Dr. John Efron, Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Berkeley, to Speak on "Medicine, Modernity and the German Jews"

Dr. Efron will address the role of medicine in the formation of modern Jewish identity in Germany. Beginning with the Jewish Enlightenment of the 18th century, Jewish medical practitioners outlined a vision for a healthy Jewish future and sought to introduce changes in such things as the Jewish diet, childcare and burial practices. This was part of an overall program of Jewish physical regeneration, designed to prepare the Jewish masses for political emancipation. It was a process that continued well into the next century and was driven by the very large numbers of Jewish physicians in German-speaking Europe. In fact, there were so many Jewish doctors that the character of German Jewry rapidly changed between 1800 and 1900 from a traditional and observant community to one that was secular, scientific and skeptical. This talk will trace these processes and shed light on how medicine came to occupy such an exalted place among Jews, to the extent that it became known as a quintessentially "Jewish" profession.

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John Efron is the Koret Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is a specialist in the cultural and social history of German Jewry. A native of Melbourne, Australia, he has a B.A. from Monash University, has studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, earned his M.A. at New York University and Ph.D. at Columbia University. Dr. Efron's work has focused on the German-Jewish engagement with medicine, anthropology, and antisemitism and he has written on subjects such as Jewish burial, circumcision, and dietary practices. He has also written on Jewish political and popular culture in Central Europe, on Yiddish political satire in Poland and Israel, and the role of sport in the modern Jewish experience. His books include: Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Yale UP, 1994); History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (U of New England Press, 1998) Co-edited with Elisheva Carlebach and David Myers; Medicine and the German Jews: A History (Yale UP, 2001); and The Jews: A History (Penguin, 2009). He is currently at work on another book called Orientalism and the German Jews in the Age of Emancipation, a study of modern German Jewry's attraction to the aesthetics of medieval Sephardic Jewry.