Studying Ibn Sīnā, Performing Abulafia in a Mid- Sixteenth - Century Prison: Emotional, Medical, and Mystical Bodies between Italy and Silesia

Historians often address knowledge transfer in two ways: as an extension and continu-ation of an established tradition, or as the tradition’s modification in an act of individual reception. This article explores the tension between the two approaches through a case study of Eliezer Eilburg. It traces the footsteps of a sixteenth-century German Jew and his study of the late medieval Hebrew medical and mystical literature composed in the wider Mediterranean. As it uncovers the cultural, political, and social processes shaping knowledge transfer between various Jewish cultures and geographies, the article highlights the receiver’s individual agency. Under the thickly described intellectual traditions, it is the receiver’s lived experience that allows historians to grasp the impact of knowledge on the lives of premodern people — the impact on their body and its relation to the world and to God. Building this argument, this article problematizes the relationship between theory and practice.

Italian Jewish market played a major role in this development.11 Eilburg-born in Braunschweig in Lower Saxony, and active in Poland, Silesia, and Italy-was one of many Jews who actively participated in the expansion of Ashkenazic geographical, intellectual, and cultural horizons associated with the sixteenthcentury Ashkenaz. In Italy, he recognized the cultural capital of the late medieval Sephardic and Italian scholarship and brought it back with him to (East-) Central Europe. Eilburg not only moved the texts; he also reworked them in a manner that presupposed an additional audience. The autograph manuscripts entitled Maḥberet ha-Me'assef12 and Ma'arekhet Refu'ot ha-Shamayim [Medical Hierarchies of the Heavens]13 thus form a suitable foundation to investigate the particularities of this transmission and reception of-from Eilburg's perspective-novel and attractive knowledge.
Eilburg's suffering inscribed into his texts, moreover, reminds us that such knowledge transmissions were never disembodied. Historians such as Lyndal Roper have emphasized that "[b]odies are not merely the creations of discourse."14 In his call for the return of "flesh and blood" to the sociology of knowledge, Loïc Wacquant theorized that men and women are thoroughly situated, sentient, suffering, skilled, sedimented as they learn, study, and practice Although the manuscript contains some medical astrology, by "constellation" instead Eilburg implies the organization, the inner order of all elements of practical medicine, which Eilburg introduces step-by-step. Thus, the term "hierarchies," or perhaps "harmonies" (similarly as in some of the their crafts.15 In their footsteps, this article aims to show that Eilburg's reception of kabbalistic and medical knowledge was not only a theoretical placement of self on the disembodied mystical and medical system of knowledge. The transfer and reception were driven by his biographical and physical circumstances. They answered his practical needs. More specifically, the studied materials enabled him to make sense of his dire condition during the imprisonment and even gave him practical solutions to aid his situation, giving him tools to mold his emotional life. This article thus aims to redirect our attention from the theory and the myth as an organizing principle of practice to highlight the active role of practice in the theory's validation, refutations, and adjustments. 16 To reach such a conclusion, this case study explores the transmission of medical and kabbalistic knowledge in three parts, exploring the full scope of social, cultural, intellectual, and personal motivations and events that drove the transmission-the subject of this special volume. In the first part, I situate Eilburg's biography into the bigger picture of the social, economic, cultural, and even political transformation of Central and Eastern European Jewry. In the second part, I establish Eilburg's two autograph manuscripts, Maḥberet ha-Me'assef and Ma'arekhet Refu'ot ha-Shamayim, as materials-texts as well as things-that reflect on Eilburg's first experience with Italy and its later reworking in East-Central Europe. In the third part, I examine whether the scholarly traditions that Eilburg obtained in Italy and promoted in Central Europe were only ideas transported or rather ideas studied, practiced, and experienced. I use Eilburg's remarks about his time in prison to demonstrate how he applied the scholarly traditions associated with the medieval and Renaissance Jews of the Mediterranean (in particular, the epistemological concepts which addressed knowing and emotions as bodily and naturalized processes) to frame his recollections and actions.

