H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content
Bullard on Katz, 'Delivering Knowledge: Jewish Midwives and Hidden Healing in Early Modern Europe' [Review]
Katz, Jordan R.. Delivering Knowledge: Jewish Midwives and Hidden Healing in Early Modern Europe. : Stanford University Press, 2026. 306 pp. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 9781503646391.
Reviewed by
Kyna Noelle Bullard (University of Colorado Boulder)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (July, 2026)
Commissioned by
Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=62920
Jordan R. Katz’s 2026 monograph Delivering Knowledge: Jewish Midwives and Hidden Healing in Early Modern Europe examines the experiences of Jewish midwives and their patients in the wake of the Thirty Years War. Drawing on a wide array of documents, Katz argues that the experiences of Jewish midwives are critical for understanding how early modern Jews navigated the institutionally diverse and often capricious landscapes of western Europe as professionalization and institutionalization overtook the medical marketplace. In fact, in the realms of municipal and rabbinical law, as well as in the production of written records, Katz argues that midwives “are central to understanding Jewish communal politics, urban healthcare provision, religious ritual, and vital recordation in the early modern period” (p. 4.)
Using the midwives of early modern Amsterdam as the heart of her book, Katz examines how civic expectations impacted the experiences of early modern midwives. Katz utilizes an impressive array of archival sources, including personal registers recording the neighborhoods that midwives served, a seventeenth-century midwifery manual translated into Yiddish for the midwife Roza Salomons, and midwives’ delivery registers, documenting the births, both Jewish and Christian, that they attended. These documents provide a window into the complex and multifaceted social worlds that these women lived in and shed light on “Jews belonging to a larger administrative culture on the one hand and their unique cultural distinctiveness on the other” (p. 84). Katz provides insight into the significant bureaucratic, medical, and communal changes that occurred in Amsterdam, using digital mapping to reconstruct the social worlds navigated by midwives in the city. This approach illustrates the limitations of authority systems and community boundaries in early modern European contexts, as well as how midwives negotiated their place within these structures.
The monograph is separated into six chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion. The first chapter, “Midwives, Jewish Communities, and Early Modern Medical Bureaucracies,” examines the medical and bureaucratic shifts that occurred in the wake of the Thirty Years War, as European municipalities enacted stricter regulations in order to promote public health. Katz examines these shifts and how Amsterdam’s Jewish midwives navigated this shifting landscape, harnessing their profession to cross-developing hierarchical boundaries. Chapter 2, “Jewish Childbirth and its Stakeholders," moves from the city streets into the birthing chamber itself, examining how parturiation transformed into an occasion for “various stakeholders to promote and actualize their perspectives” (p. 51). This chapter explores how those stakeholders, including Jewish physicians, rabbis, and neighborhood women, intertwined childbirth with larger societal debates. Chapter 3, “Recording Birth: Delivery Registers, Female Scribes, and the Emergence of Vital Records,” examines the records produced by Jewish midwives themselves as they sought to record their work and access and preserve additional forms of knowledge in their trade. Focusing on the three early modern Jewish midwives’ registers located to date in this region, Katz demonstrates how these aide-mémoires serve as an essential tool for understanding “Jewish-Christian relations, the multi-ethnic nature of urban neighborhoods, and intersections between individuals of different socioeconomic and class backgrounds” (p. 108).
Chapter 4, “Midwives, Illegitimate Pregnancies, and Paternity Suits,” explores midwives’ testimonies, as courts “trusted them to testify about paternity through the inspection of women’s bodies” (p. 128). By serving as witnesses in paternity suits, Jewish midwives used their insights and their experiences as medical professionals to become essential figures in Jewish communal life. Likewise, the chapter sheds light on the experience of marginalized individuals whose plights are not often brought to light in the historical record, such as unwed Jewish mothers and victims of rape. Chapter 5, “Patronage and Practice in Sefer ha-noshim: A Midwife's Yiddish Book,” returns to the written word, using both print and manuscript sources to examine Roza Salomon’s roles as a patron in commissioning a Yiddish translation of a Dutch-language treatise on childbirth. Katz argues that, through their involvement in the production of print sources, Jewish midwives like Roza participated in, and actively shaped, the development of midwifery knowledge during this shift “from oral to textual culture” (p. 16). Finally, chapter 6, “Midwives, Rabbis, and Medical-Halakhic Expertise,” examines how midwives contributed specialized medical knowledge to rabbinical questions of Jewish ritual practices, especially in cases centering the female body.
Katz’s monograph is deeply entrenched in the broader medical historiography of parturiation. In addition to the impressive collection of extant archival material, this monograph builds on the works of medical historians Roy Porter and Michael Stohlberg.[1] Katz also effectively utilizes examinations of midwifery cultures within other geographic and temporal scopes, including Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s 1990 social history A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, which informs at least part of this monograph’s methodology. In doing so, Katz effectively examines how midwives constructed their own frameworks of knowledge while navigating and negotiating their place in the patriarchal Jewish and Christian societies of the early modern world. Likewise, her analysis illuminates the interactions between Jews and Christians across religious, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries that often appear as separate narratives of medical care and community.
Overall, this work provides a vital window into the experiences of early modern Jewish women as mediators between the liminal spaces of the private birthing chamber, the public Jewish community, and the burgeoning bureaucracies that arose in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. Concluding with a call for further investigation into the communal history of European Jews, this monograph opens the path for new research into women’s experiences in the early modern Jewish communities of western Europe, and how those experiences intertwined with and challenged the broader urban communities in which they resided. Through an analysis of the written culture left behind, this monograph succeeds both as a call for a more nuanced analysis of Jewish women’s place in their immediate communities and in the broader Jewish intellectual and theological traditions. Ultimately, Delivering Knowledge is a valuable addition to the historiography, providing an excellent resource for those interested in early modern medicine, urban history, and the historical life experiences of Jewish women.
Note
[1]. Roy Porter, “The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below,” Theory and Society 14, no. 2 (1985): 175–98; Michael Stolberg, “Learning from the Common Folks. Academic Physicians and Medical Lay Culture in the Sixteenth Century,” Social History of Medicine 27, no. 4 (2014): 649–67, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hku035.
Citation:
Kyna Noelle Bullard.
Review of
Katz, Jordan R..
Delivering Knowledge: Jewish Midwives and Hidden Healing in Early Modern Europe.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2026.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=62920
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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