Jordan 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? 

My work has been supported by fellowships from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School, and the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.

Publications:

Delivering Knowledge: Jewish Midwives and Hidden Healing in Early Modern Europe. Stanford University Press, 2026.

“Unwanted Children and Invented Families in Early Modern Jewish Communities” (with Elisheva Carlebach), Jewish History vol. 38, nos. 3-4 (2024): 117-52.

“Birthing Cross-Confessional Relationships in French Archives,” Jewish Quarterly Review 113.1 (Winter 2023): 48-52. 

“The Allure of the Stem: The Pitam as Protection in Childbirth,” in Be Fruitful: The Etrog in Jewish Art, Culture, and History, edited by Warren Klein, Sharon Mintz, and Joshua Teplitsky (Jerusalem: Mineged Press, 2022).

“Jewish Midwives, Wise Women, and the Construction of Medical-Halakhic Expertise in the Eighteenth Century.” Jewish Social Studies Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter 2021): 1-36.

“Midwife | Judaism” and “Midwife | Medical Treatises and Other Scholarly Reception.” Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (EBR) Online. Berlin: De Gruyter (2020).

“‘To judge and to be judged’: Jewish Communal Autonomy in Metz and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Eighteenth-Century France.” Jewish Quarterly Review 104.3 (Summer 2014): 438-470. 

Courses Recently Taught:

Judaic 101 The Jewish Experience I: Ancient to Medieval

Judaic 102 The Jewish Experience II: Medieval to Modern

Judaic 221 Interfaith Relations: Jews and Christians in the Early Modern World

Judaic 251 Jews, Medicine, and Healing in the Premodern World

Judaic 318 Family and Sexuality in Jewish History and Culture