How is that relevant to a Jewish view of medicine?

Based on a lecture by Rabbi Edward Reichman, MD

While Jews were banned from England for centuries after 1290, some of the most consequential Jewish interactions with the Crown occurred in those years — and came about through physicians. From royal sickness to high diplomacy and questions of organ donations, the intersection of monarchs and Jewish medicos has generated some fascinating chapters.

Like London buses, about which it’s said that you wait ages for one, and then three turn up at once, England’s history of Jewish medical men begins with not just one Jew, but with ten of them.

For hundreds of years after King Edward I expelled the country’s Jewish community in 1290, Jews weren’t officially allowed to enter England, but in the early 15th century an exception was made.

In the early 1400s, King Henry IV — Edward’s great-great-grandson — became very ill, and none of his physicians were able to cure him. Then, through the royal grapevine, Henry heard of a prominent doctor in Italy named Elia Sabato, who served as physician to a succession of popes and Italian nobles.

Elia agreed to come over and treat the ailing king, but with one peculiar proviso: that he be allowed to come “cum decem hominibus servientibus” — “with ten male servants” in Latin.

While Elia — whose full name for aliyah purposes was Elijah ben Shabbetai Be’er — may have puzzled his host with the request, as an observant Jew he simply wanted to have a minyan on hand.

Why wouldn’t nine have sufficed, with Elia himself as the minyan man? It’s likely that as he would probably be attending to the king a fair amount of time, he would leave his minyan without a minyan — hence the insistence on a full minyan.

Skeleton Service

Doctors or not, the 15th century was not a healthy time to live at England’s royal court.

For decades, the crown was contested in a series of battles between two noble houses, a struggle known as the Wars of the Roses. Ultimately, Henry IV’s grandson, King Henry VI, was deposed by the man who became King Edward IV. In turn, his young son, Edward V, reigned briefly before being imprisoned in the Tower of London, where he was killed, likely on the order of his uncle, who took the throne as Richard III.

It’s fair to say that Shakespeare was no fan of Richard. The Bard describes the king as a “foul bunch-back’d toad,” and “deformed, unfinish’d” among other pleasantries.

Richard’s defenders, on the other hand, maintained that Shakespeare just had it in in for the king and that based on royal portraits, he wasn’t deformed at all.

The debate could never be settled because Richard, having died in battle after two years on the throne, was buried in an unknown location. That changed in the early 2000s, when people began to do research to try to determine where Richard III would have been buried.

When they excavated a parking lot in the city of Leicester, very close to the battleground where he was purported to have died, they found the remnants of a church cemetery, and in an area designated for prominent people, they found a skeleton that showed signs of kyphoscoliosis, an abnormal curvature of the spine, which would be consistent with someone who is hunchback. The skull also showed signs of severe head trauma, consistent with the head wound that Richard was said to have suffered in battle.

Contextually, the remains seemed to be of King Richard III. The question was whether 21st-century science could make that identification certain.

The researchers turned to genealogy, specifically to a mitochondrial DNA test. What’s unique about mitochondrial DNA is that it is transmitted exclusively maternally. It can actually be transmitted to male children as well, but the male children do not transmit it further.

In 2012, researchers identified two living maternal descendants of King Richard III’s mother. They tested the skeleton’s mitochondrial DNA and found a near-perfect genetic match with the living relatives. That was a confirmation that the remains were indeed Richard’s, and so he was accorded an honorary reburial in Leicester Cathedral.