Translating Medicine: The Case of Early Modern Jewish Readers

European medical literature is, by nature, a translational phenomenon. Since the Middle Ages, expert physicians, who based their authority on the textual corpus of Hippocratic and Galenic medical tradition, had to navigate the thin line between the shared (humoural) theory and its application—translation—into a particular context framed by the patient’s state. Translations of medical texts naturally engendered the same process; the translation of knowledge required its reiteration for new communities of speakers as well as its translation for the new communities of practitioners of health- and body-related care. This process left behind a few textual traces in the medical corpus of medieval Arabic- and Latin-to-Hebrew translations. With the proliferation of paper, the change of writing and observation-based practices after 1450, the trail of traces grows stronger. It thus allows us a unique glimpse into how Jewish healers interrogated the medical texts they read and sought to apply.

This paper aims to recover and contextualise the lost labour of Jewish translators in the field of body care. It analyses the translational choices of early modern physicians and healers who turned to medical books in Latin and German to render their content available for themselves and their Jewish communities in Jewish languages, such as Hebrew and Yiddish. Analysing their translational efforts, I will show that these authors went beyond the straightforward adoption of the knowledge frameworks of their texts. In the process of translation, these Jewish authors also negotiated their space to review the content and adapt it to their needs critically. In the footsteps of the history of knowledge, this paper thus seeks to position Jewish early modern translators as one of many “collaborators” in disseminating learned health discourse that was neither top-to-bottom nor bottom-to-top but took place in the middling zones between learned and folk.