Medicine as Enlightenment cure: Benedetto Frizzi, physician to eighteenth-century Italian Jewish society

Jewish History (2012) 26: 201221 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012 DOI: 10.1007/s10835-012-9150-x

Medicine as Enlightenment cure: Benedetto Frizzi, physician to eighteenth-century Italian Jewish society

LOIS C. DUBIN

Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract This article examines modern Jewish doctors and the Enlightenment in action through its analysis of Dr. Benedetto Frizzi (17561844) as an Enlightenment Jewish physician and public intellectual in Habsburg northern Italy. Frizzi sought to spread the new Enlightenment gospel of polizia medicapublic health policy or social medicinethat he learned from its pioneering exponent, Dr. Johann Peter Frank, his teacher at the University of Pavia. Frizzi dispensed Enlightenment medicine for the benet of the state and society in general, as well as Jewish society and culture in particular, for he saw himself as both public health crusader and doctor-priest ministering to his own people. His commitments to Enlightenment science and rationalism led him to criticize Jewish social practices harshly even as he creatively reinterpreted classic Jewish texts; accordingly, Frizzi was regarded in some quarters as subversive, while in others as an apologetic defender of Jews and Judaism. Situating Frizzi within the traditions of Jewish as well as European Enlightenment physicians, this article raises broader questions about religion and secularism in the modern discourse of medicalized Judaism.

Scholars increasingly approach the subject of Jewish doctors and modern medicine less in an apologetic vein of Jewish contributions to civilization and more through analysis of them as cultural and social forces within modern Jewish history. David Ruderman, John Efron, and Mitchell Hart have analyzed Jewish medical practice and theory in early modern and modern Europe as indices of change in Jewish cultural orientations and professional status, on the one hand, and in JewishGentile perceptions, on the other.1 This essay addresses the issues of Jews and medicine in modern times by broadening the purview beyond Germanyto Italy in the age of Enlightenment, and with a specic focus on Dr. Benedetto (Ben-Zion Raphael ha-Kohen) Frizzi of Lombardy and Trieste (17561844).2 A practicing physician and prolic author, Frizzi was a rm believer in medical science as a force for societal improvement, especially when promoted by the reforms of the enlightened Habsburg state; in that context, Enlightenment medicine was also a means to reinvigorate Jewish health and...