The Talmud as a Medical Textbook

One of the factors that makes the Babylonian Talmud an immensely rich text—and a bewildering one to the uninitiated—is the expansiveness of its reach. In their attempt to interpret the Bible and Mishnah and to clarify Jewish law, the talmudic sages leave absolutely no subject untouched. Thus it includes numerous folk remedies and pieces of medical advice, ranging from the baldly supernatural to the seemingly practical. Jason Mokhtarian, a scholar of talmudic medicine, discusses the subject in an interview with Kate Blackwood.

Compared to [the attitudes of] other Jewish cultures, the Babylonian Talmud downplays the role of God and sin in human illness and health, and instead promotes the idea that God authorized humans to heal themselves using the natural world that He created, such as plants and animals,.

For the most part, scholars of rabbinic literature research medicine as a subcategory of magic. . . . Yet as I argue in [my] book, it is equally important to remember that in the Talmud not all magic is medicine, and not all medicine is magic. In other words, scholars who subsume talmudic medicine under the category of magic tend to ignore the therapies that have few, if any, identifiable magical elements, such as those that use natural ingredients to be consumed or applied to the body. It is these latter therapies—the more empirical ones, so to speak—that actually make up the majority of the talmudic medical tradition.

There is no reason, [therefore], to dismiss out of hand that some of the more empirical therapies (e.g., potions, drugs, salves, etc.), based on a detailed knowledge of the medicinal properties of specific plants and animal parts, may have been effective in treating certain afflictions.

One sees, [however, a] skeptical attitude toward Talmudic medicine already in the writings of Rabbi Sherira Gaon, the head of the Pumbedita academy [in Baghdad] in the 10th century, who says simply that “our sages were not physicians.”

Read more at Cornell Chronicle

More about: Judaism, Magic, Medicine, Talmud

Why South Africa Has Led the Legal War against Israel

South Africa filed suit with the International Court of Justice in December accusing Israel of genocide. More recently, it requested that the court order the Jewish state to allow humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip—something which, of course, Israel has been doing since the war began. Indeed, the country’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC) has had a long history of support for the Palestinian cause, but Orde Kittrie suggests that the current government, which is plagued by massive corruption, has more sinister motives for its fixation on accusing Israel of imagined crimes:

ANC-led South Africa has . . . repeatedly supported Hamas. In 2015 and 2018, the ANC and Hamas signed memoranda of understanding pledging cooperation against Israel. The Daily Maverick, a South African newspaper that previously won an international award for exposing ANC corruption, has reported claims that Iran “essentially paid the ANC to litigate against Israel in the ICJ.”

The ANC-led government says it is motivated by humanitarian principle. That’s contradicted by its support for Russia, and by [President Cyril] Ramaphosa’s warmly welcoming a visit in January by Mohamed Dagalo, the leader of the Sudanese-Arab Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia. Ramaphosa’s smiling, hand-holding welcome of Dagalo occurred two months after the RSF’s systematic massacre of hundreds of non-Arab Sudanese refugees in Darfur.

While the ANC has looted its own country and aided America’s enemies, the U.S. is insulating the party from the consequences of its corruption and mismanagement.

In Kittrie’s view, it is “time for Congress and the Biden administration to start helping South Africa’s people hold Ramaphosa accountable.”

Read more at The Hill

More about: International Law, Iran, South Africa