New Heavens and a New Earth: The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought [1 ed.] 9780199754793, 0199754799

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New Heavens and a New Earth

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New Heavens and a New Earth The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought

J E R E M Y B ROW N

3

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Th ailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Jeremy, 1964New heavens and a new earth : the Jewish reception of Copernican thought / Jeremy Brown. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–975479–3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Judaism and science. 2. Astronomy—Religious aspects—Judaism—History. 3. Copernicus, Nicolaus, 1473-1543. I. Title. BM538.A76B76 2013 296.3’75—dc23 2012031274

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Erica, and Tali, Gavi, Yishai, and Ayelet The unmoving center of my universe

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Behold, I create new heavens and a new Earth; and the former things shall not be remembered, nor come to mind. Isaiah 65:17

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If there is nothing new on the earth, still the traveler always has a resource in the skies. They are constantly turning a new page to view. The wind sets the types on this blue ground, and the inquiring mind may always read a new truth there. Henry David Thoreau A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Astronomy is what we have now instead of theology. The terrors are less, but the comforts are nil. John Updike

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction

1

1. Nicolaus Copernicus and His Revolution WHAT WE BELIEVED

13

17

THE COPERNICAN INNOVATION

20

THE EARLY RECEPTION OF DE REVOLUTIONIBUS 23 JOHANNES KEPLER GALILEO

24

25

2. The Talmudic View of the Universe THE SHAPE OF THE EARTH

27

27

THE PATH OF THE SUN 29 THE SOLAR SYSTEM

31

THE LENGTH OF THE SOLAR YEAR AND ITS RELIGIOUS CONSEQUENCES 32 THE MAIMONIDEAN DESCRIPTION OF THE UNIVERSE

34

TALMUDIC ASTRONOMY AND ANCIENT ASTRONOMY

37

PTOLEMAIC BIBLICAL COMMENTARY

38

3. David Gans and the First Mention of Copernicus in Hebrew Literature 42 EARLY INFLUENCES—EUCLID AND THE SUPERNOVA 44 THE FORMATIVE YEARS—CRACOW AND PRAGUE

45

MAHARA L AND THE FIRST JEWISH ALLUSION TO COPERNICUS xi

47

Contents

xii

THE WORKS OF DAVID GANS

49

NEHMAD VENA’IM 50 TYCHO BRA HE

53

GANS’S RELUCTANCE TO ADJUDICATE BETWEEN SYSTEMS THE INFLUENCE OF NEHMAD VENA’IM ABRA HAM YAGEL

61

62

4. The First Jewish Copernican: Rabbi Joseph Solomon Delmedigo 66 BIOGRA PHY

66

SEFER ELIM 69 DID DELMEDIGO LEARN THE HELIOCENTRIC THEORY FROM GALILEO? 73 DELMEDIGO’S CONTRIBUTION SPINOZA ON COPERNICUS

75

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5. “Copernicus is the Son of Satan.” The First Jewish Rejections of Copernicus 82 ISAAC CARDOSO

82

TUVIAH COHEN

87

COHEN AND NEW SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE ASTRONOMY IN MA’ASEH TUVIAH

88

89

COHEN AND THE JESUITS ON BIBLICAL PROOF TEXTS TUVIAH COHEN IN CONTEXT

96

99

6. David Nieto and Copernicanism in London 106 NIETO’S EARLY LIFE

107

COPERNICUS IN MATT EH DAN 109 NIETO IN CONTEXT ISRA EL OF ZAMOSC

112 116

LONDON AND THE COPERNICAN QUESTION, AGAIN

7. The Jewish Encyclopedias

125

RESHIT LIMMUDIM 125 THE RECEPTION OF RESHIT LIMMUDIM 128 THE PLAGIARISM OF RESHIT LIMMUDIM 130 SOLOMON MAIMON’S GIVAT HAMOREH 131 SEFER HABERIT 133

119

58

Contents BIOGRA PHY OF PINHAS HURWITZ

xiii

134

THE CONTENT OF SEFER HABERIT AND ITS EARLY PUBLICATION 135 COPERNICUS IN SEFER HABERIT 137

8. The Eighteenth Century: Jews and Copernicus in the Newtonian Era 144 RA PHAEL LEVI OF HANNOVER LEVI AND LEIBNIZ

147

148

LEVI’S WORKS ON THE CALENDAR LEVI’S STUDENTS

150

153

JUDAH HURWITZ 154 EYBESCH Ü TZ AND EMDEN

155

HATAM SOFER 161 COPERNICUS AND THE STUDENTS OF HATAM SOFER 165

9. “I Have Written a Book For the Young People.” David Friesenhausen’s Mosdot Tevel 168 FRIESENHAUSEN’S EARLY LIFE

170

REFORM OF THE RA BBINIC TRA INING PROGRA M

171

MOSDOT TEVEL 171 ASTRONOMY IN MOSDOT TEVEL

172

10. The Nineteenth Century: Copernicus without Hesitation 179 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

179

NINETEENTH-CENTURY EXPERIMENTAL SUPPORT FOR THE COPERNICAN MODEL 180 COPERNICANISM IN HEBREW LITERATURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 181 ISAAC REGGIO AND THE CRITICAL ROLE OF SCIENCE IN BIBLICAL COMMENTARY 182 SAMSON RA PHAEL HIRSCH

184

ITT IM LEBINAH 186 HAYYIM ZELIG SLONIMSKI

188

SLONIMSKI’S LITERA RY OUTPUT

190

HALLEY’S COMET AND KOCHAVA DESHAVIT 192 SLONIMSKI’S INFLUENCE

197

Contents

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11. “Let Copernicus and Another Thousand Like Him Be Removed From the World.” Reuven Landau’s Rejection 200 LANDAU’S EARLY LIFE

201

MAHALAKH HAKOHAVIM BIBLICAL OBJECTIONS

202

205

SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIONS

206

TYCHO BRA HE AND SCIENTIFIC SKEPTICISM REB ZADOK

208

211

SPIRITUAL OBJECTIONS

213

LANDAU’S SOURCES AND SEFER HABERIT

217

NIVRESHET LENEZ HAHAMAH 219

12. The Modern Period

224

CONVERSATION ON A TRA IN CONVERSATION ON A BOAT THE PRINCIPLE OF CHARITY

224 225 229

A NEW THEORY—EVOLUTION 231 DARWIN THE MESHUGA 232 JEWISH SECULARIZATION—ASTRONOMY WITHOUT GOD

235

THE NEW ASTRONOMY AND THE JEWS OF THE MIDDLE EAST A JEWISH GUIDE TO THE NIGHT SKY

243

250

13. Relativity and Contemporary Jewish Geocentrists

254

PTOLEMY IN THE SPACE AGE 254 THE LUBAVITCHER REBBE AND THE WAGER EINSTEIN AND THE NEO-GEOCENTRISTS

256

259

SHLOMO BENIZRI, THE GOVERNMENT MINISTER WHO REJECTED COPERNICUS 262 COPERNICUS IN THE CONTEMPORA RY HAREDI WORLD

Conclusion

266

274

THE CURRENT STATE OF THE SCIENCE-AND-RELIGION DEBATE 274 PLURA LIZE, LOCALIZE, HYBRIDIZE, AND POLITICIZE THE POWER OF THE PERSONALITY

276

277

RELIGIOUS RATIONALITY AND SCIENTIFIC RATIONALITY

281

Contents

Appendix

287

DAVID FRIESENHAUSEN’S SABBATH ZEMIRA H IN PRA ISE OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM 287

Notes 295 Bibliography 369 Index 385

xv

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AC K NOW L E DG M E N TS

Because of the kindnesses offered to me by a number of individuals, this book contains fewer mistakes than would have otherwise been the case. I am grateful to my father Harvey Brown, and to Dan Rabinowitz, David Ruderman, and Mark Shapiro, who read several chapters and whose comments improved them immensely. David Ruderman was especially helpful in providing detailed comments about Tuviah Hacohen, Avraham Yagel, and Pinhas Hurwitz. David Shatz provided in-depth comments about the manuscript as a whole and carefully reviewed the work from the very start of the process to the end. I have, over the years, read several books and countless papers in which David was thanked by authors, so I know that the kindness he showed me is but one example of his selfless generosity. I am also grateful to Owen Gingerich, America’s foremost scholar of Copernicus, whose kindness in sharing some of his research notes helped lead me to the only known copy of De Revolutionibus that contains Hebrew annotations. I am grateful to the Littauer Foundation for supporting my work, and to the Editors of the Torah U-Maddah Journal and Hakirah for permission to reproduce parts of my essays that they published. I also owe a debt of gratitude to several libraries and institutions that aided me in my research. Most of my research was carried out at the Library of Congress, where Michael Grunberger, then head of the Hebraic section, extended to me every imaginable courtesy for which a scholar could wish and helped me track down some of the library’s harder-to-fi nd treasures. Later, Peggy Pearlstein and Sharon Horowitz helped me locate many books that the library held but which were not accessible through their catalogue. Sharon’s willingness to fi nd these books and have them waiting for me was much appreciated. Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, allowed me the thrill of holding and photographing some of the rarest and most valuable of the books that I studied, including the library’s xvii

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Acknowledgments

beautiful copy of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus and Cellarius’s massive Atlas Coelestis. For those rare instances when I needed to look further, I used the James Melville Gilliss Library at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., and the rare book collections at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Yeshiva University in New York, as well as the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. To each of these institutions, I am indebted. I am also grateful to Piet van Boxel, then curator of Hebraica and Judaica at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, who led me to the only extant copy of the 1612 edition of David Gans’s Nehmad Vena’im. Th is project would never have seen its completion without the vision of Cynthia Read at Oxford University Press, and to her and Charlotte Steinhardt, I am most grateful. Yet none of the kindnesses extended to me by these individuals would have produced the book you now hold were it not for the constant support and encouragement given to me by my wife, life partner, editor, and perceptive critic, Erica. Th is project would never have reached completion were it not for the Herculean efforts she made to support me; she went far above and beyond the call of duty. Finally, I am grateful beyond words to my four children, Tali, Gavi, Yishai, and Ayelet, who never fl inched when once again I would reach for an apple and an orange to explain to them some feature of our solar system. Well, actually, they sometimes fl inched a litt le, but they listened anyway and asked some really good questions. It is to them that I dedicate this book.

New Heavens and a New Earth

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Introduction

In the early years of the twenty-fi rst century, Rabbi Shlomo Benizri, a former minister in the Israeli government, published a comprehensive textbook on the Jewish calendar entitled Hashamayim Mesaprim (The Heavens Proclaim).1 Most of Benizri’s work covered the complex mathematical and astronomical foundations that determine the structure of the lunar-based Jewish calendar, and the last part of the book described the nature of the solar system. In this section, Benizri concluded that despite nearly five hundred years of scientific and astronomical evidence to the contrary, the Sun revolves around the Earth. Although Benizri was educated in traditional Orthodox yeshivot (the higher academies of Jewish learning) and never attended university, his book made use of many modern scientific instruments and discoveries. It reproduced high-resolution telescopic images of the surfaces of the planets (including those sent from the famous Viking 1 project) and described the composition of the atmospheres and surfaces of the planets using data from NASA’s solar explorations. And yet Benizri, who was once Israel’s minister of labor and social welfare, could simply not allow himself to believe that the Earth orbits the Sun because, in his analysis, the Bible, the rabbis of the Talmud, and their medieval commentators had all concluded that the Earth was at the center of the universe. If Benizri’s fundamentalist approach seems remote from daily life in America, consider the following episode involving the five-term Republican from the Georgia state legislature, Ben Bridges. In February 2007, Bridges circulated a letter to dozens of other state representatives, in which he directed their attention to websites that provided “indisputable evidence” that evolution was a religious concept dating back two millennia to “Rabbinic writings in the . . . Kabbala.” The purpose of this bizarre allegation was to demonstrate that since evolutionary theory, considered by all to be a scientific concept, was in point of fact a religious concept (or, as Bridges put it, a creation scenario of the “Pharisee Religion”), the constitution should prohibit it from being taught in publicly funded schools. Bridges hoped to provide a victory in the ongoing batt le being waged by fundamentalist Christians to prevent the teaching 1

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of evolution in public high schools. That the websites that Bridges was publicizing were profoundly anti-Semitic is beyond dispute, but what is of interest to us is the fact that their purpose was not only to fight against Darwinian thought. They also claimed that “ . . . the Copernican model of a rotating orbiting Earth is a factless observation.” Representative Bridges was not alone in publicizing the fi xed-Earth position. His memo was circulated with a letter of support from the second most senior Republican politician in the Texas House of Representatives, Warren Chisum, who served as chair of the Texas House Appropriations Committee.2 Although they were separated by thousands of miles, had no common language, and followed quite different, indeed irreconcilable belief systems, both politicians Benizri and Bridges would no doubt have been united in their fight against the common enemy, the Copernican credo. 3 The positions that Rabbi Benizri and Representative Bridges—one an ultra-Orthodox Jewish member of the Israeli Parliament and the other a fundamentalist Christian member of the Georgia House of Representatives—share with regard to Copernican thought are shared by very few others from their respective faith traditions. Yet both gave a public voice and wide exposure to a debate that began nearly five centuries ago and involved some of the most talented religious thinkers of the times. Th is debate continues to have an impact on how we view the interaction of science and religion. Over the last several years, there has been a renewed interest in the way in which scientific knowledge and religious thought interact, and there are a number of reasons for this. There was tremendous public attention paid to the 2005 court case of Kitzmiller v. the Dover Area School District. Th is case resulted from an attempt to have intelligent design taught as a scientific principle alongside the theory of evolution in public schools.4 In the years that followed, many authors with impeccable scientific credentials weighed in on both sides of the question of God’s existence. 5 The Dover case demonstrated some of the difficulties that religious believers have with Darwinian thought. But a more profound reason lies beneath the renewed interest in understanding the confl ict and coexistence of science and religion, and it involves the suggestion that, contrary to religious teachings, we may not, after all, have the freedom to choose between good or evil. Over the last fi ft y years, advances in neuroscience have raised deep and weighty questions about what it means to think and act with free will. We have come to understand that our states of mind are more determined than we had ever imagined. Consider, for example, the common affl iction of depression. We now have an understanding of its biochemical basis, and as a result, it is possible to successfully treat this disease with medication. Furthermore, the genetic basis of a vast number of other disorders once classified under the

Introduction

3

general and imprecise umbrella of “mental disorders” has been determined. It would seem that the way we feel or interact with others is not volitional, but is in large part predetermined by the genes we inherit. Th is genetic basis of much of our behavior may even affect our ability to make moral decisions. There is evidence that criminal behavior may not only be the result of personal choice, but may be genetically programmed from conception.6 All this evidence suggests that perhaps we cannot act otherwise than we do. The religious thinker must grapple with the question of what this implies for concepts that are central to the major world religions, such as freedom of choice, sin, and repentance. What role do Yom Kippur and Lent play in seeking God’s forgiveness if we are never able to do otherwise than sin? What becomes of the concept of reward in the afterlife if our actions on Earth are never freely made? It is questions like these that are the basis of a new interest in the way in which scientific discoveries affect religious sensibilities.7 The question of how a religious tradition responds when faced with scientific evidence that challenges its basic tenets of belief is not new. Whether it is the question of free will and scientific determinism, Darwinian evolution and the biblical account of creation, or the heliocentric theory and the centrality of the Earth in God’s universe, religious traditions have been challenged by science for close to half a millennium.8 Various attempts at the synthesis or rejection of these confl icting worldviews have been made for just as long. Th roughout this period of time, the religious debate over Copernicus’s heliocentric theory has been overlooked as a model of the way in which religious thought may initially contradict scientific discoveries, only later to reach a period of accommodation and understanding. The history of Copernican thought and the way in which the Catholic Church contested it have of course been well documented. What seems to have been largely ignored, however, is the process by which Judeo-Christian faiths made their peace with what was originally regarded as a subversive or even heretical claim. For those who study how religions reject, accept, or absorb new scientific discoveries, the history of the Jewish debate over Copernican theory is a paradigm that deserves much greater study among historians of science and religion, because there are several aspects of the heliocentric theory that make its study uniquely valuable. First, for many religious thinkers, the heliocentric theory is diametrically opposed to the literal meaning of the Bible. There can be no more stark a contrast between a scientific and a religious conception of the universe than this. As we shall see in detail in chapter two, in various places the Bible quite literally asserts that the Sun moves and the Earth is stationary. Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still at Gibon. Isaiah prophesied that the Sun’s shadow would move back as a sign of forgiveness for King Hezekiah, and the Book of Ecclesiastes opens with a powerful declaration of the Earth’s immutability,

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declaring that “ . . . the Earth stands forever. The Sun rises and the Sun sets and glides back to where it rises.”9 The Bible has several other verses that describe a universe in which the Earth lies at the center of God’s majestic universe. For traditional Jews, Moslems, and Christians, the Five Books of Moses—the Torah—were divinely revealed and transmitted directly to Moses on Mount Sinai, and its text has a divine imprimatur. The rest of the Bible may have been written later, but its authors were all prophets who spoke with the Lord God. From Joshua who conquered the Land of Canaan, to Jeremiah who lamented the destruction of Jerusalem, from King David, author of the Book of Psalms to Isaiah who consoled the people of Israel, all were men whose carefully chosen words carried God’s approval. God would not deceive, and his prophets’ words could deceive no less. If the Bible described the Sun as revolving around the Earth, that description must also accord with reality. To state otherwise is a direct aff ront to those who claim that the Bible is the word of God and, as such, contains truths that cannot be denied. There have been other scientific theories—notably the Big Bang theory—that also seem to threaten the word of the Bible. However, these theories are complicated and require a level of sophistication with astronomical physics to fully be appreciated. Perhaps most importantly, they cannot be verified by simply standing outside. The Copernican theory was quite different. The Sun certainly looks as if it circles the Earth, and the idea that the Earth is moving around the Sun is both easy to grasp and counter to our everyday observations. It doesn’t take an advanced degree in astrophysics to grasp the heliocentric premise. Second, for over three hundred years, the heliocentric theory of Copernicus was a theoretical construct only. It differed from other theories we encounter today, such as the theory of evolution or the theory of relativity. Here we should spend a moment to clarify what is meant by a scientific theory. Evolution, for example, has been criticized by its creationist opponents as being “only a theory,” by which they mean to contrast it with a scientific law, such as Newton’s three laws of motion. Th is claim is supposed to undermine the status of the theory of evolution and place it alongside a number of other possible explanations of how life developed on Earth. In actuality, the theory of evolution has tremendous explanatory ability and is supported by a vast array of evidence from several different scientific disciplines. Those who claim that its status is undermined because it is not described as a law fail to grasp that the word theory has several different meanings.10 It can be used to describe a hunch or a guess as in “here’s my theory of why the baseball team played a terrible game” or “that’s just a theory; here are the facts.” However, the word has a very different meaning when used in conjunction with the word scientific. A scientific theory is an explanation of how and why certain observations occur. But as Jerry Coyne has pointed out, it is “much more than just a speculation of how

Introduction

5

things are: it is a well-thought-out group of propositions meant to explain facts about the real world.”11 A scientific theory must make predictions that may be tested and falsified. The more predictions a theory correctly makes, the more likely are scientists to be confident that it is correct. The Copernican model seemed to explain the motions of the planets in far more satisfactory a way than did the previous Ptolemaic model, but for almost three hundred years it was an unproven hypothesis, and not a scientific theory. Now this is not to claim that modern conceptions of what constitutes the scientific method were shared in the fi rst three centuries after Copernicus lived. But soon after the century in which Copernicus published his revolutionary work, it was clear to some that experimental evidence should indeed be brought to bear on the question of the truth of the heliocentric model. For example, in 1674, Robert Hooke wrote that if stellar parallax could be detected, it would be a “most undenyable Argument of the truth of the Copernican Systeme.”12 The hypothetical nature of Copernicus’s claim was noted in every fi rst edition of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, for they contained an anonymous apologia in the form of an introduction to the reader. Th is introduction, known as Ad Lectorum (to the reader), was written by the fi nal editor of the work, the theologian Andreas Osiander, and was not authorized by Copernicus.13 Osiander took pains to point out that far from being a true description of nature, the hypotheses in the book were solely mathematical devices. As such, they could be used as an aid in calculating the location and movement of the planets, but should not be thought of as claiming to reflect reality. Osiander added this introduction to avoid a clash with the Church, and there is no evidence that Copernicus himself saw his heliocentric model as theoretical.14 But whether Copernicus thought that his model was a description of reality or just an elegant hypothetical construct, the important point is that there was no scientific evidence for its veracity until the nineteenth century.15 Despite this lack of scientific support, the heliocentric model was clearly viewed as a challenge to the biblical worldview. So for three centuries, Jewish and Christian thinkers faced a challenge from a scientific hypothesis that, while persuasive, was not fully substantiated. During this time, these religions developed varied responses that were significant for the fact that they did not depend on an analysis of a particular experiment. Th is allows us to study how the religious mind responds to a purely theoretical scientific challenge. Such an analysis is in many ways more rewarding than an examination of the response to a scientific experiment. Experimental evidence may be challenged in ways that theoretical conclusions are not: Are there alternative explanations for the observation? Was the test performed under ideal conditions, and have others indeed verified that its conclusions are accurate? Today we usually view the experimental corroboration of a scientific theory as its ultimate vindication.16 However, a theory that

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is at once scientifically persuasive and religiously troubling and that has yet to be experimentally supported will often require a much more creative analysis by religious thinkers, for they cannot resort to the simple defense of challenging the experimental methodology as somehow flawed. In these early years of the twenty-fi rst century, the scientific community has formulated an impressive array of theories, many of which have been experimentally verified. Yet there remain some scientific ideas that, although convincing, have yet to be subjected to crucial experimental verification. For those who understand it, string theory (if it is a scientific theory at all) is one such idea, but there are others that more directly affect the religious thinker. As we have already mentioned, notions of genetic or physical determinism have increasingly challenged the religious concepts of free will and hence concepts of reward and punishment.17 Yet the collective evidence that our actions are often determined, while persuasive, has not been experimentally verified. Consequently, notions of determinism stand in a similar relationship to religious thought as Copernican theory did almost five hundred years ago. The evidence for both is convincing but not absolute, and the implications that each has for traditional religious concepts are far-reaching. The techniques that religious communities used and continue to use to deal with the challenge of the Copernican theory are, therefore, likely to be able to teach us much about the way in which these same faith communities can face similar theoretical challenges from the contemporary scientific community. There is a third reason why the history of the reception of the Copernican theory in Jewish thought is so important for the contemporary debate about science and religion. The heliocentric model has been around a good deal longer than all of the modern scientific theories that are thought to be troubling to the modern religious mind. Darwin’s “dangerous idea” is barely two hundred years old.18 The big bang theory developed from the work of many theoretical physicists and observational astronomers beginning (depending on whom you choose to include) in the early years of the twentieth century. Modern challenges to free will based on the field of neuroscience are a good deal younger still. By comparison, there are almost four hundred years of recorded Jewish responses to Copernican thought. Th is rich history contains many approaches, some predictable and others novel, from which contemporary scientific and religious thinkers have much to learn. These approaches varied depending on the time, place, education, and religious worldview of each writer, but taken as a corpus of literature, they have left us with much to analyze and study.19 There have been several monographs and essays that have addressed the reception of Copernican thought in Jewish intellectual history.20 The earliest review in English was published in 1977 by André Neher in the Journal of the History of Ideas.21 It set the foundations for later discussions, but his contribution

Introduction

7

is limited for several reasons. Neher’s analysis intentionally extended only into the eighteenth century and so did not mention many important rabbinic works published later that relate to the Copernican debate. For Neher, the ability of Jewish thinkers to side with or fight the Copernican position indicated “the tolerant environment of their Jewish community.” He failed, however, to investigate what theological motives formed the basis of these positions. He discussed several works in which the Copernican thesis was supported, and two in which it was attacked, but overlooked those in which the heliocentric theory was simply ignored. Those scholars who chose to make no mention of the heliocentric theory were making a statement too, and their motives demand analysis. More problematically, many of Neher’s suggestions are unsubstantiated fl ights of fancy. In his analysis, Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague was a relativist, and he imagines the sixteenth-century rabbi to believe that “Ptolemy was right in his time, so why should not Copernicus be right today?” 22 Neher suggests, with no supporting evidence, that Joseph Delmedigo, a rabbi and student of Galileo, was a champion of free inquiry: “Free Galileo, Delmedigo seems to be saying, release him to us; in the midst of the Jewish community he will not be subjected to any trial, we shall not require him to make any retraction, we shall welcome him and honor him like a Rabbi in Israel.” Neher is also mistaken when he described Ya’arot Devash by Jonathan Eybeschütz as having a “positive att itude towards Copernicus.” In fact, and as we shall see in a later chapter, Eybeschütz wrote that the Copernicans had “made fools of themselves . . . and left the world with a lie.”23 Neher’s underlying thesis was that “[f]reedom of thought was an integral part of the Jewish conception of science and the world,” a conclusion that several later scholars have found severely lacking, and one that ignores the excommunication of Baruch Spinoza as important evidence to the contrary. Neher’s contribution opened the field to inquiry, even if many or perhaps most of his conclusions are highly suspect. In 1983, Hillel Levine published a brief essay that examined not only the Jewish reactions to Copernican thought, but also attempted to place these reactions within a sociological context.24 Levine criticized Neher’s earlier paper as overemphasizing the positive responses to Copernicus and overlooking the “important issues that were at stake in the confl ict between cosmological models.” Unfortunately, Levine did not review some of the important personalities whose work sheds much light on precisely these issues.25 A decade after Neher’s paper, Michael Panitz reviewed Jewish responses to the new astronomy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.26 Panitz offered a far more thoughtful analysis than did Neher, although he also failed to give an adequate evaluation of some of the important thinkers and didn’t mention others at all.27 His conclusion, contrary to Neher’s, was that although

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most Jews did eventually embrace the heliocentric view, they did not do so as easily as had previously been imagined. Although these three essays are the sum total written in English exclusively on the reception of the Copernican theory in Judaism, several others touch on this subject even if it is not their main focus of inquiry. 28 For example, there have been several books that have evaluated the contributions of some rabbinic astronomers and men of science. 29 Perhaps the earliest work in English was Jakob Petuchowski’s 1954 study of David Nieto, who was rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in London at the start of the eighteenth century. 30 George Alter reviewed the lives of David Gans and Joseph Delmedigo in 1958. 31 Still later, an intellectual biography of Delmedigo was published by Barzilai in 1974, and Neher’s study of David Gans appeared in 1986. 32 No comprehensive study, however, of the Jewish response to Copernican thought has appeared. David Ruderman, the scholar of Jewish history, noted this lacuna when he pointed out that, although the reception of new scientific ideas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been systematically studied, . . . no such investigation has yet been undertaken with respect to Jewish thought. 33 Such an inquiry into Jewish sources would be important both in assessing the awareness of Jews to the literature and technology of the new discoveries and in evaluating the ability of Jewish traditional culture to assimilate new and contradictory data and assumptions about the physical world. Furthermore, such an examination would offer a comparative perspective in which to view the Christian community’s adaption to scientific novelty and change. 34 It is precisely this investigation that this book attempts to undertake. An analysis of our topic could be approached in a variety of ways. It is possible to categorize the Jewish responses to Copernican thought by their geographical origin, or with regard to the particular branch of Jewish practice and thought to which their author belonged. We could analyze reactions along a division of accommodation or rejection, or we could do so with regard to the influence of the scientific world on the contemporaneous religious thought. While each of these approaches certainly has its own merits, our approach is generally chronological. Chapter 1 discusses the sett ing of the Copernican revolution and its challenge to Jewish and Christian thought of the time. Jewish thought, both legal and philosophical, is built as much on precedent as it is on innovation and novel analysis. We cannot understand the lengths to which the geocentric model was defended without fi rst

Introduction

9

understanding the talmudic concepts of the natural universe, and this is discussed in chapter 2. Chapter 3 examines the writings of David Gans, who studied with both the astronomer Tycho Brahe and one of the most famous Jewish thinkers of all time, Rabbi Judah Loew, known as the Maharal of Prague. In chapter 4, we learn about Rabbi Joseph Delmedigo, who wrote an important textbook of natural science and was a student of Galileo himself. The next chapter analyzes the writings of the physician-rabbi Tuviah Cohen, who studied at the University of Padua at the beginning of the eighteenth century and later wrote a textbook of medicine called Ma’aseh Tuviah. Th is work—the “best-illustrated Hebrew medical work of the pre-modern era”35 —contained a section on cosmology, in which the author aggressively described Copernicus as “the fi rst born of Satan.” The next three chapters cover other thinkers of the eighteenth century and the start of the open embracement of heliocentricity. Chapter 9 analyzes the writings of David Friesenhausen, who enthusiastically accepted Copernicanism and wrote a poem on the solar system to be recited on Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath. In chapter 10, we study the way in which Jews responded to the new experimental evidence that supported the Copernican model and detail the works of Hayyim Zelig Slonimski, a member of the Haskalah (the movement of the Jewish Enlightenment), who wrote a text on the 1835 reappearance of Halley’s Comet. Chapter 11 discusses Reuven Landau, who was unmoved by the growing evidence supporting Copernicanism. Landau wrote several books on mathematics, astronomy, and Jewish law, and concluded that it would “be better for Copernicus and a thousand like him to be removed from the world, rather than one word of the Holy Torah be changed.” In chapter 12, we analyze the continued responses of Jews to Copernicus at the start of the twentieth century, and the contrasting responses of secular western Jews and Jews living in Muslim countries. Even in the post-Apollo era, the geocentric theory still had its defenders, and we discuss these modern Jewish geocentrists and their use of Einstein’s theory of relativity in detail, and close with a review of Copernicanism in the contemporary Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) world. In the fi nal chapter, we comment on the future of the interface of science and religion, based on the lessons that our study has offered. While I was researching this book, a textbook used at a local Jewish day school was brought to my attention. 36 This book describes the appropriate blessings (brohot) to be recited over foods, natural phenomena, and various life events, and is popular among children who enter “ brochos bees”— the Orthodox Jewish equivalent of a spelling bee. In the section covering blessings of praise and thanks, the appropriate blessing to be made “when seeing a wise man (non-Jew) in the secular fields such as a scientist” is

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listed. 37 Throughout the book are illustrations, and the one that is included for this blessing is a stamp with a picture of Copernicus. 38 There are hundreds of scientists who could have been chosen to illustrate this blessing, and yet the author chose to include perhaps the most controversial of them all. How Copernicus came to be pictured in this study guide is the story of how even the most challenging of scientific discoveries can be accommodated into religious beliefs. In an era of increased cultural divisions between secular and religious worldviews, it is a story that has much to teach both sides.

A Brief Note on Transliteration, Terminologies, and Historical Methods I have generally followed academic conventions for the transliteration of Hebrew terms and book titles. No difference is made between the Hebrew letters hey (‫ )ה‬and het (‫)ח‬. There has been no attempt to indicate a difference between the Hebrew letters aleph and ayin, kaf and kuf, and no hyphens have been inserted to separate the defi nite article ha from the rest of the word. The Hebrew letter ‫ צ‬has generally been transliterated as z, unless a common usage of another spelling prevailed. In addition, I have followed the most commonly used forms for the names of certain historical figures, thus Moses Maimonides (and not Moshe), Jonathan (and not Yonason) Eybeschütz, and Baruch (not Barukh) Spinoza. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Hebrew are by the author. Every attempt has been made to translate the text literally, but all translation is of course interpretation. Even translating the three simple but crucially important words from Ecclesiastes (1:4) raises a challenge. “Veha’artz le’olam omadet ” can be translated in a number of ways, each of which subtly alters its meaning: “the Earth remains for ever”; “the Earth stands for ever”; “the Earth abides for ever.” Then there is another translation, the one that a number of Jews (together with the Catholic Church) favored: “the Earth stands still for ever.” Whenever possible, I have indicated where words have been inserted in the translation to explain the meaning of the original Hebrew. Th roughout the text, we have occasion to refer to certain personalities as scientists and some of their actions as doing science. The term science, however, was not yet used at the time that many of these people described as scientists actually lived. The word scientist was not coined in the English language until the nineteenth century and not regularly used until the twentieth. 39 In the seventeenth century, the term describing one whom we would today think of as a scientist was natural philosopher or naturalist, and what today we describe as science would then have been called natural philosophy.

Introduction

11

While I recognize this, in order to avoid unnecessarily long terminology, I use the modern term scientist to describe those people who aimed to learn more about the natural world by observation, experiment, and exploration. Th is also avoids what one historian has called “linguistic chauvinism,” for the Italian term scienziato (scientist) appeared in Galileo’s writings, indicating that its use in languages other than English has a longer history.40 Finally, throughout the text, reference is made to the “Copernican theory,” the “Copernican model,” and the “heliocentric model.” These are generally used interchangeably, unless addressing a specific historical phase, which will be readily apparent from the context. The Copernican model was modified by Kepler, who demonstrated that the planets do not orbit the Sun in perfect circles, but instead follow elliptical paths. Thus, the model in which the planets orbit the Sun would best be described as the “Copernican model as modified by Kepler,” but this is an unwieldy and unnecessarily lengthy phrase. I have therefore chosen to refer to the model in which the Earth orbits the Sun simply as the “Copernican model.” A general question that arises as we strive to understand the history of an idea is the extent to which certain published books were influential. Th is study, after all, is an attempt to understand the reception of the Copernican model in the Jewish community as a whole, not just for those who studied it in depth or published works about it. Alas, there are no recorded oral histories or similar records that allow us direct insight into this, and we must rely instead solely on an analysis of published books and unpublished manuscripts. The danger in this is that peer review as we know it today was entirely lacking, and authors paid for their books to be published by raising funds privately or by seeking subscriptions in advance of publication.41 The danger for the historian is that analyzing these works might be the modern equivalent of evaluating the influence of an idea based on the kind of books published by a vanity press. It would of course allow for some tentative conclusions to be made, but they would be limited in scope. Fortunately, there are several reasons why we can indeed proceed with our analysis. In the fi rst instance, many authors would write a précis that would be shown to prospective subscribers. On the basis of this (and of course the author’s reputation and powers of persuasion), a decision would be made to support the author. As a result, the number of subscribers (whose names some authors published on the opening pages of their works) is a reasonable indication of the level of public interest in a specific book, in addition to the simple fact that the work was being published at all. Furthermore, publishing houses were, like any business, interested in ensuring a profit, and as a result were unlikely to publish books that would not sell. Finally, we can gauge the influence of a specific book by the number of separate editions in which it was

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published, together with the number of years in which the work was in print. These factors allow us to make some reasonable conclusions about the influence of a particular work and the ideas that it contained. With these preliminary remarks completed, we now turn to study the life and work of the man who started it all: Nicolaus Copernicus.

1

Nicolaus Copernicus and His Revolution

On May 23, 2010, Jόzef Kowalczyk, the primate of Poland, led mass during a burial service at the cathedral in Frombork in northern Poland. Lest this seem unremarkable, the service was for a man who had died almost five hundred years earlier and whose works had been banned by the very same Catholic Church now represented by Kowalczyk. That man was Nicolaus Copernicus, and when he died in 1543, he was buried in an unmarked grave. At the reburial service, Copernicus was identified not as the author of a heretical work, but as the founder of the heliocentric model. His tombstone contained an etching of the solar system with the Sun at its center, even though his work, which described just this model, had been banned by the Church for over two hundred years. It was a remarkable rehabilitation for a man and the religious system that had shunned him, and it was widely reported in the media. But just who was Copernicus, and how did he come to his revolutionary and heretical conclusions? Nicolaus Copernicus was born on February 19, 1473, in Torun, in what is now northwest Poland.1 On his father’s side was a family of wealthy merchants, and his mother also came from a wealthy family, so the Copernicus family was very fi nancially secure. Nicolaus was the youngest of four children and grew up in an impressive home, but his father died when Nicolaus was only ten years old, and from then on he was raised by his uncle Lucas, a man who later became bishop of the district of Warmia. In 1491, Lucas sent Nicolaus to enroll in the University of Cracow where, in addition to his studies of law and Latin, he took classes in astronomy and astrology. Copernicus left the university some four years later and traveled to Italy where he enrolled at the University of Bologna with the intention to study canon law. But he seems to have been even more interested in astronomy and rented rooms from a professor of astronomy at the university. By 1497, Copernicus was making observations of the Moon and planets, and these were later used in his famous work. While studying in Bologna, Copernicus’s uncle Lucas arranged for him to become a canon based in the coastal town of Frombork (Frauenberg), which would provide him with an income even when he was studying elsewhere. 13

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After some eight years at Bologna, Nicolaus moved to the University of Padua where he studied medicine for two years, before fi nally receiving a doctorate in canon law from yet another university (this time in Ferrera) in 1503. He then spent seven years as the personal secretary to his uncle Lucas before moving back to Frombork in 1511 where—other than a few years spent in Olszytn as a land administrator for the diocese—he remained for the rest of his life. It was in Frombork that Copernicus continued to make observations of the Moon, stars, and planets, and some time before 1514, he completed a manuscript called the Commentariolus (Little Commentary). Th is work is a six-page outline in which Copernicus wrote his preliminary thoughts about an arrangement of the Earth and planets in which the Sun was at the center. It was circulated only to a small group of his colleagues and never widely shared, but it shows that Copernicus had worked on his heliocentric model for at least thirty years before the publication of De Revolutionibus, the work that would make him famous.2 It is not known exactly how many copies of De Revolutionibus were initially printed. The Harvard astronomer and historian of science Owen Gingerich spent some thirty years tracking down and examining every known fi rst- and second-edition copy of De Revolutionibus, and estimated that the initial print run by the Nuremberg printer Johannes Petreius was between four and five hundred copies. 3 Today there are about 280 copies in various libraries and private collections around the world, and on the rare occasions that they appear at auction, they sell for about two million dollars.4 For the printing of this work, we have to thank Georg Joachim Rheticus, a professor of mathematics at the University of Wittenberg who was so intrigued by Copernicus that he travelled to meet him in May of 1539. Rheticus ended up staying with the old astronomer for the next two and a half years and became Copernicus’s most trusted (and possibly his only) student. 5 After studying with Copernicus for a year, Rheticus published a seventy-page book in Latin called Narratio Prima (The First Report). In this work, Rheticus acquainted the reader with Copernicus and described his teacher in glowing terms: “I rather compare him with Ptolemy. . . . My teacher has written a work of six books in which, in imitation of Ptolemy, he has embraced the whole of astronomy, stating and proving individual propositions mathematically and by the geometrical method.”6 The Narratio gently introduced the reader to a number of observations of the heavens that seemed difficult to explain. Copernicus had to devise a new explanation, and as Rheticus explained it, Copernicus “therefore decided to begin with the assumption that the earth has three motions. . . .” 7 The Narratio not only caught the attention of many astronomers; it was also read by the Nuremberg printer Johannes Petreius, who recognized both the intellectual and commercial importance that a longer work would have.8

Nicolaus Copernicus and His R evolution

15

Petreius wrote to Rheticus and asked him to convince Copernicus to publish a larger work and to use Petreius as his printer.9 Th is appeal worked, and in 1540, Rheticus and Copernicus started to edit Copernicus’s handwritten manuscript in preparation for publication. By the end of the summer of 1541 the revisions were complete, and Rheticus left Frombork with the manuscript, but he delayed his journey to Nuremberg for eight months while he taught a class at the University of Wittenberg. The manuscript of De Revolutionibus was fi nally delivered to the printer in May of 1542. The world of astronomy was, however, already abuzz with rumors of what the new book would contain. For example, Erasmus Reinhold, who taught at Wittenberg with Rheticus, published a book on astronomy in 1542 in which he mentioned the not-yet-printed De Revolutionibus and told his readers that the author was the new Ptolemy.10 But although there were great expectations for the work, Copernicus and Rheticus understood that it was also liable to engender considerable opposition. To minimize any controversy, the printer appointed a theologian by the name of Andreas Osiander to oversee the production of the book. Osiander had read the Narratio and published several works with Rheticus, and was a prominent leader of the Reformation movement in Nuremberg.11 He had also corresponded with Copernicus and had suggested that one way to limit opposition to the work from “the peripatetics and theologians whose future opposition you fear” was to suggest that it was not a description of reality, but rather a hypothesis.12 Copernicus had rejected this suggestion, but this did not prevent Osiander from writing an anonymous preface to De Revolutionibus that he slipped in front of the very fi rst pages of the work. In this preface (known as Ad Lectorum, “to the reader”), Osiander wrote that the book contained a “new hypothesis” that would make it easier to compute the position of the planets, and because this preface was written anonymously, it was impossible for the reader to know that it had not been written by Copernicus.13 By March 1543, the printing process was completed. De Revolutionibus orbium coelestium—On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres—ran to some 202 leaves and contained 148 woodcut diagrams, as well as tables of calculations. The long work was broken up into six “books,” each containing several paragraphs referred to as chapters. In addition, Copernicus wrote a preface dedicated to Pope Paul III, in which he explained the hesitancy he had originally felt regarding the publication of the book. In the very fi rst sentence to this preface, Copernicus made it clear that he was likely to face considerable opposition: I can readily imagine, Holy Father, that as soon as some people hear that in this volume, which I have written about the revolutions of the spheres of the universe, I ascribe certain motions to the terrestrial

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globe, they will shout that I must be immediately repudiated together with this belief.14 Th is potential for controversy, wrote Copernicus, “and the unconventionality of my opinion” had made him reluctant to publish at all. But through the encouragement of friends—who Copernicus pointed out were clerics in the Catholic Church—he eventually allowed his work to be published. Copernicus knew that he would need help once the work was published, and by appealing to the pope directly, he hoped that the pope would provide his support. For even in this very remote corner of the earth where I live you are considered the highest authority by virtue of the loft iness of your office and your love for all literature and astronomy too. Hence by your prestige and judgment you can easily suppress calumnious attacks, although, as the proverb has it, there is no remedy for a backbite.15 Book One of the magnum opus contained a general introduction to the heliocentric theory, and it was there that he introduced the reader to the possibility that the Earth moved. To be sure, there is general agreement among the authorities that the earth is at rest in the middle of the universe. They hold the contrary view to be inconceivable or downright silly. Nevertheless, if we examine the matter more carefully, we shall see that this problem has not yet been solved, and is therefore by no means to be disregarded.16 Copernicus immediately addressed the most likely challenge to his model, which was that this motion is not sensed, noting that “when things move with equal speed in the same direction the motion is not felt.”17 Book Two discussed how to make observations, and the nomenclature of astronomical coordinates. Book Th ree addressed the phenomena of the precession of the equinoxes and the apparent motion of the Sun, and the last three books explained the movement of the Moon and the planets, and discussed solar and lunar eclipses and how they may be predicted. By the time De Revolutionibus was published, Copernicus was seventy years old and very ill. He had suffered a stroke late in 1542 and had been paralyzed as a result, but he managed to maintain a grip on life for the next five months. A copy of De Revolutionibus fi nally reached him on May 24, 1543, and Copernicus died that same day.18 He was buried inside Frombork cathedral where his remains were undisturbed until they were publicly reburied over four hundred years later.

Nicolaus Copernicus and His R evolution

17

In an effort to obtain a teaching position for Albert Einstein, the physicist Max Plank observed “if Einstein’s theory should prove correct, as I suspect it will, he will be considered the Copernicus of the twentieth century.”19 For those of us familiar with the iconic status of Albert Einstein today, these words may help to put the contribution of Copernicus into context. Perhaps then, it could be said that Nicolaus Copernicus was the Einstein of the sixteenth century. But in order to appreciate just how innovative, and threatening, was the new Copernican model, we must briefly consider the then-dominant theory of the structure of the universe and the place of the Earth.

What We Believed The geocentric model of the universe has been identified with Aristotle (384– 322 bce) and later with Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria in the second century ce. While the model did not originate with either, it has become synonymous with them, and so it is often called the Aristotelian or Ptolemaic theory of the universe. In this model, the spherical Earth was motionless at the very center of the universe.20 Surrounding the Earth was the Sun, the Moon, and the five known planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter), which orbited the Earth in perfect circles (for that was the most perfect of the geometric forms). Each planet was embedded in a clear, crystalline sphere, and it was this sphere that revolved around the Earth, carrying the planet with it. Beyond the planets lay the stars, embedded in the outermost sphere. Th is sphere, called the celestial sphere, was also the outer limit of the universe. All the stars in the celestial sphere were equidistant from the Earth, and the celestial sphere in which they were embedded revolved around the Earth once every twenty-four hours. It was the movement of this outermost sphere that caused all the other spheres to move at various speeds, taking the planet that was embedded with them. As illustrated in figure 1.1, a drawing by the seventeenth-century illustrator Andreas Cellarius, the spheres are nestled within each other like the rings within an onion. It was a feature of the heavens that they were perfect and unchanging or, even better, incapable of change. They were thought to exist now as they had done for eternity, and no new stars could be created. Comets, which were seen as new lights in the night sky, were thought to originate from the Earth itself and so were not an exception to the rule that the heavens were unchanging. One problem that the nested spheres could not explain was the irregular movement of the planets, which seemed to wander through the night sky changing position relative to the fi xed stars beyond them. For example, in figure 1.2, an observer of the night sky would see Jupiter at position 1 relative

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Figure 1.1 The nested spheres of the Ptolemaic Universe, from Andreas Cellarius, Atlas coelestis sev harmonia macrocosmia. Amsterdam: Johannes Jansonius, 1660. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.

to the fi xed stars. A week later, Jupiter will appear at position 2, and a week later at position 3, and so on. Th roughout this period, the starry background remains unchanged. Oddly enough, after week ten, Jupiter makes a sudden backward movement, which continues for three more weeks, until after week thirteen, it just as suddenly lurches forward again. In order to explain these odd movements, the system of spheres was amended, and over the centuries, a number of additional spheres were added. Each moved at a different rate and in a slightly different direction, which when added together would account for the retrograde movements that had been observed. But the number of spheres needed to account for all of the movements grew and grew, reaching some fi ft y-four by the time of Aristotle. Ptolemy reduced this number back down to seven plus an outer celestial

9 10 21

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8 7 11 12

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2

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Figure 1.2 The erratic path of Jupiter, reproduced with kind permission from Judah Landa, Torah and Science.

Nicolaus Copernicus and His R evolution

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epicycle celestial sphere x

Earth Mars deferent

Figure 1.3 The epicycle and deferent, reproduced with kind permission from Judah Landa, Torah and Science.

sphere. To account for the retrograde movements, Ptolemy developed the idea that each planet orbited in a small circle called an epicycle. 21 The center of this orbit was a point that moved along a larger circle called the deferent, and the center of the orbit of the larger deferent was a fi xed point near to, but not quite touching, the Earth. As the center of the epicycle (point X) moves around the deferent (see figure 1.3), it drags the planet with it, and it is this combination of movements along the epicycle and around the deferent that explained the retrograde movements of the planets.

17 16 15

of Jupiter Path of Earth Path

start 1

12

10

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SUN

2 3

8 15 16 4

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17 5

6 1

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17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

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start 1

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Figure 1.4 Explanation of the retrograde motion of Jupiter, reproduced with kind permission from Judah Landa, Torah and Science.

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It is worth pausing to consider the correct explanation for the retrograde movement of the planets, which is illustrated in figure 1.4. Jupiter takes twelve (Earth) years to complete one orbit around the Sun, which means it advances 2½ degrees every month, while the Earth advances a full 30 degrees every month. In figure 1.4, the position of Jupiter against the unchanging celestial background is shown. At the start of the observations, Jupiter would be at position 1 against the celestial background. A month later, the Earth has traveled one-twelft h (or 30 degrees) of the way around the Sun and has reached position 2, while Jupiter has only traveled 2½ degrees around the Sun, reaching its position 2. By the time seven months have elapsed, Jupiter has traveled a mere 17½ degrees around the Sun, while the Earth has traveled 210 degrees. As shown in the figure, the Earth now starts to move “ahead” of Jupiter, and when Jupiter is viewed against the unmoving celestial sphere, it appears to be moving backward. During the twelve years that it takes Jupiter to complete its orbit of the Sun, the Earth will “overtake it” about twelve times, and so Jupiter will appear to undergo retrograde motion about twelve times for every orbit around the Sun that it completes.22

The Copernican Innovation Copernicus did not make any new observations that led to his heliocentric model. Rather, he took existing data and developed a simple explanation for the motion of the Sun, the planets, and the stars. Th is explanation required that the Earth no longer be considered immobile at the center of the universe. Instead, the Earth moved in at least two different ways.23 First, it revolved around the Sun over the period of one year, and second, it turned on its own axis once every twenty-four hours from west to east. The Earth was one of six planets that orbited the Sun in a circle, and the stars remained fi xed to the stellar sphere that did not revolve around the Earth once a day. Instead, the apparent motion of the stars was explained by the daily revolution of the Earth around its axis. Both the Copernican and Ptolemaic models could explain the observed orbits of the stars and planets, but the Copernican explanation was far simpler.24 First, it did not require the daily movement of thousands of stars around the Earth. Instead, the moving object was the Earth itself. Second, there was only one direction of motion for the objects in the sky. Under the geocentric system, the stars orbited the Earth from east to west, while the planets orbited it at various speeds in the opposite direction, from west to east. In the new Copernican model, the planets indeed orbited the sun from west to east, but the motion of the stars was now explained by the daily revolution of the Earth,

Nicolaus Copernicus and His R evolution

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and the stars no longer moved in the opposite direction from the planets. Th ird, the Copernican model nicely explained the relationship between the period of a planet’s orbit around the Sun and its distance from it. The farther away the planet was from the Sun, the slower its orbit. Th is explanation did not apply in the Ptolemaic system, because the stars were farthest away from the Sun and yet moved with the greatest speed. The fourth simple explanation that the heliocentric model could provide was that of the apparent retrograde motion of the planets. Rather than invoke ad hoc epicycles, the retrograde motion was easily understood as a simple consequence of the speed of the orbits of the planets. There were, however, a number of significant and varied objections to the Copernican model. In the fi rst place, it ran against what our senses appeared to be telling us, an objection that Copernicus had found important enough to address directly. The Sun appeared to rise and set every day, the stars appeared to move at great speed across the night sky, and the Earth certainly felt stationary. To accept the Copernican model would be to question the information that the senses supplied. Th is was certainly possible, of course, but it would violate “the fundamental epistemological principle that under normal conditions the senses are reliable and provide us with one of the best instruments to learn the truth about reality.”25 The second objection to the heliocentric model was that the Earth had always been considered to be fundamentally different from the planets, because it was motionless, was made up of substances like water and rocks, and was constantly changing. In contrast, the planets were thought to be featureless and luminous, made of ether, and not subject to any kind of change, and before the invention of the telescope there was no evidence to suggest otherwise. In the heliocentric model, the Earth became just another of the planets that orbit the Sun, and it lost its special status. In the era before the telescope, there were three observational objections to the Copernican model. The fi rst was based on the observations of Venus, which in the Copernican model should exhibit phases like the phases of the Moon. Before the invention of the telescope, these phases could not be seen, and it was (incorrectly) assumed that they did not exist. Another observational objection was based on the apparent size and brightness of Mars. In the Copernican model, the Earth and Mars were sometimes on the same side of the Sun and sometimes on opposite sides. When the latter occurred, Mars should appear to be much smaller and dimmer than when it was observed closer to the Earth. Although a change in the brightness of Mars had indeed been observed, it was thought to be much smaller than what should have occurred. The fi nal observational objection was that stellar parallax could not be measured and was thought not to occur. (It would require much more accurate instruments

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to measure the tiny parallax that was involved, and in 1838, stellar parallax was fi nally observed.) Parallax is an easy concept to demonstrate: Simply hold out an arm and raise one fi nger. Close one eye and note the apparent position of your fi nger against the background, and then open that eye and close the other; the fi nger will appear to change position. The apparent movement of the fi nger is clearly due to a change in the position of the observer—in this case, the different positions of the eyes. If the Earth moved, the same phenomena should be observed with the stars. For example, as shown in figure 1.5, the star’s apparent position on the stellar sphere when observed from the same place on Earth would appear to move by an angle of p over a six-month period. In addition, there were objections based on experiments, particularly those involving a cannonball shot in different directions.26 It was thought that if the Earth was indeed rotating eastward, a cannonball shot in that direction would travel less far than one shot to the west. In both cases, the cannonball is launched with the same velocity, but in the former, the cannon itself moves toward the east as a result of the Earth’s motion and so will end up closer to the cannonball. Because this did not happen, the Earth could not really be revolving as Copernicus had suggested. The last kinds of objections to the heliocentric theory were biblical in nature. There were many passages that, when read literally or when translated from the Hebrew in a certain way, suggested that the Earth did not move and that the Sun did. For example: “One generation comes, and the other goes, but the Earth stands for ever” (Eccles. 1:4), or “Sun, stand still in Gibon” (Josh. 10:12). In some verses, this suggestion was explicit, whereas in others, it was apparent only with a degree of imagination. Since the Bible was the word of a God who did not lie, the biblical objections were taken to be no less important than those that were experimental or philosophical.

p

sun

Figure 1.5 Parallax. Reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought by Thomas S. Kuhn, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, Copyright 1957 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, Copyright © renewed 1985 by Thomas S. Kuhn.

Nicolaus Copernicus and His R evolution

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These were some of the objections that were raised in response to the heliocentric model. Although Copernicus in fact addressed a number of them in his famous book, they would be mentioned at various times and in different iterations in the ensuing Christian and Jewish debates over the truth of Copernicanism. Some objections could be easily dismissed, while others would be answered only with the invention of the telescope and subsequent improvements in its power, or changes in the way the Bible was interpreted.

The Early Reception of De Revolutionibus How was De Revolutionibus fi rst received? Initially it was not the book’s heliocentric theory that was of interest, but Copernicus’s painstaking planetary observations. For example, Erasmus Reinhold, the professor at Wittenberg who had compared Copernicus to the great Ptolemy, reworked these charts and published them in 1551 in his Prutenic Tables, but made no mention of the new model of the universe proposed by Copernicus.27 The Council of Trent, which met between 1545 and 1563 to consider a number of theological issues facing the Church, did not discuss the book’s heliocentric model, but it did recommend publishing a list of banned books that would be forbidden to Catholics; in doing so, it set in motion the formation of the Congregation of the Index that would later ban the works of Copernicus and Galileo.28 But eventually the heliocentric model suggested by Copernicus was noted by others and immediately rejected. In 1574, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) delivered a series of lectures on the state of astronomy at the University of Copenhagen and noted that Copernicus had been critical of the observations of Ptolemy. Tycho agreed that Ptolemy’s observations were far from accurate, but he also noted that the same criticism could be made of Copernicus’s own data. Tycho was able to produce his own, more accurate data from observations made at his observatory on the island of Hven (the site of the last important pre-telescope observations, and a place that was visited by Rabbi David Gans, as we shall see in the next chapter). Tycho would only accept the Copernican model if it was backed up with supporting observations, in particular stellar parallax, and since parallax had not been detected, Tycho rejected the heliocentric system. As well as objecting to Copernicus’s inaccurate data, Tycho challenged the very suggestion that the Earth moved, since this would contradict the literal meaning of several biblical verses. In response to all this, Tycho proposed a new model in which all the planets orbit the Sun, but the Sun itself drags them around a stationary Earth.29 We shall return to Tycho in more detail in the next chapter. In Great Britain, astronomers and writers were starting to take notice of Copernicus. The fi rst mention of Copernicus by an English writer was by the

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Oxford graduate Robert Recorde in 1556, although he did not fully explain the heliocentric model.30 However, this changed in 1573 when another astronomer named Thomas Digges (c.1546–1595) published an exposition on the Copernican system and in so doing became the fi rst English writer to accept the new astronomy.31 The English physician William Gilbert (1540–1603) accepted parts of the new model, such as the daily revolution of the Earth, but did not come to any defi nite conclusion about a yearly orbit around the Sun.32 The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge appeared to have ignored the heliocentric model entirely until at least the middle of the seventeenth century, and perhaps most famously of all, the English philosopher, statesman, and member of Parliament Francis Bacon (1561–1626) rejected the Copernican model as having “too many and great inconveniences.”33 A review of the state of astronomy in early America reveals that Copernicanism was taught at Harvard as early as 1659, and one historian has noted that although “in almost every country the new astronomy had to fight Church and priest, in New England the clergy was its primary propagator.”34 On the European continent, the reception of De Revolutionibus was as varied as it had been in Great Britain. For example, in 1634, Martinus Hortensius became the fi rst Copernican to be appointed to a chair at a Dutch university, and a second pro-Copernican appointment was made in 1647.35 In Poland, however, there was a clear distinction between Copernicus’s astronomical tables, which were widely used in Cracow in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and his heliocentric model, which was equally widely ignored.36 It was not until 1782 that the model was fi nally accepted in Poland and taught as anything other than a hypothetical construct.37

Johannes Kepler Perhaps no single person did more to advance the Copernican theory than the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), a man who stood “at a junction in the history of astronomy when the old Earth-centered universe was giving way to the new Sun-centered system.”38 Kepler was born in what is now southern Germany and entered a Lutheran theological seminary in Tübingen, where he had planned to train for the priesthood. It was while studying there that he was introduced to the Copernican model by Michael Mästlin, and as a result became convinced that the heliocentric model was correct. At the age of twenty-three, Kepler left Tübingen to teach mathematics at a Protestant school in Graz, now in southern Austria. While there, he published his fi rst book, Mysterium Cosmographicum (The Cosmic Mystery) in 1596, in which he explained that the distance of the planets from the Sun is related to the size and order of the five regular Platonic shapes.39 Kepler became a Copernican because

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of the explanatory power of the Copernican model, which he found persuasive: “Copernicus alone gives an explanation to those things that provoke astonishment among other astronomers thus destroying the source of astonishment, which lies in the ignorance of the causes.”40 Kepler later returned to Prague and worked with Tycho Brahe at his observatory. When Brahe died in 1601, Kepler succeeded him as the imperial mathematician and continued Brahe’s work producing meticulous observations of the stars and planets.41 It was on the basis of these observations that Kepler later published several Copernican works; these included Astronomia Nova (The New Astronomy) in 1609, in which Kepler described the fi rst two of his famous three laws of planetary motion. In this work, Kepler related planetary motion to the Sun itself, rather than to the center of the Earth’s orbit, which is what Copernicus had proposed, and in so doing paved the way for Newton to later outline his celestial mechanics.42 It was Kepler’s emphasis on the Sun as the driver of planetary motion that made him the fi rst astronomer to seek a physical explanation for celestial phenomena.43 Kepler went on to write other important books, including Epitome Astronomicae Copernicanae (Epitome of Copernican Astronomy), which was published in three parts from 1618 to 1621. In this, his most influential work and the fi rst Copernican academic textbook, Kepler took the fundamental Copernican model that had assumed each planet to orbit the Sun in a perfect circle and amended it, based on his own discovery that in fact the planets have elliptical orbits.44 Kepler even tried his hand at what today we would call science fiction; in 1634, his heirs published Somnium (Dream), a work that Kepler had begun in 1609 to defend the notion of the mobility of the Earth, in which Kepler imagined what it would be like to travel to the Moon and observe from the lunar surface the motion of the planets as they revolved around the Sun.

Galileo It was by luck that Galileo received a copy of Kepler’s fi rst work, Mysterium Cosmographicum. In 1597, Kepler gave two copies of the book to a colleague named Paul Homberg who was traveling to Italy. For reasons that are not known, Homberg in turn gave one of the copies to Galileo, who was then teaching at the University of Padua, and the two Copernican astronomers began a correspondence.45 In a letter Galileo wrote to Kepler thanking him for the book, Galileo admitted that he had been convinced of the Copernican model for several years and had written some preliminary thoughts on the subject, which, wrote Galileo, “I have dared not publish as I’ve been deterred by the fate of our master Copernicus. For although he has gained immortal fame among a few, he has been ridiculed and derided by countless others.”46

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It was these writings that would become Galileo’s famous defense of the Copernican model of the solar system, the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Galileo defended the Copernican model on several fronts: By using the newly invented telescope, Galileo answered the observational objections to the model, revealing that Jupiter was orbited by its own moons and therefore the Earth was not the center of orbit for all objects in the sky. He countered scriptural objections by developing a hermeneutical principle that the Bible could not be interpreted as a work of science, and he outlined a new theory of mechanics based on the principles of the conservation of motion that countered objections based on existing notions of mechanics. All this allowed Galileo “to elaborate a defense of Copernicanism that stressed reasoning and argumentation judiciously guided by the ideals of fallibility, open-mindedness, and fair-mindedness.”47 Of course, none of this saved Galileo from being questioned by the Inquisition under threat of torture, which occurred in June of 1633. A few days later, Galileo was found guilty of a “vehement suspicion of heresy”; he was forced to recant his beliefs and confi ned to house arrest, and his Dialogue was added to the index of banned books, where it remained for the next two hundred years.48 Having reviewed the historical significance of the theory that Copernicus proposed, we are ready to begin our exploration of its Jewish reception. That exploration begins with examining the biblical and talmudic models of the universe, which established the basic Jewish beliefs about the construction of the cosmos.

2

The Talmudic View of the Universe

A discussion of Jewish att itudes toward just about anything begins with the Bible and the Talmud. Biblical commentators, rabbinic leaders, and halakhic (Jewish legal) authorities all built upon a talmudic foundation, and even when the traditional Jewish world opened itself up to secular culture, it was the Talmud that was often the starting point for debates regarding the place of Judaism in the modern world. The Talmud, however, is not a monolithic text, but rather the record of hundreds of legal and ethical debates involving dozens of rabbis over at least five hundred years.1 To speak then of the talmudic view of anything is to gloss over the fact that it is the views of individual rabbis that are being described. Th is is important to remember as we attempt to distill a talmudic cosmology, which will in the end be a reflection of the cosmologies of but a few rabbinic figures. Th is cosmology addressed all of the issues that were of concern to others who considered the natural world: What is the nature and shape of the Earth, and on what does it rest? What is the path of the Sun through both the day-night-day cycle and over the year, and how are the movements of the stars to be understood? Only when we have studied how these questions were answered in the Talmud can we compare them with the perspectives of other existing cosmologies.

The Shape of the Earth To the naked eye, the terrain of the Earth varies quite distinctly; in some places it is fairly flat, while in others it is mountainous and irregular. Standing and looking out over the sea, the water appears perfectly smooth and continues as far as the eye could see. What is beyond that was often unknown in the ancient world, and what supported the Earth itself could only be ascertained from reading the Bible. Of the few sages whose cosmology is known to us, one of the most important was Rabbi Yose ben Halafta. Born in Lower Galilee some time in the middle of the second century, Rabbi Yose was a student of the famous 27

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Rabbi Akiva, and he went on to establish a rabbinic court in his hometown of Zippori (Sepphoris). Although most of his teachings were legal in nature, he also addressed the geographic locations of both the Earth and God in the universe: Alas for people that they see but know not what they see, that stand but know not on what they stand. What does the Earth rest on? On the pillars (for it is said: “Who shakes the Earth out of her place, and whose pillars tremble” [Job 9:6]). The pillars stand upon the waters (for it is said: “To Him that spreads the Earth above the waters” [Ps. 136:6]). The waters stand upon the mountains (for it is said: “The waters stood above the mountains” [Ps. 104:6]). The mountains stand on the wind (for it is said: “For, lo, He who forms the mountains, and creates the wind” [Amos 4:13]). The wind is upon the storm (for it is said: “The wind, the storm does its bidding” [Ps. 148:8]). The storm is suspended from the arm of the Holy One, blessed be He (for it is said: “And underneath are the everlasting arms” [Deut. 33:27]).2 It is of course entirely reasonable to suggest a metaphoric explanation for this cosmology and to suggest that this talmudic discussion not be taken literally.3 Th is approach would seem to be supported by an opposing cosmology suggested by those who take issue with Rabbi Yose’s picture: But the Sages say: The world rests on twelve pillars (for it is said: “He set the borders to the peoples according to the number of the tribes of the children of Israel” [Deut. 32:8]). And some say seven pillars (for it is said: “She has hewn out her seven pillars” [Prov. 9:1]). R. Eleazar ben Shammua says: The world rests on one pillar, and its name is ‘Righteous’ (for it is said: “But ‘Righteousness’ is the foundation of the world.” [Prov. 10:25]).4 Th is single pillar suggested by Rabbi Eleazar certainly seems to be metaphoric rather than literal, given the context of the surrounding verses of the Book of Proverbs from which it is taken.5 A metaphorical understanding, however, does not fit in with the rest of the discussion. For, having established what lies beneath the Earth, the Talmud then addresses the nature of the skies above it and records the precise order and number of layers of the heavens. Th is technical discussion is generally not understood as being merely a metaphor. For example, it is this passage that is used by Maimonides to establish his own cosmology.6 In light of this, it is reasonable to assume that Rabbi Yose’s claim that the Earth rests on pillars that are supported by God is his description of reality.

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Whether it stood on seven pillars or only one, the Earth was considered by the sages of the Talmud to be flat. As recorded in the Jerusalem Talmud, people lived on this flat Earth completely surrounded by water: R. Yonah said: When Alexander the Macedonian wanted to go back he flew higher and higher until he saw the Earth as a ball and the sea as a plate.7 Another talmudic sage, Rabbi Natan, noted that the stars do not seem to change in their positions overhead when walking far distances. The assumption underlying his explanation for this observation was that the Earth is flat.8 Covering this flat Earth was an opaque cap referred to as the rakia, which is most commonly translated as the sky or fi rmament. Rava, a fourth-century Babylonian sage who lived on the banks of the river Tigris, determined this cap to be 1,000 parsa in width, while Rabbi Yehudah thought that he had overestimated this thickness.9 There were others who added to the picture of the sky; Resh Lakish announced that it actually was made up of seven distinct layers.10 Given this model, there would have to be a place where the opaque cap touched the Earth, and Rabba bar Bar Hanah in fact claimed to have touched this Earth-sky interface: [A merchant said] come, I will show you where Earth and sky touch one another. I took up my [bread] basket and placed it in a window of heaven. When I fi nished my prayers I looked for the basket but did not fi nd it. I said to the merchant: “Are there thieves here?” He replied to me: “It is the heavenly wheel revolving. Wait here until tomorrow and you will fi nd it.”11 Even allowing for a degree of talmudic fantasy, this fable was clearly built on the model that we outlined above.

The Path of the Sun If the Earth was a flat disc covered by an opaque sky known as the rakia, the sages had to explain how the Sun moved into and out of view: The wise men of Israel say that during the day the Sun travels under the rakia, and at night it travels above the rakia. And Gentile wise men say: during the day the Sun travels under the rakia and at night under

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the Earth. Rabbi [Yehudah Hanasi] said: their view is more logical than ours for during the day springs are cold and at night they are warm.12 These two opposing views are shown in figure 2.1. Once again it is apparent that in the talmudic view, the sky must be completely opaque. As the Sun passes over the top of the sky at night, it is not in the slightest way visible. The phenomena that Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi described, in which a body of water feels warmer at night (when compared with the surrounding cool night air) than it did during the day, is due to a property we now call specific heat or heat capacity.13 Because the heat capacity of water is about four times that of air, water takes longer to heat up but also longer to cool down than does the surrounding air; as a result, when compared to the cooler night air, the water feels comparatively warmer at night than it did during the day. Th is is also the reason that the weather in coastal areas is generally milder than areas more inland; the ocean traps the Sun’s heat and slowly releases it, preventing large fluctuations in temperature. All this was not known to Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi, who came up with another explanation entirely. Th is discussion about the path of the Sun at night had practical ramifications that eventually found their way into Jewish law. For example, when baking matzot—the unleavened cracker-like bread that is eaten at Passover—warm water must be avoided as it would speed up the process of leavening. The German Rabbi Jacob Moellin (1365–1427) ruled that water used to make matzot must be drawn immediately after sunset, because after this time the Sun warms the water as it passes beneath the Earth. Th is opinion was codified in the Shulhan Arukh, the Code of Jewish Law written by Joseph Caro in the sixteenth century.14 Th is talmudic passage demonstrates that the sages of the Talmud did not believe in what would later come to be called the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, in which the Earth was motionless at the center of the orbiting planets and stars. In their view, the Sun had an erratic orbit and one that was most (a)

(b) sky

path of sun

sky

East

West East West

water Jewish view

path of sun Gentile view, according to the Talmud

Figure 2.1 The daily movement of the sun. (a) The Jewish view (b) The Gentile view , reproduced with kind permission from Judah Landa, Torah and Science.

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certainly not circular. Although to the naked eye, the stars and planets do seem to circle the Earth in an orbit that appears to be circular, exactly how the sages thought that they moved around the stationary Earth is not known. As a result, it would be an error to label the talmudic universe as Ptolemaic, for such a model is neither described by nor able to be reconstructed from talmudic texts.15

The Solar System The solar system describes the group of planets (and asteroids) that orbit the star closest to the Earth called the Sun. With the exception of Saturn and Venus, the planets are not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, although the stars—called kohavim in Hebrew—are mentioned almost forty times.16 Another term used to describe the heavens is mazzalot, but it appears only once in the Bible, and its meaning is unclear; some translate the word to mean the planets, while others translate it to mean the constellations or signs of the zodiac.17 It was not until the era of the Mishnah (c. 70–200 ce) that the planets are fi rst defi nitively addressed in Jewish literature, but there is continued confusion about the meaning of the terms kohavim and mazzalot, which are used in phrases such as “the Sun, the Moon, the kohavim and the mazzalot ” in multiple places in the Talmud.18 The earliest complete Jewish listing of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets is found in Bereshit Rabbah, composed some time in the fourth or fi ft h century:19 There is a mazzal that fi nishes its orbit in twelve months like the Sun; there is a mazzal that fi nishes its orbit in twelve years like Jupiter (Tsedek), and there is a mazzal that fi nishes its way in thirty days, and this is the Moon, and there is a mazzal that fi nishes its way in thirty years, and this is Saturn (Shabbetai)—except for Mercury (Kohav Hammah), Venus (Nogah) and Mars (Ma’adim), which fi nish their orbits in four hundred and eighty years.20 By the end of the talmudic period (c. 500 ce), the rabbis had a notion of the planets as distinct bodies, although some texts refer to them as mazzalot, and others use the term kohavim. The planets, together with the Sun, the Moon, and all the stars, were thought to exist in the rakia, the second of the seven layers that made up the heavens. For astrological purposes, it was important to get both the order and the orbits of the planets correct, because each planet was thought to rule over a particular hour of the day and a particular day of the week. Perhaps the most well-known and coincidentally the most difficult to understand of the talmudic descriptions of the sky is the following statement:

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“The Jewish sages say, the galgal is fi xed and the mazzalot revolve, and the Gentile sages say the galgal revolves and the mazzalot are fi xed.”21 Its meaning is unclear, and as the late Isadore Twersky pointed out, it “has a long history of interpretation, reflecting various moods: embarrassment, perplexity, satisfaction, with some attempts at harmonization or reinterpretation or restricting the significance of the report.”22 Many different interpretations have been offered. One is that the galgal refers to the Sun, and the mazzalot refer to the planets; in this understanding, the sages of the Talmud anticipated the Copernican heliocentric system. However, this explanation must be rejected because in the very next line of the discussion, the Talmud makes it clear that the mazzalot contain the constellations Eglah (Taurus) and Akrav (Scorpio).23 It is therefore apparent that the mazzalot in this rabbinic passage are not to be identified with any of the planets. It is also clear that the system being described is not the Ptolemaic one in which the stars and planets revolve around the Earth, because the Earth is never referred to as galgal.24 The most likely explanation of this passage is that the galgal refers to a sphere and that, according to the Gentile sages, the constellations are fi xed within a revolving sphere. The Jewish sages believed the sky to be both solid and immovable; according to them, the constellations—which are clearly seen to revolve, do so independently of the fi xed heavens beneath them.

The Length of the Solar Year and Its Religious Consequences Although in the talmudic debate between the Jewish and Gentile sages, the daily orbit of the Sun was erratic, another talmudic sage, the astronomer Shmuel (Samuel), described an orbiting Sun whose yearly path was absolutely regular. In point of fact, according to Shmuel, the Sun orbits the Earth in exactly 365 days and six hours. Th is is the length of the year that was used in the Julian calendar, and it is likely that Shmuel, who lived at the end of the second century, had learned this from the Gentile scholars with whom he was in contact.25 A year cannot, however, start six hours into the day, and the Julian calendar accounted for these six extra hours each year by adding them together once every four years into an extra day—a leap day. Shmuel’s length of the solar year (which is of course not the time for the Sun to orbit the Earth, but rather for the Earth to complete one revolution around the Sun) is actually longer than the correct period of orbit, which is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds. However, Shmuel’s solar year was codified as the accepted length used by the Jewish calendar to calculate the date of some of its religious ceremonies. For example, once every twenty-eight years, Jews recite a blessing that commemorates the return of the Sun to the exact position that it occupied when

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it was fi rst created. To this day, this ritual, known simply as Birkat Hahamah (the blessing of the Sun), is widely observed by Orthodox Jews and is heralded by the publication of guides and explanations for those who want to further understand the ceremony. Th is ritual can only take place on a Wednesday, and it was last celebrated by tens of thousands of Jews across the world on the morning of April 8, 2009; it will be observed again on Wednesday, April 8, 2037. The talmudic sage Abbaye outlined the reason for this ritual: Our rabbis taught: He who sees the Sun in its tekufah [lit. turning point], the Moon in its power, the planets in their set orbits or the constellations in their order should say: Blessed are You who makes the works of creation. Precisely when does this occur? Abbaye said, every twenty-eight years, when the cycle begins again, and the vernal equinox falls in Saturn on the evening of Tuesday going into Wednesday.26 And so, according to Shmuel’s calendar, in the fi rst year of every twenty-eight-year cycle, at precisely 6 P.M. on a Tuesday, the Sun returns to the exact position on the very same day of the week in which God had placed it at the very start of creation. Th is is why Abbaye—who accepted Shmuel’s solar scheme—codified the blessing of the Sun to be recited at this interval, and the cycle came to be known as the Mahzor Hagadol—the great cycle. Even though the Sun returns to the same position every four years, this return only coincides with a Tuesday evening once every twenty-eight years. Although the Talmud seems to suggest that the blessing be recited on Tuesday evening, when Maimonides codified this ritual, he wrote that it should be performed “on the morning of the fourth day of the week,” which is what happens to this day. 27 However, the system of Shmuel that was adopted by Abbaye is purely a religious construct, and although it claims to have an astronomical equivalent, there is no solar phenomenon that happens once every twenty-eight years. The length of the solar year as calculated by Shmuel is too long by over eleven minutes, and the seasons are not of equal length. Th is inequality occurs because the speed of the Earth is not constant. As a result, the length of the seasons varies and in the northern hemisphere, winter lasts about eighty-nine days and summer about ninety-three days. Furthermore, the length of daylight varies from place to place and changes over the course of the year. Th is means that daytime is not always exactly twelve hours, as it was assumed by Shmuel to be for the purposes of his calculations. To further complicate matters, Jewish law adopted another measure of the length of a solar year that is closer to (but still slightly longer than) the true length of the solar year. It is not surprising

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that one scholar of Judaism referred to the blessing of the Sun as “perhaps the most unusual periodic Jewish ritual currently practiced.”28 Despite its rarity and the fact that there is no true solar event occurring at the time of the ritual, the blessing of the Sun has become a much loved event and seems to have become increasingly important to Jews over the last few hundred years. One of the earliest descriptions of the ritual is provided by a student of Rabbi Jacob Moellin (known by the acronym Maharil). Here is the student’s description of preparations for the blessing of the Sun in the spring of 1421: At that time Maharil told the town beadles to announce in the synagogue on the previous evening (i.e., Tuesday evening) that the next day—Wednesday—everyone should be careful to say the blessing at sunrise “Blessed are you Lord our God, king of the universe, who makes works of creation” . . . for at the start of every [twenty-eight year] cycle, the Sun returns to the exact spot in which it was placed at the creation of the world. . . . 29 Isaac Schorr, the rabbi of the town of Gewitsch now in the Czech Republic, described what happened when the weather refused to cooperate for the ritual blessing to be recited in 1757: The people of the community were eager to serve and to bless by invoking God’s name; they were happy and rejoiced to do the will of their maker, for they cherished a mitzvah at its proper time. . . . Their hopes were disappointed, however, and were turned into despair, for on that day, and the time of the onset of the equinox, the sky was overcast with clouds, and the sun could not be seen at all. 30 More recently, a solution to the vagaries of the weather was suggested by some rather enthusiastic followers of Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, leader of the Satmar Hasidim. They questioned whether a light plane could be hired to carry them above the clouds should the day be overcast, allowing then to perform the ritual blessing above the clouds. 31 Although Rabbi Teitelbaum ruled that this fl ight was not required, the ritual is clearly one that has become an important, if rare, part of Jewish practice. 32

The Maimonidean Description of the Universe The famous rabbi and physician Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) was perhaps the fi rst Jewish writer to describe a model of the universe that we can recognize

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as Ptolemaic. In his fourteen-volume code of Jewish law (which was derived from the Talmud) called Mishneh Torah, he outlined this model as follows: The heavens are called shamayim, rakia, zevul and aravort, and they contain nine [concentric] spheres. The sphere that is closest to us is the sphere of the Moon. The second sphere beyond that is that of Mercury, the third is Venus and the fourth sphere is that of the Sun. The fi ft h sphere is that of Mars, the sixth that of Jupiter, the seventh that of Saturn and the eighth sphere, called rakia, contains all the stars seen in the sky. The ninth sphere is that which turns each day from east to west, which encircles all the others and which moves all of them. The explanation for the fact that all the stars appear as if they are in the same sphere—even though they actually lay one above the other, is that the spheres are absolutely clear as glass, so that a star in the eighth sphere could appear to be in the fi rst. All these spheres that orbit the Earth are spherical, like a ball with the Earth suspended in the center. 33 Having established this basic model, Maimonides then described an additional set of spheres—eighteen in all—that revolve around the Earth, as well as eight smaller spheres that remain fi xed. The calculation of the movement of these spheres is based on observations of the stars and planets, and it is this that “forms the science of mathematical astronomy, on which the Greeks composed many works.”34 These smaller spheres are epicycles, and this description is unmistakably that of Ptolemy. It was this model that became the universally accepted Jewish view of the structure of the universe, just as it had been accepted by the overwhelming majority of non-Jewish writers. Some time later, of course, it became the model that was accepted by the Catholic Church. There was simply no other conceivable way for the universe to work. 35 Figure 2.2, taken from a book that we discuss in some detail in chapter 5, illustrates this model of the universe. Although Maimonides’ universe was clearly structured in his Mishneh Torah, his philosophical work The Guide for the Perplexed suggested a different model, and scholars have debated which (if either) of the two can be described as the Maimonidean view. 36 Although in places in The Guide, the standard model of the Earth at the center of concentric spheres is repeated, Maimonides raised some objections to this model based on Aristotelian thought. For example, Maimonides questioned how some spheres could move at different speeds, and how stars that share the same spheres can appear to be of different sizes.37 These questions led him to conclude that the astronomical foundations of Ptolemy were “entirely outside the bounds of reasoning and opposed to all that has been made clear in natural science.”38 By this, Maimonides meant that,

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Figure 2.2 The geocentric universe, from Ma’aseh Tuviah, Venice, 1708. From the collection of the author.

since classic Aristotelian physics raised some questions about the Ptolemaic model of the universe, the latter could not be true. 39 There is then a contradiction between the conventional model as outlined in Maimonides’ religious code Mishneh Torah, and the one in his more philosophical Guide.40 For our purposes, however, it is important to remember that in both Maimonidean models, the Earth is immobile at the center of the universe. There is one further aspect of the Maimonidean model of the universe that we need to address: the question of whether Maimonides believed his astronomical models to be true in an absolute sense, or whether he saw them as the best that the science of the day could formulate, and likely to be revised or replaced as science improved. Th is question is absolutely fundamental for Jewish thinkers, because it will shape how science can be interpreted in the light of religious codes. Maimonides carefully outlined the Ptolemaic model in a section called The Laws of the Foundation of the Torah, alongside other fundamental beliefs required of all Jews, such as God not having a body (1.4) or that the laws of the Torah can never be abrogated (9.1). Since it is clear that these other laws are not to be thought of as merely contingent on the beliefs of the times, are the models of the universe to be thought of in the same way, as equally incumbent upon Jews to believe? Menachem Kellner, a widely respected contemporary scholar of Maimonides, has written that

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[s]ome interpreters of Maimonides think so. I recently heard a lecture by a prominent physicist and Habad Hasid who argued that since Maimonides wrote his Mishneh Torah with divine assistance, we had to interpret our view of the universe to match his; we are not permitted to dismiss his understanding . . . as expressions of now outmoded theories.41 According to Kellner however, a careful reading of Maimonides’ own words will demonstrate that this position is not what Maimonides believed himself. Rather, Maimonides was of the opinion that scientific thought was likely to change and be superseded.42 Consider, for example, what Maimonides wrote about the way in which astronomy had changed over time: Do not ask me to show that everything they [the sages] have said concerning astronomical matters conforms to the way things really are. For at that time mathematics was imperfect. They did not speak about this as transmitters of the prophets, but rather because in those times they were men of knowledge in these fields or because they had heard these dicta from the men of knowledge who lived in those times.43 Maimonides was of the opinion that not only did Aristotle (whom he referred to as the “chief of the philosophers”44) err, but that some talmudic rabbis and even some biblical figures (who were able to attain some degree of prophetic inspiration) had also made errors.45 Scientific knowledge was fallible, and this being the case, Maimonides would have thought of himself as capable of the same mistakes. For Maimonides, astronomers were only able to make provisional statements about reality, based on the best (but by its nature imperfect) knowledge available to them.46 That Maimonides described a geocentric universe in the thirteenth century did not mean he was wedded to this belief as a principle of faith. Th is however, was either willfully ignored or simply forgotten in the centuries after Maimonides’ death, allowing for the later debate over Copernicus to become contentious.

Talmudic Astronomy and Ancient Astronomy So far we have examined various talmudic beliefs about structure of the Earth and the universe around it, but these beliefs must be placed in a historical perspective. The writings of Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century bce, are the earliest that survive of any writer who thought that the Earth was spherical. He based his beliefs on both philosophical and observational considerations.

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Among the former was his idea that all matter moves toward the center of the universe. Because of this tendency, he assumed not only that the Earth was at the center of the universe, but also that it was spherical. Aristotle’s philosophical speculations were supported by his observations; in point of fact, Aristotle offered two observations that supported his contention that the Earth was spherical.47 First, during a lunar eclipse, the shadow that appeared on the Moon was curved. Because this shadow was already known to be due to the interposition of the Earth between the Sun and the Moon, the Earth itself must be round. The second observation was that some stars were only visible at what we today refer to as certain latitudes. Aristotle noted, for example, that “certain stars are seen in Egypt and the neighborhood of Cyprus, which are invisible in more northerly lands, and stars which are continuously visible in northern lands are observed to have set in others.”48 If the Earth was indeed flat, this observation could not easily be explained. These considerations led Aristotle to conclude “ . . . not only that the Earth’s mass is spherical, but also that it is not large in comparison with the size of the stars.”49 Precisely who was to be credited with the very fi rst suggestion that the Earth was a sphere was itself a matter of dispute among the Greeks themselves; some of them att ributed this thought to Parmenides, who lived in the fi ft h century bce, while others credited either Pythagorus, who lived a century earlier, or Hesiod, who lived in the seventh century bce. 50 There is no doubt, though, about the name of the Greek who most accurately calculated the circumference of the Earth: Eratosthenes (276–194 bce), who was born in Cyrene (located in modern Libya), studied in Athens, and later became a librarian at the legendary library in Alexandria. While in Alexandria (where he met Archimedes), he performed an experiment that allowed him to calculate the circumference of the Earth. 51 Later Greek writers such as Cleomedes, Ptolemy, and Theon of Smyrna either expanded upon the works of Aristotle, arguing for a spherical Earth, or added new (and sometimes more inaccurate) calculations for the Earth’s circumference. But these new arguments “ . . . had no bearing on the outcome of the case, which was sett led by the middle of the fourth century bc.”52 While the rabbis of the Talmud continued to argue about the size of the flat Earth for several more centuries, the Greeks had determined the Earth to be a sphere, had calculated its circumference, and had moved on to consider other questions. 53

Ptolemaic Biblical Commentary Ever since the Bible’s creation, it was interpreted in a myriad of ways, and the use of allegory featured prominently. The earliest readers often relied on allegorical interpretations, and this approach has continued for two thousand

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years of biblical commentary. Part of the fascination of this approach is that allegorical interpretation is abstract, and this enables the reader to identify with the text even if it appears to be discussing a concrete event or command far removed from daily experience. Although abstraction is a feature of allegory, it is often combined with more factual elements in order to emphasize its message. Th is technique, in which the concrete biblical text is interpreted to represent an abstract idea or concept, perhaps originated with Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish biblical commentator who lived in the fi rst century. 54 For example, Philo interpreted the story of Abraham’s journey from Ur, where he was born, to Canaan as an allegory for the journey of anyone searching for the true God. Philo also wrote of the allegorical meaning of the menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum (see figure 2.3) that was placed in the Tabernacle and later in the Temple in Jerusalem: [F]rom this candlestick there proceeded six branches, three on each side, projecting from the candlestick in the center, so as altogether to complete the number of seven; and in all the seven there were seven candles and seven lights, being symbols of those seven stars which are called planets by those men who are versed in natural philosophy; for the sun, like the candlestick, being placed in the middle of the other six, in the fourth rank, gives light to the three planets which are above it, and to those of equal number which are below it, adapting to circumstances the musical and truly divine instrument. 55 There are other examples in which the Ptolemaic system was used in allegorical interpretations of the biblical text. Maimonides understood Ezekiel’s famous Moon Mercury Venus

Sun

Mars Jupiter Saturn

Figure 2.3 The menorah as symbol of the order of the planets from the Earth.

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mystical vision of the chariot as referring to both the physical structure of the universe as well as the spiritual realm. 56 In the vision, Ezekiel described a creature with four faces, which Maimonides understood as referring to the four primary spheres that surround the Earth, and the wheels of the chariot that Ezekiel saw were understood as the celestial spheres. 57 Maimonides also believed that the vision explained how the four elements on Earth were related to the celestial spheres. 58 Both of these interpretations are based on the Ptolemaic model of the universe. Perhaps somewhat easier to understand is the Spanish commentator Isaac ben Moses Arama (c. 1420–1494), who wrote a commentary on the Torah called Akedat Yitzhak (The Binding of Isaac). It is fascinating to read see how Arama weaved the Ptolemaic system into his allegorical interpretation of the menorah, echoing Philo’s commentary: The Sun is the central branch, for it is that which is required to lead all the others. [The three branches on each side represent] the three planets, three on one side and three on the other, which serve to help and support the perfection of one’s intentions. . . . 59 It is easy to mistakenly read Arama’s allegorical interpretation as placing the Sun at the center of the solar system, but this is not what he described. Rather, Arama outlined the order of the planets of the Ptolemaic system. These were the seven planets in the order in which they orbited the Earth, with the Moon closest and Saturn furthest away, as shown in figure 2.3 on the previous page. Although Arama’s interpretation would have been understood in the earlyfi fteenth- century pre-Copernican world, this allegory made no sense if the Sun was not the fourth planet of seven presumed to be orbiting the Earth. Hayyim Yosef Pollak, a nineteenth-century rabbi who wrote a commentary on Akedat Yitzhak, noted this problem. Pollak paraphrased Arama’s explanation in a post-Copernican way: The six branches that come out from the sides hint at the six types of partial wisdom [contained in the Torah] that help to complete the main type of wisdom [represented by the central branch]. . . . You can also imagine the Sun is the largest and most central of the planets, and around it orbit the other six planets. . . .60 Although both Arama and Pollak interpreted the central branch of the menorah as allegorically representing the Sun, their cosmology was completely different. Pollak’s interpretation is not in fact what Arama had originally written, leading to the curious, if not entirely unexpected, situation of an allegorical

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explanation itself being interpreted allegorically. What is common to all these exegetes, from Philo writing in the fi rst century to Pollak writing in the nineteenth is that explanations of the natural world were the basis of parts of their biblical commentaries. At a time when the only source of knowledge about the natural world was to be found in the Bible, there were few opportunities for confl ict between the sourcebook and experience. Th is situation changed rapidly as experiment and observation raised questions about the truth of biblical and traditional religious explanations. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth century offered a challenge to the religious order, not only within the Christian world but also for the Jews of Western Europe who shared a belief in the Ptolemaic universe. Over centuries, the structure of the Ptolemaic universe had become braided into Jewish teaching, but this strand would soon start to unravel as knowledge of the Copernican alternative slowly entered the Jewish world.

3

David Gans and the First Mention of Copernicus in Hebrew Literature

In the heart of the famous old Jewish cemetery of Prague lies the moss-covered grave of David Gans, who died in August 1613. The tombstone shows the effects of nearly four hundred years of wind and rain, and its once-pointed top has been smoothed to a gentler angle. The text and engravings are difficult to read, but at the top of the stone it is still possible to make out a Magen David, the six-pointed Star of David, and the profi le of a bird sitt ing atop the star (see figure 3.1). The bird is a goose, an allusion to the family name Gans, which means goose in Yiddish. The text reads: “Here lies the pious, our teacher Rabbi David Gans, author of the Zemah David. . . . ” Gans was indeed best known for the Zemah David, his work of Jewish history, but his other work, less well known but no less important, is also alluded to on the tombstone in that Magen David. For Magen David was the name of a textbook on science and astronomy that Gans wrote, the very fi rst Hebrew book to mention Copernicus by name. The story of the Jewish reaction to Copernicus starts with David Gans in Prague, and with that Magen David on his tombstone.1 Prague in the sixteenth century was a special place for Jew and Gentile alike. Emperor Rudolph II (who succeeded his father Maximilian in 1572) had made Prague his capital city and moved there from Vienna in 1583. He soon established himself as a collector and patron of the arts and sciences. He built an impressive art collection, botanical gardens, and a menagerie of wild and exotic animals. Rudolph’s father Maximilian had been less than sympathetic to the Jews of Prague, although he eventually revoked his orders to expel the Jews and even visited the Jewish section of Prague together with his wife Maria in the summer of 1571.2 Rudolph exhibited a more open att itude toward minorities. The city took on a cosmopolitan atmosphere as both Protestants and Jews were welcomed, and scholars from Italy and across Europe made their way there. Estimates of the Jewish population of Prague under Rudolf ’s rule vary among historians. Some suggest as few as 150 Jewish houses out of a 42

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Figure 3.1 The tombstone of David Gans in the Prague Jewish cemetery. From The Jewish Encyclopedia, New York, Funk and Wagnalls, 1912.

total population of about 50,000, while others write of eight to ten thousand Jews living in Prague, making it the largest Jewish community in the Diaspora. 3 Gans described Prague and its environs in this way: Prague, a great and populous city, is the capital. . . . Th is land full of God’s blessings, has wheat, wine and beer . . . many large and small rivers and lakes. Fish are plentiful and the land is abundant. It is a land where “the stones contain iron and the mountains you can mine copper.”4 Greatest of all are the gold mines found in Eule, three parsangs from Prague, and the rivers contain small particles of gold and other precious stones. There are also hot springs in Carlsbad and Teplitz, the likes of which no contemporary traveler has ever seen. Precious stones, diamonds and amethyst are abundant, such that this land lacks for no good at all. 5 Although Gans spoke highly of Prague, the Jewish quarter was horribly dirty and crowded. The Jews were allowed only a

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. . . litt le city to dwell in, with gates whereof they keepe the keyes, and walled rounds about for their safety. . . . Many families of Jewes lived packed together in one litt le house, which makes not only their houses but their streets to be very fi lthy, and their city to be like a dunghill. 6 David Gans had made his way to Prague from Westphalia in Germany where he was born in 1541, most likely in the town of Lippstadt. Litt le is known about the details of Gans’s life or his family, and what information we do have is provided by Gans himself. He traveled to Cracow as a young man to study with Rabbi Moses Isserles (better known by the acronym Rema) and later lived in Saxony, having married the daughter of a Rabbi Mann from Northeim in Saxony. About 1564, he moved to Prague, where he lived until his death in 1613, although he continued to visit his home in Westphalia. Gans is known to have had three sons named Joshua, Abba, and Israel and at least two daughters, although there is no record of their names.

Early Influences—Euclid and the Supernova Although Gans does not describe how he fi rst became interested in mathematics and astronomy, two events stand out as likely influences. The fi rst occurred early in his life, while visiting his father-in-law Rabbi Mann in Northeim. There he came across a copy of Euclid’s Elements, which had been translated from Arabic into Hebrew by Moses Ibn Tibbon and which Gans studied in detail.7 Th is chance discovery of Euclid in the library of his father-in-law seems to have profoundly influenced Gans throughout his scientific career. He would later speak highly of Euclid as a famous scholar, with an intellect sharper than all those in the nations who came before him, as well as those who came after him . . . all the ancient and contemporary scholars are in agreement that among all of humanity there is no book under the sky that surpasses it . . . without it we could not lift our heads, nor fi nd our way in matters of astronomy. . . .8 The second event was later in his life, after he had spent some time in Cracow, where he witnessed the supernova of 1572. Th is supernova—an exploding star near the constellation of Cassiopeia—was described by Gans as being visible for fourteen months.9 The effect of seeing this brand new light in the sky was staggering to anyone familiar with the accepted Aristotelian paradigm of the permanent and unchanging stars and planets.10 Tycho Brahe, the Astronomer

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Royal who would later host Gans at his observatory, also witnessed the supernova and recorded the effect this vista had on him: Amazed, and as if astonished and stupefied, I stood still, gazing for a certain length of time with my eyes fi xed intently upon it and noticing that same star placed close to the stars which antiquity att ributed to Cassiopeia. When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone forth before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.11 In fact, the observation of the supernova would overturn some of the most cherished notions of the heavens that were accepted as astronomical dogma. Tycho spent a short amount of time considering all of these and then published De Stella Nova in 1573, a work that also addressed the astrological significance of the new light in the sky. David Gans was also aware of the astrological importance of this new sight and wrote of how it affected the population of Europe: The new star appeared for fourteen months, longer than any recorded in history. All the astrologers in Germany, Italy, France and Spain made astonishing predictions regarding what this star would portend. They wrote many books about it, and predicted great calamities and natural destruction.12 David Gans was a thinker who had been exposed to a world of education that existed beyond the edges of the ghetto. Seeing the supernova was an event of no less importance for him than it had been for Tycho, and it may have been one of the most influential events in his life that led, some forty years later, to his publishing his own treatise on astronomy.13

The Formative Years—Cracow and Prague David Gans started his study of astronomy during the four years between 1559 and 1562 that he spent studying in Cracow. Th is town, some 300 miles to the east of Prague, contained the yeshivah (academy of higher learning) of Rabbi Moses Isserles (d. 1572), who was a leading scholar and the founding father of rabbinic astronomy in Poland.14 Gans had the good fortune to study with Isserles in the city that was at that time the foremost center for the study of astronomy. The university there boasted not one but two separate chairs in the field. It was at this university that Nicolaus Copernicus

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himself studied from 1491 to 1495.15 It is unlikely that either Gans or his teacher had direct contact with the university or its professors, but both may have been aware of and stimulated by the activity that was taking place in the university town.16 To understand the importance of Gans’s relationship with Isserles, we must pause and consider just how important a fi gure Moses Isserles was to become. The work of Isserles that, without doubt, had the greatest influence on Ashkenazi Jewry was his gloss on the Shulhan Arukh , the code of Jewish law, which had been written by a Sephardic Jew, Joseph Caro (d. 1575). Caro’s magnum opus was to become the defi ning code of Jewish law, but it had a serious deficiency in that it lacked the customs and rulings of the Ashkenazi Jews of Germany and Poland. Moses Isserles redressed this defect by writing a commentary and supplement for the Ashkenazi Jews, and as a result the Shulhan Arukh with Isserles’ gloss became the authoritative code and guide for all Polish-German Jews.17 The Shulhan Arukh was fi rst published in Venice in 1565 and went through six editions in Caro’s lifetime alone, with Isserles’ gloss becoming the authoritative reference work for Ashkenazi Jews. But Isserles’ scholarship was not limited to the vast field of Jewish law, and he was deeply interested in astronomy; his work in this area has been described as “ . . . rich and variegated. He acted as author and commentator, advocate and propagator, teacher and mentor.”18 Isserles wrote a commentary on the Hebrew translation of Georg Peuerbach’s Th eoricae Novae Planetarum (New Th eories of Planets), which had been published in 1473.19 He also wrote a more esoteric work of astronomy entitled Torat Ha’olah (Th e Laws of the Burned Sacrifi ce), in which he demonstrated how the temple in Jerusalem symbolized a wide range of astronomical phenomena. Isserles claimed that there was a direct numerical relationship between the temple and these phenomena, and he wove together a wide range of earlier rabbinic sources and non-Jewish astronomers to prove his thesis. For example, Isserles wrote that the altar of the temple corresponded to the layout of the heavens, and that the seven gates leading into the temple corresponded to the seven planets. 20 In addition, Isserles emphasized the harmony of Gentile astronomy with that of the Talmud. Where it was not possible to reconcile confl icting theories, Isserles wrote that the talmudic opinions were the correct ones, for the rabbis “knew the secret of astronomy as much as the Gentiles, and more than them, for the sages knew that which was hidden from the learned Gentiles.” 21 David Gans lived in Cracow during the very years when Isserles was working on Torat Ha’olah and apparently grew close to him; Gans later described Isserles as “my teacher and master who trained and raised me.” 22 The intellectual att ractions of Prague may explain why Gans eventually moved there and made the town his home for almost fi ft y years. The scholarly

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elite of Ashkenazi Jews flocked there, and David Gans had the opportunity to study with many of them. He studied with the famous Rabbi Judah Loew (about whom more follows) and Loew’s brother Sinai. Gans was especially close to Ephraim Luntshitz (d. 1619) and Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (d. 1654); both these leading rabbinic figures wrote approbations for Gans’s work on astronomy. Ephraim Luntshitz led the rabbinic academy in Prague and was the author of several important works, perhaps the most famous of which was the Keli Yakar, a super-commentary on the great medieval commentator Rashi. He was most renowned as a skilled orator and preacher and made many enemies as a result of his fiery criticisms of the contemporary rabbinic leadership.23 Yom Tov Lipmann Heller spent many years in Prague where he had been appointed as a rabbinic judge at the age of eighteen. Although he is best known for his commentary on the Mishnah (called Tosfot Yom Tov), Lipmann also wrote a work on astronomy, Derush Hiddush Halevanah. He took a position quite different from Loew’s regarding the value of secular knowledge, arguing that the talmudic opposition to secular knowledge should not extend to knowledge that increased an understanding of the world.24 But of all the scholars with whom Gans was in close contact, one stood out above all: the famous Rabbi Judah Loew.

Maharal and the First Jewish Allusion to Copernicus Although David Gans was the fi rst to mention Copernicus by name, the fi rst allusion to this Polish astronomer in Jewish literature was made by David Gans’s famous teacher, Judah Loew, better known by the acronym Maharal, Morenu Harav R abbi Loew (our teacher, the Rabbi Reb Loew, c. 1512–160925). Maharal occupied the center of the intellectual circle that grew in Prague at the end of the fi fteenth century; one contemporary summed up Maharal’s standing in this way: “God has granted [the Jews in Prague] wisdom and understanding to comprehend and to teach all the sciences . . . and at their head is their king, the great . . . Rabbi Liva [Loew].”26 He opened a yeshivah in Prague around 1573 and was a prolific writer; nine of his works were published before his death in 1609. Others were published in the following centuries, and some still remain in manuscript. Nearly all his books are still in print today, and some have been translated into English.27 In a long essay on the relationship between the knowledge attained from the natural or material universe and that attained from the spiritual or religious one, Maharal emphasized the superiority of the latter. Divinely revealed knowledge would always be more accurate and reliable than knowledge obtained from the simple observation of the material universe, for such observations

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may be made in error or may be based on explanations that are later found to be either entirely false or partially incomplete. It was in the context of the inferiority of scientific knowledge compared to religious wisdom that Maharal referred to Copernicus, although not by name. Th is was the very fi rst allusion to Copernicus in Jewish literature and is found in Netivot Olam (The Paths of the World) published in Prague in 1595: And as for what is written “For it is your wisdom in the eyes of the other nations” [Deut. 4:6] this means that the [Gentile] nations want nothing more than to become wise through this knowledge [of astronomy], and indeed they became expert in this field of knowledge, as all know. Yet there always came other experts afterwards who overturned the knowledge that they had worked so hard to attain. For example, a certain person known as an expert in the New Astronomy has a new description [of the universe]. As a result, he overturned the understanding that prior [astronomers] had about the motion of the stars and constellations and the heavenly laws, and described an entirely new model, although he admits that there still remain some questions that he cannot resolve.28 Maharal here introduced an approach that would be echoed over the next four hundred years of Jewish reaction to science in general and Copernican theory in particular. Th is approach is what we have come today to call skepticism or fallibilism. Because any understanding of science (other than that revealed through some sort of divine revelation) is certain to be overturned by a later, more complete theory, there is litt le reason to have faith that any particular scientific explanation approaches the “Truth.”29 Th is failing should be contrasted with knowledge about the world that Maharal believed was uniquely given to the Jews through divine revelation: However the Sages of Israel who received their information [about astronomy] from Moses at Sinai—and who himself received this from God—are the only ones who alone possess the Truth. And, in fact, the information that we [Jews] have about the orbits of the Sun and the Moon are more accurate and correct [than those derived by non-Jews]. Th is was certainly the case in the times of the early Sages of Israel, who knew the truth about each and every matter as a result of the tradition that had been taught to them through the prophecy of Moses. Th is is the explanation of the verse “For it is your wisdom in the eyes of the other nations” [Deut. 4:6].

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Thus, the fi rst allusion to Copernicus in Jewish literature was not positive and did not actually discuss the content of the heliocentric model. Instead, Copernicus was an example of scientific uncertainty and the inferiority of Gentile scientific knowledge to that of the Jews. Maharal explained that the Jewish understanding of the natural world was always superior because it was both divinely revealed to Moses and accurately transmitted from one generation of Jewish scholars to the next. Th is notion of the antiquity and accuracy of Jewish science did not originate with Maharal; it was a legend that can be dated back to the Hellenistic period. 30 Moses Isserles, who, as we noted, was a contemporary of Maharal and a teacher of David Gans, also furthered the legend and elevated it to a belief required of every Jew: In reality every philosophical idea or demonstration came to them [i.e., non-Jews] from Israel, and all their wisdom is included in the Torah. . . . Certainly every Jew should believe this, and should not give praise or ascribe greatness to strangers or wise Gentiles. . . . 31 Isserles wrote that after Alexander the Great captured Jerusalem, he placed Aristotle in charge of Solomon’s library, from which Aristotle “stole the wisdom of Solomon.” All accurate knowledge about the world was in fact knowledge that once originated with, and was later stolen from, the Jews. As we will see, David Gans not only assimilated this belief as instructed by his teacher, but developed it in a novel way to make all knowledge of astronomy knowledge that was once the exclusive property of the Jews. It was a myth that would be passed on, in one form or another, for the next five centuries.

The Works of David Gans Unlike virtually all of his contemporaries, Gans did not write any talmudic or biblical commentaries and confi ned his efforts to the natural sciences. He wrote at least seven works, of which only two survive. 32 These two surviving books are very different from each other, in both their subject matter and their subsequent reception. Gans’s most well-known work was Zemach David (The Branch of David), a work of history from the creation of the world to contemporary times. 33 It was fi rst published in 1592 and remained popular for hundreds of years; a second edition that appeared in 1692 was brought up to date by David B. Moses of Reindorf, and the work was later translated into Latin, German, and Yiddish. 34 However it is Gans’s other surviving work, on astronomy, that is of interest to us. It was published only once, some 130 years after his death, and was called Nehmad Vena’im (Delightful and Pleasant). 35

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Nehmad Vena’im Nehmad Vena’im contains the fi rst systematic Jewish reaction to Copernican thought, and it is the oldest Hebrew work that mentions Copernicus by name. It was fi rst published in 1743 by Israel bar Abraham in Jessnitz, which was then a center of Jewish publishing. The book has eighty-two pages and is divided into twelve sections; at the back is a twenty-page précis in Latin by a Protestant professor of Hebrew at the University of Leipzig, Christian Hebenstreit (1686–1756). 36 As noted at the start of this chapter, this book was originally completed under a different title, Magen David. 37 The exact date of its composition is unclear, but it was certainly completed by 1612, one year before Gans died. 38 It seems that Gans wrote Magen David and printed a few copies that he then gave to a printer, hoping that the latter would express an interest in the project and publish the book. Whether Gans’s proposal was rejected on commercial grounds or simply ignored following the death of the author is not known, but the work remained unpublished. One hundred and thirty years later, it was rediscovered and edited by Joel ben Yekutiel Sachs, a rabbi in the town of Austerlitz, who later became a judge in the rabbinic court of Berlin. In the long period in which Magen David remained in manuscript, another book was published that mentioned Copernicus by name. That work, Sefer Elim by Joseph Delmedigo, was published in Amsterdam in 1628, and we will examine it in detail in the next chapter. Technically, therefore, Nehmad Vena’im was not the fi rst but rather the second printed book to mention Copernicus. There is, however, no doubt that Gans wrote his manuscript before Delmedigo published Sefer Elim, and for this reason, it is Gans whom historians acknowledge as having written the fi rst Hebrew work to mention Copernicus (see figures 3.2 and 3.3). Gans opened his work with a brief history of astronomy, which he believed would demonstrate the Jewish provenance of all correct astronomical thought: Adam was an outstanding astronomer . . . and Josephus has written that when Abraham went down to Egypt because of the famine he taught them astronomy and mathematics and was praised by the Egyptians for his outstanding wisdom in these two disciplines. . . . Abraham passed this knowledge to his son Isaac and grandson Jacob. It is also written that Job lived at that time and he was also famous for his knowledge in this area, which is not difficult to believe since the Book of Job has several references to astronomy and the constellations. The Egyptians were taught mathematics and engineering together with astronomy by Jacob and his sons when they went to live in Egypt

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Figure 3.2 Frontispiece of the fi rst Hebrew book to mention Copernicus, Nehmad Vena’im, Jessnitz, Germany, 1743. From the collection of the author.

