Ma'ase Tuviya (Venice 1708): Tuviya on Medicine and Science ed. by Kenneth Collins, Samuel Kottek, and Helena Paavilainen (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Ma'ase Tuviya (Venice 1708): Tuviya on Medicine and Science ed. by Kenneth Collins, Samuel Kottek, and Helena Paavilainen
• Jordan Katz

Kenneth Collins, Samuel Kottek, and Helena Paavilainen, eds. Ma'ase Tuviya (Venice 1708): Tuviya on Medicine and Science. Jerusalem: Ludwig Mayer, 2021. 299 pp. Ill. $58.90 ( 978-965-92493-1-2).

Tuviya Cohen was arguably the most famous Jewish physician of the early modern period. Born in Metz, France, in 1652, Cohen was the son of Moses Cohen Narol, a Polish émigré who fled the 1648–49 Khmelnytsky massacres and served for a time as the chief rabbi of Metz. After spending his formative years in Poland, Tuviya studied in the university of Frankfurt an der Oder and later in Padua, where he eventually earned his medical degree alongside other Jewish students.

Much of what we know of Tuviya's life is drawn from his magnum opus, Ma'ase Tuviya (Venice, 1708), a Hebrew encyclopedia of natural sciences, theology, pharmacology, and medicine. It is this work that constitutes the seed text for the articles collected in Ma'ase Tuviya (Venice 1708): Tuviya on Medicine and Science. Regrettably little information about Tuviya's life trajectory exists outside this text, aside from a few scant letters published by the late nineteenth-century scholar David Kaufmann. This makes the text of Ma'ase Tuviya all the more enticing as a primary source, as much for its insights about early modern Jewish engagement with science and medicine as for the biographical information about its author.

Edited by Kenneth Collins, Samuel Kottek, and Helena Paavilainen, with a foreword by Fred Rosner, this volume consists of eight articles concerning different aspects of Tuviya Cohen's Ma'ase Tuviya, in addition to an appendix containing translated excerpts of Cohen's text. Some components of these pieces were previously published in a special issue of Korot: The Israeli Journal of the History of Medicine and Science, of which Kottek and Collins have both served as editors. On top of this, one article by Samuel Kottek centers on the German-Jewish physician Fritz Kahn. Kottek notes that the editors deemed it worthy of inclusion in the book "in view of, and in comparison to, Tuviya's illustration of the human body delineated as a house," a curious claim given that it is difficult to discern a tangible connection between Kahn's illustrations and Tuviya's earlier work.

The volume's first article, "Tuviya Cohen and His Medical Studies," by Collins, presents an overview of Tuviya's medical education and his interaction with other Jewish students at the University of Padua. This essay is followed by a piece by Kottek, which attempts to place Tuviya Cohen's work in context primarily by identifying his work's citations. The article makes several observations about what the text reveals but lacks an overarching argument or explanation concerning the implications of this information. This piece is followed by Shalom Sabar's article on the illustrations in Ma'ase Tuviya. More descriptive than argumentative, Sabar's work unearths interesting information about the artists and engravers with whom Tuviya worked, in addition to the Stamparia Bragadina where he had his book [End Page 164] published. Unfortunately we know little about how these collaborations worked in practice. Most interesting is Sabar's treatment of Tuviya's author portrait, in which Tuviya displays himself holding a globe and other objects intended to mark his scientific authority. Edward Reichman's "Confessions of a Would-Be Forger," though presented in an unconventional way (with the question of what formal elements one would include should one wish to forge Tuviya's as yet undiscovered medical diploma), contains beautiful color reproductions of diplomas that belonged to students who studied alongside Tuviya in Padua. In addition to delineating the standard form of the diploma, the article serves as a catalogue of Jewish students who attended the university in years that overlapped with Tuviya. Jeremy Brown's article, "The Medicine of Tuviya Cohen in Comparison and Contrast," situates Tuviya as a product of his Jewish upbringing and his medical education, showing how his worldviews reflect larger patterns of thought circulating at the time. Etienne Lepicard's "Old Wine in...