The Male Gaze and Control of the Female Body in Early Modern Jewish Magic

Katherine Park’s research invites us to consider the gendered nature of medical texts, written by early modern Christian physicians, that sharply distinguished between the visual representations of the female in contrast to the male body. Thus, while the latter is depicted as containing surfaces, female anatomies were shown as comprised of a “visualizable inside” (Park, 2006, 27). The female body, with its generative and re-generative powers, constituted an impenetrable mystery to men with the womb becoming the focus of male medical inquiry as “the privileged object of dissection” in medical texts composed in the fifteenth- and sixteenth centuries. Applying the notion of the male medical gaze frames my own research of Jewish recipe books from East-Central Europe written mostly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I argue and demonstrate that magic constituted a powerful mechanism that enabled the male ba’al shem to control the female energies of the universe. More specifically, my paper will examine recipes related to the management of the womb, the breasts, and female bodily fluids in order to uncover attitudes toward health and wellbeing, on the one hand, and the religious significance these medical and spiritual interventions aimed to construct, on the other hand.