Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Situating Regeneration
Medicine, Science, and "Modern" Bodies
Racism does not limit itself to biology or economics or psychology or metaphysics; it attacks along many fronts and in many forms, deploying whatever is at hand, and even what is not, inventing when the need arises.
— Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized
In 1857 famed psychologist Bénédict Morel published his highly influential work Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles, et morales de l'espèce humaine (Treatise on the Physical, Intellectual and Moral Degeneration of the Human Species), which identified human degeneration as a scientific reality and valid medical diagnosis. Although written primarily as a psychiatric diagnostic manual, the central theme of Morel's text — human degeneration — held broad appeal as a scientific explanation for a host of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century woes. On one hand, degeneration described and explained the social upheavals provoked by the Industrial Revolution and settler colonialism, both situations in which society's elites had daily contact with the inherently degenerate masses. But on the other hand, the theory of degeneration also warned that the perils of degeneration were not consigned exclusively to the slums of the lumpen proletariat and the disordered world of the colonial subject. Degeneration, as an ontological category, also implicated the "modern condition" as a threat to the fragility of the cultivated Western body and mind and created a new category of dysfunction to encompass intellectual, physical, and moral deficiencies, both real and imagined.
Morel, with his novel diagnosis of degeneration, was part of a burgeoning school of French psychiatrists and pathologists who sought to identify mental and physical disorders through scientific empiricism. But in a broader sense, Morel and his fellow alienists were emblematic of a larger movement of clinically trained specialists who sought answers to complex medical problems in both the controlled environment of the laboratory and the tumult of the mental asylum, through the observation of live subjects and postmortem autopsies, using both qualitative data and statistical evidence. According to this new school of experts, the pursuit of knowledge was no longer "academic," it served a practical point: to identify and eliminate the characteristic evils of modern society.
More and more, Western society placed its trust in science and medicine to provide a wellspring of answers to life's complex and hitherto intractable problems. According to this line of thinking, once informed by the unimpeachable authority of scientific and medical knowledge, states would govern more effectively, cities would be cleansed, and experts would manage rationally life's most mundane decisions. The emergence of "new sciences," such as statistics, microbiology, urban planning, and sanitation (to name but a few), shifted the onus of finding answers to an exclusive cadre of experts. In France a new technocratic elite trained exclusively to manage the complexities of quotidian existence emerged from the grandes écoles — École Normale Supérieur, École Polytechnique, and the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers — (re)conceived in the wake of the Revolution of 1789. Following a rather circular train of logic, successive French regimes tasked the new technocratic elite with finding modern scientific and medical solutions to the lurking dangers of degeneration, a disease that ironically found much of its origin in man's struggle with modernity. For the most part, it was easy for scientists and physicians to wrap their minds around the degenerative maladies associated with modernity: the stresses of the terrible rumble of train travel, the exasperating hurly-burly of increased urban population, and the stench and filth associated with large concentrations of industrial machinery and laborers. These omnipresent facets of modern life caused the common signs of degeneration seen in the middle and upper classes: neurasthenia, hysteria, alcoholism, homosexuality, epilepsy, effeteness, and narcissism. But it was the inherent racial and attendant class-based manifestations of degeneration that were more difficult to pinpoint and that required more extensive and elaborate explications.
As settler colonialism brought white Europeans into close, daily contact with indigenous peoples and industrialization brought the upper classes into more direct contact with the proletariat, science became hard-pressed to elaborate theories to explain human difference: how the white, bourgeois mind and body differed from that of the "natives" or the "working classes." Moreover, Enlightenment scholars, obsessed with the classification and categorization of the natural world, including human "types," struggled to explain scientifically the large amount of phenotypic variation present in the human species. Western science assumed with little or no debate the fact that Europeans would take a preeminent position at the summit of the racial hierarchy. To the vast majority of these scholars, the notion that "whites" were superior to "blacks," or to any other colonized population for that matter, was a given — the issue at hand was how to furnish scientific justifications in support of this apparent fact. Philosophers, scientists, and dilettantes alike offered a wide variety of explanations for racial phenotypic variation, ranging from biblical accounts of Noah's wayward (and racially diverse) sons to Voltaire's Hippocratic-based theories of climactic adaptation. How and why the races were somatically different were hotly debated, but the learned consensus of experts maintained that the white European was special. Still, even within the specialness of European whiteness, there were gradations among those who best represented the inherent virtues of the Homo europeaus. Few disputed that fact that the highborn and the wealthy possessed qualities superior to those of the lower classes in much the same way that the races themselves differed.