(in addition to what they had already been taught by Abraham and Isaac). As a result of the exile, this knowledge [of astronomy] was forgotten and remained known only to the Egyptian magicians, who became great experts in these matters. . . . The Greeks were taught this by the Egyptians, and it remained with the Greeks for a long period of time . . . until it was discovered by two famous scholars, one of whom was Pythagoras . . . who admitted that he received this knowledge [of astronomy] from the Jews. 39 Gett ing the history correct was very important for Gans, whose most popular book was a work of history. Additionally, the historical perspective provided a

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Figure 3.3 Text of the fi rst mention of Copernicus in Hebrew literature Nehmad Vena’im, Jessnitz, Germany, 1743, 9a. From the collection of the author.

reason why Jews may divert time from the Talmud to study astronomy. Rather than being a distraction from traditional Jewish texts, astronomy was primarily a Jewish pursuit. Its study was therefore not only permitted, it was required. With this background in place, Gans then turned to Copernicus himself: Nicolaus Copernicus, a Prussian, was a very learned man, whose fame in astronomy surpassed all his contemporaries. Even today’s wise men unanimously admire his sharp intellect and profound understanding of astronomy, and have said that there has not been an astronomer like him since the days of Ptolemy. He has delved deeply into this science, and using his sharp mind has set his heart on proving that the Earth rotates in a perpetual orbit. Th is is not, in fact, a novel idea, and was known to the ancients over two thousand years ago. For I have found in the book The Heavens and the Earth (in chapter two rule four) that this was the opinion of the renowned and wise Pythagoras and his school. The learned Copernicus wrote his remarkable book about this, a book that is ordered and very, very profound. He completed his outstanding work in the year 1500.40 . . . Th is wise man died in the Prussia, the land of his birth in the year 1543, corresponding to the [Jewish] year 5305.41

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His respect for Copernicus is evident, and unlike Maharal, Gans was not interested in demonstrating that knowledge derived from Jewish teachings was superior to that derived from observation and science. In fact, Gans acknowledged that even though astronomy originated with the Jews, contemporary astronomical understanding among his fellow Jews was actually extremely weak. Th is weakness was one of his motivations for writing the book: [As a result of being in exile and constantly wandering from place to place,] these exalted sciences [of astronomy and mathematics] have become depleted, so much so that they are hardly even mentioned. [We now fi nd] only one person in an entire city or two in a province that knows anything about science, and there are but a few books on astronomy that are in our possession. . . . .42 [W]hen the Gentiles see us bereft of [astronomical] understanding they are astonished, and mock us saying: is this the “great nation” about whom it is written “Indeed, that great nation is a wise and discerning people” [Deut. 4:6]? What shall we say when the Gentiles ask us to explain the intercalation of the calendar, and do not fi nd our tradition sufficient? Is it appropriate to cover our mouths with our hands, as if we were mute and unable to communicate? Does this bring us honor? Does this bring our Maker honor?43

Tycho Brahe Gans not only studied with Maharal and the other leading Jewish intellects in Prague, but he was also personally acquainted with Tycho Brahe (b. 1546), the Danish astronomer who had moved to Prague to become court astronomer to Rudolf II in 1599.44 Tycho (he is commonly referred to by his fi rst name) had risen to prominence after he published a pamphlet on the new star that had appeared in the skies in 1572, the star that, as we have already noted, was also witnessed by Gans. As we noted in the last chapter, Tycho had constructed an impressive observatory on the island of Hven between Sweden and Denmark, where Emperor Fredrick II had supported him. Living before the invention of the telescope, Tycho had built a series of devices that allowed him to make astronomical measurements with unprecedented accuracy, but changes in the balance of power in Denmark forced him to depart suddenly from his island observatory, and he sett led in Prague. Tycho was uncomfortable with some aspects of the Copernican model and, most notably, could not accept the speed at which the Earth orbited the Sun in the heliocentric system. As a result, he developed what became known as the Tychonic model, in which the Sun moves

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around a stationary Earth, and all the other planets orbit around the Sun.45 As the Sun orbits the stationary Earth, it drags (as it were) the other planets with it. In this model, the Earth was stationary and so, unlike the Copernican model, it raised no difficulty with a literal reading of the Bible.46 As we shall see in the following chapters, it became a compromise position for Jews who could no longer support the Ptolemaic model, but who were not able to acknowledge an Earth in motion. The Tychonic model had many difficulties, of which the most glaring was the fact that the calculated orbit of Mars would pass through the orbit of the Sun. The problem with this calculation (aside from the possibility of the two colliding) was that from earliest times until the sixteenth century, it had been assumed that the planets were held in their orbits by solid yet transparent crystalline spheres. Aristotle had posited some fi ft y-four crystalline spheres, and Ptolemy’s works, which were the standard texts on the structure of the universe for some fourteen hundred years, regarded the spheres as a physical necessity. The rabbis of the Talmud also believed in the existence of these spheres, as did Copernicus. But if Tycho’s observations led to a model in which two planets had orbits that intersected, then the solid celestial spheres would intersect too, which would produce “a mighty celestial crack up.”47 In Nehmad Vena’im, Gans reproduced the system of the spheres, as would be expected, although he questioned how it would be possible for the outermost celestial sphere to have the ability to be the prime mover and impart motion down to the other smaller spheres.48 Know, dear reader, that I presented this puzzling question to the great astronomer to our lord Emperor Rudolph, none other than Johannes Kepler, who explained to me that it is indeed so. Each sphere imparts motion to the sphere immediately beneath it. . . . Consider as an example a boat sailing towards the east bank of a river, while on board a person walks from the stern towards the bow (also in a easterly direction). On that person’s head is a fly crawling from his neck over his scalp towards his forehead. In this way the fly, which began in the most western position will end up being in the most easterly position and closest to the eastern bank of the river. The fly’s [fi nal] position is a result of three movements: that of the boat, that of the man and that of the fly itself. So too each sphere moves as a result of its own movement . . . [and that imparted by the spheres lying outside of it]. . . .49 Th is question of the motions of the spheres was of fundamental importance to the astronomers of the sixteenth century and something of a matter of national pride for David Gans. As we saw in our earlier review of talmudic astronomy,

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the rabbis of the Talmud had debated the Gentile scholars over the exact motion of the various spheres: The Jewish sages say, the galgal is fi xed and the mazzalot [constellations] revolve, and the Gentile sages say the galgal revolves and the mazzalot [constellations] are fi xed. . . . The wise men of Israel say that during the day the Sun travels under the sky (rakia), and at night it travels above the sky. And Gentile wise men say: during the day the Sun travels under the sky, and at night under the Earth. Rabbi [Yehudah Hanasi] said: their view is more logical than ours for during the day springs are cold and at night they are warm. 50 As we noted earlier, the most likely explanation for this passage is that the galgal refers to a sphere, and that according to the Gentile sages, the constellations are fi xed within a revolving sphere. The Jewish sages believed the sky to be both solid and immovable; according to them, the constellations, which clearly revolve, must do so independently of the fi xed heavens beneath them. 51 Although the context of the passage implies that the rabbis conceded their point about the path of the Sun, neither Gans nor Tycho read it in this way. 52 In chapter 25 of Nehmad Vena’im (a chapter described by one historian as recounting a “eureka moment” for Gans53), we read of Tycho’s insistence that the Jewish model was indeed the correct one: Know that the great scientist whose knowledge of astronomy is outstanding, who is unique in his generation, the leading scientist in the court of our lord the Emperor Rudolf (may his glory be exalted) [none other than] Tycho Brahe said to me that the sages did not do well to incorrectly admit defeat before the Gentile sages. For in fact the truth is like the position of the Jewish sages, who stated that the stars move in their own orbits, without being forced to do so by the motion of the spheres. They move independently, like a bird in fl ight, and [Tycho] added many proofs to this opinion. 54 Gans continued to explain that it was Tycho’s meticulous observations and calculations, which were unprecedented in their accuracy, that allowed him to reach these conclusions and support the position of the talmudic sages: [Tycho] wrote a book about this, and demonstrated that some of the stars orbit within the sphere of the Sun . . . using observations never before made in the world. He saw all of this with his amazing instruments, as a result of which he was able to demonstrate that the stars

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are able to orbit independent of the sphere in which they are carried. I have also learned from the outstanding scholar Kepler that since he has actually observed that some of the planets follow unusual orbits . . . we are forced to conclude that the stars are able to follow all manner of orbits, like a flying bird. 55 Although this argument is, of course, long obsolete (and was later rejected by Kepler himself once he determined that the orbits were not circular but rather elliptical), the way in which Gans went about obtaining his knowledge is remarkable. He frequented the observatory of Tycho and Kepler and learned his astronomy directly from what he saw there (see figure 3.4). His description

Figure 3.4 Engraving of Tycho’s mural quadrant, one of the largest astronomical instruments of its time. In the era before the invention of the telescope, it was used to make extremely accurate astronomical observations. Brahe’s Astonomiae Instauratae Mechanica, Nuremberg, Germany, 1602. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.

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of the time he spent inside the observatory is perhaps the only one of its kind in rabbinic literature: I can recount how in the year 5360 (1600) our exalted lord Emperor Rudolf (may his glory be uplifted), a man of wisdom, full of general knowledge and expert in astronomy, who values and honors those who are learned, sent a mission to Denmark to invite the eminent scholar Tycho Brahe. He was a scientist and learned in astronomy, and a man who is a prince among his people.56 The Emperor installed him in a castle in Benátky (which is about five parsaot from the capital Prague), where he remained isolated. [Rudolf] gave him a yearly allowance of three thousand talars together with bread, wine and beer, not to mention other gifts. There he lived with twelve others, all of whom were experts in astrology [sic] and in the large instruments [for measuring,] the likes of which had never been seen. The Emperor Rudolf built thirteen consecutive rooms, and in each room were special instruments that enabled them to view the paths of the all the planets and most of the stars. Th roughout the year they would make and record daily observations of the Sun’s orbit, its latitude and longitude and its distance from the Earth. At night they would carefully do the same for each of the six planets and most of the stars, noting their latitude, longitude and distance from the Earth. I, your author, was there on three separate occasions, each lasting five consecutive days. I sat with them in their observatory, and I saw how they worked. They did amazing work, not just with the planets but also with the stars, recognizing each by its name. When each star would cross the meridian its position would be measured with three different instruments, each operated by two experts. Th is position would then immediately be transcribed into hours and minutes, for which purpose [Tycho] had an amazing clock. 57 I can testify that none of our ancestors had ever seen or heard of such a device, and it has never been described in a book, whether written by a Jew or Gentile. 58 Gans ended his own book on astronomy with a description of just how important and revolutionary was the work of Tycho Brahe: Tycho Brahe changed much of the astronomical tradition of Ptolemy. He did it all with intelligence and common sense, and these were new and amazing things, the likes of which earlier generations could not even imagine. I will briefly mention . . . them here. . . . He clearly proved

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that the five planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury and Venus) do not move in an orbit with the Earth at their focus . . . but rather the Sun is at the focus of their orbits. And according to him, the Sun lies at the center, like a king at the center of his subjects, who causes them to move. These planets never deviate—even by a hair’s breadth—from their orbit with the Sun at the center. Th is was completely unimaginable and beyond the description of the earlier [astronomers]. Now these [last] . . . points are somewhat difficult to explain properly to students, for the pen of the scribe is too weak to illustrate this properly on paper. However, I have some scrolls in my possession from the noble Tyco Brahe from which any wise student may understand quickly the true underlying explanations of these matters. 59

Gans’s Reluctance to Adjudicate between Systems Some historians believe that Gans did not take sides in the debate over which of the three competing systems (the Ptolemaic, Copernican, or Tychonic) was the closest description of reality.60 Gans wrote of each man in glowing terms; Ptolemy was “the amazing observer, the likes of whom had never before existed”; Copernicus’s “fame for astronomy surpassed all his contemporaries”61; and we have just read of the esteem in which he held Tycho. Perhaps because of the high regard that he had for each of these astronomers, Gans was reluctant to lend his own support to the most persuasive of the three. Furthermore, Gans saw his book as an introduction to astronomy in which general descriptions of competing models were described to the reader; he did not see his role as that of adjudicator. There are other examples in which Gans was reluctant to adjudicate scholarly disagreements. For example, in the introduction to Nehmad Vena’im, he mentioned his esteemed teacher Moses Isserles and his work Torat Ha’olah. In the same introduction, he also referred to Maharal’s B’er Hagolah, yet the two works were quite different, with perhaps irreconcilable worldviews. Torat Ha’olah showed how talmudic statements could be reinterpreted so as not to confl ict with the natural world, whereas B’er Hagolah was a work that described the limits of science and the superiority of talmudic views about the natural world.62 Gans mentioned both, ignoring their profoundly different approaches. However, this view of Gans as being afraid to take a stand is not completely correct, for there are several places in Nehmad Vena’im in which Gans rejected traditional Jewish beliefs about the natural world when faced with new discoveries. For example, he discarded the talmudic teaching that one half of the

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world is land and the other half is water (like a ball floating in water), and his wording is an emphatic rejection of this position: All the early sages of Israel and of the Gentiles thought [in this way], including Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra and Rabbi David Kimhi, [when they explained the verse “for the Earth is founded on the water” [Ps. 24:2]. Th is was also the opinion of the great astronomer Rabbi Abraham bar Hiyya, author of Zurat Ha’aretz, as well as that of the learned Rabbi Israeli . . . whose work Yesod Ha’olam is in many places built on this idea . . . we even fi nd this opinion in the [talmudic works of] Pirkei Derabbi Eliezer and Bamidbar Rabbah. . . . Yet we have clear evidence which refutes this belief . . . and it should not be surprising that in many places the words of our teachers about astronomy and geography are contradictory and difficult to explain, for they often spoke metaphorically or in riddles. . . .63 Gans was similarly dismissive of the previously held belief that the world consisted of only three continents (namely Asia, Africa, and Europe) and described in detail the discovery of America. Gans defended this digression from matters of astronomy by stating that he is certain “ . . . that if a person wishes to know what is above him in the eight spheres of the heavens, how much more so would he wish to know what lies below on the Earth itself which he inhabits.”64 Finally, we should consider the very fact that Gans committed his opinions to writing, for they were certain to raise the opposition of his rabbinic contemporaries.65 To suggest then that Gans avoided confl ict or adjudication is to overstate the case.66 It might be better to describe his actions using a modern idiom: He picked his batt les carefully. Although Gans praised Tycho and Copernicus, the astronomy described in Nehmad Vena’im is in general classically Ptolemaic. For example, the book contained only one drawing of the orbits of the planets, showing the Ptolemaic geocentric scheme.67 Although Gans understood the advantages of the contemporary astronomy of the time, his work did not reflect this. It is rather as though Gans was—to use another modern idiom—hedging his bets. He described Copernicus as the greatest astronomer since Ptolemy, but then explained the orbits of the planets based on the very system Copernicus overthrew, and fi nally ended his work by describing the geo-heliocentric model of his acquaintance Tycho as clearly proving that the planets orbit the Sun and not the Earth.68 Gans in fact did take sides, but he did so in a way that made all three systems seem correct at some point in the book. In trying to understand this, we should realize that Gans’s approach was common. Many other astronomy books of the late sixteenth century also mentioned the Copernican model

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without trying to explain its details or determine whether it was superior to Ptolemy’s. In fact, although Copernicus’s name often appeared in print in the astronomical literature published between 1550 and 1600, his heliocentric system was almost never discussed in any detail.69 There were several reasons for this, but perhaps the most important was that each model lacked experimental evidence, so a defi nitive answer as to which was correct could not be given.70 In addition, David Gans may have absorbed some of the previously noted skepticism of his influential teacher Maharal.71 Since the Copernican model of a moving Earth was radical and profoundly unsett ling, the existence of other theories meant that the Copernican system was one explanatory model among several, best viewed as nothing but a compelling but unproven geometric hypothesis.72 We should also recall that in 1612, the year in which Gans fi nished his manuscript, the great British philosopher-scientist Francis Bacon wrote of his objections to the Copernican theory.73 To reject Copernicus was to be in the company of some of the greatest thinkers of the times, and it is this standard by which Gans should be measured. Whatever the psychological underpinnings of his writings, the fact is that Gans ultimately decided to fi nish his book with an unambiguous endorsement of Tycho’s system. Th is fact is critically important as we follow the development of the Jewish reaction to Copernican thought over the next several hundred years. Gans was faced with three mutually exclusive astronomical theories: The oldest, the Ptolemaic, was the one in which all of Gans’s rabbinic predecessors—including the great Maimonides—had believed. The second theory was the Copernican one, which had been around for only some six decades and which contradicted daily observation (the Sun looks like it is moving, and the Earth certainly feels stationary), as well as some verses in the Bible and traditional rabbinic beliefs. The new theory of Tycho seemed to offer a compromise, a way in which Gans could both change with the times and keep a modicum of his traditional beliefs intact. In Tycho’s system, the planets did indeed revolve around the Sun, but the Sun itself revolved around a stationary Earth. Th is would allow the astronomer to explain many observations while maintaining the traditional view of the Earth as the center of the universe. There was yet another advantage to this approach; it allowed Gans to accept the new theory of the most famous observer of the planets in all of Europe. It is therefore hardly surprising that Gans chose to end his book with an affi rmation of Tycho’s system, for not only did it offer a compromise position, but it was also the construction of a man whom Gans knew personally and with whom he frequently consulted on matters of astronomy. Although the precise reasons for Gans’s choices remain a matter of speculation, this suggestion—that Gans was att racted to a compromise position by a man he had actually met and known— seems to be persuasive.74

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The Influence of Nehmad Vena’im Although Nehmad Vena’im was published only once, Gans had a clear if subtle influence on the generations of Jewish scientists who would follow.75 Not content with writing alone, Gans taught his students what he had learned from Tycho, and in so doing he directly passed on the knowledge that he had acquired.76 Galileo’s Jewish student Joseph Delmedigo had a manuscript copy of the Nehmad Vena’im in his own library, and the work was mentioned in Hurwitz’s influential encyclopedia Sefer Haberit published in 1797.77 Other references to Nehmad Vena’im appeared in works far removed from the study of the sciences. For example, the work is mentioned in Derekh Pikudekha, a Hasidic work explaining the mitzvot (commandments) that is part user’s guide and part mystical treatise. The author was the famed Hasidic leader Rabbi Zevi Elimelekh Shapiro of Dynow (1783–1841), who mentioned Nehmad Vena’im as one of the works that could be studied in place of actually performing the mitzvah of sanctifying the new month: How fortunate is the young person who was worthy to have studied in depth all the amazing science regarding the orbits of the stars and the calculations behind the onset of the seasons. These are to be found in Maimonides’ Laws of the Sanctification of the New Month, as well as [in the books] Tekhunot Hashamayim and Nehmad Vena’im. For this is an important mitzvah, especially in these times when there is no longer the high court in Jerusalem [where the actual sanctification of the month would occur]. For the study [of these laws] serves in the place of being able to actually perform them. . . .78 It is also interesting to note that this entire passage was reproduced on the front page of a handbook of astronomy published in Hebrew in 1907 by Ze’ev Wolf Gerstel.79 Th is work, which included a revolving chart of the night sky and was entirely Copernican in its approach, quoted Elimelech Shapiro of Dynow and his mention of David Gans. As a fi nal example of the subtle but profound influence of David Gans’s writings, we should consider the interaction Gans had with his younger colleague Yom Tov Lipmann Heller. As we noted above, Heller lived for some time in Prague where he was a rabbinic judge. He wrote an enthusiastic approbation for Magen David, the book that was later renamed and published as Nehmad Vena’im.80 The language that Heller used is striking, for although he personally opposed the study of non-Jewish works of literature and religion, in the approbation he took the opportunity not only to praise David Gans, but also to state

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his support for the study of non-Jewish science, a position he is likely to have learned from Gans: The house of Israel say that they would sin . . . if . . . words written by one of uncircumcised lips and flesh . . . came to their lips. . . . But I will wash my hands in innocence [Ps. 26:6] in studying this book [of Euclid] or those like it. . . . For they do no damage but are useful in the science of the calendar and the other sciences like it, which every wise man must understand. . . .81 Heller was almost forty years younger than Gans, and his older teacher had clearly affected him a great deal. Nearly all of Heller’s important works (and most notably his commentary called Tosfot Yom Tov, which is published to this day in all the standard commentaries of the Mishnah) were written or published after the death of Gans, but Gans remained an influence on Heller’s approach to the natural sciences. Among the most striking examples is Heller‘s Derush Hidushei Halevanah (Sermon of Comments on the Creation of the Moon), in which the entire last section is based on a passage from David Gans’s book.82 As the historian Joseph Davis has noted, Heller underwent a significant change in his views of the nature of the heavens. As a young man, Heller had believed that the spheres and the heavens were perfect and unchanging, but upon reaching middle age, he rejected this notion and accepted the belief that the heavens do, in fact, change.83 Heller was barely a year old when his teacher David Gans had witnessed the supernova of 1572, and so he did not personally see the event that called into question the accepted immutability of the skies. The evolution of Heller’s thinking was rather a result of his learning of the works of Tycho Brahe and Kepler, both of whom had written that the heavens do, in fact, change. Heller learned Tycho’s astronomy from David Gans’s book,84 and the change in Heller’s thinking most likely occurred after reading it.85 Unlike Gans, Heller’s writings do not even mention Copernicus; his Derush Hidushei Halevanah is more interested in the question of the nature of the spheres and whether the planets are subject to change. Heller seems to have assumed the geocentric position, and although he did not mention it specifically, we can assume that he accepted the helio-geocentric model of Tycho, again via the writings of David Gans.

Abraham Yagel We have examined the work of David Gans and understood his fascination with, but ultimate rejection of Copernican theory. The special contribution that Gans made can be brought into further relief by briefly comparing him to

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another of his contemporaries, Abraham ben Hananiah Yagel, who was born in Italy in 1553. Although Yagel was more interested in medicine than astronomy, he wrote several works that contain discussions of various astronomical phenomena.86 It should be noted at the outset that Yagel makes no mention of either Copernicus or the heliocentric theory in any of his writings.87 However, he does refer to Galileo and his telescope, calling him “ . . . a wise Gentile man who in our day found several stars from the nebula which the ancients never saw and he placed their signs and their markings in a book, and also spoke of the appearances seen on the moon. . . .”88 The respect that Yagel had for Galileo can be appreciated when we read Yagel paraphrasing how the talmudic astronomer Shmuel described his own abilities. Shmuel had famously stated that “I am as familiar with the courses of the stars as with the streets of [my home town of] Nehardea.”89 Yagel wrote that, for Galileo “[t]he paths of the heavens are as clear to him as the streets of Florence in which he dwells.”90 By adapting this talmudic phrase to describe one of his own contemporaries, Yagel made it clear that he considered Galileo’s knowledge of astronomy to be as thorough as that of the most celebrated of the talmudic astronomers. Th is in itself is worthy of consideration, for Galileo’s work with the telescope offered some of the fi rst observational evidence in support of the Copernican theory. Yagel read the works of other astronomers besides Galileo. He was familiar with the writings of Girolamo Cardano, a professor in Bologna, who had argued that Aristotle had been wrong in suggesting that comets originated from the Earth itself. Yagel had also read Giovanni Antonio Magini of Padua, whose 1589 work published in Venice left no doubt as to where the author’s Copernican sympathies lay, because it was called New Theories of Celestial Orbs Agreeing with the Observations of Copernicus. Abraham Yagel referred both to this and another pro-Copernican work (by Francesco Giuntini) in his Bet Ya’ar Halevanon.91 By siding with Cardano and mentioning at least two pro-Copernican works, Yagel demonstrated that he was not afraid of what we might call today a paradigm shift. But Yagel’s reliance on new theories only extended so far; the litmus test of acceptability was whether or not Yagel could fi nd a rabbinic precedent for a new theory. In cases where such support could be found, Yagel sided with the new science even when it overturned a previous authority. It was for this reason that Yagel sided with Cardano in rejecting the Aristotelian belief in the terrestrial origin of comets, because Cardano’s thesis that comets arose from the sky was “in keeping with the words of our sacred sages of blessed memory.”92 Yagel found rabbinic support for this in a rather clever reading of a talmudic astronomer’s description of the limits of his scientific knowledge, by the astronomer

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Shmuel, the same rabbi who had boasted of his familiarity with the night sky.93 Yagel argued that if Aristotle had been correct in assuming a terrestrial origin for comets, this would have been known to and accepted by Shmuel, who lived hundreds of years after Aristotle. That Shmuel professed ignorance about their origins demonstrated that he in fact rejected the Aristotelian explanation, and Yagel could therefore join his Italian contemporaries and do the same. Using the same logic, Yagel believed he had also found a rabbinic precedent for the telescope, which was “found in the words of our rabbis of blessed memory in [the talmudic tractate] Eruvin, regarding the same tube that was in the hands of Rabban Gamliel, which allowed him to see as far as 2,000 cubits. . . .”94 Th is precedent allowed Yagel to accept the fi ndings that resulted from Galileo’s use of the telescope. Were such a precedent lacking, Yagel would have felt it impossible to embrace a new theory, however compelling. It is for this reason that Yagel cannot be described as a Copernican thinker, for although he praised Galileo for his telescope, he was critical of Galileo’s premature rejection of the traditional Ptolemaic system: For who is this man [i.e., Galileo] who comes after the “king” [Ptolemy] who established the foundations of learning followed by all scholars in every generation? Th is person is none other than a precocious worker rising up to boast “I will rule over all in riddles and secret” . . . and his colleagues will not listen to him. . . .95 Abraham Yagel ultimately viewed science though the prism of Jewish texts, and it was his understanding of the latter that allowed him to decide on the veracity of the former. In this respect, he differed considerably from David Gans who was, as we saw, quite prepared to dismiss rabbinic beliefs in the face of new evidence. Here we must part company with the otherwise-excellent conclusions of David Ruderman, who wrote that Yagel’s “ . . . religious convictions in no way obstruct his ability to admit the new. On the contrary, by locating precedents within Jewish tradition for the discoveries, he makes the new more comprehensible and compatible with his own experience.”96 As we have seen, this approach only allowed Yagel to accept some of the science of his day. If Yagel could not fi nd a compelling way to reinterpret traditional rabbinic statements to make new scientific theories acceptable, then he rejected the science, not the rabbis. A religious and psychological explanation for Yagel’s worldview would be multi-factorial. However, there is clearly one fact that distinguished Yagel from his Jewish scholarly contemporaries, and it may partially account for his acceptance of only some of the new astronomy. David Gans conversed with Tycho Brahe and Kepler, and as we will see in the next chapter, Joseph Delmedigo

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counted Galileo as one of his teachers in Padua. Unlike these men, Yagel had no personal relationship with any of the key practitioners of the astronomy of his day. Th is reality would certainly have influenced the efforts that Yagel would make to assimilate the new astronomy into his religious worldview. It is, after all, one thing to read about Galileo’s discoveries and quite another to view them through his personal telescope under his supervision. Without the personal contact with Gentile practical astronomers that had been afforded to Gans and later to Delmedigo, Yagel remained a lonely theoretician, unmoved by the claims of the new astronomy and the demands that it made to build a new model of the universe. David Gans’s reception of the new astronomy differed then from the approach of Abraham Yagel, and Gans stood as a unique rabbinic figure in his time. His admiration for Copernicus—even if in the fi nal analysis he was unable to accept the Copernican model—was an important fi rst step in the introduction of the new astronomy to the Jews of Eastern Europe. The reception of Copernican thought in Judaism began with Gans’s respectful rejection, a position that was standard in the rest of the religious-scientific community. David Gans was not, however, the only seventeenth-century rabbi to have met with the most famous astronomers of his time. Our story now moves to Crete and Italy where we examine the life and works of Rabbi Joseph Delmedigo, a student of none other than Galileo.

4

The First Jewish Copernican Rabbi Joseph Solomon Delmedigo

In the period between David Gans’s mention of Copernicus in his 1612 manuscript and the publication of his work in 1743, another Hebrew book was published that mentioned Copernicus by name. The book was Sefer Elim, written by Joseph Delmedigo and printed in Amsterdam in 1629, and since it was published before Nehmad Vena’im, perhaps it should be given the title of the fi rst Hebrew book to cite Copernicus. Although Gans had spoken highly of Copernicus, he ultimately rejected the Copernican model. In contrast, in Sefer Elim, Delmedigo spoke uncompromisingly of Copernicus and his hypothesis as being superior to all previous astronomical models. If we were to classify this work as the fi rst published Hebrew book to mention Copernicus, we would conclude that it was both supportive and deeply admiring of the Polish astronomer. Th is chapter examines the story of Joseph Delmedigo, the fi rst Jewish Copernican, and his important place in the history of the Jewish reception of Copernican thought.

Biography Joseph Solomon Delmedigo was born in Candia on the Island of Crete on June 16, 1591.1 His family had lived on the island for several generations and was the island’s most prominent Jewish family.2 The Delmedigos were wealthy and intellectually gifted, and both Joseph’s father and grandfather served as rabbis. Joseph received a traditional Jewish education that was based on the study of Talmud as well as a general secular education, and he fondly remembered his early years: “ . . . From my youth the study of Talmud was like a father to me; all of my ancestors studied in yeshivot and later spread Torah learning and raised many disciples.”3 Delmedigo’s secular education was rigorous and involved the study of language; he was apparently fluent in Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Latin, 66

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Greek, and Polish. At the age of fi fteen he left for Italy, where he enrolled in the University of Padua. At that time, Padua was perhaps the leading medical school in Europe, and although a Catholic institution, it allowed Protestants and Jews to study there.4 However, despite the relatively open atmosphere of the university, discrimination did exist. Jews had to pay a higher rate of tuition, and when they graduated, they were required to buy meat for the Christian students. 5 David Ruderman noted that despite these hardships, the experience at Padua was unique, because for the first time a relatively large number of Jews graduated from a major medical school and went on to practice medicine throughout Europe . . . it afforded the opportunity for intense socialization among Jews from remarkably variegated backgrounds—former conversos from Spain and Portugal, together with Italian, Ottoman, German, Polish, and other eastern European Jews. . . . Padua’s university allowed its Jewish students constant social and cultural contact, both casual and formal, with non-Jewish students from diverse communities and ethnic backgrounds. Above all, Padua offered hundreds of talented Jewish students a prolonged exposure to the study of the liberal arts, to Latin studies, to classical scientific texts, as well as to the latest scientific advances in botany, anatomy, chemistry and clinical medicine.6 While in Padua, which had an established Jewish community of about six hundred, Delmedigo traveled frequently to Venice, which was only about thirty miles away but whose Jewish community numbered in the thousands.7 In fact, Delmedigo studied with some of the leading rabbis in Venice, with whom he also built close relationships. Perhaps the most important of these was Leon of Modena, who would later write an approbation for Delmedigo’s scientific work Sefer Elim. Modena recalled meeting the young Delmedigo . . . when he visited Venice during the time he was studying in Padua. The love I have for him has never left my heart, for although he was a youth I recognized him as a courageous and wise person, and one not afraid to argue with anyone. . . . I always saw in him one worthy of the title hakham [sage].8 For seven years, Delmedigo studied astronomy, mathematics, natural science, and medicine, and was taught by a certain Galileo Galilei, who was soon to become famous for both his observations of the planets and his clash with the Church; as we shall see, Delmedigo mentioned Galileo as one of his teachers. When Delmedigo graduated from Padua as a doctor of medicine in 1613, he

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returned to Candia. 9 While there, he started writing a book he called Ya’ar Levanon (The Forest of Lebanon), which was a summary of the scientific knowledge he had acquired in Padua. For reasons that are not clear, this work was never fi nished and in 1616, after just three years at home, he left for Cairo and later Constantinople.10 In Cairo and Constantinople, Delmedigo dedicated his efforts to expanding his personal library, a task made easier by his considerable personal wealth. In each of these cities, Delmedigo became intellectually close with members of the local Karaite community. The Karaites had emerged as a separate sect from Judaism sometime in the eighth century in Babylon. They rejected rabbinic Judaism and interpreted the Bible without regard to the Talmud or any of the oral traditions. Th is set them completely apart from the normative Jewish communities, yet Delmedigo seems to have had a natural affi nity with this group that was on the very perimeters of Jewish society. He would later strike up relationships with Karaite intellectuals in Poland when he traveled there in 1620. Delmedigo also visited Lublin, Vilna, and Livona, and spent much of his time working as a physician. His medical skills apparently brought him to the attention of the authorities, and he was appointed court physician to Prince Radziwill of Poland.11 But this attention was a diversion and frustration to Delmedigo, who wanted nothing more than to use his time to study and write. He wrote of . . . the sick who pray for a divine cure and who long for [God’s] mercy through me. They are officers and deputies, young and old, who, on their wagons, arrive early at my door. They bring me from city to city, crowning me with honor and praise . . . disturbing my serious work. For in truth I want nothing more than to write Hebrew books containing the entire body of science and wisdom in order to teach Jews. . . .12 After a brief stop in Hamburg, Delmedigo returned to Amsterdam in 1628. Th is was a turning point in Delmedigo’s aspirations as a writer. While in Amsterdam he met and, by all accounts, befriended Menasheh ben Israel, who had founded the fi rst Hebrew printing press there two years earlier. Th is relationship resulted in the publication of Delmedigo’s fi rst work, Sefer Elim, in Amsterdam in 1629. Despite this, Delmedigo left in 1631 for Frankfurt, where he married and had a daughter by the name of Sarah. While in Frankfurt, he served as physician to the large Jewish community there and saw his son-inlaw graduate as a physician from Padua, the same medical school from which Delmedigo himself had graduated some two decades earlier.13 Around 1650, Delmedigo, whose life was that of a wanderer extraordinaire, sett led in Prague, where he died in October 1655.14 He is buried in Prague’s famous Jewish

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Figure 4.1 Portrait of Joseph Delmedigo by W. C. Duyster, 1628, Sefer Elim, Amsterdam, 1629. Courtesy of the Hebraic Section, African and Middle Eastern Division, Library of Congress.

cemetery, and his tombstone is one of the major tourist att ractions there, ranking alongside the resting places of Maharal of Prague and David Gans. It is not clear why Delmedigo felt the need to move so often, and there are details of his life—such as when and whom he married—that are not known. Delmedigo himself described having written some forty books, but only two of them were printed—both in Amsterdam—and none of his other works has survived.15 It was in his fi rst printed work, Sefer Elim, that among other things, Delmedigo outlined his views of astronomy and the new theory of Copernicus (see figure 4.1).16

Sefer Elim Sefer Elim is a long book (it runs over four hundred pages) and deals with philosophy, science, mathematics, and astronomy. The book consists of two parts,

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Sefer Elim and Ma’ayan Ganim, the latter of which is divided into four sections. It opens with three letters written to Delmedigo by Zerah ben Natan, who was a Karaite scholar.17 In the last of these letters, Zerah posed twelve main questions and seventy more specific questions to Delmedigo.18 Delmedigo began his reply to these questions (and another letter to him from a Karaite scholar) with a discussion on Aristotle, immortality, and the nature of free thought. 19 The book continues with a treatise on spherical trigonometry, which was an important basis for astronomical calculations, and methods for measuring distances. Once these questions had been addressed, Delmedigo discussed the sizes of celestial bodies and their distances from Earth. In a part of the book called Sefer Gevurot Hashem (The Book of the Strengths of God), Delmedigo mentioned Copernican theory, as well as his own observations of Venus. The book fi nishes with a return to mathematical questions, a discussion on comets, and the mechanics of the lever and motion. That Delmedigo was a polymath is apparent from even this briefest of overviews.20 But as our interest lies with Delmedigo’s astronomy, we will focus only on these parts of the book.21 Let us note at the outset that although Delmedigo was familiar with and highly respectful of Copernican thought, he never discussed it at length in Sefer Elim. Delmedigo did write a detailed analysis of Copernican thought and its ramifications in a work entitled Amudei Shamayim (The Pillars of Heaven), but like the vast majority of his writings, it was never published and has been lost.22 All that we have in Sefer Elim are a number of isolated references to Copernicus and some passing references to his heliocentric model. These are enough, however, to allow us to reconstruct with reasonable certainty Delmedigo’s belief in its superiority.23 Delmedigo admired Copernicus as an outstanding astronomer, as great as Ptolemy himself; he referred to these men as “the two radiant lights”—playing on the Hebrew from the opening verses of the Bible, which describe the Sun and the Moon as “two great lights.”24 Part of Delmedigo’s support for the Copernican model is to be found in his criticism of the Aristotelian conception of the universe, which included the conjecture that the planets were contained within spheres that were themselves living beings. By rejecting this idea, Delmedigo not only took on the accepted scientific views of the past, but also challenged the Jewish model of the universe, which was based on Aristotle, as we noted earlier in chapter two. Maimonides had codified this belief in his Mishneh Torah: All the stars and the spheres are intelligent beings with knowledge and understanding. They are alive, and recognize He who spoke and created the world. Each according to its size and ability praise and glorify their Creator like the angels, and just as they recognize the Holy

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One Blessed be He, so too they have self-knowledge, and recognize the angels above them. The knowledge that is possessed by the stars and spheres is less than that possessed by the angels, but is greater than the knowledge possessed by mankind.25 Delmedigo found such a belief unnecessary and therefore rejected it: “We have not seen any intelligence detached [from a corporeal body], and he who wants to introduce the notion of new beings into the universe must prove their existence.”26 In contrast to the Aristotelian need for multiple spheres each moving in a different direction, Delmedigo taught the simpler Copernican model, as summarized in a letter from his student Moses Metz: According to Copernicus the orbit of the planets is easily grasped when we understand that each orbit moves in only one direction, and that all the planets including the Earth and its elements move from west to east, like the white and yolk of an egg spinning in its shell. The Earth does not rest in one place . . . but is carried along its orbit like one of them. There is no need to bend the facts in order to fit in with Aristotelian theory; rather the theory should fit the facts, if we want the theory to be true. . . . 27 Although it was the facts that had persuaded Delmedigo of the truth of the heliocentric model, the model corresponded with mystical notions that also appealed to him: I was overjoyed when I heard that today there are scholars who believe that the universe is like a lantern, and the candle in the middle of it is the sun. Its light reaches to the sphere of Saturn, which is the outmost sphere. . . . It is thought that the stars in the eighth sphere are far more distant from Saturn than was thought by Copernicus, and this is the reason that they appear to be so small. . . . Each of these stars is illuminated by a Sun which is their lantern, and who knows if they contain an Earth which is inhabited with beings like us . . . this will teach you to pay attention to the words of the Talmud which should not appear strange to you. For this is what is taught on the verse, that God will give to each person who loves Him three hundred and ten worlds. 28 Delmedigo here is unequivocally stating his belief in a universe that is huge (and possibly infi nite) and contains other solar systems. The Dominican priest Giordano Bruno had proposed such a model of the universe some fi ft y years earlier in his De L’infinito Universo et Mondi (The Infinite Universe and its

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Worlds) published in 1584.29 Since Delmedigo was an avid collector of books, it is possible that he had read this book, or heard of it from Galileo, whom we know had read Bruno’s work. 30 A further reason that Delmedigo approved of the heliocentric model was its simplicity; Delmedigo suggested that if the geocentric model was correct, and assuming that the stars all moved at the same velocity, there ought to be a relationship between the distance of a star from the Earth and the period of its orbit. Yet no such relationship had been discovered. 31 Furthermore, even the positions of the planets within the geocentric model were unclear. Accurate observations from Tycho Brahe had shown that Mars sometimes appeared to have a closer orbit around the Earth than did the Sun, and at other times, its orbit was farther away than that of the Sun. 32 Delmedigo wrote that the Copernican model could best answer these difficulties: However, according to Copernicus the Sun lies at the center of the universe. It is orbited by Mercury, Venus, Earth (which is itself orbited by the Moon), Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Finally lies the eighth orbital plane [in which the stars move]. . . . The Sun rests like a king on his throne at the center of the universe, moving the stars through the power of magnetism. . . . 33 Not content with the theory itself, Delmedigo brought experimental evidence to support this claim. If the planets revolved about the Sun and were illuminated by it, the amount of light that they reflect would depend on their location and distance from the Earth. And this is precisely what Delmedigo and his famous teacher had observed through the telescope. These observations provided facts that only the Copernican model could explain: My teacher Galileo observed Mars when it lay close to the Earth. At this time its light was much brighter than that of Jupiter, even though Mars is much smaller. Indeed it appeared too bright to view through the telescope. I requested to look through the telescope, and Mars appeared to me to be elongated rather than round. (Th is is a result of its clarity and the movement of its rays of light.) In contrast, I found Jupiter to be round and Saturn to be egg-shaped. 34 Having explained why he accepted the Copernican model, Delmedigo addressed other astronomical issues. Among these, he described how the diameter of the Earth had been determined, 35 how to measure the distance from the Earth to the Moon, 36 and how an understanding of parallax allows positions of comets to be measured. 37 By tackling the question of the positions

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of comets, Delmedigo again showed how the previous models of the universe were inadequate. Both Aristotle and Ptolemy had believed that comets originated from the Earth itself; thus the existence of comets did not threaten their notion of the heavens as being incapable of change. 38 Delmedigo wrote that had Aristotle and Ptolemy bothered to measure the positions of comets against the stars using parallax, they would have concluded that comets were actually ethereal phenomena, existing far beyond the orbit of the Moon: [Ptolemy] did not pay enough attention to measure their height with these instruments. Had he done so, there is absolutely no doubt that he would have realized this truth and not favored others. For the proof from parallax is stronger than rock and cannot be denied by Aristotle or any other person who seeks the truth. We will have nothing to do with those who wish to block their ears and follow others as if it is they who preach the words of God. Such a person is far removed from the status of a real philosopher. 39 Delmedigo reminded his readers that a radical revolution had occurred. Not only had the Earth been removed from its place at the center of the universe, but the universe itself, long considered eternal and unchanging, was in fact itself subject to change.

Did Delmedigo Learn the Heliocentric Theory from Galileo? From whom did Delmedigo learn of Copernicus? Th is is an important question, because its solution reveals something about how knowledge of the new astronomy entered the rather closed European Jewish community in the seventeenth century. At fi rst glance, the answer appears to be simple. We know that Delmedigo was an avid bibliophile and spoke several languages including Latin. Th is makes it possible that he had read Copernicus’s work in the original.40 But rather than read the theory in the original, is it possible that Delmedigo learned of the new, heliocentric theory from Galileo? Galileo taught at the University of Padua from 1592 until June of 1610. Because Delmedigo was a student of Galileo in Padua starting in 1606, one might imagine that he learned of the heliocentric model from Galileo, the consummate Copernican. But this assumption is not necessarily correct; the key question is, what model of the universe was Galileo teaching his students at that time? The historian André Neher was certain that “Delmedigo was clearly introduced by Galileo to the Copernican system.”41 Likewise, the historian of Jewish literature Israel Zinberg claimed that there was no doubt that Delmedigo had

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“ . . . studied these sciences under the famous Galileo, who also familiarized him with the new system of the great Copernicus.”42 But these simple assessments, the latter written some eighty years ago from inside Stalinist Russia, are not shared by modern scholars of Galileo. One contemporary scholar wrote that “[t]here is no indication that Galileo rehearsed anything but pure Orthodox Ptolemaic theory from his lectern in Padua. During his lectures the Earth remained absolutely fi xed as the defi nitive centre of the universe.”43 J. L. Heilbron’s recent biography of Galileo makes a similar point; during twentyfour years of teaching at Pisa and Padua, Galileo did not mention any opinion about the motion of the Earth.44 Although this may have been true for his public teaching, Galileo was well aware of Copernican theory for much of the time he taught at Padua. In a letter dated May 30, 1597, Galileo wrote that the Copernican model was much more likely to be accurate than the Ptolemaic one.45 In August of that same year, he wrote to Kepler (after reading his Mysterium Cosmographicum) that he had become convinced of the Copernican model many years earlier.46 Stillman Drake, perhaps the greatest scholar of Galileo of the last century, summed up the evidence in this way, noting that Galileo “ . . . personally preferred that [i.e., Copernican] theory as early as 1597, but the fi rst time he endorsed it in print was in 1610, and then only mildly, his unequivocal support being withheld until 1613.”47 It is likely that the long delay was due to a lack of evidence—or better yet, a lack of personal, direct evidence—that would have forced Galileo to decide between the Copernican and Ptolemaic models.48 Th is changed in 1610, when Galileo discovered the moons orbiting Jupiter, providing proof that satellites do not revolve only around the Earth. In 1613, Galileo had seen the phases of Venus, which could only be explained if Venus orbited the Sun.49 Th is provided him with enough evidence to publicly declare himself as a Copernican. Maurice Finocchiaro, the leading scholar of Galileo in the United States, concludes that while in Padua, Galileo did not teach heliocentrism in any form, neither in his university lectures, nor in his private lessons. Moreover, before 1610 (the year he left his position in Padua and hence the last time he had contact with Delmedigo), Galileo felt that the anti-Copernican arguments were much stronger than the pro-Copernican arguments. 50 We can therefore conclude with great certainty that Galileo was familiar with the Copernican model during his time in Padua; however, in his public and private lectures to his students at Padua—lectures that Delmedigo would have attended—he did not discuss or endorse this model. The path by which Delmedigo grew familiar with Copernicanism is therefore still unclear. One theory (as good as any other) is, as we suggested earlier, that Delmedigo had read the famous work of Copernicus in the original. Bur this is only one possibility, and until more documentary evidence comes to light, the assertion,

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att ractive though it is, that it was Galileo who familiarized Delmedigo “with the new system of the great Copernicus” seems to be incorrect.

Delmedigo’s Contribution In order to better appreciate just how improbable was Delmedigo’s Copernicanism, we should remind ourselves of the status of the heliocentric theory both in the Dutch Republic, where Sefer Elim was published, and in Poland, where Delmedigo spent his post-university years and where he sett led for the last part of his life. Although a third edition of De Revolutionibus was printed in Amsterdam in 1617, the universities in the Dutch Republic moved slowly. It was not until 1634 that the fi rst full-fledged Copernican to hold a Dutch chair was appointed at the Amsterdam Athenaeum. 51 Some six years later and twenty miles to the south at the University of Utrecht, Jacob Ravensberg was appointed to teach mathematics and physics. Ravensberg, familiar with the astronomical literature, favored the model of Tycho Brahe over that of Copernicus, and it was this that he taught to his students. Yet another professor of mathematics at Amsterdam, Alexander de Bie, also favored the Tychonic model. 52 In Poland, it was the Jesuits who fi rst paid serious attention to the Copernican theory, and they maintained opposition to it throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Th is opposition was initially based on both mathematical and religious grounds, but the former were soon resolved, leaving the Bible as the sole obstacle to accepting the heliocentric theory. As a result, during the fi rst part of the seventeenth century, “the Jesuits accepted the scientifically inferior but religiously uncontroversial hypothesis of Tycho.”53 In addition to these Dutch and Polish reactions, bear in mind that the English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) published a criticism of the Copernican model in 1623, just six years before the publication of Sefer Elim. 54 In the light of all this, the acceptance of the Copernican model by Joseph Delmedigo was remarkable for its time. 55 What about the role played by Delmedigo in the Jewish reception of Copernican thought? Were Delmedigo’s Copernican beliefs influential, or did the Jewish community, to whom his scientific writings were addressed, simply ignore them? Delmedigo’s biographer Isaac Barzilay was certain that although Delmedigo’s contribution was important, his audience was small. According to Barzilay, Delmedigo . . . mastered not only ancient and modern astronomy, but also adopted, for his own independent studies, the new methods of

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scientific observation and experimentation that were coming into use with such astounding results. . . . [Delmedigo’s views were] novel and startling to the Hebrew reader. Whether there were many such readers at the time is very doubtful, indeed. 56 We will never know the number of readers who studied Sefer Elim in the years after it was published, but if Barzilay was suggesting that the overall readership of Sefer Elim was small, the historical record seems to suggest otherwise. Of the many examples of its influence one will suffice here. Naphtali Herz Wessely was a leading scholar during the early period of the Haskalah, and in his famous essay on Jewish education Divrei Shalom Ve’emet (Words of Peace and Truth), he provided eyewitness testimony as to the influence of Sefer Elim, at least among his peers in Berlin in the mid-eighteenth century: We have seen among our Polish brethren who have come to this city, great Torah scholars who studied geometry and astronomy in their homeland by themselves, without the aid of a teacher. They knew the depths of these sciences to such an extent that gentile scholars marveled at their reaching such a level of knowledge without a teacher. They studied the few books that were written by scholars of our nation, such as Yesod Olam and Elim by Yosef Kandia. 57 Clearly then, Delmedigo’s work did indeed reach the very audience for which it was conceived, and if this testimony is true, Barzilay underestimated the important role of Delmedigo’s book. André Neher, another historian of Delmedigo, drew an opposite and equally inaccurate conclusion about Delmedigo’s influence. For Neher, Delmedigo was a fearless trailblazer whose goal was not only to influence his own community, but also the Catholic Church itself: When Delmedigo published Elim in 1629, he used the term “Rabbi” in speaking of his teacher Galileo. Rabbi Galileo! Was this not something of a challenge directed to the inquisitors in Rome who were then preoccupied with Galileo and who were not to let him go until his death in 1642? Free Galileo, Delmedigo seems to be saying, or release him to us; in the midst of our Jewish community, he will not be subjected to any trial, we shall not require him to make any retraction, we shall welcome him and honor him like a Rabbi in Israel!58 Th is account is linguistically, historically, and conjecturally flawed. In the fi rst place, although the term used by Delmedigo to describe Galileo was indeed the

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word rebbi, in this context, it means “my teacher,” and not “my rabbi.”59 While translating it in the way that Neher did certainly adds ammunition to his claim that the Jews were open, receptive, and respectful to new ideas emerging in astronomy, the linguistic reality does not bear this out. Secondly, in the years prior to the publication of Sefer Elim in 1629, Galileo had not become the “preoccupation” of the Inquisition. The work that led to the trial by the Inquisition, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, was not published until 1632.60 Thus Neher’s claim that Delmedigo was writing a message to release Galileo is chronologically incorrect. Finally, the notion that the Jewish community would not punish one of their own for expressing antinomian views is inaccurate. It was, after all, in Amsterdam itself, the city in which both of Delmedigo’s books were published, that the Jewish community excommunicated Spinoza in 1656 on account of “the horrible heresies which he practiced and taught.”61 All in all, Neher’s assessment of Delmedigo as challenging the Inquisition on behalf of Galileo is inaccurate and misleading. Is there a better assessment of Delmedigo’s contribution? Zinberg, although mistaken in his understanding of the source of Delmedigo’s Copernican knowledge, nevertheless offered a more accurate description of Delmedigo’s role in the dissemination of the new astronomy: Th is talented disciple of Galileo was the fi rst Jewish scholar who had a clear grasp of what a tremendous revolution had been effected by the brilliant discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler, not only in the realm of astronomy but in all of man’s understanding of the world. . . . Joseph Solomon Delmedigo was the fi rst to acquaint the Jewish reader with the rich treasures of the new world of ideas the brilliant Copernicus disclosed to mankind. He was the fi rst in Jewish literature to proclaim that the old Ptolemaic conception of the universe had crumbled and that our earth is not the immovable center around which the whole universe revolves, but one of the insignificant planets which move in a tremendous cycle around the enormously huge sun.62 Until Delmedigo’s time, there had been litt le Jewish interest in astronomy outside of the need to calculate the calendar, which was an important, if esoteric, religious commandment. Among the Jews of Eastern Europe, there was no observation of the heavens in order to further astronomical knowledge, and the goals of nearly all the works produced on astronomy were to comment on and explain the laws regarding the lunar cycle and the calendar (hilkhot kiddush hahodesh). Although astronomy itself was permitted as a means to a religious end, it was not seen as a worthy pursuit in and of itself. Joseph Delmedigo

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changed this. Astronomical knowledge was no longer restricted to understanding the calendar, but was to be pursued as a worthy science.63 Delmedigo had been deeply saddened by the att itudes toward science that he had found among the Jews of Poland: They understand neither science nor Torah. They have become enemies of the science, and despise those who study it. They believe that God has no need for the sciences . . . for mathematics or for astronomy, and He does not desire those who drink from the poisoned well of Greek wisdom. . . . 64 Delmedigo not only opened up the world of Galileo and Copernicus to his coreligionists, but also enabled them to study astronomy, mathematics, and machines, and it is not surprising that his work was often cited in later Jewish books on astronomy.

Spinoza on Copernicus Delmedigo was not the only Jewish Copernican who spent time in the Netherlands. In 1670, some forty years after Sefer Elim was published, a Dutch Jew who was raised in the Amsterdam Jewish community also printed a work that contained pro-Copernican sentiments. Th is Latin work, perhaps better described as the work of a Jew rather than a Jewish work, was called Tractus Theologico-Politicus (Theological-Political Treatise). Its author was, of course, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), who had been excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in the summer of 1656 at the age of twenty-four. Spinoza’s work covered a variety of topics including the history of religion, biblical commentary and hermeneutics, the nature of miracles, and practical politics.65 Spinoza certainly accepted the Copernican model but never mentioned it by name. Instead, he alluded to its implications in a discussion on the nature of prophecy: All commentators have displayed an extraordinary eagerness to convince themselves that the prophets knew everything attainable by human intellect; and although certain passages in Scripture make it absolutely clear that there were some things the prophets did not know, rather than admit that there was anything the prophets did not know, they prefer to declare that they do not understand those passages, or alternatively they strive to twist the words of Scripture to mean what they plainly do not mean. If either of these options is permissible,

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we can bid Scripture farewell. If that which is absolutely clear can be accounted obscure and incomprehensible or else interpreted at will, it will be vain for us to try to prove anything from Scripture. For example, nothing in Scripture could be clearer than that Joshua, and perhaps the writer who composed his history, thought that the sun goes round the earth and the earth does not move, and that the sun stood still for a time. Yet there are many who, refusing to admit that there can be any mutability in the heavens, explain this passage so that it means something quite different. Others, who have adopted a more scientific att itude and understand that the earth moves and the sun is motionless or does not revolve around the earth, make every effort to extort this meaning in the teeth of the Scriptural text. Indeed, I wonder at them. Do we believe that the soldier Joshua was a skilled astronomer, that a miracle could not be revealed to him, or that the sun’s light could not remain above the horizon for longer than usual without Joshua understanding the cause? Both alternatives seem to me ridiculous. I prefer the simple view that Joshua did not know the cause of that extension of daylight, and the he and all the host along with him believed that the sun revolves around the earth with a diurnal motion and on that day it stood still for a while, this being the cause of the prolonged daylight. . . . Similarly, the sign of the shadow going back was revealed to Isaiah according to his understanding, namely through the retrogression of the sun. For he, too, thought that the sun moves and the earth is still.66 Spinoza was critical of both the idea that Joshua was privy to any sort of correct astronomical insights and the notion that the biblical text could be reinterpreted in line with Copernicanism. In short, the Bible does not contain scientific information and should not be read as a book of science. Moreover, because it was written by fallible men and was not the result of divine revelation, it contains simplifications or errors in the description of the natural world. These should be acknowledged for what they are and not interpreted to align them with what is now acknowledged to be the truth. What mattered for Spinoza was the moral message that the Bible contained, and so he made no attempt to reconcile it with Copernican thought, or any scientific theory for that matter. As the natural consequence of his belief that the Bible was a human work, Spinoza did not struggle to reconcile it with Copernicanism. Indeed, to try and do so was a pointless exercise. The Jewish community ignored Spinoza’s approach; his denial of the divinity of the Bible meant that he was, both literally and figuratively, outside of the religious norms of the Jews of the time, and most of the theological attention paid to Spinoza came from non-Jews,

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especially the Dutch Reformed Church.67 The Amsterdam synod declared the Tractus Theologico-Politicus “ blasphemous and dangerous,” and the town councils of Leiden and Utrecht were asked by the Church to prevent the printing or distribution of the book.68 In 1715, a lay member of the Reformed Church named Bernard Nieuwentijt published “The Right Way of Contemplating the Works of the Creator” to counter Spinoza’s Tractus, and specifically addressed the Copernican model.69 Nieuwentijt discussed the Copernican and Tychonic models but did not commit to either, and he noted that the Copernican model was scientifically challenged by the lack of stellar parallax. There was also the theological question of the inerrancy of the biblical text, and Nieuwentijt was very sympathetic to those who felt the Bible should be interpreted literally.70 One theme of Spinoza’s work that would be amplified two generations later was the role of the Bible as a work to teach moral behavior. As we shall see, this was an idea that resonated in the writings of several Jewish minds, including those of Samson Raphael Hirsch, although unlike Spinoza, Hirsch most certainly believed in the divine origins of the Bible. Because the Bible taught moral and not scientific lessons, its text could be interpreted, or better, should be interpreted so that the moral lessons correspond to scientific truths. Two recent works on Spinoza have reconsidered the long-argued question of whether Spinoza should be considered a Jewish thinker. Steven Nadler questioned the notion that Spinoza was the fi rst secular Jew, as this description would assume some measure of “a Jewish identity, a sense of belonging to a certain culturally or ethnically circumscribed group and to a certain history, and this must make some practical difference in his or her life.” 71 But Spinoza assumed no such identity, and there is no reason to believe that, after his excommunication, he even regarded himself as Jewish. Nadler concluded that Spinoza was “someone for whom religious affi liation or heritage played no role whatsoever in his self-identity,” 72 but elsewhere Nadler wrote that “Spinoza can rightfully be considered a Jewish philosophers, both because his ideas exhibit a strong engagement with earlier Jewish philosophers and because in his major works he philosophized about Judaism.” 73 Rebecca Newberger Goldstein opened her biography of Spinoza by asking whether he could “be considered by any stretch of interpretation, a Jewish thinker?” 74 Perhaps, Goldstein wrote, “the indication that he wrestled with the question of Jewishness is in itself sufficient claim to Jewishness.” 75 The question certainly has no correct answer, depending as it does on defi nitions of religious and ethnic identity that are far from our topic.76 For our purposes though, Spinoza’s Jewish upbringing, his undisputed familiarity with important Jewish texts, and his writings on the Copernican system are sufficient for him to have a place in this examination of Jewish reactions to Copernicanism. As Leon Wieseltier has pointed out, to say that a view is Jewish “is to claim a provenance more than an essence,” and

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this seems a reasonable approach to the question of Spinoza’s writings on the Copernican model.77 By the end of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam had produced two pro-Copernican works by Jews. Spinoza’s work was one of the most important works of philosophy ever written, but because its author was an excommunicated Jew, its support of Copernicanism was never cited in later Jewish books. In contrast, Delmedigo’s Sefer Elim was the work of a traditional Jew who remained deeply rooted in his religion. It was not only the fi rst Hebrew book to be published that described the Copernican revolution; it was also the fi rst that supported its conclusions. The reaction was not long in coming.

5

“Copernicus is the Son of Satan.” The First Jewish Rejections of Copernicus

In the last chapter, we noted that of the two pro-Copernican books authored by Jews in the seventeenth century, one was written in Hebrew and the other in Latin. In an odd sort of symmetry, the fi rst two anti-Copernican statements by Jews were also a found in a Hebrew and a Latin text. Before we examine Ma’aseh Tuviah, a highly influential Hebrew book in which Copernicus was called “the Son of Satan,” we will fi rst review the Latin work. Its author was Isaac Cardoso, who was raised as a Catholic and who had, by any measure, a remarkable life story.

Isaac Cardoso Fernando Cardoso (1604–1683) was born in Portugal and raised as a Catholic, but ended his life living in the ghetto of Verona as a Jew. Cardoso’s parents were new Christians, Iberian Jews who had converted to Catholicism in order to save their lives. But they had not forgotten their Jewish roots, which made them Marranos, Jews who lived outwardly as Christians, but who kept their original faith to a greater or lesser degree. Th is conclusion is drawn from the fact that as a six-year-old boy, Cardoso had been told that he was a Jew. Th is would have been an unusual detail to reveal to such a young child if his family had wholly assumed their Catholicism. It led the late Yosef Yerushalmi, the author of the definitive work on Cardoso, to write that Cardoso’s parents “were in some sense active Marranos, and that their ‘Marranism,’ whatever its form and content, was a family tradition transmitted from one generation to the next.”1 However, there was not much beyond this tradition, and the revelation of Fernando Cardoso’s roots seems to have been the extent of the family’s Jewish involvement. Fernando 82

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received a traditional Catholic education, and his family moved from Portugal to Spain, where he studied medicine. He became a physician in 1625, after which he taught philosophy at the University of Valladolid in north-central Spain.2 Around 1628, he moved to Madrid, where he ultimately became a physician to the royal court and where he demonstrated that he was a man of great talent and varied interests. In 1632, he published a book on the eruption of Vesuvius, and he later wrote several medical books in addition to a number of sonnets. In 1648, at the height of what was undoubtedly a successful career, and for reasons that are not known, Cardoso abruptly left Spain and, together with his brother, moved to Venice, where he started living openly as a Jew. There he changed his name to Isaac, was circumcised, and studied Torah, Mishnah, and Talmud. After five years in Venice, Cardoso moved to Verona where he sett led, living in the ghetto and working as a physician until his death in 1683. Frustratingly, he never revealed the reasons for his dramatic mid-life choice, and the cause of his decision remains speculation. One possibility is that having likely lived as a secret Jew for several years while in Spain, he felt his life to be in danger. 3 Whatever the motivation for his leaving Spain, he could now live openly as a Jew, and it was while in the Verona ghetto and living as a Jew that Cardoso wrote his two most important works. The fi rst was Philosophia Libera, which contained his “fi nal conclusions of a lifetime of thought in science, medicine, philosophy and theology.”4 The second work was Las Excelencias des los Hebreos, a fascinating defense of Judaism that was the “culminating justification of his own life and the choice he had made.”5 It is in Philosophia Libera, written in Latin and published in Venice in 1673, that Cardoso addressed the Copernican question.6 It is a long work of over 750 pages, and although Cardoso published the work as an openly professing Jew, several sections seem to have been written long before the work was published.7 Cardoso was familiar with the work of Copernicus and Galileo, and quoted from the latter’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. He summarized the Copernican model in a detailed twelve-point exposition and quoted two biblical verses that suggested that the Earth moves.8 Despite this, Cardoso resolutely rejected the heliocentric system on the grounds that it contradicted the Bible, as well as the senses. Before rejecting the heliocentric model, Cardoso fi rst reviewed twelve common arguments in its favor. They are worth examining, since they give an insight into the reasoning that appealed to a seventeenth-century philosopher and help the modern reader understand why there was so much early argument about Copernicanism.9 1. The Earth is known to be spherical, and this is a shape that “is most suitable for motion, just as the pyramidal or cubic shape is suitable for rest.”

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2. Since the Sun illuminates the entire universe, “it is right if it sits at rest in the center of the universe, [rather] than if it orbits around the center.” Just as a lantern would provide the best illumination of an area if it were at the center, the Sun can best illuminate the universe if it is at the center. 3. That which is nobler should be at rest, and the Sun is surely nobler than the Earth. “Rest is judged to be a more noble and divine condition than motion . . . . Therefore, immobility will be appropriate for the heavens and for the Sun. However, change and instability will be appropriate for the Earth.” 4. Cardoso described his fourth argument in favor of the Copernican model as the most persuasive of all. Th is is the fantastic speed at which the planets and stars would have to orbit the Earth in a geocentric universe. Because these speeds seemed unobtainable, it was far more likely that the heavenly bodies in fact did not move as they orbited around the Earth. Rather it was the Earth itself that turned on its axis, projecting the illusion of movement of the stars and planets. 5. The next argument is related to the previous one. If the stars really moved at great speeds around the Earth, how did they manage to maintain their fi xed distances from each other? Cardoso imagined that each star, moving at great velocity, would end up “scattered in infi nite space.” However, this does not occur, and observation shows that the stars maintain a fi xed distance from each other. Th is suggests that it is the Earth that moves while the stars are stationary. 6. The size of the observed planets will vary as their orbits bring them closer to or farther from the Earth. Cardoso seems to suggest that this variation in the size of the planets should be observable, but he does not elaborate as to whether this was actually seen to be the case. 7. The Earth is so small when measured against the vast universe that it seems unreasonable “that the heavens are moved on account of us and on account of the Earth, so small a sphere.” 8. If the Earth did not move, it would fall, just as birds fall once they stop flapping their wings. If the Earth is to remain in its position in space, it must therefore be moving.10 9. The next argument seems to be an elaboration of the second one. “Copernicus says that just as light is not placed in the corner of a hall to illuminate it but in the middle, so that it might distribute rays more suitably all around and so that light might divide out in individual parts uniformly, so the Sun, the lamp of the whole universe, is more opportunely placed in the middle of the universe.” 10. Circular motion allows the Earth to begin and end at the same point in space, which was felt to be more aesthetically pleasing than if the Earth

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moved in a straight line. Th is is not an argument about whether or not the Earth is in motion, but rather what kind of motion would we expect given that it moves. 11. The structure of the universe is compared to the form of the human body. “Just as the heart exists in the middle of the body, whence the spirit diff uses itself into all parts, so the Sun, the heart of the bigger universe, ought to be placed in the center of the cosmos so that it might scatter fierce rays of light most fully in any direction.” Th is is yet another variation of the second argument that had been repeated in the ninth argument. 12. The fi nal argument is an appeal to the simplicity of the heliocentric system, which explains several different observations with the simple explanation of the Earth’s movement. Unlike the geocentric model, the heliocentric model does not need to invoke relative movements of various spheres around the Earth or explain why some spheres move from east to west and others in the opposite direction. The Earth becomes just another planet and shares many of their same features, such as a similar landscape and an orbit around the Sun. Not all of these arguments were taken directly from Copernicus’s work. Cardoso quoted from other books, some of which were pro-Copernican, and it was likely that he was familiar with them from his time as a lecturer at the University of Valladolid.11 But even though there were a number of arguments in favor of the heliocentric model, there were even more against it; Cardoso mustered thirteen arguments that, he believed, refuted the new astronomy. Of these, several are variations on a theme rather than new arguments, but since Cardoso felt it important to itemize them separately, we do the same here. 1. The fi rst objection was from the Bible, “in which the greatest truth shines and many secrets of natural things are hidden.” Cardoso identified no fewer than fi fteen verses that described the Sun as moving and the Earth as stationary, which led him to conclude that “so many times do the sacred scriptures recall the immobility of the Earth and so often do the holy prophets declare it, that it is almost reckless to doubt.” 2. The immobility of the Earth “is confi rmed by reason.” The Earth cannot have two kinds of movement, circular and straight, and once it arrived at the center of the universe, it would be expected to remain there. 3. Experimental evidence from weights dropped and arrows shot fails to show that the Earth moves. An arrow shot straight up into the air should land west of where it was released, since during the period in which the arrow was airborne, the Earth under it has moved eastward. But this does not happen.

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4. Similarly, clouds and smoke rising from a fi re should appear to move toward the west as the ground on which the observer stands turns eastward. 5. Cardoso returns to the famous cannonball experiments and states that a cannonball shot to the east should travel less distance than one shot toward the west. “A javelin thrower would never strike his target and a rifleman would never hit is mark” if the targets were to the east, since they would move away from the javelin or the bullet. Yet there is no difference in the distances traveled by the cannonballs, and the rifleman does hit his target. Hence, the Earth does not turn. 6. Birds should not be able to fly toward the west, because the rapid movement of the air against them would prevent their progress. 7. Ships would never reach an eastern port, and bullets fi red to the east would never hit their target, because the Earth rotates ever eastward. 8. The great speed at which the Earth moved would destroy buildings and “shake the fruit off the trees.” In this argument, Cardoso considered the notion of “common motion” as a counterargument to these objections. The reason that buildings do not fall and that cannonballs reach their easterly targets is that they share a common motion with the Earth itself. But Cardoso quickly dismissed this possibility, because the motions of the Earth and a cannonball were too different to be compared. “Since indeed these two motions are so greatly different, the circular motion of the Earth and the straight motion of weights, it seems very difficult to fit and compare those motions.” 9. Imagine sitt ing at the bottom of a deep, narrow pit, looking directly at a star. The rapid motion of the Earth should result in the star quickly disappearing from view. “But since we nevertheless do not see, except after much time, that the star is hidden, this is therefore an indication that not the Earth but the heavens are moved in a circle.” 10. Animals that live in the Earth like the mole “would also be disturbed by the most agile movement of the Earth towards the east, following the nature of the Earth. But nevertheless it is not so, since these animals are very slow and lazy.” 11. There are two kinds of movement that the Earth may have, intrinsic (called “natural”) and extrinsic (or “violent”). If the Earth indeed moves, it cannot be because of extrinsic movement, because this would not have lasted for so long. But if a clod of dirt is picked up and dropped, it falls in a straight line rather than an arc, as would be expected if the movement of the Earth was intrinsic. Hence, the Earth itself does not really move. 12. The Earth, being the heaviest of all the heavenly bodies, would be expected to move to the center of the universe in a straight line and, having arrived there, to remain in its place unmoved.

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13. The Earth has a task, which is “to sustain animals and plants, and to produce fruits and many other things, which are accomplished better by rest than by motion.” These then are Isaac Cardoso’s arguments against the Copernican model. What they amount to are three essential claims. First, there are biblical verses that describe a geocentric universe (argument 1). Second, there is no experimental evidence to support the Copernican model (arguments 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10) and fi nally, a geocentric universe seems more reasonable (arguments 2, 11, 12, and 13). To the mind of a seventeenth-century scholar, these arguments might have been convincing enough to sustain a belief in the Ptolemaic universe, but to the modern reader, they are highly anachronistic. Nevertheless, several of these arguments were later repeated by Jews who wrote against the heliocentric model, although none of them referred to Cardoso’s Latin masterpiece. The fact that Jews ignored Spinoza’s Latin pro-Copernican sentiments reviewed in the last chapter is understandable; after all, as a young man, he had been excommunicated, and he lived the rest of his life outside of the Jewish community. What is harder to understand is why Jews ignored the antiCopernican arguments of Isaac Cardoso, a Jew by choice who lived the latter part of his life as an observant and generous member of his community. Perhaps it was hard or even impossible for many poorly schooled Jews to read the Latin text, but there were a number of highly educated Jews who had studied at universities and for whom Latin texts were accessible. It may also be the case that Cardoso’s Philosophia Libera, with its mixture of classical, Christian, and Jewish sources was simply not of interest to Jews.12 The work certainly contained no original ideas, and in fact it rejected some recent scientific discoveries.13 Whatever the cause, Cardoso’s geocentric views were not noted by later Jews. Nevertheless, the order in which Cardoso introduced his antiCopernican arguments is significant, for the fi rst argument, the biblical verses that suggest a geocentric universe, was religious in nature. It was one of several anti-Copernican arguments that were contained in perhaps the most famous anti-Copernican Hebrew work of all time, Tuviah Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviah.

Tuviah Cohen Tuviah Cohen has long been a favorite of historians of science and Judaism. Perhaps this is because he was a reformer of sorts, ready to sweep away old superstitions and replace them with scientific knowledge. Perhaps it is because his book, Ma’aseh Tuviah, was “ . . . the best-illustrated Hebrew medical work of the pre-modern era,”14 full of wonderful drawings about astronomy and

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anatomy. Perhaps it is because his book is so clearly printed and a pleasure to read in the original. Or perhaps it is because Cohen was so adamantly opposed to Copernicus that he called him the “Son of Satan”—which made his the fi rst Hebrew work to attack Copernicus and his heliocentric system. Tuviah Cohen was born in 1652 in the town of Metz in northeastern France, where his father was a rabbi.15 After his father’s untimely death, his mother remarried in 1664 when Cohen was twelve years old.16 He studied in a yeshivah in Cracow, and at the age of twenty-six, entered the University of Frankfurt, where he began to study medicine. Despite being taken under the wing of Fredrick William, the elector of Brandenburg, and receiving a stipend from him, anti-Jewish sentiment prevented Cohen from graduating.17 As a result, he left for the University of Padua, where Solomon Conegliano, who was both a rabbi and a graduate of Padua, supported him.18 Cohen graduated with his degree in medicine in 1683 and soon found employment as a physician in Turkey. He published his only work, Ma’aseh Tuviah (The Work of Tuviah), in Venice in 1708 and moved in 1715 to Jerusalem, where he died in 1729.

Cohen and New Scientific Knowledge Cohen saw himself as an iconoclast, willing to break with some—although by no means all—of traditional Jewish teachings about the natural world and replace them with the latest knowledge being taught in the universities of his time. For example, his book contains a description of the circulation of blood that had fi rst been described by William Harvey in 1628 and shows how Cohen was indeed willing to accept new theories about the natural world.19 Th is progressive approach was of such importance that it was the motivation behind the name of Cohen’s book, Ma’aseh Tuviah. Cohen reminded his readers of the Mishnah: “It happened (ma’aseh) to Tuviah the doctor who saw the new [Moon] . . . and the Bet Din [rabbinic court] accepted his testimony.”20 Cohen saw himself as another doctor who would “see the new.” In so doing, he hoped to raise the position of Jews and Judaism from one of cultural inferiority, a feeling that resulted from his negative experiences in Frankfurt. While there, Cohen had become involved in several contentious debates about Judaism and felt that he had not responded sufficiently. Despite an initially warm welcome, he recalled how the Christian students with whom he studied would undertake long debates with us every day about questions of belief, and would many times embarrass us asking “where is your wisdom and understanding—it has been taken from you and given to us!” Although we were knowledgeable in Bible, Talmud and Midrashim, we

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were like paupers when we debated them. Th is is why I became a zealot for the Lord and swore that before I died I would neither sleep nor rest until I had written a work that included knowledge and skills . . . for although we walk in this dark and bitter exile God has been our light and there are still wise and learned men among us. . . .21 Cohen painfully remembered one particular area in which he lacked knowledge: the discipline of astronomy. It was astronomy that the Talmud considered to be the example par excellence of Jewish wisdom that would be acknowledged by Gentiles. Examining the verse “For this is your wisdom and understanding among the nations” [Deut. 4:6], the Talmud had concluded that it referred to “the calculation of the seasons and the constellations,” that is, the ability to create an accurate calendar and to forecast the positions of the stars and planets.22 Cohen seems to have been especially troubled by the taunts that Jews had no proper astronomical understanding, given the pride of place of astronomy in the Talmud. He therefore addressed this topic in detail in his encyclopedic Ma’aseh Tuviah.

Astronomy in Ma’aseh Tuviah Cohen’s review of astronomy is to be found in the second section of his work, entitled Olam Hagalgalim (The World of the Spheres). By using this name for the section on astronomy, Cohen reminded his reader just which model of the universe would serve as a guide; it was to be the Aristotelian model of the spheres, even if other models, including the Copernican and Tychonic, were discussed. Before even introducing any of his subject matter, Cohen declared his allegiance to the geocentric model in a brief introductory poem: With the help of the Perfect Rock, the God who gives dew; I will speak of the wonders of the World of the Spheres Of the stars of the skies in which they are found; and of the confused who are great and mighty Of the path of the Sun as it rises and sets; And the darkening of the Moon, both changing and remaining stationary. . . .23 Cohen reminded the reader in these opening sentences not only that the Sun appears to rise and set, but that it actually does so. Following a brief description of various astronomical terms (and a thirty-two page digression based on his father’s sermons), Cohen turned to the models of the universe. First was the

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geocentric model, in which the Earth is both immobile and “. . . at the center of the universe and the heavens turn about it . . . .” The second model is that the heavens and the stars do not revolve at all, but rather the Earth both orbits and revolves about its own axis, and completes one revolution from west to east every twenty-four hours. Th is model is not new; it comes from Pythagoras and many other philosophers, but over the last two centuries Copernicus reworked this model, and for many of our contemporaries this model is engraved on their hearts.24 Cohen illustrated the heliocentric model with a simple, yet striking half-page illustration (see figure 5.1). In so doing, Tuviah Cohen’s work pictured, for the fi rst time in Hebrew literature, the heliocentric model. When we pause to consider this illustration, its most striking feature is its simplicity. The Sun lies at the center and is shown as a large circle of fi re. Beyond it are the labeled, circular orbits of the planets, and the Moon is shown orbiting the Earth. In many ways, this illustration is similar to the one that appeared

Figure 5.1 The fi rst depiction of the heliocentric system in Hebrew literature. From Ma’aseh Tuviah, Venice, 1708, 50b. From the collection of the author.

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in the book that started it all, Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (see figure 5.2). In that illustration, the Sun appeared as a simple circle at the center of the diagram, with the orbits of the planets placed in concentric circles around it without any embellishment. Th is simplicity should be contrasted with the diagram that accompanied Cohen’s text describing the Ptolemaic system (shown in figure 5.3). In this diagram, the Earth does not simply occupy the center; rather, it is detailed with houses set among rolling hills. Furthermore, each orbit contains not just the name of the planet but also the period of its orbit around the Earth. Finally, the very outermost circle is designated as the Sphere of the Prime Mover, which was part of the Ptolemaic system, although it contained no stars. Unfortunately, the reader could not easily compare these depictions of the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems side by side, because they were on the front and back of the same page,25 but Cohen’s choice of illustrations surely influenced the reader in a subconscious way. The Earth, replete with houses, lies at the center of the Ptolemaic diagram; a fiery ball representing the Sun lies at the center of the heliocentric one.26 Cohen could have chosen to illustrate

Figure 5.2 The fi rst depiction of the heliocentric system. From Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, 1543. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.

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Figure 5.3 The Ptolemaic system. From Ma’aseh Tuviah, Venice, 1708, 50a. From the collection of the author.

the Earth in the same way in each of his diagrams; there had certainly been other texts in which the Earth was depicted as inhabitable, yet nevertheless shown orbiting the Sun.27 That Cohen did not illustrate the heliocentric system in this way was another subconscious effort to make it less att ractive than the older Ptolemaic system. After explaining and depicting the old Ptolemaic and new Copernican systems, Cohen outlined and illustrated the Tychonic model, in which the planets orbited the Sun but were in turn dragged by it around the stationary Earth. Cohen, who described Tycho’s model as a “compromise” between the other two systems, never took it seriously; instead, he focused his energies on disproving the Copernican model. To do this, Cohen felt it necessary to address three questions, perhaps the three questions that concerned astronomers of his time: (1) the nature of the substance of space, (2) whether or not the spheres themselves moved, and (3) the mobility of the Earth. That Cohen addressed each of these issues shows that he considered his book to be a complete textbook of science and not just a reaction to some of the more threatening theories of astronomy. Although we shall not analyze the fi rst two questions, we should note that Cohen rejected the notion that the substance of space was solid. He also concluded that it was indeed the stars themselves that moved rather than the spheres.

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Cohen tackled the question of the Earth’s mobility by using a combination of both biblical verses and experimental evidence. Th is raises the question of why both were necessary; after all, if the Bible stated that the Sun moved and the Earth was immobile, what need did Cohen have of other proof? We shall return to this question after reading what Cohen had to say about the new astronomy: [E]very godly philosopher should certainly oppose Copernicus and those who follow him, for all the proofs that he and his supporters bring are against the words of Holy Scripture and the true prophets. It is stated in Ecclesiastes “and the Earth stands for ever” [Eccles. 1:4] yet Copernicus believes it does not stand at all! Neither does the Sun rise or set or change its position; rather it remains in its place unmoved, for it never moves. If this is so, why is it written “the Sun rises and the Sun sets, and glides back to where it rises . . . it goes south and turns north, turning, turning. . . .” [Eccles. 1:5] And from the book of Joshua: “and the Sun stopped and did not hasten to set.” [Josh. 10:13] And in Isaiah: “ . . . the Sun‘s shadow went back ten degrees, the same degrees that it had descended.” [Isa. 38:8] Here you see a number of places in which the verses of the Bible state their case, and support the notion that the Sun, Moon and all the stars orbit around the Earth, and not that the Earth orbits the Sun. Now should Copernicus bring all sorts of proofs and false demonstrations, you should blunt his teeth28 and reply: “I, like you, have all kinds of proofs and demonstrations that show that your thoughts are incorrect.”29 Cohen was aware that these literal interpretations could be countered by others who could understand the very same verses in a different way, a way that supported the Copernican position. In a side note on his text in Ma’aseh Tuviah, he mentioned a rabbinic homily that suggested that the Earth did in fact move. “I am afraid lest someone ask me from the statement of our Sages (in Bereshit Rabbah): ‘Why is it called Earth [aretz]? Because it runs [ratzah] to do the will of its Creator.’ The solution to this problem is difficult.”30 And it was for this reason that Cohen did not rely exclusively on the Bible to reach a conclusion about which model of the universe was correct. Because there was at least one statement found in the Midrash that suggested that the world was not stationary after all, Cohen would need to look beyond religious texts to sort out the problem. In so doing, he used a second line of support for his geocentric position: mathematics and experiments. His fi rst proof was mathematical. He considered the huge speed at which the Earth would need to revolve in order to complete a daily revolution

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about its axis. Cohen calculated that this would require a speed of more than one-half-mile per second. 31 Th is would surely result in “animals being projected off of the Earth and the destruction of homes and everything attached to the Earth.”32 As movement at this speed was inconceivable, the Earth must be at rest. Cohen repeated many of the same arguments that Cardoso had suggested in his Latin text some fi ft y years earlier. Like Cardoso, Cohen suggested that an arrow shot should never be able to reach its target if the Earth was moving, because during the time that the arrow was in fl ight, the target would have moved as the Earth under it revolved. Using similar logic, Cohen suggested that a cannon would catch up with the ball that it had fi red, because while the ball moved at the speed of a mile every two seconds, the cannon itself moved at a quicker speed as it was carried by the moving Earth underneath it. Th is line of thinking would also require that a cannonball shot to the west would not travel as far as one shot to the east. Because the Earth rotated from west to east, Cohen stated that, as the ball moved against the Earth’s direction of rotation, it would be slowed. 33 Cohen’s fi nal experimental proof did not question the Earth’s daily rotation, but rather its yearly orbit around the Sun. If this orbit were real, the stars should change their size as they moved nearer to or farther away from the Earth. Because we do not see any change in the size of the stars over the year, this movement must not occur. Cohen did not quote any sources for his experimental arguments, but several opponents of the Copernican model had made similar arguments in the seventeenth century. 34 Raphael Aversa (1589–1657) argued that if the Earth moved, the clouds should not remain over the same place but should rather be seen to move from east to west. The Jesuit scholar Giovanni Riccioli (1598–1671) discussed the evidence from cannonballs in his extensive treatise against the Earth’s motion, and Tycho Brahe himself had suggested that if the Earth moved, cannonballs shot toward the west should travel farther than those shot to the east. 35 Thus, the kind of experimental challenges raised by Cohen were certainly not new, and Cohen had clearly borrowed them from others. What he failed to note was that each argument had also been rebutted. For example, almost eighty years before Cohen published his Ma’aseh Tuviah, Galileo had addressed these experimental challenges in his Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in Florence in 1632. Each of these arguments had been raised and refuted. 36 Galileo had examined another argument, but one based on the same logic as the objection from cannonballs. “Whoever performs the experiment will fi nd it to show the complete opposite of what is written; that is, it will show that the rock always falls at the same spot on the ship whether it is standing still or moving at any speed.”37 It was the common motion of the ship and the stone that was the cause of this result, and

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this common motion refuted the arguments that Cohen found so convincing against Copernicanism. 38 Cohen was either not aware of these refutations or purposefully chose to ignore them. Having raised these objections, Cohen dedicated his next chapter to further questioning the heliocentric system. The title of the chapter left no doubt as to its content: Chapter Four. Bringing all the claims and proofs used by Copernicus and his supporters showing that the Sun is at rest and the Earth is mobile; and know how to refute him, for he is the First born of Satan. Despite the precise and salacious heading, the chapter actually contains supporting evidence for the Copernican model and not a single refutation. The evidence Cohen used to support the Copernican theory is broken down into six arguments, many of which we have already seen in Isaac Cardoso’s Philosophia Libera: 1. The round shape of the Earth makes it easier for it to be mobile. This shape should be contrasted to the shape of the surrounding universe, which was thought to be either hemispherical or tent-like. Either way, the universe was too unwieldy to easily revolve around the Earth. 2. The speeds at which the stars would need to orbit the Earth are simply too great. In contrast, the calculated speed of the Earth was a more reasonable figure. 3. If the stars indeed moved at huge speeds, they would not remain equidistant from one another. Th is is not a problem if the Earth moves. As for the question about the speed of the Earth’s movement causing houses to be destroyed, “this is all nonsense, for the atmosphere moves together with the Earth, without causing any damage at all.”39 4. The size of the (eighth) fi xed sphere of the stars makes it far less likely that it moves at a high speed around a fi xed Earth. 5. If the Sun serves to illuminate the universe, it would do so best from a central position rather than off to one side or the other, as required in a Ptolemaic system. 6. Since the Earth requires sunlight, it makes more sense for it to orbit the Sun rather than the other way around. These arguments vary in their complexity, assumptions, and strengths. Yet Cohen made no attempt to refute a single one of them, as he had promised to

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do in the title of this chapter. Instead, Cohen simply concluded that “the refutations are easy for one who understands, and I will not go on at any length about them.” With that, Cohen dropped the entire question of Copernicus and moved on to describe in detail the Ptolemaic universe and its structure. Th is leaves the reader to wonder whether or not Cohen actually knew of any arguments at all that could be successfully raised against the heliocentric model. Could it be that Cohen was subtly admitting defeat in the face of arguments he could not tackle? One historian, Noah Rozenbloom, believes that this may indeed be the case. He suggested that Cohen may actually have been a secret admirer of Copernicus, and that the name “First born son of Satan” should not be understood as an aff ront.40 As used in the Talmud, “First born son of Satan” is an expression of intellectual sophistication and depth, as in the way a certain Rabbi Dosa described his brother: “I have a younger brother whose name is Jonathan, who is the First born son of Satan. He is a student of Shammai; be careful that he does not outwit you with his halakhot. For he has three hundred answers [to permit that which you forbid].”41 When understood in this, its original talmudic context, “First born son of Satan” was a compliment describing a person holding an intellectually sophisticated and well-argued position. Perhaps then, this accolade was what we might regard today as a backhanded compliment. Although Rozenbloom’s suggestion is an intriguing possibility, it is highly unlikely that Tuviah Cohen was a closet Copernican. Aside from the highly unusual way in which Cohen raised the six pro-Copernican arguments and then failed to refute any of them, the entire structure of the chapter (as well as its very title Olam Hagalgalim—The World of the Spheres) demonstrated Cohen’s allegiance to the old Ptolemaic system. Although it is true that Cohen raised questions that he chose not to answer, he did in fact lay out several objections to the Copernican model that included the issues of the paths of cannonballs and a lack of stellar parallax. Th is should not lead us to conclude that Ma’aseh Tuviah contained a hidden pro-Copernican message, but rather that it needed what most authors need: a good editor.

Cohen and the Jesuits on Biblical Proof Texts Tuviah Cohen’s work contained a number of important fi rsts: It was the fi rst Hebrew text to vilify Copernicus and also, ironically, the fi rst to illustrate his model. In addition, it was the fi rst work in Hebrew literature that quoted biblical verses as proof against the notion that the Earth moved. As we saw above, Cohen quoted four verses; two from Ecclesiastes that describe the Sun as having motion, one from the book of Joshua in which the Sun was commanded to stand still, and one from the book of Isaiah in which the Sun’s shadow moves

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back across a sundial. To understand the choice of these particular proof texts, we should compare them with the biblical texts that had been seen as problematic for Copernicans by those in the Church. Copernicus himself made some passing comments on the question of reconciling his theory with the Bible, but the fi rst systematic attempt toward reconciliation was made by Georg Rheticus, the student of Copernicus who arranged for the publication of De Revolutionibus.42 Writing anonymously, he completed a treatise entitled On Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth some time before late 1541, but it was not published until 1651. The work was then lost until 1973 when it was rediscovered by the Dutch historian Reijer Hooykaas.43 Rheticus explained that the Bible taught only what was necessary for salvation, and that it used the imprecise language of everyday speech, which may lead to false conclusions about the nature of the world.44 For Rheticus, an understanding of the natural world “should be acquired by scientific investigation and not by positive assertions based on the Bible.”45 He asked rhetorically whether “certain interpretations of rather obscure passages of Holy Writ which refer to nature can be accepted,” and analyzed several such passages, concluding that each in fact suggests that the Earth moves.46 For example, he understood a reference to the “pillars of the Earth” (1 Sam. 2:8) as describing the poles of the axis around which the Earth revolves on a daily basis.47 Although the treatise was quickly forgotten, its method of accommodation was echoed in other works that defended the orthodoxy of the Copernican model in the first half of the seventeenth century.48 Galileo had discussed his approach to reconciling biblical texts that appear to contradict the Copernican model in his 1615 Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina. There he discussed the passage from the book of Joshua at some length, but only tangentially mentioned the sundial text found in Isaiah.49 Another proof text was mentioned in the Letter, this one from the book of Job, which suggested that the Earth was mobile. 50 Galileo quoted as his source Diego de Zuniga’s Commentaries on Job (a work that was placed on the Index by the Church in March 1616, together with Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus51). Zuniga (1536–1597) printed his book in 1578 and had offered a pro-Copernican explanation of the verse that stated “He who moves the Earth from its place, its pillars are shaken” (Job 9:6). Zuniga was not only one of the fi rst Church theologians to examine Copernican thought in a biblical commentary; his was the only work that attempted to reconcile biblical verses with the new astronomy printed in between the publication of Copernicus’s work in 1543 and a 1615 letter defending Copernicanism by a Carmelite priest named Paolo Foscarini. 52 Foscarini demonstrated how each problematic biblical verse could in fact be reconciled with the Copernican system, and he suggested more generally that the Bible was not a work that taught about the natural world but rather “the true world to eternal life.”53

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In contrast to these texts that reconciled the Bible with the heliocentric model, there were prominent Jesuit theologians who rejected the theory on biblical grounds. Of these, the most famous was Christopher Clavius (1538–1612), a Jesuit astronomer who played a significant role in the reform of the calendar under Pope Gregory XIII. Clavius was the author of an important introductory textbook of astronomy, the Commentary on the Sphere of Sacroboso, which was fi rst published in 1570 and reprinted many times until its fi nal revision appeared in 1611. 54 Clavius’s Commentary contained not only astronomical arguments but also offered biblical passages to support the geocentric theory: The meanings of the Scriptures affi rm in many places that the Earth is immobile and attest that the sun and the rest of the stars move. Thus we read in Psalms 103 [v. 5], Which has founded the Earth upon the stabilite thereof; it shall not be inclined for ever and ever. And again in Ecclesiastes 1 [vv. 4–6], The Earth standeth for ever. The sunne riseth and goeth downe, and returneth to his place: and there rising againe, compasseth by the South and bendeth to the North. What could be clearer? And indeed quite clear is the testimony presented to us by Psalm 18 [vv. 6–7], where we read that the sun moves: He put his tabernacle in the sunne; & himself as a bridegrome coming forth of his bridechamber. He hath rejoiced as a giant to runne the way, his coming forth from the toppe of heaven; And his recourse even to the toppe thereof: neither is there that can hide him selfe from his heate. And again, it is recounted among the miracles that God sometimes causes the sun to go backward and then go ahead as it is used to do. 55 Although Clavius’s work was the most widely read Jesuit criticism of Copernicus, there were other Jesuits who criticized Copernican thought on biblical grounds. Johannes de Pineda (1557–1637) discussed the verse from Ecclesiastes 1:4 and concluded that Zuniga was deluded when he had written his pro-Copernican interpretations. 56 Nicholas Serarius (1510–1609) occupied chairs in theology in Wurtzburg and Mainz and cited Ecclesiastes 1:4 and Psalms 103:5 to support his contention that the Copernican model was heresy. 57 Johannes Lorinus (1559–1634), another Jesuit scholar, focused on Ecclesiastes 1:4 to support his contention that the theory was “dangerous and repugnant to the faith.”58 A Carmelite priest and professor of theology in Rome named Raphael Aversa (1589–1657) cited a different phrase: “The world stands fi rm, it cannot be shaken” (1 Chron. 16:30 and Ps. 93:1). 59 Our brief examination reveals that the number of biblical verses seen as problematic was fairly limited, and that Jesuits who opposed the heliocentric theory

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repeatedly referred to them. Tuviah Cohen used nearly all the same verses to object to Copernicus, but for reasons that are not clear, he avoided quoting some verses that would seem to be very problematic for the Copernicans. For example, the verse used by Aversa from the Book of Psalms (93:1), “The world stands fi rm, it cannot be shaken,” was not part of Cohen’s biblical armamentarium, and neither was one quoted by Clavius, “It [the Sun] is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber” (Ps. 19:6). Cohen also ignored the verses that might suggest that the Earth indeed moved, and never broached the possibility that the Bible could not be read as a textbook of science. For him, the Bible was the word of God that not only taught Jews about how to live a religious life, but also contained truths about the natural world. Cohen would have rejected any assertion limiting the scope of the Bible to religious truths alone and would certainly have concurred with the statement found in the Mishnah by the sage Ben Bag-Bag: “Turn it [the Torah] over and over, for everything is contained in it.”60 If the Bible was the word of God, its content was entirely truthful and should be used as a guide to the natural world as much as the spiritual one. Cohen’s position mirrored that of many (but not all) of the Jesuits and mirrored the stance adopted by Isaac Cardoso and the Church. It would be another couple of generations until the suggestion that the Bible could be approached in a different, but equally reverential, way became an accepted part of Jewish teachings.61

Tuviah Cohen in Context In his assessment of Tuviah Cohen, the noted historian of Jewish history David Ruderman compared Cohen’s work to that of Jacob Zahalon. In 1683 (the year Cohen graduated from Padua), Zahalon published a lengthy work on medicine called Otzar Hahayyim (The Compendium of Life), and Ruderman carefully noted how different was Zahalon’s work from Ma’aseh Tuviah. For example, Zahalon presented medicine based on classical sources, while Cohen used “contemporary sources and opinions, often those that directly contradict the standard therapies of the field.”62 Zahalon presented his medical opinions with a sense of certainty and never admitted any disagreement or alternative views. Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviah, on the other hand, revealed a “ . . . mental universe fraught with controversy, ambiguity and uncertainty.”63 As we noted above, this approach was also reflected in the way Cohen outlined the case for heliocentricity. He was prepared to admit awareness of the new theory, and he even explained and depicted it in his work, even if he did reject it on both scientific and biblical grounds. To set Cohen’s work in context, we should contrast the way he reacted to the new astronomy with the reactions of other Jews

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of the time. We begin with a Jew who had the surprisingly un-Jewish family name of Gentili. Moses ben Gershom Gentili was born in Trieste in 1664 and died in Venice in 1711. His family name was hebraicized to Hefez, and it was this name that appeared in his writings. He left two works, one on the construction of the temple and a second, more popular work named Melekhet Mahashevet (The Designer’s Craft). It is this second work that we shall briefly consider. Melekhet Mahashevet was a commentary on the Pentateuch published in Venice in 1710, and it dealt with a wide range of issues, including the natural sciences. These publication facts are important, for Melekhet Mahashevet was published just three years after and in the same city as Ma’aseh Tuviah. Litt le is known of Hefez’s life, but from reading Melekhet Mahashevet, it is clear that he was familiar with the works of Galileo, Descartes, and Kepler, although he never mentioned Copernicus by name.64 In contrast to Cohen’s radical anti-Copernican stance, Moses Hefez adopted a more nuanced approach, in which he accepted the position that the Earth turned on its own axis and revolved around another point in space, although exactly where this point was is not entirely clear. Hefez introduced his cosmology in a long comment on the biblical verse describing the end of the flood: “And the waters ebbed and flowed, and after one hundred and fi ft y days they abated” (Gen. 8:3). He was aware of Galileo’s opinion (which turned out to be embarrassingly incorrect) that the tides were caused by the motion of the Earth both around its own axis and around the Sun. In fact, Galileo had developed his theory of the tides in order to provide a proof that the Earth moves and so support the Copernican model. 65 Hefez too was intrigued by this explanation of the tides: In fact the reason for the regular movement of the tides is to be found in a natural cause. Our ancestors, who were unable to fi nd a correct explanation, investigated it. One exception—as the wise Galileo wrote—were those who believed that the Earth revolved around its axis from west to east, as do the planets. In this way they would not require the movement of a daily sphere. However, we still need to ask why the movement of the Earth would cause the time of the tides to change by an hour every day.66 In order to solve the mystery, Hefez, who correctly connected the tides to the orbit of the Moon, proposed a monthly orbit of the Earth around a central point, around which the Sun and Moon also revolve (see figure 5.4). Although the overall picture places the Earth near (but not at) the center of the system, it is clearly not the standard geocentric model, because in Hefez’s model, the Earth moves around its own axis every day as well as around a central point every thirty-two days. Hefez was not a Copernican, but as his model called for

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Figure 5.4 The monthly movement of the Earth, Moon, and Sun, according to Moses Hefez. From Melekhet Mahashevet, Venice, 1710. The Sun (‫ )א‬and Moon (‫ )ב‬move counter-clockwise, while the Earth (‫ )ג‬moves clockwise. The Earth completes it orbit in 32 days, the moon in 27 days, and the sun in 365 days. Th is model was created to explain the daily retardation of high tide by approximately one hour. From the collection of the author.

a daily rotation and a monthly orbit of the Earth, he clearly rejected the notion that the Earth was absolutely immobile. Th is model, therefore, contrasts with that of Tuviah Cohen, while demonstrating that other Jews remained skeptical of the Copernican picture in all its details. The second comparison we should make is with the work of Isaac Lampronti. It will show more evidence that Cohen’s position was not exceptional, and that Jews of the time had reservations about Copernicanism. Lampronti (1679– 1756) was an Italian Jew who, like Tuviah Cohen, studied medicine at Padua. He completed his studies at the age of twenty-two and returned to his home town of Ferrara in northern Italy. There he became a rabbi and eventually rose to become the head of the yeshivah in the city, all while continuing to practice medicine.67 Lampronti introduced a curriculum of dual learning in his yeshivah, which became “the quintessential Jewish institution of learning in Italy, where Judaism and the biological sciences, along with the propaedeutic language training necessary to pursue both, were meaningfully infused.”68 Lampronti is best known for his lengthy alphabetical encyclopedia of Jewish

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law, Pahad Yizhak (The Fear of Isaac), in which each entry contained material from the Mishnah, Talmud, later commentaries, and the responsa literature, in addition to updates from contemporary science. The fi rst two volumes, published in 1750 and 1753, covered the fi rst four letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These were the only parts published during Lampronti’s lifetime, and publication of the remaining volumes was not completed until 1888. Lampronti’s att itude toward Copernicanism was found in a rather surprising section of his work, among the laws of hunting on the Sabbath.69 Lampronti discussed the talmudic rule that lice could be killed on the Sabbath, an act normally forbidden under the general prohibition of hunting on the day of rest. The Talmud had reached this conclusion based on a belief that lice are spontaneously created from dust and therefore did not have the usual status of other creatures that reproduce sexually. As a result, the usual prohibition against killing them on the Sabbath did not apply. Lampronti brought this discussion up to date by declaring that this talmudic rule was based on faulty science. Because naturalists had now concluded that every living creature must come from an egg, the legal status of lice must be changed, and Lampronti ruled therefore that they may not be killed on the Sabbath. “Every careful person who cares for his life will stay far from these creatures, and not kill either a flea or a louse, and will not place himself in a situation in which he may have to bring a sin offering [for violating the Sabbath]. In this matter I believe that if the sages of Israel understood the proofs offered by the Gentiles, they would revisit their ruling and accept the [Gentile] opinions, as they did regarding the dispute about whether the heavenly sphere is fi xed and the constellations revolve.” 70 Lampronti here referenced the talmudic passage about the structure of the universe, which we discussed in chapter 2. “The Jewish sages say, the galgal is fi xed and the mazzalot revolve, and the Gentile sages say the galgal revolves and the mazzalot are fi xed.” 71 The Talmud concluded that “their words appear more reasonable than our words,” and Lampronti understood this conclusion to be an example of the intellectual honesty of the sages, who were open to changing their opinions when faced with new evidence. Lampronti wrote to his former teacher Judah Briel for support of his innovative ruling. But rather than offer his backing, Briel wrote back that Lampronti was in fact incorrect. Briel based his rejection of Lampronti’s ruling on the sweeping principle that “it is forbidden to change the laws which have been bequeathed to us by our forefathers on the basis of the science of the Gentiles.” Briel supported his belief with an example of how, despite apparent evidence to the contrary, the talmudic sages had the correct explanation in contrast to non-Jewish scientists. He turned to the same passage about the structure of the universe that Lampronti had quoted and suggested that it was a debate about which of the two models, the geocentric or the heliocentric, was correct.

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Although the Jewish sages believed in the heliocentric model, they had, in the end, been persuaded that the geocentric model was correct. Briel noted that although the sages of the Talmud had eventually agreed with the non-Jewish model, “in the end, after hundreds of years of investigation and experimentation, all the Gentile astronomers have sided with the views of our sages and their ancient opinions. One should therefore never change that which has been ruled upon in our Talmud, even if all of the prevailing opinions seem to be the opposite, for the spirit of God has spoken to us.” 72 Lampronti objected to his teacher’s reply and stated that the beliefs of the talmudic rabbis about astronomy were personal opinions and not part of Jewish tradition: Not every statement in the Talmud is part of Jewish tradition. Rather the sages sometimes stated their own opinions based on their own intelligence and investigations, and not from a tradition. Were this not so, why would the sages have admitted [their error in the dispute about the structure of the universe]? They should have maintained their opinions, which were based on Jewish tradition, and remain unmoved by any proof brought by the Gentile sages. Today there are Gentile sages who believe, like Copernicus, that the sphere is fi xed, but there are also those who believe in the opposite [that the Earth is immobile], and their numbers are significant. These matters are not exact sciences, unlike mathematics in which a person can demonstrate clear proofs to such a degree that there can be no further argument. Rather, each person maintains his own personal opinion and supports it with his own evidence.73 What this amounts to is that Lampronti and Briel each held a pastiche of rather opposing views. On the one hand, Briel objected to any suggestion that Jewish law could ever be amended on the basis of new scientific discoveries, while at the same time claiming that the Copernican model was indeed correct.74 On the other hand, Lampronti believed that in matters of Jewish law, there was much to be learned from scientific discoveries about the natural world, but he expressed uncertainty about the truth of the Copernican model. Lampronti’s uncertainty about the truth of Copernicanism should be compared with the anti-Copernican statements of Tuviah Cohen. Both men, contemporaries and graduates of the same university, were not convinced enough to adopt the Copernican position, even though they were open to the methods of science, and Lampronti was even willing to amend Jewish law based on it. Cohen, Hefez, and Lampronti each objected to the Copernican model, although for quite different reasons. For Cohen, the biblical verses raised significant

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problems, and the experimental support was strong enough to support the old Ptolemaic system. Hefez constructed his model to account for the changing times of the tides. He certainly believed that the Earth moved, but in his system the Sun also moved as it orbited the Earth, rather like the model of Tycho Brahe. Lampronti seemed to be open to the possibility that the Copernican model was correct, but he noted that there was opposition to it and so believed the question of which model was correct remained unanswered, at least for the time being. If Cohen’s anti-Copernican position appears to be part of a wider Jewish hesitation toward the new astronomy, we should make one last comparison of his work, this time with the pro-Copernican att itude of Delmedigo and his Sefer Elim, discussed in the last chapter. Both Cohen and Delmedigo had been educated in Padua, where presumably they had similar (although probably not identical) curricula. Indeed, in the fi ft y years that separated the two at Padua, the curriculum was likely to have become more pro-Copernican, which makes Cohen’s rejection of the scientific evidence still more glaring. One explanation is that the two men differed because of different geographic and cultural contexts in which they were raised. Delmedigo grew up in Candia “where Jews through the late sixteenth century maintained some reference to Christian culture.” 75 In contrast, Cohen was raised in Polish Ashkenazi society that was “permeated more deeply by hostile Jewish-Christian relations.” 76 Th is may offer a partial explanation, although the argument could be turned on its head when we remember that Delmedigo spent many of his later years in Poland, while the latter part of Cohen’s life was spent in the Ottoman Empire. Ma’aseh Tuviah completes a trio of Hebrew books that fi rst responded to the new astronomy of Copernicus. In Nehmad Vena’im, David Gans expressed admiration for Copernicus the man, but rejected his heliocentric model. The second work, Delmedigo’s Sefer Elim embraced the Copernican model, and the third, Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviah, moved in the very opposite direction, accusing Copernicus of the devil’s work and rejecting his model as unproven. Each of these authors was deeply familiar with the issues, either as a result of a personal acquaintance with contemporary astronomers or through a university education. Each was no less acquainted with the biblical and talmudic sources that shaped their Jewish thinking. The trio exemplifies how the Jewish reception of Copernican thought was not a linear process, at fi rst disregarding the issue, and then moving to rejection, accommodation, and fi nally an admiration of the new way of thinking. No such incremental process occurred, at least in the fi rst two centuries after Copernicus, as Cohen’s rejection after Delmedigo’s reception demonstrates.77 In fact, the contrasts among the three responses demonstrate how cautious we must be in trying to make generalizations about how Judaism responded to Copernican thought. Despite this, perhaps

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one early generalization is in order: There was no Jewish response to the new astronomy, only the responses of individual Jews. Each of these traditionally educated Jews emphasized what appealed to him about, or repelled him from, the new astronomy, and found a way to work this into his specific worldview. The Jewish reception of Copernicanism was in essence a local reaction, molded by local factors and personalities. Jews elsewhere might therefore be expected to develop their own approaches to the validity of Copernicanism. As we shall see in the next chapter, the Jews of London did just that.

6

David Nieto and Copernicanism in London

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, European Christianity faced a challenge quite different from any it had yet experienced. The scientific theories and philosophical speculations of Newton, Hobbs, and Descartes provided the foundation for an intellectual criticism of traditional Christianity. Despite the unwavering and deeply held Christian beliefs of each of these men, traditional Church beliefs were challenged by their scientific work and speculations. Newton’s mechanics for example, suggested that God operated through fi xed laws. Many saw this materialism (which was part of a developing liberal Anglicanism) as only a step away from atheism. Despite Descartes’s Christianity, his philosophy, in which mind and matter were radically separate, led some (including Newton himself) to view Descartes as undermining traditional belief. The historian Margaret Jacob summarized the diff usion of Newtonian science into Western thought as producing “the fi rst generation of European thinkers for whom faith in the order of the universe proved more satisfying than faith in doctrines, creeds and clerical authority.”1 At this time, English intellectuals were broadly divided between those who saw no need to invoke a divine explanation for the workings of nature, and those who saw the universe as “stamped with the seal of the Divinity.”2 In the former camp were Hobbes, Descartes, and Spinoza, while Boyle and Newton were the de facto spokesmen for a Christianity that incorporated new scientific fi ndings, but rejected the thought that science would lead to a mechanistic view of the universe (although Newton’s work is open to different interpretations). 3 Basil Willey opened his book The Eighteenth Century Background with the comment that although during the seventeenth century, “truth” seemed to be the keyword, in the eighteenth century, that word was now “nature.”4 These two worldviews, one that saw the divine behind everyday occurrences, and one that saw such occurrences solely as natural phenomena (even if the natural phenomena themselves were created by God), were most often described 106

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as being in confl ict with one another, and this confl ict was having an impact on Judaism. To understand it, we begin not in a university, but in a cemetery, found in the East End district of London, a place that was once the center of Jewish life in the city. Behind a row of houses at 253 Mile End Road lies what looks like a large backyard, until you notice that it contains flat grave markers. You have to look twice to be sure this is a cemetery, for there are no upright tombstones. But in fact this is the Old Sephardi Cemetery, the oldest Jewish cemetery in Great Britain. 5 Buried here is David Nieto, who led the Sephardic community in London from his arrival there in 1701 until his death in 1728. Nieto’s original tombstone, long since worn away and replaced with a simple modern one, contained the following epitaph: Sublime theologian, profound sage, Distinguished physician, famous astronomer Sweet poet, elegant preacher, Subtle logician, ingenious physicist Fluent rhetorician, pleasant author Expert in languages, learned in History Since so much is here, enclosed within so little In death a little Earth holds that which is much and little6 Although epitaphs may sometimes exaggerate, this one contains a fair assessment of Nieto’s abilities, for his was one of the most original Jewish minds of his time.7 His books were widely read during the nineteenth century, and although nearly three hundred years have passed since his death, his works remain popular and have often been reprinted and translated.8 Nieto covered a wide range of issues, from philosophy and faith to astronomy and the calendar. Although he was a fierce defender of traditional Judaism, he corresponded with Christian intellectuals and adopted many of their intellectual underpinnings in order to bolster belief in his own faith. It is therefore no surprise that he also weighed in on the increasingly contentious question of the truth of the Copernican model, and his approach was surprising given that he had moved to the homeland of one of the greatest contemporary Copernicans of all, Isaac Newton.