Transformative Mobilities
Eilburg's life is a telling example of how the Jews of Central Europe adapted to the changing political, economic, and social developments of the sixteenth century. Over the course of twenty years, he underwent a complete occupational makeover. A well-established merchant from Lower Saxony turned into a Jewish tutor and a physician active in East-Central Europe and in Northern Italy. This transformation took place against the backdrop of rising geographical mobility, exchange of expertise and goods, and remodeled local concepts of Jewish culture and scholarship.17 Eilburg was born as the third generation of merchants in Braunschweig. This city housed his extended family until the end of 1546, when the expulsion of local Jews, as Rotraud Ries has observed, transformed the pattern of the Jewish settlement in this region entirely.18 His family played a crucial role in the town; Eilburg's grandfather Akiva and later his uncle Jorden were the leading members of the local Jewish community, which just before its dispersal numbered almost one hundred. 19 They raised their objection, as they had done on other occasions, and attempted to have the expulsion decree overturned.20 Unsuccessful, the Jews left this then-Lutheran town at the time of war with the Imperial defender of Catholicism, Charles V (d. 1558). 21 Eilburg's extensive family dispersed completely. Although the expulsion in 1546 was not the first revocation of their residential rights in Braunschweig, its outcome altered their strategy of resettlement.22 Instead of returning to Braunschweig, they sought new residencies in neighboring towns, as well as in distant locations. His uncle Jorden and his sons-in-law settled in Münden, where they found protection under Duchess Elisabeth of Calenberg.23 Eilburg's widowed mother and his brother moved to Safed.24 Eilburg, his wife, and children settled in the Crown of Poland.25 According to the document penned by the Polish royal chancery, the Jews of Poznań supported his plea for protection.26 Thus, Eilburg likely followed his more distant business partners to a new town, in a new jurisdiction, hoping to continue his former mercantile activities. However, he only recounted failed business partnerships in Poland, and eventually, he fled the country.27 Eilburg's financial instability was not a recent development. It followed him from Lower Saxony to Poland. The protracted trial between Eilburg and Johann zum Hoffe, a former resident of Braunschweig who had earned the protection of Brandenburg's prince elector Joachim II (d. 1571), disclosed that Eilburg's financial situation was already dire in the 1540s.28 After losing residency in Braunschweig, he also lost the town's protection. He faced the danger of continuing the trial in Brandenburg and was therefore doomed to lose his property and freedom. In Maḥberet ha-Me'assef, this conflict is personalized in the figure of Michel von Derenburg (d. 1549), the court Jew in the services of Joachim II.29 According to his own account, Eilburg "refuted him [ in front of all the governors of the kingdom, and he was shamed and disgraced and did not know how to answer in front of the governors and noblemen."30 The situation described here likely depicts Eilburg's negotiations for residential rights in the Crown of Poland, which took place in Piotrków Trybunalski. Eilburg received his safe conduct in November 1547.31 The royal chancery also recorded his financial ill-health, and the safe conduct stipulated conditions for its renewal-namely, settling his debts within a year.32 The flight from Poland over a year later reveals that turning this momentum into successful resettlement was beyond his options. Eilburg returned to East-Central Europe in Av 5113 (ca. July 1553). He arrived at Oleśnica in Silesia, the region under the jurisdiction of the Bohemian Crown administered by the Podiebrads.33 By this time, he no longer presented himself only as a merchant. He also considered himself a tutor-a man well-read in the Bible and its exegesis, including its mystical interpretation-and a physician. He stated to have explored these two occupational avenues in Italy. He found there his "reawakening"34 along "the experts and savants in medicine [as they study] from [the works of] Aristotle, Ibn Sīnā, and the other princes," whom he followed "to their palaces openly and secretly" (i.e., he studied exoteric as well as esoteric teachings), "exploring and investigating all essential matters until I understood them correctly."35 Such an occupational combination was common in fifteenth-and sixteenthcentury Italy.36 That Eilburg adopted it, together with the knowledge and scholarship that framed it, is later corroborated by documents of Italian provenance. Anzolo and Mandolin, who likely hired Eilburg as a tutor. In 1568 and 1569, he taught the sons of two merchants in San Salvatore Monferrato.38 The immediate