I’m gen­er­al­ly a pri­vate per­son, so pub­lish­ing my first book, Ashke­nazi Herbal­ism, (with coau­thor Adam Siegel) in 2021 didn’t come eas­i­ly to me. I felt I had a respon­si­bil­i­ty — more press­ing than any hes­i­tan­cy I might have felt — to share with oth­ers my unex­pect­ed dis­cov­ery of an impor­tant part of our col­lec­tive his­to­ry that had long been neglect­ed: the sto­ry of the Jew­ish folk heal­ers of the Pale of Set­tle­ment. These heal­ers kept their com­mu­ni­ties in health and bal­ance for cen­turies, and relied on mag­ic, plants, and oth­er nat­ur­al sub­stances for their work, right up until their destruc­tion dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. Con­se­quent­ly, as an Ashke­nazi herbal­ist, recov­er­ing the folk med­i­c­i­nal tra­di­tions of the Jews of the Pale, espe­cial­ly the women folk heal­ers, was rev­e­la­to­ry for me, and gave me a mean­ing­ful way to feel clos­er to my Jew­ish heritage. 

The pres­ence of women heal­ers through­out the Jew­ish dias­po­ra can be traced back to the very ear­li­est times. Even as their cura­tive meth­ods became increas­ing­ly threat­ened over the cen­turies due to the rise of patri­ar­chal pro­fes­sion­al med­i­cine, these women con­tin­ued to pre­serve the ancient prac­tices, often in secret, rarely writ­ing their reme­dies down, but instead pass­ing their knowl­edge from one gen­er­a­tion to the next by word of mouth. 

With both of our books, my coau­thor, Adam Siegel, and I have found that sources such as yizko­rs (mem­o­ry books of the for­mer shtetls of the Pale), mem­oirs, and oth­er his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments can pro­vide clues as to how the age-old heal­ing prac­tices of the bobes (grand­moth­ers), opsh­prekherins (cur­ers of the ​“evil eye”), and mid­wives were more sought after than their male coun­ter­parts. These women were able to heal patients via mag­i­cal means com­bined with herbs, even when oth­er meth­ods, includ­ing pro­fes­sion­al or offi­cial med­i­cine, had failed. We know from scat­tered clues that these women pro­vid­ed care with­out any expec­ta­tion of pay­ment, but rather as a ser­vice to their com­mu­ni­ties, and, if they were com­pen­sat­ed for their work, remu­ner­a­tion came in the form of food or oth­er goods in kind, or occa­sion­al­ly a few coins dis­creet­ly slipped into an unsus­pect­ing pock­et. Curi­ous­ly, the same sources that allow us a fleet­ing glance at these heal­ers’ won­ders simul­ta­ne­ous­ly dis­par­age their home­spun treat­ments. And, in an iron­ic twist, it’s these very same attacks that reveal some of the most inter­est­ing and rare glimpses into the hid­den world of these female healers. 

Through my exten­sive research in these areas, I con­tin­ue to be astound­ed by how invis­i­ble Ashke­nazi women have been in the his­to­ri­og­ra­phy of the Pale, some­thing schol­ar Nathaniel Deutsch has not­ed (from his 2006 essay ​“An-Sky and the Ethnog­ra­phy of Jew­ish Women”):

Not being reg­is­tered at birth was only one of the ways in which the Jew­ish women of the Pale of Set­tle­ment were ren­dered invis­i­ble. Despite the impor­tant eco­nom­ic, cul­tur­al and reli­gious roles that Jew­ish women played in their com­mu­ni­ties, male mem­bers of the tra­di­tion­al rab­binic elite and the new­ly emerg­ing Russ­ian Jew­ish intel­li­gentsia devot­ed lit­tle if any atten­tion to women in their volu­mi­nous writings.