Nieto’s Early Life As would befit an intellectual figure of his stature, scholars have carefully examined David Nieto’s life. He was born in Venice on January 18, 1654, but few details of his family or early life are known, though it has been suggested

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that his parents were Portuguese Marranos who had sought refuge in Italy.9 Having studied medicine at the University of Padua, Nieto moved west to the Italian port town of Livorno (Leghorn), where he served as a religious judge, a preacher, and a physician. He survived three devastating earthquakes there in 1684 and remained in the city for several more years. His son Isaac was born there in 1687, and it was while living in Livorno that Nieto wrote his fi rst work, Pascalogia. Written in Italian, it was a series of five dialogues outlining the astronomy that determined the dates of Passover and Easter. The work was not published until Nieto moved to London and, remarkably for the time, it was dedicated to a religious figure outside of the Jewish community, Cardinal Francesco Maria de’ Medici. Nieto’s fi rst work contained many of the elements that would defi ne his later intellectual interests and style, namely, openness to other religions, an interest in astronomy, and the use of dialogue as a rhetorical device. In November 1703, barely two years after moving to London to become rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, Nieto delivered a sermon that sparked a major controversy. He preached that God’s divine providence worked through nature, and some of those present interpreted this as a defense of pantheism. Th is reaction must be seen in the light of painful historical events: The Sephardic community in Europe was still mindful of the excommunication of Spinoza, who had identified, or was perceived as having identified, God as “nature.” In addition, the Jewish community may have been sensitized by the debate about God as nature that was taking place in the outside world of Christian thought.10 One member of Nieto’s congregation, who had donated generously to the building of the synagogue, made claims of heresy against the rabbi, and although the lay leadership, the Mahamad, had sided with their rabbi, the controversy split the community. In response to these charges of heresy, Nieto published De la Divina Providencia (On Divine Providence), in which he expanded upon and defended the comments that had started the controversy. Th is work did not sett le matters, and the issue was eventually sent to be adjudicated by one of the leading rabbinic figures of the Sephardic Jewry, Hakham Zevi Ashkenazi, who was then living in Altona. In August of 1705, Ashkenazi ruled that Nieto’s remarks were not heretical,11 and the painful confl ict was fi nally concluded. Nieto’s most famous work, and the one that contained his important analysis of Copernicus, is called Matteh Dan. The title is translated as the Rod of Judgment, and the letters of the second word “DaN ” are the initials of the author’s name. The work was fi rst published in Spanish and Hebrew in London in 1714, and its popularity is clear from the fact that it was reprinted over a dozen times during the next two centuries.12 Matteh Dan imitated the form of Yehudah Halevi’s twelft h-century Sefer Kuzari; like Halevi’s book, Nieto’s

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work was written in the form of a dialogue between the king of the Khazars and a wise Haver (friend) and is a defense of the tradition of oral law. The Karaites had long rejected the authority of oral law, and it was against this sect that Nieto had aimed his work: I have called this work Rod of Judgement, The Second Kuzari for it is a powerful rod to smite the heads of the Karaites . . . and to judge them with the whip of truth and logic. Th is will demonstrate for all that our sages did not toil in vain when they explained the words of the living God, in distinction to those who use crooked logic, and did not rely on the truth as received from Moses our Teacher . . . .13 It is not clear, however, that there were a significant number of Karaites living in England at the time, and the term is likely to be a convenient moniker for Jews who rejected traditional Jewish belief, including perhaps Marranos.14 The work is a defense of traditional Judaism, or what would later be termed, with the development of Reform Judaism, Orthodoxy.15 Nieto’s work, published twelve years after he fi rst arrived in London, is not only important as a defense of Judaism, but also as an example of how the emerging science of eighteenth-century England was seen as a field that could be used to support the Jewish faith.16 Nieto was an enthusiastic supporter of the new sciences and believed that a thorough familiarity with them was fundamental to a successful defense of Judaism. Nieto was convinced that the rabbis of the Talmud were experts in geography, medicine, science, and astronomy, and that these sciences should therefore be used in any modern work that argued for the truth of Judaism.17

Copernicus in Matteh Dan Nieto methodically laid the groundwork for his rejection of the Copernican model in the fourth dialogue of Matteh Dan. First, he spent several pages establishing his claim that the rabbis of the Talmud were experts in the sciences—including astronomy and medicine. Nieto then asserted that contemporary scientific thought might be religiously acceptable if, and only if, it did not contradict the laws of God as interpreted by the rabbis. Finally, he rejected the Copernican system because it contradicted a literal interpretation of the Bible: haver: The models of the new astronomers are certainly founded on good reasoning, but we cannot accept their proposition that the Sun does not

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move. For in the book of Joshua (chapter 10) it is written, “Sun, stand still in Givon,” and it states that “the Sun stood still in the middle of the sky, and did not hasten to set for a whole day” This clearly proves that the Sun orbits [the Earth] like the other planets. Even those who hold this [Copernican] model struggle in vain to address this problem. Their solutions have not proven persuasive, and their model must be rejected and removed from the camp of God. king: But pray tell, how do they answer this objection? haver: They claim that the prophet used this language so that the ordinary person could understand it, for [ordinary people] believe that the Sun moves and that the Earth is motionless. king: This answer has no value. Therefore I must agree with you that this model is “abominable and cannot be accepted.”18 The discussion then moved to the question of whether there is life on other planets (Nieto thought this likely but not provable) but later returned to the topic of Copernicus. In this second analysis, Nieto introduced a litt le more caution in his rejection of the heliocentric model. haver: I have already told you my Lord, that whatever relies on experience may easily be learned with a little investigation and study, especially for one familiar with the sciences. Nevertheless, there is evidence to support both [the Copernican and Ptolemaic models], such that it remains impossible to prove which of them is correct. It appears to us that the Sun orbits the stationary Earth, and this is the view of Ptolemy and others. But those who believe that the Sun is stationary at the center of the [orbit of the] planets will state that appearances prove nothing. Consider, by analogy, that when one is sailing on a boat it appears as if the land is moving and the boat stationary, which is most certainly not the case. In the same way, we on Earth are moving and the Sun is stationary, yet it appears as if the Sun is moving and the Earth is stationary. . . . However we cannot believe such a thing, for it contradicts the book of Joshua . . . as we have already proved. . . . But even if we could believe what is in our hearts about this matter, we would be faced with a profound question as to which opinion may be correct, and there is no way to determine which way to proceed. . . . For just as a person on land sees that the land is stationary and the ship is sailing away, which is the truth, so it may be that we perceive the Earth as stationary and the Sun moving, and this is indeed the truth! king: Either opinion may be correct. I see that we remain completely undecided, as you have said, and there is no way to determine which of the two is correct.19

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In this second analysis, Nieto, speaking through the Haver, claimed that there was no way to adjudicate the question. Were it not for the verse in the Book of Joshua that teaches that the Sun moves, the correct model of the solar system would remain in doubt. In the fi ft h dialogue, the discussion returns to the structure of the universe. Copernicus is stated to have proven that the model of the sages is correct, and that the sphere of the heavens is fi xed and the sphere of the stars revolves.20 The king of the Khazars is then asked which astronomical model appears correct. king: In my opinion, the models of Ptolemy and Copernicus appear more accurate than that of the sages; and if I had to pick just one I would choose the Copernican model . . . since the Copernican model does away with [epicycles and eccentricities] I prefer it, other than that it makes the Sun motionless, [which must be rejected] for the reasons stated earlier.21 Th is then is the sum of David Nieto’s writings on the Copernican model, and it leaves the reader somewhat perplexed as to what he really believed. If the fi rst part of the fourth dialogue were all he had written, it would be reasonable to conclude that Nieto rejected Copernicanism without reservation. Yet later in the same dialogue, he offers a more nuanced and subtle analysis of the problem, introducing the notion of relative motion and admitt ing (through the persona of the Haver) that the truth (or rather the Truth) cannot be determined.22 It takes litt le effort to see Nieto as being sympathetic to the Copernican model, even if he ultimately rejects it because of a need to read the Bible literally. Interestingly, Nieto even offered a way in which the biblical text might be understood as being compatible with the new astronomy, by suggesting that the Bible used language that would be readily understood even by the unlearned.23 As a result, it described the Sun as moving because this is what appeared to be the case, even if, in reality, it was the Earth that was moving. Nieto chose to follow the same rejectionist path already taken by Tuviah Cohen that we examined in the previous chapter. Both men graduated as physicians from the University of Padua and, although there is no record of any interaction between them, it is likely that they attended similar seminars. Both used rather fi rm language: Cohen called Copernicus the “First born of Satan,” and Nieto described the system as “an abomination.” However, although Cohen had raised several “scientific” objections to Copernicanism (including the arguments about a lack of parallax and the paths of cannonballs), not one of these was used by Nieto to substantiate his rejection of the new astronomy.

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Nieto in Context David Nieto’s rejection of Copernicus was not as forceful as some historians have described, but it was a rejection nevertheless. Nieto, however, was at least willing to discuss the new astronomy and address some of its implications. David Meldola, born in the same year that Nieto published Matt eh Dan, provides an example in which, despite exposure to the discoveries of Galileo, some rabbis chose to avoid discussion of the new astronomy altogether. David Meldola was born into a famous Spanish family in 1714 in Leghorn. His family could trace its roots directly back to the thirteenth century, and each generation had produced a number of rabbis of distinction.24 David was the fourth child born to his father Raphael Meldola, who served as chief rabbi of the town of Pisa, and who authored several volumes of ethical works and responsa.25 David traveled with his father and eventually sett led in Amsterdam, where in 1740, he published Mo’ed David (The Seasons of David), a book on the calendar, and later, Divrei David (The Words of David), a volume of his responsa.26 The main purpose of M’oed David was to explain and outline the rules of the construction of the Jewish calendar, but in addition to this, the work contains some remarks on general astronomy. From the work, it is clear that David Meldola was familiar with the discoveries of Galileo: The fi rst planet is called Shabbetai [Saturn], and it has a cold nature. . . . It influences dark skinned people, and those who are thin or given to worry. . . . It orbits [the Earth] every thirty years, and is the largest of all the planets. There are two small stars that are close to it and are called “the guardians of Saturn”; they can be seen through a telescope or microscope [sic], which is a tube made to see the numerous stars in comfort and contains smooth glass inside it . . . . Jupiter orbits every twelve years and lies below Saturn [i.e., closer to the Earth] . . . and four small stars orbit it. . . .27 Galileo published his discovery of the four satellites of Jupiter in Sidereus Nuncius (The Sidereal Messenger) in 1610. Whether Meldola had ever read Galileo in the original is not known. There can be no question, though, that Meldola knew the implications of the discoveries, which although they did not prove that Copernicus was correct, lent a great deal of corroborative evidence to the Copernican model. 28 Galileo noted that Venus seemed to change shape (see figure 6.1), just as the Moon did, sometimes appearing almost (but never quite) full, sometimes as a semi-circle, and at other times as sickle-shaped.

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Figure 6.1 The phases of Venus.

It was not possible to explain these phases using the old Ptolemaic model, in which Venus could never be seen as anything other than a thin crescent of light that was always the same size. In contrast, the Copernican model explains these fi ndings perfectly. As Venus orbited the Sun, it moved farther from the Earth, and so the size of its image would grow smaller. As it moved to a point farthest from the Earth, its face would be increasingly illuminated by the Sun, which was between it and the Earth. In the Copernican model, the entire face of Venus would never be seen because this would only be observable at a point directly behind the Sun. The almost-full circular face of Venus, however, would be seen just before or after Venus crossed behind the Sun; the size of the planet would vary as its orbit brought it closer to or farther away from the Earth (see figure 6.2). The observed phases of Venus were thus fully explained as resulting from Venus orbiting the Sun. Although this did not prove Copernicus correct, it was among the most powerful supporting evidence for the heliocentric theory.29 In his description of the planets, Meldola admitted that from all appearances, it would seem that Venus and Mercury actually orbit the Sun, as the Copernican model suggested: Venus receives its light from the Sun, and its appearance changes [depending on position]. It sometimes appears large and complete, and at other times small and incomplete, depending on the angle of the Sun, as occurs with [our own] Moon . . . . Around and around it goes, as if the Sun were the center of its orbit . . . . Mercury . . . also appears to orbit the Sun . . . . 30 Despite the suggestion that some of the planets appear to orbit the Sun, Meldola avoided any mention of the Copernican model. He went even further and outlined the Ptolemaic model in his description of the orbits of the planets,

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Sun 4

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Figure 6.2 The phases of Venus in the Ptolemaic (a) and Copernican (b) systems.

although this model is clearly not compatible with his suggestion that Mercury and Venus might have heliocentric orbits. It is almost as if Meldola could not make up his mind about which model is correct. On the one hand, he noted that planets have satellites that orbit them, so clearly the Earth is not the center of orbit for all the heavenly bodies. Moreover, at least two of the planets (Venus and Mercury) appear to orbit the Sun itself. On the other hand, Meldola cited the Ptolemaic model as a description of the universe. But why was Meldola so reluctant to mention—let alone fully embrace—the new astronomy? One intriguing explanation is that Meldola had witnessed what happens when a rabbi publishes books that engender controversy. As a result, he did not want to question the traditional model of the universe. Although the dispute that he witnessed involved an arcane and largely inconsequential area of Jewish law, it resulted in books being condemned and burned. David Meldola is likely to have learned from this episode, which he observed fi rsthand, the need to avoid tackling areas in which religious controversy might lead to similarly extreme results. The dispute centered on the custom among Sephardic Jews of reading a special, additional Torah portion on the Sabbath after a wedding; the groom would be called to the Torah as the portion was chanted, but the precise status of this reading was not clear. Should it count as one of the standard seven portions that are read each week on the Sabbath, or should it be considered an additional, eighth reading? Th is turned out to be a surprisingly contentious question among the Italian rabbis of the eighteenth century. In 1735 in Pisa, Rabbi Eliezer Supino ruled that the groom should be called up as one of the

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standard seven to read from the Torah, but this position was opposed by David ben Abraham Meldola and his cousin Rabbi Rafael Meldola, father of our David Meldola who authored the largely Ptolemaic Mo’ed David and who was then serving as rabbi in Bayonne in Southern France. The Meldolas argued that the weekly Torah portion would be read as usual in seven parts, and that the groom would then be called to read as an eighth person. The dispute continued for almost a decade and involved the rabbinic leaders of several other communities, including Amsterdam, Tunis, and Algeria. In 1738, Supino published his reasoning in a small pamphlet called Kuntres Al Inyan Shabbat Hahatunnah (A Treatise Concerning the Sabbath Wedding ,) but although it was printed in Amsterdam, the work was never released for sale to the public. The Meldolas heard of the existence of the pamphlet and after exerting pressure on the publisher, seized and burned all but a single copy, which was saved from destruction and is now shelved in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Jerusalem. 31 There can be no doubt that David Meldola was intimately familiar with the dispute that involved his father and his father’s cousin, and that he had witnessed the extent to which members of his family had gone to destroy a work of scholarship with which they disagreed. 32 Th is opposition of the Meldolas is all the more striking because the work contained nothing that could have been considered heretical, but simply a legal position that was under debate. David Meldola was just twenty-one years old at the time of the incident that began the whole affair, and it was he who was sent by his father Raphael to locate and destroy the pamphlet by Supino. Th is early involvement at an impressionable age may explain why David Meldola remained obsessed with the affair: Seventeen years after the original episode (and after the deaths of Supino and both Rabbis Meldola), David Meldola published a book of responsa that contained no fewer than eighteen chapters over sixty-one pages describing the affair and its resolution. 33 It is most likely then that this episode framed the way in which David Meldola approached the subject of publishing controversial material. Mo’ed David, Meldola’s small work on astronomy and the calendar, was published during the height of the struggle with Supino, and given this atmosphere, Meldola might have wanted to avoid any controversy that writing about the new astronomy would certainly engender. 34 As the writings of both Nieto and Meldola demonstrate, the Copernican model remained anathema for Jewish thinkers in the fi rst half of the eighteenth century. There were other Jewish scholars who wrote on astronomy at the time and who similarly ignored the Copernican argument or adopted the traditional Ptolemaic position. 35 The Lithuanian rabbinic scholar Jonathan ben Joseph of Ruznay wrote a commentary on sections concerning astronomy from Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, which he published in Frankfurt in

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1720 in a work called Yeshuah Beyisrael. 36 Despite Jonathan’s secular knowledge and familiarity with Sefer Elim (which was quietly pro-Copernican), his astronomy was proudly geocentric, and no mention was even made of any competing theories. 37 Th is was likely the result of Jonathan’s near complete isolation from face-to-face contact with those who could actually teach him about astronomy, whether Jew or Gentile. One historian noted that as a result, Jonathan’s work was the work “of a lone maverick or zealot, not the outgrowth of a living intellectual tradition.”38 Rather than seeing this as the weakness that it was, Jonathan was proud of his isolation, declaring, “I have no teachers or colleagues in this glorious science. I know only that which I understood from the books given to me by God.”39

Israel of Zamosc Another eighteenth-century scholar who was surprisingly silent about Copernicus was Israel Halevi of Zamosc (c. 1700–1771). Israel is a famous figure in the history of the Haskalah movement, the movement of “enlightened” Jews who sought out greater secular knowledge and a wider role in the non-Jewish world in the early eighteenth century.40 He wrote many works to explain talmudic concepts in the light of contemporary science and was critical of his fellow rabbinic scholars whose rejection of science he considered to be foolish. Israel’s beliefs were the source of much antipathy toward him from the larger Jewish community and after having been forced to leave Zamosc, he eventually reached Berlin, where he taught the young Moses Mendelssohn. It was not, however, his scientific positions per se that caused the antagonism toward him, but rather his belief that science was a legitimate source of knowledge and, as such, it perhaps trumped traditional halakhic systems.41 Israel appears to have been self-taught in science and astronomy and while in his adopted town of Zamosc in southeastern Poland, he wrote four books that touched upon various aspects of these subjects.42 His most well-known work was Nezah Yisrael (The Eternity of Israel), which was published in 1741.43 It was a commentary on passages in the Talmud that contained astronomical or scientific material and was a radical book for its time because it treated science as a superior source of knowledge with perhaps a greater importance than that of standard Hebrew texts or prior halakhic authorities.44 He also wrote Arubbot Hashamayim (The Windows of Heaven), a work on astronomy that was never published, and two commentaries on previously published astronomical works, Yesod Olam (from the 1320s) and Sefer Elim (published in 1629).45 Despite his strong belief in the scientific method, Israel made no mention of the Copernican model in any of these works. He did cite Copernicus’s

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calculation of the length of the lunar month, and he would have been aware of the Copernican model from his reading of Sefer Elim, which he frequently referenced.46 Yet Israel neither defended nor criticized the heliocentric system in these works and chose instead simply to ignore it.47 However, Copernicus is mentioned and briefly examined in another of Israel’s works, a commentary on Ruah Hen (The Spirit of Grace), which was published in Jessnitz in 1744. Ruah Hen was a medieval philosophical dictionary ascribed to Judah Ibn Tibbon, and Israel wrote a commentary that not only explained the book’s philosophical concepts, but also introduced the reader to modern scientific discoveries, such as the air pump.48 Whether the Earth is simply one of the planets that orbits the fi xed Sun, which is what Copernicus thinks, or whether the Earth is immobile, and the Sun and the stars themselves move up and around, as is the opinion of Tycho Brahe, cannot be determined through deduction and thought. While it is the case that the Copernican view is closest to the one held by almost all of today’s astronomers, anyone who sniffs even a whiff of this idea will be reviled by it and realize that it is opposed to the views of the Torah and the words of the sages and is therefore a heretical notion. It is therefore appropriate to choose the opinion of Tycho Brahe. And I will explain all this in my work Arubbot Hashamyim in a chapter on the new heavens, where I intend to explain the new astronomy with all its proofs and claims . . . and there I will show how the words of the sages, who are wondrous in our eyes, enlighten this matter, and how the stories [aggadah] and midrash which appear strange to us not only accords with modern ideas, but are used by Gentile scholars to support their own beliefs. . . .49 For reasons that are not known, Israel never wrote the promised exposition of the new astronomy and left only this short piece to explain the Copernican model and why he found it unpersuasive. It leaves the reader unimpressed, as Israel offered no reason as to why it would be heretical. Moreover, if the model was indeed accepted by most contemporary astronomers, it was out of character for Israel to dismiss the idea. He had, after all, criticized his rabbinic contemporaries for their dismissive att itudes toward science and had called their approach “foolish.” He had even taken on the great medieval commentator Rashi for his suggestion that the sages believed the Earth was flat, and so he was not one to shy away from scientific controversy or discoveries about the natural world made after the close of the Talmud. 50 The most likely explanation is that Israel found the evidence for the Copernican model unpersuasive, and although he was prepared to reinterpret talmudic statements in

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light of modern science, he was not convinced that in this case such a reinterpretation was needed. In addition, Israel felt that the sages had a special knowledge of astronomy: “Heaven forbid that we say the sages were ignorant of astronomy and knew nothing of it!”51 Th is approach formed one of his guiding principles: I set myself the aim of explaining all the statements in the Talmud bearing on astronomy according to my own understanding, which confl icts with Rashi, but which follows the deep fundamentals of the astronomy accepted at present in the world. [I do so] in order that they [the astronomical statements] conform to the statements of the sages. Indeed, the statements of astronomy that are well known among us now are almost all grounded in strong mathematical proofs that no one can possibly reject. 52 Israel likely rejected the Copernican system not because it was new or because it challenged an understanding of biblical verses, but because he preferred the system of Tycho Brahe. We are never given the reasons for this preference, but since Tycho’s system allowed for the traditional geocentric view to remain unchallenged, this may have been enough for Israel to adopt it. The Copernican system was also ignored by Barukh Schick of Shklov, another Eastern European rabbi who rose to some fame. 53 Schick (1744–1807) was born into a famous rabbinic family in Belorussia and was appointed as judge (dayyan) on the rabbinic court in the large Jewish town of Minsk. 54 He became interested in science and read voraciously, even teaching himself Latin, but around 1762, he suffered a setback when his library was lost in a fi re. In spite of this, he wrote his fi rst work called Tiferet Adam (The Beauty of Man), a study of human anatomy, possibly with the help of Lithuanian medical students who had studied at Padua. 55 He also wrote a work on astronomy called Amudei Hashamayim (The Pillars of Heaven) and later a translation of Euclid and an introduction to the mathematics needed to study Maimonides’ astronomy. 56 Despite his efforts at self-teaching, Schick’s science was far from up to date. He completely ignored Harvey’s discovery about blood circulation and instead composed his anatomy book based on the principles of Galen, relying in addition on what he thought were the anatomical sections of the Zohar. 57 His astronomy fared no better. He described a Ptolemaic cosmology with a stationary Earth and showed absolutely no awareness of Copernicus or his model; the heliocentric system was simply absent. David Fishman, a historian of the period, suggested that Schick, living in Shklov and Minsk, was “too remote from the [eighteenth] century centers of science for the Harveyian and Copernican revolutions to have reached him via the stray manuscripts

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which were at his disposal.”58 Schick certainly lived farther east than any of the other rabbis whose works we have reviewed, but it is not clear whether this fact indeed accounts for Schick’s unawareness of the Copernican model or whether, despite his interest in astronomy, the heliocentric model was simply too great a change for Schick to contemplate.

London and the Copernican Question, Again Although David Nieto died in 1738, toward the end of the eighteenth century, the Copernican question came to the attention of two rabbis, and their responses show that Nieto’s approach was not the last word on the subject from the small Jewish community of London. The noted historian David Ruderman described Mordekhai Gumpel Schnaber Levison as “perhaps the most colorful Jewish intellectual of his times,” and even a cursory look at Levison’s interests would verify this accolade. 59 Levison wrote over a dozen books in Hebrew, English, French, and German, on subjects from dogma and Hebrew grammar to sore throats, astronomy, and human sexuality. He was born in Berlin around 1740 and sometime before 1771 he moved to London, where he became a physician. After a brief period in Stockholm, where he held the title of professor of medicine, he moved to Hamburg and continued to write and practice as a physician until his death in 1797. Levison should be counted among the Jews of London because he spent time there training in medicine and because that was where he chose to publish his pro-Copernican book. Th is book, which was perhaps his most well known, was titled Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhmah (Essay on Torah and Science) and was published in London in 1771. It was a digest of contemporary science, and the topics it covered included astronomy, Newtonian physics, and inventions such as the air pump.60 Soon after the publication of this book, Levison was identified by a London Jew as having been accused of murdering his landlord in Breslau and serving time in prison there while the crime was investigated. To make matters worse, the motive for the murder was an alleged affair between Levison and the wife of the victim. As a result of this revelation, Levison was expelled from the Duke’s Place Synagogue in London, but he was determined to clear his name. In 1775, he published a four-page rebuttal of the charges; he did not deny that he had indeed been a suspect in the case but stated that all of the boarders in the house where the murder took place had been questioned. In addition, he reprinted a declaration of his innocence that had been signed by the leading rabbis in Berlin. The controversy heated up again when a counter-essay was published later in the same year by an anonymous accuser who echoed the claim that

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Levison had a sexual affair with his landlord’s wife. Moreover, Levison was described as a dangerous freethinker who, together with others, was plott ing to “abandon, shatter, destroy and forfeit the religion of our holy Torah.”61 The historian Shmuel Feiner has concluded that, although the accusations against Levison were greatly exaggerated, they did reflect the image that Levison had likely projected at the time.62 There is no doubt that Levison’s Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhmah did contain some quite revolutionary ideas that may have felt threatening to the traditional Jewish community of London. Of these, two stand out: The fi rst was that religion and science were two separate concerns and that science could, or rather should, be studied in order develop a mature religious outlook. The second idea was that the Copernican model required no more debate or review of any supporting evidence. It was, quite simply, the only correct model of the solar system. Levison’s separation of religious and scientific knowledge was based on the primacy of the intellect. For him, there was no role for the subjugation of the intellect to religious doctrine, and, as he put it, “the Torah cannot stand without the support of the intellect.”63 The original role of the Torah had been to wean the Jews away from the worship of false gods and a belief in wrong ideas. Once this had been accomplished, “they could turn their minds away from that which the intellect does not support, and come to recognize their creator though logical proofs.”64 Consequently, there could be no problem with any study of knowledge that lay outside of the Torah, although this should only be undertaken once a person “has fi lled his belly with the correct qualities, namely logical thoughts, which can be obtained through the study of the Talmud.”65 However, as a result of the hardships of exile, Levison felt that both commonsense and intellectual prowess had been lost in those who studied the Talmud, and “the Torah and Talmud has fallen into the clutches of men without sense.”66 These men now studied the Talmud in a superficial and even “idiotic” way, which in turn had a disastrous effect on the fresh minds of students. Mindful of the effect of the Haskalah att racting men away from the traditional world of Jewish learning in the yeshivah, Levison suggested that if this failing were to continue, many minds would be att racted to secular studies and books containing “clear proofs” and “honest ideas.”67 “I address these remarks to the youth of Israel, like me,” continued Levison, “and I will demonstrate the strength of all knowledge. For they should know that the majority of secular wisdom (aside from metaphysics) has no bearing at all on even a single foundation of our faith. None of them can contradict the Torah and our faith.”68 Having demonstrated that, although secular and religious studies were separate endeavors, they could never contradict one another, Levison’s discussion of the structure of the solar system came as no surprise. He began with a brief description of the Ptolemaic system and noted that it had caused “a great

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deal of confusion,” requiring its adherents to come up with all kinds of new explanations whenever a new astronomical phenomenon was observed. “As a result of this, through direct observation and other means, later astronomers described a new model, and the fi rst among these was the great astronomer Copernicus.”69 With this brief comment, Levison declared that the truth of the Copernican model had been decided, and here we have reached a notable place in our journey. Levison’s assumption of the Copernican model as a given is the fi rst of its kind in Hebrew literature. Until then, authors had felt it necessary to support (or challenge) the model using real or imagined experiments, as well as an array of biblical quotes. Not so Levison, who simply noted that all astronomers since Copernicus, including Isaac Newton, had accepted the Copernican model; this claim was, of course, far from being historically accurate. Although a large majority of astronomers contemporary with Levison would have agreed with his acceptance of the Copernican system, it was not always presented with such single mindedness. For example, in a long entry on astronomy in the American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica published in Philadelphia in 1798 (and the fi rst encyclopedia printed in the United States), several paragraphs were dedicated to answering objections to the Copernican model.70 Th is included explaining why the Earth’s rapid motion was not felt and addressing the old question of why cannonballs don’t have a longer range when shot in one direction rather than another. For the editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published seventeen years after Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhma, it was still important to provide evidence that supported the Copernican model. Almost as an aside, Levison noted that, although there were biblical verses that suggest that the Sun indeed moves, they were not to be taken literally, “for the Torah speaks using common language.” 71 But this, and only this, was all that he provided to support a belief in the Copernican system. Acting on his principle that scientific discoveries could not contradict religious beliefs, Levison claimed that the talmudic dispute in which the Jews acknowledged that the Gentile model of the universe was correct was in fact prematurely conceded.72 In point of fact, modern science had concluded that the Jewish model in which the galgal is fi xed and the mazzalot revolve was the correct one. As we have already noted, the terms used in that dispute are unclear, and this worked to Levison’s advantage. He claimed that the term galgal, which was most often translated as sphere, referred instead to the ether, the theoretical substance that fi lled the universe and carried light, although he did not demonstrate how this proved that the Jewish sages were in fact correct. Levison was not the only Jew with an English connection who addressed the Copernican question. Eliakim Hart (1756–1814) was a native-born English Jew who, like Levison, wrote about the science of his day.73 He appears to have

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been ordained as a rabbi in Germany but worked as a jeweler and used the Anglicized name Jacob in his business dealings. Hart had been very influenced by Joseph Delmedigo, the student of Galileo and pro-Copernican author of the Sefer Elim. We know this because Hart wrote a précis of Delmedigo’s kabbalistic work Novelot Hokhmah, and he would certainly have been familiar with the pro-Copernican position that Delmedigo adopted. Hart planned to publish a ten-part work called Asarah Ma’amarot (Ten Essays) but managed to produce only five, of which one was his explication of Delmedigo. The most well-known and widely read work was Milhamot Adonai (The Wars of the Lord) published in London in 1794.74 The book is only thirty-three pages long but covered four ideas that Hart felt were a danger to traditional Jewish belief, as well as a criticism of Descartes and Newton. The fi rst belief was that the world had existed for longer than the time ascribed by traditional Jewish teaching, although he digressed from this subject to discuss pagan practices from India to China.75 Hart’s second target was Greek philosophy in general and Aristotelian thought in particular; Hart’s objection was that experimental science had demonstrated that many Aristotelian concepts and teachings were wrong.76 It was in this context that Hart introduced the new astronomy: Although they [the Greeks] thought that they knew the orders and paths of the stars and constellations, the new astronomers such as Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and his followers have disproved all of their notions. [The new astronomers] invented new and amazing instruments, specifically the telescope, which was used to show that Jupiter and Saturn have four and seven moons respectively that orbit each planet, and that each planet turns on its axis. They also demonstrated that the comets are truly stars that orbit the Sun and appear when they approach us once every seventy years, or every one hundred years or every one hundred and fi ft y years; each comet has its own length of orbit, which are known to contemporary astronomers. There are also other discoveries that earlier astronomers could not have even imagined. Th is clearly demonstrates that [the Greeks] knew nothing of the heavens and made similar errors of judgment regarding the Earth.77 Next, Hart wrote against Descartes, or more accurately Descartes’s students, whose teachings Hart found objectionable on a number of grounds.78 Hart’s fi nal targets were the students of Isaac Newton, who took Newton’s work and used it to reject the accounts of creation in the Torah.79 Hart returned to the subject of astronomy in the last three chapters, which explained the Copernican model in greater detail. Like Levison, Hart had to account for the Biblical verses that suggest the Sun’s movement, and he did this by invoking

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the same exegetical principle as Levison, namely that “the Torah speaks in the language of man.”80 Hart focused on the famous verse in Joshua in which the Sun is commanded to stand still; he suggested a new reading and offered a novel support for it by looking at the cantillation notes on each word that indicate how it was to be chanted aloud. The verse reads “ . . . and he [Joshua] said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand still upon Givon . . . ” but when phrased with attention to the cantillation, Hart read the verse in a slightly different way: “and he [Joshua] said, in the sight of Israel the Sun will stand still upon Givon,” that is to say, the Sun will appear as if it is standing still when viewed by Israel.81 “In reality” concluded Hart, “what looked to Israel as if the Sun were motionless really happened because the Earth stood still.”82 Hart’s interest in the promotion of the heliocentric model continued after the publication of Milhamot Adonai. We know this because of the relationship Hart had with Pinchas Hurwitz, the author of Sefer Haberit, a work that we review in detail in the next chapter. Hurwitz visited Hart in London and had mentioned him in the fi rst edition of Sefer Haberit, published in 1797, four years after Hart’s book.83 Hart and Hurwitz had corresponded, and Hurwitz included a letter from Hart that defended the Copernican model in the second edition of Sefer Haberit, published in 1807. Th is seems to be the fi rst example of a dialogue between a rabbinic supporter of Copernicus and a rabbinic geocentrist. There were certainly examples of fictional dialogues between the two camps. In Jewish literature, one need look no further back than to David Nieto’s Mattah Dan, and of course there was Galileo’s Dialogue on the Two World Systems, which used the artifice of dialogue to explain the Copernican model and which resulted in Galileo being tried by the Church. Still, the fact that Hart in London and Hurwitz in Poland corresponded about which model was correct, and that Hurwitz updated the later editions of his book to reflect this dialogue, reveals the importance of the issue in the early years of the nineteenth century. Despite Galileo’s discoveries that lent further support to the Copernican model, Jewish scholars of the fi rst part of the eighteenth century were not ready to replace the traditional Jewish view that had the Earth at the center of the universe. For Nieto, a literal reading of one biblical verse was all that was needed to counter the Copernican model, and for Meldola and Jonathan of Ruznay, discussion of the model was best avoided altogether. Even Israel of Zamosc, a scholar who felt that the Talmud needed to be understood in the light of science, was not prepared to overturn the old Ptolemaic system. But what remains striking in these rejections is the admission of parts of the Copernican model. Nieto admitted that there was a great deal of evidence to support the new astronomy, but that it was simply not possible to determine which model was correct. As a result, a biblical verse in which the Sun seems to have moved

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was all that could be used to decide the question, in a sort of tie-breaking decision. Meldola’s admission that Mercury and Venus seemed to orbit the Sun was never expanded upon in his work, and the traditional Ptolemaic universe remained the operative model. Israel of Zamosc also understood that the new astronomy was widely accepted among Gentile astronomers. In the latter part of the century in London, Hart and Levison’s unconditional Copernicanism was the end of a process in which the heliocentric model slowly but incrementally crept into the Jewish lexicon. To fully understand that process, though, requires a review of how the Jews of the European continent addressed the Copernican question. That review occupies the next two chapters and begins with an examination of two influential Hebrew encyclopedias.

7

The Jewish Encyclopedias

Jews have been writing encyclopedias for almost nine hundred years. The earliest was an encyclopedia of natural science written by Abraham bar Hiyyah of Barcelona sometime in the fi rst quarter of the twelft h century.1 Others followed, like Gershon ben Solomon’s Sha’ar Hashamayim (The Gate of Heaven, c. 1280), Moses of Rieti’s Mikdash Me’at (The Small Sanctuary) composed at the end of the fi fteenth century, and Abraham Yagel’s Bet Ya’ar Halevanon (The House of the Forest of Lebanon) written in the late sixteenth century.2 Tuviah Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviah published in 1708 was the fi rst Jewish encyclopedia that fi rmly rejected the Copernican model. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, two other encyclopedias written in Hebrew appeared in Europe, and each contained an analysis of the Copernican model. One was written as an introductory textbook for schoolchildren—although it reached a far wider audience; the other was an attempt to categorize and explain natural phenomena and geography, and it remains in print to this day.

Reshit Limmudim The textbook Reshit Limmudim (The Beginning of Studies) was written by Barukh Lindau, of whom we know litt le. He was born in Hannover in 1758 and moved to Berlin, where he rose through the ranks of the Haskalah movement. He became one of six advisory members of The Society for the Promotion of Goodness and Justice, founded in 1787 to spread the message of the Jewish enlightenment, and he later participated in the translation of several haftorot into German. 3 In 1788, Lindau published his encyclopedic work that covered astronomy, botany, the animal kingdom, and geography. It is therefore not surprising that it addressed the Copernican model of the solar system, but the book had a very different approach to this topic than has been seen so far. The story of the book’s publication reveals a great deal about the intellectual

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climate in which the author lived and tells us not only about the author’s views of astronomy, but also about those of an entire circle of Jews living in Berlin. Reshit Limmudim had a new intended audience, and it also underwent an unusual pre-publication review, quite unlike any other Hebrew book that had mentioned Copernicus. It was written not as a book for adults, but as a textbook for children who were studying natural sciences in the new, modern Jewish schools of the late eighteenth century. These schools had been founded in Berlin and Frankfurt to replace the traditional yeshivah education (and their exclusive study of traditional Jewish texts) by the maskilim, members of the Jewish Enlightenment movement. In Berlin, the Juedische Freischule (Jewish Free School) was founded in 1778, and it soon became apparent that there was a shortage of appropriate books for the students to study. Consequently, the Berlin maskilim set up a printing house that would provide not only the much-needed textbooks, but also a revenue stream to support the philanthropic mission of the school.4 As was the law, all printing houses in Berlin required a license, and the Freishcule was no exception. In order to prevent the new printing house from competing with those already existing, Fredrick II was only willing to grant a license if the Freischule limited itself to printing Hebrew books, and the Freischule agreed not to publish in any language other than Hebrew or the “Oriental languages.” For this reason, the new Jewish printing house was called Die Orientalische Buchdruckerie (The Eastern Book Press) and could not publish anything in German. In this way, the fi rst Jewish printing house in history dedicated to educating Jews with a modern curriculum was created. Reshit Limmudim also differed from previous Hebrew texts because it was subjected to a form of review to ensure scientific accuracy. Th is was a novel process, for in the three centuries since the invention of the printing press, there had never been what we might recognize today as peer review prior to the publication of a Hebrew book. A book would be printed if the author had the funds or the publisher felt there was likely to be a profit from sales. The chances of a large market were greatly increased if a well-known rabbinic authority added his approbation, but this was still far from any formal peer review. 5 The committee that ran the Freischule published only works that had met its standards and, in so doing, established for fi rst time a form of peer review for Hebrew books. Th is policy allowed for few exceptions; even the director of the printing house, Isaac Satanow, had to submit his manuscripts for review and was disappointed when several were rejected.6 The Freischule required that all their books be positively reviewed by at least three outside experts: Every book, new, old, or translated . . . will only be printed after it has been examined by scholars well-versed in all aspects of the science

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about which the book is written . . . it will be examined by maskilim who have an understanding of the science referred to on the front pages of the book, and the recommendation will be made by three experts to the satisfaction of the leaders of the group who will authorize the printing of the book and provide the necessary funds.7 Once it passed the peer-review requirements, Lindau published Reshit Limmudim in Berlin. The book became the “most famous, up-to-date book on the Hebrew bookshelf at the end of the eighteenth century,”8 even though, as we mentioned, its primary audience was children.9 That this popular textbook had been scientifically reviewed suggests that its deeply pro-Copernican position was not just the position of the author, but also that of many other Berlin maskilim of the time. Lindau relied very heavily on a popular contemporary German textbook for children, from which he copied large sections.10 He began his textbook by explaining that although the Sun appears to move through the sky, in reality this is not the case. “We now know that the Sun appears to the other planets as a point that is fi xed, at the center of a circle. Its only movement is about its center, around which it revolves every twenty-two days. . . . Nevertheless the Sun appears to move through the sky every day as if it is orbiting the Earth. . . . ”11 It would be a mistake to dismiss Lindau’s work as an Enlightenment-era scientific textbook in Hebrew, devoid of any religious content. Although it was written to educate both schoolchildren and their teachers, it did so in the context of a deeply religious outlook. Reshit Limmudim is fi lled with references to God’s benevolent love and the truths of Judaism. Here, for example, is how Lindau introduces the reader to his chapter on the Earth: “The planet on which we live is called Earth. As a result of the Creator’s providence and abundant love for his creation he has caused plants to grow and provide food for all sorts of animals. . . . ”12 Lindau also attested to the truths of the Bible; in a passage on sharks, he suggests that it may have been this animal that had swallowed Jonah “as God commanded.”13 There is no doubt that while it was the product of the Enlightenment, Reshit Limmudim reflects the worldview of a deeply religious Jew. Although Lindau suggested scientific supports for the heliocentric theory, his Copernicanism was also based on his belief in the existence of a wise God: From the way that it looks, the Sun, the Moon and all the heavenly bodies orbit the Earth once every twenty-four hours. However if we think deeply about this, the vast distances between the Earth and these other bodies would require them to orbit unimaginably huge distances in a short period of time each day. Th is is not the way that

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our God, who is wise and capable of everything, would work: would he have huge planets orbit the Earth that is but a tiny speck when compared to their vast size? From this we must conclude that this imagined movement is an illusion. In reality the Earth turns about its axis once every twentyfour hours. (And there are actually many more proofs from the science of engineering that demonstrate the Earth’s movement, but this is not the place to repeat them all.)14 Lindau’s textbook was a fi rst for Jewish children, and he also began a publishing enterprise that would be repeated as other teachers wrote their own textbooks. One such teacher was Moses Bock (1775–1816), who worked as a high-school principal in Berlin and published his own textbooks for children in Hebrew, German, and French.15 His Hebrew language textbook Moda’ah Leyaldei Benei Yisrael (An Announcement for the Children of the House of Israel) was published in 1812, and although it was printed by the same publishing house that had published Reshit Limmudim, it approached the question of the Earth’s movement in a more circumscribed fashion. Rather than describe any of the proofs supporting the existence of the heliocentric system, Bock’s Hebrew textbook simply stated that “[t]he Sun orbits the Earth (as would appear to us) and as it orbits it divides the Earth into four directions. . . . ” His German language textbook (Israelitischer Kinderfreund) omitted any reference to the movement of either the Sun or the Earth in the section on the Earth, but introduced it later in a discussion of the calculation of time: Time calculation is determined mainly by the fictitious movement of the Sun and the Moon. It looks as if the Sun revolves around the Earth once every twenty-four hours, and this movement determines the duration of the day as whole. Actually, however, it is the movement of the Earth around its central point that yields the differences between day and night.16 Both Lindau and Brock believed that knowledge of the heliocentric system was an essential part of a Jewish child’s education, although for the sake of brevity, neither detailed any of the underlying astronomical supports for the model.

The Reception of Reshit Limmudim In 1789, Hame’assef, the fi rst journal of the Haskalah, reviewed Reshit Limmudim and lamented the lack of any science textbooks until Lindau’s book17:

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For this we must thank the author of this book with all our heart, for his toil for the benefit of our children; for he has gathered together the introductions for the teaching of natural science from contemporary sources. He has structured them in a logical way and used clear and easy language. . . . 18 The anonymous author of the book review then turned to the content of the work and, in his fi rst substantive comment, noted how the book tackled a lingering question for those who accepted the Copernican model, namely why we do not feel the Earth’s movement.19 Lindau had written only a few lines on this: It should not surprise you to question why we do not feel any movement as the Earth orbits. For as you know when you sit in a boat, it appears to you as if the boat is stationary, and it is as if the water or the riverbank or the trees are moving towards you. Similarly, even though the Earth revolves about its axis daily from west to east, it appears to us as if the Sun and all the stars are moving towards us and are revolving around us from east to west.20 But this was enough to please the reviewer in Hame’assef: . . . [T]he author answers the question as to why we do not feel any movement as the Earth revolves. Th is is one of the errors of the author of the book Ma’aseh Tuviah, who tried to bring scorn to destroy the opinion of Copernicus the astronomer. He quoted the verse “Sun, stand still in Givon” to support his view, without understanding the explanation of this verse which in fact supports the model of the new astronomy. However any enlightened person [maskil] who contemplates and understands the disciplines of physics and astronomy will understand in a deep way that these questions stem from a lack of knowledge. Our holy Torah’s words are true, and the words of the prophets are only misunderstood by those who are shortsighted. . . . Th is is not what the author [of Reshit Limmudim] has done; he has accepted the truth from whoever states it, and still all his intentions are for the sake of Torah.21 Th is review reveals how important the batt le over the Copernican theory had become for the maskilim. It was perhaps a defi ning feature of a maskil that the Copernican theory be accepted, and since Lindau raised a criticism of the theory and provided an easy-to-understand solution, the reviewer praised his

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efforts as if they sufficed to prove Copernicanism once and for all. 22 However, as we noted in chapter 5, Tuviah Cohen’s work Ma’aseh Tuviah had raised several questions about the veracity of the Copernican model, including a theoretical difference in the paths of cannonballs fi red to the east and the west and an absence of any observed parallax, as well as questions that arose from a literal reading of some biblical verses. 23 Barukh Lindau did not tackle any of these issues but instead told his readers that the Copernican model seemed more simple for an all powerful God to have created, and that there were “ . . . many more proofs from the science of engineering that demonstrate the Earth’s movement, but this is not the place to repeat them all.” In the introduction to his book, Lindau cautioned the reader that his work was not comprehensive, and that he would not record every aspect of the debate over certain astronomical models: Since I favor brevity I did not want to burden the reader with the details of every opposing view. Rather I recorded the most acceptable model according to the scholars of our day. Nevertheless I do not mean to oppose other views, and it will be up to the reader to choose which ever is, in his opinion, the most correct. . . . 24 Whether for this reason or another, Lindau’s defense of Copernican thought was very brief. Even though the book was written for schoolchildren, Lindau certainly could have defended the Copernican model from some of these arguments without resorting to concepts too difficult for his young audience to understand. But for the maskilim of the late eighteenth century, just the appearance of this pro-Copernican textbook written in Hebrew was a victory to be enjoyed, even if its content was far from comprehensive.

The Plagiarism of Reshit Limmudim In 1789 in Prague, Shimon ben David Oppenheim published a work called Amud Hashahar (Dawn). Th is brief book was on some of the aggadic pieces of the Talmud, but quite remarkably its introduction contained an overview of astronomy, plagiarized directly and without any att ribution from several pages of Lindau’s Reshit Limmudim.25 The passages in question describe the planets and the periods of their orbits around the Sun. It is surprising that these latter details were included, because at the conclusion of his plagiarized section, Oppenheim attacked the Copernican model.26 Although he left in the details of the planets’ orbits around the Sun, he was careful not to copy a complete paragraph in which Lindau stated that the heliocentric model had become widely

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accepted.27 Oppenheim then defended the geocentric model on the basis of an explanation of two verses in Jeremiah that he claimed proved that, just as Jews obtain spiritual perfection by keeping the commandments, so did the planets obtain their own spiritual perfection by orbiting the Earth.28 Oppenheim’s work was quickly brought to the attention of Hame’assef, which reported on the plagiarized book in 1790.29 Oppenheim proceeded undeterred and published a second edition of his plagiarized and anti-Copernican work, although he did remove the plagiarized poems praising his book, poems originally written by Naphtali Herz Wessely in praise of Lindau’s Reshit Limmudim.

Solomon Maimon’s Givat Hamoreh To put Reshit Limmudim into a proper historical perspective, we should note that in 1791, just three years after its publication, another pro-Copernican Hebrew language work of the Berlin Haskalah was published. Th is work was by Solomon Maimon, who published a commentary called Givat Hamoreh (The Hills of the Guide) on Maimonides’ famous Moreh Nevukhim (Guide of the Perplexed). Solomon Maimon, who eventually gained fame as a German philosopher, had been born Shlomo ben Yehoshua in 1753, but adopted his new name in honor of Maimonides, whom he had studied with great affection. He was brought up in a strictly Orthodox lifestyle; he was married by the age of eleven and spent his early years teaching Talmud to schoolchildren in his hometown of Niesweiz in Lithuania. However, while a very young man in Lithuania, Maimon appeared to have had a crisis of faith, as a result of which he stopped praying. 30 He abandoned his wife and young children and moved to Berlin, ostensibly to study medicine, but was expelled from the Jewish community there when he told them of his intention to publish a new commentary on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. He later returned to Berlin and befriended Moses Mendelssohn. But Maimon was always an outsider to the Jews of Berlin, who considered him an Ostjude, an uneducated East-European Jew, and he was continuously on the move, traveling to Hamburg and then to Amsterdam, Altona, and Dessau, until he fi nally sett led in Breslau where he wrote a Hebrew textbook on Newtonian physics that was never published. By now, Maimon was far removed from the orthodoxy of his youth, a distance that only grew as he refused to grant his wife a get, a bill of religious divorce. By 1787, Maimon was back in Berlin where he studied Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In fact, he struck up an unlikely correspondence with the famous philosopher and achieved modest fame as one of the few who could penetrate Kant’s writings. Maimon started publishing in the leading journals of his day and wrote a commentary on Kant’s work. While in Berlin he also fi nally

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managed to publish his commentary on Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, and it is this work that contained Maimon’s thoughts on the new astronomy. 31 Maimon remained poor even when, late in his life, he found a benefactor, and when he died in 1800, he was buried outside the Jewish cemetery as a heretic. In his introductory essay to Givat Hamoreh, which reviewed the history of philosophy, Maimon spent as much time explaining the works of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton as he did explaining the works of Descartes, Kant, and Leibniz. Maimon believed that an adequate understanding of astronomy was as important as a sound philosophical background if Maimonides’ famous work was to be understood. In fact, it was the lack of up-to-date astronomy in the Guide that Maimon blamed as one of the main reasons for its relative obscurity.32 Maimon appeared to have read Copernicus directly, or at least he quoted from others who had. 33 He explained that contemporary astronomers had declared that Tycho Brahe’s helio-geocentric compromise was incorrect and how Kepler had modified the Copernican model with his discovery that the planets’ orbits were elliptical. Th is introduction was required because Maimon’s commentary would update the science on which Maimonides had based the Guide. For example, in chapter 72 of the Guide, Maimonides addressed the spheres that made up the universe, and explained how the elements surrounded the Earth: Its center is the sphere of the earth, while water encompasses the earth, air encompasses the water, fi re encompasses the air, and the fi ft h element encompasses the fi re. There are many spheres contained one within the other . . . they are perfectly spherical . . . all of them moving in a circular uniform motion . . . It is not possible in any respect or in any fashion that the number of spheres that encompasses the world should be less than eighteen. 34 In his commentary, Maimon noted that the astronomy in the Guide was Ptolemaic and had been updated by the new Copernican model, which did away with many of the needs for cycles and epicycles. As for the four elements, “this was the Aristotelian position. However the modern view is that . . . earth, water, air and fi re are not really natural elements. Instead the elements that are known to us are those discovered by the chemists.”35 Toward the end of the same chapter, Maimonides wrote that “the more noble surrounds [or orbits] that which is inferior.” Maimon found that this needed updating too: “Th is is incorrect, according to the new astronomy, because the Sun is the center and the other planets orbit it.”36 Maimon also used the new astronomy to augment, rather than supplement, Maimonides’ writings. For example, Maimonides had observed, “that the senses do not always procure certain knowledge . . . a man

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when he is far off, sees a big thing as small.”37 Maimon updated the example in Givat Hamoreh and mentioned the illusion of the Sun’s movement to show yet another way in which the senses could mislead. 38 Although Givat Hamoreh and Lindau’s Reshit Limmudim were published just three years apart by the same Berlin publisher, their intended Jewish audiences were very different. Lindau’s work was a schoolbook; it used simple language and its text was easy to read and replete with references to God’s benevolence. Maimon’s commentary was a challenging work of philosophy. It required knowledge of contemporary German philosophy, and its references to God were limited to the original text of Maimonides. Even the title pages of the two books reflected their different audiences: Lindau’s was in large print and easyto-understand Hebrew, while the title page of Maimon’s work was in Latin: “More Nebuchim sive liber Doctor Perplexorum.”39 Both works demonstrated the importance that the members of the Berlin Haskalah attached to publishing not only their approval of Copernicanism, but spreading Copernican thought to other Jews through texts of science. In fact, Maimon was approached to translate other works of science from their original German into Hebrew, in an effort to spread up-to-date science to Jews uneducated in matters of secular knowledge. But Maimon declined to work with the maskilim on the project, because he felt that the translated books of science would go unread. Just as Maimon had earlier cast off his traditional Jewish identity, he now rejected the Berlin Haskalah because he believed that its goals were unattainable.40 Jews who were interested in understanding science would go straight to the original works, while [t]he unenlightened, on the other hand—and these form the majority—are so swayed by rabbinical prejudices that they regard the study of the sciences, even in Hebrew, as forbidden fruit, and persistently occupy themselves only with the Talmud and the enormous number of its commentaries.41 But Maimon underestimated his Jewish audience. In actuality, there were a large number of traditional Jews who wanted to read about the sciences in a Hebrew-language book. Th is need was understood by a self-educated Jew from Vilna named Pinhas Hurwitz, whose Sefer Haberit became the most widely read Hebrew-language science book ever written.

Sefer Haberit Sefer Haberit is the second encyclopedia we review. It was published in 1797 and outlined the Copernican model in far greater detail than any previous

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Hebrew work. It was a profoundly influential book that was read by generations of Jews and has been reprinted many times over the last two hundred years. As just one example of the book’s popularity, consider the testimony of a young student who was studying at the famous yeshiva of the Hofez Hayyim in Radon, Poland. We know only his fi rst name, Heneh, and in 1934, at the age of twenty-one he wrote an essay about his life: I obtained a copy of the Book of the Covenant [Sefer Haberit] . . . and virtually committed it to memory, reading it in the bathroom for fear of being caught and confronted with a whole new series of accusations. The Book of the Covenant gave me a sound foundation in anatomy, physics, geography and the like. I had a weakness, however, for showing off my scientific learning to my friends (without telling them about its source). Th is led to my becoming known as a person of wideranging knowledge, and I was sought after by those who were drawn to the Haskalah.42 Here then is testimony about the book’s popularity as a work of science in prewar Poland, over one hundred and thirty years after it was fi rst published, and even today in modern Jerusalem, Sefer Haberit is readily available.43 Th is is certainly evidence of the value that the book continues to hold for some Jews, despite the fact that it was written over two hundred years earlier as a science textbook.44 For ultra-Orthodox Jews, scientific discoveries rarely require a reevaluation of their worldview, but it may come as a surprise that this scientific work of the late eighteenth century is still in demand.45

Biography of Pinhas Hurwitz It is difficult to reconstruct an accurate biography of Pinhas Hurwitz, the author of Sefer Haberit, who revealed litt le of himself in his enduring book and who published the fi rst edition anonymously. Hurwitz appears to have been born in Vilna, Poland, in 1765.46 He received a traditional Jewish education but was forced to leave at an early age as a result of a dire economic situation and the physical threats then facing Polish Jews. He probably arrived in Frankfurt before his twentieth birthday and while there he met a number of maskilim, including Barukh Lindau who published his children’s textbook nine years before Sefer Haberit.47 He picked up a working knowledge of German before moving to Holland, where he must have endeared himself to many rabbinic leaders. We know this because four of the seven rabbinic approbations that preface Sefer Haberit are from rabbis in Amsterdam,

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Rotterdam, and the Hague.48 Hurwitz then crossed into England, where again he met the leading Jewish religious intellectuals of the day. The most prominent of these was Eliakim Gottchalk Hart, whose book Milhamot Adonai (The Wars of the Lord) we examined in the last chapter.49 Hart was precisely the kind of kindred spirit that Hurwitz clearly sought out wherever he traveled. As we have already noted, Hart’s book, written in Hebrew, contained an attack on aspects of the works of Descartes and Newton from a Jewish perspective, and in another work, Hart examined the work of Joseph Delmedigo of Candia, whose pro-Copernican contributions as a student of Galileo were also reviewed. 50 It may even have been the case that Hart, who was a wealthy jeweler, provided fi nancial support for Hurwitz during his time in England. 51 Despite what appears to have been a comfortable time both physically and intellectually in London, for reasons that are unknown, Hurwitz returned to Poland, all the while working on his magnum opus. In 1797, he fi nally published Sefer Haberit anonymously and then spent many years peddling it from town to town. 52 It had taken a decade of travel and research, but Hurwitz understood the needs of the time and produced a work that was, and would remain, in great demand.

The Content of Sefer Haberit and Its Early Publication Sefer Haberit was divided into two parts; the fi rst, consisting of some 250 pages, is a scientific encyclopedia addressing what Hurwitz called human wisdom (hokhmat adam), and it focuses on the material world. The second part, shorter than the fi rst at only 130 pages, is an analysis of divine wisdom (hokhmat elohim), and it focuses on spiritual matters. Most remarkably, and as somewhat of a disappointment for those for whom Hurwitz exemplified the rationalist Haskalah movement, Hurwitz revealed that he had written his book to explain a sixteenth-century kabbalistic work of Hayyim Vital entitled Sha’arei Kedusha (The Gates of Holiness). Vital’s work had fi rst been published in 1734, and Hurwitz was concerned that it could not be understood without a thorough background in the natural sciences. 53 Scholars have raised questions about Hurwitz’s real agenda, noting, for example, that the book is simply too long to serve the primary purpose of introducing and explaining Vital’s work, and that Vital’s book raised none of the scientific questions that Hurwitz felt compelled to address. 54 The book was lengthy, dense, and without any diagrams. Despite this, the fi rst edition of two thousand copies quickly sold out, and the book was reprinted without the author’s permission in Brno, twice, in 1801. 55 These pirated editions contained only the fi rst part of the book—the one that addressed the

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natural sciences. Hurwitz later lamented how his work had been republished without his permission: You, honest [reader], should judge these men . . . the Gentile in Brno with whom I originally published my Sefer Haberit in 1797 and his two Jewish partners. Th is Gentile will do nothing and certainly not bring a Hebrew book to press unless advised to do so by these two Jews. For a Gentile does not read or understand Hebrew, and is at a complete loss as far as this goes. He would seek advice from them about every book and would ask whether they would recommend that he publish, doing whatever they advised. These three broke the law, and printed the fi rst part of my book without my knowledge soon after I left in order to sell my book. They defied a ban of the seven great rabbis who signed their names in [the approbations that appear at the start of] Sefer Haberit, stating that no person may reprint this work for fi fteen years after it is fi rst printed in 1797. . . . They have stolen from the hearts of every Jew when they write at the end of the book “the complete book has been fi nished” when in truth they have only reprinted half of the work . . . they have set out to deceive the House of Jacob and steal from the hearts of Israel, when they produce a book they call complete, when it is only half a work. . . . 56 The author’s anger at those who bootlegged his work is of course understandable. What is puzzling, however, is why those who were printing the book illegally would choose to leave out that second section when, according to the author, it was the most important part of the book. Stranger still, the fact that the pirated book lacked the second part did not seem to lessen its popularity. We know this because the pirated edition was itself reprinted, which suggests that its popularity had exceeded the printers’ initial expectations. 57 Th is popularity cannot easily be ascribed to a case of mistaken identity on the part of the buyer, because one of the pirated editions clearly stated on the title page that it was only volume one of the original Sefer Haberit. These facts point to the following conclusion: that within a few years of its publication, Sefer Haberit was extremely popular, and that the main reason for this popularity was the section on the sciences. Whether the continued popularity of Sefer Haberit was primarily due to its science text cannot be determined, but the book was hugely successful. It was reprinted at least eighteen times by 1900, and at least ten times since then, and has been translated into Yiddish and Ladino. 58 Despite the book’s length, small type, and lack of illustrations, Sefer Haberit was a book that people were interested in reading. Over the two centuries in which it remained in print, it became the

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most widely read Hebrew encyclopedia. Its account of astronomy is therefore a critical piece in the story about the Jewish reception of Copernican thought.

Copernicus in Sefer Haberit Astronomy makes an early and prominent appearance in Sefer Haberit. Hurwitz outlined a description of the universe that is entirely talmudic in his opening chapter, but he quickly brought his readers up to date in the second chapter where he introduced the discovery of Uranus by Herschel in 1781. Early on, we get a taste of Hurwitz’s weaving back and forth between the natural world as expressed by the rabbis of the Talmud and the one revealed by the science of his contemporaries. He took the discovery of Uranus as an opportunity to explain why, if the talmudic description was correct, the rabbis had never mentioned this eighth planet: Future generations will certainly discover even more planets, for they will develop telescopes even more powerful than we presently have . . . but our sages knew of all of them and understood them, not using natural sight or a telescope, but through the Divine Spirit, or from a tradition they received from our forefathers. However, they did not mention them because planets that are beyond Saturn have only a minor influence on the Earth, unlike the planets lying closer. . . . 59 Hurwitz was not prepared to accept that the sages of the Talmud could have been either mistaken or ignorant of astronomy and, with the establishment of this rubric, he was able to discuss new astronomical discoveries without the need to abandon his unwavering belief in those sages. 60 Although written in the middle of the Haskalah period, the work defended the traditional reader against an unrestrained desire to embrace all modern ideas. Hurwitz reminded his readers that any scientific theory was itself likely to be later replaced by a newer, more compelling one. 61 He also embraced a notion of philosophical skepticism that he believed had been outlined by Kant, which allowed him to reject any notion of absolute truth outside of Judaism. Hurwitz spoke highly of Kant, describing him as “sharp, learned and insightful,” and whose Critique of Pure Reason was “extremely profound.”62 Skepticism had its limits though, and Hurwitz pointed out that Jews believed in what “philosophers had rejected,” namely a belief in a “Creator who created the world and gave us his Torah through Moses his faithful servant.”63

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An analysis of the astronomy contained in Sefer Haberit is liable to be met with some frustration, because the work contains contradictory and inconsistent statements on a number of issues, of which the discussion of the heliocentric model is but one example. We will attempt to determine the kernel of Hurwitz’s beliefs about the Copernican model while acknowledging that such a task is difficult because of these internal contradictions. Given the philosophical approach in which the sages’ views were given an epistemic status quite different from that of other scientific interpretations, we might have expected Hurwitz to reject the new astronomy with a few sentences. After all, despite the previous two and a half centuries during which the Copernican model had been increasingly accepted, there was still no experiment that had demonstrated its veracity. But Hurwitz did no such thing; in fact, he analyzed the Copernican model in more detail than had any previous Jewish text. To be sure, Hurwitz did eventually declare his belief that the Earth is stationary, but this conclusion did not prevent him from discussing the many advantages of the Copernican model, including how it simplified calculations for the new month, which is itself a mitzvah.64 The fi rst time Copernicus is mentioned in Sefer Haberit is not in the context of explaining his model of the solar system. Rather, it occurs while reconciling the positions of the Earth and the Sun in the Copernican system with the biblical description of the fi rst days of creation.65 Hurwitz had not yet introduced his reader to the heliocentric system, and because he later appears to reject such a system, it is surprising that he would fi nd it important to demonstrate how it may be reconciled with the biblical description of creation. In fact, this is a pattern that we see repeated several times: the need to explain the Copernican system in a very positive light, even while later rejecting it. After reading how the story of creation may be understood in a heliocentric universe, the reader must wait for several chapters for the opportunity to learn about the detailed structure of such a universe: The belief that the world is set at the center of all the planets and in the middle of the heavens, and that it remains in one location, was the belief of all of the early thinkers, whether Jewish or Gentile. . . . However Copernicus . . . had a quite different opinion and stated that the Earth did not lie at the focus of the orbits of all the planets; rather the Earth, together with the water, wind and fi re that surrounds it is just like the other planets orbiting the Sun.66 . . . He placed the Earth in this position, and taught this belief to students and lectured about it in public. His proofs and supports for his position are clearly written in his book. He was remarkably successful in this matter, for today virtually all of

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the wise men of the world agree that this opinion is in fact correct. His model is used to understand all matters of astronomy, the phases of the Moon and the movement of the stars. Any calculation involving their appearance can be understood far more clearly and simply than if we accept the earlier model . . . the Earth and its atmosphere orbit in three hundred and sixty five days, five hours and forty-nine minutes which makes one year, while every day the Earth revolves on its own axis once every twenty-four hours from west to east. As a result it appears to us as if the Sun and all the stars move from east to west, causing the passage of day and night.67 Th is introductory passage is notable for the positive way in which Hurwitz introduced his Jewish readers to this most radical of theories. The Copernican model is both simple to understand and has more explanatory power than its predecessor; moreover, it is almost universally accepted. With such a promising set of characteristics, the reader has likely been drawn into accepting it without reservation, but Hurwitz is aware of several arguments that the Copernican system must overcome. He now shared these by sett ing up an imagined discussion between two Gentiles and two Jews. One Gentile raised a scientific objection that is answered by the second; one of the Jews then raised a religious objection that is in turn answered by the other Jew. The scientific objection is that if the Earth rotates from west to east, a cannonball fi red toward the east would meet its target sooner than one fi red toward the west, because in the former instance, the Earth’s movement would carry the target toward the cannonball.68 Th is objection is easily explained once it is understood that the cannonball itself is moving at the same speed as the Earth on which the cannon rests, and the only reason that the cannonball ever leaves the cannon is due to the extra motion imparted by the exploding gunpowder. The Jew who raised a religious objection did so based on the biblical verses that suggested the Sun has motion and the Earth is immobile. These were countered by his co-religionist who explains these verses allegorically so that they may be easily understood. Th is allegorical language is common. For example, the Torah states, “May God give you from the dew of the heavens,”69 and yet it is understood that dew does not actually fall from the sky, but rather forms from moisture in the atmosphere. “Yet because people believe it to be this way, the Torah describes it so. . . . In reality it is the Earth that is in motion . . . and it is the Earth that stood still for our ancestors and for Joshua. And even though he [Joshua] knew the truth he said ‘Sun, stand still in Gibeon’ because he wanted to publicize the miracle for all of Israel, using language that they would understand.” 70

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Th is would be a natural place to stop, but Hurwitz had his Jewish Copernican go a step further. He quoted a passage from the Zohar that suggests the Earth was round: In the book of Hamnuna the Elder it is explained that the Earth is a revolving sphere; that some people are above, while others dwell below . . . that certain places on Earth are light, while others are in darkness; for some it is day while for others night and that there are places where it is always day, or where night lasts for only a few hours.71 Hurwitz explained this passage to be more than a simple explanation that the Earth is a sphere; rather, its main point is to teach that the Earth turns on its own axis every day. The conclusion must be that the Zohar, the central mystical Jewish text, acknowledged that the Earth moves. As a result, Hurwitz concluded that any person of Jewish faith who strongly believes in this [heliocentric] theory should not be considered weak in his belief in the written Torah or the Oral Law, and certainly such a person should never be branded or suspected of heresy. Indeed he could be considered a zadik [pious] among Israel, so long as his other beliefs and practices follow both the written Torah and the Oral Law, and he fears God.72 There was no need for Hurwitz to include this quasi-endorsement of Copernicanism, which came at the end of a passage explaining how biblical statements might be understood metaphorically, a point that had been well supported with proof texts. That Hurwitz chose to offer encouragement to those Jews who were convinced by the heliocentric model is an example of how his sympathies seemed to be with the Copernicans, even as he struggled to support the traditional geocentric model. Hurwitz ultimately sided with a traditional model, although it was not the Ptolemaic one. In a spirit of compromise, Hurwitz promoted the Tychonic model in which all the planets except the Earth revolve around the Sun, while the Sun orbits a stationary Earth, dragging the planets along with it.73 Hurwitz gave two reasons for his verdict. In the fi rst place, there was experimental evidence from a stone dropped from the top of a tower. If the Earth was in motion, the stone should, it was argued, fall some distance west of the tower, because during the time the stone was in freefall, the Earth was moving from west to east. Hurwitz claimed that when a stone is dropped from a tall mast on a moving ship, it fell a small distance from the base of the mast. The fact that this did not occur on land was conclusive evidence that the Earth was in fact stationary.

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There was an additional argument against the Copernican model, based on the existence of two forces that kept objects in place on the Earth. The fi rst was the force of gravity, which had been “proven, tested and confi rmed,” and the second was what we would today call a centrifugal force, which Hurwitz had himself demonstrated.74 Hurwitz declared that God would not use two forces when one force alone would achieve the desired outcome, a principle that had been expounded by Aristotle.75 Th is principle was proof that the Earth was stationary, because if the Earth were moving, a force similar to the centrifugal force would act in addition to gravity to prevent people from falling off the Earth. The force of gravity would be redundant, as the other force alone would do the job. However, argued Hurwitz, because gravity had indeed been shown to exist, the Earth must be stationary, leaving gravity as the only force acting to keep objects in their place. If the Earth is stationary, there is no second force acting on objects in addition to gravity, and Hurwitz’s rule that God would not choose to use two forces when one alone would achieve the outcome is not violated.76 So, despite the att ractions of the Copernican model, Hurwitz declared his allegiance to the model of Tycho Brahe. He was certainly aware that Tycho’s theory was not widely accepted, but he felt that this was of litt le importance. Theories come and go, and Hurwitz was confident that in the future, with the development of more accurate instruments, Tycho’s theory would be verified and rehabilitated.77 The compromise position of planets orbiting a Sun that drags them around the stationary Earth would have been appealing because it supported another of Hurwitz’s beliefs, that the Earth was the crowning glory of creation. “All of the planets were only created for the sake of this Earth, and everything was created for the sake of mankind on the Earth . . . even if the purpose of these other heavenly creations is not always clear to us.” 78 Because the Earth was the reason for creation, it was only fitt ing that it be at the center of the universe. The idea that the Earth was both the pinnacle of the universe and its raison d’être had come under attack since Copernicus had published his model. For example, the French alchemist Jean D’Espagnet (d. circa 1637) had challenged the anthropocentric model: “They which believe that an almost innumerable multitude of heavenly bodies were created for the commoditie of the globe of the Earth, and for her inhabitants, as to their proper end, are deceived.” Later, the English naturalist John Ray (d. 1705) wrote that although there was an opinion that “all this visible world was created for Man; that man is the end of creation. . . . Wise men now think otherwise.” 79 Hurwitz found the anthropocentric argument to be an important reason to reject the Copernican model. It was picked up a century later by other Jews, including Moses Sofer and Reuven Landau, and featured in their rejections of Copernicus.

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Before leaving the question of the Earth’s mobility, Hurwitz added two further considerations. These do not seem to be as important as the previous points, but they serve perhaps as minor, supporting reasons for rejecting the Copernican system. The fi rst is that such a system would destroy the traditional model of the seven layers of the heavens, and the second is that it would contradict biblical writings att ributed to King Solomon, traditionally identified as the wisest of all men.80 Hurwitz imagined the solar system as drawn on a sheet of paper, with the Earth circling the Sun. For one half of the year, the Earth would be on one side of the Sun (“above” the Sun), and for the second half, it would be “below” the Sun. How could this be reconciled with the verse in Ecclesiastes (traditionally believed to have been written by King Solomon) that “there is nothing new under the Sun”?81 Th is problem is said to disappear in a geocentric model, in which the Sun revolves around the Earth once each day, although exactly how is not clear.82 Hurwitz then added further support for the geocentric model in a brief discussion of Lurianic kabbalah and its spiritual model of the universe. In this model, the Earth, referred to as the outer layer of the spiritual world of yosher de’asiyah, is surrounded by the sky. Hurwitz understood this spiritual model to be a reflection of reality. It would therefore be impossible to believe in both the Copernican model and the Lurianic model, for this would mean believing “in two contradictory statements at the same time.”83 Hurwitz continued to study the Copernican question in the years after he published the fi rst edition of Sefer Haberit. Eliakim Gottchalk Hart, the English Jew who had met with Hurwitz in London, corresponded with him and praised his book, but he questioned the anti-Copernican stand that Hurwitz had adopted. Hart sent the following letter to Hurwitz some time after the fi rst edition of the book was published: I received you delightful letter and I am overjoyed that those who read it are recognizing your precious Sefer Haberit. I also consider it to be a truly wonderful book, and I enjoy it day and night . . . but I do not know why my dear Sir, you impugn heaven and Earth on account that the Earth orbits the Sun in a place where there are neither Ophanim or Holy Hayot [two kinds of heavenly beings],84 and whose orbit around the Sun is but a tiny point in the vast skies. . . . 85 Hart went on to argue that because the Earth’s movement was insignificant against the backdrop of a vast universe, it couldn’t be said to rise and set to any significant degree. Hurwitz thought the objection ridiculous: “[A]nyone can dismiss it with even one hand. If a mosquito moving over a grain of rice can be said to rise and fall, however minute the motion relative to the Earth, then the

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same can be said of the Earth in its motion around the Sun.” Hart’s support of a pro-Copernican position so impressed Hurwitz that he quoted from this letter in the second edition of Sefer Haberit.86 The content of the correspondence is much less significant than the fact that it occurred at all, for unless new archival material is found, it is the earliest example of a real dialogue between a rabbinic pro-Copernican and an equally rabbinic geocentrist.87 What did the many readers of the early editions of Sefer Haberit make of all this? What would they conclude about the model of the universe? If a reader held pro-Copernican beliefs, would he be reassured by Hurwitz that “he could be considered a zadik among Israel” and remind himself that the Zohar spoke of the Earth moving? Or would Hurwitz instead persuade him that the model of Tycho was the one that Jews needed to accept? The answer depends on how much weight is given to each of the often-contradictory statements that Hurwitz made in his work. Most scholars of the work believe that Hurwitz was indeed anti-Copernican. However, as we have demonstrated, his book contains a sympathetic description of the heliocentric model, and any evaluation of his position needs to include the many pro-Copernican statements that he made.88 Overall, the best statement that we can make about Hurwitz’s position is that it was confl icted. He understood the advantages of the heliocentric model and was able to reconcile it with both the biblical account of creation and verses from the Bible that suggested that the Earth was stationary. Although he adopted the Tychonic position, he did so because of experimental evidence that he felt supported this position, rather than just appealing to the Bible. There is a deference paid to these experiments, and they allowed Hurwitz to reject Copernicus, but we are left wondering what Hurwitz would have done with experimental evidence that supported the heliocentric model. Lindau’s textbook and Hurwitz’s encyclopedia were not, however, the only works to address the Copernican question in the eighteenth century. The issue must have been of importance because it was raised in a number of other texts, from works on the calendar to commentaries on the daily prayers and the Bible. It is to these other eighteenth-century works that we now turn.

8

The Eighteenth Century Jews and Copernicus in the Newtonian Era

In Milton’s epic Paradise Lost, published in 1667, the angel Raphael asked Adam a hypothetical question: What if the Sun Be center of the World and other stars By his attractive virtue and their own Incited, dance about him various rounds? . . . and what if, seventh to these The planted Earth, so steadfast though she seem, Insensibly three different motions move?1 The question was left unanswered, and Raphael advised Adam instead to “solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid; Leave them to God above, him serve and feare.” 2 But the hidden matters of the universe were slowly being revealed, and in 1687, twenty years after Milton wrote these words, the Copernican model found support with the publication of Newton’s Principa Mathematica. In that work, Newton described the universal laws of gravitation and motion that were behind the observations of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. The book went through three Latin editions in Newton’s lifetime, and an English edition was published two years after his death in 1727. By 1700, the Newtonian model, which included the heliocentric solar system, was being taught at Yale and Oxford, although Copernicanism was much slower to gain acceptance in other countries like Poland and Hungary. 3 There was still considerable hesitation in religious circles about these changes, causing a tension between those with an intellectual openness to scientific ideas and those with an affi nity for traditional religious beliefs. Perhaps the quintessential example of this was a new three-volume edition of the Principia published in Geneva between 1739 and 1742. Th is 144

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edition contained a commentary on each of the book’s propositions by two Franciscan friars but was noteworthy for an entirely different reason. The fi nal volume of the “Jesuit edition” (as it came to be incorrectly known) contained a disclaimer by the friars distancing themselves from the heliocentric assumptions contained in the book: Newton in this third book assumes the hypothesis of the motion of the Earth. The propositions of the author cannot be explained otherwise than by making the same hypothesis. Hence we have been obliged to put on a character not our own. But we profess obedience to the decrees promulgated by sovereign pontiffs against the motion of the Earth.4 Even the Catholic Church felt the need to reassess its anti-Copernican stand, which had started in March 1616 when the work of Copernicus had been placed, until corrected, on the Index Liborum Prohibitorum, its list of banned books. There it remained, joined over time by the works of Galileo, Descartes, and Kepler. In 1754, however, acting under the initiative of Pope Benedict XIV, the Congregation of the Index began a reevaluation of its approach. Until then, the Index had prohibited “all books teaching the Earth’s motion and the Sun’s immobility,” but after several years of discussion and with the approval of the Pope, the Congregation decided to remove this clause; the 1758 edition of the Index dropped it, although the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and others remained specifically prohibited. 5 The Jesuit Pietro Lazzari was a consultant to the Congregation, and among the reasons he gave for recommending this change was the fact that “ . . . the opinion of the Earth’s motion is today a common opinion in the principal academies and among the most celebrated philosophers and mathematicians.”6 Among the Jews of the eighteenth century, most of these changes went unnoticed. On the title page of Sefer Evronot (The Book of Intercalations) published in Offenbach in 1722, there is an illustration of Moses as lawgiver and his brother Aaron as the high priest, a theme that was frequently found on the title pages of Hebrew books. But in addition there is an astronomical illustration. At the top of the page is the geocentric model of the heavens, with the Earth labeled and placed at the center. We might have concluded that this illustration had been deliberately chosen to appear in this work on the calendar because of the threat to the traditional geocentric model. However, this conclusion is not justified because the very same frontispiece of Moses and Aaron together with the illustration of the geocentric model is found in another book from the same publisher, this time in a 1721 edition of Matteh Yehuda (see figure 8.1).7

(a)

(b)

Figure 8.1 Geocentric frontispieces in two Hebrew books, Offenbach, Germany, 1721 and 1722. At left (a), Matteh Yehudah, Offenbach, 1721. Courtesy of Dan Rabinowitz. At right (b), Sefer Evronot, Offenbach, Germany, 1722. From the collection of the author. Matteh Yehuda contained “Grace after Meals” and songs to be sung at the Sabbath table (zemirot). Sefer Evronot was a work on the calendar, and both books share the same geocentric frontispiece.

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It is of course possible that the geocentric illustration made its way into a non-calendric book as a protest against the new astronomy, but another possibility is that not much thought was given to the decision, and that the printer used whatever frontispiece was at hand. Irrespective of the motives surrounding the title pages of these two books, the geocentric model was certainly the dominant one in Jewish communities at the start of the eighteenth century. In 1722, the publisher of Sefer Evronot produced a new edition of two medieval Ptolemaic books: Zurat Ha’aretz (The Structure of the Earth) by the astronomer Abraham bar Hiyya who died around 1145, 8 and Sefer Mareh Ha’ofanim (The Book of the Appearance of the Ofanim [Heavenly Beings]), which was a translation into Hebrew of Sphaera Mundi (better known in English as The Sphere of Sacroboso).9 Zurat Ha’aretz also used the geocentric frontispiece; both it and Sefer Evronot described a geocentric universe and, it is important to note, contained very litt le religious content. Th is suggests that they were not reprinted because they were important religious works, but rather because their Ptolemaic descriptions continued to be of great interest to the Jews of Western Europe. Against this backdrop, the new astronomy found its way into the thoughts and writings of several of the most prominent rabbinic leaders of the time. These works demonstrate not only the tension between openness to science and an allegiance to religious demands, but also the different conclusions that were drawn among those who grappled with the new astronomy.

Raphael Levi of Hannover In the Historisches Museum of Hannover is a striking portrait of a kindly-looking gentleman wearing a wig and ruffled cuff s that were the typical dress of an eighteenth-century scholar (see fi gure 8.2). His mouth is not quite smiling, but his cheek reveals a dimple. His left forefi nger is pointing to what we would recognize today as central Europe on a large globe. On the table lay a telescope, protractor, and rulers on top of some papers with mathematical calculations. The title of the open book that sits on the table is legible enough to read: A New Compendium of General Rates of Exchange and Exchange Tables, consisting of 26 small tables . . . and the name of the author can be easily seen: Raphael Levi.10 Th is is the only clue as to the identity of the scholar, and it is not surprising that he is shown with one of the three German-language books on commerce that he authored, and not with one of his Hebrew works on astronomy or the calendar. Levi taught both Jewish studies and general commerce, but he would have been best

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Figure 8.2 Raphael Levi of Hannover, by an unknown artist, c. 1760. Courtesy of the Historisches Museum, Hannover, Germany.

known to the non-Jewish audience of Hannover, Germany, for his role in the banking community. Levi is also an important fi gure in our story, for he demonstrates how a Jewish scholar actually changed his mind about the Copernican question. Raphael Levi was born in 1685 in Wiekersheim (in what is now southern Germany) and given a traditional yeshivah education in Frankfurt. When Levi was only six years old, his father died, and his mother returned to her native Hannover where Levi spent the rest of his life working as a bookkeeper to Simon Wolff Oppenheimer, a wealthy court Jew and banker.11

Levi and Leibniz One intriguing aspect of Raphael Levi’s life is the story about his relationship with the celebrated philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz

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(1646–1716). Although Leibniz traveled widely, he lived in Hannover for the last forty years of his life, and it is there that Raphael Levi is said to have met and studied with him. In one version of the story, Levi noticed a mistake being made by the builders of a new royal stable and brought it to the attention of the engineer in charge. The engineer was so impressed with Levi’s intellect that he introduced Levi to Leibniz. The famous philosopher was similarly taken with the Jewish accountant-mathematician and, as a result, in the first years of the eighteenth century, Levi moved into Leibniz’s house “ . . . as his amanuensis, pupil and friend.”12 In another version of the story, Leibniz offered to be a tutor to Levi and to pay part of his tuition.13 The stories told about Levi’s relationship with Leibniz also describe later aspects of Leibniz’s life. Leibniz studied Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed and so “[c]learly Leibniz must have used his amanuensis Levi as his ‘resource-person’ in the study of Maimonides. . . . Levi could of course read him in Hebrew with the classical commentaries, and he could explicate him in all detail.”14 Even in death, the two could not be separated. At the simple interment of Leibniz in November 1717 in the church of Neustadter, none of the clergy were represented and, so the legend goes, Leibniz was remembered “ . . . by a single admirer, his faithful disciple Raphael Levi.”15 Although these stories about a relationship between Levi and Leibniz are fascinating, there is no evidence that any are in fact true. In a recent and much-acclaimed intellectual biography of Leibniz, Levi is not so much as mentioned.16 It was actually Johann Hermann Vogler who was the amanuensis present at Leibniz’s death and funeral.17 Nor is there any evidence for the claim that Levi and Leibniz studied Maimonides together. Leibniz began his study of Maimonides in the 1680s using a Latin translation, and his study of both Maimonides and the kabbalah predate the birth of Raphael Levi.18 Another story told about Levi is that he submitted a solution in response to a prize of £20,000 offered by the Royal Society of London for a way to measure longitude at sea. When King George II visited Hannover, Levi met him, and after demonstrating the solution to the longitude problem, Levi was invited by the king to travel to London in order to submit his plan to those running the competition. As with Levi’s supposed relationship with Leibniz, there is no documentary evidence to support this story.19 That these stories were circulated tells us something about the desire of those telling them to connect a Jew with a strong interest in science with a famous Gentile philosopher and a king. Unless new evidence is uncovered, the stories about Levi’s connections with both a leading philosopher and royalty are likely projections of the esteem in which Levi was held by members of the Jewish community of Hannover and beyond.

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Levi’s Works on the Calendar Fortunately, there are some elements of Levi’s life that are not legends. He was deeply interested in mathematics, astronomy, and the calendar, and taught widely on these subjects. In 1756, he published the fi rst volume of what he intended to be a four-part Hebrew book on the calendar called Luhot Ha’ibbur (Tables of Intercalation).20 The work was published in Leiden and contained charts and explanations for determining various astronomical events. Unusually, the work contains neither an introduction nor any rabbinic approbations. There was, however, a single paragraph warning against copying the work, and Levi personally signed every book immediately below this paragraph as evidence that the reproduction was legitimate.21 A year later, Levi published the second volume of Luhot Ha’ibbur in Hannover itself; it became the fi rst Hebrew book to be published there.22 In some copies, an extra paragraph appears pasted onto the fi rst page, in which Levi outlined his plans to publish a total of four volumes in the series. The fi rst was to be a general introduction; the second volume would contain charts to enable the user to predict the locations of the Sun and Moon. Volume three was to be an explanation of Maimonides’ Laws of the Sanctification of the New Month, and the fi nal volume was planned to be an explanation “ . . . of the new astronomy with all its proofs together with the paths of all the seven planets using easy language and brief mathematics.” Levi therefore suggested that the reader wait for the publication of all four volumes before binding them together into a single book. However, Levi never published the last two planned volumes in the series, so we are left wondering what he would have written about the Copernican system. We are, however, given a clue through another work that is att ributed to Levi and is clearly based on information that he taught, but was most certainly not authored by him. Th is book was entitled Tekhunot Hashamayim (Astronomy of the Heavens) and was published in Amsterdam in 1756. 23 The title page states that the work is authored by “the renowned Torah astronomer, the great Rabbi Raphael Levi of Hannover, who knows all of the natural sciences,” but the reader needs to look further to realize that this is not the entire story. At the bottom of the title page is the statement that the work was “brought to publication by Moses ben Yekutiel from Tykocin,” and Moses’ name is in the same large and bold typeface as that of the supposed author. There is a long poem preceding the introduction that is an acronym spelling out “I am Moses, the son of our Rabbi and teacher Yekutiel, from Tykocin,” and a chronogram indicating the year of publication uses a biblical verse using Moses’ name, rather than that of Levi, which would have been the common practice if Levi had been the real author.24 But the strongest evidence that the work was not truly Levi’s is

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a statement by Raphael Levi himself in the preface to the second volume of his Luhot Ha’ibbur: It is also important to state that I have heard that one of my students of Torah named Mosheh Tykocin has published a book on astronomy in my name in Amsterdam without my knowledge or permission. A gentleman once met me and mentioned that he had obtained this aforementioned book from one of my students. I told him that this book is available to all of my students, in order for them to remember what they had heard from me in oral form; indeed it is really not appropriate to call this work a book. Therefore, any person who purchased this book should not blame me if an uncorrected text was published, for it was never my intention to publish this book without additional notes. May the God of my fathers help me and save me from taking that which rightfully belongs to others. Amen. 25 Th is clarification also makes clear that Levi was not disputing his authorship of the ideas in the text or even the text itself. And although Moses Tykocin emphasized his own role in bringing the work to publication, he never left Raphael Levi’s intellectual authorship in question. Tekhunot Hashamayim has ninety-six chapters explaining the astronomy and mathematics that are required to produce the Hebrew calendar. The entire text of this work is based on the Ptolemaic system. Th is is not surprising because the stated purpose of the text is to understand Maimonides’ Laws of the Sanctification of the New Month, and as we have seen, Maimonides’ preCopernican astronomy is Ptolemaic. However, in the fi nal chapter of this book, the work att ributed to Levi outlined the new astronomy of Copernicus and included a diagram of the Copernican solar system with the Sun at its center: In recent times the great astronomer Copernicus produced another diagram of the solar system, which is called the new astronomy . . . in it the Sun is at the center of the system, and the closest planet to orbit the Sun is Mercury. . . . The third orbiting planet is the Earth . . . which orbits in three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days. . . . Know that the Sun does not move, but rather revolves on its axis every twenty-seven days. However all the other planets have two movements, a revolution on its own axis and a revolution around the Sun. . . . The advantages of this new system are truly numerous, but this is not the place to explain all of them fully. However there is the

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general advantage that we do not need to make use of a daily orbit of the spheres that move at tremendous speeds from east to west, moving the orbits of the other planets with them. Such a speeding orbit is impossible to imagine given the fact that the Sun is so large a star. . . . Th is [explanation] should be enough for the novice astronomer. 26 Here then is the claim that the Copernican system is superior from an intellectual or conceptual perspective. For Levi, the invention of a required sphere that moves across the entire heavens once every twenty-four hours dragging with it all of the planets in the solar system was simply too fantastic a construct. The system proposed by Copernicus would allow the notion of this sphere to be abandoned. For Levi, the observational anomalies that the heliocentric model explained were of minor significance. Of far more importance was the opportunity to abandon a system that depended on theoretical constructs that, although widely accepted, were in reality fraught with conceptual difficulties. Levi proposed accepting the heliocentric system because of its inherent simplicity, and his example was to be followed by several other Jewish astronomers of the eighteenth century. It was Ockham’s razor at its very best. When we consider what forces may have led Raphael Levi to embrace the Copernican model, it is interesting to note that Leibniz worked quietly to have the Church reconsider its condemnation of Copernicus. In 1688, he wrote a letter that set out some of his arguments: For this [Copernican] hypothesis is now confirmed by so many reasons, taken from new discoveries, that the greatest of astronomers hardly doubt it any longer . . . all persons of good sense recognize easily that even if Copernicus’s hypothesis is true many times over, Holy Scripture will thereby receive no injury. . . . It is hard to believe how much harm is done by the censure of Copernicus. For the most learned men of England, Holland and the whole of the North (to say nothing of France) are almost convinced of the truth of that hypothesis, and so they regard that censure as unjust slavery. . . . 27 Even if in fact there was no relationship between Leibniz and Levi, Leibniz’s pro-Copernican stand and his testimony regarding the widespread acceptance of the theory suggest that intellectuals in the city of Hannover were sympathetic to the new astronomy. Th is may explain how Raphael Levi learned about and became a champion of the Copernican model.28

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Levi’s Students The historical record reveals that Levi taught astronomy for several years in a series of public lectures, and that he taught the Ptolemaic system only because it was this system that Maimonides used in his own astronomy. In addition, Levi also taught the Copernican model and praised its advantages. We do not know how many students Levi actually taught, and were it not for the unauthorized publication by Moses Tykocin, we might never have learned of the content of his classes. We do know, however, that Levi was regarded as an important figure after his death in 1779 at the age of ninety-four. One of Levi’s student’s was Issakhar Berish (1747–1807), who served as head of the Bet Din in Hannover. Berish in turn had a student named Shimon Waltch, who published his own explanation of Maimonides’ Laws of the Sanctification of the New Month in a book titled Na’avah Kodesh (Holiness Becomes [ your house]). The work was published in 1786 in Berlin by the same publishing house that two years later would publish Reshit Limmudim, the pro-Copernican children’s textbook that we discussed in the last chapter.29 Although Waltch could claim Raphael Levi as his intellectual grandfather, his book did not take up the Copernican position that Levi found so appealing. Waltch left no doubt that Levi was a serious intellectual force; he referred to him in this way: “[T] here has almost never been a greater example of wisdom among the Jews from the time of Maimonides until today.” 30 Nevertheless, Na’avah Kodesh never even mentions the new astronomy. In point of fact, it repeatedly asserts the Ptolemaic model as the “one agreed upon by all astronomers” and leaves the reader with a geocentric understanding of the universe: If you look up to the skies you will see the Sun and Moon orbiting the Earth from east to west every twenty-four hours. Because of this, all wise men have concluded that the heavens and all they contain orbit and revolve from east to west, and with it revolve all the heavenly layers once each day. 31 The lack of any acknowledgment of the heliocentric model is even more puzzling when we note that Waltch was certainly not ignorant of other scientific concepts. For example, he mentions the effect of refraction on light, as well as the use of logarithms.32 It is possible that Waltch rejected the Copernican model, but given the esteem in which he held Levi, it seems more likely that, because Waltch’s commentary was on the Ptolemaic astronomy of Maimonides, he chose for the sake of simplicity to adopt the same model as Maimonides had himself. Before leaving Na’avah Kodesh, there is one more question that must be addressed. As we have noted previously, books that were published by the

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Hinukh Ne’arim press in Berlin had to be reviewed by a panel of experts. 33 As we have seen, the Berlin Haskalah strongly favored the Copernican approach, so how could this press have published a geocentric work like Na’avah Kodesh just two years before the pro-Copernican Reshit Limmudim? The answer displays an early example of a dichotomy between scientific and religious worldviews within the Hinukh Ne’arim press. Books with content that was characterized as talmudic were exempt from the new peer-review process and were instead submitted to a panel of religious experts for approval. Th is panel consisted of the leading rabbi of the Berlin community, Zevi Hirsch Levin, and his religious court (Bet Din). As a result, the same printing press published books supporting both the Copernican and Ptolemaic models, and Na’avah Kodesh was an example of a rabbinic text that maintained a traditional worldview by simply choosing to ignore scientific challenges. Rather than seek an integrated approach to astronomy, the Berlin printing press produced pro-Copernican works for an audience more tolerant of secular progress and Ptolemaic works for its more traditional readers.

Judah Hurwitz Although Raphael Levi introduced the Copernican model to his students in a straightforward way and admired its strengths, one of his contemporaries chose to introduce his readers to the model by demonstrating its weakness. Judah Hurwitz (1734–1797) was born in Vilna and studied medicine in Padua. After traveling extensively, he sett led in Grodno, where he became aware of the dangers that faced traditional Judaism. 34 In 1766, he published Amudei Bet Yehudah (Pillars of the House of Judah), a book that is built around the imagined debates of two Jews named Itai and Hushai. Although they are both pious and learned, Itai is the more logical and rational and represents “the sovereignty of the intellect,” while Hushai appreciates God through his sensual experiences and represents “the Torah of the heart.”35 The two escape to a forest where they contemplate the nature of God and the world. While there, they encounter a native, to whom they introduce the ideas of western civilization and the fundamentals of Judaism. The native, named Ira Haye’ari, receives a utopian description of the Judaism that Hurwitz wished would be practiced. Once Ira Haye’ari is suitably educated, the three men return to civilization where he is introduced to society rather like Shaw’s Eliza Doolitt le after her education by Professor Henry Higgins. Th rough the observations about contemporary Judaism that Ira Haye’ari notes and the questions that he poses, Hurwitz is able to criticize the ways in which Jews had come under both the material and philosophical influences of the surrounding Enlightenment. In this way, Hurwitz hoped to

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defend traditional beliefs and combat what he felt were heretical views that were in danger of becoming mainstream Jewish ideas. In one of the many discussions among the three men, Hushai admits to Itai that he is does not know what to believe about the structure of the universe. Do the stars revolve around a stationary Earth, or does the Earth itself move and turn on its axis? Itai replies that the contemporary astronomers erred when they suggested that it is not possible for the universe to rotate around a stationary Earth. “The Torah has already set the Sun and the Moon in their places, until the enemy Gentile [Copernicus] declared that the Earth moves and that the stars remain stationary.”36 Hushai is not satisfied and asks how to respond to the following question posed by “the heretics” who accept the heliocentric system: Is it logical to suggest that it is the massively large Sun that orbits the tiny Earth, as the geocentric system demands? Itai again responds with a declaration of belief in the truth of the Torah, by which he presumably refers to the literal interpretation of some biblical verses that suggest a stationary Earth. “The testimony of our holy Torah is more trustworthy than the idle chatter of some astronomers. Would a blind bat dare suggest to an eagle how to navigate the skies? Would a tiny fly attempt to spread its wings and cover the Sun? Similarly, no astronomer can stand in opposition to the words of the living God.”37 There is no consideration of the science of the day and no reference to any earlier Jewish works on the subject, whether pro- or anti-Copernican. Instead, there is an assumption that the Torah teaches that the Earth is the center of the universe, and so it must be. What kind of effect would Amudei Bet Yehuda have on its readers? Shmuel Feiner, a leading scholar of the period, suggested that although Hurwitz wrote the book to defend traditional Jewish views about the origin of the Torah and the importance of the commandments, “his replies also had the very opposite effect: they introduced the Jewish reader for the fi rst time to the radical ideas of Enlightenment; they made him more aware of the very existence and intensity of religious skepticism, and were directed towards a rationalization of Judaism.” If so, the reader would be left wondering whether the simple attestations of faith were persuasive enough to maintain a belief in the geocentric universe or if, perhaps, it was time to take a look at the claims of the new astronomy in more detail. 38

Eybeschütz and Emden Although Raphael Levi had received a traditional Jewish education, he chose to expand his interests outside the areas of Talmud and later legal Jewish texts, which were the works studied in the academies of traditional talmudic

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learning, the yeshivot. Hurwitz had done the same, but the eighteenth century also saw the Copernican question enter the lexicon of those Jews who remained within these most traditional of Jewish institutions and who later served as rabbinic leaders. Th ree of the most famous leaders of their generation, Jonathan Eybeschütz, Jacob Emden, and Moses Sofer, addressed the question of whether and how to accept the new astronomy, and so serve as case studies in the Jewish reception of Copernican thought in the eighteenth century within its most traditional sett ing. Jonathan Eybeschütz (1690–1764) was born in Cracow and studied in several different countries before fi nally sett ling in 1715 in Prague, where he soon earned a reputation as a talented rabbi and teacher. He wrote commentaries on the major Jewish legal codes of Maimonides and Joseph Caro and was well connected with leading figures in both the Jewish world and beyond. He met with Moses Mendelssohn, who was the leading figure in the Berlin Haskalah, as well as the Sabbatian rabbi Nehemiah Hayyon. He also cultivated relationships with Gentiles and was involved in an attempt to publish a new edition of the Talmud from which any anti-Christian references had been removed. Eybeschütz was also a lightning rod for controversy and was accused of all manner of heresies, including being a Christian and a Sabbatian. Despite (or perhaps because of) these controversies, he had a following of hundreds or perhaps thousands of students, but he is best remembered today as the sparring partner of another rabbinic leader of the time, Jacob Emden (1697–1776). 39 Emden was born into an illustrious family: His father was Zevi Ashkenazi, one of the most respected halakhic authorities of his time. After a brief period as rabbi of Emden, Jacob never again occupied a rabbinic position, but nevertheless became a renowned and influential religious authority and polemicist. In early 1751, shortly after Eybeschütz was elected over Emden as chief rabbi of the three communities (Altona, Hamburg, and Wandsbek), Emden accused Eybeschütz of being a Sabbatian.40 Th is started a confl ict between the two rabbinic leaders that did not even end with the death of Eybeschütz in 1764; Emden continued the fight with Eybeschütz’s students until his own death in 1774. Although their confl ict has been well documented, there is one aspect that did not received attention, namely their approaches to the Copernican revolution. Eybeschütz was the more conservative of the two and stated his antiCopernican position in a sermon delivered in the town of Metz in northern France in August 1744.41 We cannot att ribute Eybeschütz’s position to a lack of interest in or acquaintance with astronomy, since in the same sermon, he cited Delmedigo’s Gevurot Hashem, part of the pro-Copernican Sefer Elim.42 Rather, Eybeschütz echoed the Maimonidean position that the planets were

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sentient beings, whose efforts to attain spiritual perfection required their constant orbiting around the Earth: All the early philosophers were in agreement that the stars orbit [the Earth] in order to obtain [spiritual] perfection, and this is how they worship God, just as we worship God through the performance of his mitzvot in order to obtain perfection for our souls. They reach perfection for their intellectual souls through their movements and continued orbiting . . . just as God ordered them to be quick and orbit the Earth each and every day.43 Because this spiritual requirement was divinely ordained, any evidence to the contrary could simply not be considered. Without consideration of any of the arguments themselves, Eybeschütz concluded that the new astronomers were mistaken: As a result, many astronomers, including Copernicus and his supporters, have made fools of themselves when they declare that the Earth orbits [the Sun]. They have left us with a lie, and the truth will bear itself witness that the Earth stands still for ever. . . . Since the reason that the stars orbit is to become [spiritually] perfect, being endowed with both a soul and intelligence, any challenges raised by Copernicus can be answered. They asked, could it be that the Sun and all the planets move simply to illuminate the tiny Earth? But this is not an objection, for they orbit to obtain spiritual perfection and to receive Divine influence, for this is the service they have been commanded to perform. Now, some later Christians maintain that not all the planets are intellectual or spiritual beings, and that they lack an intellect that drives them. Rather, they claim that the planets are inanimate material, just like the Earth itself . . . and because of this they mock our sages of blessed memory who stated that the planets rejoice and are happy in the performance of the will of their creator.44 Eybeschütz went on to claim that he had successfully argued against this point with a number of Christian theologians. He contended that if the planets really consisted of inanimate material, there would have been no need for the Bible to forbid witchcraft, which Eybeschütz identified with the ability to focus planetary powers. Th is was the literalist position that Eybeschütz took in the middle of the eighteenth century, and it was a position that was likely to have been influential, because “[i]n a generation which boasted of many outstanding

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rabbis and scholars, Rabbi Eybeschütz was recognized as an outstanding, if not the outstanding pre-eminent Torah authority.”45 It is more of a challenge to determine the opinion of Jacob Emden on the Copernican question. Because he owned his own printing press, Emden had a prolific literary output that, at least as far as the Copernican question goes, contained confl icting opinions. In fact, we can discern no fewer than three distinct positions taken by Emden regarding the question. Because we are able to date when Emden wrote each, what emerges suggests an initial rejection of Copernicus, followed by a warming, and ending with a complete rejection of the theory.46 Mor Uketziah, a commentary on the Shulhan Arukh (the standard code of Jewish law), was among Emden’s earliest works. He started writing it in 1716 at the age of nineteen, although it was not published until 1761.47 On the very fi rst page of the work, Emden wrote, “there is no time during the twenty-four hours of the day during which the heavenly sphere makes one revolution, in which it is not midnight in some location.”48 Th is sentence most likely describes a Ptolemaic model in which the rotation of the spheres (and not the Earth) is the cause for day and night. (However, it may also be a description of the apparent movement of the stars across the sky.) Understood in this literal way, this sentence is the earliest in Emden’s vast output that describes his thoughts on the model of the universe.49 The second phase of Emden’s thinking on the matter can be found in his commentary on the siddur, the Jewish prayer book. Emden began work on this in 1741 at the age of forty-four and completed it three years later, so its contents represent his thinking over this period. Tucked away toward the end of the commentary, in a section called the Ma’amadot, he penned an explanation of the opening verses of Genesis. The Ma’amadot are readings taken from the Bible and Talmud, arranged to be recited each day of the week. Emden included them in his siddur commentary to reach out to the less intellectually sophisticated reader, “the ignorant who do not study, or whose nature left them unsuited for intensive Torah study and were created to engage in business.”50 Th is made Emden’s inclusion of a favorable reference to Copernicus more remarkable, because by his own admission, this section was not aimed at the intellectual or religious elite: “And God called the dry area land (arez)” [Gen. 1:10]. Some explain [the word arez comes from] the word raz [to run]. And this is the explanation of the sages [Gen. Rabbah 5 who explain that the land] runs to perform the will of its maker. Th is also supports the opinion of the new astronomers that the Earth orbits. And this does not contradict verse “And the Earth stands [still] forever” [Eccles. 1:4], as I will explain elsewhere. 51

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Emden’s openness to the new astronomy seems to accord with his position on the natural sciences, which he felt “constitute a permitted and commendable body of knowledge, necessary to observe the plan of the Lord and His great deeds which are wondrous.”52 But as we shall soon see, Emden was willing to criticize secular knowledge when he believed that it conflicted with Jewish laws or values, or even when, in his estimation, it had not proven itself as worthy of respect. Although he did not reference Tuviah Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviah, it was in that work (published some thirty-four years earlier) that this rabbinic homily found in Bereshit Rabbah about the Earth running to do the will of its maker was fi rst raised in reference to the debate over the motion of the Earth. In that work, which adopted a strongly anti-Copernican position, Cohen had written that he found it difficult to explain this statement. Both Emden and Cohen took a literalist approach to the interpretation of aggadic (homiletic) statements, and each found it a challenge to interpret texts that disagreed with their astronomy. Emden’s brief discussion here clearly suggests that, at least for a period of time, he fi rmly believed in the heliocentric model and told his readers that he would return at a later time to this subject in more detail. But in his siddur, Emden was not consistent. Elsewhere he explained the phrase from Psalms, “the Sun forms a tent for them” in this way: “The word tent [ohel] is related to the word light [orah] . . . for all seven planets are illuminated by the Sun, which lies at their center. And the order of the planets [starting with the outermost] is Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon.”53 Th is description is pure Ptolemaic astronomy, with the Sun and all the planets orbiting the Earth, and to fi nd it in the same book in which Emden supported the Copernican model is puzzling. 54 There are perhaps two possible explanations for this: The fi rst is that Emden did not personally subscribe to the Copernican model. His explanation of the relationship between the word for Earth (arez) and the word to run (raz) was for the benefit of Jewish Copernicans, of whom Emden was not one. A second possibility is that in this period of his life, Emden did indeed subscribe to the Copernican model, and his contrary description of a Ptolemaic system was a result of poor editing on his part. If Emden was a Copernican, even briefly, he returned to this topic with a very different att itude later in his life, and this period represents the fi nal phase of his published thoughts. In 1751, during the protracted batt le with Eybeschütz and his alleged Sabbatian sympathies, Emden published a commentary on Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers). 55 Here Emden questioned not only the Earth’s mobility but the entire enterprise of astronomy and its ability to tell us anything about the nature of the universe: “For this is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations” (Deut. 4:6). What wisdom is in the eyes of the nations? The calculation

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[of the start] of the seasons [and the position of the constellations] etc.” [TB. Shabbat 75a] . . . this [type of calculation] is the wisdom of astronomy among the other nations of the world. But I am very reluctant to att ribute this obscene knowledge to the rabbis of blessed memory. 56 God forbid that the holy rabbis would boast of themselves [that they understood] the wisdom of Gentiles. These ideas of the non-Jews are based on nothing of substance, and just come into their minds . . . they are extremely confused about these things, and they acknowledge that there is no objective truth [corresponding to their astronomical models of the spheres] . . . some question the existence of the daily sphere, and there are many questions about this branch of knowledge, so [astronomers] are split into many different factions. They did not stop from creating new ideas, until they created a completely new astronomy, unlike anything that could have previously been imagined (although some believe that among the most ancient astronomers were those who thought like Copernicus). But whatever the case, it is not correct to call this “wisdom” in any way. For in the end this is all conjecture and imagination and differences of opinion . . . [astronomy] is not worthy of being described as a crown of Truth, and the sages of long ago would not have crowned themselves with it. . . . The real truth is that [the talmudic explanation of the verse in Deuteronomy which says] “calculation [of the start] of the seasons [and the position of the constellations]” means the calculations needed to create the calendar. These were determined by the rabbis, of blessed memory, and given to us in exile, and concerning this specific knowledge there was a vow never to reveal it to the Gentiles. Th is is quite unlike the false wisdom of astronomy that has been made known to the Gentiles. 57 Emden’s words require careful analysis. He starts by quoting the talmudic statement that by studying astronomy, the Jews display a skill that Gentiles acknowledge as a form of “wisdom.” This talmudic passage was widely quoted in Jewish works on astronomy not only to demonstrate the permissibility of the study of this discipline, but also the requirement to do so. Emden’s unprecedented analysis questioned the entire enterprise of astronomy for two reasons: In the fi rst place, it is an area of expertise practiced by Gentiles, and “God forbid that the holy rabbis would boast of themselves [that they understood] the wisdom of Gentiles.” Th is claim is counter to the legend that astronomy was a uniquely Jewish field, the foundation of which began with Abraham and was passed down to the rabbis. 58 In addition to this, the enterprise bears no relation to reality; astronomers propose various theories to explain their observations,

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and none seem especially convincing. Th is criticism is extended to the new astronomy, which Emden does not specifically condemn, but falls within the deficiencies of astronomy in general. As a result, Emden was forced to create a new explanation for the talmudic statement, having taken the radical step of removing astronomy from the purview of Jewish thought. He did this by interpreting the verse in Deuteronomy, “For this is your wisdom and understanding in the eyes of the nations” as referring not to astronomy but rather to the skills needed to create the Jewish calendar. Emden actually continued his explanation with a criticism of the non-Jewish calendar: “They were forced to change the calculation of their calendars a number of times, since their holidays fell in the wrong season. But in the calculations using the secrets of intercalation of the rabbis there would never be occasion to change anything. For it is a statute for Israel that will never be changed, not even by a hair’s breadth.”59 From these three texts then, it appears that Emden’s att itude toward the Copernican model vacillated, but without new evidence, the precise reasons for his later skepticism about the truth of any astronomical theory will remain unknown.60

Hatam Sofer The statement in Bereshit Rabbah that “the Earth runs to do the will of its maker” was also the subject of interpretation by one of the most reactionary rabbinic leaders of the late eighteenth century, Moses Sofer (1762–1839), better known as Hatam Sofer, after the title of his most famous work.61 He was born in Frankfurt where he was taught by, among others, Pinhas Hurwitz (not to be confused with his namesake, the author of Sefer Haberit), who was a fierce opponent of the Haskalah movement.62 In 1806, Sofer was appointed rabbi in the Hungarian town of Pressburg, and it was there that he spent the rest of his life. He founded a yeshivah that eventually grew to be the largest in Europe and educated many future rabbinic leaders who themselves fought the Haskalah and the early Reform movement. Among the most commonly remembered teachings of Sofer was “that which is new is forbidden by the Torah,”63 but despite his reactionary reputation, he was not uniformly critical of new knowledge.64 From Sofer’s grandson, we have testimony about his grandfather’s keen interest in the sciences and medicine in general, and in astronomy in particular: He knew geometry, algebra and kiddush hahodesh [the laws of the sanctification of the new month]. . . . He understood astronomy and physics, and began to write a book about these subjects for his students so they could study from it . . . but after Sefer Haberit was printed

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[in 1797] he reviewed it from beginning to end and showed it to his students. He told them that if they wanted to fi ll themselves with these various areas of study they should buy the book. “We all owe a debt of gratitude to the author whose work has given me a great deal of free time, for I no longer have to write a book like this for you. . . .”65 Even if the author was engaged in a hagiographic exaggeration of his grandfather’s abilities, it is likely that the description of Moses Sofer’s evaluation of Sefer Haberit is accurate, given the astonishing popularity of that book. As we saw in the last chapter, Sefer Haberit gave the Copernican question serious attention, and Sofer also considered the problem of the movement of the Earth. In his commentary on the Torah, Torat Mosheh, published some forty years after his death, Sofer rejected the Copernican model on the basis that the universe was created for humanity in general and the Jews in particular. Th is being the case, it was only fitt ing that the universe would serve humanity in, as it were, a supporting role. Sofer had likely fi rst encountered this notion in Hurwitz’s Sefer Haberit. The verse that allowed Sofer to comment upon the Copernican model was found in Deuteronomy (4:19): “And lest you look up to the sky and behold the Sun and the Moon and the stars, all of the heavenly bodies, you must not be lured into bowing down to them or serving them, which the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the heavens.” Th is may be explained through what is stated by Copernicus, one of the wise Gentiles, who stated that the Earth orbits to receive the light of the Sun, for the pure Sun would not orbit and serve the Earth. Some have brought experimental evidence against him, for if the Earth is moving, why when an arrow is shot toward a bird striking it and causing it to fall [would it fall to the spot under it]? Since the Earth is moving [the spot under the bird when it was shot] has moved. Th is objection can be met since some say that the world and all that is on it moves, including the air. . . . But the idea which springs from his thoughts, namely that the greater should not serve the lesser only makes sense according to Gentile thoughts. But we, the Children of Israel believe the opposite . . . humanity and Israel, God’s holy people, are the entire reason for the creation, and the world was only created for them. The land and all that is on it, the spheres of the heavens and the fi rmaments were all created for the benefit of the Earth. Consequently, it is only fitt ing that other parts of creation serve the parts where Israel dwells. As a result all the other worlds are united as one with but a single purpose. . . . Th is is the meaning of the verse

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when it states, “which the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the heavens”; For them [creation] is divided, whereas for us [creation] is unified.66 Sofer’s position is noteworthy for his clarification of common motion, which had so puzzled earlier critics of Copernicus. Even though it broke the flow of his explanation, Sofer felt the need for this brief digression to explain that everything on the Earth shares a common motion as the planet moves through space, and it demonstrates that Sofer had more than a passing knowledge of the issues. Th is, however, is the extent to which Sofer was willing to address the experimental evidence. Far more important was the development of the notion of what we might term a “homocentric” universe. Pinhas Hurwitz had fi rst suggested this in his Sefer Haberit as an explanation for a geocentric universe: “All of the planets were only created for the sake of this Earth, and everything was created for the sake of mankind on the Earth . . . even if the purpose of these other heavenly creations is not always clear to us.”67 For Sofer, this reason alone was enough to decide the issue. Sofer did not only follow in the footsteps of Sefer Haberit; He was also sufficiently impressed by Jacob Emden’s commentaries to refer to them in one of his response: “And God called the dry area land [arez]” [Gen. 1:10]. The sages said: Why is the land called arez? Because it runs [raz] to do the will of its maker [Gen. Rabbah 5:8]. Our teacher Ya’avez [R. Jacob Emden] . . . stated “that this is a proof for those who support Copernicus that the Earth orbits. And do not bring a counter argument from the verse ‘And the Earth stands [still] forever’ [Eccles. 1:4], as I will explain elsewhere.” Now, since he [Emden] stated that there is no counter argument from “And the Earth stands [still] forever” in my humble opinion it would seem that he is correct. The verse [in Genesis] does not describe the movement of the Earth in orbit, for even according to this opinion the understanding is not just that the Earth turns on its axis, but that the entire sphere [carrying the Earth] moves in orbit, with the Earth at its center. Th is is like an onion made of concentric leaves. Should the entire onion move in a circle and around its axis, the center could still be said to be at rest, even if the onion moves around it. Since it [the center of the onion] does not move about [relative to the rest of the onion] it may be described as at rest. In the same way the Earth is at rest and does not move relative to the entire sphere. The water and wind may have their own movements rather than the Earth; therefore it is [also] stated “And the Earth stands [still] forever.”

