Ma’ase Tuviya (Venice 1708): Tuviya on Medicine & Science


Ma’ase Tuviya (Venice 1708): Tuviya on Medicine & Science (Muriel and Philip Berman Medical Library, 2021), edited by Kenneth Collins, Samuel Kottek, and Helena Paavilainen

Reviewed by Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein


I first came across the work Ma’ase Tuviya as a teenager in my Yeshiva library, but I was never sure about what to make of it. Who is its intended audience, and why was it written? Ma’ase Tuviya represents an eclectic mix of theology, science, geography, astronomy/astrology, and medicine in a sort of encyclopedia that freely quotes from Greek doctors and rabbinic literature in the same breath. The book under review is a scholarly volume that presents various academic essays that look at Ma’ase Tuviya from different angles.

This book contextualizes Ma’ase Tuviya by revealing biographical details about its author and the sociocultural milieu in which he was active. Rabbi Dr. Tuviya HaKohen Katz (1652–1729) originally came from the town of Metz (on the French-German border) and was actually a stepbrother to Rabbi Yair Chaim Bachrach (1639–1702), Chief Rabbi of Worms and author of the popular responsa Chavos Yair. He studied medicine in Krakow and Frankfort-on-the-Oder, but quickly relocated to the prestigious University of Padua, where he received his degree. In Padua, Tuviyah was one of many Jewish medical pupils throughout the generations, and it was largely for the benefit of such students that he penned Ma’ase Tuviya as a primer on the basics of medicine geared towards students firmly grounded in Torah literature. As this book makes clear, Tuviya’s purpose for writing Ma’ase Tuviya was two-fold: He sought to help prepare Jewish students for the European world of study and to prove to the world at large that Jewish literature can positively contribute to the sciences.

After completing his degree, Tuviya practiced medicine in Poland and eventually relocated to Adrianople and then Constantinople (Istanbul), where served as the capitals of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. As a renowned doctor, Tuviya served as the personal physician to five successive sultans. It was during this period of his life that in the year 1708, Tuviya published Ma’ase Tuviya (first printed in Venice), and then spent the years 1709–1713 preparing to publish the works of his deceased father, Rabbi Dr. Moshe Narol. After publishing his father’s works, Tuviya immigrated to Jerusalem (which was under Turkish rule), where he lived for the rest of his life. Ari Morgenstern’s essay published in this book speculates about the different reasons that may have led Tuviya to relocate to Jerusalem and his role in helping the impoverished Ashkenazic community there.

In the first chapter of this book, Kenneth Collins provides the reader with an account of Tuviya’s schooling, including the anti-Semitism he faced before transferring to the University of Padua, and generally how Jewish students were able to fare in their medical studies in the Italian city of Padua. In the subsequent chapter, Samuel Kottek provides more of the context and cultural milieu in which Tuviya operated. Particularly, he discusses how Tuviya’s understanding of biology and medicine are shaped not only by ancient Jewish and Greek sources, but also by the burgeoning research of Renaissance physicians like the Swiss doctor Paracelsus (1493–1541), who began to question the assumptions found in Galenic, Aristotelian, and Hippocratic literature. Dr. Jeremy Brown (author of the Talmudology Blog) contributed a chapter that compares and contrasts Tuviya’s medical works with those of other physician-scientists of his time and considers whether Tuviya’s information really presented the latest state-of-art research.

Rabbi Dr. Edward Reichman presents a fun— but highly informative —essay that explores how Tuviya’s diploma from Padua may have theoretically looked. He draws on precedents seen on the diplomas of other medical graduates from Padua to piece together how Tuviya’s might have looked. R. Dr. Reichman reproduces facsimiles of several such diplomas and speculates on which of those features might have been present on Tuviya’s. This essay has several counterparts in Reichman’s series on Jewish medical history published on Seforim Blog.

Several other essays zone in on very specific aspects of Ma’ase Tuviya: Etienne Lepicard’s essay focuses on Ma’ase Tuviya’s presentation of female physiology and the roles of each gender in the reproductive process. As far as this reviewer knows, Ma’ase Tuviya is actually the first Hebrew work to make reference to the clitoris. Another essay, penned by Shalom Sabar, focuses on the artistic aspects of Ma’ase Tuviya, particularly looking at its title page, author portrait, and various scientific diagrams. Helena Paavilainen offers a learned case study of Tuviya’s explorations of headaches and how to deal with them. She surveys the various etiological explanations for headaches and the remedies that Tuviya recommends for treating such ailments.

Another contemporary scholar whose presence looms large in this book, but does not contribute an essay of his own, is the celebrated author of Jewish medical works, Rabbi Dr. Fred Rosner (father of Rabbi Shalom Rosner, a popular Daf Yomi lecturer and rabbi in Bet Shemesh). His esteemed presence bookends this scholarly volume with a foreword and words of appreciation at the beginning, as well as a lengthy appendix in which he translated excerpts of Ma’ase Tuviya into English at the end.

All in all, this reviewer thoroughly enjoyed learning more about Ma’ase Tuviya and its colorful author. With this scholarly work in hand, I have access to all the necessary background to understanding the medical parts of Ma’ase Tuviya and can now finally understood what this book is really all about. I’m looking forward to future scholarship that will explore other parts of Ma’ase Tuviya and shed light on those sections of the encyclopedia. In the meantime, Ma’ase Tuviya (Venice 1708): Tuviya on Medicine & Science is a great work that will open up new worlds of future scholarship.