Jüdisch-christliche Volksmedizin in einer Idylle Saul Tschernichowskys

Abstract

Abstract When working as a country doctor in Czarist Russia, the Jewish author and poet Saul Tschernichowsky (1875-1943) had close contact with the rural population and with the Jews living there. Meeting the village folk and peasants brought back memories of his own childhood spent in the country that made him realize the discrepancy between »yesterday’s world« and modern times. Academic medicine did not count for much in the country. The peasants wanted »proper« drugs, by which they meant drugs whose strong smell and conspicuous colour suggested effectiveness. Some of Tschernichowsky’s medical experiences from that time have found their way into his literary oeuvre, for instance into the stories »be-inyan ha-mumchim« (Concerning experts) and »ze’adim rishonim« (First steps), and particularly also into his idyll »Berele chole« (Berele is sick), composed in 1907, which is an attempt at making this literary genre also fruitful for Modern Hebrew Literature. Analysis of its content reveals that the historiographic inference that Jewish and non-Jewish religious-magic medicine overlap and influence each other is congruent with Tschernichowsky’s poetically alienated description.