Medicine and the German Jews: A History

Medicine and the German Jews: A History by John M Efron. Yale University Press, £27.50, pp 343. ISBN 0 300 08377 7. Rating: ★★★

In the Middle Ages half of all doctors in western Europe were Jewish. They held positions of power in the royal courts and among the Christian clergy. In theory the populace was forbidden to consult them, and a series of bans between 1246 and 1491 threatened to excommunicate those who tried, but the mystique of Jewish medicine—like complementary medicine today—proved too strong. At the same time practitioners were accused of killing their Gentile patients, and when Europe was rocked by the Black Death in 1348, Jews were burnt at the stake for having poisoned the drinking wells. Such paradoxes abound in Professor Efron's fascinating and even handed account of a complex story.

The public image of Jews as sickly, fragile, and effeminate, prone to diseases such as tuberculosis and diabetes (Judenkrankheit, the Jewish disease), and mentally unstable, encouraged a belief in their biological and racial “otherness,” and fed antisemitism. Yet in the hundred years from 1800 the number of Jews in Europe rose from 2.7 to 8.5 million, and statistics showed a longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, and greater resistance to infection than among their Aryan peers.

The same story applied to Jewish doctors: once they were allowed to enter university in the 18th century, their numbers outstripped those of their fellow Germans, and Jews (1% of the population) made up 16% of doctors. Barred from senior academic posts, they made a success of private practice and specialisation. The economic downturn in the 1930s, the overproduction of doctors, and the competition for patients revived the mediaeval conspiracy theories. When Hitler came to power in 1933 there were some 5500 Jewish doctors in Germany; by early 1939 there were a mere 285.