Hi, I'm Ethan Natalman, and this is Psychoactive, a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the show where we talk about all things drugs. But any views expressed here do not represent those of my Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, heed, as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not even represent my own. And nothing contained in this show should be used as medical advice or encouragement to use any type of drugs. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Today, the issue is a bit close to me personally. The subject we're talk about today is Jews and cannabis. And what prompted this was not that I just something like discovered I'm Jewish. I mean Jewish all my life. As many of your listeners hear the references I make from time to time, but there was an exhibit re only in New York that's actually playing for the rest of the year on the subject Jews and cannabis. It's at a famous institute called EVO, the Addition Institute for Jewish Research, which is part of a broader umbrella organization called the Center for Jewish History, which is committed to the preservation and study of the history and culture of East European Jury, but a key academic advisor and the head of their exhibitions, Eddie Portnoy, has always been sort of drawn to looking at the Devian side of things, and he came up with this idea of doing an exhibit on Jews and cannabis, which I just went to in May, which was fascinating. Place was packed and so Eddie, thank you for joining me on Psychoactive. Thanks for having mean so Eddie, what was it that prompted you to, you know, do Jews in cannabis. Well, one of the odd things was a few years ago I happen to see online really kind of beautifully sculpted glass bong in the shape of a manora for the holiday of Hankka, and I thought, you know, this is really kind of an unusual will think it's this confluence of cannabis culture and Jewish culture. And I thought to myself, you know, I work at a historical research institute that has a really enormous archive with something like twenty four million objects and artifacts and documents, and I thought, you know, we've been collecting Jewish material culture for almost a hundred years. This Manura bong is something that's representative of Jewish material culture. This should be in our collection. And so I contacted the company Grav that makes it, and I told them what I just told you, that I work at historical research institute that has this huge archive, and I asked if they would donate it to the archives, and they were very receptive. They said sure, and they then following week it was in my office and as it sat at my desk, I thought to myself, well, the first thing I thought was why would anyone smoke eight bowls of weed at a time. But the second thing I thought was could I feasibly make an exhibit on Jews and cannabis? You know, could this? Could this? Is this something that I could actually create? Are there more items like this? You know, what's the history of this? And I began to do a bit of research and sure enough I came up with really much more than I would ever need to create an exhibit. And we waited until COVID was a little bit calmer to open it. But it opened it. As you said, the place was packed and it's gotten a really great reception. So far. Yeah. Well, you know, when looking at your background and what you've written and done in the past, I feel a certain kinship with you know, when I was doing my own PhD in politics, you know, decades ago, and I was always drawn to the kind of deviant side of things. I was curious about deviant and about even thinking about devians, not just in a sociological context, but a political context and even in a global context. And my senses that you also had that history. I mean, the book you wrote was called I think Bad Rabbi tell us a little bit about that to provide some broader context of this, right, so bad Rabbi. The full title is Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press. This book contains a wide variety of different stories, most of them called from old Yiddish newspapers. And one of the reasons I began doing this was when I was doing research for my dissertation, which was on cartoons of the Yiddish press. I had to read the Yiddish press extensively, and I kept coming across really unusual articles about I guess what you'd call Jews in trouble, but trouble of their own making sort of bunglers and screw ups and you know, criminals and people involved in violent situations. And some of them were really hilarious. Some of them are tragic, some are tragic comic. But I've sort of found this trove of incredibly fascinating stories about Jews, mostly from the early twentieth century, and they weren't the typical things you thought of when you thought of, you know, Yiddish speaking Jews. There are riots and murders and psychics and all kinds of fights. They are knocked down, drag out battles during divorce proceedings in rabbinical courts. It's almost as if it's a kind of Yiddish Jerry Springer show. And when I was at school and deeply studying the Jews of this era, I never came across material like this. But yet in Yiddish newspapers, this kind of material was legion and it really fascinated me, and so I compiled the fair amount of it and produced this book. M Well I saw it. I think also some of the other exhibits, maybe the ones that you've curated. There. There's one called Fight Club about the Jewish boxers and how many Jewish champions that were in boxing. There were Jews in space, jewsing comedy, and Renaissance literature, jew Face, which was kind of the variant of black face, mysterally involving Jewish and Jewish theater. I mean, so it sounds like there's a number of ones where you've kind of been drawn to looking at this sort of surprising ways in which Jews play a role in which you would not expect them to be playing. Right, That's basically my m o. I look for aspects of Jewish life that people really haven't scholars or really anyone else hasn't really touched on a great deal. And often this has to do with deviance, and some of it winds up being really fascinating. And I could just add that, you know, one interesting person who's connected to cannabis is Howard Becker, who's one of the fathers of Devian studies in sociology. And you know, he wrote one of the early academic articles in the Orly nineteen fifties on cannabis use. Howard Becker's I think he wrote Becoming a Marijuana User, where he talked about what it means to learn how to be high. I mean Howard Becker is still in his nineties. He became a very famous sociologist, but no, he was an early really leader in there. Now, one of the things you put in the exhibit is you go back to the period and it's a really very rich period of the nineties, sixties and seventies when you have both the counterculture as well as the Jewish researchers and scientists who are basically, you know, advocating for marijuana reform in the very early stages of the first wave of marijuana reform, and who are disproportionately Jewish at that time. Now, I'll say there was one name in the exhibit I think that I did not recognize. I