For those in the NY area, please join me and my colleague Dr. Eddie Reichman at the Yeshiva University Museum this Wednesday. Details are below, and no, the event is not available remotely. Anyway, you should come see the books on display. They are spectacular.
Join us in NYC - Maimonides and Medicine, Wednesday Feb 21, 6.30p
Talmudology on the Parsha, Terumah ~ Kinds of Gold
שמות 25:3
וְזֹאת֙ הַתְּרוּמָ֔ה אֲשֶׁ֥ר תִּקְח֖וּ מֵאִתָּ֑ם זָהָ֥ב וָכֶ֖סֶף וּנְחֹֽשֶׁת
And this is the offering which you shall take of them; gold, and silver, and brass,
There is a great deal of gold mentioned in this week’s parsha. First, gold is donated (Ex. 25:3). Then the Ark is covered in gold (ibid, 11), as are four special rings on each of its corners (ibid, 13). The poles that carried the Ark were plated in gold (ibid, 13), as were the two childlike forms known as the keruvim that were fashioned to face one another and placed on top of the Ark. The Table was top be overlaid with gold (ibid, 24) ditto the poles to carry it (ibid, 28) and the various dishes and spoons that sat on it were to be made of “pure gold” (ibid 29). The Menorah was to be made of gold, of course (ibid 31, and more on that in two weeks), as were the clasps that held the curtains (ibid 26:6) in the Mishkan. That’s a lot of gold for a lot of stuff.
The Talmud discusses different kinds of gold, and so for those not familiar with the chemical and medicinal properties of element 79, today on Talmudology we explore different kinds of gold.
יומא מד, ב
אָמַר רַב חִסְדָּא: שִׁבְעָה זְהָבִים הֵן: זָהָב, וְזָהָב טוֹב, וּזְהַב אוֹפִיר, וְזָהָב מוּפָז, וְזָהָב שָׁחוּט, וְזָהָב סָגוּר, וּזְהַב פַּרְוַיִם. שֶׁדּוֹמֶה לְפָז. זָהָב שָׁחוּט — שֶׁנִּטְוֶה כְּחוּט. זָהָב סָגוּר — בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁנִּפְתָּח כָּל הַחֲנוּיוֹת נִסְגָּרוֹת. זְהַב פַּרְוַיִם — שֶׁדּוֹמֶה לְדַם הַפָּרִים. זָהָב וְזָהָב טוֹב, דִּכְתִיב: ״וּזְהַב הָאָרֶץ הַהִוא טוֹב״. זְהַב אוֹפִיר — דְּאָתֵי מֵאוֹפִיר. זָהָב מוּפָז —
Rav Chisda said: There are seven types of gold mentioned in the Bible: Gold, and good gold, and gold of Ophir (I Kings 10:11), and glistering gold (I Kings 10:18), and shaḥut gold (I Kings 10:17), and closed gold (I Kings 10:21), and parvayim gold (II Chronicles 3:6). The Gemara explains the reason for these names: There is a distinction between gold and good gold, as it is written in the verse: “And the gold of that land is good” (Genesis 2:12), which indicates the existence of gold of a higher quality. Gold of Ophir is gold that comes from Ophir. Glistering [mufaz] gold is so named because it resembles the luster of pearls [paz] in the way it glistens. Shaḥut gold is named as such because it is very malleable and is spun like thread [shenitve keḥut]. Shaḥut is a contraction of the words shenitve keḥut. Closed gold is so called because when a shop opens to sell it, all the other shops close, as no one is interested in purchasing any other type of gold. Parvayim gold is so called because its redness resembles the blood of bulls [parim].
רַב אָשֵׁי אָמַר: חֲמִשָּׁה הֵן, וְכל חַד וְחַד אִית בֵּיהּ זָהָב וְזָהָב טוֹב. תַּנְיָא נָמֵי הָכִי: בְּכל יוֹם הָיָה זְהָבָהּ יָרוֹק, וְהַיּוֹם אָדוֹם — וְהַיְינוּ זְהַב פַּרְוַיִם שֶׁדּוֹמֶה לְדַם הַפָּרִים
Rav Ashi said: There are in fact only five types of gold, the last five in Rav Chisda’s list. Gold and good gold are not independent categories; rather, each and every one of the types of gold has two varieties: Regular gold and a superior variety called good gold. That was also taught in a baraita with regard to parvayim gold: On every other day the coal pan was made of greenish gold, but on this day it was made of a red gold, and this is the parvayim gold which resembles the blood of bulls.
