In this page of Talmud there is a pithy comment about three kinds of lives '“that are less than living.”
ביצה לב, ב
תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן: שְׁלֹשָׁה חַיֵּיהֶן אֵינָם חַיִּים, וְאֵלּוּ הֵן: הַמְצַפֶּה לְשֻׁלְחַן חֲבֵירוֹ, וּמִי שֶׁאִשְׁתּוֹ מוֹשֶׁלֶת עָלָיו, וּמִי שֶׁיִּסּוּרִין מוֹשְׁלִין בְּגוּפוֹ
The Sages taught: There are three whose lives are not lives, and they are as follows: One who looks to the table of others for his sustenance; and one whose wife rules over him; and one whose body is ruled by suffering.
Then the Talmud adds a fourth category. Lice.
וְיֵשׁ אוֹמְרִים: אַף מִי שֶׁאֵין לוֹ אֶלָּא חָלוּק אֶחָד. וְתַנָּא קַמָּא: אֶפְשָׁר דִּמְעַיֵּין בְּמָנֵיהּ
And some say: Even one who has only one robe [since he cannot wash it properly, he suffers from lice and dirt]. And why was this last category not included in the original list? Because it is possible for him to examine his clothes and remove the lice, which would alleviate his suffering.
Today on Talmudology we will focus on the last category: lice
Head lice, Body Lice and pubIC LICE
There are three kinds of lice which infect humans: the tiny head louse Pediculosis humanus capitas, the larger body louse Pediculus humanus humanus, and the crab or pubic louse, Pthirus pubis. There is a discussion of lice in the tractate Nazir, as an aside to a question about how our hair grows:
נזיר לט, א
איבעיא להו האי מזיא מלתחת רבי או מלעיל למאי?... ת"ש מהא אינבא חיה דקאים בעיקבא דבינתא ואי סלקא דעתך מלתחת רבי ברישא דבינתא בעי למיקם. לעולם מלתחת רבי ואגב חיותא נחית ואזיל אינבא
ת"ש אינבא מתה ברישא דבינתא ואי סלקא דעתך מלעיל רבי בעיקבא דבינתא בעי למיקם התם נמי משום דלית בה חילא שרוגי שריגא ואזיל...
A question was asked: Does hair grow from the roots or the tips?...Let us suggest an answer from the live nit [or louse - meaning is not certain] which is found at the root of a strand [of hair]. Now if the hair grew from the root, shouldn't the nit be found at the tip? [The Talmud rejects this suggestion:] The growth may well be from the tip, but the nit, being alive, continually moves down [towards the root].
Let us suggest an answer from the case of a dead nit [or louse, that is found] at the end of a strand [of hair]. If the hair grows from the end, shouldn't the dead nit be found near the root? [The Talmud rejects this suggestion too:] Perhaps the dead nit has no power [to grasp the hair] and so as the hair grows from the root, the nit slides.
The louse nit (egg) with its adherent cylindrical sheath cemented to the hair shaft. The free distal end (arrow) would be directed towards the hair tip. The egg has a domed operculum (arrow) that contains air holes, allowing the maturing larvae to breath.From Burkhat el al. The adherent cylindrical nit structure and its chemical denaturation in vitro. Arch. Pediatric Adolescent Medicine 1988. 152; 711.
Pediculosis Humanus Capitas
Pediculosis Humanus capitas is the long scientific name of the tiny head louse. The female, less than 3mm long, lives for about a month, and in that time lays over three hundred eggs. The eggs are laid on a shaft of hair close to the scalp, where, warmed by the skin of their itchy host, they incubate for two weeks before hatching. The new lice emerge, grow for about 12 days, mate, and lay their eggs, and the cycle continues. Humans are the only known host of these lice, and somewhere in this cycle you as a parent may get a call to come and take your child out of school because they have been found to have head lice, or nits, the name given to their eggs. About 15% of school age children in the UK have head lice, while in the US estimates range from 6-12 million infestations per year. In the US, the cost to treat those millions of infestations is more than $350 million.