think it was Walter Bromberg. Walter Bromberg, who was a psychiatrist, you know, working in the nineteen thirties at Bellevue Hospital and he did some of the first research on marijuana smokers who had been brought into his ward and he produced i think his first article in nineteen thirty four, and what he found was brilliant opposition to what was happening in the press, where marijuana was perceived as you know, something that caused people to engage in violence. Or made them psychotic in some way. He found that it didn't do that at all. His findings showed that marijuana was not particularly detrimental, at least not in the same way as you know, opium, morphine or you know, even alcohol. Right, And his recommendations I think shaped the LaGuardia Commission, which was one of the early governmental commissions in the US to come out basically advocating for some form of decriminalization of cannabis back in the thirties, and headed up or appointed by a mayor, Fiero LaGuardia, Italian name but half Jewish, right right, Yeah, you'd just speaking Italian mayor. I'll tell you there was a moment I remember in nineteen eighties seven, and I had just started teaching at Princeton and been asked to teach a corse on drug policy and gave me an opportunity to invite some of the more prominent figures in and I remember that's how I met Andrew Wild who was actually my very first guest on Psychoactive almost a year or so ago. And I'm sitting there having dinner with Andy, and he says, he's you ever wonder or maybe worry about how many Jews are involved, and we were just talking about cannabis, but brought a drug policy reform because you know, it was him. Then there was Arnold Treeback, who had just co created the Drug Policy Foundation to advocate against the drug war. But then you had Lester grin Spoon Harvard Medical School and Norman Zendberg at Harvard Medical School. And you had Ed Brecker, who had written the Editors of Consumers Report, which is a breakthrough book challenging the major drug work. John Kaplan, a Standford law professor who together with Grinspoon, wrote a couple of the key books in the early seventies, basically advocating for some reform. And so it raises the interesting question of was there ever a sense of marijuana legalist Asian or marijuana being something of a Jewish conspiracy. Some people thought, so, you know, one of those people being Richard Nixon. Well, now that you mentioned Nixon, I mean, let's just go to the famous clip of his He's talking to hr Holden and his aid and he's complaining about marijuana and Jews Jewish matter always. So just in case you couldn't make out what Nixon was saying, there he says, you know, it's a funny thing. Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the crisis the matter with the Jews? Bob? He says to Bob Holdman, what's the matter with them? I suppose it's because most of them are psychiatrists. So, Eddie, what's your take on that Nixon quote? Right? So, on the one hand, it's hilarious, and on the other hand, and it's terrible because you know, it obviously reveals Nixon's anti Semitism and his obvious pension for conspiracy theory. But what's actually happening here is this quote was recorded in the Oval office on his secret recording apparatus on I Believe one, and he was about to officially launch his drug war, and Lester Grinsapon's book Reconsidering Marijuana had come out a few weeks earlier, and this was a book written by a Harvard University psychiatry professor published by Harvard University Press. It's clearly something that's respected and legitimate. And the end result is that marijuana is not detrimental, it's even something that should be legalized. And obviously this is backed up by years of research, and so Nixon is furious because he's about to launch the drug war and this very obviously Jewish psychiatrist comes out with this book that's going to be problematic for him. And it's connected to this in some way. Is the other people who are involved in legalization and some of the people who Nixon is also trying to get at with the drug war are the Yippies, who are also Certainly anyone can join the Yippies, and probably most of you know, I don't think that there was any kind of official membership. So the Yippies was a political organization. Some people call them the groucho Marxists. They were this kind of radical left wing political group who was very performative some of the things they did. And if anyone saw the recent Chicago Seven movie, the Chicago Seven essentially the founders of the Yippies, and they would go into the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and in the middle of trading throw out hundreds of dollar bills and the traders would all go running to grab the dollar bills, and it was obviously meant to embarrass them. They also did things like threatened to spike the water system of Chicago with LSD. During the night Democratic Convention, they attempted to levitate the Pentagon. They were all kinds of funny formative activities. But one of the interesting things that I actually didn't know about the Hippies until I started doing research on this was that marijuana legalization was central to their political platform. And in fact, their official flag, which is a black flag with a red star, also has a marijuana leaf embossed on it. And if you read their newspapers, among them the Yipster Times or Overthrow, they're full of articles about legalization and the importance of legalization. So Nixon hated these people, and obviously they hated Nixon as well, and so they were always at each other's streaks. But one way that Nixon could harm them was by instituting a drug war in which they would wind up in jail. And so that was part and parcel of the drug wars. Put users in jail and use resources for that instead of other possibly more useful matters. And it just so happens that all five of the founders of the Yippies were Jewish, I mean Abbie Hofman and his wife Anita, and Jerry Rubin, who were both in the trilog Chicago seven and Nancy Krishan and Paul Krasner. So once again, none of them probably all that connected in their adult lives to their judaism, but nonetheless organizing this kind of anarchistic group. And then of course he had Alan Ginsburg, right, the famous poet, right. Yeah, so Ginsburg he was actually one of really the early adopters of legalization as a platform. In nineteen sixty four, he and Ed Sanders of the Fugs, if anyone remembers, the Fugs band did really interesting stuff, actually did some Yiddish songs, so they also had a Yiddish connection. But Alan Ginsburg and had Sanders founded Limar or legalized marijuana in New York, and in late ninety four began organizing public protests in support of marijuana legalization. These were really, I believe, the first public protests in support of legalization. He also wrote articles, I think in the Atlantic promoting legalization. He was very active in this regard, and I guess it's somewhat unusual to have a literary figure do this. But one interesting thing here is the connection he makes between generation. So one interesting thing about Ginsberg iscause I understand that he