ABOUT WOVEN ROOTS

FORTHCOMING FROM NORTH ATLANTIC BOOKS, JUNE 2025 

Woven Roots, a companion guide to Ashkenazi Herbalism, explores the rich history of plant-based medicine and folk healing traditions of Eastern Europe from 1600 through the present. Woven Roots is the first in-depth guide to the communal care, medicinal plants, and folk healers of Eastern Europe’s Pale of Settlement, and maps the ancestral folkways, herbal traditions, and shared legacies of Ashkenazi Jews and their neighbors across the region.

Woven Roots features illuminating—and surprising—original research on:

• The pivotal but historically overlooked contributions of women folk healers

• Deep, ancestrally rooted traditions of care for land and nature among Ashkenazi Jews

• The rich cultural exchanges among Jews, Muslims, and Christians that allowed life in the Pale to flourish

• Newly discovered recipes

• Enduring legacies of mutual aid and community interdependence

• How long-lost links between Eastern and Western folk knowledge can shed new light on your heritage and ancestral connections

• Traditional magical practices of the Ashkenazim

 

ABOUT ASHKENAZI HERBALISM

NORTH ATLANTIC BOOKS, 2021 

The definitive guide to medicinal plant knowledge of Ashkenazi herbal healers, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Until now, the herbal traditions of the Ashkenazi people have remained unexplored and shrouded in mystery. Ashkenazi Herbalism rediscovers the forgotten legacy of the Jewish medicinal plant healers who thrived in eastern Europe's Pale of Settlement, from their beginnings in the Middle Ages through the modern era. Including the first materia medica of 26 plants and herbs essential to Ashkenazi folk medicine, this essential guide sheds light on the preparations, medicinal profiles, and applications of a rich but previously unknown herbal tradition--one hidden by language barriers, obscured by cultural misunderstandings, and nearly lost to history. Written for new and established practitioners, the book offers illustrations, provides information on comparative medicinal practices, and illuminates the important historical and cultural contexts that gave rise to eastern European Jewish herbalism.

Kudos and Green Blessings of Gratitude to Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel for their latest book, Woven Roots. Their diligent research is a testimony to their passionate dedication to restoring forgotten herbal medicine traditions and perhaps just as importantly, shows us how herbal medicine brought people of all cultures together, as it willcontinue to do so; herbal healing belongs to all peoples. Impressive in scope, fascinating in detail, this compendium of stories and heretofore lost knowledge is a genuine contribution to our herbal libraries. 

—ROBIN ROSE BENNETT, herbalist and author of The Gift of Healing Herbs, Healing Magic, A Green Witch’s Pocketbook of Wisdom, and the Young Green Witch’s Guide to Plant Magic

Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel’s Ashkenazi Herbalism was a revelatory dive into the ways of Jewish folk healers of Eastern Europe, and into curative rites that the obshprekherin shared with her gentile counterparts known as “whisperers,” “murmurers,” and “knowers.” Their marvelous new book, Woven Roots, offers an expanded look at their pharmacopeia, including multiple ethnic names for the herbs, along with fascinating stories and practices associated with them. Digging out this knowledge was no small undertaking, requiring an interdisciplinary search through multiple kinds of sources, from seventeenth-century books to ethnographic studies to oral accounts from living people—all of which they synthesize into a rich picture of little known healing practices and folk beliefs.

—MAX DASHU, founder and director, Suppressed Histories Archives, author of Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion

Medicinal plants have an ability to promote not only the mending of our bodies, but of our wounded psyches and societies. Woven Roots is aptly named, for its digging deeper into the fertile soils of our ancient human connection –– to the earth, and to each other. Its fascinating plant profiles take a distinctive regional approach, with the nature-honoring traditions of the Ashkenazi serving as one doorway into the wonders of ancestral herbalism and beyond, illuminating some ways in which our diverse practices have always and continue to both serve our personal health and wellbeing and contribute to the much needed healing of our world. 

—JESSE WOLF HARDIN, founder of Animá, editor and publisher of Plant Healer Quarterly

Through illuminating research, family stories, and deep engagement with plants, Woven Roots shows that the Jews of Eastern Europe were integrated into the social fabric. They learned the herbal healing practices of their neighbors, and also taught some back. These folk healing traditions were preserved by women, before being suppressed by the rise of patriarchal professional medicine. Woven Roots recovers some of these lost healing ways. This beautiful book delivers a profound message: our collective health depends on knowledge flowing across boundaries. It invites us to cultivate solidarity by following the plants. A marvelous sequel to Cohen and Siegel’s inspiring Ashkenazi Herbalism. 

—YARDEN KATZ, Assistant Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan and author of the forthcoming To Wholeness: A Jewish Radical Tradition Against Capitalist Science and Medicine

The peaceful and mutually beneficial interaction between Jews and non-Jews was for centuries the norm throughout central Europe. Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel’s Woven Roots, on folk medicine among Jews, Rusyns, and Poles, is a fascinating tale of that interaction, and a must read for anyone interested in traditional herbal remedies.