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Nevertheless, it may [also] be said that the Earth runs to do the will of its maker, meaning the entire sphere—called arez—is said to run to do the will of its maker. I do not, however, like this explanation [reconciling the two verses]. For were it the case [that the Earth moved] why is the land called arez only after the water is gathered up [in the account of creation in the fi rst chapter of Genesis]? It should have been called arez immediately after it was created. Rather the rabbis meant another idea. At the time [of creation] the water was gathered up to form streams, rivers, seas and springs, and the land elsewhere formed mounds and depressions that would hold the water. It is these mounds of dry land that were called arez that runs to do the will of its maker. I am very surprised to learn of a Christian scholar who has brought a proof to this end, namely that it makes more sense that the Earth moves around the Sun which is many times larger than it, rather than that the Sun which is many times larger than the Earth move in orbit around it. But I do not understand this. Let the Sun have some movement, for it is impossible that it be fi xed, having neither a daily orbit nor an orbit that does not move at all either south or north, and that the Earth undergoes all of these movements. The Sun must have some element of motion, and this being the case, let us ascribe movement to that which already moves [i.e., the Sun] rather than to that which is stationary [i.e., the Earth]. For we have never heard [of evidence] that the Earth moves. Nevertheless, I am unable to disprove neither Copernicus nor those who are against him, for both sides have wonderful proofs. . . .68 In this passage, Sofer rejected the Copernican model, even while agreeing with Emden’s analysis. He did this by imagining a Ptolemaic system with the Earth at its center. Because the spheres around the Earth move en masse, Sofer suggested this is the reason the midrash ascribed the Earth as “running to do the will of its maker.” Then Sofer noted that although the opening verse of Genesis uses the word “arez,” God is described as calling the dry land arez only in verse nine, after the waters under the skies are gathered into one place. From here, he concluded that the term refers not to the Earth, but rather to what lies on the surface, the dirt we refer to as earth. He does not explain further what the midrash might mean, and it is of course not clear how mounds of earth run anywhere in the performance of the will of God. Th is explanation was a clear enough rejection of the Copernican model, but Sofer then continued on somewhat of a tangent. He referenced an unnamed “Christian scholar” and the suggestion that a smaller object would always orbit a larger

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one. Th is scholar is certainly not Copernicus, whom he has already mentioned by name, and is most likely none other than Isaac Newton, whose Principia contained the law of universal gravitation.69 Although Sofer did not mention the concept of gravitation, he alluded to it in his discussion of the orbits of the Earth and the Sun. Sofer then insisted that the Sun must move in some way, without bringing any evidence to support this notion. For example, he could have mentioned the fact that Galileo had described the movement of sunspots as supporting the suggestion that the Sun revolved on its axis. But Sofer never mentioned this.70 Sofer was simply certain that the Sun must move in some way and then built on this certainty. Because the Sun moves in some direction, he ascribed all apparent movement of the Sun to the Sun itself, rather than to the Earth. Finally, and without citing any support, Sofer admitted that he is uncertain as to which argument is more persuasive “since both sides have wonderful proofs.” All of this suggests that Sofer may have learned a great deal more about the Copernican debate than he was prepared to admit in writing, but that despite this, he chose a position that was partly anti-Copernican and partly agnostic. 71 It would be up to Sofer’s students to demonstrate what their teacher had really believed.

Copernicus and the Students of Hatam Sofer Despite Sofer’s own declaration of his uncertainty, at least one of his students remained convinced that Sofer was a staunch anti-Copernican. In 1862, Israel Schlesinger (1802–1864) published a commentary on the Torah, “some of which the author heard from the mouth of the holy rabbi, teacher of all the Diaspora, our teacher Rabbi Moses Sofer, and some which are by the author himself.”72 Schlesinger defended the geocentric model and quoted his teacher Moses Sofer in support of this position: Woe to our generation who would question why the Sun would orbit the Earth. For one who believes in the Torah of Moses our teacher, may he rest in peace, and who believes that God has allowed his shekhinah [Divine Presence] to shine in the lower world [the material universe] and [believes in God] who came in a great showing on Mount Sinai, who revealed himself to humanity . . . such a person should have no trouble in understanding why the Earth would be more important than the Sun. He will believe what is clearly stated: “And God put them [the Sun and the Moon] in the skies to light up the Earth” [Gen. 1:17]. My teacher the great Rabbi Moses Sofer always had this reply at the ready. He would say that the entire enterprise of Copernicus was

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to study the stars and the like . . . and as a result [Copernicus] found no purpose for the Earth and could not understand why the Sun would orbit it. But this is not so for us, the children of Israel who study the Torah that is even greater than the Sun. It is indeed fitt ing that the Sun shine on the Earth, not for the sake of the planet, but for the sake of those who dwell on it and who study that which is even greater than the Sun. . . . The proofs of Copernicus are in no way convincing for he has no say in this matter at all. We must follow the path of our Torah, which is followed by all the statements of the rabbis and books of kabbalah. . . . God forbid that any wise Jew would accept a lie. . . .73 Moses Sofer’s teachings were not published until several years after the deaths of both Sofer and Schlesinger. However, since Schlesinger’s record mirrored Sofer’s thoughts as expressed in Torat Mosheh, it also seems likely that he accurately recorded the thoughts of his teacher. If so, and despite some statements to the contrary, we can conclude that Moses Sofer rejected the new astronomy. Given the significant numbers of Jews who would describe themselves as disciples of Sofer, it should come as no surprise that there would be some among them who would adopt a different approach to the new astronomy. Just such a disciple was Eliezer Lipman Neusatz (d. 1858), whose posthumously published May Menuhot (The Still Waters) contained an analysis of the new astronomy.74 Sofer’s son Abraham, who took over leadership of the Pressburg yeshivah after his father’s death, testified that Neusatz was one of Sofer’s “particularly special students.” 75 Despite this, Neusatz wrote a commentary in which he not only accepted the Copernican model, but also criticized those who, like his teacher Moses Sofer, refused to accept scientific models of reality. Neusatz wrote that since the Copernican model was “universally accepted,” it was inappropriate to dispute it, and that anyone who did disagree was “a boor.” He was particularly critical of the position adopted by Hurwitz in his Sefer Haberit, whose criticisms of the heliocentric model were not “worthy of a response.” Neusatz then raised an argument against scientific detractors from within the rabbinate that, although intuitive, had not previously been advanced: Who is naturally more believable, that lone author [Hurwitz] who lies secluded in his House of Study or the vast numbers of scientists and astronomers, who dedicate their lives to the study of science and who use telescopes and other experimental devices in their own House of Study—the universities. Neusatz introduced an argument about the nature of authority that was particularly sensitive, given the growth of Reform Judaism at the time and the

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resulting conservative positions taken by his teacher Moses Sofer. Neusatz posited that there was simply no place for those without scientific expertise to weigh in on a debate about which they lacked the most basic knowledge. To do so would result in being considered an ignoramus and, by implication, bring Judaism into disrepute. Neusatz explained that the Torah was written in the language of the common man, and that there were a multitude of expressions that all agreed were never to be taken literally. None of these could, therefore, be used to debate the truth of the Copernican model, which had to be decided on scientific grounds alone. He also rejected Maimonides’ position that the stationary Earth was at the center of the universe. Th is could be done without offending the Jewish tradition because, Neusatz claimed, Maimonides’ position was not an intrinsically Jewish one, but rather reflected the Greek astronomy he had absorbed. It could therefore be rejected without threatening a single Jewish claim. Neusatz was not arguing that new scientific facts and other kinds of social progress trump religious principles; he was clear that the former might only be accepted “when they do not contradict the holy Torah,” and he took a tough position against those who wanted to introduce religious reforms in the synagogue. Instead, his stance was that literalism would result in Judaism adopting an absurd position regarding contemporary science. Neusatz was also not persuaded by the argument that because the universe was created for the sake of mankind, it was only correct that the Sun orbit the Earth. Although he agreed that mankind was the pinnacle of creation, it was best to leave it up to God to decide how to arrange things and not demand that the natural order be based on a religious worldview. So far, our review of Jewish eighteenth-century thinkers has revealed a fairly mixed group. Both Barukh Lindau (reviewed in the last chapter) and Raphael Levi were strong proponents of the new astronomy. Pinhas Hurwitz was sympathetic to the Copernican system, even if he concluded that it was mistaken. The influential leaders Jonathan Eybeschütz and Moses Sofer were against it, while Jacob Emden, although initially in favor, eventually also rejected the Copernican model. The Jewish reception of Copernicanism in the eighteenth century mirrored that of the previous century. It was a story of the local Jewish reaction, and it varied in rather unpredictable ways from one decade to another and from one town to another. By the end of the eighteenth century, about a half a dozen Hebrew pro-Copernican books had been published, a number certainly smaller than books that had been written against the new astronomy.76 But the mere existence of these pro-Copernican works allowed Jews who wished to accept the heliocentric model to do so with the knowledge that there were textual precedents for their judgments. For traditional textcentered Jews, it was a written precedent that counted when advancing a position. Slowly, the Jewish Copernicans were making headway.

9

“I Have Written a Book for the Young People.” David Friesenhausen’s Mosdot Tevel

David Friesenhausen was educated in traditional yeshivot for the fi rst thirty years of his life and then spent time in a small and intellectually isolated town in northern Hungary. He was therefore an unlikely advocate for the introduction of the sciences into the traditional yeshivah curricula. Although some Jews left the ghetto to study in universities after they had spent their youths in traditional yeshivot, there was no place with a joint curriculum where traditional Jewish and secular texts could be studied together. Friesenhausen was one of the earliest proponents of the torah im derekh erez (literally “Torah together with the way of the land”) approach that advocated just such a dual yeshivah curriculum of Jewish and secular learning. He was also a most emphatic supporter of the Copernican system, which is why he enters our story. David ben Meir Cohen was born in Friesenhausen, some sixty miles northeast of Frankfurt, around 1756, and was educated in the town of Fürth, where he studied in what was then the largest yeshivah in Germany. Among his teachers were Pinhas Hurwitz and Nathan Adler, who were also influential teachers of Moses Sofer. As we have noted, Hurwitz was a staunch opponent of the Haskalah movement. Another of Friesenhausen’s teachers was Joseph Steinhart (c. 1705–1776), a man who was perhaps even more reactionary than Hurwitz. Steinhart criticized not only the Sabbatian movement, but also the Hasidim and any study of secular books. In the introduction to his responsa, Steinhart noted with sadness that the Hasidim “with their customs and actions separate themselves from the holy congregation. They have regressed, turning most of their days into holidays, and whistling and groaning during their prayers . . . .”1 Steinhart was equally critical of those who studied anything other than traditional Jewish texts. He was vehemently opposed to the study of secular philosophy and the natural sciences, which he characterized as “works 168

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of falsehood and stupidity.”2 That Steinhart was so opposed to secular studies perhaps explains why Friesenhausen did not mention him in the books that he published; this was not typical of a student, who would usually thank his teachers in print. 3 It therefore comes as somewhat of a surprise to discover that not only was Joseph Steinhart’s son Moses the author of a work that praised Copernicus, but that the elder Steinhart wrote a glowing approbation for the work, in which he congratulated his son for “clarifying many problems of astronomy concerning the Sun and Moon and the planets around the Earth.”4 Th is fact complicates any assessment of Joseph Steinhart’s opposition to natural philosophy and secular knowledge. The book by Moses was published in 1765 and was an edition of Hovot Halevavot (Duties of the Heart), a popular ethical work by Ibn-Pakuda written in the late eleventh century. Moses’ edition translated the work into Yiddish, and there was an additional section at the end of the book entitled Metaphysics, written by Steinhart, which he prefaced with a note “to you, my beloved reader”: I have pointed you to a number of natural and divine signs that suggest you should follow Copernican astronomy, that states the Earth is one of the planets that orbits following the constellations. Its revolution around its axis causes day and night. . . . I am certainly well aware that if this work reaches those who have not been illuminated by the light of wisdom and who do not see her signs, they will laugh at me and consider me a fool. . . . 5 The style and choice of Moses’ Yiddish text strongly suggest that it was adapted from a German source, although no such source is mentioned.6 For example, there is frequent mention of the Latin term “ens entium,” meaning “being of being,” or “essence of essence,” which Steinhart translated as “yahid umeyuhad,” or “single and unique.” 7 The use of this phrase demonstrates that, despite his father’s adamant opposition, Moses had studied secular philosophy. Should the reader expect a detailed exposition of the Copernican system in Yiddish, she will be disappointed; Copernicus is not the central topic of Metaphysics, which focuses primarily on the four elements and the ability of reason to provide knowledge about them. But when mentioning Copernicus, Steinhart once again warns the reader not to be surprised: Many who are inexperienced in both sciences will be shocked, especially that . . . [in] the Copernican system (systemata copernicum) the Earth is mobile and moveable, that is, it makes one movement around its axis day and night, and one in the zodiac around the Sun, which determines the four seasons of the year. 8

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Friesenhausen, with his interest in science, would certainly have seen Steinhart’s work since it had been published in the same town as the yeshivah where Friesenhausen studied. Whether this Yiddish text was responsible for kindling Friesenhausen’s interest in astronomy or merely provided confi rmation for a worldview that he had already formulated is not known, but with its publication, Copernicus had entered Yiddish literature.9

Friesenhausen’s Early Life Although we do not know whether Friesenhausen studied together with Moses Steinhart, we do know that he was married in 1783 and divorced only four years later. He then left the world of the traditional yeshivah for Berlin, where the early Haskalah movement was taking hold. He stayed in Berlin from about 1788 to 1796, during which time he was supported by Benjamin Halberstat, one of the city’s wealthy Jews. It was in Berlin that he published his fi rst book, Kelil Heshbon (A Complete Account), on algebra and trigonometry. The book made mathematics available to those who could read only Hebrew and was an important addition to the works on secular subjects published by the Berlin Juedische Freischule and its printing house.10 Berlin should have had all the elements needed to satisfy an inquisitive person like Friesenhausen, steeped in traditional Jewish learning but eager to expand and study wider, non-Jewish culture. Friesenhausen, however, grew increasingly disenchanted with the members of the Berlin Haskalah, whom he felt had rejected fundamental Jewish beliefs in God and the divine authorship of the Torah.11 Perhaps in reaction to this, he left Berlin for Hunsdorf in the Carpathian Mountains of what was then northern Hungary. Th is town had a Jewish community that had been untouched by the Haskalah, and Friesenhausen served on its rabbinic court. But he found it difficult to make a living there, and in 1808, he moved again, this time south to Ujhely, again serving on the rabbinic court.12 There he came into close contact with Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, founder of the fi rst Hasidic dynasty in Hungary and the great-great-grandfather of Joel Teitelbaum (1887– 1979), who founded the Satmar Hasidic sect. Friesenhausen spent eight years in Ujhely, during which time he observed much that he did not like about the Hasidim and Teitelbaum their leader. In later years, Friesenhausen described Teitelbaum as being “proud and always chasing after recognition, who considered the great rabbinical leaders of our time as if they were nothing . . . a man whose actions demonstrate that he is not honest in either his fear of God or his love of other Jews; who is a hypocrite, someone I recognized had a terrible temper and who got honor through the embarrassment of others.”13 In 1816, after eight unhappy years in Ujhely, Friesenhausen left in order to secure the

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publication of his second book, Mosdot Tevel (The Foundations of the World).14 Th is book had three parts; the fi rst was a review of astronomy and a defense of the Copernican model, the second an explanation of Euclid’s eleventh axiom, and the third was an autobiography and ethical will.15 Mosdot Tevel is a historical treasure, containing not only an important analysis of astronomy from a rabbi steeped in traditional Jewish learning, but also a record of both his intellectual pursuits and life for the Jews of Hungary at the start of the nineteenth century.

Reform of the Rabbinic Training Program Before examining his astronomy, it is important to note that Friesenhausen is probably best remembered, if he is remembered at all, for his attempts to introduce a new curriculum for the training of rabbis in and around Hungary.16 He dedicated a great deal of time and effort to this end, preparing a detailed curriculum in which some elements of secular study would be combined with the traditional study of Talmud and the codes of Jewish law. His goal was that all rabbis in the Hungarian empire would have to be graduates of his government-approved rabbinic schools. After several years of consideration by the Hungarian government, his proposal was rejected in 1813, after which Friesenhausen faced criticism from a wide spectrum of Jewish leaders. Those in the traditionalist camp viewed him as a dangerous reformer whose educational models would remove power from the traditional yeshivot, while those on the left viewed his reforms as not going far enough, as all but a few hours a day would be dedicated to traditional Jewish study. Perhaps Friesenhausen was simply too far ahead of his time, for ultimately his notion of combining secular and religious study was embraced by others. For example, Rabbi Azriel Hildesheimer negotiated the political realities of his day more successfully and established a rabbinic seminary in which the curriculum was very similar to that which had been proposed by Friesenhausen.17 An analysis of Friesenhausen’s writings on the Copernican system will reveal a similar story, that is, of a rabbi whose thoughts would not be mirrored in the wider Jewish society for decades.

Mosdot Tevel The importance of astronomy for Friesenhausen is clear from the title page of Mosdot Tevel. On it, he announced that part one of the book would outline “the structure of the universe according to Copernicus and describe all of

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the new fi ndings of contemporary astronomers by explaining their investigations, their proofs, or by using common sense, which any intelligent and nonstubborn person would accept.” Astronomy is the subject matter of more than half the book. Friesenhausen had spent many years writing and researching his subject, having produced a draft manuscript by 1798.18 But it took another twenty years until the book was published. As was common for those who wrote Hebrew books, prior to publication, the author had to obtain a list of subscribers who would commit to buying a copy of the work, and this took several years to complete.19 Even after Friesenhausen had obtained enough subscribers to ensure that the work was economically viable, he was unable to publish it for several years because of a series of economic misadventures. In 1817, Friesenhausen lost a significant sum of money in a complicated transaction based on wine futures, a loss that he att ributed in part to the legal decisions of Moses Teitelbaum. Having recovered economically a year or so later, Friesenhausen learned that it was considerably cheaper to print in Prague and decided to travel there in order to publish the book. However, the journey was dangerous for someone carrying a large sum of money, so Friesenhausen left his money for safekeeping with a Rabbi Oppenheim in Vienna. Th is proved to be an unfortunate decision. Oppenheim died suddenly while Friesenhausen was traveling, and Oppenheim’s wife used the book funds to pay off the family’s debts. As a result, Friesenhausen lost his money a second time, and Mosdot Tevel ended up being printed in Vienna, where, in order to save on the cost of paper, a smaller-than-usual font was used. Th is historical accident, however, allowed the author to reveal the makeup of his intended audience: “I trust that the reader will not blame me for the few pages and the small print size. What does the print size really matter? After all, I have written the book for young people and not the elderly, for whom the small print would make it difficult for them to read.”20 Friesenhausen understood that the new astronomy (like his new educational curriculum) would likely not be well received by older, more conservative readers, but that it would have a greater appeal for a new generation of Jews.

Astronomy in Mosdot Tevel Perhaps the most striking feature about the section on astronomy in Mosdot Tevel is that it is a deeply religious work.21 Friesenhausen frequently mentioned his belief in a benevolent God, and in many places, this belief frames his discussion of astronomy. For example, Friesenhausen suggested that life must exist on other planets in the solar system, “for why limit God’s glory, and suggest that He leave a large planet desolate and devoid of life?”22; elsewhere, he wrote that

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new planets are likely to be discovered beyond Saturn, “for why limit God’s ability to create another planet or two?”23 There is barely a page on which a reference does not appear to God’s wisdom, mercy, and care for mankind, often woven seamlessly into scientific discussions.24 Furthermore, the chapter on astronomy is broken up with a four-page poem to be sung at the Sabbath table describing in detail God’s handiwork and the need to praise Him. There is absolutely no doubt that this work is not that of a secular student of the Haskalah, but rather that of a profoundly religious thinker, an important point to remember as we evaluate the reception of Copernican thought among religious Jews of his period. In addition to this religious worldview, there is another feature of the work that is immediately striking: Friesenhausen simply assumes that the Copernican model is correct. Although the title page states that the work will outline astronomy according to the Copernican model, this model is neither derived nor supported. Rather, it is treated as an assumption, supported only with a passing, and somewhat tangential, single scientific fact.25 The heliocentric model is described as being more elegant than the geocentric one, and with that, the entire question of the movement of the Earth is sett led: If you were to place the Ptolemaic structure of the universe on one side of an intellectual scale and that of Copernicus on the other, and you were to understand the differences between the two systems in detail, you would see that the latter is superior to the former as gold is superior to copper. Th is advantage is both in terms of natural laws and in terms of beauty and elegance . . . Th is acceptance of the Copernican model as a given was still unusual. We have encountered it only once before in the work of Mordekhai Levison’s book Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhmah (Essay on Torah and Science), published in London in 1771.26 For Friesenhausen, there was no need to review the evidence for or against the heliocentric model. It was enough simply to state the heliocentric model as a fact, and move on. Students looking for a work to explain why the Copernican model should be accepted would be disappointed, while those who wanted a Hebrew-language digest of astronomy without extraneous diversions would perhaps have been rather pleased. Although Friesenhausen viewed the Copernican debate as long sett led, he did feel it important to explain why the study of aggadah (rabbinic legends and stories) had no bearing on astronomy. Friesenhausen repeated the legend that we have already encountered several times, in which the knowledge of astronomy was divinely revealed and then passed down in a chain of traditional teachings. Th is knowledge, however, was lost when the Jews were exiled

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from their homeland, which resulted in a dilution of certain truths regarding the nature of the universe. Consequently, even when a talmudic sage stated a fact about astronomy, its truth was not to be taken for granted. “I am often unsure,” Friesenhausen admitted, “about certain talmudic statements, like that in Beizah 4b ‘now we are expert in the phases of the Moon.’ I don’t know if this knowledge was part of an unbroken tradition or was discovered through careful study, or perhaps was learned from Gentiles who were expert in these matters.”27 Furthermore, the plethora of confl icting aggadic statements found in the Talmud may be interpreted in any number of ways. Some of these interpretations would put these aggadic statements at odds with modern astronomy, while others would make them seem to be in perfect harmony. All of this left Friesenhausen to conclude that one should not contradict a well-established principle of astronomy on the basis of any aggadic statement, as long as the principle is wellfounded, logical and in keeping with observations of the movements of the stars. Even though texts describing the days of creation are founded in holiness and hint at the most loft y and sublime ideals, most Jews cannot understand them. Their meaning has only been revealed to those with special qualities. Consequently these texts can never be used to challenge a single fact of astronomy.28 As Friesenhausen understood matters, even though long ago, the rabbis had once understood the nature of the universe, they could no longer do so on the basis of any type of religious study. Consequently, the entire enterprise of explaining how biblical texts may be reconciled with astronomy was pointless, and “any matter that does not contradict the written or oral law should be decided by logic alone.”29 Th is was a radical separation of religion and science of the kind that had been formulated by Mordekhai Levison in his just mentioned Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahochma that we examined in chapter 6. It would imply that those Jews, including Maimonides and later the kabbalists, who had accepted the Ptolemaic model, had been mistaken. Th is suggestion might have troubled those who saw kabbalistic teachings as being in some way exempt from the general rule that exile caused the Jews to lose their divinely given wisdom. Friesenhausen was careful to suggest, therefore, that the new astronomy was not a threat to the essential core of kabbalistic thought. The acceptance of the Ptolemaic model and its frequent representation in kabbalistic works was entirely accidental, and had occurred because only that model was available at the time. “Had the contemporary model of the universe become known during their time,” Friesenhausen wrote, “they would have rejected Ptolemy and agreed with the model we have today, for this model is of no consequence to the

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understanding of kabbalah.”30 Of course, the suggestion that logic and the powers of rational argument alone should sett le any dispute that does “not contradict the written or oral law” does not immediately imply that scientific matters are no longer under the jurisdiction of a religious worldview. In order for that to occur, it would need to be clear that the written and oral law, the Torah and the Talmuds, were not at odds with whatever issue was being debated, and as we have noted from the start of our exploration, some ways of reading the Bible suggested that the Earth was motionless. Friesenhausen glossed over this rather important point, preferring instead to show in broad strokes how a religious Jew might accept modern scientific statements. Neither was he concerned that there remained large gaps in the scientific corpus in general and in astronomy in particular: “Even though we do not yet know of the law that describes the orbits of the planets, and we do not have precise measures of the periods of their orbits, soon these things will be known to our children and grandchildren.”31 The scientific practice of astronomy was a young discipline, and there was much that remained to be discovered. “The principles that were established over two hundred years ago were not precise and cannot be used to build a foundation of accurate observations for today. . . . But if our descendents carefully follow the footsteps of those who went before them, the work will be much easier, and they will discover and publicize all of these [scientific] laws.”32 Mosdot Tevel, then, was a deeply religious work that managed to invoke the divine and also suggest a radical separation of what Stephen Jay Gould would later call the two magisteria of science and religion. 33 As a work of science, it was more or less up to date and provided the reader with an outline of the outdated Ptolemaic model, the accepted Copernican one, and the size of the planets and the characteristics of their orbits and moons. Friesenhausen enthusiastically shared the news of the discovery of what were thought to be two new planets in 1801 and 1802. These planets, named Ceres and Pallas, were given delightful Hebrew names by Friesenhausen, Ze’iri (“The Younger One”) and Pila’i (“The Amazing One”), but about fi ft y years later, they were reclassified as asteroids. 34 Friesenhausen described the discovery of Uranus by Hershel, the nature of comets in general, and Halley’s comet in particular, and Kepler’s third law of planetary motion. He also mentioned the kilometer as a unit of measurement, making him perhaps the fi rst rabbinic figure to do so. 35 In addition, he supported the notion of there being life on other planets within the solar system, using, as we noted earlier, an argument based entirely on his religious beliefs—“for why limit God’s glory, and suggest that he leave a large planet desolate and devoid of life?”36 It is interesting to note that he despaired of the ability to observe any planets orbiting remote stars “even if the telescope was improved many times over compared with that of today.” Th is was a pessimistic forecast, and it turned out to be quite wrong.37 And while Gustav Holst

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composed the only example of a symphonic tribute to the solar system, David Friesenhausen composed what is certainly the only zemirah, a song to be sung during one of the three Sabbath meals, on the same subject. 38 The full text, translated for the fi rst time, can be found in the appendix. Here is just one of the fi fteen stanzas that make up this highly alliterative poem: The joy of the Earth the third planet in your system, With Mercury and Venus rejoice Mars, Ceres and Pallas turn to you and sing out your glory Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus39 laugh out at the glory of your firmament On this Sabbath day of rest, your daughters roar out to the creator40 Ever the believer, Friesenhausen reworked the argument raised by the geocentrists that, because God created the universe for the sake of humanity, it was only fitt ing that they lived on the planet at the center of that universe.41 Now pay attention to this, look to the skies and you will see God’s great works . . . Th is planet Earth is tiny and inconsequential, and it is lost among the infi nite number of planets. But your soul should rejoice at God’s creation, and your tongue should praise his righteousness. For among all of these creations he chose Israel on this tiny dot and made them holy with his holiness. He gave them his holy and pure Torah with its just laws, and called them “my fi rstborn children” in order that he dwell with them forever.42 Th is geocentric argument about the importance of humanity’s position in the universe had been given before, and it would be articulated again sixty years later by Rabbi Reuven Landau, whom we shall encounter in the next chapter. The fact that the Earth’s position was neither central nor important would, so it was feared, lead to the existential conclusion that human beings were utterly unimportant and alone, adrift on an insignificant planet. The astronomer Carl Sagan expressed exactly this in his book The Pale Blue Dot, which was also the title of a famous picture taken—at Sagan’s suggestion—by pointing the camera on Voyager 1 back toward Earth as the spacecraft sped beyond Saturn. At this distance, the Earth would appear as just a point of light, but thought Sagan, . . . precisely because of the obscurity of our world thus revealed, such a picture might be worth having. . . . Our posturings, our imagined selfimportance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in

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all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.43 Friesenhausen, writing close to two centuries earlier, had turned this existential fear of insignificance on its head. Although the Earth was indeed tiny and seemingly inconsequential, God had chosen to give the Torah to those who inhabit it; this restored humanity to a place of importance. But although this might save the reader from despair, Friesenhausen cautioned against any form of spiritual arrogance: How could you believe that that the universe was created only for mankind who live like lowly worms on the surface of this tiny dot? And that which the Rabbis have stated [that the world was only created] for the sake of Israel and the Torah . . . means that through the merit of the Torah and Israel who observe it were all the worlds and their inhabitants created, so that God may do good to them all, together with doing good for Israel.44 Friesenhausen ended his review of astronomy with a return to the theme of the special role that the Jewish people played in the universe. God had chosen to give the people of Israel “his pure Torah and mizvot, and his laws and just statutes.” Friesenhausen then reminded the reader that among the Jewish people, the Cohanim, or priestly class, had a special role to play: “He appointed the Cohanim to serve him. They would rebuke the people if they wandered from the correct path, and they would atone for their sins and transgressions. They would admonish the people with kindness and great gentleness as a parent reprimands his child, so that they would return to him [God] with a whole heart.”45 Th is detail of the role of the Cohanim as spiritual beacons seems out of place here, until we remember that Friesenhausen was born into the priestly caste and was a Cohen. With this in mind, the closing paragraph can now be better understood. It was the author’s reminder (to himself and to his readers) that his role was to ensure the correct beliefs and actions of his fellow Jews. In this context, it is striking that this reminder came not in a work of traditional textual commentary or exegesis, but rather at the end of a primer on astronomy. It demonstrates once again the importance that Friesenhausen placed on his educational task. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Friesenhausen’s Mosdot Tevel and its wide readership might have been all that was needed to ensure the acceptance of Copernican thought among traditional Jews. Friesenhausen had worked for years, in vain as it turned out, to promote a dual curriculum for rabbinic students, and his enthusiastic promotion of the new astronomy

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faced an uncertain and perhaps similar future. If the new astronomy was to become accepted by traditional Jews, there were two problems that needed to be addressed more thoroughly than Friesenhausen had done. The fi rst was to fi nd scientific support for the model, which still remained open to criticism on the basis of a lack of convincing experimental evidence. The second was to develop a more structured philosophical approach whereby Jews could reinterpret biblical verses without rejecting their fundamental belief in the inerrancy of the Bible. Despite his acceptance of the heliocentric model, Friesenhausen did not address either of these issues in detail, but both were addressed with a renewed vigor as Copernicanism gained more support in the nineteenth century. Th is support resulted from two events that occurred within three years of each other: the removal of De Revolutionibus from the Catholic Church’s Index, and the accurate measurement of stellar parallax. The former paved the way for Catholics to accept the Copernican model, and the latter provided the fi rst experimental support for it. Friesenhausen would have welcomed both.

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The Nineteenth Century Copernicus without Hesitation

In 1820, the same year that David Friesenhausen’s Mosdot Tevel was published, the Catholic Church became involved in a heated controversy. In January of that year, the Church refused to give its imprimatur to a book on astronomy written by Giuseppe Settele, who served as a canon in the Roman Catholic Church. Settele’s book was based on lectures he gave as professor of optics and astronomy at La Sapenzia University in Rome, and in the book he stated, as a fact, that the Earth moved. Settele appealed the decision to Pope Pius VII, who in turn referred the matter to the Inquisition. After a lengthy investigation, the Inquisition fi nally approved the book in December of 1820, although the Master of the Sacred Palace, who was in effect Rome’s chief book censor, refused to sign the imprimatur. Instead, the Pope’s deputy bishop, the vicar apostolic, signed it.1 The matter did not end there, and barely two years later in September 1822, the Inquisition ruled that teaching that the Earth moved was not in itself a reason to refuse the imprimatur to publish. However, this reassessment did not extend to books that had already been listed on the Index; consequently, works by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Foscarini, and Zuniga remained banned. In 1835, the Church fi nally lifted the ban when a new Index published under Pope Gregory XVI omitted these five authors. For the fi rst time in more than two centuries, the work of Copernicus was no longer forbidden to Catholics.

The Industrial Revolution Whether the relaxation of the ban led to an increased interest in Europe in the heliocentric model or was a result of it, there is no doubt that throughout the nineteenth century public interest in astronomy and science in general grew around the world. Th is was the heyday of the industrial revolution, a 179

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time in which profound changes in virtually every walk of life occurred, fi rst in England and then throughout Europe and North America. Railways were built, factories sprang up, and scientists determined that cholera was associated with contaminated water. Hydraulic cement was perfected, allowing canals to be more easily and rapidly built; this was an invention so important that “it could be said to be the beginning of American technological history.”2 Sheetglass manufacturing was improved; this allowed a huge iron-and-glass greenhouse covering nineteen acres in London to be erected in 1850, nicknamed the Crystal Palace. At the beginning of the century in the White House, Thomas Jefferson installed three of the fi rst flushing toilets to be found in America, and toward its end, the Eiffel Tower was completed in Paris. Gaslights were installed in most large cities in America and Britain by 1850, and for the fi rst time in human history, people could see comfortably indoors. As a result, they also read more, and there was a sudden and sustained boom in the publication of newspapers, magazines, and books. In Britain alone, the number of newspapers and periodicals increased from 150 to almost 5,000 by the end of the century. 3

Nineteenth-Century Experimental Support for the Copernican Model Along with remarkable improvements in everyday life, there were considerable advances in the attempt to verify the Copernican model of the solar system, which by now was universally accepted within the scientific community. The most important work in this area was that of the German astronomer and mathematician Friedrich Bessel, who calculated stellar distances by measuring parallax. Although it had long been known that this phenomenon should occur, it had never actually been measured. Th is was a serious challenge to the heliocentric model, and it had already been noted by Copernicus himself; he explained (correctly as it turned out) that the distances from the Earth to the stars are simply too vast for any change in the Earth’s position to cause the effect of parallax, because any alteration in a star’s apparent position would be too small to measure.4 Th is changed in 1838 when Bessel, using improved telescopes, succeeded in measuring stellar parallax and, while doing so, calculated stellar distances. He was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for his work, which was described by the Society’s president as “the greatest and most glorious triumph which practical astronomy has ever witnessed.”5 Soon after Bessel’s discovery, a second and even more famous demonstration that the Earth moved was shown to the public, one with such a powerful

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visual impact that it can be found to this day in science museums around the world.6 The French physicist Leon Foucault demonstrated that the plane of a swinging pendulum appeared to move relative to the Earth underneath. As there was nothing causing the pendulum to change its direction, Foucault concluded that it was the surface of the Earth moving beneath the pendulum that was responsible. Th is experiment, originally performed in Foucault’s basement, was announced in Paris on February 3, 1851. Foucault staged a spectacular demonstration at the Pantheon, and other physicists soon repeated the experiment. For example, another display of Foucault’s pendulum took place in Rome in the same year; this time it was demonstrated in the Church of Saint Ignatius in the Vatican itself, which had been the epicenter of the Catholic anti-Copernican movement. In 1879 in Groningen, a city in the north of the Netherlands, H. Kamerlingh Onnes, who would later go on to win a Nobel prize in 1913 for his work on the properties of matter at low temperatures, presented a classic paper on the motion of the pendulum and the movement of the Earth.7 Foucault’s pendulum was a serious experimental challenge for geocentricism, for it provided the fi rst experimental evidence that the Earth moved on its axis, even though it did not prove that the Earth moved around the Sun.8

Copernicanism in Hebrew Literature in the Nineteenth Century Given all of these remarkable changes, it is litt le wonder that in the nineteenth century more Jewish books assessing the Copernican model were published than ever before, and nearly all acknowledged this model as being correct. At least eighteen pro-Copernican Hebrew works were published in the nineteenth century.9 We have already noted David Friesenhausen’s Mosdot Tevel published in Vienna in 1820, in which he described at length the Copernican system and praised its advantages,10 but there were many more examples throughout the century: Moses Juwel’s 1836 Limudei Hateva (The Study of Nature) and Isaac Reggio’s Iggrot Yashar (The Letters of Yahsar) published in the same year; Abraham Warshavski’s 1864 Hakirei Tevel (Investigations of the Earth); Hillel Kahane’s 1880 Gelilot Ha’aretz (The Revolutions of World); Meshulam Haberman’s 1884 She’erit Ya’akov (The Remnants of Jacob); and Dov Ber Rukenstein’s 1898 Mesilot Hame’orot (The Paths of the Lights). All were deeply religious works rooted in traditional Jewish texts that, at the same time, accepted the new astronomy without hesitation. For example, the entire second part of Rukenstein’s two-part book was an explanation of the Copernican model and Kepler’s rules of planetary motion, “which are accepted by all the astronomers and scientists of our time.”11

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Isaac Reggio and the Critical Role of Science in Biblical Commentary One especially notable work was Isaac Samuel Reggio’s Iggrot Yashar (The Letters of Yashar), published in 1836.12 Reggio (1784–1855) was born in Goriza in what is now northern Italy, and by all accounts, had an impressive intellectual ability.13 He received a traditional Jewish education from his father who served as the community rabbi, as well as a secular education. He was fluent in several languages and was a gifted mathematician, and a marriage into a wealthy family assured him of a life in which he could pursue his intellectual curiosity without worrying about the need to fi nd employment. After his father’s death, he was persuaded to assume the position of rabbi of Goriza, where he served for ten years before he was ousted in 1850.14 He wrote widely in the journals of his day and published several books, including a radical commentary on the Book of Esther, an Italian translation of both the Torah and several books of the Bible, and a defense of the divinity of Jewish law.15 Reggio also supported the establishment of a rabbinic school that taught philosophy, zoology, and history, and one of his works was on the importance of the study of philosophy and the sciences.16 One example of the importance that Reggio placed on the sciences was his support for Copernicanism, which he published in Iggrot Yashar. Reggio wrote that new scientific understandings of the world gave his generation an advantage over those that preceded it, because they were now able to comprehend things that had previously remained mysterious.17 He then argued against using any commentary or explanation of biblical passages that was based on what had been proven to be erroneous Greek science, including those written by Maimonides: “Since the explanations that were suggested were based on ancient understandings which are false, they are utterly worthless [betelim umevutalim], they are not valid and do not exist any longer [lo sheririn velo kayamin].”18 Reggio’s phraseology here would be instantly recognizable to his Jewish audience, for it comes from the Kol Nidrei service at the start of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. Th at he chose to invoke the words from this well-known prayer with its stern associations demonstrated the seriousness with which Reggio took the task of persuading his fellow Jews to adopt Copernicanism. Nowadays, he wrote, it has been demonstrated that there is no such thing as epicycles and the spheres of the planets, and Maimonides’ model of the universe with the Earth at the center “is untrue and is not consistent in any way with reality.”19 It was Reggio’s next suggestion that was perhaps the most important and most radical for the time. In order to avoid an incorrect explanation of the

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Bible based on poor science, it was a religious duty to keep up to date with science and all that it taught about the natural world: Since Maimonides chose to base his commentary on the prophecies on human knowledge as it was understood in his time, this is a clear sign that there is a relationship between the wisdom contained in the Torah and general knowledge. A deeper understanding of one will result in a deeper understanding of the other. I mean by this that an understanding of natural science will result in a deeper understanding of, and appreciation for, matters that relate to the Torah. As a result of this, the present generation has an advantage over those prior to it. Since it has a better understating of the natural sciences, it also has an advantage with regard to divine matters. . . .20 Reggio was suggesting that without science, a Jew was condemned to make error after error in his interpretation of the Bible, and by implication in his understanding of Jewish law. It was therefore not only permissible to study the sciences, but such study was in fact a prerequisite to the study of Jewish texts. We have previously noted that in 1771, Mordekhai Levison published his Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhma, in which he stated that the study of the Torah and the study of the natural world were two separate exercises. Levison was certainly in favor of the study of the natural world; he was, after all, a physician. But he suggested that the study of Torah should take fi rst place, and that only when it had been fully mastered should a person turn to a study of things scientific.21 Writing some fi ft y years later, Reggio expanded the importance of scientific study for Jews. It could not wait until religious texts had been interpreted, because in order to understand the true meaning of those texts, a scientific background was required. Religious study without the sciences would result in certain error. The obvious problem with this approach is that, as Reggio himself noted, science is a changing field. What was thought to be scientifically accurate in an earlier era is certain to be updated or even rejected in a later one. To use an example that would have been familiar to Reggio, the ancient Greek belief that the five elements of Air, Fire, Water, Earth, and Ether make up the universe was, by the late eighteenth century, shown to be incorrect when the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier demonstrated the existence of hydrogen, oxygen, and other elements. How then could a Jew wishing to derive the correct meaning of a text hope to avoid adopting a scientific understanding that would later be overturned? Th is was, after all, the very error that Maimonides had made when he based his biblical commentary on what was the accepted paradigm of the day, namely Greek science. Reggio answered this objection by noting that

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contemporary scientific knowledge was based on experiments. In this way, it was qualitatively different from previous knowledge about the natural world, which had been based on conjecture and speculation without experimental support. Reggio claimed, rather na ïvely that, in contrast to what had previously passed as science, modern scientific theories were so accurate that they could no longer be falsified: We have complete and clear proofs that verify the truth of these modern theories beyond any shadow of doubt. For as you know regarding astronomy, experiment has shown that we understand it to a greater degree than did earlier generations. As a result of the convincing proofs that we have, the opinion of Copernicus, namely that the planets orbit the Sun and that the Moon orbits the Earth, is true and will be true for eternity. Th is is the reason that (aside from the authors of the Ma’aseh Tuviah and Matteh Dan) you will not fi nd anyone stubborn enough to question the Copernican hypothesis, which is true. He who denies it denies the truth, and his is but a minority opinion. 22 Reggio’s position amounted to a claim that the science of his time was infallible, and so its claims could confidently be used to understand biblical texts. His assertion about the nature of science and the degree of its sophistication was overstated to a remarkable degree, but Reggio saw his approach as a corrective for the way in which Jews had ignored science.

Samson Raphael Hirsch Reggio would surely have approved of one rabbinic leader who embraced the heliocentric model. Th is was Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–1888), the leader of the neo-Orthodox movement in Germany in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century. The movement stood in opposition to both the Reform movement of the time, as well as the conservative reaction to it that had been championed by Moses Sofer. Hirsch described his approach as “Torah im derekh erez,” and he championed the program in which the ideal path to religious fulfi llment was the study of Torah combined with an honorable profession and a respectful embrace of secular culture.23 Torah im derekh erez became the basis of a system of schools in Berlin, as well as the slogan of several congregations that followed Hirsch’s model. Given the intellectual foundations of the movement, it would be expected to have taken a pro-Copernican stand, and it is not surprising therefore to fi nd that this is precisely the position that was adopted by Hirsch.24

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Many of Hirsch’s educational ideas and thoughts about the Orthodox response to the Reform movement were summarized in The Nineteen Letters, which was fi rst published in 1836 and remains in print today. The third letter is on the subject of recognizing God through the marvels of creation, and in it Hirsch describes the Earth as a “swift runner.” The basis of this was the connection between the Hebrew word for Earth, “arez ,” and the root for run, “raz .”25 We have noted that precisely the same exegesis was made by Jacob Emden in his siddur published in 1745, and was later mentioned by Moses Sofer, and although Hirsch did not elaborate further, this allusion would leave the reader with no doubt that the Earth was in motion.26 In his commentary on Psalms, Hirsch expressed agreement with the exegetical principle that the Torah spoke in the language of man, or as the German rabbi would call it, the sprache der menschen.27 One verse describing the path of the Sun in Psalm nineteen caught his attention: “Its going out is from the ends of the heaven, and its circuit to the ends of it; and there is nothing hidden from its heat.” 28 Hirsch explained that because the psalmist spoke in everyday language, this language “will remain the same even when the assumption that the sun is static and that the earth revolves around it—and not the sun around the earth— will have been proven to be irrefutable certainty.”29 But this Psalm, like the rest of the Bible, cannot impart scientific principles for “it is not the aim of the Holy Scriptures to teach us astronomy, cosmogony or physics, but only to guide man to the fulfi llment of his life’s task within the framework of the constellation of his existence.”30 The Psalms do not to teach a scientific lesson but a religious one, “that there can be no thought without a Th inker, no law without a Lawgiver.” Although the Bible does not teach science, it can most certainly be influenced by it, as Hirsch demonstrated when he translated the Psalms into German. The usual translation of verse seven in Psalm nineteen is “its [the Sun’s] going out is from the ends of the heaven, and its circuit to the ends of it; and there is nothing hidden from its heat.” In a clear effort to limit the suggestion that the Sun moved, even in appearances only, Hirsch chose a rather convoluted translation: “And yet one point upon the heavens remains its origin and its orbit is within their defi ned bounds; and thus He [God] is not hidden before His sun.” Here Hirsch adopted the practice he generally frowned upon, namely the reinterpretation of the Bible in the light of scientific discoveries. 31 Elsewhere in his writings, Hirsh expanded on his view that the Bible was never to be regarded as a textbook of physical science, but instead was a book of moral instruction. 32 The Bible never intended to reveal absolute truths, which Hirsch understood to be scientific truths, but rather the truths as they could be grasped by the limited human mind. Apparently, Hirsch understood that this precluded the Bible from teaching anything about the scientific realm.

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The Bible only described concepts within a framework of human understanding, “which is, after all, the basis for human language and expression.” It would therefore be inconceivable that the Bible should have intended, for example, Joshua’s command, “O sun, stand still” as implying a biblical dogma confi rming or denying the existence of the solar system. The Bible uses “human language” when it speaks of the “rising and the sett ing of the sun” and not of the rotation of the earth, just as Copernicus, Keppler and other such scientists, in their words and writings, spoke of the rising and sett ing of the sun without thereby contradicting truths they had derived from their own scientific conclusions. “Human language,” which is also the language of the Bible, describes the process and phenomena of nature in terms of the impression they make on the human senses without thereby meaning to prejudice, in any manner, the fi ndings of scientific research. 33 Hirsch combined these two ideas—that the Bible teaches moral lessons and not scientific ones, and that the Bible does not speak in objective truths—to explain the miracle recounted in the tenth chapter of the Book of Joshua. Because the Bible does not teach science, the episode in which daylight was miraculously extended was not included in the Bible to teach anything about the solar system. Rather, because the Bible is a book of moral lessons, it was included to demonstrate that God “assigns a special position to men who live for the fulfi llment of God’s Will.”34

Ittim Lebinah Although Hirsch’s comments on the solar system grew out of his commitment to both traditional Judaism and secular culture, not all Jews at the time felt completely comfortable with this att itude. There was, after all, no shortage of Jewish texts that demonstrated a more ambivalent and at times hostile approach to the new astronomy. What should be done with these texts and the traditional explanations they contained? Were they simply to be tossed aside? Joseph Ginzburg’s Ittim Lebinah (Times for Wisdom), published in Warsaw in 1886, contained an introductory note explaining how it was indeed possible to accept the new astronomy while remaining committed to traditional Jewish thought. 35 Ginzburg retold the legend of the Jewish origins of astronomy, in which the rabbis of the Talmud originally knew and accepted the heliocentric system. Th is knowledge was lost when the Jews were exiled from their homeland, and since then, the Jewish understanding of astronomy had remained

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stagnant and undeveloped. There was nothing forbidden in the copying of Gentile scientific texts, for Maimonides had declared that scientific truths must be accepted from whomever utters them. Moreover, there could be nothing threatening from the study of secular astronomy and its incorporation into Judaism because, once upon a time, the rabbis knew all of the truths of astronomy. Hence, to study astronomy was really to reclaim one’s heritage. It was the need to educate his fellow Jews, that motivated him to produce his work, wrote Ginzburg, “copying from the vernacular and reproducing them in our holy [Hebrew] tongue.”36 On a folded sheet at the end of the book, there is a chart of the solar system with a pale orange sun at the center; this was the fi rst colored Hebrew illustration of the heliocentric system. Perhaps this colored chart was what made Ittim Lebinah popular, for it was published in three editions in five years. 37 Ginzberg wrote that, in terms of the calculations needed to determine the times of the new Jewish months, it made no difference which model was followed, because the calculations generally yielded the same results. The Copernican model, however, had proven itself, wrote Ginzberg, in that it was able to predict and explain the orbits of comets, which the older Ptolemaic system could not do. Although he now sided with Copernicus, Ginzberg had begun his studies using Jewish texts that were based on the geocentric model, and this created an intellectual ambivalence for him: I am therefore like someone sitt ing on the fence; sometimes I will explain according to one model and at other times according to the other. Sometimes I will speak as if the Sun moves from point to point and then returns from whence it came, and at other times I will speak according to the new model of Copernicus and his school. I ask for the benefit of the doubt, for in reality as far as the calculations of the new Moon are concerned it is all the same; only in relation to other things that are not our present concern like the matter of comets is the new model more compelling. 38 Ginzberg’s difficulty embodied the religious tensions that were surely felt by many during this period of rapid social and scientific change. On the one hand, there were traditional texts and beliefs that had long been part of a social and religious order—whether Jewish, Christian, or Moslem. On the other hand, the explanatory power of the scientific method was increasingly regarded as more reliable than the explanatory power of many religious traditions. To complicate matters further, with the rapid growth of newspapers and periodicals, the public had access to information that had previously circulated only among the intellectual elites. Like Ginzberg, many Jews must have felt that

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they too were “sitt ing on the fence,” pulled by traditional beliefs and scientific thought in two, often opposite directions. We have already noted the rapid growth in the numbers of periodicals during the nineteenth century, and it should also be noted that this growth included popular scientific publications. In 1845, for example, Scientific American was founded in New York, as a journal of “scientific, mechanical and other improvements.” In London, Popular Science Review was published in 1862, and it contained sections that summarized the latest scientific advances for the general reader. 39 The Jewish population of Europe was also provided with its own new journal of science, Hazefirah (The Herald), fi rst published in Warsaw in February 1862. It was conceived as a weekly newspaper for Jewish readers that would report “all those things that affected them, including politics, science and technology, world news and the natural world.”40 The paper’s editor and main writer was Hayyim Zelig Slonimski, whose career exemplified how traditionally observant Jews were able to combine their interest in scientific matters with their faith. Slonimski was an inventor, a government inspector of rabbinic seminaries, and a prolific author who wrote widely on matters of astronomy and was an outspoken advocate of the Copernican model.41

Hayyim Zelig Slonimski Hayyim Zelig Slonimski was born in 1810 in Bialystok to poor parents who came from Slonim in eastern Poland. He received a traditional yeshivah education, married at the age of eighteen, and developed an unusual interest in astronomy and mathematics.42 He read Sefer Haberit and Tekhunot Hashamayim, both of which mentioned the Copernican model and its advantages, as well as newer Hebrew mathematics books, such as Barukh Shick’s Hebrew translation of Euclid and Friesenhausen’s Kelil Heshbon.43 He learned to read German, although the story of how he achieved this varies among biographers, but the result was that Slonimski became very knowledgeable about mathematics and astronomy (see figure 10.1).44 Slonimski’s fi rst few years of marriage were spent in Zubladow and Bialystok, and wherever he lived, he maintained a strictly Orthodox allegiance, although his biographers contend that his interests in science caused some friction in his family. Whether or not these interests caused the breakdown of his marriage is not known, but Slonimski divorced in 1836 and then moved to Warsaw.45 There he boarded with Abraham Jacob Stern, who was himself a mathematician and inventor. Given Slonimski’s inquisitive mind, the two are likely to have formed a deep friendship, and Slonimski eventually married Abraham’s daughter Sarah. After the death of his father-in-law in 1842, Slonimski came into the possession of

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Figure 10.1 Hayyim Zelig Slonimski at age seventy-five. From The Jewish Encyclopedia, New York, Funk and Wagnalls, 1912.

a calculating machine that Stern had developed. Slonimski introduced some small improvements to the device, and after demonstrating it to the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, he was awarded the Demidov Prize together with twenty-five hundred rubles. In 1845, the Russian minister of education made Slonimski an honorary citizen, a remarkable honor given that this time period, under the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855), was a “somber chapter in the history of Russian Jewry, characterized by their suppression and coercion.”46 Slonimski’s creative nature took many directions. He perfected a device to decrease friction in steam engines and a method to coat iron utensils with enamel, although he never was able to reap the fi nancial rewards of either.47 Slonimski was also credited by the president of Western Union as having invented the telegraph, and although this was reported on the pages of The New York Times, this claim was incorrect.48 What he actually did invent was a method to send two telegraphs simultaneously over one wire; the Russian army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (The Red Star) claimed that this demonstrated “ . . . that our fatherland holds the priority on the duplex system of

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electric telegraphy made public by the Russian scientist Z.Y. Slonimsky twelve years before Stirnes and fi fteen years before Edison.”49

Slonimski’s Literary Output Although some of the stories surrounding Slonimski were exaggerated, his scholarly contribution was indisputably extensive. He was as prolific an author as he was an inventor and published his fi rst book, Mosdei Hokhmah (The Foundation of Wisdom), a work on algebra, at the age of twenty-four. 50 His next book, Kokhava Deshavit (The Comet), was published in 1835, the year in which Halley’s Comet returned, and we shall examine this work in detail. 51 His other works include a controversial book in which he demonstrated that there were errors in the Hebrew calendar, 52 a book demonstrating the existence of the soul using contemporary scientific discoveries, 53 and two further works on the calendar. 54 In addition, Slonimski struck up a friendship with the German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). Humboldt had introduced Slonimski to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, and Slonimski published a work on the occasion of Humboldt’s eighty-eighth birthday in 1857 that contained a biography of Humboldt together with a summary of his Kosmos, a four-volume work on the natural sciences. 55 However, Slonimski is best known as the founding editor of Hazefirah (The Dawn), the weekly Hebrew-language newspaper fi rst published in Warsaw in 1862. The paper focused on popular expositions of science but also contained a review of politics and world events. The articles in the fi rst edition—nearly all written by Slonimski—show the breadth of his interests. There was a summary of a new Polish law allowing Jewish surgeons to serve the state, followed by a review of current events as they affected Jews in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Next there was an illustrated article explaining how the telegraph works, followed by two historical pieces, the fi rst on a Viennese family who traced their lineage back to 1550, and the second on Herod the Great. The eight-page newspaper ended with a discourse on a passage in the Talmud (by a guest writer), and Slonimski thanked those in Bialystok who had written to support his venture. Th is rather eclectic pattern continued until the newspaper closed after only six months when Slonimski became the head of the rabbinic academy in Zhitomir. In 1874, the Russian government closed the academy and Slonimski renewed publication of the newspaper in Berlin and later Warsaw, where it later became a daily paper and was published until it fi nally closed 1931. 56 Slonimski’s fi rst words to his readers, found in the opening paragraph of the fi rst edition of Hazefirah, was a quote from the Book of Psalms: “You have made him rule over the work of your hands, you have put

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all things under his feet.”57 Th is quote seems fitt ing if only for the fact that the paper dedicated much space to explaining the latest scientific discoveries, but only the reader who recalled the entire eighth Psalm, from where the verse is taken, would appreciate its wider meaning. Given the enormous body of biblical literature from which Slonimski could have taken his opening quote, this choice was certainly not the result of some arbitrary fit: O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the Earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have founded strength because of your enemies, to still the enemy and the avenger. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the Moon and the stars, which you have set in place; What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor. You have made him rule over the work of your hands, you have put all things under his feet. . . . The psalmist contrasted the remote stars with humanity, a contrast that might ordinarily have made mankind inconsequential. Not so, Slonimski reminded his readers, for as a result of divine grace, humans were made “a litt le lower than angels” and so have been “crowned with glory and honor.” Although the fi ndings of astronomy can lead to existential despair, they may also result in a religious awakening. It was the perfect thought with which to open his newspaper. Although Slonimski’s fi rst work was on mathematics, his passion was astronomy. In one biographic essay published in 1912, he is described as having taken part in public debates with the elders of the yeshivah in which he studied soon after his fi rst marriage. These rabbis could not accept Slonimski’s belief in the Copernican system, but despite his youth, he emerged victorious as a result of his knowledge of mathematics and astronomy. [These debates] convinced him to teach these subjects to other students in the Bet Midrash wherever they may be, to inform them and to instruct them about the truth. He started to bring this dream to reality by writing a work encompassing all of the foundations of mathematics. . . . 58 Even Slonimski’s introduction to his work on mathematics contained a paragraph in which he described the importance of astronomy in general and the

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truth of the Copernican system in particular. 59 He stated that one of the goals of the book was “to provide a clear path to understand the new astronomy.”60 There is no doubt therefore that Slonimski saw the task of educating his fellow Jews about the truth of the Copernican model as one of utmost importance. He did not have to wait long before the perfect opportunity presented itself— the return of Halley’s famous comet.

Halley’s Comet and Kokhava Deshavit To coincide with the appearance of Halley’s Comet, Slonimski published Kokhava Deshavit (The Comet) in Vilna in 1835.61 The book described where and when Halley’s Comet would be visible with precise coordinates for the inhabitants of Bialystok, as well as an explanation of the nature of comets and their orbits (see figure 10.2).62 In addition, there was a detailed exposition of

Figure 10.2 Orbit of Halley’s Comet from Kokhava Deshavit, Vilna, 1835. Note that the outermost planet is Uranus. The second edition of the book (1857) described the discovery of Neptune. From the collection of the author.

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the Copernican model, which he believed should be accepted as true alongside the eternal truths of the Torah, “ . . . for both are true and given by the true God.”63 Th is exposition actually takes up the majority of the book, and as the forward to the book by Abraham Zakheim made clear, the purpose of the book was as much to help others “tread down the paths of truth” about the nature of the Copernican system as it was to educate them about Halley’s Comet.64 Slonimski wrote of the advances made by contemporary astronomers, which could not have been imagined by earlier Jewish sages. He reminded the reader that comets were once thought to originate from the sky close to the Earth, “whereas now, contemporary astronomers know that comets are really like the stars . . . and they are able to measure their orbits, their distances, from where they came and where they will go. All of this clearly demonstrates the supremacy of contemporary astronomy compared to earlier astronomy.”65 He lamented the lack of Jewish interest in the subject, saying that “for many years we have sworn off from these sciences since they were not known to us.” Unlike others we have encountered in our story, he made no claims to Jewish superiority in the sciences. In fact, Slonimski was highly critical of other Jews who, when faced with a scientific fact that seemed to contradict a midrash or aggadic passage, declared the science to be heretical: Th is is not what any of our ancestors, the earlier great leaders did when they found a statement of the sages that contradicted a demonstrated and tangible fact. They did not conceal the truth, but rather made every effort to explain the statement in a different way, to reveal its inner rather than its literal meaning. 66 Th is is clear from all of their books! . . . And lest the reader, when he hears these things, think this is against the Torah and our faith, Heaven forbid, I have written this forward to prove that nothing that is a demonstrated and tangible fact can negate the Torah or our faith. For both [scientific facts and the Torah] are true and come from the true God.67 Slonimski was not arguing for the supremacy of science over religious values, but for his contemporaries to fi nd novel ways to reinterpret traditional texts in light of new scientific information. Th is called fi rst and foremost for a reinterpretation of traditional texts, so that they did not contradict the Copernican model that had been demonstrated as true beyond question: Specifically, if we believe that the Earth has a daily revolution around its axis, and a yearly revolution around the Sun, this does not contradict our Torah or our faith (Heaven forbid). For in his Torah God only revealed that which ensures eternal spiritual perfection, things

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that are far from the normal understanding of a person. But God did not reveal the secret detailed workings of creation. Instead he left this goal for the mind.68 Slonimski dismissed the standard counterclaims from the biblical verses that seem to imply a geocentric universe for two reasons. First, some of these verses used “flowery language” that could be understood in ways not directly implied by the literal meaning of the verse. But that still left some verses the literal meanings of which suggested that the Sun indeed moves. To explain these, Slonimski introduced his readers to the concept of relative motion. All movement is relative, and the statement that an object is in motion could only be understood when that same object is compared to another that is at rest. It is for this reason that the Bible suggests the Sun moves; if we assume a stationary Earth, this is indeed what appears to occur. In addition, it is often simply more convenient to speak of the apparent movement of the Sun and, Slonimski continued, even astronomers who accepted the Copernican system would often describe the Sun as rising, for this is “a convention of language.” As well as an exposition of the Copernican system, Kokhava Deshavit contained an explanation of Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion and an outline of Newton’s law of universal gravitation. A separate chapter called “Proofs that the Earth has both a daily and yearly motion” described the discovery of stellar aberration by the British astronomer James Bradley; this was an early, indirect proof of the validity of the Copernican system.69 Before continuing with further evidence for the Copernican model, Slonimski detoured and expressed his frustration when discussing these issues with his co-religionists.70 Slonimski declared that he could bring enough Copernican proofs to fi ll an entire book, but he contended that such an exercise was futile if the reader remained stubbornly convinced that only traditional beliefs could ever be correct. “Their ears refuse to listen . . . they think that all scientists have made errors, and that the truth only lies with them. Who can deal with them?”71 Although only twenty-five when he wrote these words, he found the parochial views of his peers contemptible: These people have never before been illuminated with wisdom. They have been weaned from the breast of their mother and from there have moved on to a wife and children, and feel the burden of the need to work; what is the point of removing ideas that have taken root in their heart from the very day on which they were born? . . . I know with certainty that would but one of these people show any interest at all and approach the gates of these sciences, were they to spend time studying in libraries, they would not raise even a single tiny objection about their foundations.72

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Slonimski’s outburst reveals the frustrations of a mind rooted in the world of traditional Judaism, committed to its teachings and way of life, but aware that such a society was too often associated with a rejection of another world—that of science and experiment. Slonimski’s entire corpus was an attempt to bridge this gap between traditional Jewish study and observance on the one hand, and the increasingly sophisticated fi ndings of science on the other. In this book, which was only his second, the difficulties of the task that lay ahead were already apparent, and it is therefore all the more remarkable that Slonimski remained committed to this goal throughout his long life. Interestingly, in the second edition of Kokhava Deshavit, published in 1857, this paragraph was removed. Because Orthodox Judaism had not by this time realigned its att itude toward the outside world in general and the sciences in particular, the reason for this omission is most likely to have been a cooling of tempers that often comes with maturity. Perhaps Slonimski realized that he was unlikely to win adherents to the Copernican model if he painted all those who opposed it as uneducated boors or religious fanatics. Slonimski also described the experiments performed by the French astronomer Jean Richer (1630–1696), who in 1671 to 1673 observed changes in the period of a pendulum as the latitude changes. Th is fi nding was correctly interpreted by Isaac Newton in his Prinicipia as due to a decrease in the force of gravity with latitude, which could only be explained if the world was flattened at the poles.73 Slonimski was awed by Newton’s conclusion: “to this day any person who sails the sea of wisdom, when witnessing the amazing wonders discovered by this sage cannot but express with his mouth what he feels in his heart: Blessed be He who gives of His wisdom to flesh and blood!” 74 After a planet-by-planet description, Slonimski returned to what should have been the main subject of the book, the nature of comets in general and Halley’s Comet in particular. He described some of the astronomers whose fi ndings helped explain what comets were, and ended his book with a description of the expected path of the comet. It would pass by the Earth, then circle behind the Sun, and reappear sometime in March 1836, after which it will continue along its path gradually becoming dimmer to the inhabitants of the Earth as it follows its orbit, until it will reappear again in the month of Shevat, 5662 [February 190275]. May it be then as a sign and wonder for our children after us in the Holy Land. Amen.76 That Slonimski’s book ended on a profoundly religious note—the desire for the ingathering of the Jewish people in the land of Israel—should not be surprising, for it was both a work of scientific discovery and religious affirmation.

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It explained the work of Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and Halley, while never questioning for a moment the existence of a Creator or the truth of the Torah. In fact, Slonimski pointed out on the very first page “when a person surveys this field [of astronomy,] his eyes cannot but behold the truth of God.”77 In this way, Slonimski followed the path of those whose works he explained; Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton were profoundly religious thinkers whose scientific discoveries only strengthened their religious beliefs.78 He categorically rejected the possibility that science could threaten Jewish beliefs “ . . . for both are true and given by the true God”79—a position that echoed Galileo’s remark: “the holy Scripture and nature derive equally from the Godhead, the former as the dictate of the Holy Spirit and the latter as the most obedient executrix of God’s orders.”80 As mentioned above, in 1857, some twenty years after it fi rst appeared, Slonimski published a second edition of Kokhava Deshavit.81 Th is second edition differed in many aspects from the fi rst, and these differences demonstrate how Slonimski continued with the struggle to educate other Jews about the truth of the Copernican system. We have already noted one significant change, namely the removal of a passage highly critical of the narrow-mindedness of traditional Jews. Just as significant was the inclusion of two recent fi ndings that further supported the Copernican model. The fi rst was a description of Foucault’s pendulum, which had gripped Paris in 1851.82 “In a visible and tangible way the pendulum itself shows that the Earth moves . . . so that every person can see it in reality and be struck with awe at how the Earth continuously moves eastwards under their feet.”83 The second fi nding was the discovery of the planet Neptune by the French mathematician and astronomer Urbain Jean Leverrier (1811–1877). Leverrier had noted irregularities in the orbit of Uranus and suggested that these were caused by the gravitational pull of a nearby but-as-yet-undiscovered planet. Observers, guided by Leverrier’s calculations, pointed their telescopes to a region where the planet should be found, and in September 1846, a new planet was indeed discovered and named Neptune. Slonimski described this fi nding not because it proved the truth of the Copernican model (since it had no bearing on the heliocentric theory), but rather because it demonstrated “the strength of the true foundations of astronomy.” His joy at the discovery is evident: The fi ndings of this amazing discovery have struck every wise person with awe. Nothing like this in the history of humanity has ever occurred since God created man on the Earth. For can a person sit at home and use his human mind to calculate and then fi nd a completely hidden celestial object thirty-six times as far away as the Sun is from the Earth? Yet indeed he can point to the sky and say “look, aim your telescopes there. That is where you will fi nd another planet that orbits

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the Sun together with us, a planet that has been completely hidden from the inhabitants of the Earth until now.”84 Even contemporary historians have noted that there was something quite extraordinary about Leverrier’s discovery. The account of the Dutch historian Antonie Pannekoek (d. 1960) reads as though it borrowed from Slonimski’s description: Th is course of events made a deep impression on the world of scientists, but no less on the world of educated laymen. From all countries honours were showered upon Leverrier, and the discovery at a desk of a body never seen was the ruling topic for a long time. It was in this mid-century that science came to dominate the world concepts of the middle class in Western Europe, and in a spiritual struggle gradually superseded the traditional biblical ideas. A number of popular books on science, by spreading knowledge, furthered the Aufk lärung (‘enlightenment’); welcomed enthusiastically among intellectuals and laymen, they served as an aid in the fight against antiquated political and social ideas and institutions. In such an environment this unexpected demonstration of the power of science and the certainty of its predictions came like a brilliant ray of light to strengthen the fight against darkness. Surely the astronomers were right who pointed out that any of the hundreds of computed perturbations used in the planetary tables, whose exactness was confi rmed by subsequent observation, was as strong a demonstration, silently repeated every day, of the truth of science.85 The overlap between these two independent descriptions is remarkable and adds veracity to both. And once again, despite Slonimski’s excitement at what the scientific method could achieve—in this case, the discovery of a hidden planet—his Jewish observance remained untouched. In fact, he added a phrase into his description that reminded the reader of this. Although the discovery of Neptune might suggest that the remarkable achievements of science proved its superiority over religion, Slonimski saw it as yet another example of the marvels of God’s creation: “Nothing like this in the history of humanity has ever occurred since God created man on the Earth.”86

Slonimski’s Influence Among those deeply influenced by Slonimski’s efforts at explaining science and astronomy from within a traditional Jewish worldview was Abraham

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Warshavsky (1841–1901). Warshavsky was born in Odessa, a city he described as “the most beautiful of all, and one full of intellectual life and access to works of literature.”87 His parents evidently indulged his thirst for education, and although much of his time was involved with business, his fi rst love remained his intellectual pursuits. He was pained at what he perceived was a lack of adequate Hebrew-language science books that were available to his fellow Jews and so set about writing what he hoped would be a three-volume Hebrew-language work on astronomy, geography, and atmospherics.88 Only the fi rst of these was published. Titled Hakirei Tevel (An Examination of Nature), it was a comprehensive review of astronomy based on several contemporary works written in German, Russian, and French.89 Warshavsky also acknowledged the work of several Hebrew-language writers, of whom he was most indebted to Slonimski. He had read Slonimski’s Kokhava Deshavit and lavished praise on him for his journal Hazefirah: “May God strengthen this most valuable sage, who is true to the house of Israel; may he strengthen his arms so that he may continue to glorify wisdom in Israel and all humanity!”90 And Warshavsky outlined a heliocentric solar system without any reference to Copernicus. It was assumed as fact and described as such.91 Although the body of Warshavsky’s book did not directly mention God or refer to a divine handprint on the natural world, the author clearly saw his work as having a profoundly religious agenda.92 The title page explained that the book was about astronomy and the natural world “from the day that God spoke,” and a later title page carries an epigraph from Isaiah: “Lift up your eyes and see who created all this,” leaving no doubt as to the impression the author hoped to achieve. 93 In the introduction, Warshavsky was even more explicit in clearly stating his religious beliefs. “How sweet is the glorious endeavor,” Warshavsky wrote, that God has given to mankind, to investigate all that is hidden. [To search for] all the good that is secretly hidden in nature’s storehouse, and the light that is sewn in the natural world for those who fear God and contemplate his name. Wherever [man] may turn, he will see the wonder that is creation and the life that exits within. Wherever [man] looks, he will observe the works of God and his infi nite strength and wisdom that cannot be fathomed . . . eventually he will reveal that which is inscribed into the natural world, and he will lift the veil that lies over nature’s secrets. He will solve the riddle and reveal just how God has worked.94 Warshavsky realized that his endeavor could be interpreted as pitt ing religious truths against scientific facts; consequently, he explained that this was

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certainly not his intention. His introduction ended with a statement of his religious worldview in which there could be no contradiction between the truths of religion and science. In this way, he followed Slonimski’s example, seeing both the Torah and scientific discoveries as emanating from one divine source: Truth is a unity, all of it fitt ing together; one part cannot contradict another. Religious faith and [scientific] understanding must advance as if joined together, and neither can endanger the other. Anything that contradicts the intellect is certain to be false and not to be believed, and those scientists with integrity have already acknowledged that all the words of our holy and pure Torah are true and that they are all refi ned and logical. . . . Warshavsky did not publish either of the two further volumes on the natural world that he had promised to his readers, but his work is an important vision of the unity of the scientific and the religious. His role model, Hayyim Slonimski, died at the age of ninety-four, having spent his life committed to teaching all manner of science to the Jews of Poland, Russia, and beyond. But Slonimski’s personal example of living an integrated worldview was not an easy path for his contemporaries to follow, even if today it would be considered a suitable role model for Modern-Orthodox Jews. Within his own family, his model was rejected; Slonimski’s son Leonid converted to Christianity, a decision that, while common in Eastern Europe, would surely have been seen by Slonimski as a rejection of his own lifestyle.95 Predictably enough, there was also opposition to his rationalist approach from within the Orthodox community: Two books were published repudiating Slonimski’s position that the miracle of Hanukah had a rational explanation.96 And although the Copernican model had become scientifically accepted beyond question, Slonimski’s heliocentric position was also not without its critics. It is to that criticism that we now turn.

11

“Let Copernicus and Another Thousand Like Him Be Removed from the World.” Reuven Landau’s Rejection

As we noted in the previous chapter, the nineteenth century saw two remarkable scientific achievements that gave experimental support to the Copernican model: Bessel’s measurement of stellar parallax in 1838 and Foucault’s pendulum in 1851. Together with the popularization of science through newspapers and journals, it was a dizzying time of scientific progress. The German writer and scientist Johann Goethe (1749–1832) did not live to see these two experiments, but writing in 1810, he summed up the feelings that Copernicanism generated: Of all discoveries and opinions, none may have exerted a greater effect on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus. The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe. Never, perhaps, was a greater demand made on mankind, for by this admission so many things vanished in mist and smoke! What became of our Eden, our world of innocence, piety and poetry; the testimony of the senses; the conviction of a poetic-religious faith? No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go and offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown, indeed not even dreamed of.1 Goethe sensed that the Copernican model would assault some of humanity’s most cherished assumptions: that a person could rely on the evidence of his own senses, and that the Earth was the center of the universe and hence its most 200

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important component. One Jewish contemporary of Goethe, Reuven Landau, offered a similar reaction to the existential threats from Copernicanism. His writings, although not widely studied today, are important because they articulated a spiritual defense of geocentricism. Unlike the anti-Copernicans who had preceded him, Landau’s primary concern was not that a heliocentric system would contradict the words of the Bible—although he claimed this as well. Rather, his was an assessment of the spiritual implications of a universe in which the Earth is not the center. Landau articulated the spiritual dangers of accepting Copernican theory, while also raising some scientific doubts about both the Copernican model and the scientific method.

Landau’s Early Life Although he wrote four books, litt le is known of Landau’s life.2 He was born in the early 1800s, but the exact date is not certain, and there are confl icting accounts of the date of his death in 1883. 3 He married, apparently at a young age as was the custom, Bruna, the only daughter of Rabbi Josef Landau of Laşi in Romania, and probably adopted the name of his wife’s family as his own. Th is town, known as Yas in Yiddish, was a center of Jewish life and the capital city of Moldavia, and its chief rabbi was an influential and important figure. Josef Landau was appointed chief rabbi of the town in 1834, where he stayed until his death twenty years later. While there, Josef Landau published a collection of responsa called Birkat Yosef and gained a reputation as a fi rst-rate scholar. Reuven Landau was educated in his father-in-law’s house and was profoundly influenced by him. Th is is clear from the title pages of his books, on which Reuven emphasizes that he was “the son-in-law of the Rabbi, true Gaon, the famous Hasid our teacher Josef.”4 It may have been through the interventions of his famous father-in-law that Reuven Landau was appointed to the position of chief of the rabbinic court of Padutark, where he served for some forty years until his death in 1883. 5 Landau wrote several works that were published late in his life: Middah Berurah (The Clear Measure) on trigonometry; Degel Mahaneh Re’uven (The Flag of the Camp of Reuven) on aggadah; and Shem Olam (The Everlasting Name), published posthumously on the correct spelling of Hebrew names. His book on astronomy was called Mahalakh Hakohavim (The Order of the Stars) and was published in 1882 and never reprinted. It appeared in the last year of Landau’s life and represented the culmination of his lifelong fascination with astronomy and mathematics.6 As a young man, Landau realized that an expert understanding in astronomy and the design of the Jewish calendar required a strong mathematical

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background. To att ain this, he dedicated part of each day to the study of mathematics and trigonometry.7 Although the texts that he used for his course of self-study are not known, his efforts culminated in a work called Middah Berurah on both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry. Landau articulated a number of reasons why the study of mathematics and astronomy was so important: . . . Aside from the study of the Torah, among the other . . . branches of wisdom, the study of astronomy is the most honorable and important of all. There are five reasons for this: (1) The sanctification of the new month and the calculation of the dates of all the festivals in the Torah are dependent on it, and this was the fi rst commandment that the Children of Israel were given. . . . (2) Th rough the command to calculate and declare a new month, God showed his great kindness and love for us, by giving us the power to [calculate and] declare a new month, or to intercalate the year . . . (3) The other nations of the world recognize and thank Israel for their skill in this science, for [astronomy] is extremely important to all of the peoples of the world, and astronomy was fi rst learned from us, as is stated in many books (and only later, due to our exile and dispersion, was this science lost to us and learned by the Gentile sages) . . . the astronomer Ptolemy praised us and those of us who developed the nineteen year cycle,8 and Ptolemy himself wrote that this knowledge certainly came through prophetic insight. . . . (4) Th is science is more worthy than the other sciences because . . . its subject and focus are the heavens and the stars which . . . are eternal. Th is is unlike the natural sciences which investigate substances made of the four basic elements which do not last. (5) When a person studies [astronomy] in detail and understands the sizes of the Sun and Moon and all of the planets, and the huge numbers of stars, then he will see the wonders of God . . . which are awesome, and he will recognize the greatness of God and the smallness of humanity. In this way a person will be inspired to serve God forever. . . .9

Mahalakh Hakohavim In Mahalakh Hakohavim, Landau had two objectives: The fi rst was to explain the fundamentals of astronomy and trigonometry, and the second was to “explain clearly all of the theories of the later astronomers of our time, the basis of their foundations, as well as other details of these theories.”10 Landau began

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his study with an explanation of gravitational attraction, without which the heliocentric system could not be understood. But he was careful to point out the divine in this natural force; he described gravity as the force “ . . . which God, blessed be his name, has placed in the center of objects.”11 Th is weaving of divine design and natural law is a theme that runs through Landau’s work, and it is interesting to note that Copernicus also described gravity as a force with divine origins, when he wrote that “ . . . gravity is nothing but a certain natural desire to draw together, which the divine providence of the Creator of all things implanted. . . .”12 Although it is unlikely that Landau had read Copernicus’s work, he certainly was familiar with writings of Copernicus and the history of his discovery, and he explained to his readers how the heliocentric theory emerged: Th is new theory did not suddenly develop. . . . At the start of the sixteenth century the astronomer Copernicus contradicted the astronomer Ptolemy who lived some fourteen centuries prior. He rejected the notion that the Sun and all the heavenly bodies orbit the Earth, and also rejected the existence of the solid spheres and their movement, which Ptolemy had established in his theory. He developed a completely new theory, in which the Sun lies stationary at the center of the constellations, and all the planets, including the Earth, move around it through space. [Each planet] has two movements; one of which is the yearly orbit, and the other is a daily orbit around its own axis, causing the continual change from day to night. . . . Copernicus was certain that the orbits of the Earth and the other planets around the Sun were perfect circles, one inside the other . . . just as Ptolemy had proposed. However, at the start of the seventeenth century, another astronomer Kepler invented another system, and used new proofs to show that the Earth and the planets orbited the Sun through space in an elliptical manner. . . .13 Landau reviewed Copernican theory at some length and summarized the three compelling pieces of evidence for the heliocentric theory, all of which he would later refute.14 The first was the result of observations using the telescope, and in particular the phases of Venus. These had famously been discovered by Galileo, who had noted that Venus seemed to change shape, just as the Moon did, sometimes appearing almost (but never quite) full, sometimes as a semi-circle, and at other times as sickle-shaped.15 All these phases of Venus were most easily explained as a result of Venus orbiting the Sun, and although this did not prove Copernicus correct, it was among the most powerful pieces of supporting evidence for the heliocentric theory.

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Landau demonstrated his familiarity with the evidence of the phases of Venus: For it has been shown in our time and with our own eyes using good telescopes that Mercury and Venus, which orbit between the Earth and the Sun, each demonstrates a waxing and waning of its light depending on its position.16 Th is is like our own Moon whose light waxes and wanes.17 In addition, Landau described another discovery made by the telescope, namely that the planets each revolve around their own axis and that some were orbited by their own newly visualized moons. These discoveries were another piece of evidence . . . that the Earth revolves around its own axis and orbits the Sun each year. For why should the Earth be different and unique compared to all the other planets that are several times larger than it? Why would [only the Earth] remain at rest without any movement at all?18 The second kind of evidence for the heliocentric model that Landau considered depended not on observations, but rather on the power of probabilities. He understood that part of the appeal of the heliocentric system was that it just seemed more likely: Jupiter is 1,333 times larger than our Earth. Saturn is 928 times larger than the Earth. Uranus is 76 times larger than the Earth, and the Sun is 3,742 million times larger than the Earth. If so, is it possible that our Earth would remain stationary while the Sun and the other large planets would serve us and revolve around the Earth, only to illuminate it and to serve its needs?19 Finally, Landau turned to the evidence from the pendulum’s motion in the famous experiment by Foucault: The latest astronomers make themselves seem great and fi ll themselves with pride. They state that aside from these reasons [mentioned above], they have another incontrovertible proof from the Earth itself, that it orbits the Sun; this is [the evidence] from their widely known pendulum.20 Unfortunately, Landau did not have the help of a good editor. He mentioned several objections to Copernicus in his work, but he did so in a piecemeal

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fashion, raising an objection in part and returning to it several pages later, often using the very same phraseology. Therefore, in order to understand Landau’s challenges to Copernicanism, we will analyze his arguments thematically, rather than in the order in which they appeared in his work.

Biblical Objections Landau’s fi rst criticism of the heliocentric model was also the oldest and most frequently raised. It was of course the text of the Bible, and Landau felt it was all that was needed to undermine the work of the new astronomers. “Th is system is absolutely false,” he wrote, [D]o not believe it and do not listen to them in any way, for this is rejected by the Scriptures and by the holy prophets. For it states in Kohelet that “the Sun rises and the Sun comes” [Eccles. 1:5], and in the tenth chapter of the Book of Joshua it states “ . . . the Sun stood motionless in Givon,” and in the thirty-eighth chapter of Isaiah it states “ . . . the Sun returned ten degrees, the number of degrees it had moved” [Isa. 38:8]. All of these verses must be interpreted according to their plain meaning, namely that the Earth rests in its place, and that the Sun, the Moon, and all the other planets orbit it.21 In this respect, his approach was similar to other Jews who had rejected the new astronomy based on a literal interpretation of the Bible. It also mirrored the Catholic Church when it determined that biblical passages could only have a literal interpretation. Th is was made clear in the infamous decree of the Congregation of the Index of the Church, which banned Copernicus’s work: “It has come to the attention of this Sacred Congregation that the Pythagorean doctrine of the mobility of the Earth and the immobility of the sun is false and completely contrary to divine scriptures.”22 Landau’s biblical objections were also the same as those made initially by Jacob Emden and quoted by Moses Sofer.23 After quoting these objections from the text of the Bible, Landau wrote that it “ . . . would be preferable to let the astronomer Copernicus and another thousand like him be removed from the world, rather than one letter of the holy Torah—of the Prophets and the Holy Writings—be annulled.”24 Th is statement sounds extreme to our modern sensibilities, but its severity needs to be tempered with some background. The language that Landau chose—“let Copernicus and another thousand like him be removed from the world” was not original. The expression fi rst appears in the Jerusalem Talmud in a story in which King Solomon believed that certain aspects of Torah law did not apply to him. After a letter of the Torah appealed to God to stop Solomon, God’s reply

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was unambiguous: “Let Solomon and another thousand like him be erased, before I erase part of you.”25 Th is phrase made its way into rabbinic responsa literature in the fourteenth century, when Shlomo ben Aderet used it to silence what he felt was scientifically implausible testimony: “Let the witness and a thousand like him be erased, and let not one jot be erased of that written by the sages of Israel, who are holy and are prophets and the descendents of prophets. . . .”26 It was also used in the eighteenth century by Jacob Emden who felt that medical evidence confl icted with Jewish law in a paternity case: “A thousand such doctors should be rejected and their words eliminated, rather than one letter of the Torah and its classic and sacred interpretation be rejected.”27 Although not original, Landau’s phrase is nevertheless notable, for it allows no subtlety, no room for maneuvering. Copernicus is wrong, and his worldview can never be aligned with that of the Torah.

Scientific Objections Landau was not content to batt le Copernican thought simply by quoting from the Bible. He advanced three scientific objections to refute the heliocentric model that he outlined in the fi ft h chapter of the second part of Mahalakh Hakohavim. His fi rst objection was that we on the Earth feel no sensation of motion. If the Earth turned on its own axis and orbited the Sun at the required rate of high speed, he questioned how it would be possible for life to exist and for objects not to be thrown from the Earth’s surface. How is it possible that the Earth should revolve on its axis each day at the amazing speed of three and a third parsa’ot each minute, and in addition to this it has a motion in an ellipse around the Sun every year . . . and yet nevertheless the Earth is able to keep on its surface bodies both animate and inanimate, along with all of mankind? Moreover all of these bodies are able to walk upright and not fall over; this is indeed very strange and difficult to comprehend.28 Landau’s second objection was the lack of stellar parallax. Landau believed that the fact that this movement had not been detected proved that the Earth was not moving. He wrote: We see that when two stars are viewed against two fi xed objects on Earth, they remain fi xed against these objects and do not move at all. Now according to Copernicus, the Earth moves about its axis and around the Sun along an elliptical path. Th is elliptical orbit is

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forty-one million parsa’ot each year, . . . How then can it be that the Earth moves along such a vast path, and yet the two stars do not move from their fi xed points [against the sky’s background]?29 However, Landau’s science was not current. Whether or not Landau knew of Bessel’s work and chose to ignore it or raised the issue of parallax because he believed it to be a solid criticism of the Copernican model cannot be determined. We should note, however, that while much of Landau’s astronomy was based on earlier Hebrew works, he was certainly aware of more contemporary scientific discoveries—such as Foucault’s pendulum. It is therefore not unlikely that Bessel’s work could have come to Landau’s attention, only to be ignored. The third scientific objection raised by Landau was based on an understanding, and a misunderstanding, of what had come to be called common motion. Th is argument, which was raised by both Jewish and Gentile opponents of the Copernican model and which we have already encountered, suggested that if the Earth was really moving, then a stone thrown upward should land some considerable horizontal distance away from its launching point because the Earth rotated from west to east during the period in which the stone was airborne. Empirical testing revealed that the stone actually landed back at its launching point, leading to the conclusion that the Earth did not move. Landau wrote that if Copernicus was correct, and the Earth orbits the Sun from west to east, . . . it would be expected that a stone which fell from the top of a tall tower on its western side would not land exactly at the base of the tower but would come to rest slightly to its west. The explanation for this is that during the time that the stone was falling, the Earth together with the tower were turning towards the east. . . . Yet we see with our eyes that this is not the case; rather the stone falls and comes to rest precisely at the foot of the tower. It is not possible to refute this objection by saying that the atmosphere above the Earth turns with the Earth at the same speed and pushes and forces the stone towards the tower. Such a thought is not logical, for there is certainly not enough force in the atmosphere to move a physical object. Only the wind which blows has the power to do this, but not the atmosphere which is stable and stationary. . . . Furthermore, has not the astronomer Tycho Brahe in his disputes with Copernicus performed experiments involving a stone falling from a tall tower and has convincingly shown for all to see that the Earth remains at rest in its place, and does not move at all. Copernicus has not been able to respond to this refutation in any way. . . . 30

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Once again, Landau’s att ack on Copernicanism was a critique of scientific knowledge combined with an ignorance of the sources that he quoted. Landau quoted Tycho Brahe’s arguments from letters written by Tycho between 1586 and 1590. 31 But in point of fact, these arguments had been raised and refuted by Copernicus, 32 Galileo, 33 and many others, 34 using various explanations that involved the idea of common motion. For example, Galileo wrote that “a stone projected from the top of a mast always fell to the foot of the mast, never into the sea, whether the ship was at rest or moving quickly,” although this experiment was hard to perform accurately. 35 It was the common motion of the ship and the stone that caused this result. Landau chose not to mention these explanations, either because he was not familiar with them or, as is more likely, they would serve to undermine his criticism of Copernican thought.

Tycho Brahe and Scientific Skepticism After Landau raised these three objections, he presented the Tychonic model as an alternative explanation. It will be recalled that in this model, all the planets except the Earth orbit the Sun, but the Sun itself revolved around the stationary Earth, dragging the other planets with it on its yearly cycle. At fi rst, Landau did not identify the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe by name as the progenitor of this system: It has already been noted in astronomy books that even during the lifetime of Copernicus, when his theory was fi rst publicized, there was a certain famous astronomer who taught Copernicus philosophy and who completely rejected the Copernican model of the Earth’s movement. He did this with the proofs that we have just noted, and also discovered a new and different model. Th is model contains parts of the model of Copernicus, while the foundations are those of Ptolemy. Th is astronomer stated that all the planets orbit around the Sun due to the gravitational force of the Sun, just as stated by Copernicus. However, he left the immobile Earth at the center of the zodiac, in keeping with the ancient astronomers, and stated that the Sun and all the planets that orbit the Sun also in fact orbit the Earth . . . . 36 Landau was careful to point out that this alternative model may also not be correct. Rather, he noted that scientific theories are constantly undergoing changes, as some new theories become widely accepted, while others, once universally acknowledged as true, are discarded:

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Th is astronomer was unable to have his theory concerning these strange movements of the Sun and the planets accepted in his day. . . . As a result it became forgotten. But perhaps there will be a time in which a later generation happily chooses to accept this theory, and decides to reject that of Copernicus. Do not think that because the Copernican theory is now widely accepted this could never happen. For as you know, Ptolemy’s ancient model was widely accepted for over fourteen hundred years. No one ever questioned it, and all accepted it. Then Copernicus arrived and contradicted Ptolemy’s model, creating a new and different model. Consequently, it is not unlikely that at a future time, a new astronomer will disprove Copernican thought, reject the Earth’s movement, and return to the currently rejected models. . . . 37 Th is objection was quite different to those that Landau had previously raised, and it addressed the very nature of the scientific process. For Landau, conventional scientific explanations change over time. History had demonstrated that a widely accepted astronomical model—the Ptolemaic—had eventually been overturned; the same could therefore happen to any contemporary theory: Even the model of Tycho Brahe, which is better and more accurate than Copernicus’s, should only be accepted provisionally. That is to say, it may be correct, but it is not absolutely certain that this is so. . . . And should another wise and more famous astronomer appear and suggest a more perfect and complete model, which contains no inconsistencies and appears without weaknesses, even in this case, it should only be accepted in a conditional way. For the omnipotent God, capable of creation ex nihilo, could certainly order the planets in any way . . . and in reality neither astronomer may be correct. 38 Although the Copernican model was both widely accepted within the scientific community and (so he believed) contrary to Jewish belief, Landau’s conclusion was that there was no reason for concern. All scientific theories are in a state of constant flux. By taking the long, historical view, Jewish belief would ultimately be vindicated. Although Landau remained skeptical of science and was not the fi rst to do so in Hebrew literature, it is striking to note the similarity of his thinking to that of another—although this time far more famous—skeptic of science, Michel de Montaigne. 39 Montaigne was born to a wealthy family in Bordeaux in 1533, and his mother was of Spanish Jewish descent. Of the hundreds of

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pages of essays that he left, his longest, and probably most famous was called Apology for Raymond Sebond. In it, Montaigne described the limits of human reason and the grounds for extreme skepticism. There, Montaigne’s analysis of the Copernican revolution is striking. Rather than increasing our knowledge of the way the universe functioned, Montaigne concluded that it actually left us even more uncertain of reality: The sky and the stars have been moving for three thousand years; everybody had so believed, until it occurred to Cleanthes of Samos, or (according to Theophrastus) to Nicetas of Syracuse, to maintain that it was the earth that moved, through the oblique circle of the zodiac, turning about its axis; and in our day Copernicus has grounded this doctrine so well that he uses it very systematically for all astronomical deductions. What are we to get out of that, unless that we should not bother which of the two is so? And who knows whether a third opinion, a thousand years from now, will not overthrow the preceding two? . . . Thus when a new doctrine is offered to us, we have great occasion to distrust it, and to consider that before it was produced its opposite was in vogue; and as it was overthrown by this one, there may arise a third invention that will likewise smash the second. Before the principles that Aristotle introduced were in credit, other principles satisfied human reason, as his satisfy at this moment. What letters-patent have these, what special privilege, that the course of our belief stops at them, and that to them belongs the possession of our belief for all time to come? They are no more exempt from being thrown out than were their predecessors.40 Although it would be another fi ft y years or so until the sociology of scientific explanation became widely studied, Landau’s insistence on not overlooking rejected explanations or models was almost certainly based on a similar approach found in the Talmud, in which two seemingly confl icting opinions are both viewed as capable of being correct. Th is is stated in the talmudic dictum that “these as well as those are the words of the living God.”41 In this ontological approach, minority opinions are recorded for later scholars to consider, because circumstances may change and reasoning that was once rejected may again become acceptable. Rashi, the eleventh-century commentator on the Talmud, explained the concept in this way: When two Amora’im [sages of the Talmud] disagree with each other about the law there is no untruth here. Each is able to justify his

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opinion; one brings a reason to permit, and the other brings a reason to forbid. One compares the case to one paradigm, and the other to something else. Yet it is possible to say “these as well as those are the words of the living God,” for sometimes one reason will be valid, and at other times another reason will be valid. Reasons may change depending on the smallest of changes in reality.42 Landau adopted a similar approach to the question of scientific veracity, and he considered it quite possible for hypotheses that had been rejected in the past to be rehabilitated in the future. However, in maintaining this position, Landau ignored the critical point that unlike ethical or religious considerations, scientific theories had to answer to the facts of observation and experiment. Th is distinction between different theories based on rhetoric and scientific theories based on observation or experiment was not made by Landau. Rather, in Landau’s construct, all theories have the potential to be accepted and rejected at some point, depending on the circumstances of the times.

Reb Zadok It is interesting to note that a contemporary of Landau’s, Rabbi Zadok Hacohen Rabinowitz of Lublin also adopted a skeptical approach to the scientific method and rejected the heliocentric model. It is unlikely that his skepticism was the reason that he rejected the Copernican model; but having rejected Copenicanism, this skepticism provided an intellectual framework for his choice. Zadok Hacohen (1823–1900) grew up in an anti-Hasidic family but became a follower of the Hasidic Rabbi Mordekhai Yosef Leiner of Izbitz. Hacohen, popularly referred to today as simply Reb Zadok, wrote several works, all published posthumously. In 1842, Zadok wrote an essay titled Meshiv Hatayna (A Response to the Claim). Th is essay was in response to Megilat Hataynot (A Scroll of Claims) that was highly critical of the Jewish calendar.43 Zadok was unimpressed with the Copernican model and in his commentary on the mitzvot, he had described the universe as consisting of the nine traditional spheres with the Earth at the center of their orbits.44 For Zadok, the fact that scientific ideas changed over time did not suggest a movement toward the truth, but rather an inability of human understanding to ever grasp reality: I have to say that even if [scientific] proofs from the Gentiles seem compelling, whatever is in opposition to the words of our sages,

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may they rest in peace, must be absolutely ignored. We should make every effort to reject these proofs, but if we are unable to do so we should not suspect [that this is because the rabbis were not correct], but rather know that this is because of our limited understanding. We must believe that the words of the rabbis are absolutely true. There were all kinds of opinions about the length of the solar year, and about such fundamentals of astronomy as the path of the Sun, the Moon and the stars; the ancient Gentiles believed that the constellations were fi xed in the spheres and that these spheres revolved. Whoever denied this was considered to be wrong. Then more recently they agreed that in fact the stars were not fi xed, and that they move through the spheres in the ether; this then replaced their original theory. It had been widely accepted that the Earth was immobile and the Sun revolved around it, and any other opinion was rejected. But after a while the matter changed, and people believed that the Sun was immobile and that it was the Earth that orbited, and now anyone who says otherwise was considered to be in error. In all these matters there are competing calculations and different models and proofs; how can we possibly know on whom to rely? We must rely on those who received knowledge from the prophets and from our sages, who were wise and had divine inspiration, and about whom it is said “He has declared his words to Jacob.”45 Th is scientific skepticism explained how Zadok rejected any evidence that the heliocentric model was correct. In fact, Zadok cautioned against even entertaining the idea of challenging traditional Jewish beliefs with any questions from the natural world: We should not bring any proofs from the Gentiles against our sages, just as we would not bring an objection from the ancient schools against the new astronomy. Their words should never be brought against our rabbis, for the rabbis are always absolutely correct. . . .46 Reuven Landau returned to the theme of scientific skepticism in his discussion of Foucault’s pendulum: Although the astronomers of our time pride themselves on fi nding a compelling demonstration that the Earth moves by using the pendulum, you should dismiss this too. For it has happened many times

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that an earlier scientist proved a point beyond a doubt using an unequivocal demonstration, and yet a later one came and disproved that which was established earlier, including the [previously] convincing demonstrations, and showed a new explanation for the fi ndings.47 Foucault’s experiment received wide publicity, and news of it made its way to the rabbinic court of Reuven Landau in Padutark; Landau’s discussion of Foucault’s pendulum is one of the very few of its kind in rabbinical literature.48 Some thirty years prior to Landau’s book, Slonimski had described Foucault’s experiment in the second edition of his Kokhava Deshavit and had announced it to his readers as a “remarkable proof ” of the Earth’s motion. Landau did not provide an alternative explanation for the movement of the pendulum, which would have been difficult to do but which was called for if indeed this most visually impressive of experiments was to be ignored. Instead, he chose to question notions of scientific knowledge and the manner in which scientific explanations changed over time. But Landau seemed less than satisfied with his criticisms of the pendulum experiment, and after a few lines, he turned to what appeared to him to be a more substantial line of attack against the Copernican model. Th is was neither in the form of questions from scientific experiments themselves nor proof texts from the Bible. It was instead a set of profound theological objections to the Copernican model that questioned the very relationship of humanity to the universe.

Spiritual Objections Landau’s thesis was simple. Mankind was the pinnacle of God’s creation and represented the “spiritual center” of the universe. Given this, the Earth, which was inhabited by mankind, must lie at the “physical center” of the universe: The modern astronomers claim that it is not logical for the Sun and the other planets to orbit the Earth, for they are hundreds of times larger than it. Saturn is nine hundred and twenty-eight times larger than Earth, and Uranus is seventy-six times the size of Earth. . . . Is it possible that these planets should serve the Earth, which would remain unmoved and at rest in its place? Would the planets serve the Earth and orbit it in order to illuminate it and give it all it needed? Would they themselves have no other purpose? Now anyone who can understand knows that it is only as a result of the opinion that man is insignificant and of less value than the stars and planets that these astronomers have come to believe this and asked these questions . . . but they do not

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know or understand the value of the pure and righteous souls of mankind who live on the Earth. For the source [of the true way] of thinking is from a more elevated and transcendent world than the world of the angels; how much more so than the world of the planets! When man redeems himself and purifies his body and his material self by constantly serving God with love and awe, and when his soul, spirit and thought cleaves to God and when he carries out his Torah and mitzvot, then he brings life and sustenance from God to the entire world. Th is is what is explained in the Holy Zohar . . . and therefore this [geocentric view] is not surprising at all. For it is certainly appropriate and correct that the stars and planets should orbit the Earth for us, for our needs, and to light our way and serve all our wants. For although they are much larger than us in size, nevertheless the value of our souls is much greater than are they. They were only created for our purpose . . . and this is why Joshua had the strength to command the Sun saying “Sun, be still in Givon” and the Sun had to obey. . . . All the stars and planets were created for our purpose, for our use, as the verse states: “He placed them in the heavens to shine down on the Earth” [Gen. 1:15]. Therefore they are required to obey and follow the prophets and those who are the completely righteous, and must do their bidding.49 In other words, humanity occupies a special position in the universe, a location that is not geographically but rather spiritually important. Th rough the worship of God (a practice available to all of humanity) and the keeping of the laws of his Torah (a practice available only to Jews), a person elevates his physical body into a spiritual being. As this is the very goal of God’s plan for universe, it is a natural consequence that the universe should serve humanity. Although such service could, of course, be provided in a Copernican model, the old order, the one in which the Earth is at the very physical center of the universe, emphasized this special relationship. For Landau, the structure of the physical universe reflected the spiritual hierarchy designed by God. As a consequence of this hierarchy, Landau’s model of the natural order included the ability of the sages to change the natural world through the suspension of the laws of nature. He outlined this belief in the introduction to his book on trigonometry, where he explained that study of the sciences still required that the scientist be subject to the laws of nature under study: Aristotle, who was a famous as a natural scientist and in other branches of inquiry, was nevertheless unable to change the laws of nature in any way. (For example, he could not produce rain when it was needed, and so on.) He was completely subjugated by

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and beholden to the laws of nature. Th is is quite unlike the Holy Torah . . . which induces a level of holiness in the soul of the person who studies it. . . . Therefore, the righteous who study the Torah for its own sake . . . are not enslaved to the laws of nature. On the contrary, Nature itself is subjugated to them and they have the power to change the laws of nature as the need arises. 50 Th is belief was repeated in the introduction to Mahalakh Hakohavim, 51 where Landau quoted the talmudic belief that when the Bet Din changed a ruling regarding the intercalation of the year, nature itself changed to conform to the new calculation. 52 Reuven Landau’s fight against Copernican astronomy was about more than a belief in the literal meaning of the Bible or a questioning of the scientific method. It was a concern about the spiritual place of humanity in a material universe. Landau understood the threat that the new astronomy brought to fundamental questions of religious thinking, and he articulated these threats in a clear way: if the Earth was not at the literal center of God’s creation, then humanity may also not occupy that place. Because this consequence was unthinkable, any model that moved the Earth from its central position must be rejected. Landau’s physical geocentrism was a result of his spiritual anthropocentrism: These astronomers are mistaken, for the truth is that although the planets are much larger than our Earth in terms of their size; nevertheless we, mankind that lives on the Earth, outsize them in terms of the value of our souls. Our souls are from the highest of worlds [i.e., God]. Th rough our worship of God with love and awe, and through the keeping of his Torah and mitzvot with our souls cleaving to the Holy One, we make ourselves unique and more important than all the other planets, and bring God’s blessing and sustenance to the entire universe. 53 Although Landau made extensive use of the argument, he was not the fi rst to object to the heliocentric model on the basis of spiritual anthropomorphism. Indeed, the earliest use of the argument seems to have been in 1615 by the archbishop of Pisa in reviewing an early draft of Galileo’s Letter to Castelli. The archbishop argued that Galileo’s support of the Copernican model was in error, “since all things are made for the service of man, it clearly follows as a necessary consequence that the Earth cannot move like a star.”54 Within the Jewish community, this argument appeared later; it was made by Pinhas Hurwitz, who although sympathetic to the Copernican model, ultimately rejected it in his Sefer Haberit: “All of the planets were only created for the sake of this Earth,

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and everything was created for the sake of mankind on the Earth . . . even if the purpose of these other heavenly creations is not always clear to us.”55 Moses Sofer, who also rejected the new astronomy, wrote that “humanity and Israel [God’s] holy people are the entire reason for the creation, and the world was created only for them. The land and all that is on it, the spheres of the heavens and the fi rmaments were all created for the benefit of the Earth. Consequently, it is only correct that other parts of creation serve the areas where Israel dwells.”56 Sofer’s student Israel Schlesinger made the argument even more explicit. He accused Copernicus of downgrading the importance of the Earth and consequently allowing the heliocentric theory to flourish: But this is not so for us, the Children of Israel who study Torah that is greater even than the Sun. It is indeed fitt ing that the Sun shine on the Earth, not for the sake of the planet, but for the sake of those who dwell on it and who study that which is greater even than the Sun. . . . The proofs of Copernicus are in no way convincing, for he has no say in this matter at all. 57 However, there is no logical argument that requires a religious person to conclude that because humanity is the pinnacle of creation, the Sun must revolve around the Earth. As if to underscore this, a number of deeply religious Jewish pro-Copernican texts made precisely the opposite claim. David Friesenhausen, for example, wrote in Mosdot Tevel that God “created the Earth through his grace and goodness for the purpose of man who has been endowed with an intellect.”58 Such a position did not prevent him from declaring that the Copernican model was correct. In fact, Friesenhausen reworked the anthropocentric argument and noted that despite the Earth’s tiny size and seeming insignificance, God chose to give the Torah to those on Earth, a fact that should demand more, rather than less, awe of the divine: See how great are God’s works, and how his creatures have enlarged their borders. Th is planet is absolutely inconsequential and is lost among the millions of other planets. So your heart should rejoice at the works of your Creator, and you should sing out at the righteousness of the labor of his hands. For among all of his creations he chose his people Israel on this tiny dot, sanctifying them with holiness and giving them his pure holy Torah full of statutes and just laws. He called them “my fi rstborn child” and dwells among them forever. 59 We have also noted that Eliezer Lipman Neusatz, a pro-Copernican student of Moses Sofer, was unimpressed by the anthropocentric argument; Neusatz

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agreed that mankind was the pinnacle of creation, but did not feel that this was an argument in favor of a stationary Earth. Instead, he proclaimed these matters to be the purview of astronomers alone, and suggested that the best approach would be to leave the arrangement of the universe in God’s hands, rather than demand that the order of the planets be based on religious considerations.60 Furthermore, Maimonides had warned against believing that the universe was created for the sake of humans alone: It should not be believed that all the beings exist for the sake of the existence of man. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not for the sake of something else. . . . Just as He willed that the human species should come to exist, He also has willed that the spheres and their stars should come to exist; and He also has willed that the angels should come to exist. In respect to every being He intended that being itself . . . .61 It is clear therefore that the argument for the special position of humanity did not convince supporters of the Copernican model to reconsider their position. Nevertheless, Landau articulated just such a position at length, expressing concern that the Copernican model would demote humans from their special position at the center of the cosmos. Th is concern was echoed by Nietzsche, who published On the Genealogy of Morality in 1887, just five years after Mahalakh Hakohavim: Hasn’t precisely the self-belitt lement of man, his will to self-belitt lement been marching relentlessly forward since Copernicus? Alas, the belief in his dignity, uniqueness, irreplaceability in the hierarchy is lost—he has become an animal, without simile, qualification, or reservation, an animal, he who in his earlier belief was almost god. . . . Since Copernicus man seems to have stumbled onto an inclined plane—he is now rolling faster and faster away from the center—whither? into nothingness? into the “penetrating feeling of his nothingness”?62 Landau decided to reclaim the center of the universe for humanity and thereby restore what had been lost—a sense of purpose and a feeling of being special.

