Jordan Rebekah Katz

I am a historian of early modern Jewry, with an emphasis on the interplay between healthcare, civic life, Jewish communities, and gender in early modern Europe. My first book, Delivering Knowledge: Jewish Midwives and Hidden Healing in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, 2026), explores these topics through the lens of Jewish midwives. Drawing upon a diverse array of rare manuscript and printed sources, Delivering Knowledge shows how Jewish midwives stood at the crossroads of tremendous changes in early modern Europe, in which new concerns about population growth brought midwives to the center of discussions about how to organize civic bureaucracy and childbirth care. The book argues that midwives played critical roles in early modern Europe, both as extensions of Jewish communal authority, as municipal employees, and as agents of burgeoning medical bureaucracies.

I view my research as using the experiences of Jewish women to illuminate broader questions related to women’s bodies, cross-confessional interactions, and the experiences of Jews in burgeoning frameworks of healthcare in early modern Europe. My work asks: How did Jews and Christians create a shared space of healthcare, and what were its limitations? How did gender impact the experience of healthcare for both providers and patients? And finally, what was the relationship between Jews, Christians, and civic authorities, and how did this differ across time and place?