began to use cannabis as a results of his connection with the jazz scene. Jazz musicians have been using cannabis since the twenties, and he's also this link between the jazz scene and the popularization of cannabis and the nineties sixties counterculture, which he's also involved in, And so that makes him a kind of unusual figure in that regard. Well, you know, there's also something else because you go back to the thirties, right when you had both very common marijuana use among jazz musicians. Annu also had beginnings of reefer madness with Harry ann Slinger, the head of the FARO Bureau of Narcotics and others. But I mean that was the point where you had many musicians right who had reefer songs, and many of them didn't even have lyrics. But I think that you had Fats Waller and Duke Ellington and Jeane Krupa. But then you had a Jewish guy like Benny Goodman, the famous clarinetist who had his song Texas tea Party. And then the one who perhaps me the greatest connection here was Mesro, a clarinetist. Among other things, he did a song sending the viper, but who had other connections? So just tell us a little bit about miss Misroe. Right, So, mess Mesro was born in Chicago, learned to play saxophone in reform school. He was, you know, admittedly not a great kid, but learning to play saxophone kind of saved him. He got into the jazz scene in Chicago, played with a number of great and as a jazz musician, he began using cannabis because apparently a lot of people who were doing it, and he, while in Chicago, made a connection with a particular Mexican dealer who apparently had higher quality marijuana than others. In late twenties, he moved to New York to become part of the Harlem jazz scene. And he's not really able to support himself. So because he has this Mexican connection, he begins selling marijuana and apparently he becomes one of the most popular figures in Harlem. Because of this, he becomes Louis Armstrong's personal dealer. Louis Armstrong was frequent user. He called it muggles, which he references in a number of his songs. And as you said, mes Mesro gets named dropped in a lot of songs. In fact, in Harlem of the nineteen thirties, marijuana was known as mez and he used to sell these pre roles that everyone called mes roles. And he was Albert Goldman, who's this journalist and scholar and well known biographer of people like John Lennon and Lenny Bruce and Elvis. He wrote a history of Marijuana America that came out in late seventies and he wrote that mesro was really one of the most seminal figures in the popularization of cannabis in the United States. And yet to a certain degree, he's been forgotten in this regard, you know, with the exception of mentioned in these books. Which is interesting here is he's this Jewish kid from Chicago who gets involved in the jazz scene, gets involved with cannabis use and sales in New York and then Alan Ginsberg winds up as a fan of jazz, going to show starts smoking cannabis because of that, and then he becomes this link to the counterculture and the ultimate large scale popularization of marijuana use as part of this growing youth culture, him being the marijuana deal supplier for the most famous marijuana use her in American history, which was Louis Armstrong, You know, Louie Armstrong, clearly not the black Man, a Baptist, I think, but somebody who wore a star of David all his adult life. I think because he had a very close relationship with the Jewish family when he was a kid, and he saw that family is having kind of enabled him to help him become who he was, not least by helping him buy his first trumpet when he was very younger. Yeah, so you get the counterculture from the thirties and the jazz era and then going into the sixties, and then in the exhibit you mentioned, I think some of the musicians famous Jewish musicians, although they were may not have been known for being famous because they were Jewish. But one I think was shel Silverstein, right, who was a writer and a poet, a cartoonist, songware player. I think it was most famous for children's books like The Giving Tree and A Light in the Attic. And he also wrote that Johnny Cash song A Boy named Sue. But what was his contribution to marijuana songology? Verstein wrote, I got stone and I missed it missed. It's a song about someone who gets high and then misses out on some things. So it's the sort of comic song about you know what happens to you if you get too high? So Phillips wrote, you can't get stone enough. And so this is obviously a popular thematic in the nineties sixties, all of these you know, folk singers and rock stars would come to sing songs about cannabis in some way. We'll be talking more after we hear this ad. Now, the most famous song I think that's associated with marijuana but may not actually have been about marijuana, was by a guy named Bob Zimmerman who became Bob Diller, right right, Rainy Day Woman, Yeah, yeah, a day Women number twelve and thirty five and everybody must get stoned. But was that actually about getting high? Right? So he claims it's not. He claims it's about getting stone in the biblical sense of people stoning you if you've done something wrong. But he's obviously referencing getting stone, you know, getting high. There's no question that that's the reference, and that's clearly what made the song funny and popular, even though he's evidently talking about something else. Dylan also famously introduced the Beatles to marijuana, and by doing so may have changed the course of music history. Although interesting, right Ringo Star from the Beatles, I think at one point writes an anti marijuana's song. And I was actually talking Eddie to a Steve Bloom, you know who's been a marijuana journalist for decades at high times. Now he has lived stoner, and he pointed me to another song called the Pot Smokers Song by Neil Diamond in eight Do you know about this? But ye, I didn't know about it. That sounds great, I'll tell you it's an anti marijuana song. I think Neil Diamond had visited Phoenix House, the drug treatment facility absence only drug treatment facility and headed by Mitch Rosenthal, also Jewish and a notorious kind of drug warrior, and Neil Diamond writes this terrible song, the Pot Smoker's Song, all anti marijuana, all equating it with heroin, and then years later he basically Recn's He says that writing that song almost destroyed his career. He realized it was a difference between marijuana and heroin. So yeah, different twist on the marijuana and songs aspect to all of this stuff. Wow, that's so fascinating. I guess it's not as big of a hit as Sweet Caroline. No, No, that's right, that's right, exactly lucky for him. But then if you jump forward Amy Winehouse right, which you know, dies tragically in her mid to late twenties and writes with the rehab song. But she has another song addicted. It's clearly something she enjoys. That's the gist of the lyric. Yeah, yeah, I think the key was you smoke all my weed man, you gotta call the green man. And then separately, there is in the Jewish music world of Klezmer music. You introduced me to something there I knew nothing about. Right. This is a song