—PAUL ROBERT MAGOCSI, John Yaremko Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto and author of A Historical Atlas of Central Europe, A History of Ukraine: The Land and Its Peoples, and With Their Backs to the Mountains: A History of Carpathian Rus' and Carpatho-Rusyns

This book is a remedy, one I will keep on the altar of my kitchen table and return to again and again. I am so grateful for Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel’s rigorous recovery of Jewish ancestral practices of communal care in collaboration with our beloved plants. This book made me weep with the joy of coming home, of remembering healing traditions dedicated to collective thriving, in deep reverence and love with the flowering, green world. 

—DORI MIDNIGHT, community care practitioner, herbalist, and ritual leader

When I first read Ashkenazi Herbalism, my favorite book of 2021, I recognized quite a few traditions that crossed over with my own family's Christian Ukrainian/Rusyn practices. It was a treasure trove for filling out several fragmentary oral traditions that had been passed down in my family through stories and anecdotes. Through it, I gained such a profound appreciation for literate Jews in these communities who recorded what my own illiterate peasant ancestors could not. Now, as if my fondest wishes are being fulfilled, Deatra and Adam have created Woven Roots, a book with brand new discoveries about the shared folk medicine of Ashkenazi Jews and their neighbors in these blended communities. The magic of plants in their ability to weave humanity together is expressed throughout this book and reminds me of the stories about the mutually respectful interactions of the Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian/Rusyn people in my own grandparents' tiny village of two hundred families. Woven Roots is an essential reference for magical practitioners and those interested in the folk history of Eastern Europe and the important role of Jewish people in this history. This incredibly well-written and impeccably researched book offers multilingual names for plants as well as traditional remedies and stories that provide the reader with a jumping off point for further research. Woven Roots sits right next to Ashkenazi Herbalism as a treasured resource on my bookshelf and, once you open it up and get drawn into the lore, you will find, as I do, that this a reference that you will return to again and again.  

—MADAME PAMITA, Ukrainian-American witch, teacher, and author of Baba Yaga's Book of Witchcraft and The Witch's Guide to Animal Familiars

By shining a light into the dank and foggy corners of Eastern European Jewish folklore, Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel have illuminated a verdant herbal underworld that reveals the ways in which all manner of flora was used and shared by Jewish and other ethnic herbalists throughout this region. Comprehensively researched and full of fascinating historical anecdotes, Woven Roots opens the door to an unexpected interface of Jewish folklife, healing practices, and the generous natural world that surrounded the Jews of this place and time. 

—EDDY PORTNOY, Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and author of Bad Rabbi And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press

Woven Roots is the compendium that so many of us have been yearning for - a magical material medica of our ancestors and ancestral lands! Expanding on their phenomenal work, Ashkenazi Herbalism, in Woven Roots, Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel bring readers more deeply into practices of earth-reverent and herbal healing methodologies engaged by Jews from Eastern Europe, as well as their neighbors. Tracing folk history through a compelling combination of popular (yet not widely translated) and obscure texts, family anecdote, and herbal lore, Cohen and Siegel explore shared healing cultures and the inter-communal care practices of Jews in Eastern Europe and their neighbors, across centuries of thriving. They chronicle not only the plants, but share stories of the myriad healers who were in relationship with them - including the ones who know, the ones who whisper, the ones who divine ~ each sacred medicine workers for the people of the Pale of Settlement.  

Woven Roots opens pathways across time for many seeking to connect with the healing magic and herbal medicine traditions of their ancestors. And, it maps a world in which Jews and their neighbors were amidst a vibrant co-existence, living interdependently with each other and with the natural world in respect and relationality.  

For anyone seeking a window into the earth-reverent embodied practices of the peoples of the Pale of Settlement, and any wanting to learn about and rekindle relationships with ancestral plants and healing ways of these lands, Woven Roots is not-to-miss, an absolute treasure. 

—TAYA SHERE, host of the Jewish Ancestral Healing podcast, professor of multi-religious ritual, and co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership

Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel’s Woven Roots brings vividly to life the “Pale of Settlement,” a region of Eastern Europe where Jews were restricted to live and work between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, home to diverse peoples who often survived by sharing healing practices with each other; Christians, Jews, Muslims, Roma, and more. Cohen and Siegel’s meticulous research into folk practices and healing modalities that have often been understudied and neglected, combined with their love and passion for plants and their power to heal and to bring people together, reverberates throughout this exceptional and beautifully written book. Woven Roots is setting a high bar and an example for other scholars to follow, and will influence generations of herbalists, writers, and researchers to come.

