| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ellen M. Umansky. From Christian Science to Jewish Science: Spiritual Healing and American Jews. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 245. $45.00.
"Take an easy comfortable position, and dismiss all strain from mind and body... . Meditate in this manner daily, morning and evening, and you will begin to feel a deep change taking place in the innermost recesses of your being; you will grow calm, and cheerful, and hopeful" (p. 107). Today the American landscape is dotted with Yoga studios, Zen centers, and retreats of various denominations. Meditation has become part of the mainstream in a way unimaginable when the above words were published more than eighty years ago in The Jewish Science Interpreter, the flagship publication of the Jewish Science movement. It is understandable if neither the journal nor the organization rings a bell, since even at its height, Jewish Science claimed fewer than one thousand members. Yet, as Ellen M. Umansky makes abundantly clear in her fascinating book, Jewish Science was at the vanguard of a broader movement that sought to link spiritual well being with physical health.	1
Jewish Science, as its name suggests, emerged under the influence of—and in reaction to—the Christian Science movement founded by Mary Baker Eddy. On the one hand, figures like Rabbi Alfred Geiger Moses, who published Jewish Science: Divine Healing Judaism (1916), were disturbed by the attraction of growing numbers of Jews to Christian Science at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. On the other hand, they were themselves drawn by some of the fundamental teachings that Eddy espoused, including the importance of individual health and happiness, the power of spiritual healing, prayer (often described in terms of "visualization") and faith, and the "role of God as healer" (p. 133).	. . .

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