Repairing the Body, Restoring the Soul: Kabbalah, Magic, and Philosophy in Premodern Jewish Healthcare

Heinlein, "is another person's engineering."1Heinlein's words testify to his literary genius, which enabled him to transcend the crude twentieth-century separation between magic and science and imagine future worlds.But a historian preoccupied with the past finds another dimension in Heinlein's turn of phrase.It typifies a way of thinking now lost to the West.As Grafton deftly observes, in premodern Europe, both science and magic rested on a common assumption that the lower and upper worlds shared certain correspondences that could be effectively manipulated through experimentation and observation.2Science Gondos and Janosikova Journal of Jewish Thought &Philosophy 33 (2025) 1-11 and magic alike operated as modes of inquiry into the world in a tangible, practical, physical way.This physicality was transmitted most powerfully in moments of bodily crisis, when the experience of the body's fragility, the loss of health or life, underpinned writing.Such existential moments form the foundation of any medical inquiry.Paradoxically, the rise of theoretical and technical-medical discourse in the Middle Ages was blamed for obscuring individual bodies.They were, as Caroline Walker Bynum points out, "dissolved into discourse.But there was also resistance to such discourse."3Poems, stories of miraculous recovery, and funerary and commemorative practices captured the historical agency and immediacy of people and their wounded bodies, bringing us closer to the transformation of bodily perceptions over centuries.Studying such sources became a timely antidote to the disembodied language of science as it emerged in the West.Contemporary sources reinvigorated the history of science and technology, encouraging us to look beyond representations of the body, organs, and knowledge systems.With newly learned sensitivities toward embodiment and its historicity, scholars return to more technical portrayals of healing to study these subjects with fresh eyes.4With this renewed gaze, we join the attempts of the past two decades to re-embody the history of premodern people, science, magic, health, and embodiment -all conceptually intertwined -with our own research agenda.5 3 Caroline Walker Bynum, "Why All the Fuss about the Body?A Medievalist's Perspective,"