Ritual Medical Lore of Sephardic Women: Sweetening the Spirits, Healing the Sick - Book Review

Folklore, Dec, 2003 by Graham Harvey

Isaac Jack Levy and Rosemary Levy Zumwalt. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2002. 260 pp. Illus. $34.95 (hbk). ISBN 0-252-02697-7

All too often academic texts have claimed to be recording the last moments of a culture about to become extinct. Sometimes, of course, their fate is to be used as a resource by the inheritors or would-be inheritors as they make a concerted effort to revive, restore or recreate that tradition. It may be too early to know whether this book correctly predicts the extinction of Sephardic culture, or perhaps only of its popular medical lore rather than elite discourses and performances. Certainly there has been change, but perhaps change has been the theme for these people. The very identity-label, "sephardic," applies to a community forced to leave the Iberian peninsula over half a millennium ago, and even before that to a people in diaspora. Since the expulsion, the name, along with local variants of the more embracing name, "Jewish," has identified a people on the move both physically and culturally. So, why is there a threat of extinction now? Most obviously, the (more-than-) decimation of Sephardic communities by the Nazis and their allies poses a threat given that there are fewer people to practice the everyday, taken-for-granted acts of blessing, cursing, invoking and warding that constitute this medical lore. Secondly, that same genocide massively disrupted the everyday and homely contexts in which such practices occurred. Thirdly, the very new insecurity of Jews in Muslim lands following the establishment and rising power of the State of Israel led to yet another dis-location or re-location for some Sephardim. Even if this move brought Sephardim into larger Jewish contexts and communities, it proffered the new challenge of a new kind of minority status: that of being Sephardic among Ashkenazi Jews. Furthermore, the rapid evolution of an avowedly secular and sometimes anti-traditional majority surrounding the new migrants required shifts in their engagement in time-honoured but otherwise marginalised acts and understandings. That all of this took place within the context of the powerful discourse and practice of modernity, with its own everyday, taken-for-granted opposition to superstition, ritual and magic (whatever these terms actually mean in any context), also damaged the changes of their continuity. What had been everyday became outlandish and sometimes embarrassing. What never changed, of course, is the causes of ill-health confronting people. Thus, embarrassment confronted nostalgia, modernisation confronted memory, and experimental identities confronted tested ones.

Isaac Levy and Rosemary Levy Zumwalt collaborated in researching and writing this exploration and presentation of what they call the Sephardic "little tradition." As always, this label unhelpfully diminishes what is probably the majority form of a tradition, culture or religion. Conversely, it overly privileges the power of elite claims to authoritatively define the tradition, culture, religion, or whatever. More helpfully, the authors define their interest in relation to their research practices: they approached, and here discuss, the medical lore of women. Usually these are elderly women who are variously encouraged, coaxed or seduced into remembering their childhood and youth. The methodologies employed are not only made explicit, but discussed in some detail, albeit at times anecdotally. We are told about the copious meals and generous hospitality offered by informants and their families. Since this is lauded as a significant element of a continuing rich Sephardic culture, it seems unlikely that everything else has been lost or relegated to memories (welcome or otherwise). Occasional uneasy shifts between past and present tenses make it uncertain whether we are to understand that some of this medical lore continues unabated, within the women's world at least, or whether this is a hangover from earlier academic styles.

The precise details of particular women's health and healing knowledge is interesting and presented fairly clearly. It is, of course, always difficult not to seem to be systematising when one focuses on only parts of a lifeway. However, by presenting their own relational engagements and encounters, narrating events and interspersing anecdotes, the authors usually manage to retain a sense of lives lived and lore entangled with other matters of importance. Sometimes the impression is also given that these contemporary elderly women's knowledge represents something either timeless or actually original to pre-expulsion Spain. However, it is also made clear that Sephardic Judaism engaged-where it was not entangled--with Islamic traditions. This at least suggests the contingent and ever-evolving and emergent nature of cultures that are never discrete bounded entities. For these reasons, beyond the interesting descriptions of Sephardic women's medical lore, this book deserves consideration by those interested in academic approaches to cultures.