occupational makeover was, however, initially halted by the imprisonment. There is no archival document that would shed light on this incident. Eilburg, the only source, skillfully hid any hints that would disclose what exactly brought him to ill-repute. According to his first-person account, he arrived to Oleśnica in late summer and was detained there in early autumn after falling ill and being informed on by a certain Abraham Glatzer (likely Abraham Syller, a medical doctor who was in service of the Podiebrads at the time).39 In a note of Italian provenience written a decade later, Eilburg remembered the place of his imprisonment differently. He identified it not with Oleśnica but Nysa.40 It is, therefore, sound to question the nature of Eilburg's imprisonment. As Susan Einbinder has asked of other Jewish prison-writers: was their imprisonment real or a literary fiction? The sheer volume of Eilburg's references to his imprisonment in Maḥberet ha-Me'assef and Ma'arekhet Refu'ot ha-Shamayim suggest that its impact was very real. Eilburg composed a dirge calling for the deliverance of the imprisoned dating to 1554.41 Another poem, written down in December 1555, celebrated Eilburg's release.42 In a copy of a letter to his cousin Mordecai, Eilburg described his captivity,43 and in his biographical account referred to Mordecai as a man who "brought light to his eyes by observing the miṣwah of the redemption of captives [

Writing and Studying between Italy and Central Europe
Maḥberet ha-Me'assef and Ma'arekhet Refu'ot ha-Shamayim closely reflect on the developments in East-Central Europe in the mid-1550s. The two manuscripts were written on paper produced in Silesian paper mills in the 1550s.45 They are further tied together by paleographical, codicological, and other paratextual features, which also reveal that their stages of production were intertwined.46 In Maḥberet ha-Me'assef, Eilburg identified Oleśnica as the place where he had begun compiling his manuscript.47 In the same town, he was also apprehended and imprisoned.48 Eilburg thus produced these two manuscripts mostly around late 1554 and 1555, and possibly later. They thus reflect his recent return from Italy, an aspiration to resettle in Central Europe, and an ambition to reframe his own occupational profile, then interrupted by the incarceration. Eilburg not only transported these mystical and medical teachings from one location to another. He also reworked them in a manner that displays his thorough involvement with their study. His list of kabbalistic literature-a piece of self-promotion revealing his ambition to be a tutor-includes commonly studied titles such as Sha'arei Orah, Ma'arekhet ha-Elohut, along with Sefer Yeṣirah and commentaries and works associated with its study.53 Yet Eilburg dedicated the greatest effort to the works of Abraham Abulafia (d. 1291), whose legacy played an intrinsic role in establishing the sources circulated south of the Alps for almost two centuries, but had only begun to emerge in Central Europe as well-received media communicating scientific knowledge during the sixteenth century. The manuscript's format reveals thorough involvement with the subject.66 The autograph does not have a title page nor a preface, the emergent features of the printed book. And yet it is clear that this autograph is a fair copy of a finalized text, a polished and pre-meditated writing that shows an understanding of the subject in its very organization. Eilburg did not disclose his sources. Instead, he referred to different passages of the book as Sefer Hashgaḥah [The Book of Providence], Tapuaḥ ha-Zahav [The Golden Apple], Sod ha-Girmiyyah [The Secret of Heavenly Spheres], and so on, thus devising his own subtitles to different parts of the manuscript. He neatly presented these materials in the format of a father teaching his son-a popular rhetorical device as well as an actual reference to Eilburg's son, Abraham. Quire by quire, it reflects the learned medical curriculum (beginning with fevers and proceeding with the body's pathologies) to be concluded with medical astrology. This organization became commonplace at the thirteenth-century university, continuing through Eilburg's lifetime and into the following century.67 Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ashkenazic physicians of Central Europe faced increasingly harsher attacks questioning the scholarly grounding of their medical practice.68 The pressure was simultaneous with the emergence of the German civic physician, who elevated the role of Galenism (medical scholarship) into an occupational identity.69 So did Eliezer Eilburg, who considered medicine "the external ladder to God."70 In its theory, he viewed medicine as harmonious with a selected body of philosophical thought and Jewish scholarship-an idea repeatedly emphasized in his first-person account. This harmonization was anything but intellectual