Description: Jews have been active participants in shaping the healing practices of eastern Europe. This wide-ranging survey of sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, and many other languages fills a gap in the study of folk medicine in eastern Europe while also shedding light on little-known aspects of Ashkenazi culture and on cross-cultural contacts between Jews and their neighbours.
Brief description: Marek Tuszewicki is deputy director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków. His publications include scholarly articles in Polish and English on Jewish folklore as well as Polish translations of Yiddish literature and his own Yiddish-language poetry. The Polish edition of this study was published in 2015. The book was awarded the Gierowski and Shmeruk Prize for the best book on the history and culture of Jews in Poland (2022) and was shortlisted for the Folklore Society's Katharine Briggs Award in 2021.
Review Quotes:
'Tuszewicki's nuanced approach to the analysis of his data is evident. Rather than rigidly evaluating rituals or beliefs according to one or another interpretive system, he allows the sources to speak for themselves, it is a testament to his intimate familiarity with the inner world of Ashkenazic Jewry that he is able to shape a huge corpus of sources into a work as legible and authoritative this one.' Natan M. Meir, The Polish Review