Illustration drawn for Talmudology by Yosef Itzkowitz (www.yosefpaper.com)
Not all Gold is “gold”
We usually think of gold as being the color of, well, gold. But that’s not its only color. While pure gold is a sort of reddish yellow, gold alloys vary in color depending on the proportion of the other metals that are found in it. (An alloy is a mixture of two or more different metal elements.) So an alloy of gold and copper will be more red, while an alloy of gold and silver (or gold and other metals like nickel or palladium) will give a white looking gold. You can see how this works in the figure below:
In addition, the purity of gold is measured in karats (also spelled carats, but certainly not carrots), where each karat is 1/24 (or 4.1667%) part of pure gold. Sixteen karat gold means that it is an alloy in which 16 parts are gold and 8 parts are another. Pure gold is, by definition, free of other metals and is therefore 24-karat (ie 24 parts out of 24) gold.
Where does “Parvayim Gold” come from?
Recent evidence suggests that gold is formed by the massive collision of neutron stars. “Every element on the periodic table heavier than bismuth…is forged by the rapid-process in these most extreme stellar surfaces” wrote the cosmochemist Tim Gregory in his 2020 book Meteorite (p.168). “This includes some of your most highly prized substances like …silver, platinum and gold.” This gold was incorporated into the earth’s mantle when the planet was being formed, and was incorporated with other metals, which is why different kinds of gold alloys may be extracted from different mines.
It is this feature that Rav Chisda and Rav Ashi were highlighting in today’s page of Talmud. Shauhut gold (זָהָב שָׁחוּט) which Rav Chisda noted to be so malleable that it could be “spun like a thread” (נִּטְוֶה כְּחוּט) was likely almost pure gold (i.e. 24 carat). Today, gold can be made into a thin sheet known as gold leaf that is an astonishing four to five millionths of an inch in thickness (0.1 to 0.125 millionths of a meter or micrometers, µm). And the “spinning into a thread” that Rav Chisda mentioned? Today it is possible to spin gold into a thread that is just one atom thick. One atom. Think about that.
Another kind of gold mentioned by Rav Chisda is Parvayim gold which was a red color that “resembled the blood of bulls” (שֶׁדּוֹמֶה לְדַם הַפָּרִים). This gold was likely an alloy with a high content of copper, (found towards the bottom right of the triangle above).
The Medicinal Qualities of Gold
The Jewish physician Abraham Portaleone was born in Mantua in 1541, and is best known for his work Shilte Hagibborim [Shields of the Mighty], in which he sought to identify the precise ingredients of the Temple incense mentioned in the famous talmudic passage called Pittum Haketoret (Grinding of the Spices). Portaleone was also very interested in pharmacology, and authored a Latin text De Auro Dialogi Tres (Three Dialogues on the Application of Gold in Medicine) about the possibilities of a medical use of gold “a topic halfway between alchemy and medical studies that still created heated scientific debate.” Here is the assessment of historian Alessandro Guetta in his 2014 work on the history of Italian Jewry:
Contemporary medical authorities were divided into two camps on this: those who denied gold’s powers and those convinced of them. Portaleone’s position lay midway between the two. In his view, the hypothesis that gold had powerful medicinal properties was true; nevertheless, it remained a mere hypothesis, since such properties do not reside within gold as we know it …but in its quintessence, a substance perfectly pure and balanced in composition. In truth, nobody had yet succeeded in extracting this essence…consequently, the long list of healings that ancient and modern doctors had attributed to attributed to the ingestion of “common gold” mixed with water or wine was the fruit of ignorance and charlatanism. As for gold’s capacity to cauterize wounds, it has this in common with many other metals with the same characteristics.
