The Folk Medicine Culture of Yazd Jews

The current population of the Yazd Jews is the survivors of a very large and ancient congregation of this people in central Iran. The long inhabitancy of this people in Yazd during the history of Islamic Iran, on one hand, and the current small numbers of these people, demonstrates the necessity of a comprehensive ethnography of this population. The present study aims to collect, study and analyze the beliefs and medical behaviors of Yazd Jews based on the recognition of these people's health and remedial beliefs and behaviors.

The data of the present research is the result of anthropological researches based on fieldwork (in-depth interview and observation technique) and documentary based and library research methods. To collect these data, all of the field study, documentary based and library research methods have been used. In this research, due to the limited information collected from field research method, the library research results have been used further. An interview with three Jews in Yazd (two indigenous people living in Yazd and one rabbi (hakham) and a physician residing in Tehran) as native informed individuals has been one of these methods.

For centuries, Jews have been renowned for their expertise and proficiency in medicine in the Iranian culture. Generally, in the medical culture of Jews, special attention has been paid to individual health, maintaining food health and provision of the healthiest raw materials for food. The particular diet of the Jews has unique features such as avoiding the simultaneous consumption of dairy and meat dishes. The Yazd Jewish pathology has a great deal to share with the original Iranian ethno-medicine, and has proposed ways to treat diseases such as al-zadegi, bad e sorkh and naftalus.

The Jewish community of Yazd, which always historically and sociologically has faced with the problem of poverty and scarce population, has never been able to step out of the level of daily livelihoods, and all of its cultural and civilization achievements have not been sustained and perpetuated from generation to generation due to widespread and successive migrations. So nowadays, it is very hard to talk about the medical culture of the Jews in Yazd. Research on this culture with immigrant Jews in Tehran, Shiraz and Isfahan can be the starting point for discovering new points in this field of Iranian ethno-medicine.