Deatra Cohen's garden.Image by Deatra Cohen
Eileen Katz Connelly April 13, 2021
Diatra Cohen was studying to become an herbalist when her teacher assigned her the seemingly simple task of researching and reporting on her culture's herbal remedies and practices.
However, the project was anything but simple. A former librarian, Cohen was adept at navigating databases and combing through archives. However, she could find little documentation of the herbal traditions on which her ancestors, Ashkenazi Jews from the Pale of Settlement, would have relied.
Today, Jewish herbalism students do not face the same problems. Three years after her initial search came up in vain, Cohen and her husband Adam Siegel, a librarian at the University of California, Davis, published Ashkenazi Herbalism. Part botanical guide, part folk history, this book details the most common natural remedies employed at the Pale of Settlement, and the religious orders that provided medical care to the Jewish community. It explores the interactions between a doctor, a shaman, a barber surgeon, and a midwife.
Gathering that knowledge was an uphill battle. Much of Ashkenazi folk knowledge was destroyed by the Holocaust without being documented. The couple created Anne's book, which includes photographs from a Holocaust database, a memoir that mentions her grandmother's treatment, and an ethnographic study documenting his life in the Pale of Settlement from 1912 to 1914. We relied on the findings of ski expeditions. A seemingly unrelated dictionary of medicinal herbs from the Soviet era. Although the book did not mention Jews, Cohen and Siegel researched the Ukrainian towns mentioned in the book and found that most had large Ashkenazi populations. This forgotten government research inadvertently preserved the Jewish knowledge they sought.
I contacted Cohen and Siegel at their home in Davis, California, to learn how they put this book together and why modern Jews need to know how their ancestors treated toothaches. We talked about what there is. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Diatra Cohen and Adam Siegel, co-authors of Ashkenazi Herbalism.Image by Deatra Cohen
How did you become interested in herbalism?
Cohen: I grew up in Philadelphia, and no matter where you live in the city, you're close to parks, forests, and natural places. I spent a lot of time in nature when I was a child. It always really comforted me.
And when did you know you had to do this project?
SIEGEL: Well, you were encouraged to explore your heritage.
Cohen: One of the really basic things about herbal medicine is knowing your own ancestral practices. Many people have access to it. There are herbs that have been around for hundreds of years for all sorts of different cultures. But nothing was found. That's what started me on this search.
We have a lot of ethnographic information about the Pale of Settlement from the An Ski Expedition. Why couldn't I find what I was looking for there?
Cohen: It's a special thing to talk about plants in a way that an ethnobotanist could document, but they didn't bring an ethnobotanist with them. They might do so in the second expedition, but that didn't happen because of World War I. Then came World War II, and the Jewish community was completely destroyed. Not having that knowledge is devastating, because there is no going back. I have no one to talk to. This is almost forensic ethnobotany.
Could you tell us a little more about this landmark moment in the Soviet document?
Cohen: I was hooked and read it over and over again. At some point, about a year in, I decided I didn't know anything about the people in this book. I want to know more about them. At the back was an index of all the towns where the book's informants lived. All of them were strangely abbreviated, and I hadn't looked into them much, but I sat down at my computer and looked them up. And each time, the first place I turned to was the genealogy site JewishGen. When I looked at this list of 100 towns, most of them appeared there, Yad Vashem, and other Holocaust-related sites. I turned to Adam and said, “Do you think this is important?”
A snapshot of Cohen and Siegel's garden. Herbs on display include valerian, mugwort, dandelion, violets, lemon balm, and Actinidia.Image by Deatra Cohen
What was the most surprising discovery for you as an herbalist?
COHEN: Probably invasive plants, people had access to them. The book includes nutmeg, but also cinnamon, ginger, and many other plants not found in the Pale settlement.
What was it like working on this multi-year project as a couple?
SIEGEL: Deatla would have had this intuition, and I found support for her hypothesis by looking at the 1926 Soviet census, for example. We both read it closely many times and bounced ideas back and forth. It's fun to realize that you're doing something that no one has ever done before.
Have you ever done a collaboration like this before?
SIEGEL: Art projects, fun things. we have children.
It's a big collaboration.
Cohen: This is my biggest project to date.
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