In November 1893, a year before Alfred Nossig's book on social hygiene appeared, the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Hermann Adler, gave a public talk, “Sanitation and the Mosaic Law,” to the Church of England Sanitary Association. The talk was later summarized and analyzed in the pages of Great Britain's most prominent journal of medicine, the Lancet. Adler, according to the Lancet, “proposed to make it clear that, as a sanitarian, the great Jewish law-giver [Moses] was not only well ahead of his time but in many respects abreast of ours, and to show that the Jewish ‘tradition’ – i.e., the two parts of the Talmud – supplemented or even surpassed the teachings of Moses in this respect.”

The editors of the journal fully endorsed Adler's argument (which had also been made earlier by Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson) that the Mosaic law and the talmudic laws are, in their practical effect, “largely sanitary.” On other realms affecting the community or society, such as criminal law, the Mosaic code is quite scanty. But with regard to those laws and rituals concerned with sanitary or hygienic matters, the code is full of detail, and the two realms, the religious and the medical, are inextricably intertwined: “There can be no doubt that the Jews under Moses' direction were far in advance of the nations around them in sanitary matters, and that whoever kept the letter of the Mosaic law would enjoy immunity from infectious disease, as well as that high standard of health which results from personal care and cleanliness.”