Prospecting for drugs in ancient and medieval European texts: a scientific approach

Goldberg is a first-rate historian and it is good to have this 1989 volume on Prague Jewry in English, especially in Carol Cosman's literate and fluid translation. Goldberg surveys notions of illness, death, dying, and burial among the Jews of Prague from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Using communal records and ancillary sources, she provides detailed (and often extensive) quotations from the Hebrew Rabbinic and secular literature of the period. And like much of Annales school work she assumes that the textual evidence is equivalent to practice-which it may or may not be. As with all Annales school social histories there is a love of minutiae, but there are questions which this level of detail does not articulate. How do Jewish and non-Jewish communities interact on the level of health and illness? Can one even speak of a "Jewish" tradition unshaped by the experience of the Diaspora? What is the role of the non-Jewish context(s) in forming "Jewish" attitudes, especially in terms of the meaning assigned to notions of "cure"? How "typical" or atypical is Prague? It is clear that the Prague chancellery is a central institution for the Empire. Its cultural significance during this period has been well noted. But as Hillel Kieval has argued, one must speak of Pragues rather than of Prague. For there are competing intellectual, social, cultural, as well as (most evidently) linguistic communities during this period. They develop and contest the very meaning of a "Prague" culture. Is the "non-Jew" in the discourse of the periods examined understood as "static" by the "Jews" (much as the Jews are by the non-Jews) even though or especially because they were so radically changing. Here the need for a complex, comparative study of the fantasies of each group of the other and how these fantasies shaped the presuppositions concerning health and illness. Goldberg's book is a major addition to any study of Jews and their bodies. I was struck by the sophisticated manner in which she used concepts of marginality in shaping her own discourse in this book. My desire in the reception of such studies in the Englishspeaking world is that one reflect also on their origin, on the role that such studies have in the development of French historiography. This is as relevant as their role in the writing of a new Jewish cultural study of the body.