Landau’s Sources and Sefer Haberit When we consider the possible inspiration for Landau’s anthropocentric structure of the universe, it is certain that Landau had relied on Sefer Haberit by

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Pinhas Hurwitz. We have just noted how Hurwitz made clear that the entire universe was created for man. There can be no doubt that Landau was familiar with this notion from the Sefer Haberit, for there are passages from it that appear virtually word for word in Mahalakh Hakohavim, although they are not acknowledged to be such.63 The astronomy of Sefer Haberit appears to be the foundation of Landau’s own, although again, Landau failed to acknowledge Hurwitz as his source.64 Although Hurwitz was more sympathetic to Copernican thought than Landau, he too ultimately chose to reject it in favor of the geocentric model.65 Hurwitz also had a skeptical att itude toward scientific discoveries, an att itude that Landau later amplified. For example, Hurwitz cautioned against rejecting Tycho’s model, because . . . who knows if at a later time or in one of the many future generations that will come after ours, his theory may be accepted. Then it may become permanently accepted, for this is the way among the Gentiles that some opinions have their time. At times they are rejected and at other times they are accepted. Even if a theory is rejected from its very inception . . . eventually there may arise a person who adopts the theory and succeeds in spreading it across the entire world. Such a person would be very successful and become famous throughout the world, and every one would listen to him. . . .66 Although Landau based much of his anti-Copernicanism on Sefer Haberit without acknowledging this source, there were several other Jewish texts that Landau quoted by name. Landau cited Tuviah Cohen (1658–1729), whose illustrated textbook of the sciences Ma’aseh Tuviah was discussed in chapter 5. There we examined the book’s forceful rejection of Copernican thought. What is surprising, however, is that Landau did not quote those parts of Ma’aseh Tuviah in which Copernican thought was rejected, but instead cited parts that supported Landau’s rejection of the possibility of life on other planets.67 Landau questioned fi ndings made using the telescope, which revealed not only the existence of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, but also the existence of “hills and valleys” on the Moon and on other planets. As these were also features found on Earth, this fi nding suggested that life might be found on other planets too. These features were also evidence that the planets were not perfect objects, as demanded by Ptolemaic astronomy. Landau could not provide a cogent explanation for these features, other than to question them and to note that areas of darkness had also been noted on the Sun. Despite these sunspots, it was clear, argued Landau, that life could not exist on the Sun itself, and so other blemishes that were features of the geography of the planets themselves would not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the planets were Earth-like

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and supported life. Cohen too had concluded that “according to our Torah it is impossible that another Earth-like planet exists.”68 However, Landau was aware that not all modern thinkers had rejected the possibility of life on other planets. Remember from chapter 6 that David Nieto (1654–1728), who became rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in London, had addressed this possibility in his book Matteh Dan. Nieto wrote that although there was no certain answer, there was no reason to reject the possibility of life on other planets based on the teachings of the Torah.69 Th is approach was rejected by Landau, who wrote: “I am very suspicious of this, and it is certainly possible that a later astronomer added these words into [Nieto’s] book.” 70 In other words, Landau claimed that this paragraph had been forged and added without the knowledge of the author. Such a claim was not likely, for Nieto’s book was published in 1714, fourteen years before his death, in Nieto’s adopted home city of London. Nieto would certainly have overseen the publication, and the claim that entire paragraphs were added without the author’s knowledge was absurd, albeit not without precedent in Jewish intellectual history.71 Over the centuries, there were several rabbinic scholars who dismissed problematic texts with the claim that these texts had been forged and could therefore be ignored. Landau’s claim was another of this ilk and, although unusual, should not be viewed as unique.72 The final Jewish source that was cited by Landau was the work of Raphael Levi of Hannover (1685–1779), the mathematician and astronomer who had (perhaps) studied philosophy with Leibniz and whose work we examined in chapter 8. Reuven Landau analyzed the tables that appeared in Levi’s Tekhunot Hashamayim at some length.73 Now this fact would not be terribly important were it not the case that, at the end of Tekhunot Hashamayim, Levi described in brief but flowery language his own conversion to a belief in the Copernican model. There can be no doubt that Landau, who praised Levi’s knowledge of astronomy, would have read this; indeed, the large diagrams of the Ptolemaic and Copernican models that appear in Tekhunot Hashamayim make this section impossible to miss. And yet Landau did not mention Levi’s Copernican conversion.

Nivreshet Lenez Hahamah Although Landau’s defense of the geocentric model was unusual, it was by no means unique. Another late nineteenth-century defense of the model was published in Jerusalem in 1898 by Hiyyah David Spitzer, and it is illuminating to contrast that work with Landau’s.74 Spitzer’s main interest was in determining the precise times of sunrise and sunset in Jewish law, and he spent hours carefully measuring these times in and around Jerusalem. His book Nivreshet

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Lenez Hahamah (The Chandelier of the Sunrise) was a summary of his fi ndings, but it also included a criticism of Joseph Ginzburg’s Ittim Lebinah (Times for Wisdom) that had been published in Warsaw in 1886. As may be recalled from the previous chapter, Ginzberg had defended the heliocentric model and had included a folded pull-out chart of the solar system. Spitzer was outraged at Ginzberg’s suggestion that the new astronomy was acceptable to Jews. “I saw things written [in Ittim Lebinah] that bring a person to heresy,” he wrote, and he was particularly incensed to see the colored illustration at the end of the book. “Woe to those eyes that must witness a universe turned upside down.” 75 Spitzer rejected the heliocentric system because “everything, including the Sun, was created for the Earth and for Israel who dwell on it and keep the Torah.” 76 In this way, he echoed Landau’s anthropocentric defense of the old geocentric model. Like Landau, he also relied on Pinhas Hurwitz’s Sefer Haberit to support his position and cited some of the scientific objections to Copernicanism mentioned in that work. There was the problem that a stone dropped from a tower does not fall to the west of the tower, and in addition, Spitzer cited Hurwitz’s theory that if the Earth moved, there would have been no need for God to have created both gravity and centrifugal force.77 It must be noted that Spitzer carefully skipped over the paragraph in which Hurwitz conceded that it was perfectly possible for a Jew who believed that the Earth moved to be considered righteous, and instead questioned how Ginzberg could have ignored Hurwitz’s important work.78 Spitzer then introduced several scientific objections of his own. These included apparent discrepancies in the calculated distances of the planets and stars from the Earth, which indicated that perhaps none were correct. If, as astronomers claimed, some stars were 24,000 light years away from the Earth, their light could not have reached the Earth, which had only existed for some 6,000 years. In addition, what purpose would there have been in creating such remote stars, the light of which served no purpose for those on Earth?79 Even when judged by the scientific standards of his own time, Spitzer’s work was astonishingly na ïve. Using a thought experiment, he proved to his satisfaction that starlight actually needed only one second to reach the Earth.80 Furthermore, Spitzer asked how astronomers could possibly have performed the work necessary to claim that some stars were 3,000 light years from the Earth: Did they stand there for some three thousand years doing the experiment, not losing their concentration, and not eating or drinking or sleeping, in order to see clearly and to know with certainty that after this period some new starlight had appeared that had not been there previously? No one believes that they did anything of the sort. Rather

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they immediately saw the distant stars with their telescopes. . . . The speed of light must not be compared to the speed of a cannonball or the telegraph, or even the speed of sound, but rather to the fastest speed of all, the speed of thought.81 Spitzer claimed that anyone could perform a simple experiment that would refute the notion that light took a fi nite time to travel vast distances. If, during the day, the door to a house was suddenly closed, it should still be possible to see an image of the Sun for some time, because the light would take time to travel from the site of the now-closed door across the room and into the eye of the observer. Similarly, if we open a closed door or window . . . we should not be able to see sunlight for some time, and we should be forced to sit in darkness as if the doors had not been opened. What can be said of this idiocy and stupidity, at which any person would laugh? Rather, as soon as a person opens his eyes he stops seeing nothing and when he opens his eyes at night he immediately sees all the stars, both those nearby that need sixteen years for their light to travel, and those far away whose light takes one hundred and twenty years to reach us.82 Th is experiment was all that was needed to refute the claim that light from distant stars takes many years to reach the Earth, but there was a further consideration that would prove the same point. As the Talmud did not mention the speed of light in any of its discourses about matters of halakhah, it was not only of no religious consequence, but it did not exist in reality.83 Spitzer also rejected Ginsberg’s claim that there was no practical difference between the heliocentric and geocentric models insofar as the calculation of the Jewish months was concerned. Spitzer claimed that “the entire story of creation” had changed if the Copernican model was accepted, but tellingly, Spitzer did not demonstrate a single practical difference that would affect Jewish law.84 Nevertheless, Spitzer was certain that the new astronomy should not compete with the older theories of the ancestors of the Jewish people, asking “who would even entertain bringing such a suggestion as this into a [Jewish] home?”85 Spitzer suggested a sinister motive for all those who supported the new astronomy: “Their entire aim is to deny God’s Torah, to destroy religion, to confuse those who would disagree with them and to embarrass and belitt le the sages of Israel.”86 Spitzer published a follow-up work in 1906 that briefly returned to the Copernican question.87 There he claimed that Hurwitz never meant to suggest that it would be acceptable for a Jew to believe in the Copernican theory;

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rather, what Hurwitz meant was that there were Jews who believed in that theory, and that they claimed that it was an acceptable belief.88 He also addressed Joseph Delmedigo’s Sefer Elim that had been published in 1629 and suggested that Delmedigo became a Copernican because he was influenced by the spirit of the age and the esteem in which Copernicus was held by his colleagues at the time.89 Spitzer also claimed that the orbit of Venus was problematic for supporters of the Copernican model, because it orbits from east to west, unlike the other planets that orbit from west to east. Th is orbit could be seen by anyone who observed Venus, which could be done with the naked eye: Didn’t Copernicus assure us that all the planets revolve from west to east? . . . Why does Venus not obey? . . . But there is no need to follow this wicked person and all of his proofs (which are absolutely false) about the Earth, for the planets do not only orbit around the Earth from east to west [sic.] but they may go in any of the four cardinal directions at any time they please. And so it has been demonstrated beyond any doubt through the observations of thousands of witnesses that it is the Earth and not the Sun that lies immobile at the center of the universe, just as God commanded. . . .90 The seven planets (that include the Sun of course) orbit the Earth and serve its needs for the sake of mankind in general and for Israel in particular, a holy people that study the holy Torah. We have witnessed again how this new false idea has gained strength. Consequently we must be extremely vigilant about protecting ourselves from this heresy that darkens the heart, God forbid, and lays siege to the garden that is Israel. May God not leave or abandon us until the coming of the Messiah, in our days.91 Compared to Landau’s, Spitzer’s criticisms of the heliocentric model were based to a greater degree on what he perceived to be the shortcomings of contemporary astronomy. Whereas Landau had accepted the fi ndings of the scientists of his day but suggested that they may in the future be shown to be incorrect, Spitzer categorically rejected contemporary science as flawed. He shared Landau’s anthropocentric construction of the universe but att ributed dark motives to those who supported the heliocentric model.92 The contemporary British astronomer Martin Rees noted how “[e]ver since Copernicus, we’ve been reluctant to put ourselves center stage in the cosmos,”93 but Landau had no such reluctance. He placed the Earth at the center of the universe because humanity was at the spiritual center of that same universe. His astronomy was guided as much by his anthropocentric outlook as it was by his interpretations of the Bible, and brings to mind Kuhn’s comment that scientific

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arguments were “ . . . not the most forceful weapons in the anti-Copernican battery, and they are not the ones that generate the most heat. Those weapons were religious and, particularly, scriptural.”94 In Mahalakh Hakohavim, Landau gave even greater weight to the religious or spiritual concerns than he gave to the scientific and scriptural ones. His perception of the challenges that scientific advances would bring to religion in general and traditional Jewish thinking in particular seem to have been most prescient.95

12

The Modern Period

Conversation on a Train Menahem Nahum Friedman of Itscan (1879–1933) was a fascinating and often confl icted person. He was, on the one hand, a great-grandson of Israel of Ruzhin (1790–1850), who had founded the most important Hasidic dynasty in Galicia and Romania. Friedman proved a worthy descendent and published several commentaries, responsa, and philosophical essays before his death from cancer at the age of fi ft y-four. On the other hand, despite his Hasidic upbringing and allegiance, he traveled widely, identified with the early Zionist movement, and read works by Spinoza, Kant, and Goethe.1 Friedman told the following story in the introduction to his commentary on Ethics of the Fathers, published in 1920. While traveling by train from Ancona in central Italy to Rome some time near the beginning of the century, a passenger sitt ing opposite him struck up a conversation that soon became very heated: When I let it slip that I was a rabbi he immediately began to attack me with questions of all sorts relating to religion and Torah. He had clearly not forgotten that which he had learned as a child and was educated in both general knowledge and science. His entire goal was to demonstrate that everything found in the Talmud was (according to the wise and cultured times in which we lived, times full of wisdom and scientific achievements . . . ) entirely outdated (heaven forbid). He brought all sorts of proofs, and began with the skies. He said that the rabbis of the Talmud stated that the sphere is fi xed and the constellations revolve. According to the sages the Sun, Moon and planets all circle the fi xed Earth. Yet the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus showed with all manner of convincing proofs that the Sun is immobile and all the planets orbit it from west to east. . . .2

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The unnamed passenger then moved to a number of other topics that had one unifying theme: science in the Talmud was outdated, and its treatment of non-Jews was derogatory. Friedman recounted that he addressed each and every criticism with a counterargument. He told his sparring partner that the sages of the Talmud never required that their views on astronomy be accepted. Rather, talmudic views on science were to be viewed as the best available assessments of their time and nothing more. 3 However, in matters of religious behavior, the sages were to be followed emphatically. As the train approached its destination, Freidman got in the last word: “Now Sir, if you really long for the truth you should follow this principle: the goal of the sages was never to teach astronomy or the workings of nature to the People of Israel, but rather to teach them that God’s Torah is perfect.”4 Th is incident allows the reader to travel back to the beginning of the twentieth century and hear just what it was about rabbinic Judaism that had prompted many young intellectual Jews to abandon their faith. As played out in that railway carriage, the fi rst issue raised was that the old geocentric model was part and parcel of normative Jewish belief. 5 Yet, as we have already demonstrated, the very opposite was the case; by the beginning of the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of Hebrew books that were being published were entirely at peace with every aspect of the model fi rst advanced by Copernicus and later refi ned by Kepler and Newton. Friedman did not point out that there were numerous Jewish books that supported the Copernican view because his point was a much larger one. But Friedman’s discussant, although seemingly educated in both matters of science and Jewish belief, had not read any of these pro-Copernican books—or if he had, he acted as if ignorant of them. We cannot know which of these two possibilities was correct, but whichever it was, it suggests that the Copernican question was still an important issue at the start of the twentieth century.6

Conversation on a Boat The publication of another work supports the notion that at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the Copernican question was still regarded as being important to sett le. Ginzei Hamelekh (The King’s Treasuries) is subtitled Moses and His Torah are True (Mosheh Vetorato Emet), and it is this subtitle that really defi nes the book’s agenda. It is a defense of classic rabbinic Judaism, written at the close of the nineteenth century when Reform Judaism, secularism, and the Haskalah were alternatives to the traditional practice of Judaism.7 It was written by Dov Ber Tursch, who was born in Warsaw in 1863, and about whom there are few biographic details. Tursch

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owned a prolific publishing house in Warsaw, and his own works include a commentary on aggadic passages in the Talmud and Midrash, and a critical analysis of the early Zionist movement. But it is in Ginzei Hamelekh that Tursch explored the threat to traditional Judaism from Copernicanism. The work is a fictional debate between two Jews traveling on a ship from Eastern Europe. One, named Mehalalel, who comes from Warsaw, is traditionally observant; the other, She’altiel, was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home and as a child believed in the divinity of the Torah.8 However, he is now secularly educated, clean-shaven, and no longer observant. Their differences are contrasted in a poignant scene in which, while Mehalalel blesses the wine by the light of the Shabbat candles, She’altiel smokes tobacco.9 After the ship survives a heavy storm, the two enter into a series of theological discussions. She’altiel claims that the Torah has brought endless trouble for the Jews, and that it, no less, is the cause of anti-Semitism.10 A Gentile who hears the two arguing suggests that they engage in a proper debate about the merits of Judaism, and after some encouragement, the two agree and shake hands.11 Over a series of fourteen questions and answers, they debate back and forth, covering a staggering range of topics. The book reveals just what matters were seen as the greatest threat to traditional Judaism as the nineteenth century closed and, conversely, the intellectual att ractions that caused Jews to leave their traditional belief structure. Among these we might expect to read about the divinity of Torah, the accuracy of historical events portrayed in the Talmud, an account of miracles, the election of Israel, and the like. Although these topics are indeed covered in Tursch’s book, the very fi rst question that the two fictional protagonists address is the truth of Copernicanism. The fi rst argument raised by She’altiel, the lapsed Jew, is that after nearly four hundred years, the heliocentric model remains accepted. “I examined this theory closely, and I noted that it was produced by a wise person, greater than a prophet . . . and it caused me to question the truth of the Bible . . . for many verses are based on the Ptolemaic model that has been overthrown.”12 She’altiel digressed into the history of Galileo’s imprisonment by the Inquisition and gave a moving, if entirely fictional, account of Galileo’s last moments. “He died a hero’s death on the batt lefield of science, and at his last breath he needed to exclaim, ‘My blood may soon lie still in my veins, but the Earth will continue to move.’ ”13 Having established the martyrdom of Galileo in the name of science, She’altiel laid down his challenge to Mehalalel: “If you are an enlightened soul and are illuminated with the light of wisdom, answer me truthfully . . . how may a human like Copernicus be more correct than God himself?”14 It must be remembered that this is a fictional debate, but Tursch chose to open it with the question of how to reconcile Copernicanism with the Bible. Th rough the words of She’altiel, the author expresses his own doubts: “Th is is a weighty question, and for the last many, many years it has

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reverberated in my mind like the mosquito inside the skull of Titus, allowing me no rest at all.” It was this issue that was of most pressing concern to Tursch as he wrote his defense of traditional Judaism. Although he acknowledged the gravity of the question, Mehalalel initially dismissed it as an easy one to deal with. Copernicanism was not free of errors, the most prominent of which seems to have been that the Sun was not itself absolutely stationary. It is of course a minor point and in no way negates the truth of the heliocentric model, but it seems to be enough of an error for Mehalalel, or better, Tursch, to avoid dealing with the real question—the seeming confl ict between the model and some verses of the Bible. Eventually this question is addressed, and Mehalalel explains that if every verse in the Bible were interpreted literally, the reader would believe that God has eyes, hands, and feet. Th is absurd conclusion stems from the approach that demands the Bible always be read literally. Mehalalel cites the medieval Jewish philosopher Albo, who wrote that the Torah would never demand a belief that was illogical or inconsistent with reality; it was therefore a religious requirement to explain any problematic verses “intelligently and in ways that are true to the Copernican system, which is correct.”15 The question of the Earth’s movement also occupies much of the second question asked by She’altiel, in which he cites thirty-four biblical verses that seem to support a geocentric universe. After a meandering reply that discusses the special place of humanity in the universe, the silkworm, the nature of lies, and why the Torah does not explicitly mention the world to come, Mehalalel eventually returns to the original question. He proposes that in order to allow the Torah in its entirety to be palatable to its readers, it was necessary to weave moral and religious teachings with a worldview that was familiar and comfortable to the readers. In Mehalalel’s analogy, the Torah is a medicine that would taste rather bitter were it not diluted with a sweet-tasting drink: “It does not matter one bit to the medication how it arrives in the belly of the patient, whether diluted with milk or sweet water. The only thing that matters is that the medication be taken and targets the disease.”16 For Tursch, the Torah was not a text to train the Jews to become philosophers or scientists; instead, it was a book that taught correct behavior. In so doing, it described a moving Sun and stationary Earth in order to be more palatable and acceptable to the reader, for whom this was indeed a correct description of the way things appear. And this was the entire explanation as to why some biblical verses describe a Ptolemaic system. Tursch discussed astronomy and Copernicus throughout his book. He strongly believed that life existed on other planets, and claimed that a meteor that had landed in Jamaica in 1864 had a chemical composition that demonstrated it was produced by an intelligent life form on another planet.17 Tursch used his belief in extraterrestrial life to explain a troubling statement, in

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which Maimonides claimed that the planets themselves were actually sentient beings.18 “The real meaning of Maimonides,” explained Tursch, “is that he is referring to the creatures that live on the planets. It is they who are sentient and are intelligent, and it is they who acknowledge he who spoke and created the universe [i.e., God].”19 Copernicus is described as having been an outcast from society because of the views he held, a view that is historically incorrect.20 Mehalalel noted more correctly that Copernicus, like many other astronomers, remained a devout Christian throughout his life and was unperturbed by the religious implications of his heliocentric model.21 Th is was held as an example to She’altiel, the renegade Jew, of how it was possible to maintain a sophisticated scientific position and remain religious, and it was a simple argument that had not been used before. Tursch was keenly aware of how the intellectual sophistication of the non-Jewish world was attractive to many Jews, and he realized that his arguments about the internal logic of the Torah and its ability to be cleverly reinterpreted were not likely, by themselves, to win a debate with a Jew who had lost his faith. As Tursch understood the situation, many lapsed Jews were impressed by the work of non-Jewish scientists; he hoped that the example of these scientists remaining true to their own faiths would encourage Jews to do the same.22 These two authors, Menahem Nahum Friedman and Dov Ber Tursch, revealed the concerns of two Jews who maintained an observant Jewish life while trying to reconcile their beliefs with rapidly changing knowledge of the natural world. And the scientific advances that occurred in the opening years of the last century were indeed astonishing. The stage was set in 1887, when Michelson and Morley provided strong evidence that ether, the matter that supposedly fi lled space and allowed light to be carried, did not exist. Einstein published his theory on special relativity in 1905 and demonstrated that the speed of light was the same for all observers, that space and time were inseparably linked, and that E = mc2 . He combined Newtonian laws with his special theory and developed his theory of general relativity in 1916, suggesting that space was curved and that gravity can warp both space and time. In 1929, Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the galaxies farthest away recede at the greatest velocities and established that the universe was expanding. And if the universe was expanding, it must follow that, going back in time, all those galaxies were once much closer to each other; the Russian physicist George Gamow suggested this theory in 1948. Surely against this backdrop, the Copernican debate was fi nally over. Had not the lines in the sand been drawn? Was not each side certain of the arguments of the other? The heliocentrists claimed that the Torah and the Talmud were not books of science but of religious obligations, that they spoke in human language, and that problematic texts can always, indeed should always, be interpreted to correspond to contemporary wisdom.

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The geocentrists were not impressed: A biblical verse can only be understood in the context of its simple and literal reading, the rabbis of the Talmud can never speak in error about any topic, and if modern science stands in opposition to the words of rabbis of the Talmud and its later interpreters, then it is science that must bend and give way. Was there anything that Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century could add to this stale debate? Indeed there was.

The Principle of Charity The nineteenth-century Jewish essayist Asher Ginsberg (1856–1927) was known as Ahad Ha’am (One of the People). He was born in Kiev and became involved in the Zionist movement in Eastern Europe. As a result, he visited Palestine on many occasions, and his writing focused on how the nascent Zionist movement could foster a state that would serve as a cultural center for the Jewish people. Although he was a secular Jew, he was concerned with how Jewish texts should be understood, and in an essay fi rst published in 1904, he distinguished between what he called sacred and profane works of literature.23 Profane books were simply sources of information that imparted knowledge, and their content was more important than their form. As information obtained from many sources changed, the profane book became less and less relevant, until it eventually became totally obsolete. Sacred books were quite different. Here it was the form that became essential, and the content merely accidental, for it was the form that sanctified the content.24 As a result, sacred books retained their status. “The book remains unchanged forever [while] the content changes ceaselessly with the progress of life and culture.”25 Given this ability to change their content, Ahad Ha’am was confident that Judaism’s most sacred texts would remain relevant.26 What is there that men have not found in our sacred books from Philo’s day to this? In Alexandria they found Plato in them; in Spain, Aristotle; the Cabbalists found their own teaching, and the followers of other religions theirs; nay some pious scholars have even found in them Copernicus and Darwin. All these men sought in Scripture only the truth—each one his own truth—and all found that which they sought. They found it because they had to fi nd it: because if they had not found it, then truth would not have been truth, or the Scriptures would not have been holy. Ahad Ha’am did not, however, identify the mechanism by which this sacred status was maintained. Just how does a text remain sacred if the meaning of its

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content can vary? If a text can mean everything, does it mean anything? It fell to later philosophers of language to explicate this, like the American analytical philosopher Donald Davidson (1917–2003), who developed the “principle of charity.” “We make maximum sense of the words of others,” wrote Davidson, “when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement.”27 The principle of charity requires that the reader change the meaning of the text in order to maximize the likelihood of agreement with the author’s words, as long as such a rational or coherent interpretation is available to the reader. It is the attempt to read the text in the “best” possible light.28 There are some texts—profane texts in Ahad Ha’am’s terminology—to which the reader does not apply the principle of charity; for example, a lawyer might interpret a legal text in order to obtain a winning verdict for his client, rather than in an effort to produce a unifying moral reading, and a literary critic may ignore the principle to produce a review that shows a work in the worst possible light.29 But a devotee’s reading of a sacred text will use this principle, albeit unconsciously at times. Indeed, the more sacred the text, the greater will be the degree of charity that the religious reader will invoke. Maimonides clearly expressed this principle when he explained how his interpretation of the Torah followed certain scientific ideas of his day—in his case, the suggestion that rather than being eternal, the world was created. Had those scientific beliefs been different, Maimonides declared that he would simply have interpreted the text in a different way, to avoid any confl ict between the text and science: “Nor are the gates of figurative interpretation shut in our faces or impossible of access to us regarding the subject of the creation of the world in time. For we could interpret them as figurative, as we have done when denying His corporeality.”30 In order to maximize the truths contained in the unchanging words of the Bible, its meaning must be amended with the times. Some texts, like the Talmud, are also considered sacred, though not as sacred as the Bible, and these too needed to be reinterpreted. For some, this was easily done: The Bible spoke metaphorically, and scientific descriptions recorded in the Talmud are simply to be understood as “best guess” statements, rather than declarations of unwavering truths. We have already seen how Hirsch and others used this approach in the nineteenth century to show how Copernicanism and the Bible should be harmonized. Ahad Ha’am did not enter the debate about the truth of Copernicanism, but instead offered the outline of a semantic theory (in a rough and unfi nished form, to be sure) in which a charitable reading of the Bible allowed it to remain meaningful, even as science expanded our understanding of the universe. 31 Ahad Ha’am mentioned Darwin in passing as he wrote about the harmonization of sacred texts with the sciences, although very few Jews had addressed the religious implications of the theory of evolution. But this would soon change.

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A New Theory—Evolution Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935) was a fervent Zionist, poet, mystic, and theologian elected as the fi rst chief rabbi of Palestine. He left a vast legacy of writings that have been studied extensively, and some of his work has only recently been published. Kook’s writings touched on a large number of areas, including the relationship of the sciences to Jewish belief. Understandably, Kook directed his energies to analyzing, within a spiritual framework, the newest scientific theory of his day, Darwin’s theory of evolution, which had fi rst been published in 1859. Kook felt that Darwin’s theory was a threat only to those who had a “limited understanding” of the issue. 32 Although Kook discussed evolution in a number of different places, perhaps his most in-depth discussion appeared in a work only recently published, although it was written in 1903–1904. 33 Evolution, Kook suggested, brings a Jew to an even-deeper understanding of the marvels of God’s creation and encourages him to follow God’s commandments. Cosmology presented no challenge either. “What difference,” wrote Kook, “is there between the formation of immense stars and planets over eons and the development of a fetus in its mother’s womb over a few months? In either case we recognize that ‘Your works are amazing, and my soul knows this well’ ” (Ps. 139:14). 34 Kook understood the creation story in the Bible as a metaphor, allowing the text to be charitably reinterpreted if scientific knowledge ever seemed to contradict it. Kook explained that the Bible did not explain the origins of the universe, but began the creation story sometime during the evolution of the Earth into the planet we recognize. At some point, the Earth began to spin, and it was this that created night and day as described in the biblical creation story. 35 Th is tangential acknowledgment of the Earth’s motion was expanded in a letter that Kook wrote in the summer of 1905, in which he addressed the Copernican model and offered a new explanation for why the theory had been proposed only relatively recently. The letter touched upon several different scientific issues, including the age of the Earth, archeological evidence of earlier civilizations, and cosmology. Once again, Kook emphasized that there could be no contradiction between an established scientific principle and the Torah, but he cautioned against accepting every scientific theory as if it were correct. The history of science shows that theories often do not last long, and “we are not obliged to accept theories as facts, even those about which there is general agreement, for they are like a fading flower. Soon enough new instruments will be developed, and people will mock these new theories . . . only the word of our God will last forever.”36 Kook did not mention which scientific theory (if any) he had in mind, but the heliocentric theory was not one about which Kook voiced any doubt. In an original explanation, Kook suggested that the heliocentric model developed

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only when humanity had evolved a level of sophistication needed to understand all of its implications: Had the fact that the Earth moved been made known to mankind thousands of years ago, a person would have been afraid to stand on his own feet, lest the force of the Earth’s movement cause him to fall. He would certainly have feared building anything, and this would have caused a general weakness of the will that would have led to an unimaginable lack of growth. The force of gravity would not have offered any relief, for everyone has seen that it is not certain that an object that is not based on a solid foundation will remain standing. Only after the development of a sophisticated nature was it appropriate to reveal that the Earth moved, [and once this occurred] only good could come of this. 37 Kook’s rather convoluted explanation makes litt le sense when it is teased apart; why would a person conclude he could not walk if the world was spinning when simple observation shows this not to be the case? Why would he decide against any kind of construction, when again simple observation would reveal that complex living things like trees grow tall without any problem, even if their roots are deep inside the moving Earth? But this aside, a number of salient points emerged. First, Kook clearly accepted the truth of the Copernican model. Second, Kook suggested a general principle that scientific theories are generated only within a social milieu that is ready for them, and fi nally, Kook’s profound optimism, and more specifically his progressive reading of history, allowed him to conclude that once a scientific theory has been accepted, it would be of some benefit to humanity. Although certainly not the fi rst to write a Jewish response to Darwinian thought, Kook seems to have been among the fi rst to claim that both evolution and the heliocentric model were correct and could be accommodated within a deeply religious worldview. 38

Darwin the Meshuga Another scholar who wrote about both evolution and the Copernican model was a colorful rabbi by the name of Yudel Rosenberg (1859–1935). Rosenberg was born in Poland and moved to Montreal in 1913, where he remained until his death. 39 Rosenberg was described by one historian as a devoted Jew whose “personal integrity however, did not necessarily carry over into his literary works.”40 Th is seems to be an understatement. In 1909,

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Rosenberg published Nifla’ot Maharal (The Wonders of the Maharal), a work that he claimed to have found as a manuscript in the Royal Library in Metz. Rosenberg stated that the son-in-law of Rabbi Judah Loew (known by the acronym as the Maharal, whose work we reviewed in chapter 3) wrote the manuscript, which described how the Maharal saved the Jews in Prague by creating a golem. But there never was a Royal Library in Metz, and the book was a forgery. Four years later, Rosenberg published Hoshen Mishpat Shel Cohen Gadol (The Breastplate of the High Priest), and again claimed that the booklet was based on a long-lost manuscript found in the Royal Library in Metz. Rosenberg’s tale told of how the Maharal of Prague traveled to London in 1590 in search of the twelve precious stones from a high priest’s breastplate that had been stolen from a museum there. However, both the plot and the names of many of the characters were plagiarized from a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle that had been published in 1908. With this background information, we turn to another of Rosenberg’s works, Nifla’os Hazohar (The Wonders of the Zohar), published in Montreal in 1927.41 Th is work was a Hebrew translation and compendium of the Zohar, the central text of Jewish mysticism that was written in Aramaic. And it is there that we fi nd Rosenberg addressing both Copernicus and Darwin. But before proceeding, we should fi rst acquaint ourselves with Rosenberg’s position on the age and authenticity of the Zohar. The traditional view was that the Zohar was composed by the talmudic sage Shimon bar Yohai, who lived at the time of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 ce. Bar Yohai wrote down mystical teachings that had been revealed to such great figures as Moses and Abraham, but which had remained in oral form only. In contrast, the modern or academic view is that the Zohar was written by Moses de Leon in Spain in the thirteenth century. Yudel Rosenberg entered this debate with a compromise position: The Zohar was indeed a collection of authentic statements dating back as far as Shimon bar Yohai, but they were only fi nally collated and written down by de Leon.42 One of the passages that Rosenberg used to support this position was a text showing that the author of the Zohar knew that the world was round and that it was widely inhabited: All the world turns as a ball, and some [on it] are below and some are above. And the local weather causes changes in the various appearances of different animals. . . . There are places where it is bright for some and it is dark for others, and when it is day for some it is night for others. There are also places where there is almost continuous daylight, and where the night is very brief.43

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In his Nifla’os Hazohar, Rosenberg wrote that the Zohar did not only teach religious principles, but that it was a work of science as well: Take for example the knowledge that the Earth was a globe that is found in the Zohar. Now it is a well-known fact that the Zohar appeared many years before the discovery of America. At that time the Zohar had not been printed [as a single work] but people would copy it [from manuscripts]. Look at this amazing thing: it contains knowledge of the Earth as a globe just as Columbus and Copernicus later discovered. That is to say, the world is round like a ball and is inhabited throughout. It has two kinds of motion: the fi rst is a daily movement on its axis like a wheel spinning on its axle, and the second is a yearly movement around the Sun. . . . Anyone with some understanding will see that in these few words are hinted that which Copernicus would discover some three hundred years after the Zohar appeared.44 Rosenberg interpreted this passage to prove that the Zohar contained the kind of scientific knowledge that was not generally known when it was fi nally committed to writing by Moses de Leon. Th is would support his thesis that the Zohar contained divinely revealed wisdom, even if it was only redacted in the thirteenth century. The problem with Rosenberg’s claim is that it ignores the fact that the world was known to the Greeks to have been a globe since at least the fourth century bce.45 In point of fact, as we showed in chapter 2, the sages of the Talmud believed that the world was flat. Although it is certainly the case that this text of the Zohar described the world as a globe, this was far from being the unique and significant breakthrough that Rosenberg had claimed. Whether or not Rosenberg knew this fact and deliberately ignored it cannot be determined, but his pattern of behavior suggests that he often knew far more about the origins of a work than he was prepared to share publicly. That Rosenberg accepted the Copernican model is interesting but hardly newsworthy. What is more interesting is his approach to Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he addressed in a note at the end of his comments on Copernicus and the Zohar: From all this we can see that the theory that is called “evolution” proposed by the crazy [meshuga] person “Darwin” was stolen from the Zohar here that describes various species of animals and groups of people found over the Earth. Darwin wrote that all people are descended from apes. But it seems that it is he who is acting like an ape in front of all mankind. . . . It is the spirit of craziness for this non-believer [apikores] to deal with this foul idea. In reality in the

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Zohar it is written that the opposite is true: monkeys are in fact the offspring of people who sinned and were punished in this way. All the honest Gentile scientists of the world agree with this.46 Rosenberg found Darwin’s theory absolutely unacceptable, but ironically he embraced the heliocentric theory as having been predicted in the Zohar. Just as many Jewish writers in the centuries before Rosenberg had objected to Copernicus’s theory, Rosenberg now objected to a new theory in his own time. And just as some had resorted to name-calling (recall Tuviah Cohen’s description of Copernicus as “the First born Son of Satan”), so did Rosenberg, describing Darwin as meshuga, the Yiddish term for a crazy or foolish person. It will come as no shock to learn that Rosenberg also bent the truth about the scientific community’s evaluation of Darwin’s theory. The claim that, by the 1920s, there was no scientific agreement about Darwin’s theory was mistaken. In fact, quite the opposite was true; for example, the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1910, noted that “the doctrine of evolution has outgrown the trammels of controversy and has been accepted as a fundamental principle.”47 Rosenberg’s dismissal of the theory of evolution was not unique. In fact, Menahem Nahum Friedman of Itscan, whom we met at the opening of this chapter on a train to Rome, was also dismissive of the theory. Friedman agreed that the story of creation as outlined in the opening chapters of Genesis suggested an evolution “from the lowest to the highest, from the simple to the advanced,” but any suggestion that the evolutionary process was still occurring was rejected. “It should be perfectly clear,” wrote Friedman, “that evolution ended with the Sabbath, and since then no creatures have changed. This is unlike the heretical philosophers who claim that evolution is still occurring, and will continue to occur until the end of time, heaven forbid.”48 Friedman also referenced the theory of evolution in his philosophical work Al Ha’adam (On Mankind), published in 1932. Here though, his goal was to make a statement about the ethical nature of people, rather than to weigh in on the truth of Darwin’s theory: “It is said that people were created from monkeys, but this remains doubtful. But that a person can become a monkey is a certainty, for we meet people like this on a daily basis.”49 Both Friedman and Rosenberg accepted the Copernican model while rejecting Darwinism, apparently unaware of the historic irony of their position.50

Jewish Secularization—Astronomy without God Th roughout the story of the Jewish reception of the new astronomy that we have analyzed so far, one aspect united Jewish scholars whether they argued for or against the Copernican model: a deep conviction that their claims were

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for the glory of God and emanated from a profound need to defend Judaism. Not one pro-Copernican we have met so far suggested that the model raised questions about the truths of rabbinic Judaism, and all were joined in the belief that scientific discoveries and traditional Judaism may comfortably be reconciled. Th is pattern came to an end at the close of the nineteenth century as the movement of Jewish secularization became fi rmly embedded within the Jewish communities of Europe, America, and elsewhere. Charles Taylor’s description of the secular age is an apt and precise picture of the way it effected traditional Judaism, taking Jews “ . . . from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others.”51 Jews still wrote books in Hebrew (or English or Yiddish) and may even have identified themselves as Jews, but many no longer cared for, or they felt limited by, Judaism’s traditional religious dictates. For those who chose not to assimilate, the growing Reform movement provided an intellectual framework within which scientific fi ndings could supersede traditional Jewish teachings. In the English language, perhaps no one summarized this position better than Claude Montefiore (1858–1938), one of the founders of Liberal Judaism in Great Britain. 52 There can be no opposition between Science and Religion, for Science must be part of Religion. Whatever laws of Nature science ascertains and proves, are also the laws of God. If any doctrine of religion is in confl ict with the ascertained law of science, that doctrine cannot be true; therefore it cannot be religious. It is no longer religious to believe it; it is, on the contrary, irreligious, for God is true, and the source of truth. If the statements in the sacred books of any religion are in antagonism with the proved doctrines of science, those statements are erroneous: held in good faith till science had shown them in error, they can no longer be held in good faith when science has proved them false. 53 Montefiore’s formulation was that the scientific method and derived scientific truths served as the fundamental path to understanding the world. Because God had created the natural world, it could serve as a repository of truth that waited only to be discovered. Should there be any confl ict between the truths of religions and the truths of science, it was the scientific truths that trumped the religious. Among the earliest examples of Hebrew books on astronomy that exhibited the trend toward secularization was Ozar Hokhmat Hateva Haklalit (A Treasury of General Knowledge of Nature), published in Vilna in 1876. The author, Zevi Hirsch Rabinowitz (1832–1889), was a rabbi’s son who took an early interest

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in mathematics. He became a teacher and then undertook a ten-year writing project to explain the sciences in Hebrew to his fellow Jews. In his works, there is a near absence of any religious theme. To be sure, there are occasional echoes of biblical verses, but this was a common literary device among Jewish writers. 54 But unlike other works of science that we have examined in detail, God is rarely mentioned. In the few instances in which there is mention of God, it is in the context of praising scientists who have discovered natural laws. For example, after summarizing how the laws of nature work across all objects no matter their size, Rabinowitz quoted a verse from Genesis (although he does not reference it as such): “These are the generations of the heaven and of the Earth when they were created” (Gen. 2:4). Rather than comment on a divine being, he turns to humans who probe the mysteries of nature: We have no eyewitness accounts of creation, but the creator has revealed his actions to us, and he revealed the power of his works to scientists to whom he has given a portion of his unfathomable wisdom. Th is ignited a passion in them to study the works of creation. The Earth and the sky have been opened like a book to these wise men, and they are able to read clearly the accounts of creation that were written with the fi nger of God. For the creator has left such a clear impression of his actions in the skies and on the Earth that any person who looks at these can read them like a clear and true letter. In this way he will come to know through God’s actions that He is the source of all wisdom and the fi rst cause of all causes. 55 Although this is not the writing of an atheist or even an agnostic, the way in which Rabinowitz shifted the focus from God to man is striking, and this shift is also found in his discussions of Copernicus. Rabinowitz, aware of how the verse “Sun, stand still in Givon” (Josh. 10:12) had been interpreted to support a geocentric universe, parodied it when introducing the new astronomy: “All the imaginary spheres, which according to Ptolemy and his students fi lled the skies, have vanished like a passing shadow ever since the great Copernicus proclaimed, ‘Sun, stand still in the sky.’ ”56 It is a delightful play on the biblical text, and one that would have been clear to the educated reader. 57 Rabinowitz made several criticisms of his co-religionists, whom he sarcastically called “wise priests,” when they attempted to reconcile outmoded religious beliefs with modern scientific discoveries: What will these wise priests do [when faced with a contradiction between their religion and science]? They try with all their strength to fi nd any forced way to reconcile science and religion, truth and

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experience. They encourage the scientists to do their best to shore up the shaky early theories and lean them against any insecure object. They beg them to fi nd a way to reconcile the early theories however forced they may be, rather than accept a new theory. For the familiar has great power, and almost everyone has a love of that which is old and a hatred of that which is new . . . so the old rarely gives way to the new without strong proof. Th is is why it was the fate of all those who discovered anything new in science to be considered very bad. At fi rst they were mocked and laughed at, and only many years after their deaths did the majority accept their theories. The best examples of this are Copernicus and Galileo. 58 Rabinowitz claimed that a religious reactionary, wedded to a scientific theory that has been invalidated, would do his best to defend it, even if that defense involved dubious scientific claims. Rabinowitz is certainly correct in his psychological insight that we often prefer what is familiar to what is new and jarring. However, he did not perhaps give enough weight to the corollary, namely that if a theory has been successfully used over a long period of time, its very success demands that any superseding theory be based on solid theoretical and experimental evidence. Unless this is forthcoming, the explanatory power of the old theory, together with a preference for the familiar, will give the old theory staying power. The philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, who died in 1994, reminded us of this concept: “. . . the material which a scientist actually has at his disposal . . . is . . . never fully separated from the historical background.”59 If this is the case for the scientist, it is certainly so for the layperson who must choose between competing theories of the world. In 1889, not long after Rabinowitz completed his series on the natural world, a short book was published that also demonstrated the subtle modulating of God in Hebrew works of science. Hama’or Hagadol Hashemesh (The Great Light: The Sun) was written by Abraham Kaplan and, as its title suggested, it was a work about the nature of the Sun from a scientific perspective. Kaplan wrote several works in Hebrew and contributed to Hebrew periodicals, but his contributions were usually literary rather than scientific. Hama’or Hagadol Hashemesh was Kaplan’s only scientific work and, perhaps sensing that he lacked some of the necessary background, he explained his credentials to the reader: Although I am neither an astronomer nor do I have an understanding of nature, I nevertheless undertook to speak on these loft y matters perhaps—and God forbid that I boast—because I am naturally intelligent and I am able to think like a scientist.60

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The title of the book was drawn from a biblical verse (Gen. 1:16), and this was one of the few features of the book that could be identified as having a religious overtone. Kaplan made it clear that the heliocentric model, refined by Kepler and Newton, was now universally accepted; the old geocentric model was buried in an “everlasting grave.” He reviewed what was known about the Sun and its own motion about its axis, and suggested an explanation for sunspots. Although Kaplan used a biblical or talmudic turn of phrase here and there, the tone of the book moved away from religious citations toward a more scientific approach.61 The most prominent example of this was a substitution of Copernicus for God in a biblical verse: Copernicus thrust his words into the spheres that were works of creation. They changed their roles from that which they had from the six days of their creation. The Sun stopped revolving and came to eternal rest, and the Earth arose from its place and started its eternal orbit. Copernicus spoke, and it was so!62 The fi nal paragraph of the book left no doubt about Kaplan’s tendencies toward a secular approach, for it ends with Galileo’s confrontation with religious authorities and his sacrifice in the name of scientific truth. Th is subject would have been entirely superfluous in a scientific work describing the Sun, but this was not Kaplan’s only goal; he also wanted to make a statement about the way in which religion must bend before science: Galileo—that brave and wise Galileo—for whose belief in the Copernican model he was brought to the pyre to be burned, at the time of his death cried out, and these were his last words: “nevertheless, the Earth moves”!63 Here Kaplan made a serious historical error. Galileo was not burned at the stake and was never tortured or even imprisoned.64 Whether or not Kaplan’s error was deliberate is not certain, for he could have conflated the death of Giordano Bruno at the stake in 1600 with the legend of Galileo’s words muttered in defiance of the Inquisition. But Galileo never actually spoke the words eppur si muovo (“still it moves”), and the fi rst claims that he had done so did not appear until 1757.65 The historian Moshe Idel noted that “[t]he history of misunderstandings is as important as theories of understanding,” and how Galileo was misremembered by Kaplan reveals a great deal about Kaplan’s goals.66 Kaplan wanted to make a point, and he did so with the fabricated story of Galileo dying as an unrepentant martyr for science. It was with this that Kaplan closed his book, in keeping with his theme throughout: Scientific facts always trump religious truths about the world.67

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The last example of the trend toward secularization in Hebrew works that discuss Copernicus is a series titled Yediot Hateva (Knowledge of Nature) by Aaron David Bernstein (1812–1884). Bernstein was born in Danzig and received a wholly traditional Jewish education, and then moved to Berlin at the age of twenty, where he was drawn to politics. Eventually he allied himself with the Jewish Reform movement in Berlin, but his reforming tendencies spread beyond religion. He wrote widely on the need for political reform and founded a monthly political paper. His views brought him into confl ict with the authorities, and he served a four-month prison sentence when his call for political reform displeased them. Along with his interest in politics, his other passion was explaining the sciences, and he wrote a series of essays on the subject in a German-language paper that he founded in 1853. These were later published in German in twenty-one volumes and translated into many languages, including Russian, English, and Hebrew.68 Each volume of Yediot Hateva was about seventy pages long and covered a number of scientific (and sometimes historical) subjects. Bernstein addressed an amazing spectrum of topics: from the speed of electricity, the volume of the Earth, the nature of bee societies, and the migration pattern of storks, to the origins of mountains and the human nervous system. In addition, Bernstein discussed the origins and structure of the universe and solar system, and perhaps for the fi rst time in Hebrew literature, the discussion involved no references to God or any divine hand behind creation.69 Bernstein understood that there were many scientific questions that could not yet be answered—the age of the Earth was one example—but he was confident that answers would in the end be found, and he never once suggested God as a solution.70 In fact, he suggested that science had surpassed religion as the explanation of physical phenomena: “The oceans will not move and the mountains will not be fall” 71 say the peoples and poets of long ago. Yet we who come after them have been fi lled with a different spirit for our eyes have seen different things: The oceans indeed move and the mountains have fallen! Oceans change every day and mountains actually grow higher, and just as they got higher each day, so from the day they were created until today they have grown higher. Even though mankind was not on the Earth to witness and examine all these processes in detail. . . . Now from where were the mountains created? Who gave birth to the waters and gathered them together? . . . The mountains were created from the depths of the hot Earth when the Earth expelled its gasses, and oceans were created when pools of water changed course and joined together. . . .72

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For Bernstein, the purpose of humanity was to achieve peace and justice and fi ll the Earth with knowledge. Here Bernstein partially quoted from Isaiah 11:9: “For the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” But he failed to include the words “of the Lord” and so changed the meaning of the verse from a vision of a future fi lled with knowledge of God, to one fi lled with knowledge of science. But there were only two ways that this outcome could be achieved: One way is to remove all the gods of belief that mankind created, and all the rules and regulations his ancestors bequeathed and that burden mankind. The second way is to extend a hand to the natural sciences, to study them as best we can. . . .73 It was a vision of a future without religion, and this was typical of Bernstein’s approach to the natural world, devoid of any hint of his traditional Jewish upbringing. Bernstein explained that it was the force of gravity that kept the Earth orbiting around the Sun, and he detailed the results of Foucault’s pendulum experiment74: In 1850, the Parisian scientist Foucault proved to everyone with his pendulum that the Earth revolves on its axis, and scientists throughout the world took note of this. It was replicated with great success in London, Cologne, Rome, Parma, Berlin, and North America. There had been no tangible way to demonstrate that which Copernicus taught some four hundred years ago (and that which had been taught by those who followed him later); then the pendulum arrived and demonstrated this for all to see.75 Bernstein celebrated the fact that Foucault’s experiment had been publicly replicated as much as he did the fact that the experiment took place at all. Indeed, one of the problems with the Copernican model had been that there was no experimental proof of its validity. As we noted in chapter 10, this deficiency was addressed with Foucault’s pendulum and Bessel’s demonstration of stellar parallax, but it was only the former that was directly accessible to the public. In the annals of science, it is hard to fi nd another example of an experiment that achieved what the pendulum experiment did, being at once easy to understand, open to public demonstration, and suggestive of a new paradigm.76 It is not surprising, therefore, that Bernstein made much of its success in establishing the claims made by Copernicus. As a review of these secular Hebrew works makes clear, by the end of the nineteenth century, there was considerable interest among Jews in what today

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we might call popular science. It was in response to this that a series of biographies of great philosophers and scientists was published in Hebrew in Warsaw. Although the series included a biography of Maimonides, most of those whose lives were reviewed were not Jewish, and included Aristotle, Galileo, and Copernicus. Nikolai Copernicus: His life and scientific work appeared in 1899, and like the other biographies of non-Jews, it was generally devoid of any religious content.77 However, at the end of the book, the author Jacob Frenkel compared the circumstances of the death of Copernicus to the death of Moses himself: The great legislator Moses the man of God, who toiled for forty years on behalf of his people, did not merit to see realized the task that had so occupied him. His soul returned to God at the moment when his life’s hope was to be fulfi lled, the moment when his people drew near to inherit the land to which, as their leader, he had guided them. So too this great astronomer did not merit seeing his book, the work of his life’s toil for forty years, leave the printing press and reach a general audience while he was still alive. Death overtook him at the moment of the fulfi llment of his life’s work.78 The comparison of the deaths of Copernicus and Moses was perhaps intended to remind the reader that Copernicus, like Moses, had led a rebellion against the old guard. Moses led a slave uprising against the dominant power of his time and had brought his people to the borders of the Promised Land. Copernicus too had rebelled, although he led an intellectual rather than a physical revolt, and many had been drawn to follow his example and think about the cosmos in an entirely new way.79 Although Eastern Europe had long been a center of Jewish life, at the close of the nineteenth century, thousands of Jews made their way to America to seek out new opportunities. Given the vast numbers of Jews who immigrated to New York City, it soon became an important center for the publication of Jewish texts. Because many Jews who arrived were either no longer religiously observant or soon became so, books written for an exclusively Jewish audience were often entirely secular in their content. Examples of this trend were several Yiddish books on astronomy that were published in New York. They ranged from basic primers of just a few dozen pages to detailed textbooks. Among the former was Abraham Caspi’s brief Yiddish introduction to the work of Sir Isaac Newton, which was published in New York in 1900.80 A far more comprehensive work (over five hundred pages) was Himmel un Erd; astronomye far’n folk (Heaven and Earth; Astronomy for the People), written by Phillip Krantz and published in New York in 1918. Th is book included images of the

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Orion nebula and the Andromeda galaxy and an illustrated explanation of parallax.81 As an up-to-date work of science, it described the heliocentric solar system of course, but it also provided a sort of history of astronomy, describing the Ptolemaic geocentric universe and how it had been superseded by the Copernican model.82 It reviewed Halley’s comet, which had returned just a few years earlier, and even provided an introduction to practical astronomy and how to observe the stars. With the publication of these texts, Jews were now the authors of books on astronomy in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish that explained their subject in entirely scientific terms and that, for the fi rst time in Jewish history, made no mention of God.

The New Astronomy and the Jews of the Middle East We noted that there was a rapid growth in the number of newspapers and special-interest magazines in the industrialized western countries throughout the nineteenth century. As this growth reached beyond Europe and into the Middle East, the Arab world, which had essentially ignored the entire debate surrounding the Copernican model, took its fi rst steps toward assessing its implications. In the 1870s, three new journals dedicated to the study and advancement of science and technology appeared in Beirut, and between 1872 and 1876, one of these journals, Al-Jinãn (The Shield), published a series of articles describing the new astronomy in very general terms. A religious response to the articles was published by the same journal in 1876, but interestingly, its author was not a Moslem but rather a Christian.83 A criticism of the new astronomy based on the biblical verses found in Joshua appeared in the same year in Al-Muqtataf (The Digest), again authored by a Christian. However, Moslems soon entered the public debate. The Egyptian deputy minister of education, who was a Moslem, wrote to Al-Muqtataf and claimed that, rather than the idea of the Earth’s motion being new, it could be found in earlier Islamic writings and in 1882, a Syrian Moslem authored another defense of the new astronomy and published it in the same journal.84 Th is increased interest in the new astronomy in the Middle East soon affected not only Arab Christians and Moslems, but Jews living in Moslem lands as well. An early example of this is a school textbook of science and astronomy published in Constantinople in 1850 titled Uno Mirada A Los Sielos (A Look at the Heavens). The work was written anonymously in Judeo-Spanish, a mixture of Hebrew and Castilian Spanish expressed in Hebrew characters, and was one of the very few Jewish books published in Constantinople at the time.85 It reviewed a wide range of scientific topics, including telescopes, comets, gravity, Kepler’s laws, and the orbits of the planets that make up the solar system. Although the book

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opened with the approbation of four community rabbis, it was not a religious work, and described the heliocentric solar system as a fact requiring no explanation.86 However, in the preface, the author appealed to religious sensibilities and claimed that the study of astronomy was in fact a way to understand God, while also being a useful skill: Because God revealed Himself to men through both his word and his works, all men should familiarize themselves with both of these. It is true that the word alone can show us the salvation that the free grace of God has prepared for sinners, but God’s works very clearly show his wisdom, his goodness and his power. Among all these works, the hosts of heaven are wondrous in their beauty and their enormous profusion; and the more we study them the more wonders of his wisdom and power we see. The word of God speaks of these things in many places: Psalm 19:1–8, Isaiah 40:26, Job 9:1–10, and so on. Since the most ancient times, men have also sought to know everything possible regarding these wondrous works of God. . . . We hope that this short book will be useful in showing the difference between true and false astronomy. . . . But besides being very beautiful and wondrous on its own, this science is highly useful in many ways: for navigation, measuring time, and so on. We shall also see that this science is constantly expanding through discoveries that are made each year; and that as wondrous as the things are that we already know, nobody can say that there are not many things still more wondrous that are yet to be discovered. 87 Th is appeal to understanding God through “his word and his works” was not only a plea for Jewish students to see astronomy as a religious undertaking, but a belief that the book of nature and the book of scripture had to coexist, and that one could not be read without the other.88 To fi nd this statement and a pro-Copernican Jewish work written in a Moslem milieu was very unusual because, as we will see, it was rare for such works to exist at all. Turning from the Ottoman Empire to elsewhere in the Middle East, we should note that, according to the historian of science Tzvi Langerman, the Jews of Yemen had contributed a number of important manuscripts on astronomy between the years 1375 and 1500. However, “interest in science among Jews waned drastically towards the end of the seventeenth century, and science went into a deep slumber, to be awakened only by the monumental efforts of Rabbi Yihye Kafah. . . .”89 Th is fact is likely explained by a general decline in scientific discoveries that took place in the Islamic world at the start of the

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sixteenth century. Th is had the result that “the Renaissance, the Reformation, [and] the technical revolution passed virtually unnoticed in the lands of Islam. . . .”90 The rabbi mentioned by Langerman was Yihye Kafah, who was born in 1850 in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen. Although he remained there throughout his life, he corresponded with leading European intellectuals of the time, including Abraham Isaac Kook (who, as we already noted, would become the fi rst chief rabbi of Palestine) and the Russian-Yiddish writer Hillel Zeitlin. Kafah evidently studied works of the Haskalah and took up the cause of modernizing Yemenite Jewry in general, but made a specific target of the superstitions that were rife at the time. He was also a bibliophile and built a large library of manuscripts, while teaching himself French and Turkish. He subscribed to a view of history in which all science had its roots in Jewish thought, and astronomy was no different. In one of his books he wrote that [t]he structure of the universe and the orbits of the stars were clearly known to Rabbi Gamliel, who received this knowledge from his ancestors. . . . [It does not matter] whether he followed Ptolemy the founder of the old astronomy, or Copernicus the founder of the new astronomy, or even another system more clear than the two of them, it was all passed down from person to person all the way back to Moses our teacher, may he rest in peace, who received this knowledge from God.91 In Kafah’s personal library were several European books in Hebrew that had somehow been brought to Yemen. Among these was one volume of Bernstein’s 1884 Yediot Hateva (Knowledge of Nature), which explained the nature and mechanics of the pendulum and detailed Foucault’s 1851 experiment.92 Bernstein wrote that the experiment had been repeated in several different countries, and that “the four hundred year old teachings of Copernicus and those who followed him could not have had a better device to use as a visual demonstration.” Kafah also had a copy of Hillel Kahane’s The Turnings of the Earth, which had been published in Bucharest in 1880. Th is book differed from Bernstein’s in two ways: First, it contained a very detailed exposition of the heliocentric model with diagrams, and second, it contained numerous religious references to the marvels of God’s creations.93 There is no doubt that Kafah would have been influenced by Kahane’s synthesis that demonstrated how it was possible to both accept the Copernican system and live as a traditionally observant Jew. Kafah was not the only rabbi from a Moslem country to address the Copernican question. Another was Shalom Mizrahi Adeni, who was born

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around 1850 in Aden, the port city in southern Yemen.94 He lived there until his early twenties, when he immigrated to Israel. In 1899, he published Shalom Yerushalayim (For the Peace of Jerusalem), a largely kabbalistic work that included a section on astronomy.95 But unlike Kafah, Adeni adamantly rejected the Copernican model.96 His main source for doing so was the eighteenth-century Ma’aseh Tuviah, although Adeni never acknowledged this. He fi rst cited eight pro-Copernican arguments, each of which had appeared in Ma’aseh Tuviah97: i. The spherical shape of the Earth makes it easy for it to move through space. ii. Since it was the Earth that required the Sun’s light, it was logical that the Earth should “chase the Sun” to obtain its light. iii. The best position for the Sun to illuminate the planets would be if it was in the middle of their orbits, rather than off to one side. iv. The size of the sphere of the fi xed stars is huge in comparison to the size of the Earth, making it more likely that it was the smaller sized Earth that was in motion. v. It is unlikely that the entire heavens orbited around the small Earth. (Th is was somehow an additional reason to the one just stated). vi. Since the stars do not seem to get any benefit from a daily motion around the Earth, it is unlikely that they would orbit it. vii. The high speeds at which the stars would have to move would result in their not being able to maintain their distances from one another. viii. The speeds at which the stars would need to move to cover the required distances are too great to be obtained. Like some medieval Jewish philosophers, Adeni believed that the planets were angelic beings through which God fi ltered his providence over humanity. It therefore made sense to speak of the planets as having desires and thoughts and of somehow benefiting from their motions around the Sun. The anti-Copernican arguments, also drawn from Ma’aseh Tuviah , followed: i. An arrow launched straight up should land many miles away, since the Earth will have moved a great distance during the time the arrow was in fl ight. ii. A stationary cannon should outrun a cannonball that it had fi red since the Earth moved quicker through space than the speed of the cannonball. iii. A ball thrown towards the east [sic] would be expected to travel further than one thrown to the west, since the Earth moves from west to east.

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iv. The observable size of the stars should change as their distance from the Earth changes. v. The Bible in Proverbs specifically stated that the Earth does not move. vi. The Book of Joshua described the Sun being commanded to stand still. vii. If the Earth moved at high speeds, houses would be unable to remain standing, but rather “they would without any doubt fall to the ground or be burned up due to the high speed of the Earth’s movement.” Adeni was apparently still in the “deep slumber” that had overtaken the Jews of Yemen, unaware of any of the scientific discoveries that had been made over the last two hundred years. His deeply mystical approach seemed to preclude him from updating himself on anything scientific, but in this respect he was not unique. Another Yemenite scholar and contemporary of Adeni, Shmuel Yeshua, also decried the suggestion that the Earth moved in space. Yeshua noted a lack of what he considered to be appropriate textbooks for children and, consequently in 1907 in Jerusalem, he published just such a work.98 Th is five-hundred-page book covered a wide range of issues, including reincarnation, the nature of the soul, the names and roles of angels, the size of talmudic weights and measures, prophecy, and divine providence. The book also addressed the calendar, geography, and astronomy, and recorded the customs and some of the special prayers of the Jewish community in Aden. In some places, Yeshua mentioned modern scientific discoveries, but the book contained not a single diagram or map, and its astronomy was purely Ptolemaic. In addition, as in Adeni’s work, the astrological influences of the planets were carefully outlined. The Earth was described as being motionless in the center of the heavenly spheres, and the structure of the heavens was as described in the Talmud. But Yeshua was certainly aware that some things had changed in the field of astronomy. In his review of the planets (as they revolved around the Earth), he mentioned that two new planets, Neptune and Uranus, had been discovered using the telescope. The question then arose: Why had the Talmud not mentioned these two planets? For Yeshua, it was all a question of astrology. The sages of the Talmud had not mentioned Neptune and Uranus because they were too far away to have any kind of astrological influence on the Earth. Only the planets (and for the Talmud this included the Sun and the Moon) that exerted an influence on the fates of humanity were included in talmudic discussions.99 In this way, Yeshua supported the claim that the talmudic sages possessed the same knowledge as modern astronomers, while explaining why they failed to mention the existence of these two newly discovered planets. Yeshua then turned to a discussion of the solar system and acknowledged from the outset that the heliocentric model was the one currently accepted by

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contemporary astronomers. He claimed, however, that not only was there was no proof for this model, but that astronomers themselves were aware of this lack of evidence. Yeshua then quoted (without att ribution) from Hurwitz’s Sefer Haberit: “[N]evertheless any Jew who believes in this theory [of Copernicus] and supports it should not be thought of as lacking in faith in our written or oral law.”100 Despite this, he concluded that there were grounds to dismiss the theory on the basis that it seemed just too bizarre to be true: We cannot accept this theory for it is too strange and surprising, especially for simple people. For they have not heard of anything like it in their lives. Furthermore it would be ridiculous and laughable if we suggested that we, together with our children, our wives and our livestock, orbit high in the skies around a stationary Sun . . . there is no notion stranger than this.101 In addition, there was the difficulty of the biblical verses that suggested a moving Sun, a difficulty that many scholars tried to address, but who, in the end, toiled in vain. “I conclude,” wrote Yeshua, “that this strange and foreign opinion must be rejected, and I will not give it further consideration.”102 Yeshua made no effort to grasp his subject or to understand the complexities of the issues. In point of fact, he raised one of the very same objections that Tuviah Cohen had raised exactly two hundred years earlier, when Cohen had written that the calculated speed of the Earth would cause “animals being projected off of the Earth and the destruction of homes and every thing attached to the Earth.”103 The science in Yeshua’s book did, however, fit a worldview in which angels existed in a hierarchy, witchcraft was rife, and reincarnation was a reality.104 Yeshua published his work two years after Einstein published his theory of relativity, yet the science with which Yeshua seemed comfortable had not progressed in two centuries. There was one other Jewish scholar from the Middle East who addressed the Copernican question at the beginning of the twentieth century. Joseph Hayyim (1834–1909) was born in Baghdad, where at the age of twenty-five, he succeeded his father as leader of the Jewish community. He authored a work that is widely read by Sephardic Jews to this day called Ben Ish Hai (The Son of Man Lives), which is a collection of halakhah and ethical discourses based on the weekly portion read from the Torah. In addition, he published three volumes of responsa between 1901 and 1905 called Rav Pe’alim (Many Acts); a fourth volume was posthumously published in 1912. It was in this work that Joseph Hayyim addressed the Copernican question. In an undated question, Hayyim was asked about the location of the Garden of Eden.105 In one tradition, the garden was located “on the other side of the

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world,” somewhere below the equator in the southern hemisphere. However, the questioner continued, the world has been circumnavigated, and the Garden of Eden has not been identified. Where then is it located? Hayyim began his answer by pointing out that the sages of the Talmud did not travel far and had certainly never explored the entire globe. He quoted from Sefer Haberit, which seems to have been the only text from which Hayyim drew his scientific information, and claimed that although the evidence suggested that the world was indeed a globe, the matter was still disputed. It was on this supposed dispute that Hayyim built his criticism of the scientific method. “Everything is built on conjecture,” he claimed, and scientific explanations were constantly being overturned or revised. Hayyim appealed to an argument that had been made by several other skeptics of Copernicanism: Even when [a scientific idea seems] persuasive, it is likely to be rejected and overturned, because later enlightened people will come to understand something that arises from the natural world that had not been understood by those earlier. [These earlier people] had invented their own system based on their understanding. When an objection to an earlier system arises, the entire system is destroyed, because when a foundation is destroyed the whole house crumbles. Th is is very common, and we see generation after generation adding to the understanding of the natural world. It is like a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant, and later generations see further than those who came earlier. Over the last two thousand years a number of systems have been developed and overridden in the fields of natural sciences and astronomy. One builds and another destroys, like the building of [the Egyptian cities of] Pitom and Ramses. There were grounds therefore to be deeply skeptical of scientific claims about the world. Part of this may be due to the limitations of the human senses, but it was the very way in which science progressed that led to Hayyim’s skepticism. He then turned to the question of the geocentric Earth and claimed that there was a continuing scientific controversy about whether the Earth or the Sun was stationary. Because the proofs, such as there were, were based on conjecture, the matter remained unsolved. Hayyim was also unimpressed by the ability of astronomers to predict the precise times of future solar eclipses. He subscribed to the myth of the Jewish origins of science and claimed that any predictive ability demonstrated by astronomers was a result of Jewish knowledge of the stars and planets having been passed from Adam down to Noah and Abraham and then out into the world at large. Th is would explain why astronomers could accurately predict many events, but it in no way proved that

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their theoretical models were correct. In fact, Hayyim remained deeply suspicious not only of the assertion that the Earth revolved around the stationary Sun, but of all the scientific statements made by astronomers. Hayyim returned to answer the original question about the location of the Garden of Eden and noted that, although it may be located on the Earth itself, it existed on a different spiritual plane and would therefore not be perceived by the human senses. Of course, this was all that needed to be said for the original question to have been addressed. The rest of the responsum, criticizing the truth claims of science, was irrelevant, but Hayyim had used the opportunity to explain his thoughts on the matter. As a result of his skepticism, he remained in doubt as to which model of the universe was correct, and he implied that the reader should adopt a similarly skeptical approach to science. Hayyim did not address any of the nineteenth-century scientific demonstrations that supported the Copernican model, like Foucault’s pendulum or Bessel’s demonstration of stellar parallax, and there is no evidence that he knew of them. Just as Shalom Mizrahi Adeni had used Ma’aseh Tuviah as his scientific sourcebook, Joseph Hayyim seems to have relied only on Sefer Haberit, a book that was by then more than one hundred years old. Even more problematic was that Hayyim had a conception of scientific progress that was not accurate. Although scientific explanations do indeed change, it is only rarely the case that this happens in the drastic way he described: “like an edifice that comes crashing down because of its weak foundation.” Much more often, new scientific theories or explanations modify those that already exist, so that they better fit experimental data or observations. Such modifications do not destroy the earlier theories, as Hayyim would have us believe, but allows them to have greater explanatory power. Th is was the model of science that Hayyim should have addressed, but he was either unaware that it existed or chose deliberately to ignore it.

A Jewish Guide to the Night Sky While things were not changing much for the Jews of Persia and Yemen, a unique pro-Copernican work was published in Eastern Europe that demonstrated how effortless the integration of modern astronomy and traditional Jewish learning could be. Ze’ev Wolf Gerstel (1861–1932) served as rabbi in the town of Jaryczow in what is now the western Ukraine, close to the town of Lvov.106 He published several books, including an explanation of midrashic statements and an introduction to Hebrew grammar, but his fi rst work was a short book called Hokhmat Tekufot Umazalot (The Science of the Seasons and the Stars), fi rst published in 1897 and reprinted in 1907.107 What made this book important was the inclusion of two field guides to observing the night sky. One

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was a foldout star map—the fi rst of its kind in Hebrew literature—that contained the names of the stars in Hebrew, as well as their apparent brightness. The map also gave the positions of the stars for both Hebrew and secular dates, so that either could be used when trying to identify a star or constellation. The second guide was pasted on the inside back cover and contained a moveable circular chart known as a volvelle (see figure 12.1). By aligning the volvelle in the direction in which the observer was facing, it was possible to determine which stars should be visible at each hour of the night. Such volvelles had been a common feature of most Hebrew works on the calendar (known generically as Sifrei Evronot), where they were used to determine the structure of the Jewish year, including its length and when certain Jewish holidays would fall.108 In contrast, Gerstel’s volvelle served an entirely different purpose: to enable an observer to identify stars and constellations, just for the sake of knowing. Despite these useful features, Gerstel’s work was not just a field guide. It contained a section analyzing when dusk begins and ends in Jewish law and,

Figure 12.1 Revolving chart used to determine which stars and constellations are visible for each hour of the night. From Hokhmat Tekufot Umazelot, 1907. In addition to the coordinates on the movable section is a quote from Isaiah (40.26): “Lift up your eyes to the heavens and see who created these things.” From the collection of the author.

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throughout the book, there were references to the Talmud and Zohar, as well as responsa.109 In the opening paragraph of the book, Gerstel reminded the reader that it was a mitzvah to calculate when the new Jewish month begins, and that this calculation required a well-grounded knowledge of astronomy. In this effortless mix of halakhah and astronomy, Gerstel described a heliocentric system, although he did not mention Copernicus or any of the historical controversy. Gerstel simply noted that, although the stars seem to move across the night sky, in fact, modern astronomers understood that it is the Earth that moves. In support of this, he referenced Jacob Emden’s siddur (fi rst published in 1744 but reprinted many times) and the midrash that phonetically related the words for Earth (arez) and running (raz).110 Elsewhere, he noted the periods of the orbits of the planets around the Sun, so there is no doubt that he accepted the heliocentric model.111 Although we do not know how many copies of this book Gerstel sold, it was reprinted a decade after it originally appeared, suggesting that the book sold well. Gerstel’s practical field guide and halakhic compendium was not the only Eastern European example of a synthesis of modern astronomy and traditional Judaism. Siedlce (known as Shedlits in Yiddish) in eastern Poland was a town of some 30,000 inhabitants of whom half were Jewish, and it was there in 1927 that Rabbi Palti’el Lubelchik published a book called Hodshei Ha’arez (The Months of the Earth), reconciling an ancient mystical text with the new astronomy of Copernicus.112 Lubelchik (1885–1929) was the rabbi of the smaller town of Kosow to the north, and his book was an attempt to synthesize the heliocentric model with a long essay known as Sefer Yezirah (The Book of Creation).113 Sefer Yezirah was most likely written between the third and sixth centuries in Israel, and it contained a mystical exposition of Hebrew letters, cosmology, and creation.114 The text refers to the Teli, a word that does not appear in the Bible or Talmud, and several astronomical terms have been suggested as possible meanings. Some thought that the word referred to the Milky Way, while others identified it as part of the constellation Draco (the Dragon).115 Among the most accepted explanations was that the Teli was the obliquity between the Sun’s apparent yearly path in the sky (called the ecliptic) and the plane of the equator.116 Lubelchick did not agree with this explanation, and he wrote a brief book (only sixteen pages) in which he interpreted the word to mean the path of the Earth’s orbit and that of each planet around the Sun (see figure 12.2).117 “The Teli is the path of the Earth’s orbit . . . and because of the Teli [we can understand why there is] obliquity of the planets from their orbits (hateli shelahem) . . . and the Earth revolves [on its axis] along its Teli causing day and night.”118 We met the fi rst union of mysticism and the new astronomy in 1629, when Joseph Delmedigo, the Jewish student of Galileo, published his Sefer Elim and

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Vertical of the ecliptic

Direction of the celestial North Pole Movement of the earth's axis

The earth's axis Terrestrial North Pole

Procession cone

The Teli

Plane of the ecliptic

Terrestrial equator

Terrestrial South Pole 23.44"

Figure 12.2 The Teli.

wrote of the possibility of other life in the universe that may have been suggested by the Copernican model.119 In 1797, mysticism—or more specifically, Lurianic kabbalah—was used to reject the Copernican model (albeit gently), this time by Pinhas Hurwitz in Sefer Haberit.120 And now Lubelchick had turned to one of the oldest extant Jewish mystical texts and used the new astronomy to explain a term found within it. Lubelchick was not using the text to reject or support the facts of astronomy; he was using the facts of astronomy to interpret a Jewish text, just like the Bible itself had been reinterpreted. Mysticism, it would appear, could either support or reject the heliocentric system. Th is might not have come as a surprise to those who rejected a mystical approach in religion, but perhaps these rationalists would have been concerned by the use of scientific theories—including Einstein’s famous theory of relativity—to argue that the Earth does not move. Surprisingly, contemporary physics was in fact the next weapon used by some Jews to argue against the Copernican model, as we will see in the next chapter.

13

Relativity and Contemporary Jewish Geocentrists

Apollo 8 was the fi rst spacecraft to leave the Earth’s orbit and be captured by the gravity of another celestial body. On December 24, 1968, the command module went into orbit around the Moon, and the three astronauts linked up to Earth in a television broadcast. It was a remarkable moment, not only because of what had been achieved in space, but also because of the interest of those back on Earth: The Christmas Eve television broadcast was, at the time, the most watched event ever. It was at that moment that the crew of Apollo 8 chose to read the opening ten verses from the Hebrew Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. . . .” It was a moment in which scientific triumph and religious humility seemed to have found, albeit briefly, a perfect balance.1

Ptolemy in the Space Age Despite the new space age, some Jews still found it impossible to accept the “new” astronomy of Copernicus, now over four hundred years old. One of the fi rst geocentrists of the space age was Pinhas Vaberman, who lived in the 1960s in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Me’ah Shearim in Jerusalem. In 1967, Vaberman printed a strongly worded attack on the Copernican model in an appendix to his privately printed Sefer Hatekhunah, a work written by Hayyim Vital. Vital, who died in Damascus in 1620, is best known as a kabbalist who did much to spread the teachings of Lurianic kabbalah, but among the manuscripts that he left behind was a work on astronomy that was published for the fi rst time in Jerusalem in 1866. The astronomy in Vital’s work was entirely Ptolemaic, and Vaberman would have felt comfortable penning his attack on

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Copernicus at the end of Vital’s geocentric book. The title page of Vaberman’s text left no doubt as to his views: Ma’amar Mevoh Hashmesh2 [An Essay on the Sett ing of the Sun] In which are brought the words of the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings, words from Midrash and from the Talmud and from the great pillars who support the world, and on whom all of Israel depends, against the Copernican system, which stated that the Earth orbits among the planets, and that the Sun is the center of all the orbits. In this essay we will very clearly demonstrate in such a way that there can be no objection, that his system is a lie and is deceitful, and that it is sacrilegious and heretical. For the truth is that the Earth is the center of all that orbits, and this is the position of the Torah and the position of the sages and the position of all the wise Jews of Israel, and it is an eternal truth for all time. 3 Vaberman’s essay is notable not only for the fact that it was published in the space age, but also for the caustic nature of the language he chose to use. Copernicus was a “liar and a cheat,” and his model was the “work of the devil.”4 Vaberman bemoaned the fact that a number of schools “that consider themselves Orthodox and Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] have accepted this model; they study and teach this heretical material to young children, and this is most damaging to a pure belief [in Judaism];” Vaberman believed his work would correct this intolerable situation. Vaberman ignored many of the works we have examined in our study. In his introduction, he wrote that the geocentric model was “the position of all the sages of Israel” and mentioned by name Sefer Haberit in support of his position. Th is was an odd choice, because as we noted in chapter 7, the author of Sefer Haberit had written that should a person choose to believe in the heliocentric model, he “should never be branded or suspected of heresy. Indeed, he could be considered a zadik among Israel, so long as his other beliefs and practices follow both the written Torah and the Oral Law, and he fears God.”5 In fact, Vaberman selectively quoted from only a few works that criticized the Copernican model and ignored the dozens that supported it. Although he did not introduce any new arguments into the debate, his intemperate language set him apart from others who felt they could not accept the Copernican model. Perhaps this use of language is best understood within the context of the ultra-Orthodox world in which Vaberman lived and in which the language of extreme condemnation is commonly used to this day. Within this world, there is a categorical rejection of knowledge that stands at odds with Jewish texts; study is limited to

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the Talmud and its commentaries, and university attendance is forbidden. It is therefore not surprising that Vaberman made no attempt to reconcile contemporary science with his pre-Copernican worldview. For the ultra-Orthodox, there can be no confl ict between science and Jewish teachings, because traditional Torah teachings always trump other sources of knowledge. As we have seen by now, there was no truth to Vaberman’s claim that the geocentric model was “the position of all the wise Jews of Israel,” and the question remains as to why Vaberman chose to ignore texts that had approved of Copernicus. 6

The Lubavitcher Rebbe and the Wager Although Vaberman’s extreme use of language was not often repeated by others, his fearless defense of a stationary Earth model in the age of the Apollo space program was shared by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the leader of the Lubavitch Hasidim and better know as “the Rebbe.” In 1963, the Rebbe wrote a letter to a correspondent who had asked which model of the solar system—the Copernican or the Ptolemaic—was correct. The Rebbe replied that, when we consider two objects one of which is in motion, it was scientifically impossible to determine which of the two was in fact moving, because of the notion of relativity: . . . Certainly it is well known that one of the foundations of the theory of relativity, which has been accepted by all scientists in the last few decades, is as follows: Regarding a “system” of two objects which are in relative motion, it is impossible to determine which is at rest and which is in motion, not because of a lack of our present understanding, but rather because of the very nature of the issue. In other words, regarding this question and others like it, science has no position; on the contrary, science is unable to declare a defi nitive answer . . . it is clear that if someone will declare one of the bodies to be at rest and the second to be in orbit around it, it is scientifically impossible to refute this claim. 7 Here for the fi rst time in Hebrew literature, Einstein’s theory of relativity was cited to support a claim that the Earth may indeed be stationary. However, the Rebbe’s private letter would not have been widely circulated, and the issue was therefore not one that came to the public’s attention. Th is changed when a strange story appeared on a Lubavitch website, easily accessible with a simple search of the Internet. The story is said to have occurred in 1975, when an unidentified rabbi, keen on spreading Judaism, developed a relationship with

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a person identified as Mr. P. The rabbi had told Mr. P. that every word of Torah had to be accepted, and this apparently included the belief in a stationary Earth. Here is how the story unfolded, as published on the Lubavitch website8: “The Torah states that the sun revolves around the earth,” countered Mr. P. “Do you believe that as well?” “Yes, I do,” replied Rabbi R. “Well, you might believe that,” said Mr. P., “but no rational, self-respecting inhabitant of the 20th century does. I’m sure your rebbe, Rabbi Schneerson, doesn’t!” “I’m sure he does,” said the rabbi. “I’m willing to wager anything that he does not,” said Mr. P. “In fact, I’ll say this: If the Rebbe states that he believes that the sun revolves around the earth, I will become a Torah-observant Jew and convince everyone I know to do the same!” “Would you put that in writing?” challenged Rabbi R. “No problem,” said Mr. P. Soon after, the Rebbe wrote to Mr. P. and declared that it was his “fi rm belief that the sun revolves around the earth, as I have also declared publicly on various occasions and in discussion with professors specializing in this field of science.” In a separate letter, the Rebbe explained his reasoning, which was based on the theory of relativity: One of the conclusions of the theory of relativity is that when there are two systems, or planets, in motion relative to each other—such as the sun and the earth in our case—either view, namely the sun rotating around the earth, or the earth rotating around the sun, has equal validity. Thus, if there are phenomena that cannot be adequately explained on the basis of one of these views, such difficulties have their counterpart also if the opposite view is accepted. Secondly, the scientific conclusion that both views have equal validity is the result not of any inadequacy of available scientific data, or of technological development (measuring instruments, etc.), in which case it could be expected that further scientific or technological advancement might clear up the matter eventually and decide in favor of one or the other view. On the contrary, the conclusion of contemporary science is that regardless of any future scientific advancement, the question as to which is our planetary center, the sun or the earth, must forever remain unresolved, since both view[s] will always have the same scientific validity, as stated. Th irdly, it follows that anyone declaring that a person who chooses to accept one of these systems in preference to the other is a fool, while one who accepts the other is a wise man—such a judgment shows

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that the person making it is ignorant of the conclusions of modern science, or that he has not advanced beyond the science of Ptolemy and Copernicus. . . . A further point might be added, though perhaps not pertinent to our discussion. It is that every person, including modern scientists, actually has three options to choose from in this matter: (a) that A revolves around B, (b) that B revolves around A, (c) that A and B revolve around each other. But such a choice cannot be dictated by science; it would be one’s personal choice and belief. The Rebbe echoed his earlier belief that Einstein’s theory of relativity made a geocentric universe scientifically valid. Th is was a shrewd move on a number of levels: The theory was widely known (if not as widely understood) by name, and Albert Einstein was an iconic figure as both a Jew and a scientist. His theory was about “relativity,” and the concept that things might be relative is one that is easily grasped by non-scientists. By quoting the theory, the Rebbe, who had trained as an engineer (and was reported as having attended the University of Berlin and the Sorbonne9), was simply siding with science to answer a simple question: Does the Earth revolve around the Sun, or is it the other way around? Who could argue with Einstein’s theory of relativity? The logic of this wager is itself very puzzling. Mr. P. was told that “every word of the Torah” had to be accepted by Jews, and the assumption was that somehow this included the belief in a stationary Earth. Leaving aside the problem that such a belief is not mentioned anywhere in the Torah itself and was, as we have noted, a point of contention among Jewish scholars, the question is why Mr. P would feel it necessary to agree to become a “Torah-observant Jew” if the Rebbe turned out to be a geocentrist. One possibility was that Mr. P had an impression of the Rebbe as both a learned man of science and a Jewish scholar of impeccable intellect. The fact that the Rebbe could reject an established scientific fact because it apparently contradicted a religious belief demonstrated that a great rabbinic mind could bifurcate and compartmentalize scientific knowledge and religious understanding. Th is was all the proof that Mr. P. needed given the esteem that he had for the Rebbe. But this being so, why did Mr. P. need the Rebbe to declare his belief in a stationary Earth? If Mr. P indeed held the Rebbe in the highest regard, Mr. P. should have become an observant Jew on that basis alone; it mattered not what the Rebbe believed about Copernicus. Another explanation is that Mr. P. would be impressed by the fact that, in order to draw one Jew to an observant Jewish life, the Rebbe was willing to adopt a position that was ridiculed by scientists. But again, how this willingness is germane to the truth claims of Orthodox Judaism is not clear. In any event, we are not told whether Mr. P. kept his word, becoming a

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Torah-observant Jew and convincing others to do the same, and the reader is left feeling puzzled as to the educational point of the entire episode.10 As we noted, the Rebbe justified his position by quoting Einstein’s theory of relativity, arguing that this theory supported the notion that one cannot speak about absolute motion. If two objects are moving, all one can say is that one object is in motion relative to the other, and either can be chosen as the stationary point of reference. As a result, it makes as much scientific sense to declare that the Earth is stationary and the Sun revolves around it, as it does to maintain that the Sun is in fact stationary and it is the Earth that orbits. Both models are correct, depending on which point of view one chooses, and no scientific advance in the future will be able to decide the matter. A reasonable person might ask why the Rebbe felt it necessary to adduce support for his geocentric position from a modern scientific theory. After all, if the Torah always trumped science, what need was there to evoke a scientific position to reject Copernicus? If, for example, Einstein had not discovered relativity, would the Rebbe rethink his belief that the Earth was stationary? Th is is unlikely, and so the additional support offered by a scientific theory cannot be on the basis that it adds to Judaism’s truth claims (as understood by the Rebbe). Instead the theory was used as a way to add weight for those who are swayed by these kind of quotes; if Einstein’s theory of relativity stated that we can never be sure if it is the Earth or the Sun that is stationary, why should we be concerned if the sages of the Talmud believed that it was the former?11

Einstein and the Neo-Geocentrists Having first been raised as an argument by the Rebbe in 1963 and again in 1975, it is not surprising that Einstein’s theory of relativity was used by others to support the argument that the Earth does not move. Those who raised this argument can best be described as the neo-geocentrists; they were generally Orthodox Jews who used contemporary science to prove that the Copernican model is at worst, wrong, or at best, one of several different theories about the way the solar system works. In this, they share both a goal and a method with at least one group of fundamentalist Catholics who also deny the heliocentric model.12 One neo-geocentrist was Avi Rabinowitz, who published a paper in the English-language Orthodox (and pro-Lubavitch) journal B’Or Ha’Torah (By the Light of the Torah). Rabinowitz claimed that there was no confl ict between talmudic geocentric statements and science, because “[u]sing Einstein’s General Relativity Theory one can show that the geocentric picture of the universe is no less correct than the non-geocentric one.”13 Rabinowitz claimed that since the universe is expanding in all directions, any point can be considered

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to be the center of the expansion. After a meandering explanation of uniform motion and circular acceleration, Rabinowitz reached his grand conclusion, punctuated with exclamation marks for added effect: From the General Theory of Relativity we can see that physically one can say that the Earth is at rest, and the sun—and in fact the entire universe—is revolving about it! The centrifugal force which has been measured and att ributed to our circular motion about the sun, can in fact be att ributed to the gravitational “rotation effect” of the rotation of the universe about us! Thus the Earth can claim to be the center of rotation of the universe! Of course, any point in the universe can claim to be the center of rotation of the universe. However, geocentricity is now seen to be just as valid as the Copernican system! The Theory of Relativity does not say that the conception of Ptolemy is correct; rather it contests the absolute significance of either theory.14 In addition, Rabinowitz claimed that the Copernican model “purporting to be a fact was employed to discredit religion” and to reach the conclusion that man is insignificant. Rabinowitz reminded his readers that this conclusion was wrong, and that “[i]ntellectually and physically it is the inanimate universe which should feel insignificant next to man, rather than vice versa.”15 Th is claim of a conspiracy by those who believe that the Earth is stationary is not found only in the writings of Orthodox Jews; a similar conspiracy is echoed in the works of Robert Sungenis, the founder and president of the grandiosesounding Catholic Apologetics International, a fundamentalist Catholic group opposing, among other things, the heliocentric model: Not only can it be demonstrated mechanically, mathematically and scientifically that the sun and the stars revolve around the Earth, but using already performed scientific experiments it can also be demonstrated that the Earth is in fact the center of the universe and motionless in space. In fact, the evidence is so plain that, in order to hide this information from the public, there is, as you will see before your eyes, a drama of cover up and obfuscation that perhaps not even Hollywood could have dreamt up.16 Two years after the article by Rabinowitz was published, a letter supporting his views appeared in the same journal.17 Its author opined that every

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experiment to show that the Earth moves has failed. “Hundreds of experiments have failed to detect even a smidgen of the purported 67,000 mph translational and 1,000 mph rotational velocity of the Earth. . . . All research confi rms the biblical-Tychonic schema. . . .”18 If this claim was not enough, the author of the letter blamed Copernicus for nearly every social ill to have followed: Marx and Darwin openly acknowledged their gratitude to Copernicus, without whom their obnoxious theories would never have gotten off the ground to hijack human minds. Historians have shown that many social woes today are directly att ributable to the rise of Copernican heliocentricism and relativistic acentrism: i.e., biblical criticism, evolution, Nietzsche, Freudian psychology, communism, moral relativism, Nazism, atheism, existentialism, humanism, hedonism, anarchism, and despair. No wonder Ma’aseh Tuviya referred to Nicholas Copernicus as the “fi rst born of Satan”!19 B’Or Ha’Torah continued to publish papers that explained how the geocentric model was compatible with modern science. In a paper published in 1999 (which claimed to be based on the teachings of Lubavitch Hasidism and kabbalah), Shimon Cowen claimed that there really are nine spheres that orbit the Earth and that “the physical heavens (the nine spheres of physical Creation) model the nine circles of their spiritual essence. . . .”20 Although Cowen seemed uncertain whether or not to take all rabbinic statements literally or metaphorically, he wrote that the Ptolemaic model represented “a valid analogy of the application of the essential, spiritual, relationship of the heavens and Earth. . . .”21 Cowen accepted the Maimonidean claim that the planets were spiritual entities possessing both a soul and intelligence, and claimed that the planets moved as they sung their praises and bowed toward the divine presence outside the spheres in the west. “Thus it is explained that when Joshua stopped the sun by saying, ‘Sun, be silent over Givon’ he instructed the sun to be silent and therefore stand still.”22 Cowen contended that science and Judaism are locked in a batt le to explain the nature of the universe, a batt le “between the revealed doctrine of Torah on the one hand, in which the unity of G-d fi nds itself reflected in the harmonies—the movements and the bonds—of the physical universe as presented by a geocentric model; and the materialistic blank mysteries of gravity and inertia in the heliocentric system of the world, on the other.” But Cowen totally ignored the need for epicycles in the Ptolemaic system and never explained in what ways a Copernican model threatens any notion of divine harmony. Like other neo-geocentrists, he assumed that there is a single “Torah worldview” and that the universe could only be explained by

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“a Torah of different rules.” How Cowen arrived at each of these conclusions is perhaps the greatest mystery of all.23

Shlomo Benizri, the Government Minister Who Rejected Copernicus It was not only English-language publications that looked to Einstein’s theory of relativity to save the geocentric model. Einstein was also quoted in a Hebrew work written by Shlomo Benizri (b. 1961), a former member of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. First elected in 1992, Benizri rapidly rose through the ranks of the Shas political party and served as minister of health and later as minister of labor and social welfare. His political aspirations ended in 2008 when he was convicted of fraud and breach of trust and sentenced to four years in prison. As mentioned in the introduction, in 2003, Benizri published a comprehensive textbook on the Jewish calendar entitled Hashamayim Mesaprim (The Heavens Proclaim).24 In the last part of the book where he described the structure of the solar system, he concluded that despite all the scientific and astronomical evidence to the contrary, it is the Sun that revolves around the Earth, and not the other way around. Although Benizri was educated in traditional Orthodox yeshivot and never attended university, his book did not ignore the world of science. It reproduced high-resolution images of the surfaces of the planets (including those sent from the famous Viking 1 project) and described the composition of the atmospheres and surfaces of the planets using data from NASA’s solar explorations. Benizri’s use of science, however, was not to be understood as an unequivocal acceptance of its value. Although he cited the fi ndings of modern astronomy, he made it perfectly clear that the ultimate arbiter of truth could only be traditional Judaism. “Although I have quoted astronomers and wise non-Jews many times,” he wrote, I have only done so in order that the reader may understand the wisdom of our holy sages, who had amazing understanding, and who without any doubt derived some of their ideas directly from the Creator, may his name be blessed. There are certain instances in which our sages disagree with non-Jewish experts, and I have quoted the latter and compared them with the beliefs of our holy sages, together with proofs for each side. But I want to make it perfectly clear that all the words of our holy sages are true, correct, and fi rmly based. Even if there are statements made by our holy sages that we cannot understand and that appear to contradict reality, it is possible that in the future a proof of their truth will be discovered. For we see today how

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science has verified many statements of our holy sages that remained inexplicable for thousands of years.25 Having declared where his allegiance lay, Benizri did admit that all modern scientists accepted the Copernican model. Th is raised the question of how great rabbis such as Maimonides could have erred when they outlined a geocentric universe. The solution Benizri suggested was one that we have encountered before: Th rough the travails of exile, authentic Jewish texts and wisdom had been lost, and the Jews had been forced to rely on outside sources of knowledge. For example, Maimonides based his astronomy on Greek science, and it was this science that was later proven to be incorrect.26 By implication, Benizri would conclude that had Maimonides and others had access to lost Jewish knowledge, they would have embraced a heliocentric system several centuries before Copernicus lived. But Benizri was confl icted by such a conclusion, because of biblical verses that suggest that the Earth is indeed stationary. Consequently, he reviewed Jewish sources from the Talmud to contemporary times, and concluded that it was difficult to decide which model was correct: “We should put this aside, to be answered at some future time, when the matter will become clearer.”27 At the present, the question is, which model is indeed correct: the Ptolemaic model that seems to be the one accepted by the Jewish sages and which fits with the biblical verses, or the Copernican model? After careful consideration of all the approaches and sources, it is my humble goal to try and fi nd a compromise. It is certainly the case that the simple meaning of the biblical verses, the Midrash from our sages, and the words of our great leaders, whether they are understood literally or kabbalistically, is that the Earth is in fact the center of the universe. Despite all the modern proofs that are used by scientists, their words are not convincing; this is because of the important statement made by Professor Einstein that it is not possible to determine which of two objects is really orbiting the other. We must believe and accept the statements of our rabbis of blessed memory that the Earth is the center. However, with regard to creation of day and night, in my humble opinion the words of the scientists that explain that the world revolves on its axis once every twenty-four hours are correct. Th is is the explanation of day and night.28 Although Benizri clearly stated his Ptolemaic conclusion, it is completely at odds with his earlier position that if Maimonides and others had access to lost Jewish texts, they would not have erroneously adopted a geocentric position.

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Moreover, throughout the rest of his book, Benizri used the heliocentric model and diagrams; for example, when he described each of the planets (except the Earth), he described their respective distances from the Sun, and their orbital periods around the Sun, and not around the Earth.29 When carefully read, Benizri’s book is an odd interweaving of both the heliocentric and geocentric models. He used the heliocentric model whenever he described a structural feature of the solar system but turned to the geocentric model whenever addressing a religious discussion. 30 Benizri also followed the suggestion made by other neo-geocenterists; Einstein’s theory of relativity dismissed the need for any defensiveness on the part of those who remained unconvinced by the Copernican model. Benizri then quoted in English (the only place in the book where he did so) from Einstein’s work The Evolution of Physics, originally published in 1938: The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus, would then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification. The two sentences, the sun is at rest and the earth moves, or the sun moves and the earth is at rest, would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS (Coordinate Systems). Could we build a real relativistic physics valid in all CS; a physics in which there would be no place for absolute, but only for relative motions? Th is is indeed possible!31 Benizri explained the meaning of this for his readers: According to the principle he discovered, called “The Laws of Relativity” the objections of earlier scholars [to the idea that the Earth is stationary] lacks any meaning. It is rather a question of agreeing what to call the center of the universe, and then placing all the other stars in orbit around it. In reality there is not one single star in the universe that may be described as stationary and around which all the others orbit, because the whole concept of “movement” is only meaningful when describing one body compared to another. Were there only a single body in the entire universe, it would make no sense to describe it as moving at all compared to infi nite space. Therefore it is impossible to say that the Earth is stationary or that the Sun is stationary in any absolute way. 32 When this quote (and others) about relativity are read superficially, they certainly seem to suggest that when considering two objects, say the Earth and

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the Sun, it is not possible to state which is in motion compared to the other. But this two-body arrangement is not a description of the solar system, which does not contain just two bodies, the Earth and the Sun, but at least eight planets. While any one of them may be said to be the center of rotation compared to another, when viewed as a whole from outside of the system, there is only one rational way to describe the orbit of the planets—and that is that they revolve around the Sun. Th is much was acknowledged by Einstein in the very same essay: “Since the time of Copernicus we have known that the Earth rotates on its axis and moves around the sun.”33 Einstein expanded on this idea just a page before the passage quoted by Benizri. When reading the passage, bear in mind that a coordinate system is simply a frame of reference or scaffold that is used to determine the position of a body: Take two bodies, the sun and the earth, for instance. The motion we observe is again relative. It can be described by connecting the CS with either the earth or the sun. From this point of view, Copernicus’ great achievement lies in transferring the CS from the earth to the sun. . . . The CS connected with the sun resembles an inertial system more than that connected with the earth. The physical laws should be applied to Copernicus’ CS rather than Ptolemy’s. The greatness of Copernicus’ discovery can be appreciated only from the physical point of view. It illustrates the great advantage of using a CS connected rigidly with the sun for describing the motion of the planets. . . . 34 It can be misleading to quote from the vast corpus of Einstein’s writings and claim to have distilled his thoughts on a subject into a pithy sentence or paragraph. Einstein’s output was huge; a recent book (almost 600 pages long) claims to contain “roughly 1,600” Einstein quotes. 35 But the historical record needs to be factually correct, and Einstein was very clear about what he believed. Without a long digression into the history of relativity, we should remember that in 1887, two physicists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, demonstrated that the speed of light remained constant regardless of the Earth’s direction of movement. In doing so, they undermined the long-cherished notion that space was fi lled with ether, the substance that carried light. Now it was possible to explain the results of this experiment by suggesting that the Earth did not move, but as a biographer of Einstein wrote, that would mean “scuttling the whole Copernican theory, and was unthinkable.”36 Einstein’s theory of relativity addressed the basic premise that the laws of nature had to be the same for all observers, as long as they are moving at a uniform speed relative to each other, and that the notion of time is relative, valid for one observer in a given frame of reference. 37 Th is did not mean, however, that Einstein denied

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the Copernican model. Indeed, quite the opposite was true, as Einstein made clear in a speech in 1922: Soon I came to the conclusion that our idea about the motion of the Earth with respect to the ether is incorrect, if we admit Michelson’s null result as fact. Th is was the fi rst path which led me to the special theory of relativity. Since then I have come to believe that the motion of the Earth cannot be detected by any optical experiment, though the Earth is revolving around the Sun. 38 A few years later, Einstein made clear his dissatisfaction with the way some of his ideas about relativity had been misunderstood: The meaning of relativity has been widely misunderstood. Philosophers play with the world like a child with a doll. Relativity, as I see it, merely denotes that certain physical and mechanical facts, which have been regarded as positive and permanent, are relative with regard to certain other facts in the sphere of physics and mechanics. It does not mean that everything in life is relative and that we have the right to turn the whole world mischievously topsy-turvy. 39 We could continue with many more examples from the vast body of material that is Einstein’s legacy, but the point has been made. To repeat: Motion is relative when discussing two observers, and it is always possible to describe the motion of one as being relative to the other. But to suggest that Einstein somehow “proved” that the Earth could be considered motionless is to deliberately ignore the historical (and mathematical) record.40

Copernicus in the Contemporary Haredi World As would be expected, of the several movements into which contemporary Judaism has splintered, only one—the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi)—continues to feel any discomfort with the notion of the Copernican model. Reform, conservative, and reconstruction Judaism all place less emphasis on Jewish texts and do not share the Orthodox belief in a divinely revealed Bible. For them, texts suggesting a geocentric universe do not offer the kinds of problems that they do for the Haredi communities. Over the last thirty years, the Copernican question has been addressed by this community in a number of different publications and, as we will see, the overall direction has been to accept the heliocentric model.

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In 1976, the Haredi Hebrew language publication Diglenu (Our Flag) published an essay that was critical of books that accepted the heliocentric model.41 The author, A. Y. Bornstein, claimed that these books had not paid enough attention to traditional Jewish thought on the issue, and that as a result they were “standing on a precipice.” Bornstein cited Valdman’s Ma’amar Mavoh Hashemesh at length and concluded with a quote from Israel David Schlesinger’s Yafe’ah Leketz (published in 1862), “everything said by Copernicus is worthless and untrue.”42 Th is essay was countered later that year by Rabbi Yonah Merzbach (1901–1980).43 Merzbach had impressive Haredi credentials: He was editor of the Encyclopedia Talmudit (Talmudic Encyclopedia) for many years and was a teacher at the famous Haredi Yeshivah Kol Torah in Jerusalem. He established five working principles to defend his position: (1) Mankind was instructed to understand the world, and the greater this understanding, the greater is the appreciation of God. (2) Only certain Jews have been endowed with the divine power (ruah hakodesh) to discern scientific truths in the biblical verses. Anyone else who tries to learn science from the Bible will err. (3) The Torah was not written to be a scientific textbook, and the sages did not strive to teach science. (4) Any attempt to use the Bible or a statement of the sages of the Talmud to reach a scientific conclusion will result in error, because “the Torah was written in the language of mankind, as were the statements of the sages.” As a result, the sages used contemporary idioms, and the truth content of their statements will change as science progresses. (5) Jews are required to learn from any person who speaks the truth. As a result of these five principles, Merzbach criticized Bornstein’s earlier essay, claiming that Bornstein had adopted a ridiculous position, which required the stars to orbit the Earth at speeds faster than the speed of light. “He refuses to accept reality—and yet he accuses others of interpreting the Torah inappropriately!” Merzbach was outraged that Bornstein had called other Jews who accepted the Copernican model “heretics and apostates,” and he further feared that his article had caused serious damage to Jewish belief in three ways: It caused God’s name to be desecrated [hilul hashem], for he has made us a laughing stock, as others mock our inability to accept reality. [Secondly] he has maligned the purity of our faith. He confused articles of faith and statements in the Torah and sages of the Talmud, things we are required to believe and things that are not required. [And thirdly] he has endangered the masses, for he has threatened the beliefs of our youth. They will hear others say that they should open their eyes, and they will learn from this (God forbid) to react negatively to other things they have learned.

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Merbzach’s position that the Bible was not a book of science, and that both it and the talmudic sages used everyday language to express ideas was a noteworthy departure from standard ultra-Orthodox thought. But perhaps even more worthy of note was his examination of the educational effects of believing in a geocentric universe. Merzbach feared that adopting erroneous beliefs like geocentrism would cause a later crisis of faith. His concern was that, once the innocent believer in geocentrism was exposed to the truth of the heliocentric model, he would inevitably question each and every Jewish belief he had been taught, with disastrous consequences. “Every wise author,” Merzbach cautioned, “should be careful that he does not cause others to stumble.” Th ree years after the public dispute in Diglenu, Rabbi Moshe Sternbuch published a pro-Copernican text as part of a commentary on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah.44 Sternbuch, who rose to become the head of the ultra-Orthodox (Edah-Haredi) rabbinic court in Jerusalem, was born in London in 1926 and raised in Stamford Hill. He later studied in the Brisk Yeshivah before spending time in South Africa and later sett ling in Jerusalem. He is an outspoken critic of Zionism, has published an opinion requiring Jews to believe that the world is less than 6,000 years old, and has led protests against Jerusalem’s gay-pride parades.45 And yet despite these ultra-Orthodox positions, Sternbuch has a nuanced and surprisingly non-literal approach to the question of the Copernican model. Early in his commentary on the Mishneh Torah, Sternbuch, like Benizri, noted that Maimonides’ astronomy was based on Greek sources. Sternbuch was clear that Maimonides’ model of the universe was in error: “Maimonides followed the old model in which the Sun and all the planets orbit the Earth, unlike the theory that is accepted by astronomers today and was proved by Copernicus and by others, that the world moves (3:4).” He also noted that due to discoveries made using the telescope, there are vastly more stars in the universe than Maimonides had thought: “If only Maimonides had seen in his lifetime what we have been able to see thanks to scientific advances, he would have added [these facts to his commentary] and explained them, igniting hearts to fear God. But as a result of our sins, in this generation that has revealed so many of God’s wonders, heretics have suggested that everything is natural . . . (3:7).”46 Sternbuch was certain that the heliocentric model was correct and equally sure that this fact did not challenge even an ultra-Orthodox Jewish worldview: The idea that the world moves in orbit is new, and was not known from the writings of our rabbis, even though it does not negate the words of our teachers of blessed memory. . . . Today we have verified with direct observation or by using advanced instruments that this is indeed the case. (3:8)

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Several other contemporary Haredim have taken a stand on the Copernican question. In 1996, Hayyim Benish published a two-volume analysis of time in halakhah and noted without comment that the heliocentric model is the one that is “accepted today.”47 Others, like Eitan Zikoni, were more reluctant to embrace Copernicus. Zikoni published a commentary on Maimonides’ laws of the new month in 2001, and he refused to decide on the Copernican issue.48 Nevertheless, Zikoni reprinted the entire essay by Yonah Merzbach that we discussed above, in which Merzbach supported the fi ndings of science in general and of astronomy in particular.49 That Zikoni chose to republish this article suggests that despite his declared disinterested stance, he was keen for his readers to appreciate all of the advantages of the Copernican model. In 2009, a plethora of works were published to coincide with the ceremony of Birkat Hahamah (the Blessing of the Sun) that occurs only once every twenty-eight years, and some addressed the Copernican question when discussing the astronomy behind this religious ceremony. Menahem Gerlitz obtained approbations from the rabbinic court of the Edah-Haredi in Jerusalem for his Birkat Hahamah Kehilkhatah (Blessing of the Sun according to Jewish Law), in which his sympathies seemed to lie with the Ptolemaic system: “For the Jewish people, the matter is simple, as explained by the sages of the Talmud and Maimonides, especially since biblical verses imply that the Earth is stationary, and that the Sun and other heavenly bodies revolve around it.”50 However, he reluctantly noted later that the heliocentric system was accepted by contemporary scientists, but only after quoting Einstein’s comments on the relativity of coordinate systems. 51 Th is should be contrasted with a work by Zvi Cohen, whose Birkhat Hahamah: Halakhot Uminhagim Hashalem (The Blessing of the Sun: Complete Laws and Customs) was no less detailed but which concluded that the Earth indeed moved, and that “the Sun appears as if it revolves around the Earth.”52 Mordekhai Ganot’s exhaustive 700-page Birkhat Hahamah Bitekufatah (The Blessing of the Sun in its Season) also noted the controversy but declared: “I prefer to explain matters according to the old model, which is also the way things appear. I am certain that many will thank me for doing so.”53 He seems then to have chosen the geocentric model for the sake of simplicity, rather than to make a scientific or religious statement. Among the many books published to mark Birkhat Hahamah, one remarkably anti-Copernican work stands out. Th is work is Kuntrus Hashemesh Bigvurato (An Essay on the Sun in its Strength), written by Joseph Zalman Bloch and privately published in Monsey, New York. The author of this brief pamphlet (only fi ft y-six pages long) explained on the title page that his goal was to explain “the position of the Holy Torah concerning the immobility of the Earth around which the Sun and all the heavenly bodies revolve.”54 Bloch ascribed to the myth to which we have referred on several occasions, in which all science

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began with the Jews. However, he was silent on the second widely circulated part of the myth in which the Jews lost their knowledge of science because of the hardships of the Diaspora: Our sages of blessed memory, the sages of the Talmud, received the entire treasure house of true knowledge that is hidden within the Torah. It is from the Torah that they knew all the secrets of nature, clearly and with certainty, from the original source, like an open box in front of their eyes. To compare our sages to scientists is to compare a sighted person to a blind man. The sighted person sees, while the blind man can only feel his way in darkness through countless episodes of trial and error, after which he can arrive at a limited understanding of the nature of things. 55 Bloch next established the religious requirements for Jews to believe that the written Torah was divinely authored and that the statements of rabbis and commentators of the middle ages cannot be disputed. 56 Having declared this theological position, he quoted Maimonides’ Ptolemaic understanding of the universe, although he took great pains to show that this position was not one that originated with the Gentiles. Th is was all that was needed to conclude that Jews must not believe that the Earth moves. But Bloch was not content to establish his geocentric position on the basis of Maimonides alone; he claimed that there were a number of serious scientific concerns with the Copernican model. For example, scientists have not fully understood the nature of gravity, and as a result have incorrectly att ributed the tides to the Moon’s gravitational field, although how this is germane to Copernicanism is not explained. 57 Bloch also denied that there was any proof of the Earth’s rotation from Foucault’s pendulum. He recalled that when he visited the United Nations building in New York, which housed an example of the pendulum, he asked one of the guides how the pendulum remained in motion for so many years. “We give it a litt le push” was the answer he was given, which was all Bloch needed to conclude that “this ‘litt le push’ completely destroys the proof. . . .” Furthermore, even if this “litt le push” was ignored, the pendulum’s revolutions could be better explained as resulting from the gravitational effects of all the stars and planets acting on it, rather than from the Earth moving under the pendulum. 58 Bloch did not just claim that there was no scientific evidence for Copernicanism; he also rejected any attempt to understand the Bible in a way that avoided a confl ict with the heliocentric model, a model that even Bloch had to admit was overwhelmingly accepted. Bloch ridiculed the exegetical principle that “the Torah spoke in the language of man,” which, as we have seen, was used by several rabbis from the late eighteenth century onward to

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explain why the Bible might describe a geocentric understanding of the universe. For Bloch, it was inconceivable “to base prayers, blessings, talmudic passages and halakhic discourses on something that was not true, something that [only] appears to be so at fi rst glance, and as a result of which the Bible wrote in error. Such a position is absolutely incorrect.”59 By the midpoint of his essay, Bloch had turned to the underlying motives of Copernicus, Newton, and Galileo, whom he claimed were anti-religious. Somewhat confused by the fact that Copernicus was also a Church canon, which would have been an odd choice for one so motivated by the need to attack religion, Bloch simply notes: “He [Copernicus] was an impure priest, who brought impurity into the world.”60 Bloch suggested that this motivation was also the basis for the work of contemporary scientists like the British astronomer Martin Rees, who was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2011. “Their entire motivation is to overturn ‘In the beginning God created’ and ‘Let us make man in our likeness and our image.’ Th is all began with the wicked Copernicus, may his name and his memory be blotted out.”61 Bloch’s pamphlet was reminiscent of Pinhas Vaberman’s 1967 essay Ma’amar Mevoh Hashmesh, which began this chapter. Both saw in Copernicanism not an attempt to explain a series of observations, but rather a means of undermining religion in general and Judaism in particular. Both engaged in ad hominem attacks and deliberately ignored the many Hebrew texts that embraced the heliocentric model. Interestingly, neither work contained a rabbinic approbation, which is unusual in the Haredi society for which the works were written. Vaberman and Bloch epitomized a fundamentalist approach in which nuance is forsaken for surety, and in which outside forces are seen as continually conspiring to destroy traditional Jewish values. Bloch’s pamphlet was credible neither as a work of science nor as an accurate statement of the Jewish opposition to Copernicanism. The interest in astronomy and Judaism that was sparked by the ceremony of Birkhat Hahamah continued to fascinate Haredi audiences. In 2010 and 2011, the Haredi magazine Mishpahah (Family) published articles in both its Hebrew and English editions that addressed the Copernican question. The English-language article, featured on the cover of the magazine and titled Center of the Universe, asked: “Is there a connection between the ‘new astronomy’ and something mentioned in the Torah? And can a Jew believe in heliocentrism?”62 The author, Eliezer Eizikovitz, briefly summarized the work of Ptolemy, Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, and some of the rabbinic positions for and against acceptance of the heliocentric model, without addressing the question of which position was correct. In addition, Eizikovitz emphasized a fundamental difference between Jewish and non-Jewish scholarship: “A non-Jewish scholar does not become ‘part of Hashem’ [God]. . . . In contrast, a person who is endowed with Torah wisdom becomes a partner in the wisdom of the

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Creator. . . . Hashem shared with him a portion of his wisdom, so to speak.”63 Eizikovitz could not take sides in the debate without implying that those rabbis who had taken the opposing view were mistaken. Th is would raise difficult theological questions given his position that Jews differed from others in the nature of the knowledge they had received. As all these examples demonstrate, contemporary works aimed at the ultra-Orthodox market do not exclusively side with the geocentric model. Of the works we reviewed in this chapter, the pro-Copernican authors (Merzbach, Sternbuch, Benish, and Cohen) slightly outnumber the fi rmly geocentric authors (Vaberman, Bornstein, and Bloch), with five others (Benizri, Gerlitz, Zikoni, Ganot, and Eizikovitz) expressing either no preference, ambivalence, or simply acknowledging that modern astronomy sides with the heliocentric model. Although we cannot be sure of the relative importance of each work, it is certain that Bloch’s privately published pamphlet in Monsey would reach far fewer readers than, say, the widely read Mishpahah magazine. It must also be noted that of all these Haredi writers, only two, Merzbach and Sternbuch, attained leadership positions within their communities, and both men accepted Copernicanism. Other Haredi rabbis have declared that despite the precedent of some geocentric works, there was reason to invoke the principle that “the Torah speaks in the language of man.”64 All of this points to the conclusion that although the heliocentric model continues to be viewed with suspicion by some in the ultra-Orthodox community, there is a steady, if somewhat hesitant, trend to accept it as the description of reality. But this pattern is only a trend, and there are of course exceptions. One interesting example of the way in which trends may be reversed is how the publishers of a calendar that is widely used in contemporary Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish congregations have chosen to describe the solar system. Every year, a charitable organization called Ezras Torah publishes a calendar of the Jewish year in both Hebrew and English.65 The calendar opens with a detailed description of the structure of that particular Jewish year and notes the start of each of the four seasons, based on a traditional computation of dividing a solar year of exactly 365 days and six hours into four equal parts.66 The calendar for the Hebrew year 5768 (2008–2009) introduced the times for the start of each season in the following way: “The beginning of each of the four periods that mark the different seasonal skies are as follows. . . .”67 The next year, a small but noteworthy change appeared in this section: “The beginning of each of the four periods that mark the different seasonal skies that are a result of the earth’s revolution around the sun are as follows. . . .”68 In 2010–2011 (the Hebrew year 5770), this language disappeared, and the calendar reverted back to its original introduction, making no mention of the cause of the seasonal changes or the orbit of the Earth, and the calendar for 2012–2013 followed

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suit. Perhaps the removal of the Copernican description was an oversight, but this seems unlikely given the amount of material that is repeated from year to year without any change in language or even typeface. Although I contacted the publisher, there was no explanation forthcoming about the reason for the editorial decision. Despite the widespread acceptance of Copernicanism among even ultra-Orthodox Jews, there are likely to remain pockets of resistance, with att itudes that may be only subtly apparent, to the new astronomy. Still, almost five centuries after Copernicus suggested his controversial model, Judaism has overwhelmingly made its peace. Some Orthodox Jews have now moved on to challenge newer scientific theories that they view as subversive, most notably Darwinian evolution, and those who do should remember the historical lesson that our study has revealed.

