Thread by @MichaelDPress

For hundreds of years, Europeans ground up Egyptian mummies so they could swallow them as medicine.

When they began to turn against mummy medicine and looked to blame someone for it, who did they scapegoat? The Jews, of course.

A thread . . .

I realize I may have buried the lede here . . . but the practice of ingesting mummy deserves its own thread.
I have a piece in the works that deals with it a bit.

For now, let’s note that the practice started in the later Middle Ages and apparently reached its peak around the 15th and 16th centuries.

In other words, the time of the High Renaissance was the height of ingesting mummy.

Here's a detail of the section on mummy medicine ("mumie") from a copy of Circa Instans, aka the Book of Simple Medicines, a 12th-century book popular in medieval and early modern Europe, attributed to Matthaeus Platearius

(BnF NAF 6593, copied in 1453)

How did Jews get involved in this?
The first person to associate Jews with mummy medicine (in what I’ve seen *so far*) is André Thevet.
Thevet was a Franciscan friar who was in Egypt c. 1550

(title page of Cosmographie de Levant, originally published 1554; this edition 1556)

Thevet discussed mummies briefly in Cosmographie de Levant, but expands his discussion in La cosmographie universelle (1575) -- by which time he was billed as "cosmographer of the king" (Henri III)

Here he says a couple of different things about Jews and mummies . . .

Thevet says that he was sick while in the Levant (odd that he didn't mention this story in his book specifically on the Levant) and a Jewish doctor gave him mummy as a cure -- but that it was, useless, or worse.
He was finally cured after 3 days in the care of a "white Moor"

Thevet claims that "Turks, Arabs, white Moors” all try to sell mummies in Egypt. . . . but "above all the Jews"

Worse, the Jews are said to fake mummies . . . as well as “every other drug”.
(He gives no further details)

Next we come to Ambroise Paré, an influential surgeon. His Discourses -- where he is called "adviser and 1st surgeon of the king" (again, Henri III) -- include a Discours de la Mumie

(portrait and title page from Discourse, 1582, via BnF)

Paré repeats Thevet's story of being prescribed mummy by a Jewish doctor. He also adds a new tale: he claims Guy de la Fontaine (doctor of the king of Navarre) told him that when *he* was in Alexandria a popular Jewish mummy merchant showed him how he faked mummies.

So in these late 16th century books we are told about Jews selling mummies -- even perhaps as the major player in the sale of mummies -- and producing fraudulent mummies.
These basic themes, and Paré's specific anecdote about Guy de la Fontaine, will prove to be very influential

Pierre Pomet (chief pharmacist of Louis XIV, the Sun King) wrote in his General History of Drugs (1694) about "the Jews carrying on their Rogueries" in supplying bodies of the recent deceased -- then went on to tell the tale of Guy de la Fontaine.

Pomet's history was very popular -- my excerpt is from the English translation, 4th edition (1748), now a "Complete History of Drugs"

(By the way, you may have noticed a trend that these claims come from French doctors/pharmacists/etc, especially around the royal court. I think this is important, and we'll see more of it later . . .)

Here's John Hill's influential History of the Materia Medica (1751) on Jews faking mummies, quoted (w/ citation) in Samuel's Johnson's famous dictionary (1755), & (w/o citation) in early edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1771; Philadelphia, 1821)

As you can see, these 16th century French claims about Jews dominating the mummy trade and faking mummies resonated for centuries, on both sides of the Atlantic.

But while Thevet & especially Paré's late-15th century books had impact on discussions of mummies and Jews, the most influential was probably Louis Guyon, a doctor and royal advisor (d. 1617)

The trend of French doctors, druggists, etc, especially around the court, continues!

Guyon's Diverses Leçons was very popular, with several editions during and after his lifetime.
It was first published in 1603, expanded into 2 volumes in 1610 -- the first edition to discuss Jews and mummies.

Guyon repeats Thevet's story about taking mummy medicine from a Jewish doctor.
He goes on about how Jews make counterfeit mummies.

And he introduces a new tale: the Jew of Damietta.
This story is supposed to explain how the (Ottoman?) authorities curbed the mummy trade.

