Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

August 20, 2020

How Diabetes Came to Be Considered a “Jewish Disease”

Many stereotypes and little data.

In the last decades of the 19th century, reports began to appear in medical and scientific literature that there was a disproportionately high incidence of diabetes—a disease still little understood—in Jews. Based on modern medical knowledge, there is reason to speculate as to why this might have been true. But, writes Arleen Marcia Tuchman, the data are largely suspect, and might reveal more about the authors than the patients:

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