Mokhtarian, Jason Sion. Medicine in the Talmud: Natural and Supernatural Therapies between Magic and Science. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. xix + 236 pp. $95.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780520389410.Excerpt:Reviewed by Alexander Warren Marcus (Franklin and Marshall College)
Published on H-Judaic (December, 2024)
Commissioned by Jessica Carr (Lafayette College)
Mokhtarian’s monograph is an important corrective to earlier apologetic scholarship by non-Talmudists, as well as to more recent studies that emphasize only the supernatural components of Talmudic remedies. He does an excellent job of synthesizing recent contextual scholarship on Babylonian rabbinic healing therapies, pointing to the importance to local contextualization and complicating simplistic distinctions between a supposedly rational West and superstitious East. In situating both “medicine” and “magic” under the umbrella of healing, he successfully recovers the understudied empirical dimensions of Babylonian rabbinic therapeutics.I noted the publication of the book here, with more on the author's work there and here.
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