Sefer Ha-Nashim: Searching for Women in Early Modern Sources

One of the primary struggles encountered by scholars of early modern Jewish women concerns the lack of available sources authored by women themselves. With regard to the medical cultures of early modern Jews, printed books have been invaluable sources for scholars interested in Jewish physicians and healers, but they offer little information about the women who worked alongside them in adjacent medical roles, since these women did not author their own works. Instead, a range of sources is necessary to reconstruct the experiences and practices of female Jewish medical practitioners in this period, who appear in personal manuscripts and archival records in addition to rabbinic writings.

This paper explores the limitations of books as resources on Jewish medical women through a close study of one such practitioner, the Dutch Jewish midwife Rachel Salomons, who resided in Amsterdam in the first half of the eighteenth century. Salomons’ career is known to us solely through records of the medical college and through one precious Yiddish manuscript which contains evidence of her training and practice. Among the miscellaneous components of this compendium, entitled Sefer ha-noshim (1709), is a treatise for midwives translated into Yiddish from a printed Dutch manual. Although this treatise reveals significant information about efforts to circulate midwifery knowledge among Jewish women in the eighteenth century, and about the engagement of Jewish women in the surrounding medical culture of the day, it tells us little about the actual day-to-day training and practice of midwives. Instead, other components of her manuscript are more revealing, and archival records from the medical college of Amsterdam offer yet more detail about the course of training that Jewish midwives pursued in this context. By investigating the various sources that shed light on the career of one practitioner, this paper argues for the importance of connecting diverse materials in order to develop a more complete picture of female medical expertise in the early modern period.