by the Kleismatics. Lyrics are written by Michael Wex. It's sheer more lakhan if and it's the reefer song in Yiddish, then run out and in Yiddish there are there are a fair number of drinking songs, and the Klismatics as a band who helped revive Klezmer music, which is Jewish traditional Eastern European music that most often gets played at weddings and sort of celebratory events. They decided that they wanted to put in an album of drinking songs, and they felt that they needed to update their material and have a song about smoking weeds. So they created this Yiddish reefer song, and I believe it's the only song in Yiddish about smoking cannabis. One of the points you made at the opening of the exhibit, and it was as part of the exhibit from which I learned the most, was that in some respects, when you look at the history of Jews in cannabis, there's relatively little, almost nothing in terms of the history of Jews in Europe, in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Yiddish Europe, Christian Europe, that it was sort of absent. And if you really want to look at the history of Jews and cannabis, you have to go back, maybe to the Bible or else to the role of the Jews, the Sephardic Jews as opposed to the ash Can Nazi Jews in Europe, the Sephardic Jews living in North Africa, in Egypt and Spain, where there is the more of a connection. And maybe you could just tell us a little bit about the origins of cannabis in the Bible, and then continuing through into the Middle Ages in that part of the world. Cannabis has been around, obviously for thousands of years. It's been in the Middle East for thousands of years. It's mentioned in the Bible and the Talmud, and the Talmud which is compendium of Jewish law, as well as a number of other religious texts. And in the Bible they refer to something called kannebos, and this is Hebrew, and it's usually translated as fragrant stock or aromatic cane, And in Exodus, for example, it's it's used to make anointing oil. Some translators call it sweet calamus, which is another plant. It's not really clear that that's what it is at all, and it's also not clear that it's actually cannabis, but a number of medieval rabbis and scholars today believe that it is cannabis, and one of its roles in the Bible, in addition to being used in making anointing oil, is as part of something called the cat at which which is a mixture of herbs and spices that was produced to create incense that was burned in the ancient temple in Jerusalem. And the burning of incense actually had was an integral part of Jewish ritual, and so this kind of bossum appears in this regard. And so one component of this squatt or the incense that's burned in the temple is something called the malaya shan or, which in Hebrew means this smoke riser, and it's an element that apparently makes the smoke go directly up. And there's a twelfth century Spanish rabbi is known as Nahumanities in his commentaries on Exodus, seems to claim that this sort of mysterious element, the smoke razer is kannebosum or cannabis. Additionally, there's the recipe for this incense is not found in the Bible, It's not found anywhere, and in fact, the recipe itself was held by a particular family in Jerusalem, the of Tina's family, and they notoriously refused to tell anyone what exactly was in it, and so no one really knows. There are a number of books that claim to know what exactly is in it, but apparently no one. No one actually does know. And there is also just more evidence as to what kind of bosa maybe in the Talmud, there's a story and the Talmud, as I said, as a compendium of Jewish law. There's a story in which Rabbi Akiva finds a boy in Jerusalem laughing and crying at the same time, and so he asks them, you know, why, what's going on while you're laughing and crying at the same time. And it turned out that he was in a field of the secret herb that made part of this incense. And so I think that if you're in a field of this herb that's part of this incense, and you're laughing and you're crying, there's something about a type of psychoactive ingredient that may be part of that. Another aspect to this is my Monitis, who's another well known medieval rabbi, I mean, perhaps the greatest of all the medieval era right Jewish philosophers. And he was an astronomer, He was a physician, a personal physician to the Sultan salad In. So I mean really, I mean, of all the great Jewish scholars, probably the ones who my Monity stands out one of the best known from this era. So all of these rabbis and scholars attempt to make sense of the sort of the flora and the fauna that's in the Bible, and so of course my monty is his definition of kane bosm is that it's a reddish green plant. It's used in medicine, and it's imported from India. India had long been a source for cannabis, and this is more evidence that kind of bosum does appear to actually be cannabis. Additionally, there was a Polish scholar named Jula Bennett who claimed that linguistically, kind of bosam came from the Scythian word, and the Scythians were a Middle Eastern tribe that preceded the Israelites I think by number of thousands of years or hundreds of years, and they were known to have used cannabis and their rituals. Is it just coincidence that kind of bosam sounds so much like cannabis. It may be, but it's actually not clear. It may be coincidence, and it may be that that's where the etymology actually stems from. And there is archaeological evidence also from some of the digs in Israel and Palestine. Looking at right, that's correct. So in the nineteen sixties, archaeologists began to excavate a dig of an ancient synagogue in a town called Telerod, which is near the Dead Sea, and it was actually be in the nineties sixties. But one of the things they found that they didn't investigate was that there are two small altars in this synagogue ruin and on the tops of the altars was the burned residue of some substance. So they took it for carbon dating and for chemical analysis, and they found that one the residue was from the third century, which is when the synagogue was apparently active, and on one of the altars was the burned residue of frankinsense, and the other altar was the burned residue of cannabis, and they found cannabinoids found cb d, t h C, CBN, And this is, you know, yet another indication that the ancient Hebrews were burning cannabis in religious ceremonies, and apparently not only the temple in Jerusalem. So what's fascinating here is and obviously with the advent of the diaspora two thousand years ago along the way, there are certain rituals that you're not you know, either because they must be performed in Jerusalem in the Temple or because they got us along the way that have just sort of disappeared from normative Jewish ceremony, and these appeared to be one of them. I mean, we still on Saturday night, at the end of the Sabbath, a ritual called Havdalah is performed, which separates the holiness of the Sabbath from the secularity of the work a day week. And part of that ceremony is to smell sweet herbs, and so that maybe the remnant of the use of incense in ancient times. It's not it's entirely