Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe

Tuition: $325 | YIVO members: $250**

This is a live, online course held on Zoom. Enrollment will be capped at about 25 students. All course details (Zoom link, syllabus, handouts, recordings of class sessions, etc.) will be posted to Canvas. Students will be granted access to the class on Canvas after registering for the class here on the YIVO website. This class will be conducted in English, and any readings will be in English.

Instructor: Marek Tuszewicki

Within the context of East European Ashkenaz, the term ‘folk medicine’ refers to curiosities, particularly various non-medical methods of treatment, preserved in ethnographic sources of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In this course, we will consider the question of Ashkenazi Jewish folk medicine in historical, cultural, and social contexts.

We will go beyond a narrow understanding of the term, removing the stigma of harmful superstition, to understand it in connection with other aspects of daily life. Why could the white pigeon be an effective remedy against jaundice? What was the "frog under the tongue", and which townspeople were the most proficient at folding broken limbs? We will try to find the logical (although not always obvious) rationale behind these ideas, taking into consideration such fundamental issues as religious traditions, daily activities, the division of gender roles, and contacts with the gentile population.

Folkways were rooted in the heritage of ancient (medieval, early-modern) medicine and the pre-modern morals bound it tightly with religious ideas and demonology. Our geographic interest will cover most of the lands inhabited by Ashkenazi Jewry in Eastern Europe: the Russian Empire (the Pale of Settlement), Austro-Hungary, Poland and Romania.

Course Materials:
Students are encouraged to purchase the following book before the first date of class:

• Marek Tuszewicki, A Frog Under the Tongue: Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe (The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with Liverpool University Press, 2021) (Purchase)

The instructor will provide all other course materials digitally throughout the class on Canvas.

Dr. Marek Tuszewicki (b. 1981) is a Deputy Director of the Institute of Jewish Studies, Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Much of his research and teaching focuses on language and culture of the Ashkenaz, particularly in their relation towards modernity. In 2014 received a Ph.D. in History from the Jagiellonian University and a year later published the book: A Frog Under the Tongue: Jewish Folk Medicine in Eastern Europe (in Polish, later in English). Authored numerous articles devoted to the Ashkenazi popular and medical culture, translations of Yiddish literature into Polish (incl. Mendele, Peretz, Sutzkever) as well as his own book of Yiddish poetry Fun beyde zaytn shpigl.

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