We are now some four centuries after Abraham Portaleone wrote his book about gold. And it is indeed now true that gold can be used as a medicine. Aurotherapy is used to treat some kinds of inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, and may have a role to play in the treatment of some cancers and as an agent to improve wound healing. So to add to the Talmudic categorization of gold based on its color and malleability, we can now thankfully add another: how useful it is in treating disease.
Bava Kamma 105b ~ Teaching By Humiliation
בבא קמא קה, ב
אמר ליה תדורא...
Rabbah said to Rav Amram : "Scatterbrain"
As a medical student in London, humiliation came with the territory. There I was, on rounds on General Surgery Firm. At its head, the consultant surgeon, followed (in their correct pecking order) by two senior registrars, three or four registrars, several senior house officers and house officers, nurses, physiotherapists, and a couple of medical students. We gathered around the bed of some poor patient who had recently undergone surgery. The consultant surgeon turned to me: "Mr. Brown" he said, looking at me atop of his professorial reading glasses, "how long is the anal canal?" Everyone else smiled, relieved to know they had not been asked this, rather challenging question. I had no idea, despite having once known this useful fact to pass my anatomy exams. "Thirty centimeters, sir" I replied, hopefully. "Correct," said the surgeon, as he surveyed the menagerie of staff trailing him. "If you are an elephant." And so ended my surgical career.
Teaching By Humiliation in the Talmud
The rabbis of the Talmud were not shy to call out those they felt were slow-witted or annoying. After Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi was asked a relatively innocent question by Levi, the great editor of the Mishnah replied כמדומה לי שאין לו מוח בקדקדו - "it appears to me that Levi has no brains in his head," an insult he repeated on at least one other occasion. Rabbi Tarfon had enough of Rabbi Elazar when he told him "How long will you pile up meaningless words and bring them against us." He even used the same insult against Rabbi Akivah. Rabbi Akivah! (See ילקוט שמעוני תורה פרשת בהעלותך רמז תשכה.) Rabbi Yishmael was called "a date palm" (and not in a good way) by Rabbi Eliezer (see ספרא תזריע פרשה ה). One of my favorites, though, came from Rabbi Dosa who called his younger brother "the first-born of Satan" (and you thought your kids had issues). I could go on, but you get the point. These guys could be really insulting.
Pimping in the Medical Literature
For the reader who is not medically trained, here's a new word: pimping. It's a real word that is OK to use in polite company (maybe). According to the esteemed Journal of the American Medical Association, pimping is
a series of difficult and often intentionally unanswerable questions posed to a medical student or house staff in quick succession. The objective of pimping is to teach, motivate, and involve the learner in clinical rounds while maintaining a dominant hierarchy and cultivating humility by ridding the learner of egotism.
There is an art to pimping, according to Fredrick Brancati, the man generally thought to have invented the term in its medical content. Here is an excerpt from his classic 1989 paper, called, what else, The Art of Pimping:
Pimp questions should come in rapid succession and should be essentially unanswerable. They may be grouped into five categories:
1. Arcane points of history.These facts are not taught in medical school and are irrelevant to patient care—perfect for pimping. For example, who performed the first lumbar puncture? Or, how was syphilis named?
2. Teleology and metaphysics.These questions lie outside the realm of conventional scientific inquiry and have traditionally been addressed only by medieval philosophers and the editors of the National Enquirer. For instance, why are some organs paired?
3. Exceedingly broad questions. For example, what role do prostaglandins play in homeostasis? Or, what is the differential diagnosis of a fever of unknown origin? Even if the intern begins making good points, after 4 or 5 minutes he can be cut off and criticized for missing points he was about to mention. These questions are ideally posed in the final minutes of rounds while the team is charging down a noisy stairwell.
4. Eponyms. These questions are favored by many old-timers who have assiduously avoided learning any new developments in medicine since the germ theory. For instance, where does one find the semilunar space of Traube?
