The Jewish Enlightenment in Russia - 1800-1860 : social aspects.

digitize

Yaḥid be-doro.Englis

A legendary figure in his own lifetime, Rabbi Eliahu ben Shlomo Zalman (1720-1797) was known as the "Gaon of Vilna." He was the acknowledged master of Talmudic studies in the vibrant intellectual center of Vilna, revered throughout Eastern Europe for his learning and his ability to traverse with ease seemingly opposed domains of thought and activity. After his death, the myth that had been woven around him became even more powerful and was expressed in various public images. The formation of these images was influenced as much by the needs and wishes of those who clung to and depended on them as by the actual figure of the Gaon. In this penetrating study, Immanuel Etkes sheds light on aspects of the Vilna Gaon's "real" character and traces several public images of him as they have developed and spread from the early nineteenth century until the present

German medicine, folklore and language in popular medical practices of the Eastern European Jews (nineteenth to twentieth century)

Medical customs of the Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities in Eastern Europe consisted of various elements, only some of which, mainly those associated with the Rabbinic tradition, could be described as idiosyncratic. Ashkenazi folk medicine was a complex heterogeneous system, to a large extent dependent on its social, geographic and historical milieu. It interacted with other systems: the official medicine and local folklore(s). In the following article several examples of German influences on the Jewish folk medicine will be indicated, as they appear in the sources written or published in the Russian Empire and Galicia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its intention is not only to present the visible impact of such works as Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland’s Makrobiotik oder die Kunst, das menschliche Leben zu verlängern or Heinrich Paulizky’s Anleitungen für Landleute zu einer vernünftigen Gesundheitspflege, and not only to enumerate excerpts from the early modern German-Yiddish medical literature, but also to shed some new light on the presence of such influences in the Yiddish folklore