The Twenty-Four Egyptian Days in Yiddish

Abstract

The object of this study is a list of twenty-four Egyptian days in Yiddish discovered at the end of a Hebrew miscellany from medieval Ashkenaz, preserved in the Basel Universitätsbibliothek. Egyptian days are inauspicious days for bloodletting; these are listed according to the Julian calendar and sometimes identified by saint names and feast days. The list is edited and translated into English. Dates and variants of these Egyptian days are then compared with those of the only other known list of its kind, found in the earliest dated astro-medical fragment in Old Western Yiddish, from 1396–1397. A tabular comparison and descriptive commentary of the names and dates in both lists follows. Preceding this analysis, the status and knowledge of Jewish physicians in medieval Ashkenaz is addressed, as well as a brief description of Ms R IV 2, revealing its rich content and some of its codicological and paleographical characteristics.