Here in the west, in the Untied States, oats are associated with breakfast foods: oatmeal, muesli, cheerios. In more ancient times and right up until the second world war, in the shtetls, oats were also medicine.
In Mordkhe Schaechter's Plant Names in Yiddish, oats were known as האָבער or hober, a name that derives from Old High German "haber" (which, we would argue, is evidence of how "well-rooted" oat is in Ashkenazi Jewish foodways; the Yiddish word is closer to the Old High German form than Modern German _Hafer_).
Schaechter's notes on the grain include a quote from scholar Mordechai Kosover that states oats, along with four other grains (wheat, spelt, barley and rye) "had Yiddish terms all through the history of Ashkenazi Jewry". (original source: Jewish Foods by Mordechai Kosover, 1958)
As we write in our first book Ashkenazi Herbalism, 19th century memoirist Pauline Wengeroff recorded a few of the precious herbal recipes of her grandmother-in-law, Beile. Beile was a folk midwife in Konotop (present day Konotip, Ukraine) at the turn of the twentieth century. Not only was Beile known for delivering the shtetl's babies, but she was also one of the village's revered healers. Beile's recipe for recuperating from a cold called for “oatmeal, cream butter and forty grams of candied sugars.” This concoction seems completely at odds with what might be prescribed today but its nutritious contents most likely helped Beile's patients regain their strength (and it probably tasted pretty good, too). (For Beile's full story, see: Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century by Pauline Wengeroff and translated by Shulamit S. Magnus)
Around the same time that Beile was delivering babies and curing colds in Konotop, the late nineteenth century Polish ethnobotanist, Julian Talko-Hryncewicza was recording the ancient medicinal traditions of folk healers in a multi-ethnic region of then Polish lands, not too far from where Beile was living and practicing. One of the folk remedies commonly given to consumptive (or tubercular) patients that Talko-Hryncewicza documented in what today is western Ukraine was describe thusly:
"combine two glasses of fresh, unskimmed milk with a glass of clean, large-grained oats in a pot; after sealing the lid tightly, place it in a warm oven. Once the oats have swollen, mash them and serve the mixture to the patient with fine sugar."
(the original Polish study: ZARYSY LECZNICTWA LUDOWEGO NA RUSI POŁUDNIOWEJ przez Dra Julijana Talko-Hryncewicza or Sketches of Folk Medicine in Southern Rus by Dr. Julian Talko-Hryncewicz)
This remedy must have been relied upon by healers for untold generations and over large swaths of the region because a few decades later, between the World Wars, this time a Soviet ethnobotanic expedition travelled through Ukraine in order to study the folk healers of that region and learn their ancient remedies. Among the practices they documented, the researchers found that oats were looked to for alleviating respiratory complaints. Additionally, the herb was given as a nourishing food to convalescents, especially as reported in the former shtetl of Kresilev (present day Krasyliv, Ukraine), one of the almost one hundred towns and villages the expedition visited (For more information on the Soviet ethnobotanical survey of Ukraine, see Herbs Used in Ukrainian Folk Medicine by Natalia Ossadcha-Janata)
As we write in Ashkenazi Herbalism, Kresilev was the shtetl where the Jewish midwife and herbalist Shana Gitl lived and practiced (and would have been a contemporary of Beile's) before emigrating to Grand Forks, North Dakota in the early 20th century. While the brief summary of her life as a midwife doesn't include specific herbs, her grand-daughter desribes a woman folk healer who was extremely knowlegeable about plant medicine who most likely concocted her own nutritional and healing oats remedy. (You can find Shana Gitl's complete story in the book And Prairie Dogs Weren't Kosher: Jewish Women in the Upper Midwest Since 1855 by Linda Mack Schloff.)
While we can surmise Shana Gitl must have had her own oats cure, the fact remains that a folk healer's oat recipe (for both respiratory health and revitalization after illness) was recorded by the Soviet ethnobotanical survey in Shana Gitl's shtetl of Kresilev at least two decades after she'd emigrated to the United States.
In trying to piece together a history of shared folk healing in the former Pale of Settlement, it's interesting to note there's quite a distance between Beile's and Shana Gitl's shtetls - from Konotip to Krasyliv today is approximately 334 miles. The similarities between these remedies in shtetls several hundred miles apart suggests the oat remedy was pretty widespread among folk healers in the former Pale of Settlement.
And, if we want to compare east and west, it's interesting to look at standard western sources documenting herbal practices in British lands during approximately the same era that Beile and Shana Gitl were healing their communities. For example, British herbalist Maude Grieve states in A Modern Herbal, "it is unknown when oats were first introduced into Britain". However, regardless of oats debut in Britain, by the early twentieth century, Grieve documents that a "gruel" prepared from oats, enhanced with more flavorful herbs, was a nutritious remedy in convalescence and was especially helpful after childbirth because of its easy digestion and its helpfulness in alleviating inflammation and fever. (for Grieve's entire entry on oats, see: A Modern Herbal (Volume 1, A-H): The Medicinal, Culinary, Cosmetic and Economic Properties, Cultivation and Folk-Lore of Herbs, Grasses, Fungi, Shrubs & Trees with Their Modern Scientific Uses by Maude Grieve or online at: https://botanical.com/)
These are a few of the notes I have on האָבער/hober (or oats or Avena sativa) as this medicinal herb was known by the ancestors in the Pale of Settlement prior to the second World War.
Photo credit:
Avena sativa L. [Gramineae] [Avena orientalis Schreber ] O.W. Thomé, Fl. Deutschl., vol. 1 : t. 66, fig. B (1885) courtesy of plantillustrations.org
