Medical Schools Cadaver Affair 1920s Poland Bleich

Contemporary Halakhic Problems, by J. David Bleich. 1995

Jewish Teachings Behind the Medical-School “Cadaver Affair” in 1920s Poland (Jewish Medical Students Dissected Only Polish Cadavers): A Dual Morality Governing the Jewish Dead and the Non-Jewish Dead

This work discusses many topics, of which I mention a few. There is reference to Jewish religious opinion, notably that in the Talmud. I encourage the reader to look up the passages in the online Babylonian Talmud (halakha.com), as I did. It is a rewarding experience.

A DOUBLE STANDARD ON THE EXPLOITATION OF CORPSES

The Talmud (SANHEDRIN 47b) forbids the deriving of benefit from the cadaver of a Jew. (p. 184). As for the cadaver of a non-Jew, the opinions of leading Jewish thinkers were mixed. (p. 187).

Bleich remarks, “On the other hand, Ramban [1194-1270], KETUBOT 60a, advances an opposing view in remarking, ‘I know of no prohibition with regard to a non-Jew since we derive [the prohibition] from Miriam.’” (p. 187. That is, from the customs surrounding the burial of a Jew. See also p. 184).

The Talmud (BECHOROTH 45a) has the famous account of the body of an executed criminal dissected for the purpose of studying anatomy. This led to the question of whether the scientific knowledge gained had been sufficient to offset the exploitation of the corpse. HATAM SOFER [1762-1839] stated that this was a moot question, since the body had not been that of a Jew. Bleich comments, “HATAM SOFER resolves the problem by commenting that the subject of this experiment was undoubtedly a non-Jewess from whose corpse it is not forbidden to derive benefit.” (p. 186).

Other Jewish sources that affirmed the fact that there is no prohibition in exploiting the body of a GOY included SEFER YERE’IM [d. 1175] no. 310 as well as TOSAFOT, BABA KAMMA 10a (p. 187) and, more recently, MISHNEH LE-MELEKH [~1731]. (pp. 184-186).

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JEWISH MEDICAL STUDENTS IN POLISH UNIVERSITIES IN THE 1920s: JEWISH CADAVERS ARE SPECIAL, CATHOLIC CADAVERS ARE NOT

I now go beyond the immediate contents of this book for the purpose of deeper analysis.

Consider the “cadaver affair” for which Poles are nowadays exclusively blamed. In interwar Poland, the Jewish community, based on ostensible religious grounds, failed to provide Jewish cadavers for Jewish medical students to dissect (except when compelled). Instead, Jewish medical students freely dissected the bodies of Polish Catholics. Nowadays, Poles are blamed for (what else?) being anti-Semitic in objecting to this arrangement. In other words, Poles refused to comply with this transparently racist Jewish system that treated Polish cadavers as less sacred than Jewish cadavers and—guess what—now Poles are the problem!

What’s more, Poland’s rabbis strenuously and stubbornly opposed the dissection of Jewish corpses–until they had to bend to utilitarian considerations (the likely reduction in numbers of Jewish medical students).

POTENTIAL ONGOING IMPLICATIONS OF THE DUAL MORALITY GOVERNING THE REMAINS OF JEWISH AND NON-JEWISH DEAD

Cultural memes can survive for many generations after they had last been generally verbalized. Just because most Jews today are irreligious and Talmud-uninformed does not mean that the considerations raised in this book have died out. They evidently live on in secularized, modernized forms, as discussed below.

During the Auschwitz Carmelite and Cross controversy, the Poles wanted to end the standoff by proposing that Auschwitz would “belong” to the Poles and Birkenau would “belong” to the Jews. However, this reasonable compromise was rejected by the Jews on the basis of the fact that Jewish ashes are found everywhere at the site of the former Nazi German death camp. Polish ashes did not enter into this equation at all. Evidently, Jewish ashes are sacred in a manner that Polish ashes are not.

