Abstract
The aim of the present study is to outline the image of the Jewish physicians and pharmacists of the Mamlūk period in the Muslim literature. The ample presence of the Jewish physicians and pharmacists in the Islamic society is vividly documented in biographical lexicons of physicians and findings of the Cairo Genizah starting from the 10th century.
Their names figure in the classical period of Islam among members of entourages of caliphs, sultans, viziers, generals, or governors. The tolerant attitude has changed in the 13th century.
The worsening of the social and legal position of the Jews and Christians during the Mamlūk period in Egypt and Syria is reflected also on the attitude of the Muslim society towards non-Muslim and particularly Jewish physicians. The contemporary Muslim literature portrays a Jewish physician as someone whose only aim is to harm Muslims by false or poisonous drugs and who deprives Muslim physicians of work.
The paper documents this bias, which has its counterpart in medieval and renaissance Christian literature, on citations from various Arabic sources with different agendas, and tries to outline its origins and the impact on the attitude of the Muslim society towards the Jewish minority in the studied period.