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It is significant that the astronomical structure of the world as conceived in modern times was accepted by Judaism without protest or any feeling of incompatibility with its own beliefs. Having pledged itself to none of the old astronomical systems, it could observe their fall without concern. Leo Baeck, 19481 Though the Copernican system gradually gained ground during the fi fteenth century and was fi nally accepted after the time of Galileo, it did not produce the corresponding change in Jewish astronomical literature. With the exception of Joseph del Medigo, a disciple of Galileo, most of the other scientists still clung to the Ptolemaic or geocentric conception of the universe. . . . Such is the power of tradition. Mayer Waxman, 19382

The Current State of the Science-and-Religion Debate In his popular 1999 book Rock of Ages, the late Stephen Jay Gould claimed that the rejection of the theory of evolution in favor of the biblical story of creation was a peculiarly American phenomenon. In fact, he maintained that, because it was the product of only a few states, it could not rightly be called “American” in a general sense at all. Gould claimed that young Earth creationists are “as locally and distinctively American as apple pie and Uncle Sam. No other Western nation faces such an incubus as a serious political movement (rather than a few powerless cranks at the fringes).”3 The simple picture painted by Gould at the start of the fi rst decade of this century turns out to be rather more complicated by the start of the second. The relationship between science and religion has become an increasingly important issue in American politics 274

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and civic life. More than three-quarters of the most religious Americans reject evolution, believing instead that God created human beings less than ten thousand years ago.4 In the overall population, just over one-third believe in evolution, one-quarter state that they do not believe in it, and the remainder have no opinion either way. 5 Books on the science-religion debate are regularly published by scientists who believe in God and philosophers who do not. The issue even reached the loft y halls of the American Philosophical Association, when in February 2009, Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett debated the compatibility of science and religion in a hall in which there was standing room only. Although America still seems to lead Western countries in terms of the percentage of its citizens who take the Genesis story literally, other countries are not far behind, and creationism is neither peculiarly American nor a phenomenon of the fringes. In 2004, the Italian government briefly tried to stop schools from teaching evolution. A poll of schoolteachers in England and Wales in 2008 revealed that 37 percent felt that creationism should be taught alongside evolution. In Germany, about 20 percent of the public holds creationist views; in Turkey, the theory of evolution is rejected by more than 75 percent of university students in training to become schoolteachers. In Algeria, Senegal, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia, over half the biology teachers agreed with the creationist statement “It is certain that God created life.” The rejection of science is not as wholly American as apple pie after all.6 It is into this arena that we cautiously introduce the conclusions from this study of the reception of Copernican thought in Judaism. As we will see, these conclusions, although most germane to the relationship between Judaism and science, may be expanded to address the more general issue of the relationship between science and Western religion. There are several conclusions that are suggested by this review of four hundred years of Jewish intellectual history. There is of course a risk when generalizing; Leo Baeck’s assertion in this chapter’s epigraph that Judaism accepted the new astronomy “without protest” and Mayer Waxman’s claim that litt le changed in Jewish literature after Galileo both exemplify this danger. Furthermore, as any scientist knows, conclusions need to be based on more than one case study or experiment. Historians are also aware of the danger of generalizing from a specific set of circumstances, and so we must be cautious in suggesting generalizable conclusions from our review. With these caveats in mind, however, it is possible to reach some tentative conclusions from our inquiry. The historical record demonstrates that over some four centuries of action and reaction, accommodation, attack, defense, and rehabilitation, Judaism, in all its various contemporary forms, has accepted the heliocentric model. There are, to be sure, small pockets of resistance to the model, just as there are Americans today who believe that the manned landings on the Moon

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were elaborately staged fakes, and Catholics who still reject the Church’s rehabilitation of Galileo.7 There will always be opposition to religious change, but this does not and should not prevent an observer from reaching sensible conclusions about these changes. There is one further point that must be made before attempting to generalize from our study to other religions. The umbrella of “religion” is so large that any comments or conclusions that can safely be made about one religion will surely not apply to all. As our analysis focused on Judaism, our comments on the interaction of science and religion are limited to Judaism and other monotheistic religions in which a divinely revealed text is central, such as Christianity and Islam. We certainly do not mean to suggest that our conclusions are valid for, say, the Indic religions of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, or the religions practiced in sub-Saharan Africa (although they may indeed prove to be so).8 Similarly, our comments assume a notion of science in which a hypothesis is generated that is falsifiable and does not rely on a supernatural or divine explanation. With this in mind, we proceed.

Pluralize, Localize, Hybridize, and Politicize The historian David Livingstone has suggested four “imperatives” that must be considered whenever an encounter in the history of science and religion is evaluated.9 First, we must pluralize and remember that no religion is monolithic. For example, because there are many branches of Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism, it is challenging to speak of the Jewish (or the Christian or the Buddhist) approach to science. Second, we must localize the encounter of science and religion and ask what special local or contextual factors were at play in a specific geographic area when a particular religious community addressed a scientific question. In trying to understand why people accepted or rejected a scientific theory, it is critical to make sense of the contexts “that render such intentions intelligible to both the actor and to others.”10 The motivation for accepting a theory can only be understood in the context of the prevailing standards of a particular place at a specific time. Livingstone calls the notion of an objective scientific rationality, independent of time and place (what was once thought of as “the view from nowhere”) “highly dubious.” Instead, everyone has a view from somewhere, based in part on where and when they live and the prevailing intellectual and religious paradigms they encounter.11 The third imperative is to evaluate the role of intellectual hybridization, in which there is a cross-cultural synthesis both between different religions and within religious subgroups. In the account of the Jewish reception of Copernican thought, therefore, we need to consider the way in which Jewish

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approaches to science were influenced by and absorbed the host cultures in which they existed, be they Ottoman, Islamic, Catholic, or Deist. Such an analysis often shows how different scientific and religious traditions were intertwined and produced a hybrid response. Finally, we must consider the role of cultural politics and remember that “science and religion are always embedded in wider socio-political networks and their relationship is conditioned by the prevailing cultural arrangements.”12 It is difficult to speak of pluralization, that is, Livingstone’s observation that there are often many types of any one religion, as a significant factor in the reception of Copernican thought among Jews before the eighteenth century. With the notable exceptions of the splits with Christianity and the Karaites, rabbinic Judaism remained a fairly unified tradition from the Second Temple period until the onset of the Haskalah in the early eighteenth century.13 It was only then that, within this textual tradition, there arose significantly new approaches to the question of rabbinic interpretation and the divine origins of the Torah. Leaders of Reform Judaism, which arose in Germany in the early nineteenth century, did not generally concern themselves with reconciling the heliocentric system with the Bible, because the latter was seen as a product of human minds and therefore fallible. We have also noted that at the end of the nineteenth century, Hebrew works on astronomy fi rst appeared in Warsaw, Cracow, and Vilna that, for the fi rst time since the birth of Copernicus, did not emphasize the role of God. But before this period, there would have been no disagreement on either the divine origins of the Torah or the importance of rabbinic texts between, say, Friesenhausen and Landau, or Delmedigo and Nieto. Yet, the former of each pair of contemporaries embraced the new astronomy, while the latter was equally emphatic in its rejection.

The Power of the Personality The second historical conclusion is the least controversial, but it powerfully demonstrates Livingstone’s imperative to localize the encounter of science and religion. The fi rst two rabbis to analyze the Copernican model were also those who had close contact with contemporary astronomers. David Gans, the fi rst Jewish author to mention Copernicus by name, met Tycho Brahe and spent time at his observatory, and also met Johannes Kepler. Joseph Delmedigo, who wrote the fi rst widely published Hebrew book to mention Copernicus, was taught by Galileo and recorded the observations he made through his teacher’s telescope. Neither of these men spent time defending their reasoning, and both ultimately adopted the models of their mentors. Gans, while praising Copernicus, ultimately adopted Brahe’s model, and Delmedigo sided with the

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Copernican model without equivocation. The proximity of each rabbi to the leading astronomer of the time meant not only that each was influenced by the ideas of the astronomer with whom he associated, but also, and perhaps more importantly, by the personality of the astronomer himself. Th is close contact between Tycho Brahe and Gans and between Delmedigo and Galileo allowed each rabbi to study a specific model of the universe and to interact directly with each astronomer.14 Gans spent a number of weeks working at Brahe’s observatory and watching the meticulous way in which the coordinates of the stars and planets were measured and recorded. Such fi rsthand knowledge, which unfortunately remained very unusual in the annals of Jewish astronomy, would have convinced Gans of the correctness of the model that Tycho described.15 Similarly, Delmedigo’s relationship with his teacher Galileo at the University of Padua would naturally have resulted in the student being influenced by both the character and teachings of his persuasive mentor. Consider the young Jewish student Joseph Delmedigo looking through Galileo’s telescope as we read the following description of Galileo’s personality: The primary thrust of Galileo’s new science was to argue that knowledge must be grounded in sensory experience—that seeing is believing. But almost equally powerful was the conviction that knowledge is about abstractions, and that it can go beyond and even against the evidence of our senses. Thus Galileo praised Copernicus for holding fi rm to his conviction that the planets (including the earth) go round the sun, even when the evidence of his senses directly contradicted his theories.16 If this account is correct, then Delmedigo keenly followed in his teacher’s path, making sure that theory and fact were harmonized and relying when possible on observation. Delmedigo’s observations of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter, using Galileo’s own telescope, would certainly have influenced his thinking to a much greater degree than the more passive act of reading about these planets in the texts of others. Sadly, this combination of direct contact with contemporary experts in astronomy, together with the ability to make visual observations of the planets, was not repeated by any Jews who would later take a position in the Copernican debate. The importance of the power of the personality is supported by the fact that Abraham Yagel, a contemporary of David Gans, met with neither Brahe nor Galileo, and he ignored the entire Copernican debate, even though he was clearly familiar with the issues.17 In contrast, Delmedigo published his book in Amsterdam and spent much time in Poland, but neither of these places was particularly pro-Copernican at the time. Despite this, Delmedigo

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published his pro-Copernican work in 1629, further demonstrating the power of Delmedigo’s formative years on molding his outlook on astronomy. Even if Galileo did not actually teach Delmedigo the Copernican model, Delmedigo’s experience of having studied under Galileo and having made observations through his teacher’s telescope appears to have been most influential in forging his Copernican sympathies. Th is is not to suggest that others who accepted the heliocentric model did so out of personal rather than religious allegiances, but rather that personal allegiances must be considered, and that they are likely to play a part in future debates in which scientific facts must be evaluated in light of religious traditions. In his most recent work, the historian Robert Westman noted the critical role that the master-pupil relationship played in the diff usion of Copernicanism.18 Westman claimed that the “master-student relationship seems to provide the essential sett ing for breaks and stresses with the via antiqua of various kinds and degrees. . . . Temperament and reason were conjointly implicated in a narrative of belief change. Personal identification with the teacher and his convictions set up the conditions for subsequent approval or rejection.” Th is is a reminder that the power of personality is an important factor in the Copernican question as a whole, and not just in the ways in which Copernicanism and Judaism interacted. Westman’s thesis, which he supports with several historical examples, reinforces the conclusion that the relationship between a student and teacher played a key role in how and when Copernicanism was disseminated into the Jewish community. The historical record has also demonstrated the remarkable degree to which Livingstone’s third imperative, hybridization, has been a driving force in the Jewish reception of Copernican thought. At the most superficial level of course, without hybridization, there would have been no penetration of external ideas into Judaism, and hence no reaction to analyze. But the hybridization that Livingstone raises takes place on a deeper level; it is the synthesis of ideas across cultures, and its analysis requires sensitivity to the subtle differences in the ways in which the Copernican controversy was addressed among various communities. It is here, however, that the linear direction suggested by historical theory runs into the vagaries of historical facts. We might have supposed that once the Copernican theory encountered the rabbinic mind, a progression would occur in which, broadly speaking, there might be rejection, reconciliation, and synthesis. However, no such linear movement transpired. The messy picture that emerges instead is that there was acceptance and rejection of Copernicanism within the same period of time, the same geographic location, and among the same students of a particular rabbinic academy or personality. The pro-Copernican Joseph Delmedigo, for example, graduated as a doctor of medicine from the University of Padua in 1613, but Tuviah Cohen,

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who graduated from the same university with the same degree in 1683, became a forceful anti-Copernican, famously describing Copernicus as “the Son of Satan.” In the eighteenth century, Israel Schlesinger supported the geocentric model, while Eliezer Neusatz wrote in support of the heliocentric system. Both men were born in what was then Hungary, and both were students of Moses Sofer. Both published works in the town of Pressberg within twenty years of each other, and each died less than thirty-five miles from the other. They both remained fi rmly within the Orthodox community, and both received a warm approbation for their work from Abraham Sofer, son of Moses Sofer, who had known Schlesinger since he was a child, and who called Neusatz one of his father’s “particularly special students.”19 When we turn to contemporary Jewish responses, we might have expected a more unified outcome among the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community in Israel, in which a secular university education is shunned and social control is ceded to the rabbinic leaders of the community. But even within this small group, there are those who view the Copernican model as acceptable, and others who see it as heresy. Th is observation serves to remind us that we must be aware of the limitations of compartmentalizing the interaction of science and religion with broad strokes and post-hoc categorization. As Livingstone has noted, the relationship between science and religion “is conditioned by the prevailing cultural arrangements,” and this conditioning might allow us to speculate about how a particular group may approach a challenge to their religious worldview that arises as a result of a new scientific theory.20 But knowledge of these cultural arrangements cannot explain, much less predict, how a given individual will approach the specifics of a question raised by the interface of science and religion. Finally, we come to Livingstone’s fourth imperative: to analyze the way in which scientific ideas are used in the interests of local or cultural politics. It is here perhaps that the role of Copernicanism has gone most unnoticed as a factor in the cultural changes that European Judaism experienced. For the European Jews of the Haskalah in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Copernicanism became an uncrowned cause célèbre, for it offered them a stark choice. They could believe in a traditional Ptolemaic universe and along with that identify with a Judaism that rejected modernity and secular education, or they could accept the Copernican model and allow for the radical reevaluation and reinterpretation of traditional Jewish texts. Copernicanism became one unwitt ing yardstick by which such allegiances might be measured. We noted how, from its inception, the printing press of the Berlin Haskalah published pro-Copernican works, and that these were not simply science primers written in Hebrew. They were also deeply religious texts that frequently mentioned God’s benevolence. As Hame’assef, the newspaper of the maskilim, commented

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on the methodology of the pro-Copernican writer Reuven Lindau, “he has accepted the truth from whoever states it, and still all his intentions are for the sake of Torah.”21 Copernicanism was used to further the reforming agenda of the maskilim, although the question of which approach toward the inerrancy of the Bible and the primacy of the Talmud should be used remained undecided. Just as Newtonian science was used to support the newly reconstituted British monarchy, so too Copernicanism was used to support what was undoubtedly an agenda of increasing openness to the secular world among the maskilim.22 The same phenomenon of Copernicanism as a measure of secularism is seen today in much of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Although, as we have noted, most ultra-Orthodox Jews accept the heliocentric model, for those few who dispute it, the most important motive seems to be the rejection of any societal value or truth statement that comes from outside their community. It is this overarching concern that lies at the foundation of their rejection of scientific statements.

Religious Rationality and Scientific Rationality In his recent biography of Galileo, David Wootton asked at what point it would have been “rational” for Galileo, or anyone else, to adopt Copernicanism.23 He suggested that the outer limits for this time would have been between 1540, when Rheticus published the Narratio Prima, which was an introduction to the astronomy of Copernicus, and 1838, when the fi rst measurement of stellar parallax occurred, providing the fi rst experimental support for the Copernican model.24 We should ask the same question of those Jews who wrote about astronomy. When would it have been “rational” for a Jew steeped in the traditional cosmology of the Talmud and Maimonides to have accepted the Copernican model? Wootton’s question requires more than simply looking at the scientific evidence. For traditional Jews who accepted the divine origins of the Torah and the special place of talmudic statements, what was “rational” must also include an assessment of what could be religiously tolerated. For them, reason was not the only source of knowledge, for in addition to reason, there was faith. When deciding whether or not to accept the truth of a scientific statement, there is a corpus of Jewish texts to consult, beginning with the Bible and Talmud and ending with the most recent commentators. These texts are no less a legitimate source of knowledge about the world than is a scientific experiment. Although there was some scientific evidence supporting the Copernican model in the fi rst two centuries of its existence, it was certainly not fully persuasive until Bessel’s measurement of stellar parallax in 1838 and Foucault’s pendulum demonstration in 1851. Anyone, Jew or

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Gentile, who accepted the model before then, did so with relatively litt le scientific support. Similarly, Jewish texts that supported the Copernican model were not widely available before the nineteenth century, and before this time, Jews who accepted the Copernican model based on a reading of Jewish texts would have struggled to fi nd support, although it was sporadically available. How then did Jews accommodate a scientific fact that was not consistent with traditional teaching? The answer, as we have seen, is that they undertook a shift in the relative weight that they assigned to the truth content of science and a reevaluation of the way in which Jewish texts were interpreted. Consider, for example, the confl ict suggested by the verse in Ecclesiastes that ends “and the Earth stands still forever” (Eccles. 1:4) and the Copernican hypothesis that the Earth in fact moves. For the fi rst couple of centuries, the explanatory power of the Copernican hypothesis was limited, while a literal reading of this verse, namely that the Earth does not move and is at the center of the universe, could continue to be supported. However, once the movement of the Earth was suggested by scientific evidence like Foucault’s pendulum, there was a need to readdress the meaning of the text. The Bible remained the revealed word of God that is incapable of falsehood, but the question of the meaning of that revealed word was reconsidered. Did it really imply that the Earth was stationary in the center of the universe, or did it perhaps suggest that, unlike the brief span of each human life, the Earth endures for eternity? Could this be the meaning of the divine text? After all, given the complete verse in context, this was certainly possible: “One generation passes away and another generation comes; but the Earth stands still forever.” As more weight is given to the scientific evidence, a belief that was once held and supported by the Bible can be reassessed without the authorship and truth of the Bible being questioned. In this way, it is possible for a traditional Jew to acquire a scientific belief that causes him to change his opinion about the meaning of a divinely given text. Such a pattern might be found in those cases that attempted reconciliation between scientific facts and certain biblical texts. But not all Jews would fi nd the scientific evidence equally persuasive, and for some, the notion of replacing one derived meaning from the text with another was simply not conceivable. For those whose a priori religious view shunned an attempt at accommodation, the meaning of the text was never to be changed. There could then be only one logical outcome when faced with the scientific evidence about the movement of the Earth, and this was to reject the science. In the seventeenth century, Spinoza offered an alternative to this rubric in which the Bible was no longer regarded as a divinely authored document. As such, there was never any tension felt between the scientific and biblical depictions of reality, but for most Jews, this was not an acceptable path down which to tread until the mid-nineteenth century. Th is then was the way in which scientific rationality

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and religious rationality might interact and determine a particular response to Copernicanism.25 When the very fi rst declared Jewish Copernican, Joseph Delmedigo, published his position in 1629, there were no prior Jewish works on which he could rely. Delmedigo’s conclusion was based on what he understood to be the scientific facts of the time, together with telescopic observations, some of which he had made himself. He also referred to some vague kabbalistic notions, but this was hardly the main thrust of his arguments. He made no attempt to reconcile his belief in the heliocentric model with some of the troubling verses in the Bible. Most of the other Jewish Copernicans followed Delmedigo’s reliance on his observations and the inherent explanatory power of the Copernican model. They embraced Copernicanism without any need to address problems that might arise from literal interpretations of the Bible. Th is basic view was modified over the next three centuries. Mordekhai Levison, writing in 1771, introduced the notion that science and Torah were two separate disciplines, and that since the scientists of his time accepted the Copernican model, the question had been sett led. In addition, Levison dismissed textual challenges from the Bible as irrelevant, based on the principle that the “Torah spoke in the language of man,” meaning that the idioms it used were never to be understood literally. Once this exegetical principle had been introduced as a way of harmonizing biblical texts and science, it was used by Hart (1794), Slonimski (1835), Hirsch (1836), Warshavsky (1864), and Neusatz (1884). The principle, however, was never used on its own. Additional reasons were always invoked, such as “the Torah is not a book of science” or “the scientists had already settled the argument.” Later, the increasingly secular Jewish authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw their task as disseminating the Copernican model without any need for justifying it, while religious Jewish Copernicans sometimes added a new reason to support their position: In 1905, Abraham Isaac Kook suggested that the heliocentric theory had needed to wait until humanity was intellectually mature enough to accept it, and in 1927, Yudel Rosenberg based his approval of the heliocentric model on the Zohar’s statement that the Earth is round. Because for most of the period we examined, Jewish access to the secular sciences was legally difficult and often religiously perilous, the question of when it was rational for Jews to accept the Copernican model cannot be answered by looking at the scientific evidence alone. Although Galileo believed in the Copernican model, there was not at the time any evidence that the model was correct. Galileo, of course, did not know this and explained that the Earth’s movement caused the tides; this was a mistake.26 Wootton concludes that Galileo’s Copernicanism was premature, and that an explanation of his position must be psychological rather than scientific. The same conclusion likely

284

N e w H e av e ns a n d a N e w E a rt h

applies to the early Jewish Copernicans, like Delmedigo, Levi of Hannover, and Levison. The scientific evidence for their position was slim (but steadily increasing), and the precedents for their position among earlier Jewish scholars were either missing (as in the case of Delmedigo) or minimal. Each would have had his own set of psychological reasons for his conversion to Copernicanism. We do not, however, have enough biographical evidence for any of the men we have reviewed to allow us to draw reliable conclusions as to why each chose to adopt the Copernican model at a specific time, any more than we are able to suggest why some Jews today choose to continue to support the geocentric model when there is enough scientific evidence and halakhic textual support to do otherwise. Although we have emphasized that parts of the story of the Jewish reception of Copernicanism are nonlinear, when we look back at the historical evidence, there is litt le doubt that taken as a whole, Judaism in its many contemporary forms has made its peace with what was once a most troubling of theories. Judaism’s gradual acceptance of the heliocentric theory suggests that although scientific models and accounts of how the natural world works may be viewed with initial hostility, they may eventually be accepted and even welcomed. Some chose to accept the model at once, given the authority of the scientists who supported it, while others rejected the claim because of a lack of experimental evidence and biblical objections. When experimental evidence became available, biblical objections were reconsidered, while those who held on to the geocentric model maintained that the evidence was faulty or incorrectly interpreted. Eventually, even this objection was shown to be unlikely, and even the most conservative movements within Judaism have made peace with the heliocentric model of Nicolaus Copernicus. If this pattern is representative, we are likely to see it repeated when Judaism is again faced with other challenges based on scientific theories. In fact, even though it has been around for a far shorter time than the heliocentric theory, a strikingly similar pattern can already be seen in the Jewish reception of Darwin’s theory of evolution. A full evaluation of the Jewish reaction to Darwinian evolution is in itself worthy of a book-length analysis, but a few general points can be made.27 Very early on in its history, the theory had some rabbinic adherents. In what was likely the fi rst American Jewish response to Darwin, Joseph Krauskopf (1858–1923), a reform rabbi who graduated from the fi rst class of the Hebrew Union College, claimed that “Darwinism, though disagreeing with the biblical account of creation, is with religion, not against it.”28 The Orthodox Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook accepted the theory of evolution; Kook wrote that it “coincides with the loft y doctrines of kabbalah more than any other philosophical teaching.”29 Such positions, however, were in the minority, and for the fi rst hundred years of the theory’s existence, most rabbis

Conclusion

285

rejected it for two reasons30: First, as they understood it at the time, there was not sufficient scientific evidence to support the theory, and second, the theory implied a diminished role for a divine creator. But over time, this approach has become nuanced, and an increasing number of Orthodox Jews have written to support evolutionary theory within a Jewish worldview, a trend culminating most recently with Great Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Sacks acknowledged that evolution has “immense religious implications” and concluded that the story told by “Darwinian biology is wondrous almost beyond belief . . . it remains the most unlikely and beautiful story ever told.”31 Echoing Kook’s mystical reference, Sacks wrote: “How it happened, we will never know for sure. But it suggests a story of almost infi nite divine patience consistent with everything we know from the Bible yet on a scale only mystics hitherto imagined.”32 Although these should be seen as preliminary remarks, it would seem from this cursory review that the Jewish reception of the theory of evolution has mirrored the Jewish reception of Copernicanism, and will continue to do so to a remarkable degree. So much then for our discussion of what has been. Let us now turn to what still may come. In the introduction, we asked how Judaism might be expected to interact with science in the future. Th is question becomes especially important when we consider that Judaism will certainly have to grapple with new scientific discoveries that threaten some of its most cherished teachings. For example, we mentioned how the biochemical basis of our behaviors, whether based on genetics or neuropharmacology, is gradually challenging some of the traditional Jewish notions of free will and responsibility. In so doing, science raises a set of difficulties at least as troubling as those raised by the Copernican model. In fact, when properly understood, this challenge is far more threatening to truly important foundational Jewish beliefs than was the discussion of whether or not the Earth moves. How will Jewish thinkers respond to this latest religious challenge to arise from the scientific community? One way, perhaps the only way, to answer this question is to discover how Judaism and science interacted in the past. Based on their prior interactions, we can perhaps make some reasonable predictions about the future. Some will fi nd the undertaking futile. For example, the sociologist of the scientific process Benjamin Nelson wrote that the attempt to generalize from case to principle is a mistaken undertaking: “We accomplish litt le when we treat actual histories as a reservoir of instances which go to prove one or another abstract propositions of structural-functional analysis or general systems theory.”33 Nelson is correct to point out the dangers, which can be lessened by carefully considering Livingstone’s four imperatives that we noted above. Such predictions are indeed fraught with qualifications, yet there is not much else that can be done.

286

N e w H e av e ns a n d a N e w E a rt h

But if our analysis of how Judaism reacted to Copernicanism is correct, we can make the following simple prediction, which can, in the full spirit of the scientific method, be falsified. Although initially there will be some Jews who will see no problem reconciling a biochemical basis of human behavior with traditional Jewish teachings on free will and personal responsibility, at fi rst, Jewish thinkers will overwhelmingly write against it. They will maintain that such a theory stands in opposition to a number of biblical verses, and will further claim that in any event, the theory is scientifically flawed for reasons that are clear to them, but somehow opaque to those scientists actually involved in the research. After a number of years (perhaps even several decades), and assuming that more scientific evidence accumulates to support the theory, the tide will slowly turn in favor of a religious accommodation. Eventually, the overwhelming majority of Jews (at least those for whom such things matter) will accept that there is no confl ict between the biochemical explanations of human behavior and Jewish thought, and will claim that traditional sources, when properly understood, can be interpreted in a way that lends support to their inclusive approach. Whether or not this prediction will turn out to be correct, there is no doubt that the challenge to contemporary Jewish thought from some scientific fi ndings is real. Judaism, like Christianity and Islam, will need to provide its adherents with a religiously satisfying way to address issues that are raised by biblical criticism, evolutionary psychology, evolution and cosmology, to name but a few of the many scientific models for understanding the universe that are currently popular in academia and well represented on best-seller lists. The history of the Jewish reception of Copernican thought suggests that both secular scientists and the religiously observant have room to be optimistic. Jews eventually found a way to incorporate what was a very disconcerting hypothesis into a religiously acceptable fact. It took hundreds of years, and there were some detours and backtracks along the way. But some five hundred years after Copernicus lived, a Jew whose faith is challenged by the notion that the Earth revolves around the Sun is a rare creature indeed. A similar pattern is already being seen as Jews grapple with the theological implications of Darwinian evolution. The suggestion then that all attempts to reconcile faith with science are, in the words of the great atheist critic Christopher Hitchens, “consigned to failure and ridicule” is not borne out by the historical evidence that we have reviewed. 34 Perhaps religion and science can walk together, if not hand in hand, then certainly side by side.

Appendix

D AV I D F R I E S E N H A U S E N ’ S S A B B A T H ZEM IR A H IN PR A ISE OF TH E SOL A R SYSTEM From Mosdot Tevel (Wien, 1820) From the holy quarry, the source of wisdom God sent us the beloved of our souls Not only to look upon your deeds on the Earth did you put an eye in our head But also to observe the sky above During the night of our watching Then knowing eyes will not be satisfied Just like the eye is not satisfied to look at the material of our body On this Sabbath and day of rest We lift up our hearts to the creator of everything. Yet this Earth will tell and recount the great works of your hands The mountains and everlasting hills, the seas and its waves will tell of your glory Precious stones, large and small vegetation will express your glory The wild animals of the forest, livestock, small creatures and birds will reveal your secrets On this Sabbath and day of rest, my soul will rest in order to be saturated with your love

‫ יהוד שלחת‬1‫ממחצב הקודש ממקור החכמה‬ ‫יקר נפשנו‬ ‫לא על הארץ לבדה לראות מעשיך נתת עין‬ ‫בראשנו‬ ,‫כי אם להביט רקיע השמים ממעל‬ 2 ‫ליל אשמרותנו‬ 3 ‫אז עיני דעת לא תשבענה‬ ‫כאשר לא תשבע עין עפר‬ ‫גויותנו‬ , ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :4‫נשא ליוצר הכל את לבבנו‬

‫אמנם האדמה הזאת גם היא תאמר ותגיד גדל‬ ‫מעשי ידיך‬ , 5‫ההרים וגבעות עולם‬ 7 ‫ מספרים כבודך‬6‫הימים ומשבריהם‬ ‫ צמח השדה קטנים עם גדולים יביעו‬,‫אבני יקר‬ ‫הודך‬ ‫ יגלו‬,‫ בהמה ורמש עד כל צפור כנף‬,‫חיתו יער‬ 8 ‫סודך‬ ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :‫נפשי תנפש לרות בדודך‬

‫ למרומי‬,‫ נפקח עיננו‬9‫אכן! אם בהשכל ודעת‬ ‫שמים‬

Surely if we open our eyes to the heavens with wisdom and knowledge

287

288

Ap p e n d i x

Then our lips will be filled with laughter and our tongues with praise and song in great multiples We will know for certain that God’s kindness is abundant at every corner, like the water that covers the sea And because God did wonders with us to enable us to know this we will bless him without slacking On this Sabbath and day of rest, He will be sanctified by all peoples. From the depths of my lowly position, from a dark and gloomy land, I will stand up and awaken I will give honor to the Lord our God, who called forth the world from nothing and measured it Every clever person, every person with a voice will elevate Him and make Him great together with me, and I will not be alone With fear and trembling we will wake up In fear and fright we will gather together as a unit On this Sabbath and day of rest, no person should leave his place and walk away I awoke at dawn and looked around, in the morning I will look on your deeds on the Earth Your deeds and all that results are for the enjoyment of mankind, and of all the creatures that have life But had you not commanded the Sun to shine from the east To pour a wholesome blessing on them

‫ ורנה בכפלי‬10‫אז ימלא פינו שחוק ולשוננו תהלה‬ ‫כפלים‬ ‫נדע נאמנה כי רבו חסדי יהוד בכל פנה ככסות‬ 11 ‫לים מים‬ ‫ נברכהו‬, ‫ לדעת זאת‬12‫ועל כי הפליא לעשות עמנו‬ 13 ‫בלי עצלתלם‬ , ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :‫יתקדש מכל שפתים‬ ‫ אקום‬,14‫ מארץ חשוכה ואפלה‬,‫מעומק שפל מצבי‬ ‫ואתעודר‬ 15 16

‫אתן כבוד ליהוד אלקינו‬ ‫קורא תבל מאפס וימודד‬

,‫כל איש תבונה כל בעל גרון‬ ‫גדלוהו ורוממוהו אתי ולא אבודד‬

,‫ נתעורר‬17‫בחיל ורעדה‬ ‫בפחד וחרדה נתקבץ יחדיו ונתגודד‬

‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :‫ ויתנודר‬18‫האיש ממקומו לא יצא‬ ,‫שחר קמתי וארא סביבותי‬ ‫בוקר אביט פעליך עלי אדמה‬ ,‫הן צאצאיה כלם לעונג אדם‬ ‫ואשר באפו רוח ונשמה‬ ‫אבל לולא צוית השמש ממזרח‬ ‫להריק עליהם ברכה תמימה‬

Ap p e n d i x

289

Then quickly all vegetation would wither and return to dust dried out, and the land would be a desolate wilderness On this Sabbath and day of rest, every knee will bow down in front of you

,19‫מהרה יבולו ולעפר ישובון וימלו‬ 20 ‫והארץ מדבר שממה‬

The Sun will squeeze sweet waters from the bitter sea by her warmth, it will send these waters with wind and storm It will push plentiful rain into the clouds It will pour out drops of water on the land To quench its thirst and to grow plants It will bring down precious things [rain] to bring forth fruit For this our mouths will praise God And in the midst of many nations we will praise Him On this Sabbath and day of rest, I will praise Him with my tongue and my lips will make Him great

, ‫ מתוק ממר הים תמץ בחמתה‬22‫איד‬ ‫ביד רוח סערה תשלחנו‬

In an instant [the Sun] will spread charity to those near and far And its wings will cure many people Establish peace between nations that God created On each of its planets Radiate great abundance here and there In order to provide for her army each day We, like them, praise and elevate God Our maker and its maker On this Sabbath and day of rest, The land and all its inhabitants will sing to God

,‫ברגע תזרה צדקה לקרובים ורחוקים‬ 28 ‫ותרפא צבאה בכנפיה‬

‫ביום השבתון והמנוח ההזה‬ :‫ וקומה‬21‫תכרע לפניך כל ברך‬

,‫ בעב הענן תניף‬23‫גשם נדבות‬ ‫ מים תשפכנו‬24‫עלי ארץ באגלי‬

‫לרות צמאונה להצמיח צמחה‬ ‫ תורידנו‬25‫ולהוציא מגדנות‬ 26

,‫על כן תהלות יהוד ידבר פינו‬ ‫ובקרב עמים רבים נהללנו‬

‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :27‫ארוממהו בלשון ובפי אגדלנו‬

‫ על‬,‫ לעם ועם אשר ברא אלקים‬29‫תשפות שלום‬ ‫אחת אחת בנותיה‬ , ‫תשפיע שפע רב הנה והנה‬ ‫יום יום לכלכל כל גדודותיה‬ ‫כמונו כמוהם לפאר ולרומם ליהוד‬ ‫יוצרנו ויוצרה‬ ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :‫תזמר לו ארץ והמון יושביה‬

290

Ap p e n d i x

Beauty was poured on the face of the Sun you are beautiful, nothing is like you The third planet, the joy that is Earth, Mercury and Venus are happy in front of you Mars, Ze’iri and Pila’i [Ceres and Pallas] Will turn to you and be happy in glorifying you Jupiter, Saturn and Timna’i [Uranus] Will laugh at your embroidered garments On this Sabbath and day of rest, These tranquil planets will sing to your creator

,‫רבת בנות הצק חן על פניך‬ ‫ אין דומה בכלנה‬30‫יפיפית‬ ,‫ שלישיה בבנותיך‬31‫משוש הארץ‬ ‫ככב ונוגה נגדך תשמחנה‬ ,‫מאדים זעירי ופלאי‬ ‫אליך תפנינה ולהדרך תגלנה‬

‫צדק שבתאי ותמינאי‬ ‫לתפארת בגדי רקמתך תצחקנה‬ 32

, ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה חוה‬ :‫ לבוראך תרננה‬33‫בנות שאננות‬

My sisters, a young dove will not say haughty things about you preceding us [in creation] For the hand of the creator also spanned [the heavens for us] On the very day that he brought you forth The finger of God showed us our way At the instant in which he showed you your way Although we were hidden because of the blindness of people Our greatness is as great as is yours On this Sabbath and day of rest, We acknowledge our creator as do you

‫אחיותי! תאמר יונה גם צעירה‬ ‫ על קדמתכן‬34‫גבהות לא תדברנה‬

These planets and their moons with power and happiness Will dance a dance in front of you They will orbit around you to see your front and back To be illuminated with your brightness

‫אלה ובנותיהן הירחים בעוז וחדוה‬ ‫במחול תרקודנה לקראתך‬,

35

‫גם אותנו יד יוצר טפחה‬ ‫בעצם היום ההוא הוציאה אתכן‬

,‫אצבע אלקים מסלתנו הראנו‬ ‫ברגע הראה מסלתכן אליכן‬ ‫אם מעורות עין אדם נסתרתנו‬ ‫גדלתנו חשובה כגדלתכן‬ ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :‫אנחנו נכיר יוצרנו כמוכן‬

‫לראות פניך ואחורך סביבתך תצעדנה להאר‬ ‫ביפעתך‬

Ap p e n d i x

291

, ‫ תהיינה‬36‫בלעדך חשך וצלמות‬ ‫ למו זלתך‬37‫שמחה ערבה‬

Without you all would be dark and the shadow of death Without you joy would be darkened Everything would be covered with ice and frost Were it not for the warmth that comes down with your power On this Sabbath and day of rest, I will sing to God about your greatness

‫קרח הנורא וכפור יכסימו‬ ‫לולי החמתמו בגבורתך‬

, ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :‫אשיר ליהוד על רוב גדלתך‬

Besides these [planets] you capture many beautiful comets in your net Your left hand will distance them and your right hand will draw them close, they return straight They also run in their own way to circle you Their face is tuned towards your face When they leave they go backwards And in their pride they hide and do not reveal themselves On this Sabbath and day of rest, We will thank God as the sailors in their boats

,38‫ חטפת לך ברשתך‬,‫זולת אלה במושכך‬ ‫עוד בנות רבות יפה פיות‬

You are in control! Give honor to the Lord of hosts He made you govern many nations Sing to the praise of God who made you the provider of life on other planets Sing to him a new song, play instruments out loud Don’t be silent for a whole day All the army of your government who follow your light Will be associated with you forever

, ‫ ליהוד צבאות‬43‫את שלטת! תני כבוד‬ ‫המשילך על רבים עמים‬

39

,‫ ובימן קרבתמו‬,‫בשמאל הרחקתמו‬ 40 ‫ותלכנה קוממיות‬ , ‫ תרוצנה גם המה‬41‫במעגלותן‬ ‫ פניהן לפניך פנייות‬,‫לסב אותך‬ , ‫בצאתן אחורנית תצאנה‬ ‫ובגאותן תסתתרנה מבלי גליות‬ , ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :42‫נודה אל כיורדי הים באניות‬

, ‫ השם אותך מכלכלת‬44‫זמרי לשמו עליון‬ ‫לאמים מלאמים עצומים‬ 45 , ‫שירי לו שיר הדש הטיבי נגן בתרועה‬ ‫ולא תדום יום תמים‬ ,‫ ההולכים לאורך‬,‫וכל צבא ישבי ממשלתך‬ ‫אתך יתרעו לעולמים‬

292

Ap p e n d i x

On the Sabbath and day of rest We will rejoice, for it is the best of all days For in six days he created not only you and your army and offspring But also your friends and their offspring and inhabitants, too many to be counted He also created and made and took of the highest sanctity The honor of his palace that he built Some are for the honor of his throne and the glory of his chariots, and some are for his footstool On this Sabbath and day of rest, With the Seraphim we will raise a voice of singing and happiness He completed His work on the seventh day That He had created from nothing, and said to them “multiply” I will watch over you, that you will not return to nothing, But you should also guard yourselves And this day on which I stopped my work I will bless and make holy in order that all creatures of the world may remember That everything was made by my hands And they should trust and look to me On this Sabbath and day of rest, With the Ophanim they will make me glorious So when God appeared on Mount Sinai In order to bring down a fiery law to his treasured nation

, ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :‫נגילה כי הוא מבחר הימים‬

46

, ‫כי בששת ימים עשה‬ ‫לא אותך וצבאך וצאצאיהם לבדנה‬ ,‫כי אם גם רעיתיך ובנותיהן עם יושביהן‬ 47 ‫המון רב מי מנה‬ ,‫גם יצר וברא גם האציל קדושי עליון‬ ‫כבוד היכלו אשר בנה‬ ‫ ואלה להדום‬,‫אלה להוד כסאו ולתפארת מרכבתו‬ ‫ קנה‬48‫רגליו‬

50

, ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :‫ נשאו קול צהלה ורנה‬49‫עם שרפים‬

51

,‫ביום השביעי כלה מלאכתו‬ ‫ ויאמר להם פרו‬,‫אשר ברא מאפס‬

52

,‫ואני אשגיח עליהם ולאין לא תשובו‬ ‫וגם אתם נפשכם שמרו‬ ,‫והיום הזה אשר בו אשבות ממלאכתי‬ 53 ‫אברך ואקדש‬ ‫למען יזכרו‬ 54

, ‫ כי הכל ידי עשתה‬,‫כל יצורי עולם‬ ‫ובי יבטחו ולי ישברו‬ , ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :‫ אותי יאדירו‬55‫עם האופנים‬

,‫על כן בהופיע יהוד על הר סיני‬ ‫ לעם סגלתו‬56‫להוריד אש דתו‬

57

Ap p e n d i x

He commanded them to rest on the seventh day Every person, with his animal, manservant and maidservant In order that his soul will rest and rejoice With the knowledge of God’s creation and greatness You will honor and bless God with good food and wine, for his kindness and good deeds On this Sabbath and day of rest, With his holy Hayot we will express His mighty acts

293

,‫צוה להם לשבות ביום השביעי‬ 58 ‫איש ובהמתו עבדו ואמתו‬

,‫למען תנפש ותתענג נפשו‬ ‫דעת מעשי יהוד וגדלתו‬

,‫ ויין ויברך את יהוד‬59‫יכבדהו במעדנים‬ ‫על חסדו וצדקתו‬ , ‫ביום השבתון והמנוחה הזה‬ :61‫ נמלל גברתו‬60‫עם חיות קדשו‬

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NOTES

Introduction, Pages 1–12 1. Shlomo Benizri, Hashamayim Mesaprim . This book is discussed in detail below 262–265 . 2 . Chisum later retracted his letter of support, stating that “through further review,” he came to realize that the memo did not reflect his views “about such a complicated and deep subject.”(See htt p://www.sptimes.com/2007/02/25/News/Flat_Earth_ society_s_.shtml, accessed Feb. 7, 2008, and New York Times, Feb. 17, 2007.) The two letters can be found at htt p://www.texscience.org/news/chisum-bridges.htm (accessed Jan. 21, 2012). 3. Th is is of course the irony that Benizri is a spiritual heir of the Pharisees so demeaned by Bridges, but in batt les such as these, perhaps it really is the case that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. 4. For a review of the intelligent design project and the Dover court case that resulted, see Edward Humes, Monkey Girl . The philosophical issues in the debate are addressed in Michael Ruse, But Is It Science? 5. For just two of the many examples, see Owen Gingerich, God’s Universe, and Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Gingerich is professor emeritus of astronomy and history of science at Harvard University, and the foremost American scholar of Copernicus. He is also a practicing Christian. Dawkins holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and is an avowed atheist. 6 . For a thoughtful collection of essays on genetics, crime, and moral responsibility, see David T. Wasserman and Robert Samuel Wachbroit, Genetics and Criminal Behavior. 7. For a full discussion see Richard Swinburne, Free Will and Modern Science, and David Shatz, Jewish Thought in Dialogue, 224–256. 8. I am thinking here of science in the modern sense of the word. Discoveries about the natural world going back over two thousand years have challenged earlier religious thinking. 9. See Joshua 10:12–14, Isaiah 38:8, Ecclesiastes 1:4–5. 10. Hence the title of Kenneth Miller’s book on the intelligent design movement in America, Only a Theory. 11. Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, 15. 12 . Robert Hooke, An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations, 5. For a discussion on the explanatory power of the Copernican model, see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, 45–77, as well as more generally, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 13. Osiander’s identity was known to a Jerome Schreiber, and revealed publicly in 1609 by Johannes Kepler, in his Astronomia Nova. See Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read, 141, and Richard J. Blackwell , Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible, 23. 295

296

Notes

14. “[B]efore entering into the mathematical astronomy of De revolutionibus, and occasionally even within it, Copernicus wrote as if he believed in the truth of the great structure he was building.” J. L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church, 183. A similar device was used in a 1762 edition of Newton’s work that was preceded by a statement from the Minorite Fathers responsible for its publication. They stated that the theories expounded in the text were to be considered hypothetical only, and that in truth they believed in the teachings of the Church regarding the position of the Earth among the planets. See Anton Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy, 234, and Owen Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven, 286–302. 15. The two demonstrations of the Earth’s movement were Bessel’s measurement of stellar parallax and Foucault’s pendulum. The work of each is discussed in detail in chapter 10, and they provided the heliocentrists with clear evidence that it is the Earth and not the Sun that moves. See Amir D. Aczel, Pendulum: Léon Foucault and the Triumph of Science, and William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth, 101–103. See also below, chapter 10, note 8. 16 . I am oversimplifying the scientific method here somewhat, but the conclusion is valid nevertheless. For the relationship between a scientific theory and its experimental verification, see, for example, Karl Raimund Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, W. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science, Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, and Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 17. Not all thinkers who accept modern scientific notions limiting traditional concepts of free will view this as problematic. See, for example, Daniel Clement Dennett , Elbow Room, and Ted Honderich, How Free Are You?, especially chapter 9. 18. I am using the term coined by Daniel Dennett . See Daniel Clement Dennett , Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. 19. Th is long history eliminates one of the criticisms often made by the religious community. Th is is what David Shatz has called the “shift ing sands” argument, in which religions need not take seriously any scientifically based challenge, since science often changes its paradigms. Therefore, no scientific theory can be used as a basis for religious interpretations, because the science is bound to change. As there is no scientific question about the truth of the Copernican model, and no debate as to the observational and experimental supports for its veracity, the shift ing sands argument cannot easily be invoked by those who might fi nd the model religiously challenging. For an excellent discussion of the shift ing sands argument, see David Shatz, “Is There Science in the Bible?,” especially 207–215. 20. There were passing comments, usually inaccurate, made about the reception of Copernican thought in Jewish literature in other more general works. For example, in his four-volume work A History of Jewish Literature, Meyer Waxman summed up the entire subject in this way: It is to be noted, however, that though the Copernican system gradually gained ground during the fifteenth century and was finally accepted after the time of Galileo it did not produce the corresponding change in Jewish astronomical literature. With the exception of Joseph Solomon del Medigo, a disciple of Galileo, most of the other scientists still clung to the Ptolemaic or geocentric conception of the universe. . . . (See Meyer Waxman, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. II, 310–311.) Waxman’s timeline of the way in which Copernican thought was accepted in general society is grossly mistaken, as is his view of its reception in Jewish literature. Equally mistaken, although with precisely the opposite conclusion, was Leo Baeck: It is significant that the astronomical structure of the world as conceived in modern times was accepted by Judaism without protest or feelings of incompatibility with its own beliefs. Having pledged itself to none of the old astronomical systems, it could observe their fall without concern (Leo Baeck, The Essence of Judaism, 41). 21. André Neher, “Copernicus in the Hebraic Literature.” For an earlier review in Hebrew, see Menahem Mendel Kasher, “Ha’arez O Hashemesh Merkaz Ha’olam,” which was published in 1950. Kasher’s essay did not mention David Gans and claimed that the fi rst Jewish scholar to oppose Copernicus was Jonathan Eybeschütz, ignoring perhaps the most famous early opponent, Tuviah Cohen.

Notes

297

22 . For a rather scathing criticism of Neher’s other errors regarding the Maharal, see Y. Zvi Langermann (1990), “Reviewed work: Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution, by Andre Neher.” 23. André Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution, 253, and Jonathan Eybeschütz, Ya’arot Devash, 127. 24. Hillel Levine, “Paradise Not Surrendered.” 25. For example, he did not mention the nineteenth-century rabbi-inventor Chaim Zelig Slonimski, as well as Reuven Landau, a vocal geocentrist of the same century whose writings carefully considered the spiritual implications of a heliocentric universe. For more on these two thinkers, see chapters 10 and 11. 26 . Michael Panitz, “New Heavens and a New Earth.” 27. Slonimski’s important contributions to a philosophy of compatibility between Judaism and science are summarized in but two sentences, and Landau is not mentioned at all. Panitz and Levine also fail to discuss works that were ambivalent to Copernican thought but accepted some of the fi ndings of the new astronomers, such as David ben Raphael Meldola’s Moed David, published in Amsterdam 1740. 28. There have also been some recent publications in Hebrew that have addressed the Jewish reception of Copernicanism. Hayyim Rappaport published a paper in Hebrew reviewing the statements of several of the more pro- and anti-Copernican Jewish scholars, although with no historical analysis. See Hayyim Rappaport, “And the Earth Stands Still for Ever.” In 2012, Eliezer Brodt published a review in Hebrew of Jewish literature mentioning Copernicus. The review was one of the most complete to date, but Brodt engaged in almost no analysis of the many texts that he quoted. See Eliezer Brodt, “The Relation between Jewish Literature and Copernicus.” 29. There is also a large body of literature on Jewish astronomers and scientists of the twelft h to fourteenth centuries, which of course predates the era on which we are focusing. 30. Jakob Josef Petuchowski, The Theology of Haham David Nieto. Petuchowski originally published this work, based on his doctorate, in 1954 through his synagogue, Temple Emanuel in Welch, West Virginia. 31. George Alter, “Two Renaissance Astronomers.” 32 . Isaac Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo, and Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution. 33. Ruderman notes that Neher’s paper is the one exception to this observation, apparently overlooking the work by Levine. 34. David B. Ruderman, “The Receptivity of Jewish Thought to the New Astronomy.” 35. B. Barry Cohen, Planets, Potions and Parchments, 61. 36. Eliezer Wenger, Brochos Study Guide. I am grateful to my friend and bibliophile Dan Rabinowitz for bringing this to my attention. 37. “Blessed are you Lord our God, King of the universe, who has given of His wisdom to flesh and blood.” 38. Th is commemorative stamp was issued in April 1973 to celebrate the quincentennial anniversary of the birth of Copernicus. For a review of the role of postage stamps in the cultural understanding of scientific achievements, see Robert A. Jones, “Science in National Cultures.” 39. Michael Cyril William Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science, 1–2, and Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 5–6. Ross claims that William Whewel fi rst used the term “scientist” in English in 1834. See also Sydney Ross, “Scientist: The Story of a Word.” 40. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Defending Copernicus and Galileo, 66. 41. There was, however, a form of peer review of some Hebrew scientific works published in the early nineteenth century. See 126.

Chapter 1, Nicolaus Copernicus and His Revolution, Pages 13–26 1. The name Nicolaus Copernicus is the Latin version of his original Prussian name Mikolaj Kopernik. See Jack Repcheck, Copernicus’ Secret, 26. For the biographical details of Copernicus, I have primarily used Repcheck (especially 26–67), and Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read.

298

Notes

2 . There are only three known copies of the Commentariolus: One is in the Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, and a second is in the National Library in Vienna. The third known copy exists as notes written by hand into a copy of De Revolutionibus now in the University of Aberdeen. 3. Gingerich, 128. 4. In June 2008, a copy of De Revolutionibus sold at auction at Christie’s in New York for $2.2 million dollars, almost double the estimate of $900,000 to $1.2 million (See Important Scientific Books: The Richard Green Library, Christies 2008, 68–70.) A copy of the second edition of De Revolutionibus sold for $98,000. 5. For a detailed examination of the life of Rheticus and his role in the spreading of his teacher’s heliocentric theory, see Dennis Richard Danielson, The First Copernican. 6 . Edward Rosen, Three Copernican Treatises, 109–110. 7. Rosen, 148. 8. Petreius was correct. The Narratio aroused sufficient interest for it to be reprinted in Basel a year after it fi rst appeared. 9. Petreius actually dedicated a book to Rheticus and appealed to him through the dedication, which was in the form of a letter (Repcheck, 155). 10. Repcheck, 161. 11. Robert S. Westman, The Copernican Question, 128. 12 . The quote is found in a letter from Osiander to Copernicus and cited in Westman, 129. 13. The true author of the Ad lectorum was only revealed in 1609 when Kepler identified Osiander in the introduction to his Astronomica Nova. Th is of course infuriated the Church, which could no longer claim that Copernicus’s work was only a theoretical description. (See Gingerich, 141, and above, introduction, note 13.) 14. Nicolaus Copernicus and Edward Rosen, On the Revolutions, 3. Jean Dietz Moss (Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science, 27) has suggested that Copernicus was more afraid of philosophical objections than religious ones, but this hypothesis is not supported in the preface to the Pope. 15. Copernicus and Rosen, 5. 16 . Copernicus and Rosen, 11. Th is sentence was later censored by the Sacred Congregation of the Index and changed in a minor but important way: “Nevertheless, if we examine the matter more carefully, we shall see that, as far as saving the appearances of the celestial motions is concerned, it makes no difference whether the earth is in the middle of the universe or outside the middle.” (See Copernicus and Rosen, 349.) 17. Copernicus and Rosen, 12. 18. The story sounds legendary, but it may in fact be true. It is based on the eyewitness testimony of Triedemann Giese, who was another of the canons at Frombork and a friend of Copernicus. Giese later became bishop of Warmia. See Danielson, 230. 19. Ronald William Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, 174. Plank noted that Einstein’s work had caused “a revolution in our physical picture of the world that can be compared only to that produced by Copernicus” (Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe, 163). Plank was not alone in his comparison. After reading Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity, the Polish physicist August Witkowski remarked “a new Copernicus is born!” (Clark, 142.) 20. As Finocchiarro emphasized, the Copernican controversy was not about the shape of the Earth, which was assumed to be spherical, but rather about its position in the universe and whether or not it moved. “Although uneducated persons or primitive peoples at the time of Aristotle or Galileo may have believed that the earth is flat, scholars had sett led the controversy a long time earlier.” (Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Defending Copernicus and Galileo, 4.) 21. The use of epicycles and deferents began some time in the third century bce and likely originated with Apollonius of Perga, but it was Ptolemy who refi ned it into the system that was accepted for the next fourteen hundred years or so. See James Evans, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, 337–392. 22 . Th is explanation is taken from Judah Landa, Torah and Science, 103–104. 23. Copernicus also correctly assumed that the Earth had a third kind of motion, in which the axis of its daily spin was itself revolving about a fi xed point, like a wobbling spinning top.

Notes

24. 25. 26 . 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32 . 33. 34.

35. 36 .

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42 . 43. 44. 45. 46 . 47. 48.

299

Th is resulted from the observation that the direction of the celestial North Pole changed over thousands of years. It is discussed on page 252. The explanation of the greater simplicity of the Copernican model is taken from Finocchiaro, 21–23, and Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, 155–177. The objections to the Copernican model are from Finocchiaro, 24–34. Finocchiaro, 25. These are addressed in more detail in chapter 5. Reinhold owned and read a copy of De Revolutionibus. For more detail on this work and its relationship to De Revolutionibus, see Westman, 150–160, and “Erasmus Reinhold and the Dissemination of Copernican Theory” in Owen Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven, 221–251. Westman, 197. For a detailed review of the influence of Copernicus on Tycho Brahe, see Kristian Peder Moesgaard, “Copernican Influence on Tycho Brahe,” in The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory; Proceedings of a Symposium, 31–55, and more generally, Adam Mosley, Bearing the Heavens. Th is work was The Castle of Knowledge. See John L. Russell, “Copernican System in Great Britain,” in The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory; Proceedings of a Symposium, 189–239. Russell, 192. Russell, 206. Cited in Russell, 215. For a detailed review of Copernicanism in early America, see Samuel Morison, “The Harvard School of Astronomy,” 8, and Harry Woolf, “Science for the People: Copernicanism and Newtonianism in the Almanacs of Early America,” in The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory; Proceedings of a Symposium, 293–309. R. H. Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans, 126–129. For a full discussion, see Barbara Bienkowska, “From Negation to Acceptance. The Reception of the Heliocentric Theory in Polish Schools in the 17th and 18th Centuries,” in The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory; Proceedings of a Symposium, 79–116. “Cracow chroniclers and professors of the latter part of the 17th century frequently extolled Copernicus. At the same time they propagated geocentrism in the version of Tycho or even Ptolemy” (ibid., 88). Bienkowska, 82. Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven, 305–306. Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven, 307. For a detailed discussion of how Kepler became a Copernican, see Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven, 323–330. Johannes Kepler Gesmammelte Werke (Munich, 1937), vol. 1, 14:35–15:1, cited in Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven, 327. Gilder and Gilder have suggested that Kepler poisoned Brahe with mercury in order to gain possession of Brahe’s observations. See Joshua Gilder and Ann-Lee Gilder, Heavenly Intrigue. Bern Dibner, Heralds of Science, 111. Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven, 309. Westman, 493. David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, 55; John Heilbron, Galileo, 112. Heilbron suggests that Homberg traveled to Padua precisely because of its reputation as an enlightened city. Once there, he would have quickly learned of Galileo. Cited in Heilbron, 113. Finocchiaro, xxxvii. Finocchiaro’s work expands on each of these key points. There is of course a wealth of literature on the trial of Galileo. Some of the most useful literature includes Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible, especially chapters 5 and 7; Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 7–25; Heilbron, 308–317; Wootton, 218–228; and more briefly, Ronald L. Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 68–78. A helpful chronology of events is provided in Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, 297–308.

300

Notes

Chapter 2, The Talmudic View of the Universe, Pages 27–41 1. There are two Talmuds. The Babylonian Talmud was completed some time in the sixth century and is the larger and more studied of the two. The Jerusalem Talmud was completed around 450 ce. See Lawrence H. Schiff man, “The Making of the Mishnah and the Talmud,” 15–16. 2 . TB. Hagigah 12b. 3. See Maharsha loc. cit. 4. TB. Hagigah ibid. 5. See Prov., chapter 10. 6. See Maimonides, Yesodai Hatorah 3:1.Th is is discussed in detail on page 35. 7. TJ. Avodah Zara 3:1. In his commentary on Midrash Rabbah , Rabbi Ze’ev Wolf Einhorn (d. 1862) wrote that “the opinion of our sages of blessed memory in these matters is well known: They believed that the Earth and the Great Ocean were flat.” See Midrash Rabbah Perush Maharzu 6:8. See also Aryeh Leib Feinstein, Elef Hamagen, 75: “The sages in their time believed the Earth was flat, which opposes the clear contemporary evidence and proofs of those who have circumnavigated the globe, that the Earth is in fact a globe.” An alternative geography is described by Menahem Kasher, who concluded that the rabbis of the Talmud believed that the Earth was a globe that floated, half-submerged, in the ocean. See Menahem Kasher, “Zurat Ha’arez Veyahasah Leshemesh Besifrut Hazal Veharishonim.” 8 . See TB. Pesahim 94a and Rashi there. R. Natan’s observation is quite contrary to experience in which the relative positions of the stars change considerably depending on where on the Earth the observer is located. Th is change in position is due to the curvature of the Earth itself, a point made by the sixteenth-century commentator Judah Loew, (Maharal of Prague) in his Be’er Hagolah (Be’er Shishi). Indeed, it was these changes of position that led early astronomers to posit a round Earth, as we will see below. See Judah Landa, Torah and Science, 59–60. In another talmudic dispute (TB. Yoma 54b), Rabbi Eleazar opined that the world was created from the center outward, while Rabbi Joshua declared that the world was created from the edges inward. Th is dispute is only intelligible if the world is flat. 9. TB. Pesahim 94a. 10. TB. Hagigah 12b. See also Pirkei Derabbi Eleazar, chapter 3, where this geographical description is given in the name of R. Eliezer ben Horkanus, who lived in Israel in the early second century: “The beams that hold the sky are embedded in the ocean. The waters of the ocean stand between the end of the sky and the end of the Earth, and the ends of the sky are spread over the ocean.” 11. TB. Bava Batra 74a. 12 . TB. Pesahim 94b. See also Rashi s.v., who explains the natural phenomena of condensation that may be seen rising from bodies of water: “And at night they are warm . . . for the Sun heats them under the ground. Th is is why at dawn you see smoke rising from the rivers.” 13. Technically, the specific heat of a substance is the amount of heat that must be added or released for one gram of the substance to change its temperature by 1°C. 14. Jacob Moellin, Sefer Maharil, and 6b. Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh De’ah 455:1. There were other ramifications in Jewish law. For example, the Spanish Rabbi Moses ben Isaac Alashkar (b. 1466) was asked to decide on which day a circumcision should be performed in a case involving a baby boy born at dusk. Th is case raised the question of when Jewish law considered one day to have ended and the next to have begun. Alashkar based his answer in part on the time it took the Sun to travel under the Earth, which was, of course, the opinion of the rabbis of the Talmud. See She’elot Uteshuvot Maharam Alashkar #96. With the later acceptance of the Copernican model this law remained unchanged. For example, Hanokh Ehrentreu (1854–1927), who served as the head of the rabbinic court (Bet Din) in Munich, wrote that “today there is no one who can question [the truth of the heliocentric model] for it is beyond any doubt.” Nevertheless, Ehrentreu (whose grandson and namesake was the head of the London rabbinic court until his retirement in 2007)

Notes

15.

16 . 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22 . 23. 24. 25. 26 .

301

wrote that the laws about the water used to make matzot remained in effect, since “we do not know all the reasons [for the law] and we must follow the rulings of all [who write on this question] whenever possible.” (Hanokh Ehrentreu, Sheyorei Haminhah, 268.) This error is made by several scholars, notably Feldman, who wrote that “. . . after a full discussion, the rabbis adopted the Ptolemaic system.” See W. M. Feldman, Rabbinical Mathematics and Astronomy, 71. For a detailed discussion of how the Talmud and later commentators viewed the path taken by the Sun, see Natan Slifk in, “The Sun’s Path at Night.” For a detailed review, see Reimund Leicht, “Planets in Ancient Hebrew Literature,” from where much of this information is taken. The term appears in II Kings 23:5. See Leicht, “Planets in Ancient Hebrew Literature,” 17. As Leicht points out, since the word mazzalot is unique (a hapax legomenon), which of these interpretations is correct cannot be determined. See, for example, TB. Berakhot 6:6; TB. Hullin 2:18; TB. Niddah 5:16. The Sun and the Moon were also traditionally categorized as planets; Uranus and Neptune were not discovered until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bereshit Rabbah 10:4, Leicht, “Planets in Ancient Hebrew Literature,” 27. TB. Pesahim 94b. Isadore Twersky, Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, 256, note 52. See Feldman, Rabbinical Mathematics and Astronomy, 71, and Selig Brodetsky, Astronomy in the Babylonian Talmud, 18–20. See Slifk in, “The Sun’s Path at Night,” 4. See, for example, TB. Shabbat 129a and 156b, and Avodah Zarah 30a. Another later example is from TB. Berakhot 59b and is discussed in more detail below. TB. Berakhot 59b. Abbaye’s explanation of when this rare blessing occurs is based on Shmuel’s calculated length of the solar year as being exactly 365 days and six hours. Because the solar year had this regular length, the timing of the seasons would vary predictably: Shmuel stated: Spring can only occur at the start of one of the four quarters of the day: either at the beginning of the day or the beginning of the night, or in the middle of the day or in the middle of the night. The summer season can only begin at one and a half or seven and a half hours, which may be in the daytime or at night. Autumn can only begin at the third or ninth hour of the day or at night, and winter can only begin at the fourth and a half hour or the tenth and a half hour, which may be during the day or at night. And the exact length of every season is ninety-one days seven and a half hours (TB. Eruvin 56a). Let us untangle all this. The Bible clearly describes the Sun as having been created on the fourth of the seven days of creation (Gen. 1:16–19). In Jewish law, the day legally begins not at midnight, as it does in our Western calendar, but at sundown. So the fourth day, counting from Sunday, begins at sundown on Tuesday evening. According to the rabbis of the Talmud, the Sun was created at the very start of the fourth day of creation, at a time we would recognize today as 6 p.m. on Tuesday evening (assuming that the length of daylight is exactly 12 hours). Th is time is also assumed by these rabbis to be the vernal equinox, the time we call the start of spring. To understand Shmuel’s explanation about the times for the start of the seasons, see table 2.1 below. Remember that Shmuel’s solar year is exactly 356 days and 6 hours long. Since each of the four seasons occupies exactly one quarter of a year, each season is 91 days and 7.5 hours. Because the Sun was created at 6 p.m. on Tuesday evening (the start of the fourth day, which was spring in that fi rst year of creation), the next season, summer, would begin exactly 91 complete days and 7.5 hours later. Since 91 complete days brings us back to 6 p.m. (but not a Tuesday), the start of summer may be calculated by adding 7.5 hours to the time of the start of spring, which is 1:30 a.m., or 7.5 hours into the night. The fi rst fall season began 7.5 hours later than the fi rst summer, or at 9 a.m., and the fi rst winter began at 4: 30 p.m., or 10.5 hours into the day, assuming that daytime began at 6 a.m. Th is is outlined in the table and is in keeping with Shmuel’s statements about the start of the seasons.

Notes

302

Year Spring

Summer

Fall

Winter

1

0 hours into the night (6 p.m.)

7½ hours into the night (1:30 a.m.)

3 hours into the day (9 a.m.)

10½ hours into the day (4:30 p.m.)

2

6 hours into the night (midnight)

1½ hours into the day (7:30 a.m.)

9 hours into the day (3 p.m.)

4½ hours into the night (10:30 p.m.)

3

0 hours into the day (6 a.m.)

7½ hours into the day (1:30 p.m.)

3 hours into the night (9 p.m.)

10½ hours into the night (4:30 a.m.)

4

6 hours into the day (midday)

1½ hours into the night (7:30 p.m.)

9 hours into the night (3 a.m.)

4½ hours into the day (10:30 a.m.)

5

Cycle repeats as year 1

According to Shmuel, the start of every fourth spring always occurs at 6 p.m. but does not fall on the same night of the week. It is not difficult to calculate on which night spring will begin every four years if the spring of year one began on a Tuesday. Four whole years later contain sixteen seasons, which each last 91 days and 7.5 hours. Thus, sixteen seasons contain (16 × 91 days + 16 × 7.5 hours) or 1,456 days and 120 hours. Now 120 hours are exactly 5 days, so four years contain 1,461 days, or 208 weeks and 5 days. Because every complete week added to the Tuesday evening start brings us back again to Tuesday evening, we need only add 5 days to the day of the week on which the season began to determine the day of the week on which it will begin four years later. If in the fi rst year, spring began on a Tuesday night, in the fi ft h year, it will begin on a Sunday night; in the ninth year, it will begin on a Friday night, and so on. In fact, spring will not start at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday until a full twenty-eight years have passed, as we can see from the table below.

Year

1

5

9

13

17

21

25

29

Evening Tuesday Sunday Friday Wednesday Monday Saturday Thursday Tuesday on which Spring begins

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32 .

(For more details, see Landa, Torah and Science, 148–157, from where much of this information is taken.) Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Berakhot 10:18. Nehemia Polen, A Blessing for the Sun: A Study of the Birkat Ha-Hammah. Sefer Maharil (1556), 113a. Koah Shor #27, cited in Polen, 6. Cited in Menachem Mendel Gerlitz, Birkat Hahamah Kekhilhatah, 103. The importance of the ritual can be gauged by the large number of books that were published to coincide with the most recent occasion of Birkat Hahamah. The ceremony was reported in the New York Times (page A26 of the New York edition on April 7th, 2009) and commemorated with a special exhibition at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. It was not only the Orthodox Jewish community that celebrated the date. Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Jews also widely participated. Temple Beth Israel, a reform synagogue in York, Pennsylvania, encouraged children to attend this “once in a generation, multi-generational event” by joining a service at dawn

Notes

33. 34. 35. 36 . 37. 38. 39. 40.

303

on the lawn of the temple, followed by a “Dutch-treat breakfast” at a local diner. Other synagogues called on its members to use the event as a way to increase environmental awareness. One suggestion from the Reconstructionist movement was to undertake to “reduce my household’s carbon emissions by 10% by next Passover.” Stephen Colbert also lampooned the event on his popular cable television show (available at htt p:// www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/224061/april-08-2009/birkat-hac hama—stephen-frees-his-jews, accessed Feb. 19, 2012). Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei Hatorah, chap. 3, 1–4. See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Yesodai Hatorah 3:5. Although Aristarchus of Samos (c. 270 bce) and Heraclides of Pontos (c. 350 bce) had suggested it was the Earth that moved, their opinion was all but ignored until it was taken up again by Copernicus. See, for example, T. M. Rudavsky, “Philosophical Cosmology in Judaism,” and Menachem Kellner, “Maimonides on the Science of the Mishneh Torah.” Some of Rudavsky’s ideas appear in the discussion that follows. See Shlomo Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed, 308–310. Ibid., 322. For example, Maimonides was concerned that Ptolemy’s need for epicycles violated an Aristotelian requirement that the stars move in perfectly round orbits about a fi xed center. See Rudavsky, “Philosophical Cosmology in Judaism,” 164. Or perhaps it is the other way around, because Maimonides wrote that “the science of astronomy in his [Aristotle’s] time was not what it is today (Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed, 308). Kellner explains the contradictions in this way: Maimonides’ astronomy in the Mishneh Torah is straightforwardly and conventionally Ptolemaic. Maimonides is there interested in presenting a nonproblematic account of the heavens in order to impress upon his readers the magnitude of God’s wisdom. In the Guide of the Perplexed, on the other hand, he was interested in presenting the truth. The truth presented there is that astronomy and metaphysics are intrinsically uncompletable [sic] (Kellner, “Maimonides on the Science of the Mishneh Torah,” 192).

41. Ibid., 173. For a complete analysis of this question, see this article and also Menachem Kellner, Maimonides on the “Decline of the Generations.” 42 . In this discussion, I am following from the careful analysis of Kellner, “Maimonides on the Science of the Mishneh Torah.” 43. Maimonides, Pines, and Strauss, The Guide of the Perplexed, 459. 44. Ibid., 29 45. See Kellner, “Maimonides on the Science of the Mishneh Torah,” 180–181. 46 . See Kellner, 175, note 18. 47. A third observation was based on the geographic locations of elephants. It need not concern us here. 48. Aristotle, On The Heavens, book II, chap. 14. 49. Ibid. 50. James Evans, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, 47. For an overview of the early Greek measurements of the Earth, see A. Diller, “Ancient Measurements of the Earth.” 51. Briefl y, he noted that on the summer solstice, when the Sun was directly overhead at noon in Syene (located near Aswan), it was located about 7° south of the overhead position in Alexandria. He measured the distance between the two locations as being 5,000 stadia, and calculated that if a 7° angle intercepts a distance of 5,000 stadia on a circle, the circumference of the entire circle would be about 250,000 stadia. Depending on which estimation for the size of a stadia is used, this calculation is within 15–20 percent of the actual circumference of the Earth. See J. Dutka, “Eratosthenes’ Measurement of the Earth Reconsidered,” and Diller, “Ancient Measurements of the Earth.” 52 . Evans, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, 49.

304

Notes

53. It is interesting to note that Perush, the anonymous writer of a commentary to Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, asserted that the Earth was 24,000 mil in circumference and 7,800 mil in diameter. (A “mil” is a talmudic measure of distance about 2,000 cubits long. Th is is about 1,200 yards, or about two-thirds of the modern mile.) See Mishneh Torah Yesodei Hatorah, 3:8. Judah Landa, an Orthodox Jewish writer, was scathing in his summary of the rabbis’ knowledge of the natural world: The attainment of mathematical and scientific skill, understanding, intuition, and knowledge requires serious effort and concentration, substantial investments of time and energy, and an appropriate attitude toward same. The rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash did not see fit to do these things, so they achieved little in science and mathematics (Landa, Torah and Science, 77). 54. For more on Philo and an overview of allegorical interpretation, see James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible, 17–21. 55 . Philo, Moses II, 105. The fi rst-century Jewish historian Josephus (c. 37–100 ce) also noted this parallel and described how the Menorah “spread itself into as many branches as there are planets, including the sun among them. It terminated in seven heads, in one row, all standing parallel to one another; and these branches carried seven lamps, one by one, in imitation of the number of the planets” (see Josephus, Antiquities III, chapter 6). 56 . Ezekiel, chapter 1. See Maimonides’ Commentary on the Mishnah, Hagigah 2:1: “The Vision of the Chariot contains wisdom about God, the nature of reality, and the reality of the Creator. . . .” 57. Maimonides expands on these four spheres in the Guide, part 2, chapters 9–10. 58. See Shlomo Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed, 415–430. For a full discussion, see Howard Kreisel, “From Esotericism to Science; the Account of the Chariot in Maimonidean Philosophy,” 21–56. 59. Akedat Yitzhak , part 49 (Terumah). 60 . See the commentary of Hayyim Joseph Pollak (loc. cit.), completed in 1847, and published in many editions of the Akedat Yitzhak. For another example of an allegorical (but this time non-scientific) explanation of the Menorah , developed not long aft er Arama’s, see Moses Isserles (known by his acronym as Remah), Torat Ha’olah I, chapters 16 and 19. There, Isserles compares the Menorah to the Torah and olive oil to the scholars. “Know that every gate [in the Temple] is a symbol of a defi nite science or wisdom” (ibid., chapter 7). Th is work is described in more detail in the next chapter. An identical allegorical exegesis to that of Philo and Arama was made by the Salonikan scholar Moses Almosnino (1518-c.1579). In Me’ametz Koah, a book of his sermons published posthumously, Almosnino compared the structure of the Temple in Jerusalem to that of the universe. He noted that “the Menorah represents the seven planets in the seven spheres which lie below the eighth sphere. The middle branch represents the middle sphere, which contains the Sun, to whom all those who revolve turn their faces under the sphere of the constellations . . . ” (Me’ametz Koah, 170b of the mispaginated pages). Almosnino’s interpretation is not to be understood as suggesting that he believed the planets orbited the sun. Like Amara, he was wholly committ ed to the Ptolemaic model in which the Sun lay in the fourth sphere beyond the central and unmoving Earth, but this solar sphere was the middle of the spheres of the other six planets; the Moon, Mercury and Venus were inside it, and Mars, Saturn and Jupiter beyond it. Th is point was misunderstood by Avner Ben-Zaken, who seems to have mistranslated the text from Me’ametz Koah: “Almosnino’s most fascinating analogy is of the Menorah to “the spheres of the planets; the middle candle indicates the sun, around which all the planets were put in motion.” Th is, claims Ben Zaken, is “the implication of a heliocentric cosmology…Almosnino thus was using Jewish methods of exegesis in order to popularize among Jews cutt ing edge discoveries of astronomy” Alas there is no such implication, nor suggestion, in the original Hebrew text of Almosnino’s work. (See Ben-Zaken, Avner. “Bridging Networks of Trust” 355-356.)

Notes

305

Chapter 3, David Gans and the First Mention of Copernicus in Hebrew Literature, Pages 42–65 1. Gershom Scholem pointed out just how significant is the tombstone of David Gans: [T]he “official” use of the hexagram [star of David] as the insignia of a Jewish community had its origins in Prague. . . . After more than a thousand years it reappears for the first time on a tombstone in the old Jewish cemetery where the grave of the once very famous chronicler David Gans, who died in 1613, bears a large Shield of David. . . . Otherwise the sign is not common on tombstones even in Prague” (emphasis added) (Gershom Gerhard Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays, 275–277). 2 . “In his diary entries, Maximilian II described Jews as a quarrelsome and deceitful people who denounced one another, gave usurious loads to miners and artisans, and traded in inferior metals. Between 1567 and 1573, the emperor repeatedly issued mandates to expel Jews and prohibit usury in Lower Austria, orders whose executions apparently were less than complete” (R. Po-chia Hsia, “The Jews and the Emperors,” 73). Th is att itude should be contrasted with that of Rudolf, who “refused to distinguish between Catholic, Protestant, Jew or Muslim in the pursuit of truth and beauty. A staunch advocate of free enquiry and religious tolerance, he allowed his subjects to follow their intellectual and spiritual investigations to wherever they might lead them” (Peter H. Marshall, The Magic Circle of Rudolf II, 87). The visit of Maximilian is described in Tzemah David, Mordechai Breuer, ed., 405: The pious emperor Maximilian (may his righteous name be for a blessing), in order to show his kindness and faithfulness, love and affection for the Jews, passed in his glory through the heart of the Jewish street in Prague, together with this wife Miriam . . . and his senior and officers and advisors, in the year 332, which corresponds to the Christian year of 1571. 3. The low figure comes from Mordechai Breuer, “Modernism and Traditionalism in Sixteenth Century Jewish Historiography,” 51. The high estimate is found in Marshall, The Magic Circle of Rudolf II, 93, apparently citing Peter Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold, 200. The Encyclopedia Judaica states that there were six thousand Jews in Prague at the beginning of the seventeenth century. According to Davis, at the end of the sixteenth century, the population of the entire city of Prague was 60,000. (See Joseph M. Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, 26.) Rowland gives a figure of 15,000 Jews and states that Prague was the second-largest Jewish community in Europe (Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic, 203). 4. Compare with Deuteronomy 8:9, from where Gans borrowed this description of the holy land and applied it to Bohemia. 5. Cited in André Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution, 21–22. 6 . Fynes Moryson and Charles Hughes, Shakespeare’s Europe, 490, quoted in Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, 27. 7. Breuer, ed., Zemah David, a Chronicle of Jewish and World History, 127: “I, your author, saw a copy of this book by Euclid, and I studied from it in the city of Northeim in Saxony. . . .” It should be remembered that at the time Gans encountered this text, it was available only as a manuscript (Gad Freudenthal, “Hebrew Medieval Science in Zamosc,” 62). 8. David Gans, Nehmad Vena’im, introduction, 8a. See also Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution, 16–17. Gans was not the only writer to have been deeply affected by reading Euclid. John Aubrey, a student and biographer of Thomas Hobbes, wrote that in his middle age, Hobbes had suddenly become deeply interested in geometry. Aubrey, writing about 1680, explained that this began when Hobbes accidentally happened to see “in a Gentleman’s Library . . . Euclid’s Elements lay open. . . .” (John Aubrey, Brief Lives, 427). 9. See Breuer, ed., Zemah David, a Chronicle of Jewish and World History, 406. Breuer’s suggestion (ibid., note 70) that Gans confused or combined the comet of 1577 and the supernova of 1572 seems to be correct.

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10. “At its fi rst, sudden appearance, this new star shone as brightly as the planet Venus and on a clear day was even visible at noon” (Joshua Gilder and Ann-Lee Gilder, Heavenly Intrigue, 58). 11. Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, 71. 12 . Breuer, ed., Zemah David, a Chronicle of Jewish and World History, 406. Gans seems to have confused the entirely new phenomenon of the supernova with the more often seen appearance of comets. 13. As John Barrow notes, in the 1,000 years prior to the invention of the telescope, there were three supernovae that were visible. The fi rst was initially seen in July 1054, the second in November 1572 (this was the one seen by Tycho and Gans), and the third was fi rst noted in October 1604 and was studied by Kepler (John D. Barrow, Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science, 552). To this day, the observation of a supernova is an important scientific event. For example, in 2008, Alicia Soderberg described the serendipitous discovery of a supernova that, while not visible to the naked eye, was detected by a luminous X-ray outburst, an event that had been predicted but had never been previously observed. See A. M. Soderberg et al., “An extremely luminous X-ray outburst at the birth of a supernova,” Nature 453, 469–474. 14. David E. Fishman, “Rabbi Moshe Isserles and the Study of Science among Polish Rabbis.” The accolade can be found on page 574. 15. For a description of the importance of Cracow, see Jack Repcheck, Copernicus’ Secret, especially chapter 4. 16 . For a discussion of the plausibility of an intellectual exchange between different faiths in Gans’s day, see Noah Efron, “Irenism and Natural Philosophy in Rudolfi ne Prague,” especially page 630. 17. See Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. VI, especially 38–40. It is well known that the Shulhan Arukh was criticized by several figures, including Gans’s other famous teacher, Judah Loew (see his Derekh Hayyim and Derush al Hatorah), and we can only speculate on how Gans would have dealt with this confl ict among his teachers. 18. Fishman, “Rabbi Moshe Isserles and the Study of Science among Polish Rabbis,” 576. 19. Coincidentally, this was also the year of the birth of Copernicus. Th is book introduced the geocentric model of Ptolemy and was translated into Hebrew by Efrayim Mizrahi of Turkey around the year 1500 in a book titled Mahalah Hakokhavim (The Paths of the Stars). Interestingly, this was also the name of the book written almost four hundred years later by Reuven Landau that contained a strong anti-Copernican argument. Noah J. Efron ( Judaism and Science: A Historical Introduction, 116) seems to have mistakenly written that Puerbach published his work in 1456. 20. Moses Isserles, Torat Ha’olah I:5 and I:7. It is interesting to note that a similar exegesis was made by a Carmelite priest from Calabria in southern Italy, Paolo Antonio Foscarini, in a letter that he wrote in 1615. Foscarini’s goal in the letter was to demonstrate how the Bible could be reconciled with the new Copernican model. In the letter, which was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in March 1616, Foscarini suggested that the six branches of the candelabra found in the temple corresponded to the six “heavens,” or planets, that orbit the Sun. For more on Foscarini’s letter, see Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible, chapter 4, and appendix VI, in which the lengthy letter is presented in translation. 21. See Torat Ha’olah I:2, 4b–5a. 22 . Gans, Nehmad Vena’im, 8a. Aside from David Gans, Isserles trained another student who was later to become an important author of books on astronomy. Th is was Morderchai Jaffe (1535–1612), best known as the author of Levush Edar Hayakar (Lublin: Kalonymos ben Mordechai Jaffe, 1595), a commentary on Maimonides’ laws of the new moon. Jaffe wrote several other works on astronomy, including a commentary on Abraham Bar Chiyya’s Tzurat Ha’aretz (appended to Levush Edar Hayakar) and a guide to the lunar phases, Levush Ha’or (Venice: Petrus and Lerenzo Bragadini, 1620). Jaffe went on to produce several students of astronomy, including Judah ben Nathan Ashkenazi (who authored a critical edition of Jaffe’s Levush Edar Hayakar) and Jacob Koppelman, who wrote a collection of mathematical and astronomical novellae,

Notes

23. 24. 25. 26 . 27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32 .

33. 34. 35. 36 . 37.

307

entitled Omek Halacha (Cracow, 1593). See Fishman, “Rabbi Moshe Isserles and the Study of Science among Polish Rabbis.” He published many of his sermons in a collection called Amudei Shesh, and a selection and analysis appear in Marc Saperstein, Jewish Preaching, 1200–1800. For a comprehensive study of Lipmann, see Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller. About the exact date of Maharal’s birth, see Giuseppe Veltri, “Science and Religious Hermeneutics,” 121. See Abraham Rappaport, She’elot Uteshuvot Eitan Ha’ezrahi, at the start of response #36. For one example of these translations, see Judah Lowe and Eliakim Willner, Nesiv Hatorah: An Appreciation of Torah Study. Judah Loew, Netivot Olam, chapter 14. For more on Maharal’s scientific skepticism, see note 71 below. There is more to this discussion, and we are not using either term in its strictest philosophical sense. In his classic study, Richard Popkin noted that the term skepticism came to be associated with a rejection of belief in the central doctrines of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but that this is not its only meaning. “The sceptic is raising doubts about the rational or evidential merits of the justifications given for a belief; he doubts that necessary and sufficient reasons either have been or could be discovered to show that any particular belief must be true and cannot possibly be false. But the sceptic, like anyone else, still accepts various beliefs” (Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism, xxi). Fallibilism, on the other hand, is the recognition that “any claim justified today may need to be revised or withdrawn in light of new evidence, new arguments, and new experiences. . . . Just about anything that looks solid today may crumble and melt away, whether it is because of unforeseeable events that force us to rethink things from the ground up, or because of the emergence of new interpretations, valuations and practices that, equally unforeseeable force us to reconsider our old ones, either transforming or suspending them” (Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure, 180–181). The skeptic has reason to doubt a claim because there is always a way to undermine it, while the fallibilist might fi nd no fault with a theory or claim, but be confident that one may arise in the future. Any theory is therefore contingent at best. The two terms are often interchanged, although it is fallibilism that comes closest to the description of what Maharal and other Jewish critics of the scientific method were gett ing at. See the excellent recent book on this subject, Abraham Melamed, Rekohot Vetabahot (the Myth of the Jewish Origins of Science and Philosophy). He also published some of his fi ndings in English in Melamed, “A Legitimating Myth: Ashkenazic Th inkers on the Purported Jewish Origins of Philosophy and Science.” Isserles, Torat Ha’olah I, chapter 11, 17a. The lost works to which Gans refers in Nehmad Vena’im (21a, 26b, 36b, 70a) are Gevulot Ha’aretz , Me’or Hakatan, Migdal David, and Prozdor, and untitled works on the quadrant. In Zemah David, he refers to Sefer Hamedidah (A Book of Geometry), “which I plan to write.” See Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution, 50, and Efron, “Irenism and Natural Philosophy in Rudolfi ne Prague,” 636. According to Alter, Gevulot Ha’aretz is probably identical to another work called Tzurat Ha’aretz , and which was said to have appeared in Constantinople. Th is work was written by a David Absi, whose last name is similar to avsa, the Hebrew word for goose. As mentioned before, Gans means goose in German, and we have noted that a goose appears on Gans’s tombstone. Gans also called himself Avsa. See George Alter, “Two Renaissance Astronomers,” 15. David Gans, Zemach David. See “Gans, David ben Solomon,” Encyclopedia Judaica. A critical edition was published by Breuer in 1983 (Breuer, ed., Zemah David, a Chronicle of Jewish and World History). However, the book was reproduced in a collection of works on astronomy. See Po’al Hashem. Lawrence B. Phillips, The Dictionary of Biographical Reference, 485. Others have misunderstood this point and classified the book as having been called Nehmad Vena’im by its author, when in fact Gans did not give it this title. See the

308

38.

39. 40. 41. 42 . 43.

44. 45. 46 . 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52 .

53. 54. 55.

Notes comments of Yitzhak Shmuel Reggio (1784–1855) to Elijah Delmedigo’s Behinat Hada’at, 133. Steinschneider suggests that Gans began work on his book in 1592 and fi nished a fi rst draft by 1598 (quoted in Alter, 33). An incomplete manuscript with the title Magen David dated 1596 can be found in the Staats-und Universitatsbibliothek, Hamburg. See Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution, 72. The Bodleian Library in Oxford has the only complete copy of Magen David known to exist. It is dated 1612 (Hebraica Opp. 4° 417). Gans, Nehmad Vena’im, 8a–b. For a detailed analysis of this passage and its place in the legend of the Jewish origins of science, see Melamed, Rekohot Vetabahot (the Myth of the Jewish Origins of Science and Philosophy), 326–330. Gans is mistaken here, and the correct date of publication is 1543. Gans, Nehmad Vena’im, 9a. Ibid., 9a–b. Ibid., 10a. Gans gave four other reasons why the study of astronomy was so important: (1) It brings about a better understanding of God’s power, (2) it forces us to conclude that there must be a First Cause behind the complexity, (3) it allows the calendar to be accurately calculated, and (4) it is an explicit command in the Torah. It should be emphasized that Gans also believed that, at least originally, Jews did in fact have a superior understanding of astronomy, which was only transmitted to the Gentiles during the years of Jewish exile (see, for example, 9a). Th is point is also made by Ruderman, who noted that Nehmad Vena’im “. . . can hardly be seen as advocating Jewish superiority in science. On the contrary, by putt ing together a conventional handbook on the subject, including a smattering of up-to-date information from Prague, Gans left the distinct impression that Jews may have once been proficient in the field but now lagged painfully behind their Christian contemporaries.” See David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 83–84. For an outline of the contribution of Tycho, see Anton Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy, chapter 22, and the more recent Adam Mosley, Bearing the Heavens. The model was fi rst presented in Tycho’s De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis (Concerning the New Phenomena in the Ethereal World) published in Uraniborg in 1588. The stationary Earth would also explain why a ball falling from a tower hits the ground below the point from which it was dropped, and not some distance from it, as should be the case (so Tycho believed) if the Earth was moving. Gilder and Gilder, Heavenly Intrigue, 86. I am borrowing from their description of the celestial spheres. Another problem that the observed orbit of Mars had created was its greater-than-expected eccentricity. For a discussion of the study of Mars and the evolution of Kepler’s thought, see Owen Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven, 305–322. See part I, chapters 11–25. Gans, Nehmad Vena’im, 13b. TB. Pesahim 94b. As we noted, this difficult passage is open to a number of different interpretations. See above at 31–32. See also Noah J. Efron and Menachem Fisch, “Astronomic Exegesis,” 74. A similar point is made by Neher ( Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution, 216, note 2). As pointed out by Neher, Maimonides seems to understand this passage in a different way than Gans and Tycho: “. . . [I]n these astronomical matters they preferred the opinions of the sages of the nations of the world to their own . . . [a]nd this is correct” (Shlomo Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed, vol. 2, 267). However, there is no evidence from any of the manuscript variants that I have seen (Vatican Bibliotheca Apostolica, Ebr. 109 & 125, New York Jewish Theological Seminary Rab. 1623) to support Neher’s suggestion that Maimonides may have had a variant reading of the text in Pesahim. See Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution, 216. As he does many times in his work, Neher vastly overstates his case. Gans, Nehmad Vena’im, 15b. Ibid., 15b.

Notes

309

56 . “For Brahe was not just a member of the Danish nobility, he was born to the small subset of the nobility that occupied the very pinnacle of political power, a handful of families that made up the Danish Council of State of Rigsraad” (Gilder and Gilder, Heavenly Intrigue, 32–33). 57. An accurate clock was required for Tycho’s work on a star catalogue; on this, see Victor E. Thoren and J. R. Christianson, The Lord of Uraniborg , 123 and 158. Note the clocks in the bottom right of the engraving of Tycho’s mural quadrant in figure 3.4. 58. Gans, Nehmad Vena’im, 83b. 59. Ibid., 82b. 60. See, for example, Efron and Fisch, “Astronomic Exegesis,” idem. David Ruderman wrote that Gans is “. . . eclectic, sends confl icting messages, and consciously avoids taking strong, controversial stands. Although fully aware of the differences between his two Jewish teachers, he respectfully presents their positions without attempting to reconcile them” (Ruderman, Jewish Thought and ScientificDiscovery, 83). 61. See the introduction to Nehmad Vena’im. 62 . Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 83. 63. Gans, Nehmad Vena’im, 25a. 64. Ibid., 27b. He described the traditional geography on pages 26b–27a. 65. Th is point is emphasized by Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 84. 66 . Efron and Fisch, “Astronomic Exegesis,” 75. 67. Gans, Nehmad Vena’im, 15b. One need look no further than the opening section of the book, in which Gans clearly stated his concerns with the Copernican model. “Over the last eighty years, they [astronomers] have sought do to the impossible and prove with their sharp minds that the Earth continuously moves in orbit . . . however the majority of those who investigate these matters, and in particular the most recent astronomers, have not accepted this belief.” 68. The entry on Gans in the Encyclopedia Judaica failed to acknowledge this point and stated that “. . . he rejects the new Copernican system in favor of Ptolemy’s. . . .” (See Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 7, 310.) 69. Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven, 294. A similar point was made by the historian Lynn Thorndike, who noted how the early writers of astronomy texts thought that the intricacies of the Copernican theory were . . . beyond the reach of the beginning students for whom they wrote. They commonly adhered to the Ptolemaic system, as both customary and as presenting the heavens the way they looked to an observer on Earth. . . . Hardly a single elementary textbook was written on the Copernican basis. Usually a passing sentence or two was all the recognition given to it (Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science). For a full discussion of the reception of Copernican thought during the period in which David Gans wrote, see Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven, chapter 16. 70. Efron and Fisch, “Astronomic Exegesis.” 71. Maharal’s skepticism toward the scientific knowledge of astronomy was clearly stated: It is not even appropriate to call the entire enterprise of astronomy a science. The accolade of a science is only fitting concerning a well-understood subject. You will certainly not find in their “science” even a single person who understands the subject as it truly is, and what difference is there between a great lie and a smaller lie? The truth can never really be known . . . the wise Gentiles only know the time of the orbits of the Sun, the Moon and the planets, but have no deep explanation of these phenomenon. . . . ( Judah Loew, Be’er Hagolah, 115). 72 . See Gingerich, The Eye of Heaven, 297. 73. Bacon’s manuscript was not published until 1623 (De Dignitae et Augmentis Scientiarum Libre IX, London: J. Haviland, 1623). For an analysis of the reception of Copernican thought in Great Britain, see Jerzy Dobrzycki, ed., The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory; Proceedings of a Symposium, 189–239. See also Hans Blumenberg,

310

74.

75. 76 . 77. 78 .

79. 80. 81.

82 . 83. 84. 85. 86 . 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92 . 93. 94.

Notes The Genesis of the Copernican World, 541–542, and William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, 388–390. If new evidence in the form of other writings by Gans were discovered, this might help solve the question. However, this seems unlikely and increasingly so with the passage of time. It is interesting to note that another acquaintance of Brahe’s who was persuaded of the truth of his system was King James VI of Scotland, who visited Brahe in March 1590. James, who went on to become James I of England, was impressed by what he saw and adopted the Tychonic system. See Avner Ben Zaken, “The Angelus Novus of Early Modern Science,” 276. In contrast, Zemah David was published in 1592, 1692, 1743, 1768, 1785, 1834, 1847, 1859, 1863, 1865, 1871, 1876, 1878 and 1920, with a critical edition published in 1983. For Gans’s description of his teachings, see Gans, Nehmad Vena’im, 75b. Alter, “Two Renaissance Astronomers,” 52. Delmedigo is discussed in chapter 4. Pinhas Hurwitz, Sefer Haberit, part I, chapter 2, #10; part I, chapter 9, #9. Zevi Elimelekh Shapiro, Derekh Pikudekha , Mitzvah 4, practical section, paragraph 12. Shapiro had planned to write a comprehensive study of all 613 commandments, but published only one section, containing the fi rst fi ft y-eight. He divided his study of each mitzvah into several parts, covering their practical, mystical, and theoretical underpinnings. Shapiro is widely studied to this day, especially in Hasidic circles, where he is oft en referred to by the name of his more famous work B’nei Yissaskhar. Another work quoting Nehmad Vena’im is Divrei Yermiyahu , Sefer Zemanim Hilkhot Shabbat #5. The author Jeremiah Loew (1811–1874) was a Hungarian rabbi. His book was fi rst published posthumously in 1875 and again in several editions as late as 1934. Zeev Wolf ben Samuel Gerstel, Hokhmat Tekufot Umazelot. For a list of the approbations that Heller wrote for other books, see Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, 228–229. The translation is from Davis, 90. None of the three approbations for Magen David appear in Nehamd Vena’im, but may be found in the only extant complete manuscript of Magen David. Heller’s approbation is reprinted in Mayer Herskovics, Two Guardians of Faith, 105–110. Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, 168. For a detailed discussion of the Sermon, see ibid., 159–174. Derush Hidushei Halevanah was fi rst published some two centuries after it was written, in 1866 in Vilna. See Joseph Davis, “Ashkenazic Rationalism and Midrashic Natural History.” See Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, 167–168. Because Heller read no Latin, his sources would have been limited to the two extant books in Hebrew about astronomy. One was Nehmad Vena’im, and the other was Sefer Elim, which Heller may have read. But this is somewhat controversial. See Davis, “Ashkenazic Rationalism and Midrashic Natural History,” note 44. Some of Yagel’s works were never published and exist only in manuscript. For a detailed examination of Yagel, see David Ruderman, “The Receptivity of Jewish Thought to the New Astronomy,” 73–93, and Ruderman, A Valley of Vision, 1–16. Ruderman, “The Receptivity of Jewish Thought to the New Astronomy,” 91. Th is translation from an unpublished work of Yagel’s is found in ibid., 88–89. TB. Berakhot 58b. Yagel, Beit Ya’ar Halevanon (manuscript Oxford Bodl.) 1305, chapter 98, folio 226a. For more on Shmuel, see chapter 2. See Ruderman, “The Receptivity of Jewish Thought to the New Astronomy.” Cited by Ruderman, 79. Yagel did not accept every suggestion made by Cardano, such as Cardano’s rejection of Aristotle’s doctrine of the four elements. TB. Berakhot, 58a. Cited in Ruderman, 90. The Talmudic reference is to TB. Eruvin, 43b. There were many claims of telescopic vision (or a tool for producing such vision) in the centuries before the actual invention of the telescope. See Eileen Adair Reeves, Galileo’s Glassworks, especially chapters 1 and 2.

Notes

311

95. Th is is my translation of the text provided by Ruderman, “The Receptivity of Jewish Thought to the New Astronomy,” note 67. 96. Ruderman, 93.

Chapter 4, The First Jewish Copernican: Rabbi Joseph Soloman Delmedigo, Pages 66–81 1. Th is biographical information comes from one primary source (Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, 42–48) and several secondary sources (see the printer’s introduction to the second edition of Sefer Elim); Isaac Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo (Yashar of Candia), 24 et seq,; George Alter, “Two Renaissance Astronomers,” 45–50. See also the “Ahuz letter” in Abraham Geiger, Melo Hofnaim, 1–29. The Ahuz letter was written by Delmedigo to one of his disciples and was originally published in the fi rst edition of Sefer Elim. Geiger claimed to have found a different version of the letter, but there are doubts about its veracity. On this, see David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, chapter 4, especially 146–151. An abridged version of the letter translated into English can be found in Frank Kobler, ed., A Treasury of Jewish Letters, vol. 2, 486–496. 2 . There is confl icting evidence about whether Delmedigo’s family originated in Germany (Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo, 26) or Italy (Alter, “Two Renaissance Astronomers,” 45–46). 3. Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, introduction to Ma’ayan Ganim, 5. 4. See Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, chapter 3, from where much of the information on Jewish life in the University of Padua is taken. 5. Ibid., 110. 6. Ibid., 104. 7. Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo, 38. 8. Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, unpaginated approbation (also found at 4 of the 1864 edition). (Because the second edition is generally more accessible, it is referenced in addition to the fi rst edition.) For more on the importance of Modena, see Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. VI, 126–154. On his disagreement with Delmedigo over the nature of kabbalah, see Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific, 118–153. 9. “Prior to 1615, the few Jewish students who succeeded in completing their academic requirements at the medical school generally gained the title of magister. Only in exceptional cases were they awarded the more prestigious degree of doctoratus in artibus et medicine through the personal intervention of the Pope’s representatives . . .” (ibid., 110). 10. Barzilay opined that Delmedigo abandoned the project “. . . when he came to realize that its scope was too daring and its completion beyond the power of a single individual” (Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo, 48), but this is pure speculation. 11. Ibid., 58. 12 . Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, introduction to Ma’ayan Ganim, 5. (Th is is also found on page 132 of the second edition of 1864.) 13. Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo, 84–85. 14. Delmedigo died on the fi fteenth day of Tishrei 5416 (the fi rst day of the festival of Sukkot), corresponding to October 16, 1655. Barzilay’s date of September 1655 (ibid., 85) seems to be in error. 15. Delmedigo’s printed works referenced these treatises five times, and Barzilay counts forty-three unpublished titles. See ibid., 328–337. As noted earlier (see note 1 above), there is some dispute as to the status of the Ahuz letter. 16 . We will not examine Delmedigo’s other printed work Novelot Hokhmah that was published two years after Sefer Elim, as it is concerned with kabbalah and contains no scientific material. However, even in this book Delmedigo alluded to his other works on astronomy and the Copernican model. “I have written a large volume on important questions about . . . astronomy, an explanation of Al-Magestri, and some notes on its methodology and the methodology of those who believe that the Earth and the planets revolve, and that the Sun stands unmoving at the center of the universe” (Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, Novelot Hokhmah, 6a of the unpaginated introduction).

312

Notes

17. Barzilay (Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo, 97) mistakenly refers to Zerah ben Nissim. The author of the second letter is printed as Zerah ben Yizhak [sic]. 18. It is the precise number of these questions that gave Sefer Elim its name, because the Bible records that, at the oasis of Elim “ . . . there were twelve wells and seventy palm trees” (Exod. 15:27). 19. The additional fourth letter is known as the Metz letter, after its author Moses Metz. 20. Here is how Delmedigo describes his own quest for knowledge: “There was no subject, great or small, which I did not examine and investigate, for you know my nature is to learn from everyone. Each day I write down every good piece of knowledge that I hear, even from a woman” (Delmedigo, Novelot Hokhmah, unpaginated introduction, page 6b, emphasis added). Although this last proclamation might sound condescending to our ears, in seventeenth-century Europe, it was a daring statement of openness and intellectual honesty. 21. For analysis of the mathematical content of Sefer Elim, see Sandra Marylin Pulver, “Selected Mathematical Paradoxes.” 22 . Delmedigo refers to this lost work in his Sefer Elim (Ma’ayan Hatum, 77, and 438 of the second edition). 23. Many of the statements we quote are to be found in the Metz letter published at the opening of Sefer Elim (27–52, and 40–76 in the second edition). Nevertheless, scholars of Delmedigo are convinced that these statements are the opinions of Delmedigo himself. In his biography of Delmedigo, Barzilay wrote that the att ribution of this part of Elim to Metz is merely a device used by Yashar (the acronym of Yosef Shlomoh Rofeh— Joseph Solomon the Physician) to shield himself against possible criticisms and accusations, because of the radical views expressed therein. Indeed in no other part of Yashar’s writings does one come across such an unprecedented, all out assault on the basic concepts of ancient and medieval metaphysics, in general, and astronomy in particular, as in this relatively short tract. . . . Whatever Yashar’s reason for att ributing this part of Elim to Metz, the ideas are all his own (Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo,153). Zinberg agreed with this this theory: Delmedigo . . . hides under the umbrella of his two admirers, the Karaite Zerach ben Nathan and Moses of Metz. He reprints the letters they wrote to each other and to him. Geiger, however has clearly demonstrated that in these letters Delmedigo secretly inserted much that was his own. In this way, hiding under the names of two Karaites, he smuggled in, as contraband, his own ideas, extremely liberal for that time. He does not express his views under his own name, but they are given in Moses’ letter to Zerach ben Nathan (Elim, 27–51) in which Moses . . . describes Delmedigo’s views on the discoveries of Copernicus and on several important theological problems (Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. IV, 168–169).

24.

25. 26 . 27.

Even if this conjecture is incorrect, it is certainly the case that these statements represent the opinions of students of Delmedigo that were chosen for inclusion in Sefer Elim because Delmedigo himself agreed with their sentiments. Delmedigo, Sefer Elim; Gevurot Hashem, 161 (315 in the second edition). Compare with Gen. 1:16: “God made the two great lights, the greater light to dominate the day and the lesser light to dominate the night, and the stars.” Delmedigo also praised the work of Tycho Brahe, although he dismissed Tycho’s planetary system as having taken the fundamentals of Copernicus and “dressed them in other clothes.” (See Gevurot Hashem, 160–161, second edition, 317–318.) Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Yesodai Hatorah 3:9. Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, 38 (second edition, 57). Ibid., 39 (second edition, 58), emphasis added. Delmedigo seems to have predated the famous remark by Thomas Huxley that the “great tragedy of science was the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact” (see John Timbs, The Year-Book of Facts in Science and Art, 7). Although the Copernican model was certainly much simpler than the Ptolemaic one with its epicycles, it did not completely account for all the observed movements of the planets, because it supposed that the planets orbited in perfect circles, when in fact

Notes

28.

29. 30.

31. 32 . 33. 34.

35. 36 . 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42 . 43.

