Midwifery provides a critical lens into the influence of women serving in medical capacities in early modern Europe, but this unique position has not been sufficiently explored with regard to Jewish communities. This paper examines the Yiddish translation of a Dutch treatise on reproduction and childbirth as a way to investigate the circulation of medical knowledge among early modern Jewish midwives. Commissioned in 1709 by an Amsterdam Jewish midwife, the resultant manuscript bears the name of the midwife alongside her translator, highlighting the crucial role of translators in communicating medical knowledge to Jewish women. I argue that by transmitting one culture to another, translators emerged as pivotal figures who could decide how information was phrased and packaged, and could fundamentally alter concepts in the books that they were supposed to “simply” translate. Especially with regard to Jewish women, who often could not read the local vernacular, translation into Yiddish became an important vehicle for accessing midwifery handbooks. In the present case, the Yiddish translation differs from the original Dutch work in numerous ways, suggesting the translator’s decisive choices about what to preserve or alter. Furthermore, an investigation of the sources of authority in these works allows us to establish some of the medical influences of early modern Jewish midwives. I thus provide a starting point for considering Jewish midwives within an international system of medical and scientific communication, whose content flowed between vernacular and elite practitioners in a way that makes clear boundaries or hierarchies difficult to delineate.
