• Jewish Healers and Yellow Fever in the Eighteenth-Century Americas
• Laura Arnold Leibman (bio)

One of the many side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 has been the proliferation of riffs on the antisemitic "happy merchant" meme featuring "a Jewish man with heavily stereotyped facial features who is greedily rubbing his hands together."¹ While some COVID-19 happy-merchant memes focus on Jews as spreaders of disease who enter cities hidden in a Trojan horse, others show the happy merchant holding a syringe with a yellow warning sign "Get Your Coronavirus Shot." The trope of the self-serving Jewish doctor (or researcher) populates white nationalists' threads, even as it also haunts the tweets issued by the Nation of Islam's Research Group suggesting that "Israel may have developed the coronavirus as a weapon for assassinations."² In such portrayals, Jews are both modern (they manipulate science) and retrograde (they wear kipot [skullcaps] and Jewish men do not shave their beards). While journalists have been quick to note that antisemites have long associated Jews with disease, I argue that the trope shows how pandemics have the potential to exacerbate long-standing phobias about Jews and citizenship.³

In this article, I focus on three Jewish healers who worked in Philadelphia and New York during two yellow fever epidemics that plagued the United States during the eighteenth century (one in 1793 and another in 1798): David Cohen Nassy (1747–1806), Matthias Nassy (ca. 1770–?), and Walter Jonas Judah (1778–98). For each, I focus not only on their actual roles as healers but also on different people's portrayals of "Jewish" approaches to healing at the time. [End Page 77] While white Protestants sometimes portrayed Jewishness and professionalism as at odds, all three men and their communities emphasized the ways that their medical service benefitted the state. In the 1790s, Jewish enfranchisement was a relatively new phenomenon, with Jews having only received the vote in Philadelphia in 1790, and Jews having lost and regained the vote in New York in the eighteenth century.⁴ Thus, these Jewish medics' self-fashioning took part in the larger—and still ongoing—debates over emancipation: could Jews in general, and Jewish medics in particular, heal the young nation or would their distinctiveness fester like a raw wound?

Yellow fever illuminates the way racism, capitalism, and epidemics have long been intertwined, not just in the United States but in the Americas more broadly. Contagious diseases were part of the daily lives of medical professionals (Jewish and non-Jewish alike) throughout the eighteenth century. Yet, the yellow fever outbreaks of the 1790s stood apart not only because the disease was relatively new to the region but also because of the fear it provoked and the ethical questions it raised. The disease was brutal and it progressed very rapidly, sometimes taking just ten days between the appearance of the first symptoms and death.⁵ Over 10 percent of Philadelphia's population died of yellow fever in 1793 alone, and the treatments people paid doctors to give were commonly useless.⁶ Yellow fever was also uniquely tied to the ethical problems of capitalism. The same doomed ships that brought enslaved Africans also brought the infected Aedes aegypti mosquito to the Americas and Europe. Eventually, yellow fever plagued each of the European empires that relied on slavery.⁷ In the Americas, the disease spread wherever the slave trade prospered. Jews in the eighteenth century were often enmeshed in the triangle trade that brought enslaved people from Africa, raw materials from the Americas, and manufactured goods from Europe. Christians harped on how yellow fever seemed to follow Jews, specter-like, around the Atlantic World. The first American epidemic of the disease was in 1648 in Mexico City.⁸ The same year, the Inquisition "uncovered" what its representatives called la complicidad grande (the great conspiracy) of the city's conversos and began to dissolve the "main network" of crypto-Jews.⁹ As both Jewish communities and the slave trade became entrenched in the West Indies, so too did the virus.¹⁰ By 1668, yellow fever arrived in New York City, just 42 years after the first enslaved Africans and 14...

• 十八世纪美洲的犹太疗愈者和黄热病
• 劳拉·阿诺德·莱布曼（Laura Arnold Leibman）

2020年COVID-19大流行的许多副作用之一是，即兴起的反犹太主义的“快乐商人”模因即兴传播，其特征是“一个面部表情刻板的犹太人，贪婪地揉手”。¹虽然一些COVID-19快乐商人模因关注犹太人作为传播疾病的传播者，他们进入隐藏在特洛伊木马中的城市，但其他人则显示快乐商人拿着注射器，上面带有黄色警告标志“让您的冠状病毒射杀”。自我服务的犹太医生（或研究员）的圈子充斥着白人民族主义者的线索，尽管它也困扰着伊斯兰国家研究小组发表的推文，暗示“以色列可能研制出冠状病毒作为暗杀的武器。” ^2个在这种刻画中，犹太人既是现代的（他们操纵科学）又是逆行的（他们戴kipot [ skullcaps ]，而犹太人则不剃胡子）。尽管记者很快注意到反犹太人长期以来将犹太人与疾病联系起来，但我认为，这部流行病表明流行病有可能加剧关于犹太人和公民身份的长期恐惧症。³

在本文中，我重点介绍三位犹太医士，他们在18世纪困扰美国的两次黄热病流行期间曾在费城和纽约工作（一个在1793年，另一个在1798年）：戴维·科恩·纳西（David Cohen Nassy，1747年至1806年），马蒂亚斯·纳西（Matthias Nassy，1770年-？）和沃尔特·乔纳斯（Walter Jonas Judah）（1778–98年）。对于每个人，我不仅着重于他们作为治疗者的实际角色，而且着重于当时不同人对“犹太人”治疗方法的描述。[完第77页]尽管白人新教徒有时将犹太人和职业精神描述为矛盾的，但所有三个人及其所在社区都强调他们的医疗服务使国家受益的方式。在1790年代，犹太人的特权是一个相对较新的现象，犹太人仅在1790年在费城获得选票，而犹太人在18世纪在纽约输掉并重新获得了选票。⁴因此，这些犹太军医的自我塑造参与了关于解放的更大且仍在进行的辩论：犹太人，尤其是犹太军医，是否可以治愈年轻国家，或者他们的独特性会像生伤口一样溃烂？

黄热病阐明了种族主义，资本主义和流行病长期纠缠在一起的方式，不仅在美国，而且在更广泛的美洲。在整个18世纪，传染病一直是医务人员（无论是犹太人还是非犹太人）日常生活的一部分。然而，1790年代的黄热病爆发之所以与众不同，不仅是因为该病在该地区相对较新，还因为它引起了人们的恐惧和提出了道德问题。该疾病是残酷的，并且进展非常迅速，有时从出现最初症状到死亡仅需十天。⁵仅在1793年，费城人口中就有10％以上死于黄热病，人们付钱给医生的治疗通常毫无用处。⁶黄热病还与资本主义的道德问题息息相关。那些被奴役的非洲人遭受厄运的船只也将被感染的埃及伊蚊（Aedes aegypti）蚊子带到了美洲和欧洲。最终，黄热病困扰了每个依赖奴隶制的欧洲帝国。⁷在美洲，这种疾病传播到奴隶贸易繁荣的任何地方。十八世纪的犹太人经常陷入三角贸易，这种贸易带来了来自非洲的被奴役者，美洲的原材料和欧洲的制成品。基督徒们在大西洋世界周围如何思考像犹太人一样的黄热病之后，犹太人大发雷霆。美国首次流行这种疾病是在1648年，在墨西哥城。⁸同年，宗教裁判所“发现”它是什么代表呼吁拉大complicidad全市conversos的（大阴谋），并开始溶解加密犹太人的“主网络”。⁹随着犹太人社区和奴隶贸易在西印度群岛的根深蒂固，这种病毒也是如此。¹⁰到1668年，黄热病抵达纽约市，距第一批被奴役的非洲人仅42年和14岁...