In recent years, Jan T. Gross has gotten a great deal of adulatory media coverage of his accounts of the desperately-poor postwar Poles robbing the cremains of Jews. Needless to say, there was no such consternation about Jews robbing the graves of other Jews, of Poles robbing the graves of other Poles, or of other war-traumatized peoples engaged in similar odious behavior. Instead, there was an almost-obsessive demonization of Poles as a “nation of thieves” that had “exploited the Jewish dead.” It is not hard to figure out why.

Finally, the unequal treatment of GOYIM dead and Jewish dead can extend to genocide. This partly accounts for the Holocaust preeminence that permeates much of western culture. In other words, in practice, the genocide of a GOY is not as significant as the genocide of a Jew.

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BASIC JUDICIAL MATTERS DIVIDED JEWS AND GENTILES FOR CENTURIES

I now return to the immediate contents of this book.

Until fairly recent times, Jews insisted on having their own courts (kahals). More recent versions of such particular Jewish courts, however partly secularized, became part of the Jewish demands for special rights, in the so-called Minorities Treaty, that was partly-successfully imposed on 1918-era Poland.

The original religious basis, for this form of Jewish separatism, is expounded by Bleich, “Fundamentally, idolatry is renunciation of God and His Torah. Hence recourse to non-Jewish courts, even when the law administered by such courts is not derived from idolatrous cults, does not involve a novel prohibition but constitutes a form of idolatry, e. e., the heresy of denying the applicability of the Law of Moses to adjudication of the matter of dispute. Thus, the prohibition against supplanting the Law of the Torah by another legal code is subsumed under the prohibition against idolatry and does not constitute an independent transgression.” (pp. 12-13).

WHY THE DEATH PENALTY FOR A GOY WHO STUDIES THE TORAH OR OBSERVES THE SABBATH

This refers to SANHEDRIN 58b. (p. 149). There are so many proposed “answers” to this question that it becomes obvious that all of them are speculative and exculpatory in nature rather than some kind of “correct” understanding of the Talmud.

Rabbi Ha Me’iri [1249-1310] attempted to account for this harsh teaching in terms of what now is called cultural misappropriation, as described by Bleich, “Proficiency in Torah and observance of SHABBAT are the unique hallmarks of a Jew. According to Me’iri, the fundamental concern underlying this prohibition is that a non-Jew who becomes proficient in Torah or who observes SHABBAT is a coreligionist and hence they may seek to emulate his conduct in other areas as well.” (p. 158). [Similar concerns about cultural misappropriation were voiced by the much-condemned Endeks. They were skeptical of potential large-scale Jewish assimilation, notably in terms of insincerely- and incompletely-Polonized Jews and their inimical influences on Polish culture.]

Other rabbinic teachings about SANHREDRIN 58b go far beyond potential cultural misappropriation, and are far less charitable to the GOYIM. These revolve around the supposition that the gulf between the gentiles and Chosen-People Jews is so fundamental that each is governed by nothing less than a qualitatively different set of cosmic rules. For instance, Rabbi Meir Dan Plocki [b. 1866 or 1867) referred to the Talmud (SHABBAT 156a and NEDARIM 32a), which teaches that Jewish Chosenness extends to the privilege of Jews being governed directly by God. In contrast, the GOYIM, unlike the Jews, have to settle for being governed by the constellations and by natural forces.

The position of Rashi (1040-1105), the famous French rabbi, is instructive in this regard. He states that, just as celestial bodies must unfailingly perform their orbits, so also must non-Jews unfailingly fulfill their destined role in the universe. Therefore, any GOY who deliberately abstains from productive labor for a full twenty-four hour period is, in effect, violating his “place” in the created order of things (p. 160), and, worse yet, is usurping the status of the Jew.

Author Bleich specifies, “Thus the comment of the Midrash describing a non-Jew who observes SHABBAT as an interloper interjecting himself into the unique relationship between God and Israel is equally applicable to a situation in which a non-Jew observes any day of the week as a day of rest. In observing any day as a day of rest, the non-Jew, in effect, announces that he does not emulate the celestial bodies because he is not dependent upon them as the conduits of providence but enjoys the unmediated guardianship of God as do the people Israel.” (pp. 160-161).