5. Technical points of laboratory research. Even when general medical practice has become a dim and distant memory, the attending physician-investigator still knows the details of his research inside and out. For instance, how active are leukocyte-activated killer cells with or without interleukin 2 against sarcoma in the mouse model? Or, what base sequence does the restriction endonuclease EcoRI recognize?
“....pimping can create a hostile environment among the team members, suppress creativity or intellectual curiosity because of fear of embarrassment, and dehumanize students at the expense of maintaining medical hegemony.”
Years ago an Australian team published a paper titled "Teaching by humiliation” and mistreatment of medical students in clinical rotations. They found that 74% had experienced and 83% had witnessed teaching by humiliation during their adult clinical rotations; smaller proportions had experienced (29%) or witnessed (45%) it during their pediatric rotations, which just proves what everyone already knows. Pediatricians are all nice. All this pimping comes with a down side. "Students’ responses to these practices" wrote the Australian researchers, "ranged from disgust and regret about entering the medical profession to endorsement of teachers’ public exposure of a student’s poor knowledge. Reported victims and perpetrators included junior medical staff, who were subjected to the practices as much as students and were equally likely to be the perpetrators, alongside senior medical and nursing staff."
“As a deeply ingrained cultural, institutionalised practice, mistreatment requires focused action to replace the existing culture with one of compassion, tolerance and respect.”
Talmudic Insults and Respect for the talmid
In today's page of Talmud, Rabbah called Rav Amram תדורא, a scatterbrain. In fact he called him a scatterbrain again (in the next tractate we will learn), so I guess he really meant it. This epithet seems to have been the "moron' of its day. Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba called Rebbi Zeira a scatterbrain, and even the great Abayye must have felt a little miffed when he was called a scatterbrain by Rava bar Hannan.
It seems demeaning to use language like this, and out of place given the words of the Mishnah (Avot 2:10) יהי כבוד חבירך חביב עליך כשלך - "let your friend's honor be as important to you as your own." Rabbi Yair Chaim Bachrach (Germany, 1638-1732) addressed talmudic insults in his book of responsa called Chavvot Yair, first published in 1699. Apparently things were getting out of hand in Germany, where the talmudic art of humiliating had evolved. Yeshivah students now also yelled and gesticulated rather enthusiastically as they sparred with their learning partners:
מש"כ קפיצה וסיפוק וריקוד תוך הפלפול איש נגד רעהו שזה גורם בלי ספק שחבירו ימהר לעשות כמעשהו וירקוד ג"כ כנגדו וירים קולו בצעקה גדולה ומרה יותר ולא ישמע איש שפת חבירו ואין זה רק מנהג יהוא וכל המרבה בה ה"ז משוגע
Students jump and dance around each other in the middle of expounding a subject, and this will cause, without doubt, that other students will do the same and will leap and raise their voices in a louder and more bitter cry. No one will be able to listen to the voice of his partner. This is nothing other than a ridiculous custom, and anyone who does this often is a mesgugah...
Rabbi Bachrach then rose to the defense of those who used talmudic insults, claiming that they did so with only good intentions. They did it, he said, in order to bring out the very best they could in those they insulted. Hmmm. I'm not convinced.
Insults don't work, not for medial students and not for any students. Ad hominem attacks are also unlikely to elevate the quality of an argument. In the run up to the US presidential elections later this year we are likely to see more of both forms of disrespect, though they usually say more about the person uttering them than the person against whom they are directed.
“ תנו רבנן: שלשה שונאין זה את זה, אלו הן: הכלבים, והתרנגולין, והחברין. ויש אומרים: אף הזונות. ויש אומרים: אף תלמידי חכמים שבבבל
The rabbis taught: three groups hate each other: Dogs, roosters, and sorcerers. Some say: so do prostitutes. And others say: so do the sages in Babylon...”
Happy Birthday Tomorrow, Galileo
Galileo Galilei in a 1636 portrait by Justus Sustermans.
Tomorrow, February 15th, is a special day. It is the birthday of Galileo Galilei, who was born in Pisa on that day in 1564. Among his many achievements were his careful observations of the Earth’s moon, the identification of four of Jupiter’s moons, and the discovery that Venus, when observed through a telescope, has phases, just like that of our own moon. The only reasonable explanation of this was that Venus orbited the Sun, and not the Earth. And just like that, the geocentric model of the universe in which everything revolved around the Earth, came to a grinding halt.