clear, but it maybe or the ritual just disappeared entirely. But there are currently people who are trying to reintegrate cannabis use into Jewish ritual, which is you know something that's that's pretty fascinating. Yeah, I think you're talking about. There's a cannabis sader out in Oregon and a couple of Roy and Clear Kaufman organized some of your In fact, I was invited to it. I was unable to go. I was very Sabbath. They came out with a cannabis Agata and created a nonprofit called They are basically I think too, you know, the substitute cannabis for let us the Sader plate and promote consumption of cannabis as part of the passover. Going back to the ancient stuff, you also had a couple of posts in an exhibit involving the Cairo Geniza and just maybe explain what that was and what was found there. Right, So this isn't really ancient, it's really from the medieval period. It's from the eleventh through the fourteen centuries. And you know, this is one of the things that I found in Eastern Europe and in Europe, and generally you really don't find much activity, and there's a little bit, but you don't find much activity with Jews and cannabis or really many people in cannabis. I mean, there's some intellectuals who sort of explore it, and I'm sort of a mass scale. Cannabis is available for rope making or textiles, but it's not used as as an intoxican at all. So when I began this research, one of the things I found was I needed to find Jews who were in an area where cannabis was used regularly, and that turned out to be the Middle East, where hashish has been a popular intoxican for thousands of years, and so Jews who live in the Middle East who are either Safardim or the descendants of Spanish Jews or Miserachim who are considered Eastern Jews or Jews who have remained in the Middle East from the beginning. They were dispersed throughout North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula and other places, generally throughout the Middle East, and because Hashish was was generally popular, they used it as well. You know, Jews always participated to varying degrees in the cultures in which they reside, and so because has she was commonly used in these places, they did as well. And so generally you don't find documentary evidence of things like hashish use. It's you know, like trying to find documentary evidence of something someone eight, although you can sometimes find that in some ways. But there was a synagogue in Egypt called the Benezer Synagogue, and most synagogues, I would say almost all synagogues have a special room called the giniza. And what that essentially is is a storage room for damaged documents, damaged prayer books, damaged bibles, damaged torahs, damaged Talmud's, things that people can no longer use. And the reason that these things need to be stored is that, according to Jewish tradition, you're not allowed to just casually throw these books away because they contain the name of God, and as a result, you have to store them until you have enough to bury them in a ceremony, which is what's traditionally done. So in the Benezer Synagogue, beginning in the ninth century, they began throwing away the books that were damaged, and in addition to books, it turned out that for the next thousand years until the nineteenth century, this community throughout hundreds of thousands of documents that ranged from wedding contracts, business contracts, all kinds of literature ranging from prose to poetry to popular songs, letters, all kinds of correspondence to and from businesses, individuals, the government. And it is an incredible historical trove of documentary evidence that shows how this community lived and what they did with their interests were, what literature they read, all kinds of fascinating aspects that we would never know otherwise had this stuff actually gotten thrown away. This ins it was discovered in the late nineteenth century by scholars who began researching it and also began taking it to wherever they lived. So there's a huge trove of it in St. Petersburg, it's a huge trove of it in Cambridge, England, there's trove of it to New York that Jewish Theological Seminary, and in a variety of other places. But there are now certain projects scholars who focus on this, and one of them is the Princeton guinessa project where they've taken digitized images of a lot of these documents and uh created databases of them. And so I looked in their database and discovered that there were a number of documents that referenced Hashish, and theoretically there shouldn't be surprising. Initially I was surprised, but then once I thought about the society in which they lived, it really made sense. And so, you know, there are things like letters to people, and I can read the text of one of them, and a lot of this material is written in Judeo Arabic, which is Jewish version of Arabic that's written in Hebrew letters and was the vernacular of the Jews in this time and place, and so this letter is it's very short, and it's dated to the from the twelfth to the thirteen centuries, and it reads as follows, me the esteemed Elder Abu el Hassan, God preserve him graciously obtained for the bear with the silver that he has fifty deer hums imitation sem nuty silk. He also has two carrots of ingots silver. Obtain hashish for me with them after I kiss your hands and feet peace. This is like a twelve th century venmo, please buy me wheat. You know, here's money, Please buy me wait, which shouldn't come as a surprise. But you know, when people think about ancient or medieval societies and the way that people live, there's just you know, there's a certain certain sensibility or certain stereotypes that people have, and hashish usage is not is generally not one of them. Like I never learned about Joos using hasheesh in Hebrew school. If I did, I might have stayed in Hebrew school. But certain things get canonized, and this is not one of them. There are a number of works by a particular writer that we're found, and he's thought to have lived in mom Look ruled Egypt around thirteen hundred from the year thirteen hundred and he calls himself Nasir the Hebrew litera tour. They think he's kind of like a popular bard. He sings his songs at weddings and in the marketplace, in another sort of popular events. And a number of his songs were found in the Genisa, and one of them is called Wine My Religion, and it's basically a wine versus Hashish battle song. It's like a rap battle, you know, between wine and hashe like again, this is not something you necessarily expect from the fourteenth century, written in Judeo Arabic, found in a synagogue waist bin. But one of the things he does is he Nasir really likes wine. He loves wine, and he really dislikes hashish and the people that use it. And so in the song he talks about how hash has a way of scrambling your brain. People that use it they eat everything in sight, their eyes turn all red, they slack off at work. These are the same stereotypes that people discussed today. But yet you have this early fourteenth century reference to it in Judeo Arabic that in consideration of Jewish documents that people dig out