True story: Many years ago while working in an emergency department in Boston, I received a call from the (warm and loving Jewish) preschool my children then attended. My daughter had nits, and could not attend class. Despite my explaining that I could not leave my shift in the ED to come and get her for as trivial a reason as head lice, the school was adamant. She remained outside the classroom until arrangements to pick here up were made. I do hope the psychological damage was minimal.
“No healthy child should be excluded from or allowed to miss school time because of head lice. “No nit” policies for return to school should be discouraged.”
Fortunately, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report on head lice in 2002, and though it came too late for me, their advice supported my decision. Here's what they suggested:
Because a child with an active head lice infestation has likely had the infestation for a month or more by the time it is discovered, poses little risk to others, and does not have a resulting health problem, he or she should remain in class but be discouraged from close direct head contact with others. If a child is assessed as having head lice, confidentiality must be maintained so the child is not embarrassed. The child’s parent or guardian should be notified that day by telephone or a note sent home with the child at the end of the school day stating that prompt, proper treatment of this condition is in the best interest of the child and his or her classmates.
Head Lice in Antiquity
Head lice have been with us for a long, long time, as evidenced by the Talmud's clear acquaintance with them. Amazingly though, remains of a head louse have been identified on a louse comb from the Roman period that was discovered near the Dead Sea. (Even older remains have been found on the hair from Egyptian mummies, and nine-thousand year old lice eggs were found on human remains in Nahal Hemar near the Dead Sea.) "The comb was most probably used by inhabitants of the village of En Gedi, who were preparing a place of refuge in the cave, which would have been well equipped with food in baskets, storage jars and a large water pool before the end of the Bar Kokba Revolt in 135 CE."
Wooden comb found in the Cave of the Pool, near Nahal David in the Dead Sea region. It was discovered in 1961. From Mumcouglu and Hadas. Head Louse (Pediculus humanus capitis) Remains in a Louse Comb from the Roman Period Excavated in the Dead Sea Region. Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 61, No. 2 (2011), pp. 223-229
Head Lice More Recently
The House of Twenty Thousand Books, by Sasha Abramsky is wonderful read about the life, and library, of Chimen Abramsky (1916-2010) who was the son of the great Dayan Yechezkiel Abramsky, (1886-1976) head of the London Bet Din. Chimen (pronounced Shimon) who eventually became a professor of Jewish Studies at University College London, was an expert on Jewish books and built a significant collection of his own, which is detailed in the book. He also served as an advisor to Sotheby's and to Jack Lunzer, who built the greatest privately owned Jewish library in the world. Anyway, I came across this passage in the book, reminding us that presence of head lice was not just an annoyance - it was a way of life:
Infant and childhood mortality soared in these years [of the First World War] in part because of the prevalence of diseases such as typhus - which presumably explains why, in early photographs, the heads of Chimen and his brothers are shorn, to county the typhus-carrying lice. Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was a few years older than Chimen, and like Chimen was brought up in a devout household...recalled having his sidelocks and head hair shaved off for this reason during the First World War...he wrote in his essay "The Book"..."I saw my red sidelocks fall and I knew this was the end of them. I wanted to get rid of them for a long time." (Sasha Abramsky. The House of Twenty Thousand Books. NYRB 2015. 57-58.)
For the Nazir, hair is a central part of his religious identity, and once that identity is no-longer needed, the hair is shaved off. Which is exactly what Isaac Bashevis Singer felt too.
The Body Louse and Typhus
Isaac Bashevis Singer (and his younger brother Moishe) caught lice during the occupation of Warsaw by the German army that began in late 1915. The lice certainly made life uncomfortable, as this page of Talmud describes. But the lice brought another more terrible and life-threatening condition. Typhus.
In his classic 1935 book Rats, Lice and History, Karl Zinsser wrote that “swords and lances, arrows, machine guns and even high explosives have had far less power over the fates of the nations than the typhus louse…”It is little wonder therefore that of the many diseases that were associated with Jews and Jewish immigrants to the New World, typhus was among the most feared.
