The II CHAM International Conference with the keynote theme “Knowledge Transfer and Cultural Exchanges will” take place 15-18 July 2015, in Lisabon. Dr. des Lennart Lehmhaus (SFB 980) und Tanja Hidde, M.A. (BabMed) will participate in the panel “Medical knowledge in motion: exchange, transformation and iteration in the medical traditions of the Late Antique Mediterranean world“, 16 July 2015.
Throughout their legal-religious discussions, the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmudim deal also with medical issues. In the Babylonian Talmud one can discern not only traces of Greek medicine, but also of earlier Mesopotamian medicine. This presentation focuses on the category of “Diet & Regimen” within the medical passages of the Talmudim and its connection to older medical systems. The genre of “Diet & Regimen”, emphasizing proper nutrition and physical exercise as prerequisites for a healthy constitution, is a distinct medical genre in the corpus of Greek medicine, but almost absent in Mesopotamian medicine. When the Babylonian Talmud was composed, Mesopotamia was under Sassanian rule, and although it is commonly assumed that Mesopotamia resisted Hellenization, a bulk of medical advices concerning “Diet and Regimen” within rabbinic literature is preserved in the Babylonian Talmud. Medical knowledge about “Diet & Regimen” in the Babylonian Talmud has to be analyzed together with rabbinic literature from Palestine which was closer to the Greco-Roman cultural realm. We will ask if this knowledge was transmitted and transefered into the Babylonian Talmud through Palestinian rabbis.
Tanja Hidde
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