Jews, Cadavers, and Politics in Medical Discourses East Central Europe

In 1923, the Association of German Medical Students in Vienna petitioned the faculty of the Medical Department demanding that the Jewish community provide their unclaimed dead for dissections. The students objected to what they perceived as Jews pursuing medical training “at the expense of the Aryan population”. In their view, medical training for Jewish students ought to be linked to quotas for a proportionate number of Jewish medical corpses available for dissection by Jews alone. Vienna was not an exception as a site of the conflict over medical bodies. In the early 1920s, Christian student associations voiced similar demands at Czechoslovak, Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian universities. They submitted memoranda to their respective academic authorities and appealed for support, citing religious, scholarly, civic, and racial concerns about Jewish students dissecting non-Jewish medical bodies or about Jewish bodies being absent from anatomy classes. They also argued that in the face of a persistent shortage of medical bodies—which were indispensable for their instruction—the Jewish communities had long unjustly avoided sharing the responsibility for providing specimens because of Judaism’s religious prohibition against autopsies. Facing an increasingly violent campaign, Jewish medical students, medical professionals, communal and religious leadership were forced to respond to the demands. Based on in-depth archival research in Austria, Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, as well as published and unpublished diaries and memoirs, and oral interviews, this lecture will explore how, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, medical schools in East Central Europe turned into sites of bitter conflict over dissections and the place of Jews in the medical profession and – more broadly – in the emerging nation-states.

Natalia Aleksiun is the Harry Rich Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, where she teaches courses on the Holocaust and its aftermath, Eastern Europe, Jewish childhood and the history of medicine. She holds doctoral degrees from Warsaw University, Poland, and New York University, U.S. She has written extensively on the history of Polish Jews and the Holocaust. In addition to her 2021 book Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization), she is the author of 2002 Where to? The Zionist Movement in Poland, 1944-1950 and editor of Gershon Taffet’s The Destruction of the Jews of Zolkiew, published by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw in 2019. She co-edited several volumes, including The Rescue Turn and the Politics of Holocaust Memory (2024); Entanglements of War: Social Networks during the Holocaust (2023), European Holocaust Studies, vol. 3: Places, Spaces and Voids in the Holocaust (2021), and Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 36: Jewish Childhood in Eastern Europe (2023). She serves as editor of East European Jewish Affairs. Aleksiun is working on a monograph about Jews who went into hiding in Western Ukraine during the Holocaust. In 2024-2025, she is Dalck and Rose Feith Family Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, completing her book on the so-called Cadaver Affair in medical schools in East Central Europe between two world wars.

Host or Publisher Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies