Medical Expertise, Women’s Bodies, and Jewish Law in Early Modern Europe with Jordan Katz moderated by Jessica Marglin

The early modern period witnessed a rise in Jewish legal (halakhic) discussions that incorporated new medical understandings into their rulings, especially when it came to women’s bodies. Focusing on eighteenth-century rabbinic responsa, this talk highlights the way in which halakhic questions that required medical knowledge of female bodies provided an opening for female medical experts as interlocutors. It also demonstrates the practical legal ramifications as rabbis reacted to and inflected contemporary medical knowledge, pressing new scientific understandings of women’s bodies into extant Jewish legal frameworks.

Jordan Katz is a historian of early modern Jewry, with a focus on Jewish cultural history, history of medicine, and women and gender in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Her current book project examines the role of Jewish midwives within communal, intellectual, and medical frameworks in the early modern Ashkenazic world. Through an exploration of Jewish midwives’ medical influences, their engagement with administrative knowledge systems, and their intellectual status in the eyes of prominent male leaders, Katz’s study offers a new understanding of the structures of knowledge and authority that undergirded early modern European society. More broadly, she is interested in the ways in which expertise and special skills created pathways for interaction between Christians and Jews, and between Jews of different socioeconomic classes, that have not yet been studied.

Professor Katz has received fellowships from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture; the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine; the Center for Jewish History; and the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme. Her work has been published in Jewish Quarterly Review and Jewish Social Studies.