalgamated incantations manifest Christian, Catholic, or Russian Orthodox yet markedly Old Testament-esque connotations. Both kabbalistic incantations address God as He who created heaven and earth, not He who took us out of the Land of Egypt.

These syncretistic incantations also reflect pagan elements (for example, they address in the name of God the healing tree verba—willow, asking it to cure the body of a sick person), Christian ceremonies, and popular Slavic (Ukrainian and/or Polish) rhymes and rhythms, all elements typical of rural folklore. Hillel Ba‘al Shem employed an incantation that brings together some obvious Christian allusions (chernetz and chernytzia—a monk and a nun) as well as kabbalistic-rabbinic allusions like the idea of the 248 parts of the human body:

Podi sebe z tego Ploni ben Ploni od vshystkikh dveso (200) shterdesti (40) i osm (8) chlonkikh imenem Boshkim ktury istvoryl nebo i zemliu bendze mi na dopomotze iak uv den taki v notse i vazyvaiu i vyklykaiu zaklinaiu imenem Boskim ktury iztvoril nebo i zemiu bendze mi dopomotzi tego Ploni ben Ploni riatuvatz. Zheby Bozhe zhyvy, v tebe shyre sertze, sluzhil.…Ia, Ploni ben Ploni, imenem Boskim ot(s)ylaiu, za chernym morem na trestenitzy, tam i znaidesh cherno i chernitze, tam rashchengaeshsia i tam krev vypyvaie, a tomu Ploni ben Ploni pokidai naveki.³⁵

Compare this Hebrew transcription of a Slavic incantation with a late seventeenth–early eighteenth-century incantation recorded by a Polish scholar: Boz[a$ moca$, Panny Mariej pomoca$, Wszystkich świętych pomoca$, by mu nie stanowiło, jako pirwy było, skóra z skóra$, kość z kościa$, w Imię Ojca i Syna i Ducha [ś]wia$tego.³⁶ Consider also evidence from a Polish-owned manuscript that recommends a Hebrew conjuration (taken from the fifth chapter of the famous magical treatise Solomon’s Key) presenting a remarkable concoction of Jewish prayers, including penitential ones, and containing the enunciation aloud (forbidden in Judaism) of the four-letter name of God transcribed in Latin letters:

Da Pys[.?.?.]ne, mi, atu, ai met; melech mauche hamlochem, hakudaus. Boruh, hu, Iechowa, iut, hai, wof, hai [four times]—Aba, beryia, ama, yecyra, zo esai mukwe, iut, ha, wof, ha—wenialdaja hakol, tenfilin, laja freno, biwris, anlauheho, pajhotau, Kaiwonat, damen, hoio, hoiwe, wenhieie, kawonas, daiamen, dankadis, iehodunki, ithenau, ono, baykauh, gedolas, ieminho, tatir, cenruro, kabelrunas, anho. Sakweynu, tahareuny, nauro, no; gibaur, daurszei, ienhudiho, kenwowas, [P]zaumrem, birhem, taharem, rahmem, sitkafka, tanmit gaumlem, koszen. Kodaus, banraf, tahel, anhel, andoytchowhet gorio, laiamho, penay, zauther, kandusoscho, szauwieszynu, iaudeja, talumas baruh szem, kewault, malhusa, wuet, ono, godal, lucy, anderninihal, Jehowa, El, rahum, wayhanon, eireh apaim, wanraf heiset, veiemes, nocer cheyset, lalofim, nausauwun, wupesa, wanhatuo, wannakar, wenesefiweaies, wenio ipa, ei wii pacwem, lanro . . .³⁷

Slavic incantations transliterated into Hebrew, Hebrew incantations transliterated into Latin and inserted into a Polish manuscript, and Polish incantations in Polish share the same rhythm, syntactical rhymes that sometimes defy all rules of semantics and grammar, magical usage of divine names, and a firm conviction that a healer can pronounce these incantations effectively against the disease. Given these proximities, one cannot but agree with Belova and Petrukhin, who point to a literal similarity of the elements of popular beliefs among Jews and Slavs.³⁸ But ba‘alei shem and their Polish counterparts built upon a common foundation.