Racial purity, however one chose to justify it, was a highly unstable category. Inherent in any argument seeking to validate and promote the supremacy of the white, wealthy European race was the fear of racial contamination and the subsequent dissolution of the European species. Racial theorists cum anthropologists, like Johann Blumenbach and the Comte de Buffon, posited that the dilution of "pure" races through miscegenation exacerbated the spreading scourge of racial decay. Europeans were expected to abide by the visual signposts that nature had erected between the races and to respect the phenotypic barriers between the "white" European, "black" African, and "yellow" Asiatic. However, some race experts noted that lurking within the liminal spaces of phenotypic and inherent biological difference, among white, black, and yellow, there existed another special classification of human typology, the "Jewish race," which was already present and living among the European species. Although ostensibly "white" and "European," Jews, even those of the upper classes, presented a unique challenge to those obsessed with racial classification and concerned about the perils of degeneration. These obsessions with the race and class of European Jews, and their capacity for regeneration, held important implications, as we will see, for Tunisian Jews.
The Medical Tradition
But before we continue the discussion about degeneration, regeneration, and racial science, it is helpful to revisit the unique and enduring history of scientific and medical exchange that existed between Europe and the Arab world, which helps to explain the ease with which many in the Tunisian community embraced late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical theories in regard to eugenic degeneration. For more than a millennium, educated physicians in Europe, the Maghrib, and the Middle East, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, had accepted the major tenets of the medical texts passed down from classical Greece and Rome as enhanced during the golden age of Islam at Baghdad's House of Wisdom (Ar. Bayt al-Hikma). From these classical sources, philosopher physicians learned environmental and holistic theories of disease etiology and therapeutics as explained in the case studies of the Hippocratic treatises dating from 400 BCE. Carefully recorded clinical notes and empirical research guided successive generations of healers whose results were compiled into a corpus of medical knowledge. To the philosophical and empirical foundations of the ancient Greeks, the Ptolemaic Greeks, Herophilos, Erasistratus, and others of the Alexandrian school of medicine added their knowledge of gross anatomy, including a mapping of the veins, arteries, and nervous system in the third century BCE.
But much of the foundation of the humoral medicine that would come to dominate learned understandings of the human body is credited to the second-century Greco-Roman philosopher Galen, who combined the teachings of Aristotelian philosophy, Hippocratic empiricism, and Alexandrian anatomical research to articulate the theoretical prototype of human health and well-being. The primary tenet of Galenic humoral medicine, like its Hippocratic predecessor, is based on idiopathic equilibrium: each body has a natural state of balance of its hot, wet, cold, and dry humors, which is tantamount to good health. Disturbance of this unique and natural humoral balance results in disease. According to Galen, only a learned philosopher-physician possessed the required knowledge to recalibrate the diseased body's imbalance through diet, exercise, and of course, bloodletting and cautery, which were all highly dependent on other interrelated factors, such as season, temperament, and astrology.
The intricate medical system built on Galen's theories of humoral medicine would likely have died out with the fall of the Roman Empire had it not been for their widespread adoption outside the boundaries of the shrinking empire, first in Byzantium and later in the rapidly expanding world of Islam. In fact, much of the Greco-Roman traditions, on which Christendom claimed to be founded, had been lost or forgotten by European scholars in the chaos of the collapse of the Roman Empire and the subsequent "barbarian" invasions. But in the Early Middle Ages, Jewish and Muslim scholars from Umayyad al-Andalus reintroduced the textual history of ancient Greece and Rome to medieval Europe, including the tenets of learned Galenic medicine and Greco-Roman philosophy.
Although medievalists debate the degree to which Jews were accepted as part of the Islamic community in Umayyad Iberia, there is little doubt that Jews played an integral role in the translation and dissemination of medical and philosophical texts, not only within the world of Islam, but also in Christendom. Jews, as a "homeless" diasporic people who were found within the realms of both Christendom and Islam, became important arbiters and agents of cross-cultural exchange who reintroduced to Western Europeans the philosophical underpinnings of humoral theory, diagnosis, therapeutics, and pharmacopeia, which had been safely harbored and enhanced greatly in the Arab world.