This story has it all: a Jewish mummy merchant mistreating his slave, greedy Arab/Turkish governors extorting fines from Jewish merchants -- and the hero is the Christian slave.

No wonder this story was repeated in Europe for centuries.
(here, Elizabeth Stone, God's Acre, 1858)

So, through both vague statements & anecdotes, writers in the late 16th/early 17th centuries that claimed Jews controlled the mummy trade, faked mummies, & were responsible for the trade's demise.

But that wasn't enough...they also claimed that Jews invented mummy medicine.

Thevet claims (citing unnamed "Arab doctors") that mummy medicine was invented by a doctor from Alexandria named Elmagar.

Paré attributes it to a "malign Jewish doctor" (unnamed)

Guyon (left) combines these into a "malign Jew named Elmagar", a doctor from Alexandria.

Guyon is very influential, and the story of Elmagar -- like the others he tells -- is repeated many times over the next couple of centuries.

Théophile Raynaud, Opusculorum miscella philologica (1651)
Benedetto Chiarelli, Chimica Filosofica..bk. 1 (p. 19)

(Both cite Guyon.)

Ephraim Chambers's popular Cyclopaedia, one of the first English-language encyclopedias (the 1st edition here, from 1728) attributes the origins of mummy medicine to the "Malice of a Jewish Physician"
(note the word "malice" echoing Paré's/Guyon's "malin")

As Egyptology developed in the 19th century & the study of mummies became a "science", 2 scholarly publications recycled these sorts of claims without critical examination.

One is Pettigrew's History of Egyptian Mummies (1834), which became an authoritative source for decades.

Within a chapter of just 4 pages on mummy as a drug, Pettigrew
➡️tells us that Jews were the main sellers of mummies
➡️tells us that they faked mummies with the bodies of executed criminals
➡️gives us the story of Guy de la Fontaine
➡️gives us the story of the Jew of Damietta

. . . and of course Pettigrew tells us that the Jewish doctor Elmagar introduced the use of mummy as medicine (citing Guyon)

The 2nd 19th-century scholarly source is E. A. Wallis Budge's The Mummy: Chapters on Egyptian Funereal Archaeology (1893).
Budge was then Assistant Keeper (soon to become Keeper) of the Dept of Egyptian & Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum.

And Budge just seems to copy all of the tales & claims about Jews and mummies right from Pettigrew . . . including that mummy medicine was first introduced by Elmagar (now presented in more scholarly form as El-Magar)

What's notable about these claims circulating in early Egyptological literature is that they're poorly sourced and yet there's no attempt to be critical about this fact.

Other than a couple of anecdotes told 1st or 2nd-hand, all were originally vague claims w/o attribution.

And then for later authors Thevet or Paré or Guyon themselves become the attribution -- though clearly that doesn't establish the reliability of the claims.

In the case of Elmagar, Thevet does cite "Arab doctors" as his source but doesn't name them.

This is beyond me, so I'd be interested to know if there are any references to anyone or anything like this in medieval/early modern Arab medical writers.

But if Thevet is the earliest source for Elmagar, he is writing 275 or 475 (remember, Elmagar is said to have lived around *either* 1100 or 1300) years after the fact.

Clearly this isn't a reliable earliest source!

The irony is that our early modern Frenchmen came to doubt the value of mummy by going back to the sources: they noted that medieval Europeans had mistranslated the term "mummy" in Arabic medical works.

Yet they never applied the same humanistic methods to the claims about Jews

Here's Ambroise Paré (Discours, 1582) pointing out that in Arabic mumia didn't come from human bodies but was natural bitumen, & how this meaning was changed in European medical authorities.

Yet as we saw he still blamed a "malign Jewish doctor" for the use of mummy as a drug!

Given the unreliability of the original claims about Elmagar and other Jewish involvement with mummies, it's not surprising -- and encouraging -- that it's difficult to find scholars repeating these claims over the last century.
References are occasional & mostly non-specialist.

For example, here's an odd book *celebrating* the role of Jews in medicine that repeats claims about Elmagar, calling him "enterprising"

Frank Heynick, Jews and Medicine: An Epic Saga (2002)