313

they traveled along elliptical paths. The Copernican model, therefore, still made use of the additional epicycles. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution, 169–171. Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, 141 (second edition, 292). Delmedigo refers here to the Mishnaic statement on the verse in Proverbs 8.21: “I will endow those who love me with substance, and I will fi ll their treasuries.” The Mishnah (Ukzin 3:12) records a statement of R. Joshua ben Levi that plays on the word Yesh, meaning substance. The numerical value of this word is 310, which led R. Joshua ben Levi to expound that God would repay each righteous person with a reward of 310 worlds. For an English edition of the book, see Dorothea Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno, His Life and Thought, which contains an annotated edition of this work. “An exchange between Kepler and Galileo in 1610 shows that Galileo had also read Giordano Bruno’s work on cosmology, and until 1601 it had been perfectly legal to do so” (Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic, 280). As Delmedigo had been Galileo’s student in Padua from 1606–1613, it is entirely possible that he had learned of Bruno’s work through Galileo. As is well known, Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for his belief in this and other heresies that were contrary to Church teaching. As noted by Ingrid Rowland in her recent biography, Bruno was deeply interested in kabbalistic beliefs (ibid., 61). However, there is some debate as to the nature of Delmedigo’s views on the kabbalah. Zinberg, for example, states that Delmedigo “. . . witnessed with indignation how the Jewish book market was flooded with all kinds of kabbalist books, full of incantations, notarikon, and combinations of letters, which in his view confused and barbarized mens’ minds.” (See Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. IV, 163.) Barzilay follows in the footsteps of Zinberg and wrote that Delmedigo’s att itude towards kabbalah and occultism “was critical and derogatory” (Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo, 279 and also chapter 16, passim). David Ruderman has offered a much more nuanced and persuasive review of Delmedigo’s att itude toward the kabbalah. Ruderman suggests that despite Delmedigo’s rationalism and mastery of secular learning, he was eager to establish bridges between the sciences and kabbalistic theosophy. (See Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, chapter 4 entitled “Can a Scholar of the Natural Sciences Take the Kabbalah Seriously?”) Th is argument fails, of course, if we question the assumption that all the stars had to orbit with the same velocities. Nevertheless, Delmedigo found it convincing. Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, 148 (second edition, 299). Ibid., 148 (second edition, 300). A full explanation of this very real appearance lies in the orientation of the rings of Saturn at the time it was being observed. For a pictorial representation of what Delmedigo was describing, see Edward R. Tufte, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, 106–107. Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, Gevurot Hashem, chapters 25–29. Ibid., chapter 9. Ibid., chapter 7. See Anton Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy, 146–147. Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, 151 (second edition, 304). Th is suggestion is further supported by the fact that Delmedigo referred to the Sun as the lamp in the center of the universe, which was the same analogy used by Copernicus (see Nicolaus Copernicus and Edward Rosen, On the Revolutions, 22). By 1628, three editions of De Revolutionibus had been published, including an edition published in Amsterdam in 1617, which commemorated the seventy-fi ft h anniversary of the death of Copernicus. It is of course speculation to suggest that Delmedigo had read any of them, but it is certainly possible. On Delmedigo’s fluency in Latin, see Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, 32. André Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution, 252. Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. IV, 155. Atle Næss, Galileo Galilei, When the World Stood Still, 28. Galileo’s light teaching load focused on introductions to astronomy, as well as the teachings of Euclid, Ptolemy’s Almagest, and Aristotle. See Michael H. Shank, “Sett ing the Stage; Galileo in Tuscany,

314

44. 45. 46 .

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52 . 53.

54. 55. 56 . 57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62 . 63. 64. 65. 66 . 67.

Notes the Vento, and Rome,” 65. The same point is made by Pannekoek: Galileo’s “adherence to Copernicus’s theory did not appear in his academic lectures; here conforming to the imposed task, he taught the celestial sphere and the theory of Ptolemy with all its arguments” (Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy, 227). John Heilbron, Galileo, 202. Antonio Favaro, ed., Le Opere Di Galileo Galilei, vol. 2, 197–202. Ibid., vol. 10, 68–69. See James Reston, Galileo: A Life, 53, and Michael Sharratt , Galileo: Decisive Innovator, 68–70. Sharratt thinks that Galileo’s claim to have been a Copernican for many years is an exaggeration. Nevertheless, there is clear evidence that by 1597, Galileo did indeed believe in the Copernican model. Stillman Drake, Galileo Studies: Personality, Tradition, and Revolution, 73. According to Finocchiaro, the 1597 letter to Kepler showed merely that Galileo was indirectly pursuing a Copernican research program, in the sense of elaborating a new anti-Aristotelian physics that was more in accordance with Copernicanism than with the geostatic theory (see note 50 below). Ibid., 74. See chapter 11. Maurice Finnocchiaro, private correspondence. R. H. Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans, 126. See also Kenneth J. Howell, God’s Two Books, especially chapter 5. Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans, 125–126. Jerzy Dobrzycki, ed., The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory; Proceedings of a Symposium, 93. For a detailed review of the early Jesuit reaction, see Edward Grant, “In Defense of the Earth’s Centrality and Immobility,” especially 11–32, and Irving A. Kelter, “The Refusal to Accommodate.” Dobrzycki, ed., The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory; Proceedings of a Symposium, 215. I am not suggesting here that either the Dutch or Polish reactions to Copernicus were uniformly negative, for they were not. The point rather is that Delmedigo was working in a sett ing in which the heliocentric theory was far from having been accepted by all. Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo, 166. Th is assertion is similar to Koestler’s famous characterization of Copernicus’s own work as “the book that nobody read,” and was inaccurate. (See Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read, vii–x, 255.) Naft ali Herz Wessely, Divre Shalom Ve’emet, 45; quoted in David Eli Fishman, “Science, Enlightenment and Rabbinic Culture in Belorussian Jewry 1772–1804,” 64. On whether Wessely was an “early maskil” or a “precursor of the Haskalah,” see Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 26–35. André Neher, “Copernicus in the Hebraic Literature,” 214. For example, the talmudic term Moshe rabbeinu means Moses our teacher. There are many other examples in the Talmud in which the term rebbi means “teacher” and not “rabbi.” Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, 297–308. The pope forwarded the case to the Inquisition in September 1632. Galileo had previously been investigated in April 1625 by the Inquisition, which reviewed his work The Assayer for the possibility that it confl icted with the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Sacrament. Galileo was exonerated. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World, 50. Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. IV, 158–160. Th is point is made by Alter in “Two Renaissance Astronomers,” 71. Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, introduction, 3 (second edition, 129). Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell, 18, 20. “Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise,” in Michael Morgan, ed., Spinoza. Complete Works, 409. A detailed review of the general and Jewish response to Spinoza is outside the scope of our study, but it should be noted that there were some early Jewish responses to Spinoza. Isaac Orobio de Castro (1617–1687) wrote what is the only Jewish rejoinder to Spinoza’s philosophy published in Spinoza’s lifetime called Certamen Philosphicum in 1684. For

Notes

68. 69.

70. 71. 72 . 73.

74. 75. 76.

77.

315

a detailed discussion of de Castro’s response, see Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism. The Story of Isaac Orobio De Castro, 263–296. Later Jewish responses were led by Isaac de Pinto (1717–1787), discussed in Jonathan Israel, “Failed Enlightenment”: Spinoza’s Legacy. Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell, 2–3. Bernard Nieuwentijt, Het Regt Gebruik Der Wereltheschouwingen. His work was popular and was republished in eight editions by 1759. It was also incompletely translated and published in English in 1718 as The Religious Philosopher; or, The Right Way of Contemplating the Works of the Creator. Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans, 352–356. Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell , 164. Ibid., 165. Stephen Nadler, “The Jewish Spinoza,” 492. Nadler also notes that “it seems perfectly right that Spinoza should appear in most recent histories of and ‘companions’ to Jewish philosophy, either as the culmination of the medieval tradition or the beginning of the modern” (ibid.). Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza, 3. The editors of the Nextbook Press, which published Betraying Spinoza, obviously thought that Spinoza did deserve a place in a series of books on Jewish thinkers and themes. Ibid., 14. Daniel Schwartz addressed the history of Spinoza’s image in his recent, very engaging book. See Schwartz, The First Modern Jew, especially his epilogue, which discusses the question of Spinoza’s identity as a Jew. More generally, the British philosopher Alan Montefiore examined the nature of Jewish identity and Jewish secularism in his A Philosophical Retrospective: Facts, Values, and Jewish Identity. Leon Wieseltier, “Because They Believe.”

Chapter 5, “Copernicus is the Son of Satan.” The First Jewish Rejections of Copernicus, Pages 82–105 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12 . 13.

14.

Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 65. Ibid., 72. For the evidence, see ibid., 176–193. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 350. Isaac Cardoso, Philosophia Libera. All further quotations from Cardoso are taken from this work, folios 20–28. Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 216, 300. In the Vulgate that was used by Cardoso, these verses are Job 9:6 “who shakes the Earth out of her place . . . ” and Ps. 113:7. In the standard Hebrew version, the reference to the verse in Psalms is Ps. 114:7: “Tremble you, Earth, at the presence of the Lord.” I am deeply indebted to Jonathan Warner for his help with the translation of large portions of Cardoso’s writings on Copernicanism. Cardoso did not explain why the Sun is not subject to the same requirement. These include William Gilbert’s De Magnete (fi rst published in 1600 with two further editions during Cardoso’s life), Celio Calcagnini’s Quod Caelum Stet (1525), and Aristotle’s De Caelo. Yerushalmi reviewed the likely curriculum that Cardoso followed. See Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 70–89. See ibid., 216–301. Yerushalmi summarized the content in this way: “It is simply not in a class with the works of such true seventeenth-century pioneers as Galileo, Descartes, Harvey, Pascal, Huygens, or Newton. No major discovery is announced or anticipated in the Philosophia Libera, no new path in scientific method is blazed on its pages.” Ibid., 232. According to another historian of the period, Philosophia Libera “was consigned to almost complete oblivion” (Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism, 269). B. Barry Levy, Planets, Potions, and Parchments, 61.

316

Notes

15. There are various English renditions of his name, including Tobias Cohn (in the Encyclopedia Judaica), Tobias Cohen, Tobias Katz, Tuviayah Cohen, and more. I have chosen the spelling that has been most commonly used and most closely matches the Hebrew pronunciation, and so refer to him throughout as Tuviah Cohen. Biographic details of Cohen’s life can be found in David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, chapter 8 and the detailed footnotes therein, and in Abraham Levinson, Tuviah Harofeh, 12–28. 16. Cohen’s stepfather Samson was a rabbi and the father of Yair Hayyim Bakhrakh, who later became one of the leading talmudists of his time. Thus, Tuviah Cohen was the stepbrother to Bakhrakh (see David Kaufmann, “Jair Chayim Bacharach”). Although they were stepbrothers, they were not raised together; Bakhrakh was some fourteen years older than Cohen and was married in 1653 (although he did later spend some time back in his parents’ home). Nevertheless, there are some remarkable overlaps between the two scholars, not the least of which is Bakhrakh’s own love of science and mathematics. Bakhrakh’s main source for his mathematical information was none other than Joseph Shlomo Delmedigo (see chapter 4 above). In fact, Bakhrakh and Delmedigo met on at least two occasions. There is, however, no record of Bakhrakh having transmitted any of Delmedigo’s pro-Copernican thoughts to his anti-Copernican stepbrother (see Isaac Barzilay, Yoseph Shlomo Delmedigo, 85). Cohen mentions Bakhrakh in glowing terms on page 101a of the first edition of his book, where he also mentions Delmedigo’s Sefer Elim. Cohen had clearly read Sefer Elim and, although he rejected its pro-Copernican stance, he relied on its methodology when this suited his purposes. See, for example, Ma’aseh Tuviah, 51b. 17. Tuviah ben Moses Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviah, introduction, 5a. 18. There was clearly a strong bond of admiration between the two, for Conegliano wrote the opening approbation for the Ma’aseh Tuviah in the form of a poem. 19. Cohen discusses Harvey’s explanation of the circulation of blood on page 114b of Ma’aseh Tuviah. Cohen published his book almost a century after Harvey’s discovery, by which time it had been widely accepted, and so the novelty of Cohen’s position must not be overstated. However, there were still Jews who failed to notice Harvey’s discovery and continued to describe a circulatory system based on Galen’s principles. For example, in 1777, Baruch Schick of Shklov (about whom more in the next chapter) published Amudei Shamayim (The Pillars of the Sky), a work on anatomy that completely ignored Harvey’s work (see David Eli Fishman, “Science, Enlightenment and Rabbinic Culture in Belorussian Jewry 1772–1804,” 51).Harvey’s theory of the circulation also met with some initial opposition because it overturned the teachings of Galen that had been accepted for some 1,400 years. See Steven Lubitz, “Early Reaction to Harvey’s Circulation Theory,” and more generally Roger French, William Harvey’s Natural Philosophy, chapter 6. 20. Mishnah Rosh Hashanah, 1:7. See Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviah, 5b. Cohen also stated another reason for his choice of book title. His children had died, “. . . and I do not know whether or not I will merit other children. So I said, let my deeds (ma’asay) be my descendents . . .” (ibid.). 21. Ibid., 5a. 22 . TB. Shabbat 75a. 23. Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviah, 32a. 24. Ibid., 49a. 25. Th is is also true of the second edition. Even though the illustrations had been drawn anew, they resembled those found in the fi rst edition. However, in the third edition of Ma’aseh Tuviah, published in Lvov in 1867, the repaginated text has the two diagrams opposite each other, allowing the reader to make an easy side-by-side comparison for the fi rst time. Th is side-by-side pagination is also present in the fourth edition. These later editions were not the fi rst to show the heliocentric and geocentric models on the same page. The fi rst Hebrew text to do so was Raphael Levi’s Tekhunot Hashamayim, published in 1756. Th is work is discussed in detail in chapter 8. Tuviah Cohen’s depiction of the Earth is very similar to one by the sixteenth-century German cartographer Peter Apian in his Cosmographia (Antwerp, 1545); this image is available at htt p://hsci. ou.edu/galleries/16thCentury/Apian/1545/.

Notes

317

26 . Cohen’s use of a bare diagram to illustrate a theory with which he disagreed was also found in his illustration of the Tychonic model. 27. See, for example, Thomas Digges’s diagram of the heliocentric system in his work A Prognostication Everlasting. Digges was the fi rst to translate Copernicus’s work into English. 28. Th is phrase is found in the Passover Haggadah, as a response to the question of the wicked son. The reader would immediately recognize this language and no doubt make the association. 29. Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviah, 51b–52a. 30. Ibid., 52a. In point of fact, this very midrash was used by Jonathan Eybeschütz, a contemporary of Cohen’s, to support the heliocentric theory (see chapter 8). The midrash is found in Bereshit Rabbah Bereshit #5. 31. Cohen slightly overestimated the speed of rotation, if we assume that his measurement of a mil is similar to that of a modern mile. At the equator, the Earth rotates at a speed of just over 1,000 MPH, or about one-third of a mile each second. 32 . Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviah, 52a. Here is an example of an argument that had already been suggested by Isaac Cardoso, but of which Cohen was likely unaware. 33. Cohen’s reasoning here is not clear. He seems to be suggesting that because the cannon itself is moving due to the Earth’s rotation, the cannonball would encounter resistance when fi red to the west, as the cannon itself is moving from west to east. These experimental arguments seem unlikely ever to have been tested, for Galileo claimed that quite the opposite would occur, namely that a cannonball shot toward the west would travel farther than one shot toward the east (see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Galileo on the World Systems, 146). Finocchiaro wonders whether either side actually bothered to perform any of these experiments (ibid. 164, note 104.) 34. These are extensively discussed in Edward Grant, “In Defense of the Earth’s Centrality and Immobility,” especially 33–57, from where much of this information is drawn. 35. See ibid., 35 and 43. Grant explains Tycho’s reasoning in this way: [T]he ball fired eastwards should advance hardly any distance from the cannon because the latter will be carried swiftly eastward with the rotating earth, while the cannonball will move only with its violent eastward motion [caused by the gunpowder]. The two eastward motions would prevent much of a separation. By contrast the cannonball shot westward should be far removed from the cannon because the latter will be carried eastward by the rotating earth while the cannonball moves westward [as a result of the gunpowder]. . . . (43) 36 . See, for example, Galileo Galilei and Stillman Drake, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 198, 206, and 296. 37. Finocchiaro, Galileo on the World Systems, 164. Th is and other experiments were difficult to perform with any convincing accuracy, and this was acknowledged by Galileo: “[A]ll experiments feasible on the earth are insufficient to prove its mobility but can be adapted indifferently to a moving as well as to a motionless earth” (ibid., 79). 38. See ibid., 155–170. 39. Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviah, 52a. 40. Noah Rosenbloom, “Diyunim Cosmologiyim Ve’astronomiyim Besefer Haberit,” 4. 41. TB. Yevamot 16a. See Rashi, who explains the meaning in this way: “He is sharp and loyal to that which he has learned. He will act and not turn to follow the majority.” 42 . See, for example, Nicolaus Copernicus and Edward Rosen, On the Revolutions, 5. For more on Rheticus, see above at page 14–15. 43. Rheticus’s treatise is translated and analyzed in R. Hooykaas, G. J. Rheticus’ Treatise on Holy Scripture and the Motion of the Earth. 44. Ibid., 102–103. 45. Ibid., 105. 46 . Ibid., 72. 47. Ibid., 79, 117. 48. Ibid., 183.

318

Notes

49. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, 109. 50. Ibid., 108. 51. Zuniga’s work was fi rst published in Toledo in 1578 and reprinted in Rome in 1591. (A translation of the commentary on this passage in Job may be found at htt p://home. student.utwente.nl/j.w.dijkshoorn/grotedenkers/faraday/appendix.html.) Despite his initial enthusiasm for the Copernican model, Zuniga later came to reject the theory of the mobility of the Earth, not because of any theological objection but rather because of physical ones. For analysis of Zuniga’s work, see Irving A. Kelter, “The Refusal to Accommodate.” Strictly speaking, both the works of Copernicus and Zuniga were “suspended until corrected” rather than banned. 52 . Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible, 87–110. An English translation of the letter can be found in Blackwell’s appendix VI (217–251). Foscarini’s work was “completely prohibited and condemned” in the Index of 1616. 53. Ibid., 233. 54. James M. Latt is, Between Copernicus and Galileo, xv. Sacroboso’s text on which Clavius wrote his commentary “was the most popular textbook of elementary astronomy in Europe, from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. It was written and fi rst came into use in early thirteenth-century Paris, and it fi nally began to pass out of use in the schools of the early seventeenth-century” (ibid., 38). Grant contends that the influence of Clavius on seventeenth-century scholastic cosmology “cannot be overestimated” (Edward Grant, In Defense of the Earth’s Centrality and Immobility, 61). 55. From Clavius, Sphaera (1611), 106, quoted in Latt is, Between Copernicus and Galileo, 123. Note that the reference is to the Vulgate Psalm 18, which in the Hebrew Bible is Psalm 19. The last reference is to either the story of Joshua (chapter 10) or the moving shadow of the sundial in Isaiah (chapter 38). 56 . Kelter, “The Refusal to Accommodate,” 277. 57. Ibid., 276–277. 58. Ibid. 59. Grant, In Defense of the Earth’s Centrality and Immobility, 62. Although Tycho Brahe felt that the Bible openly contradicted a moving Earth, he never specified to which verses he was referring (see Kenneth J. Howell, God’s Two Books, 92–97). 60. Avot 5:26. 61. Now, such a position is common. Jonathan Sacks, the Orthodox chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, has written that the Bible “is not proto-science, pseudo-science or myth masquerading as science. It is interested in other questions entirely. Who are we? Why are we here? How then shall we live?” (Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership, 285) 62 . Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 244. 63. Ibid., 235. 64. For his references to Galileo and Descartes, see Moses ben Gershom Hefez, Melekhet Mahashevet, 12a. For Kepler, see 56b. 65. These are described in the text for the fourth day of the famous Dialogue. See Galileo Galilei, Dialogue on the Great World Systems, 416–465. For more on Galileo, the science behind his tidal theory, and its historical context, see David Edgar Cartwright, Tides: A Scientific History, 28–30. 66 . Hefez, Melekhet Mahashevet, 12a. The effect that Hefez alludes to is real (although the time difference between high tides is actually 54 minutes each day) and occurs because in the 24 hours that have passed from one high tide to the next, the Moon has also moved about 13 degrees from the position it had been in exactly 24 hours ago. It takes another 54 minutes for the Earth to “catch up” and for a point on Earth to be in the same position relative to the Moon as it had been the previous day. 67. For a detailed review of Lampronti’s life and att itude toward the sciences, see Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 256–272. 68. Ibid., 259. 69. Isaac Lampronti, Pahad Yizhak , 21–22. 70. Ibid., 21b.

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71. TB. Pesahim 94b. The debate about the fi xed spheres and revolving constellations is reviewed above at page 32. 72 . Lampronti, Pahad Yizhak , 21b. See 2 Sam. 23:2. See Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 261–262, for a detailed discussion. 73. Lampronti, Pahad Yizhak , 21b. 74. Because Briel did not write more on the subject of Copernicanism, his position cannot be analyzed further. 75. Hillel Levine, “Paradise Not Surrendered,” 211. 76. Ibid. 77. There were other Jewish works that outlined a Ptolomaic cosmology that show that Cohen’s rejection of Copernicus was not unusual. For example, Judah Assael del Bene of Ferrera (c.1615–1678) published a book of essays in 1646 called Kissot L’Bet David. In it, del Bene refers to the Sun as moving and the Earth as the fi xed center of the cosmos, (Judah Assael del Bene, Kissot L’Bet David 41a–42b). As David Ruderman pointed out, del Bene did not study at a university, and he displayed “litt le technical mastery of the sciences.” Still, del Bene referenced Delmedigos’s Sefer Elim and so should have been aware of the heliocentric model, even if he chose to ignore it. (See Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 185–198. The reference to Delmedigo is found in Kissot L’Bet David at the very end of chapter 16. Page references are not helpful as the pagination was erroneously compiled.)

Chapter 6, David Nicto and Copernicanism in London, Pages 106–124 1. Margaret Jacob, “Christianity and the Newtonian Worldview,” 249. 2 . David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 314. 3. For the view that Newton elevated reason over religion, see Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, chapter 8. A succinct opposing view can be found in Ronald Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail, 115–122. 4. Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background, v. 5. The cemetery was purchased in 1657 and is known as the Bet Holim cemetery, named after the Sephardic Home for the Aged that used to occupy the houses. 6 . Israel Solomons, “David Nieto and Some of His Contemporaries,” 61. Th is is a translation of the Spanish epitaph. 7. See Ruderman’s assessment in “A Jewish Th inker in Newtonian England,” 311–312. On epitaphs, see Albert Montefiore Hyamson, The Sephardim of England, 80. 8. New translations are Meir Levin, The Rabbis’ Advocate, and David Nieto, The Rod of Judgement. See note 12 below. 9. Solomons, “David Nieto and Some of His Contemporaries,” 2. 10. Nadler wrote that “Spinoza’s God is not some transcendent, supernatural being. He—or rather It—is not endowed with the psychological or moral characteristics traditionally ascribed to God by many Western religions. . . . God is not the providential awe-inspiring deity of Abraham. Rather, God just is the fundamental, eternal, infi nite substance of reality and the fi rst cause of all things.” Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell. Spinoza’s Scandelous Treatise, 13. 11. The opinion is printed in the responsum of Hakham Zevi #18. 12 . The work was printed in Hebrew only in London (1714), Metz (1780), Warsaw (1865, 1884, 1890, 1895, 1902, and 1914), Lvov (1857, 1859, 1874), and Jerusalem (1958). The fi rst section of the work was translated into English and published in London in 1842; the fi rst three sections were translated into English in 2006, and a complete English translation was published in 2008. 13. David Nieto, Matteh Dan Vekuzari Sheni, unnumbered introduction. 14. Jakob Josef Petuchowski, The Theology of Haham David Nieto, 6–9. 15. As an example of how Nieto’s work is seen as a tool against “reform” views, see Levin’s The Rabbis’ Advocate, especially the appendix.

320

Notes

16 . So, for example, David Ruderman argued that Nieto, “[l]ike his Christian colleagues, the followers of Boyle and Newton . . . acknowledged that an argument for the validity of his faith would be credible only if couched in the language of science” (Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 323). 17. See the introduction to Matteh Dan, part IV. 18. Nieto, Matteh Dan, Fourth Dialogue #132–135. The phrase comes from Leviticus 19:7, describing a sacrifice that may be eaten for up to two days after it is offered. Once the third day is reached, it is no longer acceptable. 19. Nieto, Matteh Dan, #256–261. 20. Ibid., Fift h Dialogue #4. In this section, the birthplace of Copernicus is mistakenly described as Denmark. Nieto is likely confusing Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. 21. Ibid., #15, 19. 22 . Neher viewed Nieto as summarily rejecting the Copernican model, albeit in kinder language than Tuviah Cohen (André Neher, “Copernicus in the Hebraic Literature,” 221). Panitz and Levine thought that Nieto rejected Copernicus because of the relationship of reason to revelation (Michael Panitz, “New Heavens and a New Earth,” 34; Hillel Levine, “Paradise Not Surrendered,” 212–213). In his recent article in Hebrew, Rappaport quotes only from the Fourth Dialogue and summarizes the section on Nieto’s att itude with the biblical quote “it is abominable and cannot be accepted” (Hayyim Rappaport, “Veha’aretz Le’olam Omedet. Yahasam Shel Gedolei Yisrael Leshitat Copernicos”). 23. Nieto, Matteh Dan, Fourth Dialogue #134. 24. The Meldola family continued to produce outstanding scholars, rabbis, and academics into the twentieth century. In 1805, David Meldola’s nephew Raphael (1754–1828) became rabbi of Nieto’s congregation. Raphael’s son David later led the same community and was involved in the founding of The Jewish Chronicle. Raphael’s grandson and namesake Raphael (1849–1915) became a prominent British chemist and an early supporter of Darwin’s theory of evolution (see Geoff rey Cantor and Marx Swetlitz, eds., Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, 40–46). 25. Rafael Meldola’s responsa were published by his son David in Amsterdam (Mayyim Rabbim, Amsterdam: Joseph Dayan, 1737). He also wrote a poem in honor of Mendelssohn’s book Jerusalem. 26 . Mo’ed David was fi rst printed as an appendix to a prayer book called Tefilat Yesharim in Amsterdam in 1740. It was reprinted as an independent work later the same year in a pocket-sized edition. 27. David Meldola, Moed David, 17b–18a. It is unclear why Meldola mistakenly introduced the word “microscope” into his text. Perhaps Meldola had been overly impressed with the successful work of the Dutchman Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, whose work on the microscope had become internationally recognized. 28. In two places, Galileo had written explicitly about Copernicanism. In the fi rst, Galileo suggested that his telescopic discoveries had shown that the Earth’s geography was essentially no different than that of the Moon. He was then able to provide an answer to the objection that the Earth could not be a planet because it was devoid of light. The discovery of the moons of Jupiter enabled Galileo to answer another anti-Copernican objection; this one suggested that the Earth could not be in motion because if it were, the Moon would be left behind. To this, Galileo offered the evidence of Jupiter—which is clearly moving—and its moons, which both orbit it and follow the planet. For more on the Copernican agenda in Sidereus Nuncius, see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Defending Copernicus and Galileo, 52–54. 29. Galileo devised a famous anagram cryptically describing his discovery that, when deciphered, read Cynthiae figures aemulatur mater amorum—“The Mother of Love [Venus, named after the Roman Goddess of Love] imitates Cynthia [an epithet for the Greek Goddess of the moon],” or less cryptically, Venus has phases like the moon. Galileo explained that “. . . what is happening is that it [Venus] is sickle shaped and its horns are not only very thin but are also receiving the sunlight obliquely; hence this light is very dim in intensity and litt le in amount, and consequently its irradiation is less than when

Notes

30. 31.

32 . 33. 34.

35.

36 . 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42 . 43. 44. 45.

46 . 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52 .

321

the planet’s hemisphere appears entirely illuminated. On the other hand, the telescope clearly shows us its horns as clear-cut and distinct as those of the moon . . . ” (Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Galileo on the World Systems, 242). Meldola, Moed David, 19a. Th is copy contains handwritten amendments to the text that are likely to have been written by Supino himself. For a detailed history of the affair, as well as a critical review of the text of Supino’s pamphlet, see Shmuel Glick, ed., Quntres ‘Al ‘Inyan Shabbat Hahatunna. See Divrei David #21, 38, and Glick, 32. David Meldola, Divrei David. Supino printed three hundred copies of his work in 1738, but it remained in the Amsterdam printer’s warehouse for over two years, apparently as a result of a fi nancial dispute between Supino and the publisher (Glick, 31). Mo’ed David was published in Amsterdam in 1740. It should be noted that Neher reached a different conclusion, and wrote that “. . . all the [Hebrew] works published between 1720 and 1791 . . . [contain] a positive theological att itude with regard to Copernicus, even though some reservations are made on the scientific level.” Th is assertion is entirely without foundation. See Neher, “Copernicus in the Hebraic Literature,” 218. Jonathan Ben Joseph, Yeshua Beyisrael. The work is a super-commentary on chapter 3of Sefer Maddah and the entire Hilkhot Kiddush Hahodesh. He mentions Socrates several times in his introduction. David Eli Fishman, “Science, Enlightenment and Rabbinic Culture,” 23. Joseph, Yeshua Beyisrael, fi rst unnumbered page of the introduction. Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment. “Israel considered science to be the Great Luminary that allows the light of Tradition, the Small Luminary, to pass from potentiality to actuality. The view that in order to be apprehended Tradition requires the light of science introduced a difference of principle between Israel’s innovations and those of the other scholars” (Gad Freudenthal, “Hebrew Medieval Science in Zamosc,” 50). Information about Israel comes from ibid. 25–67. For more on Israel, see Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 332–334 and the footnotes there. Israel ben Moses Levi of Zamosc, Netzah Yisrael . In fact, Freudenthal calls the book “subversive” See Freudenthal, “Hebrew Medieval Science in Zamosc,” 29. These two commentaries have since been lost. Arubbot Hashamayim exists in only two manuscripts, both thought to be incomplete. I examined the manuscript of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, MS 2612, a large volume in a script that is handsome though difficult to read. Israel wrote other works, including a commentary on the Kuzari, entitled Otzar Nehmad, published posthumously by his nephew Yeruham Ba’er (Vienna, 1796), as well as a criticism of the ethical standards of Torah scholars of his day called Nezer Hadimah (Dyhernfurth, 1773). For Israel’s references to Sefer Elim, see Freudenthal, “Hebrew Medieval Science in Zamosc,” 28, 29, and 59–61. Israel made use of Jonathan ben Joseph’s Yeshuah Beyisrael, which as we noted also chose to ignore the Copernican model. See Freudenthal, “Hebrew Medieval Science in Zamosc,” 61–62. See Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 333–334. As Ruderman notes, the air pump had been available for over a century but had not previously been described in Hebrew literature. For this reason, Israel could present the device as a novelty. Israel ben Moses Levi of Zamosc, Ruah Hen, 2a. Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 48, and Freudenthal, “Hebrew Medieval Science in Zamosc,” 51. Feiner, “Hebrew Medieval Science in Zamosc,” 33. Zamosc, Netzah Yisrael, 55a, quoted in Freudenthal, “Hebrew Medieval Science in Zamosc,” 33. Israel subscribed to the legend that science began with the Jews, and

322

53. 54. 55. 56 . 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62 . 63. 64. 65. 66 . 67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72 . 73. 74.

Notes that the library of King Solomon was delivered to Aristotle by Alexander the Great. See Abraham Melamed, “A Legitimating Myth: Ashkenazic Th inkers on the Purported Jewish Origins of Philosophy and Science,” 307–308. For a detailed review of Schick and his work, see Fishman, “Science, Enlightenment and Rabbinic Culture in Belorussian Jewry 1772–1804,” from where most of this information has been obtained. Schick’s uncle was Arye Leyb Ginsberg, author of the famous responsa called Sha’agas Aryeh. Fishman, “Science, Enlightenment and Rabbinic Culture,” 41. Ibid., 55. Schick’s fi rst two works were published as a two-part work in Barukh Schick, Amudei Hashamayim. Fishman, “Science, Enlightenment and Rabbinic Culture,” 51–52. Ibid., 54. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 345. The information on Levison’s work is taken from Ruderman’s Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, chapter 12. A detailed examination of Levison’s intellectual output, as well as some of the scandal surrounding his life, can be found in Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization, 130–133, and Heinz Moshe Graupe, “Mordechai Shnaber-Levison” 3–20. Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization, 132. As we noted with the work of Israel Halevi of Zamosc, the air pump had been described a century earlier, but as Ruderman notes, it was only described in Hebrew literature in the middle of the eighteenth century, suggesting “. . . a belated awareness of discoveries in the physical sciences among Jewish writers, at least in comparison to the more up-to-date information they appear to have obtained in medicine and the life sciences” (Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 336). Levison asked his reader to forgive him if he wrote on topics that had already appeared in other languages or if he copied word-for-word from existing texts, but he suggested that a discerning and intelligent reader would realize “that I have discovered many original things, unprecedented as far as I know.” See Mordekhai Gumpel Schnaber Levison, Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhmah, 1. Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization, 132. Ibid. Levison, Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhmah, 8b. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Levison, Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhmah, 9a. Ibid. Some of Levison’s ideas are heavily borrowed from an essay entitled Ma’amar Hamaddah (A Treatise on Science). Th is essay was written by Aaron Gumpertz and appeared in his work entitled Megaleh Sod (Revealed Secrets) published in Hamburg in 1765. See Abraham Melamed, Rekohot Vetabahot (The Myth of the Jewish Origins of Science and Philosophy), 334–335. For more on Gumpertz, see Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery, 334–335, and Thomas Kollatz, “Under the Cover of Tradition: Old and New Science in the Works of Aron Salomon Gumpertz.” Levison, Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhmah, 18. Encyclopædia; or, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature, Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1798, vol. II, 516–517. Th is fi rst American encyclopedia was based on the third edition of the British Encyclopedia Britannica that had been published in 1798. In order to avoid upsett ing American sensibilities, the dedication to King George III was removed, and extra emphasis was placed on American history and geography. Levison, Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhmah, 19. See above at page 55. For a detailed review of Hart, see David B. Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key, 188–200, from where much information about Hart is drawn. See also Arthur Barnett , “Eliakim Ben Abraham (Jacob Hart).” Eliakim Hart, Milhamot Adonai. Among his other essays was Bina Le’itim (Understanding for the Times), a commentary explaining the prophecies in the Book of Daniel in light of

Notes

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82 . 83.

323

contemporary events. Newton also wrote a work on prophecies in the Book of Daniel that was published in 1733, and David Ruderman makes the following observation: “Th at Hart composed his own commentary on the Daniel prophesies only a year after his discourse on Newton seems more than a fortuitous resemblance” (Ruderman, Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key, 193). Hart, Milhamot Adonai, 2–5b. Ibid., 5b–9a. Ibid., 9a–9b. Ibid., 9b–12a. Ibid., 12a–14b. The reference to the rejection of the account of creation is on page 12b. Ibid., 28b–33b. Joshua 10:12. Ibid., 29a. Ibid., 29b. See, for example. Pinhas Hurwitz, Sefer Haberit, 62b.

Chapter 7, The Jewish Encyclopedia, Pages 125–143 1. Mercedes Rubio, “The First Hebrew Encyclopedia of Science,” 140–153. 2 . See Abraham Melamed, “The Hebrew Encyclopedias of the Renaissance,” 441–464. Some encyclopedias focused on astronomical or medical issues, whereas others attempted to cover the entire corpus of knowledge. I am grateful to David Ruderman for this and other observations he made on this chapter. 3. Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 255, 323. The haftorot are passages from the Books of the Prophets and Writings that are chanted in the synagogue after the Torah reading is concluded. 4. Ibid., 243–251. The fact that Reshit Limmudim was primarily written as a textbook for the Freischule probably explains why it lacked diagrams and illustrations. The school was small (it graduated only about sixty students per year in its fi rst decade), and the additional costs to produce an illustrated book would not likely have been recouped by this small market. (See Tal Kogman, “Baruch Lindau’s Reshit Limmudim,” 299.) 5. There was of course the additional thorny issue of the Church giving permission for a book to be published. For the role of rabbinic approbations, see Meir Benayahu, Copyright, Authorization and Imprimatur for Hebrew Books Printed in Venice . 6. See Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 248. 7. Quoted in ibid., 248. As we shall see in the following chapter, this requirement was not enforced for books of a solely religious nature, even if they tangentially dealt with scientific matters. In that case, the traditional system of fi nding rabbinic leaders to write haskamot (approbations) was used, and the books were submitted to the Berlin Bet Din (court of law) led by Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Levin. 8. Ibid., 266. After its initial publication in 1788, Reshit Limmudim was republished in 1799 in Brno, in 1810 in Dessau, in 1821 in Cracow, and in 1869 in Lemberg, demonstrating the book’s popularity over the next eighty years. 9. For example, Rabbi Eliezer Lipman Neusatz mentioned Reshit Limmudim in his discussion of the heliocentric model. See Eliezer Lipman Neusatz, May Menuchot, 36b. For more on Neusatz, see pages 166–167. 10. For a detailed review of the German-language sources of Reshit Limmudim, see Tal Kogman, “Haskalah Scientific Knowledge in Hebrew Garment,” and her article “Baruch Lindau’s Reshit Limmudim.” Lindau used a German textbook for children, Naturgeschichte f ür Kinder (Natural History for Children), by Georg Christan Raff that had been published in 1778. Raff ’s textbook, however, dealt only with natural history, and so it was not the source of Lindau’s knowledge of astronomy, which has yet to be identified. 11. Reshit Limmudim, 1b-2a. Lindau is aware of the discoveries of Saturn’s rings and of the moons of Jupiter, as well as the recent discovery of the new planet Uranus, which had been seen in 1781 by the English astronomer Hershel. 12 . Reshit Limmudim, 7b.

324

Notes

13. Reshit Limmudim, 54b. Lindau describes a report in 1758 of a sailor having been swallowed by a large fi sh. The sailor’s quick-thinking comrades fi red their cannons at the fi sh, which vomited out the hapless sailor “whole and unharmed.” “Perhaps it was this species,” continues Lindau, “which was the fi sh that swallowed Jonah the Prophet, as God commanded.” 14. Reshit Limmudim, 9b. 15. It would appear that the license limiting publication to only Hebrew or other Oriental languages had by this time expired. 16 . The original German text is from Moses Ben Zwi Bock, Israelitischer Kinderfreund: oder der gemeinüßigsten wissenschaft ilichen Kenntnisse, Berlin: Chevrat Chinuch Nearim, 1811,130. The text and the English translation are from Kogman, “Haskalah Scientific Knowledge in Hebrew Garment,” 78. 17. Hame’assef (lit. The Collector) was founded in 1783 and published (with some long breaks) until 1811. It was the Hebrew-language journal of the Haskalah and originated in Koenigsberg, although it later moved to Berlin, Breslau, and elsewhere. See Tsemah Tsamriyon, “Hame’assef,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 8, 298–299, Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. 18. Hame’assef 1789:30. 19. The fi rst actual criticism of the reviewer is the correction of a typographic error. The comment on the Copernican system immediately follows. 20. Reshit Limmudim, 10. 21. Hame’assef 1789:31. 22 . It is interesting to note a letter sent from Naphtali Herz Wessely to Moses Mendelsohn in 1768. Wessely (1725–1805), who was a maskil, poet, and linguist, had written to Mendelsohn that he was working to prove that the Copernican model could be accepted, based on Jewish sources. “For in those generations, what [the sages] had rejected was accepted, namely Copernicus’ view that the constellations revolve in the ether and are not held fast in the heavenly sphere,” cited in Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 385, note 65. 23. See above pages 93–96. 24. Reshit Limmudim, last page of the unnumbered introduction. 25. Shimon Oppenheim, Amud Hashahar. 26 . Oppenheim plagiarized from Reshit Limmudim’s paragraphs 2 through 9. 27. Oppenheim skipped paragraph 3, which reads as follows: You should know that prior scholars believed that the Sun orbited the Earth daily, for this is indeed how it appears to us at first sight. But this belief has been disproved (see below [paragraph]18) and we know and completely understand that the Sun remains fixed and at the center of the orbits of the planets. The Sun only revolves about its own axis once every twenty-two days as is known to us from the observation of its sunspots; these are sometimes visible and sometimes hidden, which is a sign that the Sun turns on its own axis. However it remains fixed in its place and never rises from it. Oppenheim also skipped paragraph 4, which described how the seasons were not caused by the Sun’s movement around the Earth, but rather by “. . . the day to day change in the Earth’s position relative to the Sun as it revolves around it. . . .” 28. The verses are from Jeremiah 9:22–23. Oppenheim followed a Maimonidean approach and claimed that despite recent evidence (presumably telescopic), the planets were not inert but were in fact spiritual beings: “For in this I desire” [ Jer. 9:23]. This is what God stated, that the planets would orbit the Earth for its benefit and the benefit of those who inhabit it. In so doing they obey His word and this explains that they orbit in order to obtain perfection. In this way they obtain perfection and the proofs of Copernicus and his supporters are hence as nothing (Oppenheim, Amud Hashahar, 8a–8b).

Notes

325

29. Hame’assef 1790 (Sivan 550); 6: 285–288. Oppenheim was somewhat of a serial offender. He had published Nezer Hakodesh in 1831 on religious ethics (!), but it turned out to have been plagiarized from Ma’alot Hamiddot, fi rst published in 1556. The review of Amud Hashahar in Hame’assef was brutal: “After reading the book in its entirety . . . I could not restrain myself for a moment more. I threw this worthless book away in anger and outrage. I have not seen as much nonsense from a group of drunkards or idiots as I have seen written here in this book. . . .” However, it was not the plagiarism that seemed to anger the reviewer, but the fact that the author described himself on the title page as “The great Gaon, sharp and famous, the outstanding investigator Shimon.” According to the reviewer, the matter was brought to the attention of Ezekiel Landau, head of the Bet Din in Prague, who called the author to his court and forbade him from printing further copies in which he included this description of himself. When Oppenheim disobeyed, Landau wrote a public rebuke stating that the book had been published without Landau’s permission, and that the author was not fitt ing of the description he wrote of himself, adding that “he is not fitt ing of rabbinic ordination in any way.” Interestingly, Landau too seemed more concerned with the way in which the author described himself than with the fact that the book contained plagiarized sections, a fact he did not mention in his rebuke of Oppenheim.There is at least one other example of religious figures plagiarizing what today we would call a work of science. In 1572, a French priest named Jean Taisner published a work on magnetism in Cologne under his own name. In actual fact, the work was a plagiarized copy of the fi rst treatise on magnetism in the Western world. Th at work (Peter Peregrinus of Maricourt, Epistle to Sygerus of Foucaucourt, Soldier, concerning the Magnet) had been written in the thirteenth century by Peter Peregrinus. See The Catholic Encyclopedia (eds. Charles Herbermann et al.), New York: The Universal Knowledge Foundation Inc., 1913, vol. 12, 80. 30. Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization, 1. It is fascinating to note that in his autobiography, Maimon recalled that as a child, he discovered some books that had been hidden away by his father. Among these was a work on astronomy (which Maimon does not identify): In this work a new world was opened to me, and I gave myself up to the study of it with the greatest diligence. Think of a child about seven years of age, in my position, with an astronomical work thrown in his way and exciting his interest. I had never seen or heard anything of the first elements of mathematics, and I had no one to give me any direction in the study: for it is needless to say that, to my father I dared not even let my curiosity in the matter be known, and, apart from that, he was not in a position to give me any information on the subject. How must the spirit of a child, thirsting for knowledge, have been inflamed by such a discovery! This the result will show. After reading this work, Maimon constructed a globe that modeled the celestial sphere so that he could better understand the astronomy about which he was reading. His father soon learned of the globe, but Maimon recalled that although he had been forbidden by his father to read anything other than the Talmud, his father “felt a secret pleasure, that his young son, without a guide or previous training, had been able by himself to master an entire work of science” (Salomon Maimon, Solomon Maimon: An Autobiography, 29–30). Maimon the philosopher started on his journey as Maimon the astronomer. 31. The commentary Givat Hamoreh was published anonymously alongside a medieval commentary on The Guide by Moses Narvoni. Maimon’s commentary covered only the fi rst part of the Guide. The work was published through the encouragement and tireless efforts of Isaac Euchel, who briefly managed the Berlin press Hanokh Na’arim. Euchel used his contacts in a variety of Jewish communities including Lvov, London, and Amsterdam to att ract advance subscribers to Maimon’s work. (See Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 298 and note14; and Gideon Freudenthal and Sara Klein-Braslavy, “Solomon Maimon Reads Moses Maimonides,” 581.)

326

Notes

32 . Mose Majemonide, More Nebuchim, introduction by the author of Givat Hamoreh, unnumbered page. The question of Maimon’s true motives is explored in Freudenthal and Klein-Braslavy, “Solomon Maimon Reads Moses Maimonides,” 581–613. The authors conclude that although Maimon was certainly motivated by a desire to update the science mentioned in the Guide, he was equally dedicated to providing an exacting commentary. 33. For example, in his introductory essay, Maimon wrote how Copernicus tackled the question of why objects fall toward the Earth if the Earth was not, after all, the center of the universe: Copernicus addressed this and stated: “Gravity is not a force unique to the Earth; it is found in the Sun, the Moon, and all the stars. By which I mean that they attract one another through gravity, and this is the reason that they remain spherical, even as they change their direction in orbit” (Majemonide, More Nebuchim, unpaginated introductory essay, “The History of Philosophy”).

34. 35. 36 . 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42 .

43.

44.

45.

Th is is, more or less, a direct quote from the fi rst book of De Revolutionibus, where Copernicus suggests that gravity causes other planets to remain spherical: “Quam affectionem credibile est etiam Soli, Lunae, caeterisque errantium fulgoribus inesse, ut eius efficacia in ea qua se repraesentant rotunditate permaneant, quae nihilominus multis modis suos efficiunt circuitus” (De Revolutionibus, 7a). Moses Maimonides and Shlomo Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed, vol. 1, 184–185. Majemonide, More Nebuchim, 76a. Maimonides and Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed, 192, and Majemonide, More Nebuchim, 80b. Maimonides and Pines, The Guide of the Perplexed, 273. Majemonide, More Nebuchim, 97a. Th is changed when the work was republished in a second edition in 1828. The Latin page was no longer used. Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization, 298–299. Maimon, Solomon Maimon: An Autobiography, 269. Jeff rey Shandler, Awakening Lives, 119. I am grateful to David Ruderman for bringing this source to my attention. There are dozens of similar accounts of the influence of this work. For example, Isaac Bashevis Singer recalled that not only did he read Sefer Haberit as a child, but that his mother was also an avid reader of the work. See Isaac Bashevis Singer, Love and Exile, 8, 23. I bought a modern edition of Sefer Haberit in a small bookshop in Me’ah She’arim, the ultra-Orthodox section of Jerusalem. I asked the owner if he might perhaps have a copy of the work. Without moving from his position behind the counter, he reached behind his shoulder and handed me a copy that had been published in Jerusalem in 1990. I not only appreciated the clear type and crisp pages of this modern edition, but I was also struck by the ease with which it had been obtained. As we shall see, Sefer Haberit is also a kabbalistic work, but in the second edition, Hurwitz himself defi ned his book as an encyclopedia: “It is known that the word berit means connecting [kesher], and it is always translated that way in the German Bible. For this reason all the German intelligentsia and Berlin intellectuals have called this book an encyclopedia. Th at is to say, a collection [sefer ma’asaf] of all natural knowledge and understanding, teaching and divine matters that a person might desire to know, on any subject or any aspect at all, virtually all of it is contained in this book.” (See the introduction to the second edition, reprinted in Pinhas Eliyahu Hurwitz, Sefer Haberit Hashalem, 18.)In the fi rst edition, Hurwitz gave another reason for the book’s title, based on a verse in Exodus (24:7): “And [Moses] took the Sefer Haberit and read it to the people. And they said ‘we will do and we will listen to all that God has spoken” (introduction to the fi rst edition of Pinhas Hurwitz, Sefer Haberit, 1b). The 1990 edition contains several inaccuracies that should be pointed out. It claims to be based on the corrected second edition of the work published in 1818 when, in fact, the corrected second edition appeared in 1807. The editor (who is anonymous)

Notes

46 .

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52 .

53.

327

states on the opening page that that this modern edition is “complete and corrected.” Remarkably though, the editor is inconsistent in his use of the list of corrections that Hurwitz himself appended to the end of the fi rst edition. (Th is list runs to seven pages and follows page sixty-six, the last numbered page of the fi rst edition.) For example, at the beginning of book one, #4:1, Hurwitz amends the text to include a mention of Copernicus. The amended text is not included in the 1990 edition. Noah Rosenbloom, “Ha’inzyclopediah Ha’ivrit Harishonah; Mahbarah Vehishtalshelusha.” Much of the biographical information below about Hurwitz is based on Rosenbloom’s paper. Hurwitz was born on April 23, 1765 (2nd Iyyar 5525). Others state he was born in Lvov, Poland (see The Bibliography of the Hebrew Book 1470 –1960, Jerusalem: EPI & The Institute for the Hebrew Biography, n.d.). For a general overview of Hurwitz and his contribution, see Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 6, 260–270. David Ruderman is to publish a book on Sefer Haberit that will correct some of Rosenbloom’s omissions and offer an expanded biographical portrait. Hurwitz copied many sections of Reshit Limmudim word-for-word without acknowledgment. See Resianne Fontaine, “Natural Science in Sefer Ha-Berit,” 161. Those approbations that are dated are from 1790. See pages 121–123. See chapter 6. Hart is discussed further on pages 142–143. Rosenbloom, “Ha’inzyclopediah Ha’ivrit Harishonah; Mahbarah Vehishtalshelusha,” 28. It is not clear why Hurwitz chose to hide his authorship, but he revealed his name in a chronogram at the start of the book. Immediately before the introduction, there is a cryptic single sentence, the last letters of the words of which spell the phrase “I am Pinhas Elijah ben Meir, from the town of Vilna.” (The page is not numbered in the 1797 fi rst edition.) The author left additional clues to his identity. After the introduction, there is a foreword that begins with the words: “Elijah opened and said” (fi rst edition, 6a), followed by the body of the book itself, which begins “R. Pinhas ben Ya’ir said… (9b). In this way, the author left his name—Pinhas Elijah—and hinted at his father’s name Me’ir (sounding rather like Yair). The second edition of the book was not anonymous. See the opening words to the introduction (fi ft h unnumbered page in the fi rst edition): The matter which propelled me to write, and the reasoning behind this entire work called Sefer Haberit is that I have seen a small work of much value to sanctify the Holy Name, [written] by the divine Rabbi Hayyim Vital . . . called Sha’arei Kedusha. It contains the true paths for a holy people such that any member of Israel can ascend to the level of speaking with the Divine Spirit, even in these times and outside of the Land [of Israel].

54. 55. 56 . 57.

58 .

Vital’s kabbalistic work remained in manuscript after his death in 1620, but was published in 1734 and then again in eight editions from 1742 through 1794. Th is points to the popularity of the work in the years immediately before Hurwitz published Sefer Haberit. Th is objection was raised in the second part of a review of Sefer Haberit published in Hame’assef in 1809 (136–141). See also Rosenbloom, “Ha’inzyclopediah Ha’ivrit Harishonah” 34–39, and Fontaine, “Natural Science in Sefer Ha-Berit,” 175–181. The size of the print run is mentioned in “Natural Science in Sefer Ha-Berit,” 177. 1807 edition, introduction. Reprinted in Hurwitz, Sefer Haberit Hashalem, 19. The two pirated editions of 1801 differ in typography, as well as the content of the last page. Levine also notes that it was only the fi rst volume that was illegally printed: “The fi rst part [of Sefer Haberit] was the main source of scientific knowledge among eastern European Jews during the nineteenth century. It proved so popular that it was published as a separate volume to the chagrin of the author (Hillel Levine, “ ‘Dwarfs on the Shoulders of Giants’ a Case Study,” 66). Editions of Sefer Haberit were published in 1797, 1801 (twice, as bootlegged printings), 1807, 1818, 1859, 1865, 1869, 1870, 1872, 1873, 1876, 1880, 1887, 1889, 1893,

328

59. 60.

61. 62 . 63. 64. 65. 66 . 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72 . 73. 74.

75.

76 .

Notes 1897, 1900, 1904, 1911, 1913 (by three different publishers), 1920, 1960, and 1990. In addition, it was published in Yiddish in 1898, 1929, and 1969, and in Ladino in 1847. Further evidence of the success of Sefer Haberit is the fact that it engendered a book writt en in response. Ka’or Nogah (As the Light of the Sun) was published in Breslau in 1816 by Moses b. Eliezer Koerner, and it contained a critique of some of Hurwitz’s kabbalistic thoughts. I am grateful to Dan Rabinowitz for bringing this book to my att ention. The influence of Sefer Haberit will be addressed in David Ruderman’s forthcoming book. Sefer Haberit, part one, #2:2 (1990 ed., 37). See also part one, #20:24, where Hurwitz criticized those who rejected religious belief in favor of the scientific method (1990 ed., 357). Hurwitz was not entirely consistent here. He expressed his belief in the correctness of the sages in numerous passages, and yet also explained that prayers suggesting that the Sun moves through a heavenly window should not be taken literally: “. . . The Merciful One desires the heart; so this prayer was not written only for the wise and intelligent— who are the minority. Rather it was written for everyone so that it might be found on the lips of all, and the simple constitute the majority. Th is is the reason the prayer was written according to their [simple] thoughts—even if it is not this way in reality (Sefer Haberit, part one, #4:9, 1990 ed., 69). Sefer Haberit, part one, #10:15 (1990 ed., 199). Sefer Haberit, part one, #20:25 (1990 ed., 360, 364). Sefer Haberit, part one, #20:26 (1990 ed., 364). The declaration that the Earth is stationary is found in Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8 (1990 ed., 154). On how the Copernican model simplified the laws of the new Moon (Kiddush Hahodesh), see Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8 (1990 ed., 155). Sefer Haberit, part one, #4:9 (1990 ed., 67). Hurwitz maintained the classic belief that these four elements make up all matter. Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8 (1990 ed., 149–150). Th is is a slightly different version of a similar argument offered by Tuviah Cohen in Ma’aseh Tuviah (see page 94). See Genesis 27:28. Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8 (1990 ed., 151–152). Zohar on Vayikrah, 10a. Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8 (1990 ed., 52). See page 54. Hurwitz had demonstrated the existence of this force by swinging a water-fi lled bucket in a vertical loop: “. . . not one drop of water fell out, for the circular motion is powerful enough to keep [the water] in place” (Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8, 1990 ed., 153– 154). Hurwitz’s source for the demonstration of gravity was the French scientist Pierre Bouguer (1698–1758). Bouguer undertook a ten-year expedition in 1735 to Peru, where he demonstrated that gravity varies with elevation and latitude. Hurwitz detailed this in Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:7 (1990 ed., 147). See Noah Rosenbloom, “Diyunim Cosmologiyim Ve’astronomiyim Besefer Haberit,” 9 and note 34. Rosenbloom believed it unlikely that Hurwitz had read Aristotle in the original; Hurwitz would have read of this principle in a contemporary work, or perhaps even in Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed. “Why would he [God] place the force of gravity for no reason, since the Earth was moving? Th is is proof that the Creator placed the world in the center of the orbits of the constellations, stationary and unmoving, and in order to keep objects from falling off of the Earth, The Holy One, Blessed Be He created the force of gravity . . .” (Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8, 1990 ed., 154). Hurwitz expanded on this principle to prove that the Moon’s gravity was not the cause of the tides. Because the moon had been shown to rotate, it must exert a force, just as a rotating bucket exerts a force on the water it contains. By the principle of the elimination of unnecessary forces, the Moon therefore could not also exert a gravitational force and so could not cause the tides. Hurwitz explained that the tides were actually caused when the Moon pushed the Earth’s atmosphere down and

Notes

329

exerted a force that caused the tides. Hurwitz was in good company; Galileo famously could also not conceive of the Moon causing the tides. Instead, for Galileo it was the movement of the Earth itself that caused the tides, rather like water sloshing about in a moving bucket. 77. See Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8 (1990 ed., 153–154): . . . who knows if at a later time or in one of the many future generations that will come after ours, his theory may be happily accepted. Then it may become permanently accepted, for this is the way among the Gentiles that some opinions have their time. At times they are rejected and at other times they are accepted. Even for a theory that seems rejected from its very inception . . . eventually a person may arise who adopts the theory and succeeds in spreading it across the entire world. Such a person would be very successful and become famous throughout the world, and every one would listen to him. . . . 78. Sefer Haberit, part one, #3:3 (1990 ed., 50). 79. Jean D’Espagnet, Enchyridion Physicae Restitutae; or the Summary of Physics Recovered, 162, and John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifest in the Works of Creation, 127. Both are cited in Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, 181– 182. Harrison (177–184) provides a detailed discussion about the changing notions of the anthropocentric universe. 80. TB. Hagigah 12b. The model of the seven layers of the sky was clearly very important to Hurwitz, who mentioned it on the opening page of Sefer Haberit immediately after the title of the book: “Sefer Haberit: which discusses the seven layers of the sky, the ten spheres, and the stars.. . .” 81. Eccles. 1:9. 82 . Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8 (1990 ed., 156–157). 83. Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8 (1990 ed., 156–157). 84. See Ezek . 3:13 85. Sefer Haberit, 1990 ed., 156. 86. Ibid. 87. Th is is discussed in detail in the previous chapter. 88 . Among those who consider Hurwitz to have been singularly anti-Copernican are Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 348; Rappaport, “Veha’aertz Le’olam Omedet. Yahasam Shel Gedolei Yisrael Leshitat Copernicos,” 210; the anonymous reviewer of Sefer Haberit in Hame’assef, 68–75, 136–171; Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, 261; and the anonymous author of the introduction to the 1990 edition of Sefer Haberit, 16. For an opposing view that correctly sees the question as more nuanced, see Ira Robinson, “Kabbala and Science in “Sefer Ha-Berit,” 278–279. Rabbi Chaim Kanyevski (b. 1928), a leading Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) rabbinic figure, also understood Sefer Haberit to be uniformly anti-Copernican. In a brief undated and unpublished responsum written to Rabbi Hayyim Rapport of London, Kanyevski wrote: “In the Sefer Haberit it is written that it [the heliocentric model] is heresy, but our great Rabbis of blessed memory have stated that this is not necessarily the case, for the Torah speaks in the language of man, according to the subject” (Hayyim Rapport, personal communication of April 27, 2009). However, nowhere in Sefer Haberit does Hurwitz refer to the heliocentric system as heresy, and Rabbi Kanyevski ignored the passage in which Hurwitz wrote precisely the opposite: that if a person believed in the heliocentric model, he should not “be branded or suspected of heresy” (see note 72 above). I thank Rabbi Rapport for sharing this correspondence with me.

Chapter 8, The Eighteenth Century: Jews and Copernicus in the Newtonian Era, Pages 144–167 1. John Milton, Paradise Lost, book VIII, lines 122–130. As Grant McColley noted, Milton was not convinced by the Copernican argument, but “accepted as much of the new astronomical thought as it was possible to accept and, at the same time, retain a geocentric cosmos” (Grant McColley, “The Astronomy of ‘Paradise Lost,’ ” 245).

330

Notes

2 . John Milton, Paradise Lost, book VIII, lines 167–168. 3. John Russell, “The Copernican System in Great Britain,” in The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory; Proceedings of a Symposium, 216–227. Dorothy Stimson, The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory, 91. For the history of the reception of Copernicanism in Poland, see Barbara Bienkowska, “From Negation to Acceptance,” in The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory; Proceedings of a Symposium, 79–116. On the reception in Hungary, see Jolan Zemplen, “The Reception of Copernicanism in Hungary,” in The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory; Proceedings of a Symposium, 311–356. 4. Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, with a commentary by Thomas Le Suer and Francis Jacquier (Geneva: Barrillot and Filii, 1739–1742). The translation is from the Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diff usion of Useful Knowledge (London: Charles Knight & Co 1839), vol. 15, 455. 5. For a detailed discussion, see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 138–153. 6 . Ibid., 142. 7. See the frontispiece of Matteh Dan by Leib ben Shmuel Oppenheim. The printer of Sefer Evronot was the same Bonaventura de Launoy and this printer published at least eight books in Offenbach from the years 1709 to 1723. Of those I have been able to examine, four contain the geocentric frontispiece. 8. Abraham bar Hiyyah, Zurat Ha’aretz . 9. The Sphere was an early medieval work written by Johannes de Sacrobosco (d. circa 1256). It described the Ptolemaic universe and had been translated into Hebrew by Solomon ben Abraham Avigdor in 1399. 10. The full title of the book, published in Hannover in 1760, is Neue compendiose Allgemeine Cours und Weshsel-Taflen, bestehend aus 26 kleinen Taflen vermittels welchen der Unterschied zwischen allerley Munzarten sowohl de rein auslandischen durch ganz Euorpa blos durcheine klein Addition oder Subtraction, ohne alle ubrigen Rechnungen in Procenten und auch stuckweice kann bestimmt werder (A New Compendium of General Rates of Exchange and Exchange Tables, consisting of 26 small tables permitt ing exchange between all sorts of different kinds of coins from foreign lands as well as all of Europe through small addition or subtraction, without the usual calculations in percents that can be applied piece by piece). 11. Much of the information cited is found in a comprehensive article by Steven and Henry Schwarzschild, “Two Lives in the Jewish Fruhaufk larung.” There is a brief biography of Levi in Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. VI, 243–244, and Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 41–42. 12 . See Schwarzschild and Schwarzschild, “Two Lives in the Jewish Fruhaufk larung,” 231, and the German-language references they cite there. Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 41, states that Levi lived in Leibniz’s home for six years. See also Isidore Singer,“Levi, Raphael,” The Jewish Encyclopedia (available at htt p://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/ view.jsp?artid=264&letter=L&search=levi,%20raphael, accessed Sept. 7, 2010). 13. Shimon Bollag, “Mathematics,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, eds. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, second ed., vol. 13 (Detroit, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 676. In 1872, Moshe Frankfurter of Hamburg (writing under the pseudonym Moses Mendelsohn) published an ethical work called Pnei Tevel that also included brief biographies of rabbis who had straddled the worlds of Torah scholarship and secular knowledge. His description of Raphael Levi included a third version of the story of Levi’s friendship with Leibniz. Levi was employed by the wealthy Oppenheim family as a sort of bookkeeper, and while there, his employer noted his exceptional talents: At that time Leibniz, the famous philosopher and astronomer was living in Hannover. Oppenheim took Raphael and presented him to this wise person. Oppenheim asked him to have mercy on the boy to whom God had given a wise and discerning mind. “Why should he waste his time in my house dealing with material matters? It is better for you to have pity for him and and let him benefit from your instruction in astronomy and mathematics. But alas, the boy is poor and cannot pay for his tuition.”

Notes

331

Leibniz interviewed Raphael and agreed with Oppenheim’s assessment. There then followed a bizzare negotiation between Oppenheim and Leibiniz, in which the philosopher made an opening bid: “If he does not have the means to pay, open up your own hands—for you are very wealthy; pay me two thousand gulden a year and I will teach him.” [Oppenheim] replied: “I will give you a thousand gulden per year.” [Leibniz] anwered: “No, I want two thousand.” The two argued about the money, until Leibniz said, “you are making a mockery of this; I will teach him and he can board in my house, all for free. I will take responsibility for him.” Raphael lived in Leibniz’s home for three years, where [Leibniz] taught him all manner of wisdom, even feeding him bread in keeping with Jewish law (Moses Mendelsohn, Pnei Tevel, 247). 14. Schwarzschild and Schwarzschild, “Two Lives in the Jewish Fruhaufk larung,” 240. 15. Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, 243, note 15. Schwarzschild and Schwarzschild, “Two Lives in the Jewish Fruhaufk larung,” 241, note that this story “has all the earmarks of a moral fable.” 16 . Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography. Levi is also not mentioned in the Cambridge Companion to Leibniz , or in any other of the several biographies of Leibniz that I consulted. 17. See ibid., 554. Antognazza notes that the details surrounding the death and funeral of Leibniz “seem to be devoid of foundation in a reliable source.” I have yet to fi nd any contemporary source, however unreliable, that places Levi at the funeral. For a detailed description of the death and burial of Leibniz, see Thomas Sonar, “Some Differentials on Gott fried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Death.” 18. I am grateful to Prof. Christoph Schulte of The Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam for providing me with these details. As Prof. Schulte noted in his e-mail to me, at least half of Leibniz’s correspondence has not yet been published, so we do not know for certain whether Levi is mentioned by Leibniz in these letters. For the influence of Jewish ideas on Leibniz, see Daniel Cook, Hartmut Rudolf, and Christoph Schulte, eds., Leibniz und das Judentum, and Lenn Goodman, “Maimonides and Leibniz.” 19. See Schwarzschild and Schwarzschild, “Two Lives in the Jewish Fruhaufk larung,” 255–256, and the references cited there. The story of how the problem was solved is recorded in Dava Sobel’s best-selling work Longitude. 20. Raphael Halevi, Luhot Ha’ibbur. Note that in Hebrew, the author’s last name is Halevi, but we are following the common convention of dropping the defi nite article and calling him simply Levi. 21. My own copy has the author’s autograph inserted in the correct place, but two other copies I inspected lack this autograph. In her excellent book on the role of the Jewish calendar in European Jewish life, Prof. Elisheva Carlebach wrote that Hannover signed every copy “after he had personally inspected it: in this way, he indicated that each copy of the printed tables had met his high standards” (Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time, 59). Th is is true, but there is more. Hannover clearly stated that the reason for his signing each and every copy was to authenticate it in an effort to prevent others from stealing his work. Th is is hardly surprising, given the theft of his ideas by his student Moses ben Yekutiel. 22 . Raphael Halevi, Luhot Ha’ibbur. The work was reprinted at the back of Meir Firdah’s commentary on Maimonides’ Laws of the New Month called Sefer Yirat Shamayim. 23. Raphael Halevi, Tekhunot Hashamayim. 24. The verse is from Exodus 38:21: “And Moses blessed them” indicating the Hebrew year 5496 (1796). For more on the genre of chronograms, see chapter 5 of Marvin J. Heller, Studies in the Making of the Early Hebrew Book . There are other clues that the author was not really Raphael Levi. The main letter of approbation is written to Moses and not to Levi, and there is a small paragraph at the foot of the page of approbations that outlines the provenance of the work. Meir Ostrosh of Altona fi rst owned the work. On his death,

332

25. 26 .

27. 28 .

29. 30. 31. 32 . 33. 34. 35. 36 . 37. 38.

39.

40. 41.

Notes his estate sold it to Zevi Hirsch Dahn of Amsterdam in 1749. Moses of Tykocin was a student of Dahn’s and bought the manuscript from him. Although the book was published in 1756, the manuscript was completed in 1734. Tekhunot Hashamayim was reprinted in Brooklyn in 1996 by descendents of Moses of Tykocin. The reprint includes a picture of Tykocin’s grave in Zefat, Israel. Th is reprint gives Moses’ full name as Yoseph Mosheh ben Yekutiel Zalman Eisenberg, who served as chief of the Bet Din in Regitshein. He is described as a kabbalist and student of Isaac Luria and the author of several books, none of which I have been able to confi rm. A new edition of Tekhunot Hashamayim with a much clearer typeface appears in vol. 3 of Po’al Hashem. Halevi, Luhot Ha’ibbur, unnumbered verso of title page. Halevi, Tekhunot Hashamayim, 32a. Neher comments that “. . . in the name of reason and of certain elementary didactic principles, Halevi leads his reader up to the great open doors of the new system, inviting him in to admire its major lines, without, however, taking the reader into it more deeply” (André Neher, “Copernicus in the Hebraic Literature,” 222. C. von Rommel, ed., Leibniz Und Landgraf Ernst Von Hessen-Rheinfels (Frankfurt: 1847) vol. 2, 200–202, as cited in Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 102. In addition to his work on astronomy and the Jewish calendar, Levi was also the author of an eschatological text called Heshbon Hakez Vehatehiya (A Calculation of the End of Times and the Resurrection). In it, he determined that the Messiah would arrive in 1783, and the resurrection of the dead would follow exactly 420 years later, in 2203. The work was never published. Levi’s combined rationalism and interest in the end of days was not unusual. Isaac Newton interpreted the prophecies of Daniel and the revelation of John in his Observations upon Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John in Two Parts , which was published in 1733, six years aft er his death. For an analysis of Levi’s eschatalogical work, see Alexander Ibn-Chen, “On Two Messianic Texts,” 87–97. Shimon Waltch, Na’avah Kodesh. Waltch was from Braunschweig in northern Germany. Ibid., fi rst page of the unnumbered introduction. Ibid., 11a. For other examples of the geocentric model, in Na’avah Kodesh see 2b, 3a, 23b, and 38b. See ibid., 42b. Logarithms began to be used around 1614 with the publication of John Napier’s work Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis. See pages 126–127. Hurwitz is discussed in Ben Zion Katz, Rabbanut, Hasidut, Vehaskalah, 122–128; Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature VI, 250–256; and Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 50–58, 70–71, and 345–347. See Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, 252. Judah Hurwitz, Amudei Bet Yehudah, 35a. Ibid. As Feiner notes, Amudei Bet Yehudah was a very complex work that was easily misunderstood. In fact, Hurwitz was later accused of introducing heretical ideas and responding by inserting an apology and explanation of his motivation into all the unsold copies of his book. See Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, 58. The literature on Eybeschütz and Emden is vast. By way of an introduction to Eybeschütz, see Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. VI, 191–204, and the many works of Shnayer Leiman. For an overview of Emden’s life, see, for example, Jacob J. Schacter, “History and Memory of Self: The Autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden.” The best history of Emden is Jacob J. Schacter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden: Life and Major Works.” For a careful examination of the history and causes of the controversy, see Schacter “Rabbi Jacob Emden: Life and Major Works,” 370–499. Many of these sermons were published posthumously in Ya’arot Devash (Beehives of Honey), fi rst published in 1779. Th is work remains widely read and has been reprinted in over forty editions.

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42 . See Jonathan Eybeschütz, Ya’arot Devash, 129. (All further citations to this work refer to this edition, which is based on the fi rst edition of the work published in Karlsruhe in 1797.) For a detailed discussion of Delmedigo, see above, chapter 4. 43. Ibid., 123, 126. 44. Ibid., 127. It is also instructive to note that a famous contemporary, Elijah ben Shlomoh Zalman, known as the Vilna Gaon (1720–1799), ignored the entire debate about Copernicanism. His writings outlined a descripton of the universe that was a mixture of Ptolemaic and talmudic astronomy. See, for example, Elijah ben Shlomoh Zalman, Aderet Eliahu, 8, 21. 45. Schacter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden: Life and Major Works,” 391. Isaac Bashevis Singer noted that his father “thought the world of Rabbi Jonathan Eibeshutz. . . . Rabbi Jonathan’s book Tablet of the Testimony almost always lay on the desk in my father’s study.” See Isaac Bashevis Singer, Love and Exile, 96. 46 . Th is evolution of his thought is not, however, noted by Schacter, who records only Emden’s acceptance of Copernicus (see Schacter, 532). 47. See Jacob Emden, Mor Uketziah, II, 97a, where Emden dates his work. 48. Ibid., 2b. 49. Because the passage in question is found at the very beginning of the work, it is likely (although not certain) that it was written close to the starting date of 1716. 50. Jacob Emden, Amudai Shamayim (I), 196b. Cited in Schacter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden: Life and Major Works,” 297. Th is passage was not reprinted in the 1904 edition of the siddur. 51. Jacob Emden, Siddur Bet Ya’akov, 447. The 1904 edition of the siddur became the most popular, but it contains some passages not written by Emden and also deleted some of his original material. Th is passage can be found in the original siddur (I:224b). For a detailed history of the siddur and an analysis of its contents, see Schacter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden: Life and Major Works,” chapter IV. 52 . Jacob Emden, She’elot Yavetz , 1:41, Cited in Schacter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden: Life and Major Works,” 685–686. Emden’s approach to secular studies and his relationship to Mendelssohn and the Haskalah movement are thoroughly discussed in ibid., chapters VI and VII. Schacter demonstrates that Emden’s respect for the sciences in general, and medicine in particular, ended when Emden felt there was a confl ict. In those cases, science must defer to rabbinic authority. 53. Emden, Amudai Shamayim (I), 86a. 54. Emden also described the standard Ptolemaic system in Migdal Oz, Ma’amr Otzar Hatov, Mosad Gimmel, 47–48. 55. Emden dated the work to the year [5]501 (1741) on the title page, but the dates of the two approbations are ten years later in [5]511 (1751), so the dates of composition of the work are sometime between these two dates. The dates of the approbations make clear that the work could not have been printed before 1751. In his Luah Eres, part I (77a), published in Altona in 1769, Emden references Etz Avot and states that it was published in [5]512 (1751–1752). 56 . Lit., “my kidneys are far removed.” 57. See Jacob Emden, Ez Avot, 32b. Emden’s language here is particularly challenging to translate. 58. On this legend, see Abraham Melamed, “A Legitimating Myth: Ashkenazic Th inkers.” Melamed expanded on this theme in his recent excellent Hebrew work Rekohot Vetabahot (the Myth of the Jewish Origins of Science and Philosophy). 59. Emden, Ez Avot, 33a. 60. Emden’s position that astronomy cannot teach anything about the real nature of the universe has an interesting historical precedent. As will be recalled from chapter 1, the Nuremberg theologian Andreas Osiander had written and inserted an anonymous preface to Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus. Osiander had been given the responsibility to oversee the publication of the work, and thought that it was less likely to encounter opposition if it were read as a hypothesis, rather than as a description of reality. Osiander, like Emden after him, believed that astronomy had a limited epistemic capacity; truth

334

61. 62 .

63. 64. 65. 66 . 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72 . 73.

Notes could only be found within scripture. Astronomy was useful only insofar as it allowed accurate calculations to be made so that the calendar was accurate, and it really did not matter if the models that it used reflected reality. As the historian of science Robert Westman described him, Osiander viewed astonomy as “a discipline fundamentally incapable of knowing anything with certainty.” Robert S. Westman, The Copernican Question, 130. There is a large body of literature on Sofer. For an overview of his life and intellectual approach, see Jacob Katz, “Towards a Biography of the Hatam Sofer,” and Marc B. Shapiro, “Aspects of Rabbi Moses Sofer’s Intellectual Profi le.” It is tempting to suggest that it was the influence of Hurwitz that fi rst aligned Sofer with those who were critical of the Haskalah, but this suggestion would need support. Furthermore, and as we shall see later, Hurwitz had another student who took quite a different path from Sofer and dedicated much of his life to encouraging rabbis to study secular subjects along with their traditional Jewish texts. See for, example, Teshuvot Hatam Sofer (many editions) Orah Hayyim, 328, 148. In Yoreh De’ah (2), #19, he wrote, “All that is new is forbidden from the Torah in any place, and that which is tried and tested is better.” See Aaron M. Schrieiber, “The Hatam Sofer’s Nuanced Att itude Towards Secular Learning, Maskilim and Reformers,” 123–173. Shlomoh Sofer, Hut Hameshulash, 23b. Moses Sofer, Torat Mosheh, vol. 5, 16a. Hurwitz, Sefer Haberit, part one, #3:3 (1990 ed., 50.) Sofer, Kovez Teshvot, #26. The work also appears in Kuntrus Birkat Hahamah (An Essay on the Blessing for the Sun), written on the occasion of the completion of the twentyeight-year solar cycle. Sofer lived through two such cycles, which occurred in 1785 and 1813. Kuntrus Birkat Hahamah was copied from a manuscript by Shimon Sofer and reprinted in Po’al Hashem, vol. 3. However, there is no title page or other clue to date the work. For another contemporary work that cited the midrash quoted by both Emden and Sofer, see Moses Kunitz, Sefer Ha’oyen, 71a. For a general discussion, see Anton Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy, 261–275. Th is suggestion requires further investigation, but Newton seems to be the scholar most fitting Sofer’s description. Galileo Galilei, History and demonstration concerning sunspots and their phenomena, translated by Stillman Drake, in Discoveries and opinions of Galileo. Galileo’s methods are analyzed in Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information, 18–21. Moses Sofer was not alone in his uncertainty. One of his contemporaries, Dov Baer Gott leib (c.1740–1796) wrote a work called Yad Haketanah (Th e Small Yad) based on Maimonides’ famous code of Jewish Law. (The work was writt en anonymously, but the author’s identity was widely known.) In a section that discussed the topic of uncertainty, Gott leib outlined several theories about the construction of the universe and described the “most profound” work of Copernicus. He wrote that while there was an unprecedented ability of astronomers to measure and predict the position of the stars and planets, “yet they remain a puzzle, as each person tries to gather support and evidence for his particular theory . . . it is beyond human ability to understand any issue completely and with certainty” (Dov Baer Gott leib, Yad Haketanah , 85a–b). Israel David Schlesinger, Yafe’ah Leketz , title page. Schlesinger, Yafe’ah Leketz , vol. 1, 8a, 8b (emphasis added). Schlesinger had adopted this position in an earlier work called Hazon Lemo’ed on the Jewish calendar. In that work, he outlined in some detail the Copernican model and admitted that it was in fact an intellectually compelling theory: “But one who believes in God and His Torah, and believes that God revealed himself on Sinai at the giving of the Torah will not have any problem understanding that the Sun—one of God’s creations—would serve the Earth, on which live those who study this Torah” (14a, 14b). See Israel David Schlesinger, Hazon Lemo’ed, especially 14a, 14b, 62a, 64a, and 65a. Of note, Abraham Sofer, son of Moses Sofer, wrote one of the five rabbinic approbations to the work. Careful reading of

Notes

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Hazon Lemo’ed suggests a more sympathetic understanding of the heliocentric model, even if it was ultimately rejected. 74. Eliezer Lipman Neusatz, May Menuhot. The discussion of the Copernican model is found on 36–39, from where all quotes are taken. 75. See the approbation of Abraham Sofer to Eliezer Lipman Neusatz, Betzir Eliezer. 76. Some authors intended to bring their works up to date with the new astronomy, but were not able to complete the task. For example, Elijah Hokheim (1740–1800) wrote a commentary on Maimonides’ Laws of the Sanctification of the New Month called Shevilei Derakia (The Paths of Heaven) that was published in 1784. In the book’s opening paragraph, he wrote the following: Since my main intention is to explain the words of Maimonides in his Laws of the Sanctification of the New Month I am not able to depart from his conception of the form of the universe and its construction. Neither can I address in any way the ideas of later commentators, even when I agree with them. Nevertheless it is my intention to write a second volume on algebra and Copernican astronomy, and there I will explain everything according to the findings of contemporary scholars (Elijah Hokheim, Shevilei Derakia, 1a). The promised second volume was never written.

Chapter 9, “I Have Written a Book For the Young People.” David Friesenhausen’s Mosdot Tevel, Pages 168–178 1. Joseph Steinhart, Zikhron Yosef, second page of the unnumbered introduction. Shmuel Glick noted that as a result of these criticisms, many copies of the book had this introduction torn out by angry members of the Hasidic movement (Shmuel Glick, Kuntrus Hateshuvot Hehadash, vol. 1, 325). 2 . Steinhart, pages 1–2 of the unnumbered introduction. Steinhart does seem to approve of a brief study of some of these subjects “in order to know how to answer those who question us,” but his overall approach is clear. 3. Meir Gilon, “R. David Friesenhausen between the Enlightenment and Hassidism,” 22–23. 4. Ibn-Pakuda, Hovot Halevavot, 161. Gilon (22) states that the work contains the “earliest unequivocal acceptance of the Copernican model” in Jewish thought, a claim that, by now, the reader will know to be very inaccurate. 5. Ibn-Pakuda, Hovot Halevavot, 161. 6. I am deeply indebted to Prof. Jerold Frakes of the University of Buffalo for these observations and for his translation of the Yiddish text. 7. Elmar Waibl and Philip Herdina, German Dictionary of Philosophical Terms, 72. Th is phrase would later be used by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. For more on the use of this phrase, see Samuel H. Bergman, The Philosophy of Solomon Maimon, 7–14. 8. Ibn-Pakuda, 161b. There is another reference to Copernicus: “Since then according to the opinion of Copernicus all bodies—indeed also even our Earth—move. Thus the universal craft sman must of necessity have set such things in motion” (Ibn-Pakuda, 165a). 9. It is likely that this is also the fi rst time that Copernicus is mentioned in Yiddish literature. There is surely more to the story of the intellectual relationship between this son of Freisenhausen’s teacher and Friesenhausen himself. 10. David Friesenhausen, Kelil Heshbon. The work is dedicated to Halberstat. Although a mathematical book, it has three rabbinical approbations, including one (perhaps obligatory) from Zevi Hirsch Levin, head of the Berlin Bet Din. A second edition was published posthumously in 1835 in Zholkva. Kelil Heshbon followed the general pattern of Hebrew works on mathematics in that it addressed religious questions. Another example was Na’avah Kodesh (1786), which we examined in the last chapter. It also contained sections on geometry, but it was essentially a religious text, being a commentary on Maimonides’ Laws of the Sanctification of the New Moon. Sefer Elim (which

336

11. 12 . 13.

14. 15.

16 .

17. 18.

19.

Notes we examined in detail in chapter 3) was published in 1629 and dealt with philosophy, science, and astronomy, in addition to mathematics. Later mathematical works such as Kaneh Hokhma (1829) also contained large sections devoted to religious questions or the explanation of Talmudic passages. One Hebrew work purely on mathematics that preceded Kelil Heshbon was Melekhet Mahashevet by Elijah ben Moses Gershon Zahlin, published in Berlin in 1765. Even that work, in which mathematical principles are taught in answers to general questions, opened with mathematical problems found in the Talmud. For more on Kelil Heshbon, see Abraham Tourgeman, “Matematika Ivrit Be’ivrit (Hebrew),” Alon le’Moreh Matematika (Aleh) 38 (2007). David Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 85b; and Gilon, 23–26. The town of Satoraljaujhely is called Ujhely or Ihel in Hebrew. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 77b–78a. After a long description of the way in which Teitelbaum produced amulets for the masses, Friesenhausen wrote, “I am concerned that such a person as this would be liable to the death penalty as a false prophet” (Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 79a). The phrase is biblical. See II Sam. 22:16 and Psalms 18:16. Euclid’s eleventh axiom is more commonly referred to as his fi ft h postulate. It states that, if a straight line intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, will meet on that side on which the angles sum to less than two right angles. In Kelil Heshbon, his earlier book on mathematics, Friesenhausen had committed to publishing a proof of this axiom in German, but he failed to do so. He therefore returned to this subject in Mosdot Tevel. After the publication of Mosdot Tevel, Friesenhausen retired from public activity and moved to Karlesburg, where he died in 1828. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 89a–90a. For an excellent analysis of Friesenhausen’s educational contributions, see Gilon, and Shnayer Z. Leiman, Rabbinic Responses to Modernity, vol. 5, 22–32. Leiman concludes that Friesenhausen “won no friends, influenced few people, and spent a lifetime as a wandering Jew who was almost denied his rightful place—at the very least as a footnote in Jewish history.” Indeed, Friesenhausen has been long overlooked; for example, he does not appear in either Israel Zinberg’s twelve-volume A History of Jewish Literature or Feiner’s more recent work The Jewish Enlightenment. He is ignored in Levine’s review of Jewish reactions to Copernicus, “Paradise Not Surrendered: Jewish Reactions to Copernicus,” and is mentioned only in two short sentences in a paper by Panitz, “New Heavens and a New Earth.” The Encylopedia Judaica mentions him only in passing (in an entry on mathematics), though he surely deserves his own entry. The Rabbiner Seminar f ü r das Orthodoxe Judenthum (known today as the Hildesheimer Rabbinical Seminary) was founded in 1873 and operated until 1938 when life in Berlin became intolerable for Jews. In June 2009, it ordained its fi rst graduates since closing. Friesenhausen obtained the approbation of Rabbi Meshulam Zalman Cohen of Fü rth in early 1798; it was printed on the fi rst page of the book. Cohen wrote that he had seen the manuscript called Mosdot Tevel, “which the author wrote to understand the Laws of the Sanctification of the New Month.” Th is misconception about the book’s content does not appear to have been the result of any duplicity on the part of Friesenhausen. Cohen wrote that he had not read it in any detail “because of my communal responsibilities and because I do not understand these subjects.” Mosdot Tevel contains forty-two pages in the section on astronomy, nine in the section on Euclid’s axiom, and twenty-seven in the fi nal section containing the author’s ethical will. The list included Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, whom we noted was intensely disliked by Friesenhausen (and was the object of a character assassination in the book), as well as Rabbi Moses Sofer. In addition, there were over seventy chief rabbis listed as subscribers. The list of subscribers leaves us with an important historical record of who was interested in obtaining a work that would address the Copernican model of the universe. It contains almost 160 towns and villages in which over 1,100 (and three women) had agreed to buy a copy of the book. Th is was a huge number, as will become apparent with some comparisons. Friesenhausen’s fi rst book listed just sixty-eight

Notes

20.

21. 22 . 23. 24 .

25.

26 . 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32 . 33. 34.

337

subscribers, and a work on the natural sciences called Limudei Hateva (a work that was also pro-Copernican), published in 1856 in Chernivtsi in the Ukraine, had only 450 subscribers drawn from thirty-seven towns and villages. Shevilei Derakia on mathematics and Ptolemaic astronomy, published in Prague in 1784, had ninety-four subscribers. Judging a book’s popularity by the number of those listed as its subscribers is not an exact science. Not all books listed those who had agreed in advance to buy a copy, and perhaps not all authors relied on subscriptions in order to raise enough money to begin printing. In addition, some subscribers bought more than one copy; Barukh Lindau undertook to buy no fewer that thirty-two copies of Friesenhausen’s fi rst book Kelil Heshbon (which appears to be somewhat of a record, and perhaps suggests that it was to be used as a school text). Some of those who subscribed did so on the condition of anonymity, and of course the author may have exaggerated the list in order to att ract readers. It is also possible that not all those who subscribed understood the exact content of the work they had paid for in advance, although there is no evidence that this was the case. The lengthy list of subscribers to Mosdot Tevel may be an indication of the author’s powers of persuasion and charisma, the nature of the subject matter, or some combination of both. See the mispaginated opening section of Mosdot Tevel entitled “An apology for my supporters,” where Friesenhausen described in great detail how these economic catastrophes occurred—and how he was not to blame for them. It is certainly possible that Friesenhausen’s description of his target audience was a post-hoc justification. However, there was no reason for him to have even raised the issue of the size of the print of the book were it not for the fact that it allowed him to reveal that his audience was a new generation of Jewish intellectuals. Henceforth, we will simply reference the section on astronomy in the book as Mosdot Tevel. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 37a. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 32b. By way of just a few examples: “The Creator, blessed be he, formed the Earth out of his kindness and his abundant goodness” (16b); “God has done great things . . .” (24b); “The Creator, blessed be he, made the heavens and all the stars, and the Earth, and formed them from nothing” (25b); “Any honest and sensitive person on the Earth cannot but give praise and thanks to his great name for the scope of his kindness” (35b); “We must thank God for the awesome size of his creation . . . and give him praise and honor with all of our strength” (41b); “The existence of life is palpable evidence of a creator, blessed be he above all else, and of his perfection (45b). See also the Shabbat zemirah (table song) he composed: 39a–40b, 41a, 42a, 43a, 43b, 44a–b, 45a–b, 46a–b, 48a–b, and the lengthy poem on God’s wonders through Jewish history on 48b–56b. The fact is found on 43a, where Friesenhausen described the delay in the calculated times of the eclipse of the moons of Jupiter. Th is delay was due to the increased time it took light from the moons to reach the Earth when the Earth is at its farthest point from Jupiter. Th is observation was also among the earliest proofs that the speed of light could not be infi nite. See Anton Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy, 256. See pages 119–121. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 18b–19a. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 19a. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 23b. Ibid. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 45a. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 45b. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, 1–10. See Pannekoek, 352. The notion that asteroids may be mistaken for planets is of course well known to any contemporary reader; in August 2006, Pluto, formerly the outermost planet in the solar system, was downgraded and recategorized as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union.

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Notes

35. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel , 31a, 32a–b, and 33a. The kilometer is mentioned on 34a. In the discussion of Halley’s Comet, Friesenhausen’s date of its appearance in 1749 and calculated reappearance in 1824 is incorrect. The comet actually appeared in 1759 and 1835. 36. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 37a. Th is notion was somewhat radical within the JudeoChristian weltanschauung. In 1794, Thomas Paine rejected the possibility of life on other planets in his Age of Reason, a work that was fi rst published only a few years before Friesenhausen composed Mosdot Tevel: Though it is not a direct article of the Christian system, that this world that we inhabit, is the whole of the habitable creation, yet it is so worked up therewith, from what is called the Mosaic account of the Creation, the story of Eve and the apple, and the counterpart of that story, the death of the son of God, that to believe otherwise, that is, to believe that God created a plurality of worlds, at least as numerous as what we call stars, renders the Christian system of faith at once little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air. The two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind; and he who thinks that he believes both, has thought but little of either (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Part One, 53). 37. For an early report, see, for example, John Noble Wilford, “Two Sightings of Planet Orbiting a Sunlike Star Challenge Notions Th at Earth Is Unique,” New York Times, Oct. 20, 1995, Section A, 21. Since then, hundreds of extrasolar planets have been discovered. In February 2011, scientists working on the Kepler telescope reported that they had identified a further 1,235 possible planets that may be orbiting other stars. Seehtt p://kepler.nasa.gov/news/nasakeplernews/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews &NewsID=98 (accessed Sept. 22, 2011). 38. Dava Sobel, The Planets, 161–176. The song is found on 39a–40b of Mosdot Tevel. The solar system has also inspired more recent music. For example, Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (Dream), published posthumously in 1634, was the inspiration for a 1983 album by Mannheim Steamroller called Fresh Aire V. 39. The Hebrew text calls Uranus simply “The Eighth,” a reference to its position. In Mosdot Tevel (29b), Friesenhausen explained that he categorized Ceres and Pallas (as well as two other newly seen planet-like objects) together as one “for they all lie at almost the same distance from the Sun, and they are much smaller compared to the other planets . . . perhaps long ago they were one single planet, that split into four parts at the will of their maker. . . .” Hence Uranus, discovered in 1781, is called “The Eighth.” 40. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 39b. 41. See pages 141 and 215. 42 . Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 43b. 43. Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 2, 7, emphasis added. 44. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel , 45b. Friesenhausen is referencing a homiletic commentary of Rashi on the very fi rst verse of the Bible, in which two midrashim are combined: “In the beginning (be’reshit) God created the heaven and the Earth (Genesis 1:1). . . . God created the world for the sake of the Torah which is called “The beginning (reshit) of His way” (Prov. 8:22) and for the sake of Israel who are called “The beginning (reshit) of His increase” (Jer. 2:3).” Since this is part of the commentary on the fi rst verse of the Bible, it is among the best known of Rashi’s exegetical statements. Th is fact was not lost on Friesenhausen who clearly understood how it could be used to support the notion that all of creation existed to serve mankind. It is for this reason that he offered his own, different account of Rashi’s meaning. 45. Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel , 48b

Chapter 10, The Nineteenth Century: Copernicus without Hesitation, Pages 179–199 1. For a detailed history and evaluation of the Settele event, see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 193–221, from where this information is drawn.

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2 . Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, 193. 3. Bryson, 123. See also Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 172–174, where he analyzes the increased rates of literacy and book production that began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 4. Copernicus, De Revolutionibus I, 10. 5. Th is was the remark of the Society’s President John Herschel, cited by Anton Pannekoek in A History of Astronomy, 343. Of course, the phenomenon of parallax does not prove (in a mathematical sense) that the Earth is moving, but the only alternative explanation is that each and every object in the sky revolves around the Earth. “The phenomenon of annual stellar parallax, established (latterly with the aid of photography) for hundreds of stars, constitutes a classic proof of the Earth’s orbital motion; the only alternative hypothesis would involve the revolution of the stars themselves in annual orbits in phase with the sun” (Angus Armitage, Copernicus and Modern Astronomy, 217–218). 6 . Most of the major museums of science have a working model of Foucault’s pendulum. The Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., housed a seventyone foot pendulum, under which the Earth moves 226 degrees in twenty-four hours. It was removed in 1998 to make room for the Star Spangled Banner Preservation Project. A larger model can be found in the lobby of the United Nations General Assembly Building in New York. Other locations include the Science Museum in London, the Czech Technical University in Prague, the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, the National Natural History and Science Museum in Lisbon, the Technical Museum in Stockholm, the National Science Museum in Tokyo, and dozens of others. In 2001, a working Foucault pendulum was built at the South Pole (see htt p://www.phys-astro. sonoma.edu/graduates/baker/southpolefoucault.html). Sadly, in 2010, the cable supporting the original pendulum at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris snapped, sending the brass bob smashing to the ground and irreparably damaging it. 7. Th is was part of his Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Nieuwe bewijzen voor de aswenteling der aarde” (New proofs of the rotation of the Earth). 8. Although Foucault did not actually prove that the Earth moves around the Sun, his experiment is considered to be the fi rst to demonstrate that the Earth moves. See Amir D. Aczel, Pendulum: Léon Foucault and the Triumph of Science, and William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, 101–103. Th is is not quite the full story because observations made in the early seventeenth century had suggested that the Earth was moving, although a geocentrist could explain these same observations in a quite different manner. For example, it was shown that the meridian line in the Church of San Petronio in Bologna had shifted in relation to the Church. “An Earth-centered person would think that the Earth’s axis had held steady and that the direction of rotation of the entire heavens had changed; whereas the sensible and modest Copernican would att ribute whatever motion occurred to the mobile Earth” (J. L. Heilbron, The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories, 177). Another, earlier observation that suggested that the Earth was moving was made in 1675 by the Danish astronomer Ole Römer, when he suggested that light traveled at a fi nite speed. Th is radical hypothesis was part of a solution to the question of why the Jovian satellite Io made a series of late appearances. His explanation depended on both this suggestion and a further supposition that the Earth revolved around the Sun. See R. J. Mackay and R. W. Oldford, “Scientific Method, Statistical Method and the Speed of Light.” 9. These works are Friesenhausen’s Mosdot Tevel (1820); Slonimski’s Kokhava Deshavit (1835); Hirsch’s The Nineteen Letters (1836); Juwel’s Limudei Hateva (1836); Reggio’s Iggrot Yashar (1836); Slonimski’s Toldot Hashamayim (1838); Caro’s Minhat Shabbat (1847); Warshavsky’s Hakirei Tevel (1864); Rabinowitz’s Yesod Hokhmat Hateva Hakelali (1876); Zosnich’s Hashemesh (1877); Kahane’s Gelilot Ha’aretz (1880); Haberman’s She’erit Ya’akov (1884); Ginzberg’s Itt im Lebina (1886); Shapira’s Tekhunot Ha’aretz (1894); Bernstein’s Yediot Hateva (1884); Kaplan’s Hama’or Hagadol Hashemesh (1889); Dov Ber Tursch’s Ginzay Hamelekh (1896); and Rukenstien’s Mesilot Hame’orot (1898). Another example of the increased acceptance of Copernicanism was the publication of a fictional story by David Frishman in 1884 called “The Adversary of Copernicus.”

340

10. 11. 12 . 13. 14. 15. 16 . 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22 . 23.

24. 25. 26 . 27. 28. 29.

Notes The story is about a disheveled man named Leibish who spends his days studying in the Bet Midrash (the House of Religious Study) and is steeped in traditional Jewish texts. Leibish argues against the Copernican model and wanders to Warsaw, where, despite his obvious knowledge of some matters of astronomy, he fi nds no audience for his geocentric ideas. He is eventually voluntarily confi ned to a madhouse, reasoning that at least there he can preach to those who will actually listen. Interestingly, the same volume of Ha’asif that carried Frishman’s story has an advertisement for Kahane’s Gelilot Ha’aretz , which suggests that the audience for Frishman’s story overlapped with the audience for a work that harmonized the Copernican model with traditional Jewish texts. Some astronomy books simply failed to mention the heliocentric theory in any way and proceeded to describe a Ptolemaic universe. For an example of this genre of nineteenth- century Jewish astronomy, see Zevi Elbinger, Tiferet Zevi. Another notable Hebrew work was Judah Kochizov’s Halikhot Olam (The Pathos of the World), published in Odessa in 1880. Kochizov (1840–1917) was born into a famous Karaite family and became a prominent historian of Karaite traditions. Halikhot Olam was identified in the Russian précis as having been written specifically for the Karaite community. In it, there is a description of the Sun and planets that follows the heliocentric model. It is written as a guide and so contains no historical material or scientific explanations justifying why the heliocentric system is correct. It also contained no religious references, other than a single verse from Psalm 19 that was used as an epigraph to the section on the planets. The work demonstrates the diff usion of the Copernican model into the Karaite community. David Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel. See chapter 9 above. Dov Ber Rukenstein, Mesilot Hame’orot, part II, 1. Isaac Samuel Reggio, Iggrot Yashar. Reggio used the acronym of his name, Yashar (Ya’akov Shmuel Reggio), which means straight or honest. For a review of Reggio’s career and influences, see Ephraim E. Urbach, “Rabbi Yizhak Lampronti Vehiburo ‘Pahad Yizhak,’ ” 385–390. The precise causes that led to Reggio’s termination as the communal rabbi are discussed in David Malkiel, “New Light on the Career of Isaac Samuel Reggio,” 283–294. For details of Reggio’s life, see Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. X, 119– 124, and more recently, Malkiel, 276–303. For references to earlier biographic material on Reggio, see Malkiel, 294, note 3. Isaac Samuel Reggio, Hatorah Vehafilosofia. Reggio’s efforts to provide a dual curriculum to students of the rabbinate were very similar to those of Friesenhausen, which were reviewed on page 171. Reggio, Iggrot Yashar, vol. 2, 17. Reggio, Iggrot Yashar, 31. Ibid. Ibid., 31–32. See page 120. Reggio, Iggrot Yashar, 32. Further criticism of David Nieto, author of Matteh Dan, for his position on Copernicanism, is found on page 110. The phrase is found in Avot 2:2. In his commentary, Hirsch wrote that the term derekh erez refers to “ways of earning a living, to the social order that prevails on Earth, as well as to the mores and considerations of courtesy and propriety arising from social living and also to things pertinent to good breeding and general education” (Samson Raphael Hirsch, Chapters of the Fathers, 22). See Noah H. Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform, 364–367. Samson Raphael Hirsch and Joseph Elias, The Nineteen Letters, 28. As we have already noted, the connection between the two was fi rst made in Bereshit Rabbah Bereshit #5. See page 164. Samson Raphael Hirsch and Naphtali Hirsch, Gesammelte Schriften Von Rabbiner Sampson Raphael Hirsch, vol. 1, 293. Ps. 19:7. Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Psalms, 136.

Notes

341

30. Ibid., 138. Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865), better known by his acronym Shadal, an Italian rabbi and a contemporary of Hirsch, made a very similar point. Shadal was a staunch defender of the belief in the mosaic authorship of the Torah, while simultaneously using the fi ndings of biblical criticism to amend the text of some of the other books of the Bible. For Shadal, the Bible was never to be viewed as a science textbook: The cosmogony of Moses is not and ought not to be a tractate of physics, geology, or natural science for it would have been incomprehensible to mankind during many generations and would have been more harmful than beneficial to their religious and moral education. However that cosmogonic narrative itself in describing the sun, moon and stars set in the sky to shine upon the earth teaches us the unity of the world machine. (From Luzzatto’s Discorsi Morali Agli Studenti Israeliti, Padua 1857, 103, cited in Noah Rosenbloom, Luzzatto’s Ethico-Psychological Interpretation of Judaism, 71.) 31. Th is point is made by Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform, 447, note 48. 32 . Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Collected Writings, vol. VII, 57–58. The comments appear an essay titled “Ethical Training in the Classroom,” fi rst published in the newspaper Jeschurun in 1868 as an invitation to the graduation exercises of Hirsch’s school. Having established that the Bible does not set out to teach science, Hirsch then made a rather counterintuitive leap and claimed that the Bible demonstrated “the way to a rational study of nature”: No matter how strenuously some people may resist this notion, it is a historically demonstrable fact that rational inquiry into nature became possible, and actually materialized, only after the people of the Jewish Bible had helped mankind regain the perception of the world as the work of one, sole free-willed thinking Creator, Who, through His almighty Will, is capable of translating His plans into reality. . . . No matter how vehemently the adherents of this approach may deny His existence, the Giver of the laws which they are attempting to trace by scientific methods is the indisputable presupposition for their intellectual endeavors. With each new success in their work, with every advance toward the goal that they regard as their ultimate scientific triumph in their endeavor to help trace the infinite variety of phenomena to the unity of one law, they only contribute one more building block to the temple of Him Whose existence their mouths has denied, to the temple of the one, sole God Whose thoughts fill the universe and “in Whose temple all His creations proclaim His glory” (Hirsch, The Collected Writings, 58). Th is description of science as the search for God’s unifying law is one that most scientists today would reject as absurd. 33. Hirsch, The Collected Writings, 57. 34. It is useful to compare Hirsch’s position with that of a traditionalist contemporary, Meir Leibush Weiser, better known as Malbim (1809–1879.) Malbim had a stormy rabbinic career in which he att acked the early Reform movement, but he was also a prolific author. His commentary on the Torah, Hatorah Vehamitzvah (The Torah and the Commandment, published between 1867 and 1876), included references to the new astronomy. In his explanation of Gen. 1:14, he referred to gravity and the fact that all the planets orbit the Sun, but never declaratively stated that the Earth moved. Th is led Panitz to suggest that Malbim “espoused the Tychonic cosmology” (Panitz, “New Heavens and a New Earth,” 37), although this conclusion is overstated. (For an example of Malbim’s hesitancy in deciding whether the geocentric or heliocentric model was correct, see his commentary to Psalms 75:7.) Elsewhere, Malbim articulated the role that scientific progress has in the interpretation of the Bible. He rejected Maimonides’ explanations for the vision of Ezekiel, because they relied on understandings of the natural world that were incorrect. Maimonides’ explanation is no longer relevant, he wrote, because the foundations on which he built it have been disproved. For the ancient science, astronomy, biology and philosophy on which his commentary is based

342

Notes have all been utterly refuted and replaced by the advances of recent generations. These have resulted in a new astronomy and new understandings of nature, based on other, more reliable principles (Meir Leibush Weiser, Nevi’im Uketuvim Mikra’ey Kodesh (Vol. 6), unnumbered introduction, 3a).

35. 36 . 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42 . 43. 44.

45.

See also Nahman Broder, Gan Yerushalayim, 23, where he understands Weiser’s commentary as accepting the heliocentric model. Joseph Ginzburg, Itt im Lebinah, 6–7. Ginzburg, 6–7. However, the later editions published in Warsaw in 1889 and 1891 do not seem to have been printed with the three illustrations at the back of the book. Ginzburg, 7. R. Barton, “Just before Nature: The Purposes of Science.” Th is quote is from the masthead of the newspaper. There are several sources that describe the life, legends, and achievements of Slonimski. Some of these appear to be hagiographic, while others are more reliable. Among the former is the account by Max Lilienthal published in 1847 (Lilienthal, “Sketches of Jewish Life in Russia”). A brief description of Slonimski by his grandson Nicolas Slonimsky seems to be among the more reliable accounts, based as it is on eyewitnesses (Nicolas Slonimsky, “My Grandfather Invented the Telegraph”). Th is account is from the autobiography of Nicolas Slonimsky, who was an accomplished composer and pianist (Nicolas Slonimsky, Perfect Pitch: A Life Story). For academic reviews of Slonimski, see Isaac Goldberg, “Chaim Selig Slonimski: 19th Century Popularizer of Science”; Itai Sneh, “Hayim Zelig Slonimski and the Founding of Ha-Tsefi rah”; and Ira Robinson, “Hayyim Selig Slonomski and the Diff usion of Science among Russian Jewry in the Nineteenth Century.” One of the earliest reviews of Slonimski’s life was published on the occasion of his seventy-fi ft h birthday in the Hebrew-language journal Ha’asif (“Dr Chaim Zelig Slonimski,” 1884, 255–258). Two essays in Hebrew on Slonimski’s correspondence were published in 1966; see H. R. Rabinowitz, “Letters of Hayyim Selig Slonimski,” and N. Ben-Menahem, “Two Additional Letters of H. S. Slonimski.” A web page with links to several Russian, Yiddish, and German documents about Slonimski’s computational inventions can be found at htt p://chc60.fgcu.edu/EN/HistoryDetail. aspx?c=16 (accessed Nov. 1, 2012). Lilienthal wrote that Slonimski married at the age of sixteen, and there are many discrepancies with dates among Slonimski’s various biographers. Lilienthal recounted that Slonimski was forced to hide a German-language mathematical work, for “he had to fear to lose his reputation as a pious Talmudist if it should be discovered.” According to the family legend, Slomiski had a natural affi nity for things scientific. One anecdote repeated by Slonimski’s grandson Nicolas recounts how, in 1820, a German astronomical mission arrived in Bialystok to observe a solar eclipse. Nicolas’s grandfather, then aged ten, asked how the astronomers hoped to view the corona without using a double diff raction lens. Th is caused the German astronomer to dispatch a report back to the Berlin Academy of Sciences declaring that Bialystok was “the most civilized community in the world.” Nicolas apparently found the story hard to believe but after some research, he learned that “there was a total eclipse of the Sun in the region of Bialystok on September 7, 1820, when my grandfather was ten years old, a date which would bear eloquent testimony to his precocity,” although he notes that he could fi nd no record of the eclipse in the bulletins of the Berlin Academy of Sciences (Slonimsky, “My Grandfather Invented the Telegraph,” 57). There was indeed a solar eclipse at the location and time described in the legend; NASA lists a solar eclipse as having occurred on September 7, 1820, although the totality did not pass over Bialystok. (Fred Espenak and Jean Meeus, “Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses, A-154.) The story remains fanciful nevertheless. (The date of the story is incorrectly cited as 1828 by Sneh, 49.) Nicolas Slonimsky cites the 1836 date of the divorce; Goldberg gives the date as 1828 (Goldberg, 249); and Sneh gives it as 1842 (Sneh, 47).

Notes

343

46 . “Russia” in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, eds. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, vol. 17, second ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 533. 47. Goldberg, 255. 48 . “Communications Officials View World’s Fastest Telegraph,” New York Times, Sept. 18, 1952, 43. See also htt p://onthemainline.blogspot.com/2011/02/dangerouspath-from-comet-comprehension.html, where the source of the error is examined in detail. 49. The quote is a translation by Nicolas Slonimsky from the original Russian publication of Aug. 19, 1952. See Slonimsky, “My Grandfather Invented the Telegraph,” 57. 50. Hayyim Zelig Slonimski, Mosdei Hokhmah. One of the approbations to the work was written by no less a figure than the head of the Vilna rabbinic court, the eminent scholar Rabbi Abraham Abele Poswoler, who had also supported the publication of other works by maskilim. For more on this, see David Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim, 22–23 and note 46. Nahum Sokolow (1859–1936) recalled a story told to him by Slonimski about the circumstances under which Rabbi Abraham Poswoler had agreed to write an approbation for the book. Slonimski had traveled to the court of Rabbi Poswoler, where he had to wait for several days before the latter agreed to write the approbation. During this time, Slonimski witnessed several other authors submit similar requests. Their approbations were granted within a couple of days and after only a brief review. Slonimski asked the rabbi why he approved these works so quickly, yet continued to question Slonimski about his mathematical book. Th is was all the more puzzling since, by Slonimski’s own admission, his work was about relatively obscure mathematical subjects, while the other books were written about important areas of Jewish law. “Then Reb Abele [Poswoler] laughed quietly and answered him. With them I can start and fi nish one-two-three, it being an everyday occurrence. But you are a rare fi nd, and I want to walk with you and study in detail” (Nahum Sokolow, Ishim, 141). Sokolow replaced Slonimski as editor of Hazefirah in 1886 and knew Slonimski well. Th is story is therefore likely to have been accurately reported. Interestingly, in 1817, the same Rabbi Abele Poswoler gave his approbation to a commentary on the Torah that rejected Copernicansim. (See Yom Tov Lipman, Kavod Yom Tov, unnumbered page of approbations.) The anti-Copernican passage is on the very last page of the book, 57a. 51. Hayyim Zelig Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit. 52 . Hayyim Zelig Slonimski, Toldot Hashamayim. 53. Hayyim Zelig Slonimski, Meziut Hanefesh. 54. Hayyim Zelig Slonimski, Yesodei Ha’ibbur, and Slonimski, Yesodei Hokhmat Hashiur. 55. Hayyim Zelig Slonimski, Ot Zikaron Le’aleksander Fun Humboldt. Humboldt wrote a brief preface to the book. Slonimski was not the only writer to dedicate a work to Humboldt; Edgar Allen Poe (1809–1849) dedicated his long prose poem Eureka—a meditation on the nature of the universe and man’s relationship to God—to the German naturalist. Slonimski is certainly likely to have been influenced by Humboldt’s Kosmos, which was published between 1845 and 1847, even though Slonimski had by that date authored his pro-Copernican works. The historian of science Hans Blumberg, in his sweeping review of the significance of the Copernican revolution, pointed out that it was Humboldt who was most responsible for disseminating the notion that intuition was no longer an acceptable way of doing science (Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, 91–97). Slonimski’s emphasis on experimental evidence reflects this approach. 56 . For details, see Menuha Gilboa, Lexicon Ha’itonot Ha’ivriot Bema’ot Hashmonah Esrei Vehatesha Esrei, 167–181. There are many examples of the popularity of Hazefirah; as but one, Isaac Bashevis Singer recounted how both he and his brother read it. (See Isaac Bashevis Singer, Love and Exile, 28.) 57. Ps. 8:7. 58. Isaac Nissenbaum, “Hazas: A Biographical Essay,” 2. See note 70 below. 59. Slonimski, Mosdei Hokhmah, page six of the unnumbered introduction. 60. Ibid., page 9 of the unnumbered introduction. 61. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit. The title of the book is the talmudic term for a comet.