innovation from the perspective of the readers of the medieval Hebrew medical translations.71 Eilburg was merely following the way medical knowledge had been studied, interpreted, and performed south of the Alps for the past two centuries.72 Yet his turn to this particular Jewish (and non-Ashkenazic) library not only signals the library's extension to new cultural and geographical territories. It is also a witty response to the pressure exerted on a Jewish medical practitioner by Central European cities and their learned physicians entering the municipal administration. Eilburg could acquire medical teaching that praised the theoretical as well as the practical through his Italian tutor, Judah d' Ascoli (also known as Ashkelon). D' Ascoli taught him biblical exegesis and its esoteric tradition, and medicineindeed, the very combination of scholarship and skills far more common to Italy than Central Europe.73 Eilburg praised d' Ascoli's linguistic skills; he spoke "the language of the Zohar but also sometimes the language of the Jerusalem Talmud, and the language of Syria."74 Eilburg listened to d' Ascoli's daily homilies, and noted the struggles that d' Ascoli's wisdom and linguistic proficiency posed for him.75 It is, therefore, difficult to assess d' Ascoli's real impact, as his image was clearly designed to be juxtaposed to his-according to Eilburgignoramus Ashkenazic counterparts.
Joseph Davis identified d' Ascoli with the figure of a Roman physician and a young dignitary accompanying David Reuveni during his mission to Rome around 1525.76 In case Davis is right, d' Ascoli must have moved to Ancona in the footsteps of other Roman Jews after the city (formerly an independent port) was incorporated into the Papal State in 1532. The port became a safe haven for merchants of "all nations" in 1534,77 but the burgeoning life of its Jewish communities was thwarted by the papal attack on the New Christians In a chronogram, Eilburg referred to autumn 1553 as the initial time of his imprisonment, which took nine months until the moment he wrote these words. Therefore, he wrote these words around July 1554. 80 Cf. 1 Sam 4:9. 81 Here, Eilburg refers to the division of theoretical philosophy into mathematics (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), physics, and theology. This comment is more than a scribal curiosity. Stating the problem, the place, the circumstances, followed by the applied remedies and their result, the micronarrative forms a medical proto-observation.83 The content may seem mundane rather than a reflection on a systematic theory and practice. But its larger (con)textual setting reveals Eilburg's thorough involvement with the concept of emotions and their bodily dimension presented in On Cardiac Drugs, as well as with the medical (and philosophical) theory that defined the medieval naturalization of emotions-in contemporary literature also known as accidents of the soul, passions, the movements of the vital spirit born in the heart. The comment stems out of the discussion concerned with exhilarants. It is a reaction to the idea that the feelings stemming out of solitude may be diffused by activities of the opposite nature.84 But if the remedy requires more company in the patient's life, what would the options be of an imprisoned man? The second part of On Cardiac Drugs provides a list of remedies to rectify the saddened, fear-stricken, and even exhilarated hearts, bringing the body to balance in the spirit of humoral medicine. This part is not included in Eilburg's Ma'arekhet Refu'ot ha-Shamayim (although he likely had access to it). As the studied text implies, there were ways to influence one's emotions, if one understood their motions and bodily and reactionary situation, and applied this knowledge to practice. Eilburg's recounted actions indeed suggest that they were guided by these theories. His comment here thus functions as proof that studying and copying went hand in hand with a personally practiced verification of the studied content. According to Ibn Sīnā, "[j]oy, grief, fear, and anger are reactions specific to the soul (pneuma) located in the heart."85 Emotions were produced in reaction to impulses.86 They were reactions to a sensory input evaluated by the power of estimation, localized in the brain. Like "the sheep judging that this wolf is something to flee from,"87 estimation enabled the extraction of information concerned with sensory knowledge that went beyond its sensory nature. 88 In this process, the attraction or repulsion towards the processed images developed (then stored in the memory) side by side feelings of grief, joy, fear, or anger. The information that caused emotional response, therefore, objectively existed. Avoidance, a measure to prevent such inescapable emotional upheaval, was thus medically proven advice. Eilburg's study of philosophy (the Torah, mathematics, and physics)89 as a therapeutic activity thus seems much aligned with the strategy of diffusing one's attention, promoted by regimens of health. 