EASTERN EUROPEAN NATURAL MEDICINE

Natural medicine is based on a belief in the healing functions of botanical species, and this belief was shared by practically everybody in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This syncretistic medicine drew from the purported healing qualities of plants, roots, herbs, stones, extracts, and tinctures prepared on their bases, and on chemical substances immediately available for an eastern European village, town, or shtetl-dweller. A late seventeenth-century Polish manuscript, Notes, Prescriptions, and Home Medical Recipes, by a certain Adam Smielowski, a pious person with strong interests in theology, ancient history, law, and the Old Testament, contains among other things a detailed Latin and Polish list of popular herbs and a medical discourse on healing herbs like lavender, Melissa, and cloves. An eighteenth-century Polish manuscript entitled Secret Adorning and Curing of the Head and Its Parts suggests a variety of wines, balsams, and essences to cure diseases, prevent hair loss, treat noises and winds in one’s head, and help one achieve an erection.³⁹ Another Polish manuscript, An Expert Doctor, combines astrology and natural medicine, explaining when to gather roots and herbs, when a natural remedy does or does not help, on what days to purify the stomach, how to diagnose a disease based on the color of the blood, and how to treat urinating dysfunction and impotence.⁴⁰ Consider also a late seventeenth–early eighteenth-century manuscript containing lists of remedies and entitled Domestic and Tested Medicine. This manuscript prescribes powders and vodkas for heart tremors, baths for epidemics, bandages, discusses types of humor and blood, and, most important, includes small pieces of paper with various medical recipes. The owner meticulously collected and attached them to the manuscript, which was apparently a guide to creating a home pharmacy.⁴¹

The Polish manuscript Literary and Medical Varieties contains, among interesting predictions of famine and other calamities for 1724–29, rules of fortunetelling, basic elements of astrology, and various natural remedies for aural disabilities, stomach purification, tuberculosis, eye diseases, dysentery, hemorrhage, and so on. A medical manuscript entitled Medicine. Domestic Healing Recipes recommends using wormwood for stomach indigestion; onion, lard, and herbs for worms, diarrhea, and headaches; wine with cinnamon and ginger for heartache; and a mix of bull’s manure with warmed beer for colic. The eighteenth-century manuscript Descriptions of Various Herbs prescribes wild angelica, plums, parsnip, cloves, mint, rosemary, pumpkin, marjoram, wormwood, and absinth—as well as the essences, syrups, and tinctures made thereof—for treating stomach ailments, worms, diarrhea, and other dysfunctions. These and similar manuscripts illustrate the extent to which natural remedies formed part of the reading and writing experiences of the intellectual elite of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Poland.⁴²

While manuscripts had limited circulation, natural medicine made its way to the popular consumer through newly published Polish books. Throughout the seventeenth century, most Polish medical doctors and students of medicine published their treatises in Latin. Their publications were voluminous compendia in duo or in quarto, targeting teachers and students of medicine and pharmacology. At the very end of the seventeenth century, Polish language books on applied medicine translated from German began to appear. Their authors gave a detailed explanation of the influence of the seasons on human health, of causes of headaches, eye inflammation and ear infections, and of remedies for fevers, toothaches, dry coughs, kidney pains, diarrhea, and melancholy. They offered a variety of rubbing remedies, balsams, and herbal vodkas, able, according to the highest medical authorities, to cure both stomachache and hypochondria.⁴³

Simultaneously, and perhaps under the direct impact of the translated German volumes, Polish medical doctors began to publish heavily indexed 200- to 400-page books in the Polish language. Most of them were published in handy in octavo editions. These books provide large-type descriptions of diseases and medical remedies, organized in concise and practical chapter titles and subchapters, and with a meticulous index—undoubtedly targeting a mass readership of Polish urban dwellers, clerics, and gentry.⁴⁴ Of particular interest among these books are Compendium medicum (1704, 1719–3rd edition),⁴⁵ Promptuarium medicum (1716),⁴⁶ and Vademecum medicum (1721).⁴⁷ Like Hebrew books on popular medicine (which appeared slightly later), Polish tractates introduced the reader to various homemade healing remedies, medical herbs, and alchemic recipes, all of which drew heavily upon natural medicine. Later there emerged even more accessible books like A Pharmacy for Those Who Do Not Have a Doctor, which recommended a healthy lifestyle, dairy and vegetarian diets, vodka washings, and drinking herbal liquors, all required for the preservation of good health without an expensive doctor.⁴⁸

A comparison of these books with the Hebrew kabbalistic works Mifa‘alot ‘elokim, Toldot adam, Zevaḥ pesaḥ, and Keter shem tov—also targeting a broader audience and relying on popular medicine—demonstrates that similar prescriptions for magical remedies (refu’ot and segulot) made their way into Jewish books. The title pages of these books leave little doubt that tractates on Jewish practical Kabbalah were closely related to Polish books on popular medicine. According to the Compendium medicum’s introduction, the book provides a "brief description of diseases, internal and external, male, female, and childhood diseases, their differences, their causes, ways to treat them easily at home, particularly for those who for various reasons cannot afford a