Typhus (from the Greek word typhos, meaning confused) is caused by a bacterium called Rickettsia prowazeki, but it cannot spread without the body louse. Once inside the louse it causes internal bleeding, and the lice takes on a reddish color as its blood leaks into its tissues. Eventually the carrier louse dies, and if it is on the skin, clothing or bedding of a person the bacterium passes through the skin and into the cells where it reproduces during the incubation period of about two weeks. It then causes a rash, fevers, headaches, confusion, hallucinations, and abdominal pain; it may spread to the lungs where it causes pneumonia. Before the antibiotic era, about 60% of all cases were fatal.
Typhus should not be confused with typhoid fever, which is caused by the Salmonella bacterium in contaminated food. In both conditions there is confusion, and hence the common root of their names. Modern outbreaks of typhoid fever have been prevented by the chlorination of drinking water, but the World Health Organization estimates that there are at least eleven million cases of typhoid fever worldwide, and about 130,000 deaths.
Typhus was described in eleventh-century Spain, sixteenth-century Italy and nineteenth-century France. In the catastrophic French invasion of Russia in 1812, only 3,000 soldiers of Napoleon’s original army of more than half a million men returned home. Most died of the cold and of typhus. Throughout its history, epidemic typhus was most associated with wars and large population upheavals. Some three million Russians died of typhus between 1917 and 1925.
Because it was a disease of the those who were malnourished, and who lived in crowded conditions with poor sanitation, typhus was common among the poor Jews of eastern Europe. It is therefore not surprising that it featured some of the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991), who grew up in the Polish village twenty-five miles north-west of Warsaw. The only child of Reb Mordecai Meir, the central character in his short story Grandather and Grandson, died of typhus. In a poorhouse in Poland we meet Mottke, a failed beadle who had reached America but was deported when he was found to have trachoma in his eye. Singer was not content with giving Mottke just one misfortune; Mottke’s father had died of typhus. And as we have noted, as a young boy Bashevis Singer had himself caught typhus, as had his brother Moishe. Still, Bashevis Singer managed to joke about the awful disease. In the short story Errors one of the characters cleverly notes that “an author doesn’t die of typhus but of typos.” Typhus was also found among the poor who had managed to emigrate, and who faced new living conditions that were not always much better than those they had left behind.
The Jewish Fight against Typhus
In 1912 a group of Russian physicians and lawyers established the Obshchestvo Zdravookhraneniia Evreev (OSE), The Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jews. Its mission was to battle typhus, cholera and other epidemics among the Jews, and to improve their standards of sanitation. The effort quickly grew and by 1917 there were more than 45 OZE branches that operated in 102 cities in the former Russian Empire; later, offices opened in Berlin, Paris and London. They ran nineteen hospitals and ninety out-patient clinics, two sanatoria for patients with tuberculosis, and one-hundred and twenty-five nurseries that served over twelve-thousand children. A branch opened in Warsaw in 1921, called Towarzystwo Ochrony Zdrowia Ludności Żydowskiej w Polsce (TOZ)– The Society for the Protection of Jewish Health in Poland. The two organizations worked together. They produced a Yiddish health journal for the public called Folks-Gezunt, as well as a Polish-Yiddish scientific journal issued in Warsaw called Medycyna Społeczna (Social Medicine). Before the outbreak of World War II, the TOZ employed more than a thousand doctors, nurses, dentists and teachers.
Among the many public health campaigns that the OSE ran were a series of posters. One of these is especially poignant. It is a poster that uses the motif of the biblical plagues as a warning to prevent the body lice that transmit typhus. “Blood, Frogs, LICE [kinim]: the third plague is the worst. Stop the lice! Lice cause typhus.
Yiddish health poster warning against lice which carried typhus. By Joseph Tchaikov, printed by OSE London/Berlin 1923. Reproduced from Murderous Medicine by Naomi Baumslag, p6
The TOZ was shut down by the Nazis in 1942. Its property and assets were confiscated and most of the staff and patients were murdered. And of course under the deceit of “delousing,” the Nazis killed over a million Jews, along with Gypsies and other “undesirables” using Zyklon B, which had originally been developed as a pesticide and was used to fumigate and delouse clothing, trains and buildings. This page of Talmud is a reminder of the darkest period of Jewish history, when lice really did turn Jewish lives into lives that were not lived, חַיֵּיהֶן אֵינָם חַיִּים.
