Sula Benet: Cannabis research (1903-1982)
Sula Benet was born in the very heart of Jewish pre-war Warsaw, on Gęsia Street. Not much is known about her life in Poland, except that in the 1920s she married a man named Samuel Benet, only to become a widow shortly thereafter. She was a student of one of the most respected and independent Polish educational institutions – the Free Polish University – where she studied under the supervision of Professor Stanisław Poniatowski, an ethnographer and anthropologist. In 1936 she left Poland after earning her degree with the thesis Konopie w Wierzeniach i Zwyczajach Ludowych (Hemp in Folk Beliefs and Customs), which brought her fame and an invitation to a scholarship in New York.
It was then that, at a seminar in Warsaw, she shared her theory that ‘calamus’ in the Bible is actually hemp. In short, Benet made a deep linguistic analysis of Torah texts in several languages of the time, concluding that the Aramaic word for hemp could be read as ‘kannabos’ and therefore was related to the modern word ‘cannabis’. More precisely, the work concerned a plant called kanem-bosh, kneh-bosm or kanah-bosm, mentioned many times in the Old Testament.
In her work, she also analysed the words meaning ‘hemp’ in Slavic, Finnish, Celtic and many other languages. She found in them a common root: ‘can-’. In the 1960s, Benet’s work was reprinted in The Book of Grass (Grove Press, NY), and her research is often presented at scientific conferences. Her work inspired both scientists and supporters of the legalisation of marijuana. In 1980, scientists from Hebrew University in Israel were asked to take a second look at the results of Sula Benet’s work. A group of linguists working there confirmed her thesis.