Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- THE HEALTHY JEW
- Introduction: “Links in a Long Chain”: Jews, Judaism, Health, and Hygiene
- 1 “'Tis a Little People, But It Has Done Great Things”: The Role of Health and Medicine in Modern Jewish Apologetics
- 2 Moses the Microbiologist: Alfred Nossig's The Social Hygiene of the Jews
- 3 Healthy Hebrews, Healthy Jews: The Bible as a Sanitary Code in Anglo-American Medical Literature
- 4 From Ghetto to Jungle: Darwinism, Eugenics, and the Reinterpretation of Jewish History
- 5 TB or Not TB, That Was a Jewish Question: Moses, Kashrut, and the Prevention of Tuberculosis
- 6 “Then What Advantage Does the Jew Have?”: Judaism as a Model for Christian Health
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- THE HEALTHY JEW
- Introduction: “Links in a Long Chain”: Jews, Judaism, Health, and Hygiene
- 1 “'Tis a Little People, But It Has Done Great Things”: The Role of Health and Medicine in Modern Jewish Apologetics
- 2 Moses the Microbiologist: Alfred Nossig's The Social Hygiene of the Jews
- 3 Healthy Hebrews, Healthy Jews: The Bible as a Sanitary Code in Anglo-American Medical Literature
- 4 From Ghetto to Jungle: Darwinism, Eugenics, and the Reinterpretation of Jewish History
- 5 TB or Not TB, That Was a Jewish Question: Moses, Kashrut, and the Prevention of Tuberculosis
- 6 “Then What Advantage Does the Jew Have?”: Judaism as a Model for Christian Health
- 7 Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Where does this discourse about Jews, Judaism, health and medicine fall within the longer trajectory of modern Jewish history? Did the narratives of “the healthy Jew” that appeared in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries signal a growing confidence among German, French, American and British Jews, or a residual unease, a continuing need to demonstrate the “natural” relationship of Judaism to a progressive modernity, to civilization, and to those societies in which Jews resided? The latter seems more likely given the explicit apologetic impulse to so much of the scholarship. But perhaps, too, we might discern some of the former, some confidence or assertiveness in the dissemination of these stories of Jewish contribution. Consider the assertion discussed in Chapter 6 about the way in which Jewish ritual could and should serve as a model for societies in general. Gentiles made such a suggestion, but so, too, did Jews. Such an assertion is an implicit critique of current practices, a suggestion that what health officials are currently doing is insufficient and even dangerous. It is also, perhaps even more impudently for many, an implicit suggestion that Christianity erred in dismissing the Mosaic laws as unnecessary or irrelevant. Taken as a whole, the literature produced by Jews and non-Jews on the nexus of Torah, Talmud, and health suggests a continuing relevance of Jewish law that runs counter to Christian and European philosophical notions of supercession, and the more prosaic dismissal of the continuing relevance of Jewish religious observance.
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- Information
- The Healthy JewThe Symbiosis of Judaism and Modern Medicine, pp. 191 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007