90 Yet his words imply more than mere disengagement. Studying employed the very same faculties which reacted to impulses, eventually producing emotions. The molding of one's emotional life and by extent cognition was thus far more demanding. But in controlling the latter, the strictly medical advice often met with the philosophical, theological, and mystical traditions of knowing (God). Thus, the Jew prescribed the Muslim client a remedy to dilate his melancholystricken heart.92 Any preventive advice, however, could not be found in Maimonides' medical works written for wider Arabic readership, but in his religious and ethical writings such as Mishneh Torah. One of its chapters presents a brief list of medical advice, closely mirroring the theory of six non-natural things (i.e., a learned regimen of health). Yet, as a Jewish legal book, it is preoccupied with one particular type of body-that of a Jewish learned man.93 His address was not only limited to this gendered social group; it was exclusive: "[O]ne finds that these passions only make a very strong impression on persons who have no knowledge of ethical philosophy, nor of the disciplines and admonitions of the Law, such as children, women, and the ignorant. For these, because of the softness of their soul, are anxious and fearful."94 The cultivation of the soul went hand in hand with the cultivation of the intellect, susceptible to being overpowered by emotions.95 The regulation of emotional responses, therefore, carried innate social and gendered significance. It became a part of the scholar's image, which intricately linked the exercise of emotional moderation with the production of the rabbinic (scholarly) persona. The very act of studying-the one activity that played such a crucial role in rectifying Eilburg's emotional state-was a variable in this equation, as it gave Eilburg the opportunity to project an image of a pious Jewish man and scholar even in moments of crisis.
Maimonides' program of self-perfection, namely that of the Guide of the Perplexed,96 then borrowed this theoretical framework to Abulafia's ecstatic Kabbalah.97 As Moshe Idel has observed, this process included an inner spirit" through Abulafia's kabbalistic prism solely on account of the structural parallels in these narratives describing bodily experiences. The Abulafian connection, in relation to Eilburg's experience of imprisonment, resurfaces in another passage. Located in Maḥberet ha-Me'assef, filled with practices concerned with letter-combinations and Abulafian extracts, the text brings to mind the above-cited passage and its mystical tradition far more vividly than the passages located in his medical manuscript: Abulafia described hitbodedut [concentration] along with the separation from the lustful and long and intensive study as a way to attain the Divine knowledge.105 And in Eilburg's passage above, its attainment is far more clearly articulated.
Yet any divine or universal knowledge is not the main goal here. Instead, Eilburg focuses on the brain and the memory as dysfunctional organs and faculties. This passage is thus preoccupied with the same issue as his comment in On Cardiac Drugs, where he identified memory as the source of his grief and anger, then impacting his whole wellbeing. Both passages thus discuss the mechanisms of cognition and emotions as their mighty and impactful by-products and imply the need to modulate their flows as situated bodily processes.
The experiences described by Abulafia and Eilburg-sharing the focus on intellection-thus differ greatly in relation to man's (or the Jew's) body. Conjoining was foundational in Abulafia's prophetic-messianistic dimension. As Elliot Wolfson put it, the kabbalist's enlightened state of mind enabled him to unfetter the soul from "the chains of corporality."106 But in Eilburg's case, the prophetic (and ecstatic) aspect of the Abulafian techniques was suppressed. The body and the environment remained a part of any experience of supernatural.
Such an attitude towards prophetic aspects of knowing also permeates Eilburg's later work, Eser She'elot, which equally focused on naturalized epistemology. 107 Writing in the century of messianic upheaval, Eilburg preoccupied with the inadequacy of rabbinic criteria for evaluating prophetic claims. His first she'elah addresses the proofs by miracle-making and foretelling future among other topics.108 Basing himself in earlier authorities, he presents them as natural rather than only supernatural skills and qualities also common among magicians and witches, astronomers, and other selected or learned individuals and groups that know how to interpret the nature and its relation to God. Miracles and deeds bringing awe were interwoven into the material world and so were one's aptitude to interpret them.
