Anti-Jewish polemicists claimed Jews lacked moral conscience, making them lethal doctors

Evidence

In addition to claiming that the dietary restrictions followed by Jews rendered them ignorant of the medicinal properties of numerous non-kosher foods, Alfonso de Valladolid asserted that the Jews did not possess any concept of sin, thus rendering Jewish doctors particularly dangerous: It is clear that [the Jewish doctor] is not [afraid of sinning] because the Jewish wisemen said that the best physicians will go to Hell. And the reason is that the physicians’ intentions are generally to acquire wealth and renown and not to serve God. And this is why they sometimes prolong an illness or make it worse or precipitate the patient’s death. And if such is the nature of healers in general, it is even more so in the case of the Jews, for, by and large, they are not afraid of sinning, as has been said …. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 368

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The claim that Jewish dietary law makes Jewish doctors ignorant of non-kosher foods’ medicinal properties is a striking inversion—restriction as ignorance—that could seed a fiction about medical knowledge and dietary law.