Medicine as Enlightenment cure: Benedetto Frizzi, physician to eighteenth-century Italian Jewish society

This article examines modern Jewish doctors and the Enlightenment in action through its analysis of Dr. Benedetto Frizzi (1756–1844) as an Enlightenment Jewish physician and public intellectual in Habsburg northern Italy. Frizzi sought to spread the new Enlightenment gospel of polizia medica—public health policy or social medicine—that he learned from its pioneering exponent, Dr. Johann Peter Frank, his teacher at the University of Pavia. Frizzi dispensed Enlightenment medicine for the benefit of the state and society in general, as well as Jewish society and culture in particular, for he saw himself as both public health crusader and doctor-priest ministering to his own people. His commitments to Enlightenment science and rationalism led him to criticize Jewish social practices harshly even as he creatively reinterpreted classic Jewish texts; accordingly, Frizzi was regarded in some quarters as subversive, while in others as an apologetic defender of Jews and Judaism. Situating Frizzi within the traditions of Jewish as well as European Enlightenment physicians, this article raises broader questions about religion and secularism in the modern discourse of medicalized Judaism.     

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi,the Royal Alliance,and Jewish Political Theory

This article examines Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s views of the realities and myths of the “royal alliance” in medieval and modern Jewish history as a seminal contribution to Jewish political history and theory as well as a revealing entrée into his overall historiographical approach. Elaborating the ideas of his teacher Salo Baron and drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s insights into the relationship between Jews and modern states, Yerushalmi ultimately used his own understanding of Jewish political experience to argue against her indictment of wartime Jewish leaders. For Yerushalmi, Jews’ awareness of their tendencies to forge vertical alliances with the highest authorities served to fortify and console them; he considered these perceptions generally realistic and, though at times tragically blinding, still ultimately anchored in historical experience. This essay situates the royal alliance within Yerushalmi’s broader conceptions of Jewish community, political agency, and domicile as diasporic survival strategies. It also views this concept as part of his post-Holocaust commitment to chart the paradoxes of Jewish hope and to regenerate Jewish hope, both collective and individual. Yerushalmi is often celebrated as a pioneering thinker who contrasted modern critical historiography to traditional collective memory and who explored the individual, existential, psychological, and skeptical dimensions of modern Jewish identity. Yet, this essay suggests, a traditionalist strain may be heard in his profound identification with the Jewish people and his deriving hope from their political and historical experience—in both its continuities and its ruptures.