of archives, this is not something that gets a lot of play in the scholarly world. So for me, this is really kind of a fascinating reference. I mean, obviously Nasir doesn't like hashish, but it clearly references Jews who do, and there were quite clearly Jews who were using it in fourteenth century Egypt and doubtlessly all over North Africa in the Middle East because it was just commonly used. In the exhibit, there are a number of other references to this kind of usage as well. Let's take a break here and go to an ad. You have another part of the exhibit where you briefly mentioned this tradition and Judaism of gaumatria or numerology right where letters have numerical values. And for many people they most familiar with this is that typically if you see Jews wearing anything that's kind of Jewish oriented around their neck on a necklace, it might be the star of David, or the other thing will be the high the letters, and you would right and is eight, and you would is ten as eighteen and that means light. But you had something there about the possible numerology around four, right, So gamatri or or Hebrew numerology, and every Hebrew letters are accorded in numeric value, and this is most prominently used in Kabala. And what they do is they take these numbers and they create words out of them, or they take words and they add up their numeric value and they create new words or phrases or things like that. Using this system. The number four twenty turns into word ashan, which is smoke in Hebrew. It turns into a lot of other words as well. But this was useful for us because we have this really kind of with this brilliant artist Steve Marcus make this amazing poster that you know, has four twenty at the top and the word has shot at the bottom and a plume of smoke creating the number four twenty and also coincidentally insaid that the kids initially came up with four twenty, which is apparently the time they used to leave school and go get high as a code word for that was a group of mostly Jewish kids who called themselves the wal Does and they were, you know, somewhere in northern California. And this is obviously coincidence, but it's a good coincidence. Yeah, you know, it's funny because when you think about that strand of Judaism, Hasidic Judaism, a real kind of more spiritually oriented Judaism in a way, and one in where there's more drinking and dancing in addition to all of the scholarship you see with other elements of Judaism, but and with the ballsh until the founder of that some hundreds of years ago, you would think that there would have been cannabis associate with that, but I guess simply because it just wasn't around in that part of the world were Jews were living in central eastern Europe, they just didn't know about if they didn't have access to it or anything like that. Right right there is an author whose name is Josef le Needleman who wrote a book called Cannabis Hasidus, and one of the things that he argues is that all of the early Hasidic masters smoked pipes, and they were known to reach heights of ecstasy after smoking their pipes. So his claim is that they possibly were smoking cannabis, although it's not clear that historically it was actually available, but you never know. It's never mentioned explicitly anywhere, but it's still a fascinating idea. What's interesting today is that because cannabis is now legal in more places than it had been, there are Hasidium and other Orthodox Jews who are now using cannabis. Certainly they were using it before under the radar. But three years ago I was in Megi Budge, which is a town in Ukraine where the Balshamtov, the founder of Hasidism, is buried, and when we arrived there at the cemetery, the first thing we saw was a group of hassid Um sharing a joint, and so that was not expected, but also to a certain degree, I guess, not completely unexpected. And it's really interesting because you see now, I mean, there's videos on YouTube of these hyper orthodox ninety year old, you know, Orthodox rabbis blessing medical marijuana. And I know that in my own interactions with some of the Lebovit, the Hasidic community in Brooklyn, I can see there's an ease around marijuana. This seems to be that even though I guess an Orthodox Judaism, it's not treated the same as alcohol. There's a sense in which there seems to be a greater toleration of it, and maybe not just for medical but even sometimes outside the medical. But what's your perspective on this right there, I think definitely for medical and you know, since it's become legal, especially in New York, I think you'll find that it will become a regular feature of theirs and many other people's lives. And one of the reasons is that there's a ruling or a law in Judaism called din, which means the law of the land is the law. And what that means is that if something is illegal in wherever you live, it's also illegal for you as a Jew. And if it's permitted, it's also permitted to you as a Jew. I mean, obviously something like bacon is not going to be permitted, but because cannabis is available as a medication and as something recreational, this is something that you'll find Orthodox Jews using it just like everyone else does. Yeah. Often times wonder about when tobacco enters Europe in the sixteen hundreds and then just sort of takes over Europe during the seventeenth centuries, cetera. I wonder how the Jewish scholars and rabbis dealt with that at the time, and whether it was something like marijuana where it's initially a look down upon or prohibited and then depending upon what the broader society says about its legality, that shapes them. But do you have any idea about how how tobacco I don't, but it's a great question. I don't actually know. But tobacco, especially among Hassidam, became extremely popular obviously throughout Europe. It was like spread like wildfire. You know, everyone spoke. It was extremely common. It was also common, especially if I mentioned earlier than all the early Hasidic masters smoked pipes and they also did snuff was also extremely popular there as well, So using tobacco in a variety of ways was very common. I don't know if initially Rabbis looked at it a scance or not, but if it was legal and wasn't perceived as harmful, then it was okay and certainly acceptable for use. Although you can't smoke chopper course, well, I mean most earingshibit folks on the US. But obviously there's this part about Israel, and Israel, you know, in recent decades really became the epicenter of medical marijuana research. And you have a little part there about Raphael michelan sort of the godfather of marijuana research. So tell us about your interactions with him. Right, So, Rafel Maulm is in his nineties. I think he's still doing research and as you said, he's the godfather of cannabis research. He was a young chemist. He got a PhD in chemistry from the Whitesman Institute and when he started his career, he realized that he was in a small country and he had a small research budget, and that if he wanted to make a mark in his field, he would have to engage in research on a topic that was not typically researched in big countries with big