—NAOMI SPECTOR, ethnoherbalist and author of The Jewish Book of Flowers

Woven Roots by Deatra Cohen and Adam Siegel is so much more than a book about the world of plants. This botanical atlas of Eastern Europe is also an encyclopedia of folk medicine and a testament to the many connections between the cultures that inhabited the region in the ninteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the pages of the book we hear a lively dialog between Jewish opshprekherkes, Tatar and Roma healers, and Slavic conjurers of the evil eye, all of whom used the same herbal remedies and remarkably similar rituals in their practices. It is also a testament to the forgotten influence of communities from central Asia on this part of Europe, bringing their beliefs with them and introducing crops that were no less revolutionary than the later arrival of America-grown cocoa or tobacco. It is a fascinating journey through specimens, shapes, and scents. The authors spare no effort to show, based on numerous sources and their own experiences, the extent of the cultural community that unites people regardless of their origins. The Jewish town of a century ago proves to be the bustling contact junction it often was, and the East Ashkenaz remains as embedded in nature as its non-Jewish surroundings. 

—MAREK TUSZEWICKI, deputy director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków and author of A Frog Under the Tongue

In Woven Roots, Cohen and Siegel delve into Ashkenazi Jewish herbalism with signature depth and sincerity. Their rigorous scholarship illuminates the ethic of communal care that flourished in the Pale of Settlement, crossing religious and ethnic divides. As multilingual librarians, they confront the challenge of recovering knowledge that has been marginalized and largely unwritten. A vital contribution to the understanding of our diasporic and syncretic herbal tradition! 

—BRUNEM WARSHAW, clinical herbalist & co-creator of the Ashkenazi Herbalism workshop series

PRAISE FOR ASHKENAZI HERBALISM

A significant contribution to Jewish studies—Cohen and Siegel have successfully resolved the mystery of Ashkenazi herbal traditions.

—MAREK TUSZEWICKI, deputy director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków and author of A Frog Under the Tongue

Meticulously researched, absorbing, and poignant, Ashkenazi Herbalism is an important addition to the canon of herbal literature, bequeathing to us a tradition of herbal practice that, but for [Cohen’s and Siegel’s] efforts, would have remained lost to the world.

—JUDITH BERGER, writer, herbalist, and author of Herbal Rituals

A brilliant work that captures an important but long-ignored facet of traditional herbal healing practices.

—ROSEMARY GLADSTAR, herbalist and author of Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs and Rosemary Gladstar’s Herbal Recipes for Vibrant Health

A delightfully written and highly original work that sheds new light on a woefully understudied aspect of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. The common stereotype of shtetl life is that Jews were cut off from the natural environment that surrounded them. Cohen’s and Siegel's pioneering book reveals, by contrast, some of the ways in which Ashkenazi Jews in the Pale of Settlement and neighboring regions were deeply embedded in their local ecologies and possessed a rich heritage of herbal practices and knowledge.

—NATHANIEL DEUTSCH, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of The Jewish Dark Continent

Reading Ashkenazi Herbalism is like finding a family heirloom you thought had been lost forever. . . . This book, full of rigorously researched ethnobotany and shtetl magic, is an answered prayer for those of us who have longed to reconnect with Ashkenazi folk healing traditions.

—DORI MIDNIGHT, community healer, herbalist, and educator

Ashkenazi Herbalism fascinates the reader with its deep detective work and thorough research of a healing tradition that was mostly lost by the horror and genocide of the Second World War, which destroyed Jewish communities and culture throughout Europe. . . . Thankfully, the authors have captured the Ashkenazi healing traditions that were practiced by itinerant Kabbalists, feldshers, and midwives so that these precious remnants of knowledge are not forgotten. Whether you are an avid herbalist, history buff, or plant lover, you’ll find something in this book to satisfy your soul. What a gift to us all.

—PHYLLIS D. LIGHT, MA, herbalist and author of Southern Folk Medicine

[A] deep dive into the past to bring forth the plant knowledge once practiced by the Ashkenazi people is a great contribution to future generations.

—PAM FISCHER, executive director of the Berkeley Herbal Center

Ashkenazi Herbalism explores the local and exotic plants Eastern European Jews used as medicine. After a thorough discussion of Jewish medical practitioners, especially female folk healers, it draws on a wide range of sources to look at how plants—alphabetically from aloe to nutmeg to violets—were used in the Russian Jewish Pale of Settlement compared to other times and places.

—GABRIELLA SAFRAN, Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies at Stanford University and author of Wandering Soul

DEATRA COHEN AND ADAM SIEGEL are the co-authors of Ashkenazi Herbalism: Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews. Deatra trained as a clinical herbalist at the Berkeley Herbal Center, co-founded a Western Clinical Herbal collective, and is currently part of a community herbal project. Adam is a linguist, translator, and bibliographer. In their research, Deatra and Adam are dedicated to recovering the lost or forgotten shared plant healing cultures of Jews and their neighbors in the historic Pale of Settlement. They continue to explore the rich diasporic symbiosis of plants and peoples in both the Old World and the New.