In short Jews, Muslims, and Christians, in spite of their political and religious differences, shared common philosophical precepts in regard to the physiological, and even spiritual, functions of the human body. This familiarity of terms and a sharing of common concepts eased the way for the transmission of ideas between Europe and the Maghrib, including the new concepts of racial difference and regeneration that surfaced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is true that local communities in the Maghrib practiced various types of Islamic medicine, Prophetic medicine (Ar. al-Tibb al-nabawii), or Jewish medicine, but each of these medical paradigms shares common roots in Greek philosophy, Galenic humoral tradition, and healing customs also practiced on the European side of the Mediterranean. Although the reception of ideas in the Maghrib was not seamless, it is undeniable that principles of physiology, philosophies of medicine, and scientific mind-sets were exchanged across the Mediterranean Sea with a facility that was not seen when Western medicine arrived in areas with dramatically different cosmological explications of the human body and its well-being, like sub-Saharan Africa or Far East Asia.
In spite of the intellectual debt of gratitude owed to the Orient, much religious and political antagonism lingered among Jews, Muslims, and Christians well into the modern era, and European Christians harshly persecuted Jews in their midst. Before the Enlightenment, when most Europeans — or at least, those who valued their lives and reputations — viewed intellectual thought and scientific advancement through the sanctioned, narrow prism of Catholicism, there was little room for dissent in regard to spiritual beliefs and religious dogma. The Catholic Church dominated political, social, and even economic life in Europe, and Jews were spurned and persecuted as a religious sect that refused to accept the "one true faith." Although the Reformation created a chink in the armor of papal authority, the one thing on which the feuding sects of Protestantism and Catholicism could agree was the disapprobation of Jews. Unlike the infidel and the pagan — or the Protestant in the eyes of those who remained loyal to Rome — European Jews embodied a stubborn and longstanding religious apostasy within the confines of Christendom. Christians, regardless of sectarian difference or internecine warfare, agreed that Jews were abhorrent and aberrant in their rejection of the message of Jesus Christ as the Son of God.
Jews in France
As religious influence waned during the Enlightenment, especially in France, which saw the power and prestige of the Catholic Church diminished even further by the subsequent violence of the Revolution, intellectuals posited that French secularism, in jettisoning the yoke of Rome, similarly shot down attendant ideas of Jewish "difference" based on religious apostasy. However, this secular laissez-faire attitude of acceptance proved to be a mixed blessing for Jews. As the religious impediments to acceptance were being systematically dismantled, the continuation of Jewish exclusion in continental Europe increasingly relied on the racial difference of the Jew, now defined as an inherent somatic condition that religious otherness only aggravated. The expanded reliance on science and medicine to explain racial disparities, together with the secularization of Jewish difference led to new theories of redemption for the Jewish body. In this new view, revitalization and "regeneration" of Jews would not necessarily stem from conversion to Christianity; the path to salvation lay increasingly within the purview of science and medicine. Indeed, as regarded Jews, the focus had shifted in the French mind from saving souls to regenerating bodies.
One of the earliest manifestations of this new focus can be seen in the philosophical and political writings of Abbé Henri Grégoire. In 1788, in response to a scholastic competition, Abbé Henri Grégoire presented to the Royal Society of France his famous essay advocating the redemption and "regeneration" of French Jews. Igniting much controversy, the abbé publicly stated that the Creator had endowed Jews with certain sociopolitical rights and that Jews, once rescued from their degenerate state, could and should be incorporated into the fabric of French society. In 1789 Abbé Grégoire became the official representative for Jews at the newly reconvened Estates General at Versailles, and his advocacy for Jewish inclusion laid the cornerstone for equality and French citizenship.
In an effort to normalize relations between Jews and Christians in France, one of the primary goals of a newly emerging Franco-Jewish elite was to battle degeneration within their fold. In the eyes of the French state, unto which a Jewish consistory became an official arm in 1808, the nineteenth-century social transformation of France's Jewish community was a remarkable success. The Franco-Jewish community, especially those concentrated in large, urban areas, like Paris, Strasbourg, and Bordeaux, increasingly found a home in the liberal professions, the military, the government, and French social and cultural life in a broader sense. Although the tolerance of French Jews was not entirely universal, by the mid-nineteenth century, the community enjoyed a level of acceptance and absorption into the social, cultural, and political makeup of their nation unrivaled in continental Europe. The successful integration and acculturation of French Jews became a template for other European nations but also for the French imperial administration, which was rapidly acquiring foreign territories with substantial indigenous Jewish populations.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Medical Imperialism in French North Africa"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
