Stein, Sarah Abrevaya (Author)
This article traces the genealogy of a Jewish-owned botánica located in East Harlem in the 1930s and 1940s. Botánicas are understood to manifest an intricate, transatlantic religious, spiritual, and healing world, offering herbal products, sacramental goods, ritual implements, and counseling to Italian, Latinx, Black, and Caribbean practitioners of folk Catholicism, herbalism, hoodoo, Vodou, Santería, Espiritismo, Curanderismo, Òrìṣà worship and other ethnomedical and spiritual systems. Yet this botánica was owned by an Eastern Mediterranean Jew from the Ottoman/Italian island of Rhodes, and it integrated Sephardic and Mediterranean histories and sources of inspiration. Extraordinarily, this history stands for a greater whole. Jews were pioneering spiritual merchants in the United States. Restoring their history requires journeying globally, beginning with Ottomans’ fidelity to herbalism; tracing émigré Sephardic Jews’ uneven dialogue with Black African men and women in colonial Central and Southern Africa; and delving into the commercial, spiritual, and racial interplay furthered by Jewish-owned pharmacies and botánicas in New York City, Baltimore, Atlanta, Memphis, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles and by Jewish spiritual merchants and their Caribbean, Latinx, and Black patrons. All this introduces an unexpected Jewish and Mediterranean history to the botánica, and an unexpectedly multifarious spiritual, mercantile, and racial dimension to Jewish history.
...More
Article
Jonathon L. Earle;
(2018)
Political Activism and Other Life Forms in Colonial Buganda
(/isis/citation/CBB766834408/)
Book
Brooke, John Hedley;
Numbers, Ronald L.;
(2011)
Science and Religion around the World
(/isis/citation/CBB001023085/)
Article
Benoît Henriet;
(2018)
Facing the Talking Snake: Witchcraft, Anxiety, and Sense-Making in Interwar Belgian Congo
(/isis/citation/CBB674187772/)
Article
Daniel J. Smith;
(2018)
“Outside the Pale” of Professionalism: The Pharmacists Union of Greater New York, 1932–1941
(/isis/citation/CBB131064789/)
Article
Pinchak, Frank;
Cowen, David L.;
(2004)
“A Bit of Honest Information” Pharmacy in an Industrial Eastern City in the Early Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB000630330/)
Thesis
Dan Tsahor;
(2015)
Hebrew Encyclopedias: Objectivity, Jewish History, and the National Territory
(/isis/citation/CBB054216437/)
Article
Meredith B. Linn;
(2022)
Neither Snake Oils nor Miracle Cures: Interpreting Nineteenth-Century Patent Medicines
(/isis/citation/CBB855105432/)
Article
Schneider, Stanley;
Berke, Joseph H.;
(2010)
Freud's Meeting with Rabbi Alexandre Safran
(/isis/citation/CBB001035684/)
Article
Cantor, Geoffrey;
(2004)
Creating The Royal Society's Sylvester Medal
(/isis/citation/CBB000410698/)
Article
Tal, Alon;
(2008)
Enduring Technological Optimism: Zionism's Environmental Ethic and Its Influence on Israel's Environmental History
(/isis/citation/CBB000950062/)
Article
L. Rodríguez;
(2017)
Frigyes Riesz between the Two World Wars
(/isis/citation/CBB156076796/)
Article
Rachel S. A. Pear;
(2015)
Differences over Darwinism: American Orthodox Jewish Responses to Evolution in the 1920s
(/isis/citation/CBB025128400/)
Article
Langton, Daniel R.;
(2013)
Jewish Religious Thought, the Holocaust, and Darwinism: A Comparison of Hans Jonas and Mordecai Kaplan
(/isis/citation/CBB001213462/)
Book
Jutta Wimmler;
(2017)
The Sun King's Atlantic
(/isis/citation/CBB307939896/)
Book
Youval Rotman;
(2016)
Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium: The Ambiguity of Religious Experience
(/isis/citation/CBB284246107/)
Article
Robbie Hart;
Rainer Bussmann;
(2018)
Trans-Himalayan Transmission, or Convergence? Stauntonia (Lardizabalaceae) as an Ethnoveterinary Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB143183456/)
Article
Chen, Lijuan;
Wang, Chuanchao;
(2012)
The Great China Chemical Works Ltd. and the Manufacture of Chinese Patent Medicines Using Western Technology in 1930s
(/isis/citation/CBB001252848/)
Book
Dominic Green;
(2022)
The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848-1898
(/isis/citation/CBB944055311/)
Article
Julian Goodare;
(2020)
Away with the fairies: the psychopathology of visionary encounters in early modern Scotland
(/isis/citation/CBB931900351/)
Article
Irene Becci;
Christophe Monnot;
Boris Wernli;
(2021)
Sensing ‘Subtle Spirituality’ among Environmentalists: A Swiss Study
(/isis/citation/CBB336752522/)
Be the first to comment!