Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

December 15, 2023

The Rabbi-Doctors of 17th-Century Italy

Rabbinic “fellows” and their graduation odes.

In the 15th century, the University of Padua’s medical school opened its doors to Jewish students, and by the 1600s it had become the alma mater of a sizeable number of Jewish physicians at a time when European universities were generally closed to Jews. Edward Reichman examines a set of extraordinary documents to show how some of these students combined talmudic study with their medical training:

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