Jewish Healers and Yellow Fever in the Eighteenth-Century Americas

Abstract

The first American epidemic of the disease was in 1648 in Mexico City 8 The same year, the Inquisition "uncovered" what its representatives called la complicidad grande (the great conspiracy) of the city's conversos and began to dissolve the "main network" of crypto-Jews 9 As both Jewish communities and the slave trade became entrenched in the West Indies, so too did the virus 10 By 1668, yellow fever arrived in New York City, just 42 years after the first enslaved Africans and 14 years after the first Jews stepped foot there 11 For each of the Jewish individuals whose lives I explore here, slavery and the triangle trade undergirded their legacies [ ]the triangle trade, its mosquito fellow-travelers, and, hence, yellow fever continued to flourish 12 As with earlier pandemics, Jews often became entwined in the imaginations of white Christians with the spread of the virus 13 Yet, the very wandering that made Jews suspect also made them invaluable as practitioners of medicine and other healing arts Portuguese Jews (members of the so-called nation, or nacâo) in the Atlantic World prided themselves on being cosmopolitan, and Nassy's healing techniques as a doctor benefited from the fact that members of the nacâo often saw no contradiction between secular knowledge and religious practice 21 Although later historians have sometimes assumed that Nassy's choice to write in French meant he was French himself, his linguistic choice instead signaled both his erudition and the international audience to which he aspired 22 An autodidact, Nassy is known to have had an extraordinary library of 433 books that included a wide range of medical tomes in Spanish, Dutch, French, Latin, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Hebrew 23 He owned not only several books on pharmacology and general medicine but also on surgery, venereal disease, onanism, and illnesses common to the Caribbean 24 It was this latter subject, along with Nassy's own life experiences in Suriname, that set him apart from local Philadelphian doctors after he migrated north According to his own account, Nassy had great success: of the more than 160 patients he attended to during the 1793 fever season, he "had the misfortune to lose 19