institutions that had big research budgets. And he happened to read about hashisha arrests in the newspapers and he thought, you know, this is maybe a possibility for something to work on. So he contacted the police and he asked them if he told them that he was a chemist, you know, working at Hebrew University, and he asked that if they would give him, you know, the hashish that they had confiscated, and they agreed and he began to work on it, and in the early nineteen sixties he became the first chemist to isolate th HC and CBD. And he understood even then that these substances would come to have medical applications, and he's worked on cannabis entire career. Mostly his his work focuses on cannabinoids, and by the early nineties he and his colleagues discovered the endocannabinoid system, which is a complex cell signaling system that regulates a variety of bodily functions in mammals. And this includes appetite, mood, memory, sleep, and it's it's almost as if the human body produces its own version of THC in order to regulate homeostasis, which bodies required order to maintain stability. And so he's really a major figure in cannabis research, and he very much helped and it took it really took way too long. It took, you know, so many years to break the stigma on cannabis as something legitimate on which to research. His initial research has led to all kinds of successful trials that indicate the medicinal value of cannabis for a wide variety of ailments. He's really really a major figure and his work services the basis for for all cannabis research today. But also, you know, one of the ironies here is that creational use is not legal in Israel. Nowtheless, Israel is still at the forefront of cannabis research. They've created hundreds of different kinds of strains of medical marijuana that you know, target specific ailments, have all undergone clinical trials. Apparently that also export a lot of medical marijuana. Al Right, well, let's just come back a bit to the president. And in the United States, I mean, obviously there were all of the scholars ACT in the late sixties, early seventies, Grinspoon and Zendberg, Andy Wile and others. More recently, there's Julie Holland, who you have in the exhibit. There is Ethan Roussel of kind of famed medical marij wanna research who sounds Italian but in fact is Sephardic Jewish, and many Safari Jews have names that sound like their Italian Mitch early wine professor Suny Albany, whose writing was crucial in the early two thousands in this area. But then there's the political domain here. I was thinking about the fact that if you look at the politicians, i mean even at the national level, who had been deeply involved in cannabis reform, probably the major champion of marijuana reform going back a decade ago was Barney Frank, you know, Jewish, right, and then Earl Blumenauer, who's not Jewish, Morrigan steps into his shoes. But if you look at the major marijuana bill coming out of Congress each year and out of the House, it's Jerry Nadlin, my congressman on the Upper West Side. And then if you look at on the Senate side, who's the trio leading the marijuana legalization effort. It's Chuck Schumer, the Jewish New York Senator who's a majority leader. It's Ron Wyden from Oregon, also Jewish, and it's Corey Booker, who has typically been described as the most Jewish nine Jew in the US Senate. But then I looked back Eddie historically, and if you look at the early marijuana decriminalization bills in Congress in the seventies, the two sponsors were Ed Cootch then a liberal Jewish congressman in New York who became something of a drug warrior when he became mayor, and Jacob Javitt, the liberal Jewish senator from New York as well. And so, I mean, you know, I sometimes worry about even pointing out all these Jewish connections, and I kind of like wishing something here to be Oh my god, federal marijuana legalization is entirely a Jewish conspiracy here, but it's really striking the extent to which it's been playing a very leading role on marijuana reform, and any thoughts about that. Part of this I think comes from the traditional Jewish place in society, which is off to the side. And what I mean by that is, for thousands of years, and especially in the medieval period, Jews did not have any sort of citizenship on power with anyone else I mean, and obviously in medieval society has no one really had anything called citizenship. But they were prohibited from engaging in certain kinds of occupations, they were prohibited from owning land, they were forced into certain kinds of occupations, and their opportunities were very much limited. And this is something that occurred for many centuries, and as a result, Jews were really required to scramble to make a living, and that forced them to engage in either black market or gray market activities, and this to a certain became a Jewish tradition. And because of this you find Jews getting involved in let's say, risky New technologies. You can think of things like the early film industry or the early recording industry. People tend to forget that in the late nineteenth early twentieth century Jews couldn't enter proper society. You find this tendency for Jews to gear themselves to doing things that are sometimes risky but also sometimes have a big payoff. So when it comes to something like cannabis, Jews saw this risk. They also, to a certain degree, coming from a different direction, saw this kind of injustice that this substance was illegal when it was clearly not particularly harmful or even beneficial. Additionally, with the advent of the drug war, the sense of justice kicked in even more because not only they as in the guise of the hippies or other members of other left wing organization, but they also clearly saw that minorities were suffering the most from interdiction during the drug war. That sense of justice that tends to be part of especially secular Jewish culture really kicked in and became part of this equation. But you know, it's also a moment to talk about and when it comes to the money and the politics of this thing. You know, when I think back to six when we did the first medical marijuana initiative. Now, the person who instigated it was Dennis Barron, not Jewish, you know, and AIDS activists in San Francisco who drafted it. But then I came in in order to raise the money and put together the campaign the whole thing, and the guy I hired to leave the campaign was Bill Zimmerman, Jewish, and the three major donors were George Sorrows and Peter Lewis, the head of Progressive Insurance, and George zimmer the founder of the Men's Warehouse, all Jewish, So I mean essentially it was quote unquote Jewish money and I was the kind of major doma running the thing. And Bill zmin who basically led that first medicalmar Wana initiative and basically the next half dozen that came thereafter. On the other hand, when you look at some of the tax that were coming directed at, especially Sorrows and me back years ago on that one of them was a m Rosenthal, the Jewish former you know, executitor of the New York Times, who was a rabid drug warrior. It was Mitch Rosenthal, Jewish, who