These kinds of era­sures aren’t unique to Ashke­nazi women heal­ers. Around the world and across cen­turies, women’s heal­ing prac­tices have been neglect­ed, belit­tled, or destroyed. It is a for­tu­nate cul­ture that has been able to recon­struct the lega­cy of women’s heal­ing from such scat­tered shards. But invis­i­bil­i­ty was a three­fold fate for East­ern Euro­pean Jew­ish women folk heal­ers: an almost uni­ver­sal imper­a­tive to erase women’s heal­ing wis­dom from mem­o­ry, the destruc­tion of most of the record of Jew­ish women heal­ers’ com­mu­nal care, and the anni­hi­la­tion of the heal­ers them­selves in the Shoah. These three era­sures have made recov­er­ing or redis­cov­er­ing even the most fugi­tive and dis­parag­ing ref­er­ences to these women and their prac­tices noth­ing short of mirac­u­lous. Addi­tion­al­ly, when we’ve been able to com­pare new­ly dis­cov­ered threads depict­ing Ashke­nazi women’s secret med­i­c­i­nal ways to the cus­toms of women heal­ers from adja­cent pop­u­la­tions, such as Poles, Ukraini­ans, Belaru­sians, Lithua­ni­ans, and Tatars, we’ve found that their prac­tices are often high­ly sim­i­lar, and some­times identical.

This has been yet anoth­er thrilling dis­cov­ery for us: uncov­er­ing and restor­ing this col­lec­tive cul­ture of heal­ing among Ashke­naz­im and their non-Jew­ish neigh­bors shows us all a path for­ward toward a com­mon­weal of shared heal­ing. And this fur­ther under­scores the fact that, as one ear­ly read­er of our book so beau­ti­ful­ly not­ed, ​“our col­lec­tive health depends on knowl­edge flow­ing across bound­aries. [Woven Roots] invites us to cul­ti­vate sol­i­dar­i­ty by fol­low­ing the plants.”

Of course, we are not the first to observe that tra­di­tion­al heal­ing in East­ern Europe was a com­mu­nal affair. These par­al­lels and com­mon­al­i­ties have, for my coau­thor and I, affirmed a quote by Hirsch Jakob Zim­mels, a twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry rab­bi and his­to­ri­an of Judaism, whose insights have guid­ed our research: 

…In spite of all social, polit­i­cal, and reli­gious restric­tions – as far as Chris­t­ian Europe is con­cerned – in cas­es of ill­ness, non-Jews sought reme­dies from Jews, and Jews asked non-Jews for help. This applies to all class­es of the pop­u­la­tion and to all cen­turies. Med­i­cine alone did not respect any bound­ary. (Magi­cians, The­olo­gians and Doc­tors, 1952) 

Zim­mels’ asser­tion alludes to folk med­i­cine as well, includ­ing plants, sim­ply because plants have been part of human, if not hominin, heal­ing since time immemo­r­i­al. As an herbal­ist, I’ve come to under­stand that plants gen­er­ous­ly inter­act with any­one who engages with them regard­less of a person’s cul­ture, lan­guage, eth­nic­i­ty, or reli­gion. The plants, and by exten­sion all of nature, are com­plete­ly unbi­ased and con­se­quent­ly have always brought dis­parate groups togeth­er to heal them­selves and one anoth­er. Zim­mels’ pro­nounce­ment that heal­ing has been the most all-embrac­ing cul­tur­al uni­ver­sal is rev­o­lu­tion­ary: not only does it encour­age us to re-exam­ine some of the his­to­ry we’ve long tak­en for grant­ed, but it also sug­gests the pos­si­bil­i­ty for a tran­scen­dent vision of com­mu­ni­ty and com­mu­nal care ​“in spite of all social, polit­i­cal, and reli­gious restric­tions” in our own times. It’s this con­vic­tion that has guid­ed the research for our forth­com­ing book, Woven Roots: Recov­er­ing the Heal­ing Plant Tra­di­tions of Jews and Their Neigh­bors in East­ern Europe. We can’t wait to share the sto­ries that we’ve found con­cern­ing the plants and the nat­ur­al world, so beloved by our fore­bears, that can help us imag­ine a bet­ter world.