In March 1900, an individual identified only as “Medicus” wrote a letter to the New York Times about “the tuberculosis problem.” The very immediate and practical crisis of tuberculosis, “Medicus” suggested, could possibly be addressed and remedied through the ancient laws of Moses. It was now generally conceded, with the acceptance of the germ theory of disease, that tuberculosis was infectious and not hereditary. This meant that health officials and policy makers must begin to think not only or primarily about what to do with those who were already ill, but how to prevent the healthy from becoming sick.

“Medicus” devised an imaginary dialogue between an older, more traditional medical authority and a young, progressive voice. The former believes that treating TB means dealing with those already ill: those in an advanced state must be isolated, given whatever aid can be provided, and prevented from infecting others; those in the early stages of the disease should be treated and cured if possible. Then the progressive voice is heard. Why not try to prevent the disease? How? It is generally agreed that the cow and cow's milk are the origin of tuberculosis. “Keep your cattle in good shape, learn to recognize disease in them and consumption will cease.” Where is the evidence for such claims? “Talmudic writings show that the wise men of Judea recognized the existence of tubercle in cattle and its consequent danger to human kind.”

In December 1883, James E. Reeves, the Secretary of the State Board of Health of West Virginia, delivered a speech to the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association. The speech was later printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the nation's most prestigious medical journal. Reeves spoke about the “usefulness of state boards of health in guarding the public welfare” and the intimate link between laws of health, the fitness of the individual citizen, and the “prosperity, freedom, and glory of the State.” He began by noting that

Forty-five years later, in the Hebrew language journal The Hebrew Physician (Ha-Ropheh ha-Ivri), Dr. Yosef Tennovim gave voice to the same basic idea, though more forcefully and with greater specificity: “Almost all contemporary medical issues or questions found expression already in ancient Hebrew medicine. Concerning the modern understanding of the circulation of the blood, there are already hints of this understanding in the Talmud, testifying to a specific professional erudition [b'kiyut] long before [William] Harvey….”

Where does this discourse about Jews, Judaism, health and medicine fall within the longer trajectory of modern Jewish history? Did the narratives of “the healthy Jew” that appeared in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries signal a growing confidence among German, French, American and British Jews, or a residual unease, a continuing need to demonstrate the “natural” relationship of Judaism to a progressive modernity, to civilization, and to those societies in which Jews resided? The latter seems more likely given the explicit apologetic impulse to so much of the scholarship. But perhaps, too, we might discern some of the former, some confidence or assertiveness in the dissemination of these stories of Jewish contribution. Consider the assertion discussed in Chapter 6 about the way in which Jewish ritual could and should serve as a model for societies in general. Gentiles made such a suggestion, but so, too, did Jews. Such an assertion is an implicit critique of current practices, a suggestion that what health officials are currently doing is insufficient and even dangerous. It is also, perhaps even more impudently for many, an implicit suggestion that Christianity erred in dismissing the Mosaic laws as unnecessary or irrelevant. Taken as a whole, the literature produced by Jews and non-Jews on the nexus of Torah, Talmud, and health suggests a continuing relevance of Jewish law that runs counter to Christian and European philosophical notions of supercession, and the more prosaic dismissal of the continuing relevance of Jewish religious observance.