In a similar vein, conjoining could have not been a mere actualization of the soul. Eilburg depicts it as the actualization of the kabbalist's body and soul. Conjoining with the divine did not serve to channel new universal knowledge, but to repair cognition. Indeed, it is memory, firmly located in the body, that plays a crucial role in both of Eilburg's descriptions. In Ma'arekhet Refu'ot ha-Shamayim, it is memory that brings about the images of enemies then overpowering his rational faculty,109 and in Maḥberet ha-Me'assef, it is memory that fails him in conjuring the images, intentions, and other processed pieces of knowledge that would enable him to practice Judaism in its most embodied way. For Eilburg, conjoining thus was deeply seated in man's body, restoring his broken faculties and healing his soul along with the body.

Conclusion
The case of Eliezer Eilburg-a small hero of great microhistories rather than a bearer of a singular historical legacy-helps us to problematize the relationship between theory and practice. Doing so, his works help us to bring Jánošíková European Journal of Jewish Studies 16 (2022) 1-23 forward more nuanced accounts of the sixteenth-century transformation of Ashkenazic Jewry in particular, and further methodological observations concerned with the study of knowledge transfer and the history of (kabbalistic) practices in general. As Elchanan Reiner has already shown, the reception of non-Ashkenazic works among Central and Eastern European Jews was not a one-way process. In the case of Halakhah, it eventually transformed the Ashkenazic culture of scholarship, giving it its own distinct face; and so did the kabbalistic and medical materials, which were transformed as they made their way north of the Alps with figures such as Eilburg. This deliberate process of knowledge exchange and its adaptation was wider than the solemn focus on print could suggest. It involved subjects and modes of study that did not take place in the more institutionalized settings of a yeshivah or later kloyz-at least not as their essential program. It takes us to prisons and to closed circles of masters and their apprentices. It factors in not only the "internal" Jewish discourse but also the status of Jews as a minority and as mercantile and medical experts living in a changing Europe. For instance, Eilburg's medical manuscript was not only a response to the demand for works associated with Italian and Sephardic Jews; it was also a response to the rising stakes of the physician's occupation in Central Europe.
Eilburg's relentless agency may appear to historians as a dead-end project. Many titles that he promoted as the foundation of his occupational makeover had become obsolete by the following generation. The medieval Hebrew medical translations were disused by the beginning of the seventeenth century. Evidence-wise, Eilburg's proclivity for Abulafia was rather unique and did not officiate the next chapter in Abulafia's reception. This image is, however, in stark contrast with the liveliness of these texts in Eilburg's hands. Reorganized, annotated, verified, and amended, they represented materials of high cultural capital and, as Eilburg's references to imprisonment show, bore the potential to generate real life solutions.
It seems that while certain intellectual traditions appeared and disappeared, some of their accompanying practices remained. The Lurianic Kabbalah associated with Safed led to the "psychological revolution" according to Jonathan Garb; its emphasis on individual "activism" was driven by the medical discourse according to Assaf Tamari.110 But how was it distinct from Eilburg's personal activism and his molding of a body of passions in a prison 1,600 miles away? In terms of theory, the answer may be long and detailed. But what if we inquire about the way distinct practitioners engaged their bodies? Early modern Ashkenaz has been widely recognized as a culture less preoccupied with devising original mystical theories and far more inclined towards practical Kabbalah (or magical practices).111 And as we further disentangle the relations between theory and practice, as exemplified in the study of intentionality by Agata Paluch,112 we will find ourselves writing a history of the body, medicine, and Kabbalah that crosses traditional divides between schools of thought. Instead of analyzing the reception of individual titles and knowledge frameworks, this history will focus on collective and individual engagement with the body, the environment, and God. This case study, therefore, chose to present Eilburg's manuscripts not as an offshoot of a story that did not fully materialize but as a challenge to presentism. It may be that the epistemological corpora of early modern Ashkenaz were far more diverse than current scholarship recognizes, and that supposed tensions between various schools of thought were rather theoretical than practical.