Tanja Hidde

The BAB-MED Project of
Bar-Ilan University & the FREIE UNIVERSITÄT BERLIN
INVITE THE PUBLIC:
Medical Knowledge from Ancient Babylonia to Talmudic Babylonia
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 20TH 2015
THE SCHECHTER INSTITUTE OF JEWISH STUDIES,
4 AVRAHAM GRANOT ST., JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

Program
14:15 registration
14:30 opening remarks

Mark Geller (Freie Universität Berlin)
Shamma Friedman (The Jewish Theological Seminary, Bar-Ilan University)
15:00 First Session

Gideon Bohak (Tel Aviv University)
Aramaic Manuals of Divination from Late Antiquity

Tanja Hidde (Freie Universität Berlin)
Bulmos/Boulímos in the Talmudic Tradition

16:20 Break/ refreshments
16:40 Second Session

Mark Geller (Freie Universität Berlin)
Goodbye Julius Preuss: Unexpected Instances of Medicine in the Bavli

Aaron Amit (Bar-Ilan University)
An Obscure Disease and a Dubious Cure: The Case of סוסכינתא in Bavli Yebamot 64b
18:00 closing remarks

Throughout their legal-religious discussions, the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim deal also with medical issues. When the Talmuds were edited in the 5th-7th centuries AD, medicine was already a well-developed science. In the Babylonian Talmud one can discern not only traces of Greek medicine, but also of earlier Mesopotamian medicine. This presentation focuses on the category of "Diet & Regimen" within the medical passages of the Talmudim and its connection to older medical systems. The genre of "Diet & Regimen", emphasizing proper nutrition and physical exercise as prerequisites for a healthy constitution, is a distinct medical genre in the corpus of Greek medicine, but almost absent in Mesopotamian medicine. When the Babylonian Talmud was composed, Mesopotamia was under Sassanian rule, and although it is commonly assumed that Mesopotamia resisted Hellenization, a bulk of medical advices concerning "Diet and Regimen" within rabbinic literature is preserved in the Babylonian Talmud. The Greco-Roman practice of bloodletting and the food one should consume or avoid afterwards is often discussed in the Babylonian Talmud, but occurs less in the Palestinian Talmud. Medical knowledge about "Diet & Regimen" in the Babylonian Talmud has to be analyzed together with rabbinic literature from Palestine which was closer to the Greco-Roman cultural realm. We will ask if this knowledge was transmitted and trasnfered into the Babylonian Talmud through Palestinian rabbis. The genre of "Diet & Regimen" was adapted by the rabbis according to their own needs and integrated into discussions about modest behavior, or constructed as excurses on halakhical issues.

Panel/ Session Organiser and Respondent: Dr. Lennart Lehmhaus
Panel/ Session Chair: Prof. Charlotte Fonrobert



This panel examines different but interrelated aspects of discourses on bodies, health and disability in Jewish Late Antiquity against the backdrop of their cultural embeddedness in different context (i.e. Greco-Roman West and Iranian-Mesopotamian East). First, the panelists discuss the intertwinement of medical knowledge available to the rabbis and their religious and halakhic norms. Second, all presentations examine the nexus between abstract theological or scientific concepts and their more concrete implications in everyday life and cultural practices. Third, the contributions address the importance of literary and rhetoric representations of those ideas in narratives and other discursive forms.