was a founder of Phoenix House and radically in support of the drug war. It was her cleber professor at Columbia and Yale who was the deputy drugs are into the first drugs are William Bennett, right, it was a Senator from California, Diane Feinstein, and more recently a Congresswoman from Florida, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. So there's been a healthy dose of Jewishness on the anti marijuana and pro drug war side as well. Now, their numbers and influence obviously don't compare to the role of Jews on the kind of pro reform side, But I think we need to point out that it's not all been one sided in this regard. Sure, of course not it never is. Obviously, the anti semis will will claim if there's some sort of conspiracy. But there's there's an expression in Yiddish Zemlin of I should blink that which means if you open a role, a jewel pop out, And what that really means is you could find Jews everywhere when you want them and when you don't want them. So and it's the same in this matter as well. Jewish drug warriors and there are Jews who are for the legalization of Yeah no, I guess that's true. Well, just to bring it up right now to the whole marijuana industry that's booming. I was trying to figure out it would almost make sense that Jews would play a disproportionate role in this, because Jews are deeply involved and successful in commerce, disproportionally wealthy relative to the average part of the American population. But I'm wondering if that's fully true when I look around at some of the biggest companies, I was trying to go through a list to them, and I'm seeing, you know, benk Hold or a Green Thumb. You know, you must have looked into this some what what was your take on that? First of all, there are hundreds thousands of new companies and it's impossible to keep track of them, so it's really hard to say. My general perception is that there are a lot of Jews involved in this industry. I would suspect that they're not a majority, and I'm talking current, but I would say that they're probably is a pretty significant minority. I guess could well be, could will be. Welly, let me ask you. I mean, this has been fascinating for me. I love the fact that we intersected on this issue here, What do you imagine? I mean, can you imagine doing an episode on Jews and some other element of psychoactive drugs in the future, or is this going to be it for evil exhibits on Jews and psychoactive drugs of any sort. You know, if something comes up, it's always possible. And I will say that when I first broached this idea to a number of people, the first thing out of their mouths was you gotta do psychedelics, you know, Jews and psychedelics, and I I would want to wait for that. I want to silo cannabis because it's something you know, distinct, and I don't want to sort of mix it up with something else. But if I find that, like I did with cannabis, that there is a significant history to this, and there's significant activity on the part of Jews, either in the industries or in creating new rituals, then I'm open to anything that. I think any kind of culture that people create that's sort of based their traditions is fascinating to me. And if I'm able to develop something on Jews and psychedelics, I'd be happy to well. And if you go that way, remember to ask me about the time twenty years ago when Ramdas otherwise known as Richard Albert, who had been Timothy Larry's colleague at Harvard, he was doing his ram Das and Friends gathering at the Omega Institute of New York. It was just a couple of weeks after nine eleven and two thousand and one, and he invited me to join the other DOSses, you know, Lamassuria Doss and Christna Doss and Ron Das. So I got to be Ethan Dos for a week, and it turned out that Junkie Poor was in the middle of the week, and so I started ragging on all of them, like here we are probably half the people act as gathering our lab to Jews, right, And if you think about it, what did ram Das, Krishna Doss, Lamassiria Dos all having common. They all were bar mitzvooed, they all did psychedelics. They all went to India to find their guru. They all came back to America to become a spiritual leaders who had ambivident relationships, you know, with their judys. And then a couple of days there they're all kind of sheepish about it and A couple of days later, Ron Dass pulls me into his room, gets me, sticks a joint in my mouth this when he was smoking seven, gets me high, and he says, Ethan, I want you to league called kneed Ray Services tonight and for his whole group. And so that like me and Rondas and Lamassuria DAWs and Mickey Lemley also Jewish. He was doing a documentary about ron Dust. Got up there and I let a call kneed Ury Service at Ron Dawson friends gathering back, you know, two weeks after nine eleven. It was one of the more remarkable moments in my wife, I'll tell you that. That's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing. All right, you know what you're in the exhibit? Oh well, Guyle, that about getting I'll get a two friend in that case. But Eddie, listen, I think he did a marvelous job with the exhibit. I'm so glad you did. It was so much fantastic energy and enthusiasm. You put together a great panel when you're there. And so I surely hope that EVO is going to be doing other exhibits involving Jews and psychoactive drugs. As for this one, it will be still showing at EVO. That's why I the o based at the Center for Jewish History sixteen Street in New York, or just google Juice in Cannabis. It's going to be showing there through the end of the year. If you're visiting New York or living New York, I strongly encourage you to check it out. And Eddie, thank you ever so much for being my guest on Psychoactive. Thank you had a great time. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please tell your friends about it, or you can write us a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like to share your own stories, comments and ideas, then leave us a message at one eight three three seven seven nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com or find me on Twitter at Ethan natal Man. You can also find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted by me Ethan Nadelman. It's for deduced by noam Osband and Josh Stain. The executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio and me Ethan Edelman. Our music is by Ari Blusien and a special thanks to A. Brios F Bianca Grimshaw and Robert bb. Next week I'll be talking with Norman Ohler, an award winning German novelist, screenwriter and journalist who has written a fascinating book called Blitzed All about the use of methamphetamine and other drugs by Hitler and a German military during World War Two. No army in the world I've ever done this to to march for three days and three ninths because no human being can stay awake for three days and three ninths without an artificial stimulant, but with methamphetamine is actually possible. So the German army used this no longer time window of being able to be active to overrun the enemies which had to go to sleep. Actually subscribe to cycleactive now see it, don't miss it.