Sara (medical doctor)

Sara , also known as Sarah or as the Jewish doctor of Würzburg , was one of the earliest Jewish doctors in Germany.

Life

Few documents attest to Sarah's work as a doctor; her birth and death are dated approximately between 1385 and 1445.

It is known that she did an apprenticeship with the Jewish doctor Salkmann or Seligmann from Mergentheim in Würzburg . After a few years of training with him, a commission from the Würzburg city council confirmed her as Salkmann's official assistant. On May 2, 1419, the Würzburg bishop Johann II von Brunn appointed her personal physician and thus defied a papal instruction from 1415. The historical background is that Johann II allowed a limited Jewish community in Würzburg at the beginning of his term of office between 1412 and 1422, and that decades after the severe plague epidemic of 1347-49 there was a dramatic shortage of doctors in Würzburg.

Sara was given the privilege of practicing medicine for an annual tax of 10 guilders plus the sacrificial penny , which was another two guilders. Also in 1419 she received permission from the Würzburg canon to acquire the manor of her insolvent debtor Friedrich von Riedern. She was represented in court by a knight von Wissentann.

Contradicting statements are made about the further fate of Sarah, in which mainly general decrees pertaining to Jews were used: Hoffer reports of the end of Johann's Jewish privilege in 1422 and of an arrest of the community, which was released in exchange for a ransom, which was also raised by Sara. She is said to have left Würzburg afterwards.
Contemporary regests, on the other hand, report the extension of the episcopal charter in 1421 for a further five years and also of Johann II's ongoing benevolent Jewish policy. According to other sources, the Jewish community was only gradually pushed out of Würzburg, despite Johann's foreign policy treaties not to tolerate Jews; the end of the inner-city community is therefore dated to 1436.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ursula Köhler-Lutterbeck, Monika Siedentopf: Lexicon of 1000 women. Bonn 2000, ISBN 3-8012-0276-3 , p. 308.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Gerda Hoffer : Time of the heroines. Life pictures of extraordinary Jewish women . Munich 1999, ISBN 3-423-30701-3 , pp. 26-48. (For this work it should be noted that the author has freely added "plausible additions" based on historical facts, which, however, do not emerge from the sources used)
3. ^ ^{A b c} Richard Landau: History of the Jewish doctors. Berlin 1895, p. 102 f. (Digitized version)
4. ↑ M. Wiener: Regesten on the history of the Jews in Germany during the Middle Ages. Hanover 1862, pp. 182, 186, 189. (digitized version)

literature

• Werner Dettelbacher: The Jewish doctor Sara and her activities in Würzburg (1419). In: Würzburg medical history reports. Volume 17, 1998, pp. 101-103.