Galileo’s Jewish Connection
Galileo taught astronomy to anyone who would listen, including Jews, and his most important Jewish student was Joseph Solomon Delmedigo who was born in Candia on the Island of Crete in 1591. At the age of fifteen Delmedigo left for Italy, where he enrolled in the University of Padua. For seven years there he studied astronomy, mathematics, natural science and medicine, and was taught by none other than Galileo Galilei, who was soon to become famous for both his observations of the planets and his clash with the Church.
When Delmedigo graduated he traveled to Lublin, Vilna, and Livona, where he spent much of his time working as a physician. He ultimately settled in Amsterdam where he published his Sefer Elim, a long book (it runs over four hundred pages) that deals with philosophy, science, mathematics, and astronomy.
“Galileo my Teacher” from Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, Amsterdam 1629. 148.
In this book Delmedigo outlined the reasons he accepted the Copernican model of the universe. In addition to explaining all of the theoretical support for the heliocentric model, he cited experimental evidence. If the planets revolved about the Sun and were illuminated by it, the amount of light that they reflect would depend on their location and distance from the Earth. And this is precisely what Delmedigo and his famous teacher had observed through the telescope.
My teacher Galileo observed Mars when it lay close to the Earth. At this time its light was much brighter than that of Jupiter, even though Mars is much smaller. Indeed it appeared too bright to view through the telescope. I requested to look through the telescope, and Mars appeared to me to be elongated rather than round. (This is a result of its clarity and the movement of its rays of light.) In contrast, I found Jupiter to be round and Saturn to be egg-shaped.
This glorious passage reminds us that religiously observant Jews were sometimes at the very cutting edge of the new astronomy. How many could claim to have been instructed by the great Galileo himself?
But don’t get carried away
The historian Andre Neher (d. 1988) viewed Joseph Delmedigo as a fearless trailblazer whose goal was not only to influence his own community, but also the Catholic Church itself. In a paper published in 1977 he wrote:
When Delmedigo published Elim in 1629, he used the term “Rabbi” in speaking of his teacher Galileo. Rabbi Galileo! Was this not something of a challenge directed to the inquisitors in Rome who were then preoccupied with Galileo and who were not to let him go until his death in 1642? Free Galileo, Delmedigo seems to be saying, or release him to us; in the midst of our Jewish community, he will not be subjected to any trial, we shall not require him to make any retraction, we shall welcome him and honor him like a Rabbi in Israel!
Well, not quite. As I have written elsewhere, this account is linguistically, historically, and conjecturally incorrect. In the first place, although the term used by Delmedigo to describe Galileo was indeed the word rebbi, in this context, it means “my teacher,” and not “my rabbi.” By translating it in this way Neher was able to support his claim that the Jews were open, receptive, and respectful to new ideas emerging in astronomy; but the linguistic reality (and much else besides) does not bear this out.
Secondly, in the years prior to the publication of Sefer Elim in 1629, Galileo had not become the “preoccupation” of the Inquisition. The work that led to the trial by the Inquisition, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, was not published until 1632. And so Neher’s claim that Delmedigo was writing a message to release Galileo is chronologically incorrect. Finally, the notion that the Jewish community would not punish one of their own for expressing antinomian views is inaccurate. It was, after all, in Amsterdam itself, the city in which Delmedigo’s books were published, that the Jewish community excommunicated Spinoza in 1656 on account of “the horrible heresies which he practiced and taught.” Although Neher’s assessment of Delmedigo as challenging the Inquisition on behalf of Galileo was not accurate, it he was certainly correct in noting the important role that Galileo must surely have played in the education of the young Jew Joseph Delmedigo from Crete, who grew up and became the first Jewish Copernican.
A selection from the Talmudology Library Galileo Collection
Want more Galileo-related Talmudology posts? Try Jews and their Telescopes, available here.
[A repost, obviously, because it was also his birthday last year.]