CSMBR Upcoming Lecture
Daniella Zaidman-Mauer
11 June 2026 – 5 PM (CET)
Before the advent of modern medicine, healing was never purely physical. Across different religions, illness was understood to be both a physical and a moral event — a disruption to the balance between humanity and God. When epidemics struck early modern Europe, people turned to every available remedy — whether practical, spiritual, natural or supernatural.
This lecture explores how Jewish communities in Central and Western Europe responded to epidemic disease by examining vivid examples drawn from Yiddish books and pamphlets, which was the everyday language of European Jews.
We will encounter a Yiddish plague treatise that offered rules for surviving an outbreak by blending hygiene, community solidarity and spiritual discipline into a single, coherent guide, together with other instances of Jewish healers and rabbis navigating this world with remarkable creativity, integrating herbal remedies, dietary advice, quarantine regulations and prayer into a unified, practical system of care.
Together, these stories reveal a world in which prayer and medicine, faith and science were partners in the urgent, deeply human work of survival.
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