The Brighter Side of Medieval Christian-Jewish Polemical Encounters: Transfer of Medical Knowledge in the Midi (Twelfth-Fourteenth Centuries)

Abstract

Abstract This paper argues that as a result of the competition over patients between Jewish and Christian doctors in the Midi (twelfth–fourteenth centuries) Jewish doctors were more prone than other Jewish intellectuals to acquaint themselves with Christian culture (and also to convert). In this respect, the massive Latin-into-Hebrew cultural transfer in medicine contrasts with the slight Latin-into-Hebrew cultural transfer in philosophy (until the end of the fourteenth century). Jewish doctors were able to keep up with Latin medicine, even at times of rapid change, often through Latin-into-Hebrew translations. To illustrate and sustain the general claims I look closely at a few figures: the anonymous Jewish doctor who called himself “Doeg the Edomite” and who, in the closing years of the twelfth century, translated into Hebrew 24 books of theoretical and practical medicine, mainly from the Salerno corpus; and Leon Joseph of Carcassonne, whose remarkable Preface to his translation of Gerard de Solo’s Pratica super nono Almansoris (1394) I analyze in detail as an eyewitness report of a participant observer. His trajectory is comparable to that of Moses ben Samuel of Roquemaure (Jean, or Juan, of Avignon).