344

Notes

62 . The book was published on Sept. 28, 1835, corresponding to the Hebrew date of 22nd Elul 5595, the Hebrew date on the title page of the book. Slonimski’s introduction was dated June 16, 1835 (19th Sivan 5595), and the forward by Abraham Zakheim was dated Aug. 26 of the same year (Rosh Hodesh Elul 1835). All of this suggests that the book was published very close to the actual fi rst appearance of the comet, rather than in the months prior. Slonimski wrote that the comet would fi rst appear at the end of the Hebrew month of Av or August of 1835, and indeed the fi rst observation of the comet occurred around Aug. 31, 1835. The comet reached its perihelion (when it was closest to the Sun) on Nov. 16 of that year (Julian A. Smith, “Halley’s Comet: Canadian Observations and Reactions,” 2). 63. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, fourth unnumbered page of the author’s introduction. 64. See the last page of Zakheim’s unnumbered introduction. Slonimski dedicated the book to Zakheim. 65. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, fi rst unnumbered page of the author’s introduction. 66 . Some fi ft y years after Kokhava Deshavit was published, Zalman Haberman authored a book that did precisely what Slonimski had suggested. On the title page of Haberman’s work She’erit Ya’akov (The Remnant of Jacob), he stated that the work “explained a number of statements in the Talmud about astronomy . . . in a way that allows them to comport to contemporary astronomers” (Meshulam Zalman Jacob Haberman, She’erit Ya’akov). Haberman did indeed agree with the Copernican model; he wrote that the rabbis agreed with the contemporary astronomers who deny the existence of the celestial spheres (34), and stated (without much support) that a talmudic passage (TB. Hagigah 12b) did not contradict the view that the Earth moved (43). Although he acknowledged the heliocentric system in only a few lines (26, 48), he was clearly familiar with it and with the fact that the planets have elliptical orbits (51). Despite these passing references to the Copernican model, Haberman’s work did litt le to reconcile the Talmud with the astronomy of his day. Most of the talmudic statements that Haberman tried to reconcile with astronomy were in fact reconciled with Ptolemaic astronomy or with Hebrew works of astronomy that were centuries old, rather than with the heliocentric model. Thus, Haberman quoted from Nehmad Vena’im (26, 32, 39) and Delmedigo’s 1629 work Sefer Elim (30, 34, 46). He also reconciled talmudic statements with the medieval works Zurat Ha’aretz (32, 34) and Yesod Olam (33, 35). However, Haberman did occasionally quote from Slonimski’s controversial 1838 book Toldot Hashamayim (32, 51). 67. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, fourth unnumbered page of the author’s introduction. 68. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, fourth unnumbered page of the author’s introduction. 69. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, 21. Stellar aberration is the apparent motion of a star around its real location due to the motion of the Earth and the fact that the speed of light is fi nite. It is not to be confused with stellar parallax (discussed on page 22), which was not demonstrated until 1838, three years after the publication of the fi rst edition of Kokhava Deshavit. Bradley (1693–1762), the third British astronomer royal, made his discovery in 1727. See Pannekoek, 289–290. 70. Th is suggests that Nissenbaum’s description of Slonimski as having taken part in debates about the veracity of the Copernican model with his rabbis may not have been a hagiographic invention. See note 58 above. 71. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, 23. 72 . Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, 23–24. 73. For details, see Paul Murdin, Full Meridian of Glory, 41–45. 74. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, 28. The reader of the original Hebrew text would certainly have understood the double meaning here; Jews are commanded to make a blessing upon seeing a wise person, although the text differs slightly depending on whether the sage is a Jew or Gentile. “Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who gives of His wisdom to flesh and blood” is the blessing to be recited on seeing a wise Gentile. 75. The date was an error. The next time Halley’s Comet was visible to the naked eye was at the beginning of May 1910. 76 . Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, 53.

Notes

345

77. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, fi rst and second unnumbered pages of the author’s introduction. 78. The case of Edmond Halley differs somewhat, for he was accused by some of atheism. Whether or not this accusation was correct remains the subject of academic debate. The historian of science Allan Chapman wrote that there was no reason to doubt that when Halley declared himself to be a Christian . . . he was speaking truthfully. . . . Similarly, Halley was not simply offering appeasement when he asserted in several papers after 1691 that he believed that the great systems of nature, such as the increasing salinity of the oceans, pointed to a clear beginning of the world in time. But where Halley did “incur the suspicion of the Sacred Order” was in his belief that the first two chapters of Genesis did not provide a complete and sufficient history of that Creation.

79. 80. 81. 82 . 83.

84. 85. 86 . 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92 .

93. 94. 95.

See Allan Chapman, “Edmond Halley’s Use of Historical Evidence in the Advancement of Science,” 176. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, fourth unnumbered page of the author’s introduction. Galileo’s letter to the Grand Duchess in Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, 93. Hayyim Zelig Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, 22–23. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, 23. There were only a few descriptions of Foucault’s experiment in Hebrew literature. For other examples, see Aaron David Bernstein, Yediot Hateva 44, and Hillel Kahane, Gelilot Ha’aretz , 48–52 and page 212, in the discussion on Reuven Landau. Slonimski, Kokhava Deshavit, 17. Pannekoek, 360–361. For another description marveling at the scientific achievement of the discovery of Neptune, see Avraham Warshavsky, Hakirei Tevel, 61–84, which is discussed below. Warshavsky, Hakirei Tevel, II. Ibid., 128 (unpaginated). Warshavsky had originally decided to simply translate sections of Ludwig Gott fried Blanc’s work Handbuch des Wissenswürdigsten aus der Natur und Geschichte der Erde und ihrer Bewohner, published in Halle in 1846, but chose instead to expand on this work with information from other authors, including Alexander von Humbolt. Warshavsky’s open acknowledgment of his sources stood in sad distinction to other authors we have encountered who freely plagiarized. Warshavsky, IV. Warshavsky, 22, 30. Copernicus is mentioned in passing on 118, but only in the context of a discussion about the size of a lunar crater named after him. Warshavsky’s work was not completely without mention of God. For example, he wrote that the discovery of Neptune demonstrated “how far the human mind can reach with a full measure of wisdom and higher understanding, that was endowed by he who creates wisdom in order that [man] reveal and understand all that God has done . . . ” (Warshavsky, 61). He also described the sense of awe and wonder felt by those who study astronomy—including Schiller and Kant (21). Isa. 40:26. Warshavsky, 3 (unpaginated). The introduction continues in this vein for another three pages. According to data compiled by Christian missionaries, about 200,000 Jews converted to Christianity during the nineteenth century. Some 15,000 Polish Jews converted, the majority to Catholicism (cited in Assaf, 245, note 15). Slonimski was by no means the only prominent educator or rabbinic leader whose children left Judaism for Christianity. “Especially well known in Jewish circles in the modern era are the tragedies that affected such prominent figures as Mendele Mokher Sforim (Yaakov Shalom Abramowitz) whose beloved son converted to Christianity; Shimon Dubnow, Ahad ha-Am and Mordeckai Ben-Hillel HaKohen, whose daughters married into Russian Orthodox

346

Notes

families; and Rabbi Eliyahu Klatskin of Lublin, whose son Yaakov, a renowned philosopher and ardent Zionist, abandoned Judaism and married the daughter of a Protestant minister” (ibid., 31–32.) The son of the founder of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty Rabbi Shneyur Zalman of Lyady converted to Christianity in 1820. 96 . Dov Ber Yehudah Lev Ginsberg, Emunat Hakhamim . Ginsberg wrote that Slonimski had “opened up a breach the width of a needle that weakened the mitzvah of Hanukah, allowing others to open a doorway the width of the world resulting in their not observing it at all” (3). The second work was Isaac Judah Sapir, Nes Pah Hashemen. Sapir stated, “my goal is to defend the walls of religion that were breached by this publication” (8).

Chapter 11, “Let Copernicus and Another Thousand Like Him Be Removed From the World.” Reuven Landau’s Rejection, Pages 200–223 1. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Materialien Zur Geschichte Der Farbenlehre,” vol. 14, 81. 2 . Dov Baer Wachstein, Mafteah Hahespedim, 27. Meir Vunder, Me’orei Galitzyah, vol. 3, 639–640. Vunder wrote that Landau was educated by his father-in-law. 3. Landau may have been born in 1813. The recorded date of his death varies; Vunder (ibid., vol. 3, 640) records that it occurred on 29th Av 5643, corresponding to Sept. 1, 1883. However, Landau’s brother-in-law, Matt isyahu Landau, in a lengthy funeral oration (hesped) published in the preface to one of Landau’s own works, stated that the death occurred on Wednesday 29th Sivan (“the 29th day of the month in which the Torah was given”), corresponding to Wednesday, July 4, 1883. Because Matt isyahu was an eyewitness to the death, we should assume his dating is the more accurate of the two. Matt isyahu’s funeral oration gives a dramatic insight in to the life and leadership style of Reuven Landau and is the only fi rsthand account of Landau’s personality. Th is description, part of the eulogy given by Matt isyahu for his brother-in-law is particularly striking: For forty years he was the Rav and religious leader here in Paduturk. All of the surrounding towns in the country asked that he be crowned their rabbi, and that he give from his honor to them, and illuminate them with his Torah study. He refused their offers, and rejected them out of fear that in a large town his service of God would be compromised. For this [service of God] was his entire goal and desire, and he was disgusted with any material affairs. When he prayed in the evening and morning he would isolate himself in a special room he used for the study of Torah and service [of God]. Even when I visited him and spoke face to face with him (for such was the deep affection we had for each other, as all know), he would demand that I leave his room when it came time for his pure prayers, and I would fulfill his request. Last winter I was in his home when a question about the kashrut of a goose arose, and he requested that I listen to the question and that I make a ruling. I examined the knife, and I was concerned about a specific perforation in the intestines. (I could not be sure if the perforation was made with the knife or was natural). We discussed the matter at great length until we agreed that the animal was not kosher. He then asked the boy who had raised the question to whom the goose belonged. He replied that it belonged to his mother, who sold milk [in the town]. He then gave the boy two franks that he should give to his mother, and told him to tell her that he [R. Landau] would buy milk from her. The boy was overjoyed and gave thanks and praise to God, Blessed be He, that He had taken this goose from him. [Landau] often said to me that he would often suffer greatly if he had to rule an animal not kosher and its owners would refuse to take money from him. Now I could go on recounting his great deeds . . . woe to us who have lost such a leader, the crown on our heads . . . (see Reuven Landau, Degel Mahaneh Re’uven, 39–40). 4. At the end of the second section of Mahalakh Hakohavim, Landau identified the names of his parents as Yizhak and Hannah. 5. There are a number of variant spellings of this town, including Podu Turculi and Podul-Turcului. The town is located approximately 137 miles northeast of Bucharest.

Notes

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12 . 13. 14. 15. 16 .

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22 . 23. 24.

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Jews originally sett led there around the year 1827, and the Jewish population reached almost 1,100 by the year 1899. The town had two synagogues, as well as a number of professional societies, and most of the Jewish population was involved in trade. With the building of railway connections between local towns, Paduturk became a far less important commercial center, and the Jewish community declined as a result. Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, there were fewer than 480 Jews living in the town. The Jewish population of the town was rounded up on Saturday, June 20, 1941, and less than a quarter of the Jewish population returned after the war. There are currently no known Jews living in the town. The last recorded Jewish burial there occurred in 1952. See Pinkas Hakehillot, 200–202, and the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies Cemetery Project, available at htt p://www.jewishgen.org/ cemetery/e-europe/rom-p-r.html (accessed May 18, 2006). Although no date appears on the title page, the book contains an approbation from Isaac Friedman, dated Tuesday 4th of Shevat 642, corresponding to January 24, 1882. We can therefore assume that the book appeared sometime in that year. Reuven Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, introduction, 2b. Landau is referring here to the nineteen-year mahzor katan. In the Jewish calendar, every nineteen years contain twelve regular and seven leap years. After nineteen tropical years, both the Sun and the Moon return to the same positions they occupied on the ecliptic. In fact, this cycle was certainly known to the Greeks and probably known to the Babylonians. It is named the Metonic cycle, after the astronomer Meton, who introduced it in Athens in approximately 432 bc. See James Evans, The History and Practice of Ancient Astronomy, 185 et seq. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, 1–2. See the unnumbered title page to the second part of Mahalach Hakochavim. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, section II, chapter 2, section 5. Nicolaus Copernicus and Edward Rosen, On the Revolutions, 18. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, section II, 7b et seq. See ibid., 4–14. See pages 113–114. Although it should have been possible to see similar phases of Mercury, the planet was too close to the Sun, and Galileo’s telescope was not powerful enough to observe these phases. As early as the 1630s, there were claims that the phases of Mercury had been seen, but these observations were actually spurious and caused by faulty use of the telescope itself (see Mary Winkler and Albert Van Helden, “Johannes Hevelius and the Visual Language of Astronomy”). The fi rst reliably detailed observations of Mercury were not made until after Landau’s death, and it is not clear whether Landau knew that the phases of Mercury had not been accurately observed. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, section II, chapter 3, section 13. Ibid. Ibid. Again, this argument from probabilities seems to closely follow the Copernican train of thought. Copernicus needed to deal with the objection that if the Earth moved, the rapidity of its motion would be so great that the Earth would long ago have been destroyed. Early on in De Revolutionibus (I, 8), he denied that the Earth would indeed be destroyed by such rotation and argued that the required movement of the planets at huge speeds, as proposed in the geocentric model, clearly does not lead to their destruction. He ended this section by stating that his arguments “. . . made it more likely (omnibus probabilior) that the Earth moves than that it is at rest” (ibid.). Ibid., chapter 5, section 2. Ibid., chapter 5. Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible, 122. Moses Sofer, Kuntrus Kiddush Hahodesh, chapter 3, part 1. Th is work is published from a manuscript that was in the possession of Shimon Sofer, son of Moses Sofer. Reprinted in Po’al Hashem. See also pages 163–165. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, section II, 19.

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Notes

25. TJ. Sanhedrin 2, 5. Variations of this story, together with the same phrase, also appear in Shemot Rabbah 6 and Midrash Tanhumah, Parshat Va’erah 5. Moses uses the phrase in another story told in Devarim Rabbah parshat Va’ethhanan. 26 . Teshuvot Rashbah, part I, 98. 27. J. Emden, Iggeret Bikkoret, 22a. Cited by Jacob J. Schacter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden: Life and Major Works,” 695. 28. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, section II, 19b. 29. Ibid., chapters 5, 19. 30. Ibid., section II, 20b. 31. Epistolarum astronomicarum liber primus, Nuremberg, 1601. Reprinted in J. L. Dreyer, ed. Tychonis Brahe Dani Scripta Astronomica, vol. 6, 218–223. 32 . De Revolutionibus, book 1, chapter 8. 33. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Galileo on the World Systems, 155–170. 34. For a full discussion of the arguments from common motion, falling bodies, and cannonballs, see Edward Grant, “In defense of the Earth’s centrality and immobility; Scholastic reaction to Copernicanism in the seventeenth century,” especially part IV. See also Carla Palmerino and J. M. Th ijssen, eds., The Reception of Galilean Science of Motion in Seventeenth Century Europe. 35. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 144. For an example of a Hebrew work that explained why the stone does indeed fall to the foot of the tower and not some distance from it, see Aryeh Rabinowitz, Torat Ha’olam Vehayahadut, part 4, 12a–b. Rabinowitz (1809–1879) was a contemporary of Landau’s, and in his posthumously published work, he claimed that the story of creation in Genesis was better understood using a Copernican, rather than a Ptolemaic, model. In addition, he explained that the stone falling from the tower has inertia (koah hatmadat hatenua) and therefore continues to move in free-fall in the same direction and speed as the Earth and the tower that sits on it. 36 . Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, section II, 20a. 37. Ibid. 38. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, Section II, 21b. 39. For an earlier example of skepticism regarding the truth claims of science, see Kinat Adonai Zeva’ot (The Zeal of the Lord of Hosts), fi rst published in 1852. The fi rst edition of the book was published anonymously, but later editions in 1880, 1925, and 1965 ascribed the authorship to Nathan Sternhertz. Sternertz (1780–1845) was a member of the Bratzlav Hasidic community and wrote that the Jewish tradition could make truth claims whereas the scientific community could not. The fact that scientific explanations changed over time was proof that its claims were partial and provisional and always likely to be false: We see with our own eyes a number of the early great explorers stated that half of the Earth was under water, but for the last three hundred years it has become clear that the opposite is the case: since the discovery of America, there are large inhabited areas on the opposite side of the globe to us. Yet there is still more to be learned in this field, just as in the field of astronomy. All the scientists and the Jewish sages stated that the Earth lies at the center and is orbited by the spheres. This [claim] was examined by great scientists. It has now been more than a hundred years since Copernicus constructed a new astronomy in which the Earth moves around the Sun and so on. . . . Who knows what the future will look like? Without a doubt, in the near future new scientists will discredit this foolish Copernican theory. Even now a number of scientists disagree with him and ridicule him. According to our own beliefs, the beliefs of the Children of Israel, there is no doubt that his path is utterly false . . . and we wait for [God’s] kindness and for him to bring the true sage who is the Just Redeemer. He will bless all the sciences, and the spirit of God’s wisdom and understanding will come to rest upon them, and he [God] will certainly reveal to us new explanations in the field of astronomy, as to how the planets and stars move. For we believe that each and every day God, blessed be he, places the stars in their

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fixed positions in the heavens according to his will. . . . In any event everyone agrees that astronomy has not yet fully understood the fundamental principles that cause the heavenly bodies to move. See Nathan Sternhertz, Kinat Adonai Zeva’ot, 8. 40. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, 429. 41. TB. Eruvin 13b. 42 . Rashi BT. Ketuvot 57a s.v. Ma kamashma lan. See also Eliezer Berkovits, Not in Heaven: The Nature and Function of Halakha, especially chapter 2. 43. Both are reprinted in Zadok Hakohen Rabinowitz, Zeh Sefer Hazikhronot. 44. Ibid., 65. 45. Ibid. 46 . Ibid. See also 147, where he provides more reasons for his rejection of science. For a detailed investigation of how Zadok viewed secular sources of knowledge, see Yaakov Elman, “The History of Gentile Wisdom According to R. Zadok Ha-Kohen of Lublin,” 153–187. 47. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, Section II, 20b. 48. Although it is not known how Landau heard of Foucault’s experiment, one possibility is that he read about it in Hillel Kahane’s Gelilot Ha’aretz , which was published in Bucharest in 1880. For more on this work, see page 245. 49. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, section II, 21a (emphasis added). 50. Middah Berurah, introduction, 2b–3a (emphasis added). 51. Mahalakh Hakokhavim, 1. 52 . See TJ. Rosh Hashanah 25. 53. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, section II, 26a. 54. William R. Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius, 63–64. 55. Sefer Haberit, part one, 3:3 (1990 ed., 50). See page 141. 56 . Moses Sofer, Torat Mosheh, vol. 5, 15a. 57. Israel David Schlesinger, Yafe’ah Leketz , vol. 1, 8a–b (emphasis added). Schlesinger is also discussed on pages 165–166. Schlesinger had adopted this position in an earlier work on the Jewish calendar called Hazon Lemo’ed . In that work, he outlined in some detail the Copernican model and admitted that it was in fact an intellectually compelling theory. “But one who believes in God and his Torah and believes that God revealed himself on Sinai at the giving of the Torah will not have any problem understanding that the Sun—one of God’s creations—would serve the Earth on which live those who study this Torah” (14a–b). See Israel David Schlesinger, Hazon Lemo’ed , 14a–b, 62a, 64a, and 65a. Of note, Abraham Sofer, son of Moses Sofer, wrote one of the fi ve rabbinic approbations to the work. Careful reading of Hazon Lemo’ed suggests a more sympathetic understanding of the heliocentric model, even if it was ultimately rejected. 58. David Friesenhausen, Mosdot Tevel, 16b. 59. Ibid., 43b. 60. Eliezer Lipman Neusatz, May Menuhot, 38. 61. Moses Maimonides, Shlomo Pines, and Leo Strauss, The Guide of the Perplexed, book III, chapter 13, 452. I am grateful to Saul Stokar for bringing this to my attention. 62 . Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzche, On the Geneology of Morality, 112. 63. Compare, for example, the passage in Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, part II, 20a with that of Hurwitz, 152. For a more detailed examination of Landau’s use of the astronomy in Sefer Haberit, see Jeremy Brown, “Rabbi Reuven Landau and the Jewish Reaction to Copernican Thought,” 112–142. 64. Sefer Habrit was widely read in the nineteenth century and had been acknowledged as a source of material by at least two other writers. See Isaac Amaragi Darkhei Ha’adam, who acknowledged copying much of part 2, chapter 13, and Judah Riswasch Shevilei Derakia, 21–22, who used part 1, chapters 1 and 10. These authors, unlike Landau, openly acknowledged their debt to Sefer Habrit. For another example of a book that

350

65. 66 . 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72 .

73. 74. 75. 76 . 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82 . 83.

84. 85. 86 . 87.

88. 89.

Notes supported the geocentric model and cited Sefer Haberit in support of its position, see Elijah Gutmacher’s 1875 work Zofnat Pe’aneah, 22. See pages 140–141. Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8 (1990 ed., 152–153.) For example, see Tuviah ben Moses Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviah, part two, chapters 2–4. Ibid., 67b. David Nieto, Matteh Dan Vekuzari Sheni, part 4, 106–109. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, part 2, 25. A second edition of the Matteh Dan was published in Metz in 1780 and a third in Warsaw in 1865, and although it is not known which edition Landau used, the passages in question are essentially the same in all the later editions. However, there are indeed minor differences in the third edition in the passage cited above. In the London edition of 1714 and the Metz edition of 1780, the word nakhri—Gentile—is used, whereas the Warsaw edition of 1865 uses the abbreviation akum—idol worshipper. The difference is both subtle and important, but it does not substantiate Landau’s suggestion that the entire passage was forged. Perhaps the earliest rabbinic figure to claim that a problematic text was forged was the tenth-century Sherirah ben Haninah Gaon (d. 1006), who claimed that part of Sa’adiah Gaon’s responsa had been forged (see Shut Hage’onim Sha’arei Zedek , part 3, #11). More recently, the late Rabbi Moses Feinstein opined that significant parts of R. Yehuda Hahasid’s works (which suggested that not all of the Torah was given by God to Moses) were forgeries (see Iggeret Moshe Yoreh De’ah, part 3, 114–115). For a discussion of these and other examples, see Yaakov Shmeul Speigel, Amudim Betoldot Hasefer Haivri; Ketivatah Veha’atakah (Chapters in the History of the Jewish Book;Writing and Transmission), 260–261 and 271–275. Landau, Mahalakh Hakokhavim, part III, 4 et seq. Hayah David Spitzer, Nivreshet Lenez Hahamah. Ibid., 30b–31a. Ibid., 31a. See pages 140–141. Ibid. Spitzer also cited the twelft h-century Ptolemaic work Yesod Olam that had been reprinted in Berlin in 1774 as a work that disproved the heliocentric model. Spitzer, Nivreshet Lenez Hahamah, 33b–34a. Ibid., 34b. Ibid., 35a. Ibid., 35a. Ibid., 35b. Spitzer considered the consequences of adopting an eight-minute factor— the time it took for sunlight to reach the Earth—in calculating the times of sunrise and sunset. For example, in calculating the exact time for sunrise, which was the proper time for the morning Amidah prayer to be said, it might be necessary to subtract eight minutes from the time the Sun was seen to rise, since this was the time it took the sunlight to travel from its position to the Earth. Similarly, night (or more precisely dusk) would start eight minutes before the Sun was seen to drop below the horizon, since in reality the Sun had been in that position eight minutes earlier than was seen on Earth. He ultimately rejected the notion as foolish (ibid., 36a). Ibid., 32a. Ibid., 32b. Ibid., 34b. Hiyyah David Spitzer, Tikkun Nivreshet. There is no date of publication, but The Bibliography of the Hebrew Book (The Institute for Hebrew Bibliography, Jerusalem, 2008) suggests that Tikkun Nivreshet was published in 1906. However, Spitzer references his fi rst book as having been written “eleven years ago” (14b), which suggests that this volume was not published before 1909. Ibid., 18a. Th is forced reading is not supported by the text. Ibid., 16b. As we pointed out on page 75, the historical record shows that Delmedigo lived at a time when Tycho Brahe’s model was far more popular than Copernicus’s. It is not likely though that Spitzer knew this.

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90. Ibid., 16b. Venus, as well as Uranus and ex-planet Pluto, all orbit from east to west. 91. Ibid., 19a. Another of Spitzer’s objections was to a passage in another work suggesting that one of the leading rabbis of the Jewish community in Palestine, Yehoshuah Leib Diskin, had declared that it was not heretical to accept Copernicanism. Spitzer found it impossible to believe this suggestion: “Everyone who knows our rabbi [Diskin] knows . . . how far he would stay away from anyone with sympathies for the haskalah (that brings darkness). . . . How is it possible to claim that he accepted the new astronomy, which is against all the statements of our sages, may they rest in peace, as I have already demonstrated.” 92 . Another contemporary work also rejected the position of accommodation. Th is was by Aryeh Leib Lipkin, who published a commentary on a talmudic work in 1901 in which he explained how the new astronomy might be reconciled with the Bible (Lipkin, Beritah Deshmuel Hakatan, 57–58). Lipkin also suggested that the heliocentric model could be the “secret of the intercalation” (sod ha’ibbur) mentioned in the eighth chapter of Pirkei Derabbi Eliezer. Lipkin objected to both suggestions on the grounds that it was simply inconceivable for so many Jews to have been wrong for so long. 93. Martin J. Rees, Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others, 32. 94. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution;Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought, 191. 95 . For more on the question about the place of humanity in a heliocentric system, see Dennis Danielson, “Myth 6. Th at Copernicanism Demoted Humans from the Center of the Cosmos,” in Ronald Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail; and Other Myths About Science and Religion, 51–58. Nathan Aviezer emphasized the notion of the spiritual dominance of humanity as an explanation for the persistence of the geocentric system in his Fossils and Faith . In this book, which was an att empt to reconcile evolutionary theory with Orthodox Judaism, Aviezer very briefl y discussed the Jewish geocenterists; he maintained that they placed the Earth at the center of the universe because, to do otherwise, would appear to be “an aff ront to the divine dignity of man” (73). But he rather overstated the case when he claimed that “the medieval geocentric theory of astronomy was not based on scientific considerations” (ibid.). His analysis, though, agrees at least in part with ours, and he concluded with the observation that “the Torah views physical and spiritual characteristics as unrelated ” (ibid., 84, emphasis original). Landau would have objected, but Friesenhausen would have wholeheartedly agreed.

Chapter 12, The Modern Period, Pages 224–253 1. For a detailed analysis of Friedman’s life and writings, see the excellent work by David Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim, chapter 6. 2 . Menahem Nahum Friedman, Masekhet Avot Im Perush Man, 5. 3. Ibid., 7. 4. Ibid., 12. Although Friedman accepted the literal meaning of the heliocentric model, he also understood the power of metaphor. Concerned with the power that money had to corrupt, he wrote: “[T]his accursed Earth no longer revolves on its axis; it revolves around money” (Menahem Nahum Friedman, Al Ha’emet Vehasheker, 32). 5. It is important not to overstate the claim here. For most Jews of course, the issue of which astronomical theory was correct was entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not to follow the religion of their fathers. For them, economic and social reasons were far more important. However, for those with an intellectual bent, the question appears to have been very germane. 6. There are several examples that support the contention that, at the start of the twentieth century, the question about the truth of the heliocentric model was still of importance to Jews. One is a commentary on the Bible by Aryeh Rabinowitz (1804–1879) published posthumously some thirty years after his death. Rabinowitz, who served as a rabbi in Minsk for two decades, incorporated Copernican thought into his explanation of the opening verses of Genesis. (Aryeh Rabinowitz, Torat Ha‘olam Vehayahadut part 4, 23–24. See also chapter 11, note 35.) Another commentary on the Bible was published in

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Notes 1904 by Moses Rabinowitz (apparently not a relative), a teacher in Vilna. Moses used the Copernican model in a homiletic explanation of several verses from the Book of Judges: Just as the world turns on its axis and revolves around the Sun, so must a person look around and ensure that he has an adequate income to support his lifestyle. (See Moses Rabinowitz, Sha‘ar Bat Rahamim, 42.) The same homiletic message was published by Joseph Caro (1800–1895) in his work Minhat Shabbat. Th is work, a commentary on Ethics of the Fathers (Pikei Avot), was fi rst published in 1847 and was republished over a dozen times. Caro wrote that the rabbis of the Talmud had certainly known the truth of the heliocentric model. The model taught the lesson that each person should “turn about his own axis every day, meaning, to pay attention to his income . . .” (see Joseph Caro, Minhat Shabbat, 25–26). In Yad Vashem published in Vilna in 1908, the author Reuven Israel wrote that “Copernicus is now accepted by all wise people without exception.” Israel suggested that there were other worlds inhabited by sentient creatures, and that “on each of these worlds God chose one group, just as he has chosen the Jewish people here on Earth. Or perhaps there are worlds on which all the creatures are worthy to be his chosen . . .” (Reuven Israel, Yad Vashem, 24). Shalom Schwardon (1835–1911), who served as head of the Rabbinic Court of Brzezany in what is now western Ukraine, also addressed the Copernican question, but remained skeptical of its veracity. (See his posthumously published Tekhelet Mordekhai, vol. 3, 35.) His work is based on a sermon he delivered on the Sabbath before Passover, one of the two Sabbaths of the year on which the rabbi would give a deliberately lengthy and learned sermon. It is therefore likely that this sermon was delivered to a large audience, who would have heard their rabbinic leader question the truth of Copernicanism, about which at best, Schwardon seems to have been agnostic. Overall, in the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, an increasing number of Jews believed that the heliocentric model was indeed correct. Th is assumption was certainly behind the strong rejection of the model by Zevi Shpilrein, who lived in Warsaw but about whom no more is known. He wrote a single book, Mahmadei Yosef (The Delights of Joseph) that was published in his home city in 1909, and in which he rejected the heliocentric model because it could not be squared with the creation of the world as described in the opening verses of Genesis. “I have written all of this,” he declared, “because I am zealous about a number of contemporary Jewish leaders ( gedolei yisra’el) who support the Copernican model and who follow it as if it had been given at Sinai” (Zevi Joseph Shpilrein, Mahmadei Yosef, 5). But perhaps the strongest rejection was from Elijah Faivelsohn (1867–1928), who published a critique of the heliocentric model in his 1914 book Nezah Yisra’el (The Everlasting Israel). In the book, he addressed a number of contemporary religious challenges and encouraged support of the fledgling Agudat Israel movement among the Jews of Eastern Europe. Faivelsohn’s agenda was to support this movement, founded in 1912 as a response to the Zionist movement’s acceptance of secular culture. In his ten-page essay on science, he made a number of claims that he hoped would strengthen the allegiance of his readers to the movement that represented traditional Judaism as he interpreted it. These included an attack on scientists who claimed to have discovered or invented something, when in reality most of their fi ndings were either built upon the work of others or were fortuitous discoveries that required litt le or no intellectual input. Copernicus’s model was criticized as being unable to explain the lack of stellar parallax and requiring new and non-literal interpretations of several verses in the Bible. Evidence that the Sun itself moved through the universe was cited as proof that it could not be the unmoving center of the solar system, as was the fact that ever since Copernicus proposed his model, “there were in every generation great men of science who opposed it.” Further questions were raised about the discovery of Uranus, the calculated volume of the Earth, and experimental evidence about the force of gravity. All this led Faivelsohn to conclude that “one who leaves the House of Study (Bet Midrash) to seek ‘certainty’ in the field of science will not have achieved much.” (Elijah Meir Faivelsohn, Nezah Yisrael, 311–318. See also note 57 below.) Th is work is an important early example of a fundamentalist rejection of science woven into support for a social-political movement, and Faivelsohn’s denunciation

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of science is strikingly similar to that of the preacher Wilbur Voliva (1870–1942), who joined the Christian Utopian sett lement of Zion City on the shore of Lake Michigan. In December 1915 (a year after the publication of Nezah Yisra’el), Voliva preached: I believe this earth is a stationary plane; that it rests upon water; and that there is no such thing as the earth moving, no such thing as the earth’s axis or the earth’s orbit. It is a lot of silly rot, born in the egotistical brain of infidels. . . . Neither do I believe there is any such thing as the law of gravitation. I believe that is a lot of rot too. There is no such thing! I get my astronomy from the Bible. (Cited in Christine Garwood, Flat Earth, 203.) The subject of Copernicus was discussed openly at the famous Mir Yeshivah, then located in White Russia. Rabbi Yeruham Leivovitz (1873–1936) was the spiritual director (Mashgiah Ruhani) of the yeshivah and was charged with the oversight of the spiritual needs of the many students who studied there. He gave weekly speeches to the students, some of which were recorded by those who attended. In an undated speech, Leivovitz addressed Copernicanism while discussing how the study of Torah should result in highly ethical behavior. “If you see a person studying Torah who has no good deeds that result from his study, this implies that his Torah study is not in order.” Leivovitz expanded on the idea that there are simple practical tests that can be used to verify the truth of a theory or even a way of life. “There is a simple general rule, which is that to evaluate the truth of anything there is an essential test; without such a test, one should not accept anything.” Leivovitz continued: There is a dispute about the path of the Sun and the Earth: does the Sun orbit the Earth or does the Earth orbit the Sun? A long time ago it was thought that the Sun orbited the Earth until Copernicus the sage taught that the Earth in fact orbited the Sun, and also rotated on its axis every day. I say that this should be tested. Let Copernicus and his theory of how the Earth moves be tested, so that the truth of his words can be determined, which will be good for Copernicus. For there is, thank God, a ruler of the entire universe, and whatever the outcome [of the experiments] the world will continue to be ruled. . . .

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12 . 13. 14. 15. 16 . 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22 .

Leivovitz clearly did not know of the experimental support for Copernicanism, such as Foucault’s pendulum and the observation of stellar parallax. It is also unclear whether Leivovitz believed Copernicanism would in fact be verified. What is certain, however, is that Leivovitz was not concerned that the outcome could confl ict with Jewish belief. See Yeruham Leivovitz, Da’at Torah, 274–276. Dov Ber Tursch, Ginzei Hamelekh. The title comes from Esther 3:9. The book is written in poetic and sophisticated Hebrew and is full of allusions to biblical and talmudic phrases. It is challenging to read and difficult to translate into non-archaic prose. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 16–17. Ibid., 17. For an analysis of how the death of Galileo was reported in an earlier work, see page 239. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 23, 24. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 112, 113. See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yesodei Hatorah, chapter 3, #9. Tursch, Ginzei Hamelekh, 119 (emphasis added). Ibid., 50. Ibid., 92. Tursch also noted that Sir Moses Montefiore did much to elevate Judaism in the eyes of his Christian neighbors (ibid.). In his review of Jewish literature that mentions

354

23.

24. 25. 26 . 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Notes Copernicus, Eliezer Brodt mistakenly claimed that Tursch was anti-Copernican. Th is is not the case; the author was using the character of She’altiel to raise the question about the correct model of the universe and provided a compelling answer through the character of Mehalalel. See Eliezer Brodt, “Yahsah Shel Hasifrut Hayehudit Lecopernicos Bemeshekh Hadorot,” 27. See the essay, “Sacred and Profane,” in Ahad Ha-Am Selected Essays, 42–45. He returned to the confl ict of science and religion in another essay, “Two Masters,” published in the same volume, 98–101. The work was fi rst published in Hebrew in 1904 under the title Al Parashat Derakhim (At the Parting of the Ways). David Gelb, “The Editor’s State of Mind,” i. Ha-Am, Selected Essays, 43. Ibid., 44. Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” 19. It should be noted that Davidson was not the fi rst to use the phrase “principle of charity,” and that the principle was also developed by others, such as the philosopher W. V. O. Quine. For a more detailed examination, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 213–219. These examples come from Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority, 28. I have followed Halbertal’s approach to the principle of charity and the reading of sacred (or in his example, canonical) texts. Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed (II, 25), cited in ibid., 29. For those who adopted a more conservative stand about these things and insisted on a literal interpretation of both Bible and Talmud, the principle of charity is still used, but this time in its radical formulation. Here, the truth statements of the sacred text are so powerful that it is other forms of knowledge (in this instance scientific) that must be reinterpreted to avoid any confl ict. To the degree that the reader can identify himself as adhering to the regular or radical formulation of the principle of charity, he may also predict his reaction when a scientific fi nding seems to confl ict with a sacred statement. In a recent work, Norman Solomon addressed the issue of scientific inaccuracy in the Bible and introduced a decidedly uncharitable approach: Since the close of the Talmud rabbis have interpreted Genesis I in terms first of Ptolemaic astronomy, then Copernican, and more recently in terms of “big bang” cosmology. . . . The interpretation of Genesis through the ages carries self-delusion to unprecedented heights; the best one can say is that the convolutions of the interpreters indicate that they are aware of a serious discrepancy between text and reality (Norman Solomon, Torah from Heaven, 125–126).

Maimonides, Ahad Ha’am, and Davidson would disagree. 32 . Th is is a slight oversimplification, and the nuances of Kook’s approach to evolution, as well as to scientific progress in general, are discussed in detail in David Shatz, Jewish Thought in Dialogue, 102–107. 33. Abraham Isaac Kook, Linevokhei Hador. I am grateful to Marc Shapiro for bringing this work to my attention. It was written immediately before Kook left Russia (Marc Shapiro, private correspondence). Evolution is discussed in chapters 4 and 5. For an analysis of this work, see Marc Shapiro, “New Writings from R. Kook Part 1,” in the Seforim blog. Available at http://seforim.blogspot.com/2010/10/marc-b-shapiro-new-writings-from-r-kook.html (accessed March 28, 2011.) For an overview of Kook’s thoughts on evolution, see G. N. Cantor and Marc Swetlitz, Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism,, 215–217, and Shai Cherry, “Th ree Twentieth-Century Jewish Responses to Evolutionary Theory.” 34. Kook, Linevokhei Hador, 14. 35. Ibid., 15. 36 . Abraham Isaac Kook, Igrot Hare’ayah, vol. 1, 106. 37. Ibid., 106. 38. For the fi rst Jewish-American response to Darwinism, see Joseph Krauskopf, Evolution and Judaism. For more details, see Marc Swelitz, “American Jewish Responses to Darwin.”

Notes

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39. The information about Rosenberg and his propensity for forging is from Shnayer Leiman, “The Adventure of the Maharal of Prague in London.” 40. Joseph Dan, Hasipur Hahasidi, cited in ibid., 27. 41. Yudel Rosenberg, Nifla’os Hazohar. 42 . See, for example, Yudel Rosenberg, Zohar Torah Varikrah, 6. For more details about Rosenberg’s att itude to the Zohar, as well as evidence that he forged a letter about its authenticity, see Leiman, “The Adventure of the Maharal of Prague in London,” and the sources cited in the detailed endnotes there. 43. Zohar, Vayikrah, 10a. 44. Rosenberg, Nifla’os Hazohar, 145–146. 45. See page 38. 46 . Rosenberg, Nifla’os Hazohar, 147. 47. Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh ed., vol. X, 34. 48. Friedman, Masekhet Avot Im Perush Man, 78. 49. Menahem Nahum Friedman, Al Ha’adam, 45. It should be noted here that Friedman did not reject the theory of evolution as an impossibility; rather, he thought it unlikely. Based on this statement, which is part of a series of ethical aphorisms in his fi nal book, we cannot conclude with any certainty whether or not this represented a change of his own earlier, dismissive views of the theory. 50. Th is trend continued. In 1928, Martin Schwartz, then rabbi of the Jewish community in Hull, England, published a work in English entitled Faith and Science, in which he ridiculed Darwin’s theory: We only know of six days of creation, not six million years of evolution that are, to say the very least, questionable. There can be no possible comparison between these two standpoints; we cannot be called upon to decide between God and Charles Darwin; this is too ridiculous for words. . . . I can quite understand the expression current among a distinguished circle of German scholars describing Darwin as “the greatest clown of his age.” However, Schwartz assumed that the heliocentric model was correct and used it to explain postdiluvian changes in the Earth’s climate (see Martin Schwartz, Faith and Science, 151, 171). Even recently this phenomenon continues. In 2009, Avi Cohen published We Are Not Alone. The book, which originally appeared in Hebrew under the title Anahnu Lo Levad, used an amalgam of scientific discoveries and Jewish texts to support the belief in God. It included an analysis of the theory of evolution that was dismissed in a chapter entitled “A Theory in Crisis.” It also claimed that the universe was only 5,770 years old—although it was created as if it was “billions of years old.” Despite these distinctly anti-scientific positions, Cohen embraced the Copernican model, stating clearly that the Earth spins both on its axis and around the Sun (20). Copernicus also headed Cohen’s list of the “greatest scientists from every generation” who believed in a Creator (86). Cohen wrote that Copernicus was “. . . the fi rst astronomer to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology based on mathematics, which placed the Earth orbiting around the sun. He mentioned God in his works many times and saw no contradiction between his scientific discoveries and his religious beliefs” (ibid.). The author did not mention the controversy that had surrounded the adoption of the Copernican model in Jewish thought, but while he fully accepted that model, Darwinism and modern geology were condemned. As a fi nal irony, I found this book for sale in Me’ah She’arim, the ultra-Orthodox enclave in Jerusalem, not far from the house where the vehemently anti-Copernican text Ma’amar Mevoh Hashemesh had been written some forty years earlier. (For more on Ma’amar Mevoh Hashemesh, see pages 254–256.) 51. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 3. For a detailed study of Jewish secularization, see Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularization. 52 . Liberal Judaism was the British equivalent of the continental Reform movement. Montefiore also remained active in parts of the traditional Orthodox community; he was on the board of Jews College and helped prepare the standard Orthodox prayer book used in the United Synagogue.

356

Notes

53. Claude Goldsmid Montefiore, Truth in Religion and Other Sermons, 3, 4. 54. For example, see Zevi Rabinowitz, Ozar Hokhmat Hateva Haklalit, part I, 28, 46, and part II, 79, 100, 215. 55. Ibid., part II, 114. Another example is found in part II, 209, where he discusses the laws of conservation of matter. Rabinowitz dedicated the book to his only son Bezalel, who had died. In the dedicatory poem, the poverty of references to God is notable. The only mention is “The God who grants man wisdom granted you [Bezalel] with great wisdom and understanding.” 56 . Ibid., part I, 47. 57. Copernicus is further discussed on pages 81–82, along with Kepler and Newton, and later, Kant and Laplace. There was another example of a play on the biblical verse from the Book of Joshua, when Elijah Faivelsohn’s 1914 att ack on the Copernican model was introduced with these words: Joshua commanded, “Sun, stand still in Givon” for only one day, and it was a tremendous miracle. In the year [5]305 [1545, sic] Nicholai Copernik (from Torun in Prussia) said “Sun, stand still in Frombork,” and after three hundred and seventy four years it is still unmoved!

58. 59. 60. 61. 62 . 63.

64. 65. 66 . 67.

Despite this introduction, as we saw above in note 6, Faivelsohn resolutely rejected the heliocentric model as an example of scientific enterprise that was fi lled with inconsistencies. (See Elijah Meir Faivelsohn, Nezah Yisra’el, 311–318.) Rabinowitz, Ozar Hokhmat Hateva Haklalit, part I, 36. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 66 (emphasis original). Abraham Kaplan, Hama’or Hagadol Hashemesh, 13. See, for example, 7 and 14. Kaplan, Hama’or Hagadol Hashemesh, 6 (emphasis, but not the exclamation mark, added). The allusion is to the opening verses of Genesis: God said . . . and it was so. Ibid., 22. Th is appears to be the fi rst mention in Hebrew literature of the legendary phrase att ributed to Galileo. As we noted earlier in this chapter, Ginzei Hamelekh, published in 1896, also reported that Galileo was executed and that he died with these words on his lips, so the myth does not seem to have been limited to Kaplan’s work. Ronald L. Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 68–78. For 250 years after his trial, the evidence suggested that he had indeed been tortured, but this was not the case. Had Kaplan made only this mistake, it would have been understandable. John Heilbron, Galileo, 317, and David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, 224. Moshe Idel, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism, 11. Kaplan was not alone in manipulating the facts about Galileo’s life in order to make a general point. As Finocchiaro points out, from the late eighteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth, a number of myths about Galileo and his trial began to circulate. These included the claim that Galileo had been imprisoned for five years and that his eyes had been gouged out. These myths sometimes resulted in the creation of pseudofacts. For example, in 1887, a column was erected near the Villa Medici in Rome, where Galileo had spent a brief time under house arrest. The column reads: “The palace next to this spot,/which belonged formerly to the Medici,/was a prison for Galileo Galilei,/ guilty of having seen/the earth turn around the sun./SPQR/MDCCCLXXXVII.” Galileo was never imprisoned, and he had not seen the Earth revolve around the Sun, which is something that even today is not possible to directly observe. Finocchiaro also notes how William Whewell’s 1847 essay on Galileo was an example of “myth-making in action.” Whewell had written about the legendary phrase eppur si muovo: This is sometimes represented as the heroic soliloquy of a mind cherishing its conviction of the truth, in spite of persecution; I think we may more naturally conceive it uttered as a playful epigram in the ear of a cardinal’s secretary, with a full knowledge that it would be immediately repeated to his master. See Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Defending Copernicus and Galileo, 254–273 and 309–310.

Notes

357

68. Details of Bernstein’s life are taken from the Encyclopedia Judaica 3:97 and 4:682–683. One of the English translations, Popular Books on Natural Science, was published in New York in 1869. 69. Aaron David Bernstein, Yediot Hateva, vol. 3, 32. The age of the Earth is addressed in vol. 8, 29–30. 70. Aaron David Bernstein, Yediot Hateva , vol. 5, 69–70. Bernstein did mention Moses parting the Red Sea and the patriarch Abraham with his wife Sarah, which would suggest that he acknowledged these as historical facts (Bernstein, Yediot Hateva , vol. 8, 69). Bernstein spelled out his opinion on the historicity of the patriarchs in a work that was translated into English as On the Origins of the Legends of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 71. A reference to Isa. 54:10. 72 . Bernstein, Yediot Hateva, vol. 8, 6–7. 73. Bernstein, Yediot Hateva, vol. 13. 74. For his explanation of gravity see Bernstein, Yediot Hateva, vol. 3, 29–30. 75. Bernstein, Yediot Hateva, vol. 8, 44. 76 . As David Livingstone pointed out, public demonstrations are required if a scientific claim is to be established as public knowledge: “Only when the journey from private to public space had been successfully concluded could a scientific claim enjoy the privilege of knowledge” (David N. Livingstone, Putt ing Science in Its Place, 27). Elsewhere (vol. 18, 40), Bernstein revealed to his readers that the Sun itself is not stationary but orbits another group of stars once every 22.5 million years. 77. Jacob Frenkel, Nikolai Copernicus . This work appears to be the first book-length biography of Copernicus in Hebrew. The author translated an existing German text into Hebrew, although he did not record which book he used. It should also be noted that although few and far between, there are references to religious texts in the work. For example, Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed was mentioned when analyzing the Copernican notion that nature does not create things without a reason for doing so. This belief was, according to Frenkel, a central feature of De Revolutionibus (see 82). 78. Ibid., 93–94. 79. Th is is not the only example of Copernicus being an exemplar of a particular historical or social movement. On May 26, 1943, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem observed the 400th anniversary of the death of Copernicus with remarks from Martin Buber, who was then a professor of social philosophy, and Samuel Sambursky, a lecturer in experimental physics. Buber’s short address, given against the backdrop of the murders of European Jewry by the Nazis, noted how Copernicus had stood up for his beliefs against a far stronger majority: In these times in which a man who has gone astray threatens the destruction of humanity, we commemorate the memory of Copernicus, and celebrate the spirit that stands eternally in the face of destruction. Like him, we look with caution and hope to the stars, and vow to join the collective effort to save humanity and build a foundation for human values, which should be no less deserving of the solar system (Martin Buber and Samuel Sambursky, Nicolas Copernicus, 3). 80. Abraham S. Caspe, Astronomy. 81. Philip Krantz, Himel Un Erd: Astronomye Far’n Folk . The book is heavily illustrated with diagrams such as the transit of Venus (216), the movement of the Earth through the seasons (385), and the precession of the equinoxes (387), among many others. 82 . Krantz, Himel Un Erd: Astronomye Far’n Folk , 100–112. 83. Ahmad S. Dallal, Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History, 162–165. 84. Ibid., 164. 85. Abraham Yaary identified the author as Nissim de Castro, and Castro’s name is mentioned in the rabbinic approbation, although as the publisher and not as the author. According to Yaary, there were only four Hebrew books that were printed in Constantinople in the years 1849 to 1850. (See Abraham Yaary, Hadefus Ha’ivri

358

86 . 87. 88. 89. 90.

91.

92 . 93.

94. 95. 96 .

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102 . 103. 104. 105.

Notes Bekushta, 55, 237.) The author of Uno Mirada a Los Sielos acknowledged his indebtedness “to the works of Herschel the younger, Nichol, Dick and Chambers.” John Herschel was the son of the English astronomer William and wrote widely on astronomy. Thomas Dick (1774–1857) was a Scott ish minister who wrote several books on practical astronomy. The reference to Chambers likely refers to William and Robert Chambers, who published their Introduction to the Science of Astronomy in 1843. But see the unnumbered preface, where several biblical texts are referenced, and also 17, where the author quotes Isaiah 40:10. On the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, see 59. Uno Mirada a Los Sielos, fi rst page of the unnumbered preface. For a detailed analysis of the concept of the Bible and the natural world being the two books of God, see Kenneth J. Howell, God’s Two Books. Y. Tzvi Langerman, The Jews of Yemen and the Exact Sciences, 3. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, 7. Th is decline has been noted and extensively analyzed by historians of Islam and science. See George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, 233– 255; Dallal, Islam, Science, and the Challenge of History, 149–157; and most recently, Jim Al-Khalili, The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge, 223–240. Yihye Kafah, Da’at Elohim, 9. Th is work was an essay written in response to an article Hillel Zeitlin had published in Hatekufah in 1920. The reference to Copernicus is tangential and not the main subject of discussion, which was whether or not the Zohar contained information about the natural world that was not already found in the Talmud. For a detailed, if hagiographic, review of Kafah’s life, see Shalom Karah, Iggeret Bokhim. It is interesting to note that Karah included a single photograph of Kafah in his book, in which Kafah is holding what appears to be a scientific instrument. Aaron David Bernstein, Yediot Hateva, 43–44. Hillel Kahane, Gelilot Ha’aretz, 38–58. Kahane was director of a Jewish school in Botosani, northern Romania. The book was dedicated to, and has a letter of greetings from, Moses Montefiore of London. Kafah’s library also contained installments of the serialized work on science by Zevi Rabinowitz called Otzar Hahokhmah Vehamada (A Treasury of Knowledge and Science), with information on magnetism, mechanics, and chemistry. The serials were later published as a single volume that we noted above. The list of books in Kafah’s library comes from Langerman, The Jews of Yemen and the Exact Sciences, 10. Other sources give the place of his birth as Bida. See Shimon Vanunu, Arzei Halevanon, 2037. Vanunu conjectured that Adeni arrived in Jerusalem in 1875 (ibid., 2039). Shalom Mizrachi Adeni, Shalom Yerushalayim. The book was reprinted in Jerusalem in 1984. See, for example, his statements at 245 and 248, as well as 257 et seq. Although Vanunu’s biography of Adeni is too hagiographic to be reliable, it is interesting to note that Vanunu described Adeni as regularly protesting against change and innovation—and noted that Adeni was a signatory to a pubic notice that banned participation in the Israeli general elections (Vanunu, Arzei Halevanon, 2040). If true, this certainly fits the picture of a man who also clung to the notion of a geocentric universe. See page 95 and Tuviah ben Moses Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviah, 52a–53a. Shmuel Yeshua, Nahalat Yosef. Ibid., 92b. Th is argument was fi rst proposed by Pinhas Hurwitz in his Sefer Haberit, part one, #2:2. Pinhas Hurwitz, Sefer Haberit, 48b. Yeshua, Nahalat Yosef, 98a. Ibid., 99a. Cohen, Ma’aseh Tuviah, 52a. For his view on angels, see Yeshua, Nahalat Yosef, 42; for witchcraft , 52–53; and for reincarnation, see 54 et seq. Joseph Hayyim, Rav Pe’alim, vol. 2, question 1. See also the responsum Hayyim wrote under the pseudonym Ezekiel Kehali, in which he analyzed whether the fact that the Earth is a globe may affect the laws of ritual impurity. Although he accepted this

Notes

106.

107. 108. 109.

110. 111. 112 . 113.

114. 115.

359

fact, at the same time, he rejected any suggestion that the Earth moved in any way. See Joseph Hayyim, Torah Lishmah, 352. (For recent evidence that the author of this work was indeed Hayyim, see Koppel et al., “Measuring Differentiability: Unmasking Pseudonymous Authors.”) The Gerstel family served as rabbis to the town of Jaryczow (Yartchev, Novyi Yarychev) for some two hundred years. Following the First World War, when Ze’ev Gerstel moved to Lemberg, there were about two hundred Jewish families in the town. The Jewish population of Jaryczow grew to some two thousand people; in January 1943, the Nazis murdered the entire community. See htt p://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Novyy_Yarychev/ yar010.html (accessed July 25, 2011). Ze’ev Wolf ben Samuel Gerstel, Hokhmat Tekufot Umazelot. Gerstel hoped to publish a series of books on astronomy but, aside from a calendar for the year 1928, this did not happen. See, for example, Sefer Evronot, 25a–25b. For more on volvelles, see Elisheva Carlebach, Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe , 106–108. See, for example, Ze’ev Wolf ben Samuel Gerstel, Hokhmat Tekufot Umezelot, 10b, 11b, 24b. It should be noted that the full title of the work is Sefer Hokhmat Tekufot Umazelot, Sefer Ben Hashmashot Vesefer Hacokhavim (The Science of the Seasons and the Constellations, Dusk, and the Stars). See page 93. See Gerstel, Hokhmat Tekufot Umezelot, 15b, where the period of the orbit of Venus is “approximately 224 days around the Sun,” and 16a, where the period of Mercury “orbits the Sun in 87 days.” Gerstel also refers to the Sun’s apparent yearly orbit (ibid.). Palti’el Lubelchick, Hodshei Ha’arez . Information about Siedlce is from htt p://www. holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/siedlce.html, accessed July 26, 2011. The town is known as Kosow Lacki and is about thirty-two miles north of Siedlce. In 1921, it had a Jewish population of about 1,300. Its Jews were marched from the town on foot to the Treblinka death camp in September 1942. See htt p://www.jewishgen.org/ yizkor/pinkas_poland/pol7_00474.html, accessed July 26, 2011. Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, 23–30. Th is used to be a much more important constellation than it is today, because one of its stars, Thurban, used to occupy the position of polestar, so it appeared as if the skies rotated around it. The rather impenetrable text of the Sefer Yetzirah (6:1) is as follows: These are the Three Mothers AM”Sh. And from them emanated Three Fathers, and they are Air, Water and Fire. From the Fathers, descendants. Three Fathers and their descendants, and seven planets and their hosts, and twelve diagonal boundaries. A proof of this, true witness in the Universe, Year, Soul and a rule of twelve and seven and three. He set them in the Teli and the Galgal and Heart.

116 . Today, this obliquity is 23.44 degrees, but it changes over time as the Earth wobbles through space like a spinning top. A good discussion of the astronomy involved in the identification of the Teli can be found in Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, 231–238. The meaning and iconography of the word Teli is also discussed in Marc Michael Epstein, Dreams of Subversion in Medieval Jewish Art & Literature, 75–76, and the endnotes there. 117. Lubelchick, Hodshei Ha’aretz . The argument is hard to follow, but it is most easily understood on page 15, item 28. 118. Ibid., 15. 119. See page 71. 120. See page 142 and Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8.

Chapter 13, Relativity and Contemporary Jewish Geocentrists, Pages 254–273 1. For a detailed history of the broadcast, and the public reaction in the United States that followed it, see Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth, 128–140.

360

Notes

2 . The phrase mevoh hashemesh comes from Deut. 11:30, where the location of two mountains is described as “on the other side of the Jordan, by the way where the Sun goes down [mevoh hashemesh],” i.e., the west. 3. Pinhas Vaberman, “Ma’amar Mavoh Hashemesh,” 115. 4. Ibid., 116–117. 5. Sefer Haberit, part one, #9:8. 6. Two books that touched on the question of whether the Earth moved were published in Europe between the wars, and both rejected the heliocentric model. In 1928, a Dutch communal rabbi named Abraham Waxman rejected the model in a work called Gei Hizayon (The Valley of Vision). Waxman was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. In 1934, Hayyim Gloskin, the rabbi of the town of Horodno near Minsk published Rohashei Lev (The Overflowing Heart) and he too attacked the Copernican model, based on the work of Pinhas Hurwitz’s Sefer Haberit. No doubt with the life-and-death horrors of the Second World War and the fight for the survival of the newly founded State of Israel, there were more important things to argue over than whether or not the Earth moved. Menahem Kasher (1895–1983) was another rabbi who addressed the Copernican question, though he did so from the relative safety of Palestine, then under the rule of the British. Kasher was a prolific writer who went on to win the Israel Prize in 1963 for his Jewish scholarship and is most well known for his encyclopedic Torah Shleimah (Complete Torah), which now consists of over forty volumes. In 1945, Kasher addressed the question of Copernicus in an essay on the International Date Line, and stated simply “as far as the Torah is concerned, there is no opposition to this theory” (Kasher, “Shabbat Bereshit Veshabbat Sinai,” 634). Kasher expanded on this idea in his 1950 essay “The Earth or the Sun as the Center of the Universe” and came to the same conclusion: “. . . There is no contradiction to the theory of Copernicus from a Torah perspective” (Kasher, “Ha’arez O Hashemesh Merkaz Ha’olam,” 410). Another Orthodox writer to accept the Copernican position at this time was Shragah Hacohen Rosenberg (1861–1958), the rabbi of the Knesset Israel synagogue in Cleveland Ohio. In a book of sermons on the weekly Torah readings published in 1946, Rosenberg gave a homiletic explanation of the verse in Isaiah 66:22: “For as the new heavens and the new Earth, which I will make, shall remain before me, says the Lord, so shall your seed and your name remain.” The old heavens and Earth were scientifically different from the modern heavens and Earth. Earlier, people believed that the Sun and the stars orbited the Earth, and that the Earth was stationary, until Copernicus proved beyond any doubt that the Sun is stationary and that the Earth orbits it. God, who gives of his wisdom to flesh and blood, implanted this new idea into the heart of this wise person. . . . Other nations also believe in the heavens, in the divine and in higher powers, but their beliefs and their service revolves around the Earth. Materialism is for them the main purpose in life, and for them the Earth stands [at the center]. . . . But with Israel we see the opposite; the Earth revolves around the Sun in the sky. It is the Sun that rules and the Earth that serves the heavens. . . . If Israel will identify with this aspiration, and not be swayed or try to mimic the other nations, if it does not bring the Sun down from its heights, and does not try to have the Sun serve the Earth, then Israel will continue for ever. For this is the great strength of the people of God, that spirituality lives inside them, and that their materialism orbits the Sun of their beliefs, and not that their beliefs serves their materialism…(Shragah Hacohen Rosenberg, Avnei Shayish, 64–65). Vaberman’s work ended a relatively long period of Jewish silence about the Copernican question. It was well known to later Orthodox writers who looked for support for the geocentric position. It was, for example, cited in support of the geocentric position in Shlomo Benizri’s 2003 work Hashamayim Mesaprim, 472, and in an essay printed in 1976 in the Haredi newspaper Diglenu. Both these works are reviewed in detail below. 7. Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Iggrot Kodesh, vol. XXII, 508–509, emphasis in the original. The letter was also printed in Likutei Sihot, vol. 10, 181. The letter appears in a more complete form and translated into English in Arnie Gotfryd ed., Mind Over

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Matter, 75–77. In a second letter dated August 1964 and reprinted in the same volume, the Rebbe wrote that . . . the Copernican sun centered system is no more than a theory, subject to a variety of reservations, as all scientific theories must be. . . . I once asked a professor of science why he did not tell his students that from the viewpoint of the relativity theory the Ptolomaic [sic] system could claim as much validity as the Copernican. He answered candidly that if he did that, he would lose his standing in the academic world, since he would be at variance with the prevalent legacy from the 19th century. I countered, “What about the moral issue?” The answer was silence (Gotfryd, ed. Mind Over Matter, 182–183). 8. See htt p://www.chabad.org/therebbe/article_cdo/aid/73253/jewish/The-Wager.htm (accessed May 14, 2011). It should be noted that I have yet to see any independent verification of this story, and it does not appear in Gotfryd’s Mind Over Matter. Nevertheless, the fact that it is posted on the “Chabad-Lubavitch Media Center under the auspices of the Lubavitch World Headquarters” suggests that the story has passed muster for that organization. 9. These claims are widespread. See, for example, htt p://www.chabad.org/therebbe/ article_cdo/aid/244372/jewish/The-Rebbe-A-brief-biography.htm. “[The Rebbe] later studied in the University of Berlin and then at the Sorbonne in Paris. It may have been in these years that his formidable knowledge of mathematics and the sciences began to blossom.” According to his recent biographers, Schneerson was not able to acquire either a degree or academic credit from the University of Berlin, and there is no record that he actually attended the Sorbonne. See Samuel C. Heilman and Menachem Friedman, The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, 111, 125. 10. Not surprisingly, Schneerson also opposed Darwinian evolution. In a letter that appears to have been written in 1962, he wrote to a young student that “[i]f you are still troubled by the theory of evolution, I can tell you without fear of contradiction that it has not a shred of evidence to support it. . . . Hence such a theory can have no place in the arsenal of empirical science” (Aryeh Carmell and Cyril Domb, eds., Challenge: Torah Views of Science and Its Problems, 148). Apparently, the editors of Challenge felt that Schneerson’s views were as valid in the year 2000 as they had been some forty years earlier because they were reprinted in a new edition. 11. Schneerson was not the fi rst leader of the Lubavitch Hasidim to reject Copernicanism. Shne’ur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812) was the founder of the Habad sect that later became better known as Lubavitch, and he wrote an important siddur (prayer book) that remains in print to this day. In the section on berit milah (circumcision), Shne’ur Zalman wrote: “It is known that the Sun in its journey orbits; this orbit is as if it bows down to nullify itself . . .” (see Shne’ur Zalman of Liadi, Seder Hatefilot Mikol Hashanah, 283). Th is Ptolemaic description was noted by the scholar Hayyim Yehiel Bornstein (d. 1928), who wrote an appendix to a biography of Shne’ur Zalman that was published in 1910. Bornstein defended the anachronistic science of the founder of Lubavitch, who had been very influenced by Delmedigo’s Sefer Elim in all matters except Copernicanism: The approach of the author of Sefer Elim appears to contradict the senses and destroy the foundations of acceptable religious belief which places man at the center of all of creation. This approach can only be accepted by a scholar after a profound examination of the heavens, for it completely destroys all of the previous work of researchers. [It can only be accepted] after clearly understanding all the proofs upon which the astronomers claim it to be true. From the books that he had, the Rav [Shne’ur Zalman] could not know of all these proofs and supports that were known even before the Frenchman Foucault proved to the senses that the Earth moves, with his pendulum demonstration. [Shne’ur Zalman] could only consider the Copernican model as a theory, and one that had not yet been adequately proven. This is the reason that he saw the greatness of the Creator through “the incredible rapid speed of the Sun’s movement that moves as if bowing down in an amazing act of self-abnegation.”

362

Notes Had the Rav lived under different circumstances, and had he been able to examine more deeply the proofs and science of astronomy, we could safely say that he would have had no opposition to the new astronomy, which has now been demonstrated beyond question (Hayyim Bornstein, “Simat Ayin,” 21). Although we cannot know how the founder of the Lubavitch movement might have reacted to the experimental supports for Copernicanism, we know with certainty that one of his successors did not accept the heliocentric model, even after, in Bornstein’s own words a century ago, “it has now been demonstrated beyond question.” Schneerson’s use of relativity to support his geocentric view even found its way into the children’s magazine published by the Lubavitch movement called Moshiach [Messiah] Times. In 1996, a reader wrote to the magazine and asked how it could have illustrated the planets revolving around the Sun when “according to the Rambam the sun, the stars and all the planets revolve around the earth.” The reply to this child was as follows: You are 100% correct. In the Rambam, and the teachings of our Sages, there are passages which tell us that the sun revolves around the earth. . . . For many years, people felt that Copernicus’ theory was a contradiction to what the Torah said. However, in our century the scientist Einstein has shown that really there is no conflict between Copernicus and the Torah. According to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, when we are talking about several moving objects, it is impossible to “prove” which one moves around which, for everything is relative. It is like being on a train or a subway when another train pulls up alongside. At first it may look as if the two trains are travelling together. Then, as the second train “catches up,” it appears to the passengers that the two trains are standing still. Then, as the second train passes, it seems as if the first train has started going backwards. Really, it is going forwards all the time. It only seems to be going backwards “relative to the second train,” which is passing. Similarly, we can understand that notwithstanding Copernicus’ calculations, we may still undertand the Torah literally, that the sun goes around the earth, just as it appears to our eyes (Moshiach Times, vol. 14, #3, February 1996, 18).

12 . 13. 14. 15.

16 .

17. 18.

The Lubavitch movment fi rmly believes that the geocentric model is the only one that is suggested by the Bible and has continued to defend this position. Robert A. Sungenis and Robert J. Bennett , Galileo Was Wrong, the Church Was Right. Avi Rabinowitz, “Geocentrism.” Ibid., 26 (emphasis original). Ibid., 28, 31. Rabinowitz has since clarified and expanded his views on his website, where he wrote that “the original article was published in a fundamentalist journal, and so has a somewhat religious slant, but careful readers will see that its intent is the same as that of this revised version.” However, he does concede that “the universe is defi nitely not visually unambiguously geocentric, so this form of geocentrism has defi nitely been disproved.” See Avi Rabinowitz, “Egocentrism and Geocentrism; Human Significance and Existential Despair,” htt p://www.pages.nyu.edu/%7Eair1/GeoCentrism%20&%20 EgoCentrism,%20Existentialist%20Despair%20&%20Significance.htm (accessed May 23, 2011). Sungenis and Bennett , Galileo Was Wrong, the Church Was Right, vol. 1, 45. Catholic Apologetics International (also known as the Bellarmine Theological Forum) is a profoundly conservative Catholic group. Although it focuses on Catholic belief and ritual, it considers the question of whether the Earth is at rest or in motion to be of great importance. In November 2010, the group organized what it described as “The First Annual Catholic Conference on Geocentrism” in South Bend, Indiana. The group’s website hosts a number of anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist links, and Sungenis has defended a revisionist approach to the Holocaust. B’Ohr HaTorah 1998: 10: 165–167. Th is was the only letter on the subject published in that volume of the journal. It was, however, criticized by Prof. Cyril Domb in a letter to the editor published in the next volume, B’Ohr HaTorah 1999: 11: 173–175. B’Ohr HaTorah 1998: 10: 165–167.

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19. One of the numerous errors in this letter is the claim that Darwin was influenced by Copernicus. There is not a single reference to Copernicus in any of Darwin’s writings that I have searched using several online databases. 20. Shimon D. Cowen, “Torah Metaphysics Versus Newtonian Empricism,” 107 (emphasis original). 21. Ibid., 108. 22 . Ibid., 109. Cowen acknowledges this explanation as coming from the writings of Shalom Dov Ber of Lubavitch. 23. It is even more puzzling to read that in 1988, Cowen founded the Institute for Judaism and Civilization in Melbourne, Australia, “with the purpose of helping to bring together the two worlds of religious tradition and secular society in discussion and, ultimately, harmony.” His worldview seems to be that there is nothing that civilization has to offer Judaism. 24. Shlomo Benizri, Hashamayim Mesaprim. 25. Ibid., 4. 26 . Ibid., 469. The suggestion that relying on Greek astronomy had misled Maimonides had been made before, by Eliezer Neusatz (the student of Moses Sofer) in 1884, although Benizri seems not to have been aware of this. See page 167. 27. Ibid., 476. This is a well-used approach to difficult questions found throughout the Talmud; the question is left for the prophet Elijah to answer. Benizri used the principle to explain why Maimonides stated that the Sun was 170 times the volume of the Earth, rather than 110 times, which was a more accurate estimation. “If there is a difference between the words of Maimonides and modern teachings, this is certainly not, God forbid, due to a mistake in the Torah or in the teachings of our rabbis of blessed memory. Rather it is an error based on Greek science, and nothing more” (491). 28. Ibid., 480. 29. Ibid., 493–513. Benizri also used heliocentric diagrams to explain the path of Voyager 1 (515) and the structure of the zodiac (559). 30. A similar pattern can be found in Ethan Zikoni, Hazon Shamayim. Zikoni quoted exactly the same passage from Einstein as did Benizri (7). 31. Benizri, Hashamayim Mesaprim, 478. The quote can be found in Albert Einstein and Leoplold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, 212. 32 . Benizri, Hashamayim Mesaprim, 479. 33. Einstein and Infeld, The Evolution of Physics, 154. To make the point clearer, think about the hundreds of newly discovered exoplanets that have been discovered orbiting distant stars. Our Earthly astronomers could describe these planets as stationary and as having a large star revolving around them. Indeed by fi xing their telescopes on an exoplanet, it would be possible to claim just that. But it would involve a great deal of needlessly complicated mathematics, and when the system is viewed as a whole, it is the exoplanet that is seen orbiting the fi xed star. 34. Ibid., 211 (emphasis added). 35. Albert Einstein and Alice Calaprice, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein. 36 . Ronald William Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times, 110. 37. Ibid., 118, 119. 38. Albert Einstein and Yoshimasa Ono, “How I Created the Theory of Relativity,” 46 (emphasis added). 39. George Viereck, “What Life Means to Einstein,” 17. 40. It takes some effort to understand the concepts of relativity, and the challenge has been made easier by several works. Some of the best ones are Amir D. Aczel, God’s Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe; David Bodanis, E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation; Brian Cox and J. R. Forshaw, Why Does E=mc2 : (and Why Should We Care?); and chapter 4 of Roland Clark’s Einstein: The Life and Times. 41. A. Y. Bornstein, “Giluy Panim Batorah.” I am grateful to Natan Slifk in for his help in locating a copy of this article. Bornstein quoted from Vaberman’s Ma’amar Mavoh Hashemesh, with which we opened this chapter.

364

Notes

42 . Schlesinger is discussed on pages 165–166. The quote is found in Israel David Schlesinger, Yafe’ah Leketz , 8a. 43. Diglenu, Cheshvan-Kislev 5736 (1976). The article was recently reprinted with new footnotes in Yonah Merzbach, “The Earth Stands Still Forever,” 10–16. All further quotes from Merzbach are from this reprint. 44. Moshe Sternbuch, Emunah Vetorah. Oddly enough, I could not fi nd this book in the collection of works by Sternbuch at his synagogue in Har Nof, Jerusalem, when I visited there in July 2011. Inside the Gr’a synagogue, there is a small bookcase housing Sternbuch’s works (with a large notice that the works are for reference only), and Emunah Vetorah was missing. As the synagogue was virtually empty at the time, the explanation was not that the book was being used. Whether this pro-Copernican book had been deliberately removed, mislaid, or simply never placed there in the fi rst place is not clear. 45. Predictably, Sternbuch is also an opponent of the theory of evolution. See, for example, Daniel Travis, “Darwin’s Theory Revisited,” 53. 46 . Despite his openness to the heliocentric model, Sternbuch did not abandon Maimonides completely. Maimonides stated that because the planets move, they must have souls. As a result, Sternbuch considered the argument that if the Earth moves, it might be endowed with a soul. He ultimately rejected this possibility and argued that, as the existence of the Earth allows humanity to serve God, this was its ultimate purpose, and it therefore did not require a soul (3:11). 47. Hayyim Benish, Hazemanim Behalakhah, vol. 2, 480. The work includes approbations from Shmuel Halevi Wosner and Nissim Karelitz, leading Haredi rabbis in Bnei Brak. 48. Zikoni, Hazon Shamayim, 8. 49. Ibid., 10–12. 50. Menahem Gerlitz, Birkat Hahamah Kehilkhatah, 29. Gerlitz misquoted the medieval work Yesod Olam by Isaac Israeli, claiming Israeli had written that “it made no difference whether we assume that the Sun revolves around the Earth or that the Earth revolves around the Sun.” No such claim was made in Israeli’s work. 51. Ibid., 33. 52 . Zvi Cohen, Birkhat Hahamah: Halakhot Uminhagim Hashalem, 69 (emphasis added). Cohen’s work contains the approbations of nine Haredi rabbis, two of whom also gave approbations to the work by Gerlitz. 53. Mordekhai Ganot, Birkhat Hahamah Bitekufatah, 103. The heliocentric system is explained in chapter 12, 130–136. 54. Joseph Zalman Bloch, Kuntrus Hashemesh Bigvurato, title page. 55. Ibid., 6. See also 23. 56 . Ibid., 6. 57. Ibid., 18–19. 58. Ibid., 25–26. A similar explanation for Foucault’s experiment is offered by the fundamentalist Catholic geocentrist Robert Sungenis: “[I]t would be just as logical, not to mention scientifically consistent, to posit that the combined forces of the universe which rotate around the Earth are causing the plane of the pendulum to rotate around an immobile Earth” (Sungenis and Bennett , Galileo Was Wrong, the Church Was Right, 110). 59. Bloch, Kuntrus Hashemesh Bigvurato, 23. 60. Ibid., 30. 61. Ibid., 29. In addition to these sentiments that make for very uncomfortable reading, the pamphlet contains numerous errors, such as confusing the astronomer Ptolemy, who lived in the fi rst century of the Common Era, with Ptolemy, who succeeded Alexander the Great and who died in 283 bce (ibid., 33). In another error, Bloch noted that William Vollmann’s 2006 book Uncentering the Earth demonstrated that Copernicus was motivated by “the secularization of science” (ibid., 29, note 20.) There is no such suggestion in Vollmann’s text. 62 . Eliezer Eizikovitz, “Center of the Universe,” 6–15. The English-language article is a translation of the Hebrew article that was published in 2010. Kolmus is a monthly

Notes

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supplement published by Mishpachah and is subtitled “The Journal of Torah and Jewish Thought.” The mission statement of Mishpachah is to “provide informative and compelling features in a format suitable to readers striving to live by Torah standards.” According to an article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz , Mishpachah is the most widely read magazine in the Haredi sector, selling more than 45,000 copies weekly (Shachar Ilan, “Hamishpacha Harevi’it”). 63. Eizikovitz, “Center of the Universe,” 13. 64. See note 88 above in chapter 7. 65. The charity describes its history and mission in this way: Ezras Torah, established in 1915 by Gedolei Torah, is a nonprofit Jewish relief organization that specializes in supplying funds to needy Torah families primarily in Israel. . . . Ezras Torah is also known for its world renowned Halachic Calendar and Guide, providing important information on how to conduct oneself as a Jew or Jewess on a day to day basis. This unique Luach also includes a list of Candle Lighting times and important Zmanim for many major cities in the United States and Canada. (htt p://www.ezrastorah.org/index.php [accessed Oct. 29, 2011]) 66 . See page 301 note 26, where this was discussed in detail. 67. The Ezras Torah Luach; the English Version (Ezras Torah, 5768 [2008]), 7. 68. The Ezras Torah Luach; the English Version (Ezras Torah, 5769 [2009]), 2 (emphasis added).

Conclusion, Pages 274–286 1. Leo Baeck, The Essence of Judaism (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 41. 2 . Meyer Waxman, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. II, 310–311. Waxman is a century off; Copernicus did not suggest his system until the early sixteenth century. 3. Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages, 129. 4. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace, 21–22. 5. Th is is the result of a Gallup poll taken on the eve of the two-hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s birthday. Results available at htt p://www.gallup.com/poll/114544/ darwin-birthday-believe-evolution.aspx (accessed Jan. 17, 2012). 6. Still, Gould was correct about the way creationism, or at least a strong anti-science movement, might reach into our regular political discourse. All this data is found in Andrew Curry, “Creationist Beliefs Persist in Europe,” Science 323 (2009), 1159. See also Ronald L. Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 215–223. At a primary debate for presidential candidates seeking the Republican nomination in May 2007 at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, the moderator asked whether there was anyone on the stage who did not believe in the theory of evolution. Th ree of the ten candidates (Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mick Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancred) raised their hands. 7. The New York Times reported that “polling consistently suggests that some 6 percent of Americans believe the landings were faked and could not have happened” (John Schwartz, “Vocal Minority Insists It Was All Smoke and Mirrors”). For an example of a Catholic minority who rejects much of the Church’s teachings, see the efforts of The Bellarmine Report, found at htt p://www.catholicintl.com/ (accessed Nov. 3, 2011). 8. For a review of the complexities in those and other cases, see John Hedley Brooke and Ronald L. Numbers, Science and Religion around the World. 9. David N. Livingstone, “Which Science? Whose Religion?,” 282–288. 10. David N. Livingstone, Putt ing Science in Its Place, 184. 11. Ibid., 185. Although the reasons for accepting a scientific assertion may be local and relative, the assertion itself is not relative to any local factors, and Livingstone makes no claim that scientific truth itself is relative. 12 . Livingstone, “Which Science? Whose Religion?,” 287.

366

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13. There are of course other examples that would question this generalization, such as the rise of Hasidisim or the Sabbatean movement that preceded it. The point here is that until the early eighteenth century, there was really only one kind of Judaism, and that any Jew who failed to follow its accepted dictates was, ipso facto, an outsider to this world. Since the Haskalah and the growth of Reform, Hasidic, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Modern Orthodox Judaism, not to mention the rise of secular Judaism as a branch of its own, there have been far more options for those who wished to remain within a framework that recognized them as Jews, but allowed them to reject some of Judaism’s normative practices and beliefs. 14. Galileo was described as having a strong personality and a devastating method of argument: He never takes his adversary by abrupt frontal attack, but after a courteous greeting stands back to await the first blow. Going on the defense, he entices his opponent to advance. Suddenly he strikes where least expected, and, profiting from the surprise, presses in, pushes back, knocks out his adversary, and withdraws without taking any further notice of the combat (Antonio Belloni, Storia letteraria d’Italia, 535–536, cited in John Heilbron, Galileo, 22). 15. 16 . 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22 . 23. 24. 25. 26 .

27. 28. 29. 30.

See page 57, and David Gans, Nehmad Vena’im, 83b. David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, 252–253. See pages 63–64 Robert S. Westman, The Copernican Question, 487–489. See the approbations of Abraham Sofer to Israel David Schlesinger, Hazon Lemo’ed, and to Eliezer Lipman Neusatz, Betzir Eliezer. Livingstone, “Which Science? Whose Religion?,” 287. Hame’assef 1789:31. See page 129. See Bernard Lightman, “Unbelief,” especially 254–261. David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, 261–263. As we mentioned in chapter 1, Copernicus wrote an anonymous précis of his ideas some time before 1514, but this work was only available in manuscript to some of his close colleagues (Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read, 31). Th is account is based in part on Alvin Plantinga’s description of how religious beliefs can be defeated by science. See Plantigna, Where the Conflict Really Lies, 183–186. Because Galileo believed that tides were caused by the movement of the Earth, it is incorrect to say that there was no evidence for Galileo’s Copernicanism. Instead, Galileo based his beliefs on a scientific theory that was later found to be erroneous. Th is is a different state of affairs from the one that Wooten claims existed. See the articles collected in Geoff rey Cantor and Marc Swetlitz, Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism. There is more, however, to be said on the matter. Joseph Krauskopf, Evolution and Judaism. For more details, see Marc Swelitz, “American Jewish Responses to Darwin.” Abraham Isaac Kook, Orot Hakodesh, vol. 2, 565. A partial translation of this essay appears in Ben Zion Bosker, Abraham Isaac Kook , 220–221. See, for example, the anti-Darwinian position of Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg, cited on page 234, and Cantor and Swetlitz, Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, 23–88. A full review of the topic is not possible here, but it is important to note that in the 1970s, evolution was widely criticized by a number of authors who self identified as “Orthodox Jewish scientists” (see Aryeh Carmell and Cyril Domb, eds., Challenge: Torah Views of Science and Its Problems, section II). There are still many contemporary Orthodox authors who believe that the theory of evolution is scientifically incorrect. One example, chosen at random from many that could have been quoted, will suffice: “[T]he Jewish objection to the theory of evolution is not because evolution disproves creation. . . . Judaism does not demand rejection of scientific fact. The reason that Judaism currently rejects evolution is because as a scientific theory it is fatally flawed” (Yehuda Herskowitz, The Sun Cycle, 88).

Notes 31. 32 . 33. 34.

Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership, 231–232. Ibid., 232. Benjamin Nelson and Toby E. Huff, On the Roads to Modernity, 112. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything , 64–65.

Appendix, Pages 287–294 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12 . 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22 . 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32 . 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42 . 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Prov. 18:4. Ps. 63:7, 119:148. Prov. 27:20, Eccles.1:8. Exod. 36:2, Lam. 3:41. Gen. 49:26, Hab. 3:6. Ps. 93:4. Ps. 19:2. Amos 3:7. Prov. 21:11, Dan. 1:4. Ps. 126:2. Is. 11:9. Joel 2:26. Ecc. 10:18. Joel 2:2. Deut. 32:3, Jer. 13:16. Hab. 3:6. Ps. 48:7. Exod. 16:29. Ps. 37:2. Jer. 12:10, Joel 2:3. Isa. 45:23. Job 36:27. Ps. 68:10. Job 38:28. Gen. 24:53, cf. Rashi loc. cit. Ps. 145:21. Ps. 51:17. Mal. 3:20. Isa. 26:12. Ps. 45:3. Ps. 48:3, Lam. 2:15, Ez . 16:18. Isa. 32:9. I Sam. 2:3. Isa. 48:13. Ps. 107:14, Job 10:21. Isa. 24:11. Ps. 10:9. TB. Sotah 43a. Lev. 26:13. Prov. 4:11. Ps. 107:23. Jer. 13:16. Ps. 92:2. Ps. 33:3. Exod. 20:11. Num. 23:10. Isa. 66:1.

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49. 50. 51. 52 . 53. 54. 55. 56 . 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Isa. 6:2. Isa. 12:6. Gen. 2:2. Gen 1:22, Gen. 1:28, Gen. 9:1. Gen. 2:23, Exod. 20:11. Isa. 66:2. Ez . 3:13. Deut. 33:2. Deut. 7:6. Exod. 20:10. Gen. 49:20, Lam. 4:5. Ez . 1:14, 3:13. Ps. 106:2.

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I N DE X

Abbaye, 33, 301n26 Adeni, Shalom Mizrahi, 245–248 Aderet Eliahu (Gaon of Vilna), 333n44 Ahad Ha’am, 229–230 Akedat Yitzhak, (Arama) 40 Al-Jinãn, 243 Al-Muqtataf, 243 Almonsino, Moses, 304n60 Alter, George, 8, 307n32 Amaragi, Isaac, 349n64 Amud Hashahar (Oppenheim), 130 Amudei Bet Yehudah (Hurwitz), 155, 332n39 Amudei Hashamayim (Schick), 118 anthropocentric universe, 329n79 archbishop of Pisa and, 215 D’Espagnet and, 141 Friesenhausen’s rejection of, 176, 216 Hurwitz and, 141 Landau and, 213–217 Maimonides’ rejection of, 217 Neusatz’s rejection of, 216–217 Ray and, 141 relativity and, 260 Schlesinger and, 165–166, 216, 334n73 Sofer and, 162–163, 216 Spitzer and, 220 Arama, Moses, 40 Aristotle, 17,18, 37, 38, 63, 70, 89, 141, 210, 214, 229, 242 origination of comets, 63–64, 73 in Maimonidean thought 37 on shape of Earth, 38 stealing from Solomon, 49, 321n52 spheres of, 54, 89 Arubbot Hashamayim (Israel of Zamosc), 116, 321n45 Ashkenazi, Zevi, 108, 156 astronomy, Cohen, need to study and, 89

Emden, and limits of, 159–160 epistemic limits of, 333n60 Gans, need to study and, 56–57 need for Jews to study, 53, 77, 202, 308n43, 78 rabbis as expert in, 109, 118 superseding tradition, 196 Yiddish textbooks of, 242–243 see also science Astronomy (Caspi), 242 Aviezer, Nathan, 351n95 Avnei Shayish (Rosenberg), 360n6

B’Or Ha’Torah, 259–261 Bacon, Francis, 24, 60, 75 Baeck, Leo, 274, 275, 296n20 Bakharakh, Yair Haim, 316n16 Ben Ish Hai, (Hayyim), 248 Benish, Hayyim, 269 Benizri, Shlomo, 1, 262–265, 360n6 Bereshit Rabbah, 93, 158, 161, 163–164, Berish, Issakhar, 153 Bernstein, Aaron David, 240–241 Bessel, Friedrich, 180 Bible, allegory in, 38–39 approach of Spinoza to, 78–79 as a book of science, 79 not a book of science, 185, 194–195, 341nn30,32 reinterpretation of in light of science, 282 verses supporting stationary Earth, 85, 93, 205, 227, 282 Jesuit interpretations of, 96 Birkat Hahamah, 33–34, 269–271, 301n26, 302n32, 334n68 Birkhat Hahamah Bitekufatah (Ganot), 269 385

386

Index

Birkhat Hahamah: Halakhot Uminhagim Hashalem (Cohen), 269 Birkat Hahamah Kehilkhatah (Gerlitz), 269, 364n50 Bloch, Joseph Zalman, 269 Bock, Moses, 128 book production, rates of, 180, 188 Bornstein, A.H., 267 Bornstein, Hayyim Yehiel, 361n11 Bradley, James, 194, 344n69 Brahe, Tycho, 25, 50 criticism of Copernican model, 23 Delmedigo and, 312n24 description of observatory of, 57 effect of supernova on, 45 Hurwitz and, 140 Jesuit acceptance of, 75 Landau and, 208 meeting with David Gans, 55, 57 observatory of, 56, 57 Zamosc, Israel of and, 118 Bridges, Ben, 1 Brodt, Eliezer, 297n28 Bruno, Giordano, 71, 239, 313n30 Buber, Martin, 357n79

calendar, 161, 211 nineteen year cycle of, 202, 347n8 cannonball, experimental proof using, 22, 86, 94, 96, 111, 121, 130, 139, 246, 317nn33,35 Cardoso, Isaac (Fernando), 82–87 arguments against the Copernican model, 85–87 arguments for the Copernican model, 83–85 Caro, Joseph (d. 1575), 30, 46, 156 Caro, Joseph (d. 1895), 339n9, 351n6 Caspi, Abraham, 242 Castro, Nissim de, 243, 357n85 celestial sphere, 17 Chisum, Warren, 2 Christianity, conversion to, 199, 345n95 Cohen, Tuviah, 87–96 biography of, 88 comparison with Gentili, Moses, 100–101 comparison with Zahalon, Jacob, 99–100 criticism of Copernican model, 93 Ma’aseh Tuviah, 87, 89–96, 99, 129, 246, 261, 316n20 Sefer Elim, and, 104, 316n16 support for Copernican model, 95 Cohen, Zvi, 269 comet(s), 17, 63, 70, 72–73, 122, 175, 187, 243, 291 Halley’s, 192–195, 243

common motion, 86, 94–95, 163, 207, 208, 348nn34,35 Congregation of the Index, 23 Copernicus, biography of, 13–16 biography in Hebrew, 242, 357n77 Buber on, 357n79 Commentariolus, 14, 298n2 comparison to Einstein, 17, 298n19 comparison to Moses, 242 comparison to Ptolemy, 14, 15, 23, 70 death of, 16, 242, 298n18 De Revolutionibus Ad Lectorum to, 5, 15, 298n13 banning of, 205 dedication to Pope Paul III, 15–16 and death of Copernicus, 16 editions of, 75, 313n40 on gravity, 326n33 hypothetical only, 5, 15, 296n14 illustration from, 91 more likely Earth is at rest, 347n19 number of copies, 14 preface to, 333n60, see also Osiander publication of, 15 reception of, 23–24 value of, 298n4 first allusion to in Hebrew literature, 48, 66 first born son of Satan, compared to, 96 first Hebrew book that mentions, 50 first Hebrew book that attacked, 88 heliocentric theory, 20–21 accepted, 121, 173, 244 contradicting the Bible, 3–4 early acceptance of, 23–24 Earth’s motion not felt, 16 first illustrations of in Hebrew, 90, 187, 316n25 first mention in Yiddish, 169, 335nn8,9 experimental support for, 180–181, 200, 339n8, 353 Haredi Judaism and, 266–273 homiletic use of, 351nn4,6 hypothetical only, 5, 24, 296n14 in Ahad Ha’am’s writings, 229 in Amudei Bet Yehudah, 155 in Avnei Shayish, 360n6 in Birkhat Hahamah: Halakhot Uminhagim Hashalem, 269 in Emunah Vetorah, 268 in Diglenu, 267 in Encyclopedia Britannica, 121 in Gelilot Ha’aretz, 245 in Givat Hamoreh, 132 in Ha’arez O Hashemesh Merkaz Ha’olam, 360n6 in Hakirei Tevel, 198

Index in Hama’or Hagadol Hashemesh, 238–239 in Hatorah Vehamitzvah, 341n34 in Hazemanim Behalakhah, 269 in Hazon Lemo’ed, 334n73 in Hodshei Ha’arez, 252–253 in Hokhmat Tekufot Umazalot, 252 in Hovot Halevavot (commentary on), 169 in Iggrot Hare’ayah, 232 in Iggrot Yashar, 184 in Ittim Lebinah, 187 in Kokhava Desahvit, 193 in Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhmah, 120, 121 in Ma’aseh Tuviah, 90–96 in Mahalakh Hakokhavim, 203–204 in Masekhet Avot Im Perush Man, 224 in Matteh Dan, 109–110, 320n22 in May Menuhot, 166 in Milhamot Adonai, 123 in Mosdot Tevel, 173 in Nifla’os Hazohar, 243 in Ozar Hokhmat Hateva Haklalit, 237 in Philosphia Libera, 83–87 in Reshit Limmudim, 126, 127 in Sefer Elim, 71–73 in Sefer Haberit, 137–143 in She’erit Ya’akov, 344n66 in Simat Ayin, 362n11 in Tekhunot Hashamayim, 151–152 in Uno Mirada A Los Sielos, 243–244 in Yad Vashem, 353n6 in Yafe’ah Leketz, 334n73 in Yediot Hateva, 240–241 introduction to, 16 Islamic responses to, 243, 245, 358n90 Jewish reaction as a local reaction to, 105 Leibniz and, 152 objections to, 21 biblical, 22 experimental, 21–22 reconciled with account of creation, 138 spiritual dangers of, 200, 201 supported by Bereshit Rabbah, 93, 159 memory of, during World War II, 357n79 motives of, 221, 260, 261, 271 Narratio Prima, 14, 281 reburial of, 13 Cowen, Shimon, 261, 363n23 Coyne, Jerry, 4 Cracow, 299n36 Copernicus and 13, Cohen and, 88 Eybechütz and, 156 Isserles and, 45–46

Da’at Torah (Leivovitz), 353 Darkhei Ha’adam (Amaragi), 349n64 Darwin, Charles, as meshuga, 234, see also evolution Davidson, Donald, 230 Dawkins, Richard, 295n5, deferent, 18 del Bene, Judah Assal, 319n77 Delmedigo, Joseph, Amudei Shamayim, 70 biography of, 66 cited by Tuviah Cohen, 316n16 contrasted to Gans, 279–280 Copernicanism, support for, 70–72, 283 frustration with being a physician, 61 Galileo and, 71, 73–77, 278 influenced by Nehmad Vena’im, 61 influence of, 75–76 Karaite community and, 68, 70 Karaite letter reflecting his own views, 312n23 Sefer Elim, 68, 69- 72, 76, 116, 122, 156, 316n16, 361n11 thirst for knowledge and, 312n20 Derekh Pikudekha (Shapiro), 61, 310n78 Derush Hidushei Halevanah (Heller), 62 Descartes, René, 100, 106, 122, 132, 135, 145 Diggs, Thomas, 24, 317n27 Diglenu, 267 Diskin, Yehoshua Leib, 351n91 Dutch Republic, 75

Earth, created for mankind, 141, 176, 215 flat, 29, 117, 234, 300n7, 353 measuring the circumference of, 38, 72, 303n51, 304n53 movement of as felt, 60, 129, 206 spherical, 38 see also geocentric theory Ecclesiastes, Book of and geocentric verses, 4, 282 Ehrentreu, Hanokh, 300n14 Einstein, Albert, 264 coordinate system and, 264–265, 269 theory of relativity, 228, on the Earth orbiting the Sun, 265, 266 see also relativity Eizikovitz, Eliezer, 217–272 Elijah ben Shlomoh Zalman, see Gaon of Vilna Emden, Jacob, 156 cited by Moses Sofer, 163 controversy with Eybeschütz, 156 geocentric belief, 158, 159 heliocentric belief, 158, 159

387

388

Index

Emden, Jacob (cont.) on limits of science and astronomy, 159–160, 333n52 Emunah Vetorah (Sternbuch), 268, 364n44 Emunat Hakhamim (Ginsberg), 346n96 Encyclopedia Britannica, 121 encyclopedias, Jewish, 125 epicycle, 19, 298n21 Eratosthenes, 38 ether, 21 Euclid, 44, 62, 118, 171, 188, 202, 274, 305n8, 313n43, 336nn15,18 evolution, theory of, 4, 231, 234–235, 284, 285, 355n50 belief in, in US and Europe, 275 contrasted with heliocentric theory, 235, 355n50, 366n30 only a theory, 4 Schneerson and, 361n10 Sternbuch and, 364n45 Eybeschütz, Jonathan, 156–157 controversy with Emden, 156 criticism of Copernican model, 157 Isaac Bashevis Singer on, 333n45 as pro-Copernican, 7 Ez Avot, (Emden), 159–160 Ezras Torah, 272

Faith and Science (Schwartz), 355n50 Faivelsohn, Elijah, 352, 356n57 fallibilism, see skepticism Feyerabend, Paul, 238 Fishman, David, 339n9 Fossils and Faith (Aviezer), 351n95 Foucault, Leon, 181 free will, 2 Frenkel, Jacob, 357n77 Friedman, Menahem Nahum, 224–225 Friesenhausen, David ben Meir Cohen, on aggadah, 173–174 biography of, 170–171 criticism of Moses Teitelbaum, 170, 336n13 Mosdot Tevel, astronomy in, 172 Copernican model in, 173 contents of, 171, 336n18 discovery of new planets in, 175 difficulty publishing, 172 subscribers to, 336n19 reform of rabbinic training, 171 rejection of anthropocentric universe, 175, 176 role of the cohen, 177 zemirah for the solar system, 176, 287–293

Galgal, 32, 102, 121, Galileo, Galilei, 7, 11, 25–26, 67, 94, 97, 100, 123, 165, 203, 208, 215, 238, 242, 271, 281, 283, 320n28, 328n76 accounts of death of, 226 banned works of, 23, 26, 145, 179 biblical texts, approach to, 97 Cardoso and, 83 criticism of by Abraham Yagel, 63–64 Delmedigo and, 67, 72, 73–77, 313n30 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 26, 77, 83, 94 early acceptance of Copernicus, 25, 314n46 eppur si muovo, myths of, 239, 356nn63,67 God as the creator of both scripture and nature, 196 myth of execution of, 239, 356n63 myth of imprisonment of, 226, 356n67 Meldola and, 112 personality of, 277–279, 366n14 “Rabbi”, 76 rationality and, 281–282 Sidereus Nuncius, 112, 320n28 teaching Copernicanism while at Padua, 73–74 tides, theory of, 100, 318n65 and Venus, phases of, 113, 320n29 mentioned in Hebrew books, 63 Galileo Was Wrong, the Church Was Right (Sungenis), 259, 260, 362n12 Ganot, Mordekhai, 269 Gans, David, biography of, 44 Brahe, Tycho, 277 endorsement of, 60 influence of, 277 meeting with, 55, 57, 277 Delmedigo, contrast to, 279–280 discovery of America and, 59 Euclid, influence of, 44 gravestone, 42 Isserles, relationship to, 46–47 Magen David 42, 305n1 Nehmad Vena’im, 50–53, 104 influence of, 61, 310n78 system of the spheres in, 54 rabbinic influences on, 47 rejection of Copernicus, 59–60, 309n67 rejection of traditional Jewish teachings, 59 reluctance to adjudicate between models, 58–59 writings of, 49, 307n32 Zemah David, 42, 49, 304n 2, 307n34, 310n75 Gaon of Vilna, 333n44 Gei Hizayon, 360n6 Gelilot Ha’aretz (Kahane), 245, 358n93 Gentili, Moses ben Gershom, 100–102

Index geocentric universe, 20 Aristotle and, 17 danger of educating a belief in, 268 frontispiece of, 145–146 in Amud Hashahar, 131 in Amudei Bet Yehudah, 155 in Birkhat Hahamah Bitekufatah, 269 in Birkat Hahamah Kehilkhatah, 269 in B’Or Ha’torah, 259–261 in Diglenu, 267 in Gei Hizayon, 360n6 in Hashamayim Mesaprim, 1, 262–265 in Hazon Shamayim, 269, 363n30 in Ma’aseh Tuviah, 87, 89–96, 99, 129, 246, 261, 316n20 in Iggrot Kodesh, 256, 360n7 in Kuntrus Hashemesh Bigvurato, 269–271 in Ma’amar Mavoh Hashemesh, 256 in Mahmadei Yosef, 352 in Mosdot Tevel, 176 in Moshiach Times, 362n11 in Nahalat Yosef, 247–248 in Nezah Yisra’el, 352 in Nivreshet Lenez Hahamah, 219–222 in Rav Pe’alim, 248–249 in Rohashei Lev, 360n6 in Sefer Haberit, 138 in Shalom Yerushalayim, 246–248 in Torat Mosheh, 162–163 in Yafe’ah Leketz, 165–166 Milton and, 329n1 Ptolemy and, 17 supported by the theory of relativity, 257–258 see also Earth, neo-geocentrists Gerstel, Ze’ev Wolf, 61, 250–252 Gilbert, William, 24 Gingerich, Owen, xvii, 295n5, on number of copies of De Revolutionibus, 14 Ginsberg, Asher, see Ahad Ha’am Ginzburg, Joseph, 186 Ginzei Hamelekh (Tursch), 225–228 Givat Hamoreh (Maimon), 131–133 Gloskin, Hayyim, 360n6 Goethe, Johann, 200 Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger, 80 Gottleib, Dov Baer, 334n71 Gould, Steven Jay, 175, 274 gravity, 141, 195, 203, 241, 326n33, 328n76 Gutmacher, Elijah, 350n64

Hakirei Tevel (Warshavsky), 198–199 Halley, Edmond, 345n78, see also comets Hama’or Hagadol Hashemesh (Kaplan), 238–239 Hame’assef, 129–130, 325n29, 327n54

389

Hannover, Raphael Levi of, biography of, 148–149, 330n11 calendar and, 150 eschatology and, 332n28 in Makalakh Hakohavim, 219 Leibniz and, 149, 330nn12–13 students of, 153 Tekhunot Hashamayim, 150–151, 219, 331n24 Hart, Eliakim ( Jacob), 121–122, 142–143, see also Milhamot Adonai Harvey, William, 88, 118, 316n19 Hashamayim Mesaprim (Benizri), 1, 262–265 Haskalah, 120, 125, 280 Berlin, 170 Copernican agenda of, 129, 133, 324n22 publication using peer review and, 126 Hatam Sofer, see Sofer Hayyim, Joseph, (Ben Ish Hai), 248–250 Hazefirah, 188, 190–191, 343n56 Hazemanim Behalakhah (Benish), 269 Hazon Lemo’ed (Schlesinger), 334n73, 349n57 Hazon Shamayim (Zikoni), 269, 363n30 Hefez, Moses, see Gentili heliocentric theory, see under Copernicus Heller, Yom Tov Lipmann, 47, 61–62 Himmel un Erd; astronomye far’n folk (Krantz), 242–243, 357n81 Hinukh Ne’arim Press, 154, see also peer review Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 184–186 Hitchens, Christopher, 286 Hodshei Ha’arez, 252 Hokhmat Tekufot Umazalot (Gerstel), 250–252 Holland, see Dutch Republic Hooke, Robert, 5 Hortensius, Martinus, 24 Hovot Halevavot (Steinhart), 169 Hubble, Edwin, 228 Humboldt, Alexander von, 190, 343n55, 345n89 Hurwitz, Judah, 154–155 Hurwitz, Pinhas biography of, 134–135 Copernican model, rejection of 139 and Eliakim Hart, 123, 135 and Barukh Linda, 134 skepticism and, 137 see also Sefer Haberit

Idel, Moshe, 239 Iggrot Hare’ayah (Kook), 232 Iggrot Yashar (Reggio), 182–184 Index Liborum Prohibitorum, see Index of Forbidden Books Index of Forbidden Books, 26, 97, 178, 205, 298n16, 306n20 1758 edition of, 145 1835 edition of, 179

390

Index

industrial revolution, 180–181 Islam, responses of to the new astronomy, 244–245, 358n90 Israel, Reuven, 352 Isserles, Moses, 45 Itttim Lebinah (Ginzburg), 186, 220

Jesuits, 94 attention paid by to Copernican model, 75 biblical interpretations by, 96 Joshua, Book of and geocentric verses, 3, 4, 79, 93, 96, 97, 110, 111, 123, 139, 189, 205, 214, 243, 247, 261, 356n57 parodies of, 237, 356n57 understood as metaphor, 186 Judeo-Spanish, 243–244 Juedische Freischule, 126, 170 Jupiter, 18–19, 26, 72, 74, 290 moons of, 112, 122, 337n25, 339n8

kabbalah, 1, 136, 142, 174, 312n30 Kafah, Yihye, 244–254, 358n Kahane, Hillel, 245 Kant, Immanuel, 131, 132, 137, 224, 335n7 Kaplan, Abraham, 238–239 Karaites, 109, 339n9, see also Delmedigo Kasher, Menahem, 360n6 Kavod Yom Tov (Lipman), 343n50 Kelil Heshbon (Friesenhausen), 170, 335n10 Kellner, Menachem, 36–37, 303n40 Kepler, Johannes, 11, 24–25, 54, 56, 62, 64, 74, 77, 100, 132, 144, 196, 203, 225, 239, 271, 277, 295n13, 299n41, 308n47 meeting with Gans, 54 works banned by the Index, 145, 179 laws of planetary motion, 175, 181, 194, 243 Kinat Adonai Zeva’ot (Sternhertz), 348n39 Kissot L’Bet David (del Bene), 319n77 Kitzmiller v. Dover School District, 2 Kokhava Deshavit (Slonimski), 192–197 Kook, Abraham Isaac, 231–232, 245, 283, 284 Krantz, Phillip, 242 Krauskopf, Joseph, 284 Kuntres Al Inyan Shabbat Hahatunna (Supino), 115 Kuntrus Hashemesh Bigvurato (Bloch), 269–271, 364n61

Lampronti, Isaac, 101–103, 318n67 Landau, Ezekiel, 325n29 Landau, Reuven, biography of, 201, 346n3 objections to heliocentric model, biblical, 205–206 scientific, 206–208

spiritual, 213–217 skeptic about science, 208–209 Langerman, Tzvi, 244 Leibniz, Gottfried, 148–149, 330n13, 331n18 on Copernican model, 152 Leivovitz, Yeruham, 353, Leverrier, Urbain Jean, 196, 197, see also Uranus Levi, Raphael, see Hannover Levin, Zevi Hirsch, 323n7 Levine, Hillel, 7 Levison, Mordekhai, 119–121, 173, 283 Liberal Judaism, see Reform movement light, speed of, 220–221, 339n8, 350n83, see also Michelson-Morley experiment Lindau, Barukh, 125–126, 134, see also Reshit Limmudim Linvokhei Hador (Kook), 354n33 Lipman, Yom Tov, 343n50 Livingstone, David, 276, 279 Loew, Judah, (Maharal of Prague), 47, 233 first allusion to Copernicus, 48 on the shape of the Earth, 300n8 skepticism and, 48, 309n71 London, 107, 119 Lubavitch Hasidim, 256, see also Moshiach Times Lubavitcher Rebbe(s), Schneerson, Menachem Mendel, 256, 257, 360n7, 361n9 Shalom Dov Ber, 363n22 Shne’ur Zalman, 361n11 Lubelchik, Paltie’el, 252–253 Luhot Ha’ibbur (Hannover), 150, 151, 331n22

Ma’amar Hatorah Vehahokhmah (Levison), 119–121 Ma’amar Mevoh Hashemesh (Vaberman), 255, 267 Ma’aseh Tuviah, see Cohen, Tuviah Mahalakh Hakohavim (Landau), 202–211 Maharal of Prague, see Loew, Judah Mahmadei Yosef (Shpilrein), 352 Maimon, Solomon, 131–133, 325n30, 335n7 Maimonides, Moses, 131 allegorical reading of Bible, 40, 230 based writings on Greek science, 167, 263, 268, 363n27 criticism of by Reggio, 182 criticism of Ptolemy, 36 description of the universe, 35, 303n40 planets as sentient beings, 157, 227–228, 261 science as changing, 37 Malbim, 341n34 Mars, 21, 290 Masekhet Avot Im Perush Man (Friedman), 224 maskilim, see haskalah mathematics, study of, 170, 335n10

Index Matteh Dan (Nieto), 108–111 Matteh Yehudah (Oppenheim), 145–146 May Menuhot (Neusatz), 166, 216–217 mazzalot, 31–32 Me’ametz Koah (Almonsino), 304n60 Meldola, David, 112–113 controversy with Supino, 115 Galileo and, 112 Mo’ed David, 112–115 reluctance to embrace Copernicanism, 114 and Venus, orbit of, 113 Meldola, Raphael, 110, 115, 320n24 Melekhet Mahashevet (Gentili), 100 Melekhet Mahashevet (Zahlin), 335n10 Menorah, 39, 40, 304nn55, 60, 306n20, Mercury, 31, 35, 58, 72, 113, 114, 124, 151, 159, 176, 290 phases of, 204, 347n16 Merzbach, Yonah, 267–268 Mesilot Hame’orot (Rukenstein), 181 Michelson-Morley experiment, 228, 265 Milhamot Adonai (Hart), 122, 135 Milton, John, 144, 329n1 Minhat Shabbat (Caro), 352 Mishpahah, 271–272 Mo’ed David (Meldola), 112–115, Moda’ah Leyaldei Benei Yisrael (Bock), 128 Modena, Leon of, 67, 311n8 Montaigne, Michel de, 209–210 Montefiore, Claude, 236, 355n52 Mor Uketziah (Emden), 158 Mosdot Tevel (Friesenhausen), astronomy in, 172 Copernican model in, 173 contents of, 171, 336n18 discovery of new planets in, 175 difficulty publishing, 172 subscribers to, 336n19 Moshiach Times, 362n11 motion, relative, 194

Na’avah Kodesh (Waltch), 153 Nahalat Yosef (Yeshua), 247–248 Neher, André, 6–7, 76 neo-geocentrists, 259–262 Neptune, discovery of, 196, 247, 345n92 Neusatz, Eliezer Lipman, 166–167 contrasted with Neusatz, 280 criticism of rabbis, 166 rejection of Maimonidean science, 167 Newton, Isaac, 106, 122, 135, 194, 319n3, 334n69 Principa Mathematica, 144–145, 195 Slonimski on blessing, 195 Sofer on, 165, 334n69 Nezah Yisrael (Faivelsohn), 352

391

Nezah Yisrael (Israel of Zamosc), 116 Nieto, David accussed of pantheistic beliefs, 108 ambivalence towards Copernican model, 110 biography of, 107–108 De la Divina Providencia, 108 grave of, 107 Matteh Dan, 108–111, 319n12 use of science to defend Judaism, 109 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 217 Nifla’os Hazohar (Rosenberg), 233 Nikolai Copernicus (Frenkel), 242 Nivreshet Lenez Hahamah (Spitzer), 219–222

Oppenheim, Shimon ben David, 130, 325n29 Oppenheimer, Simon Wolf, 148, 330n13 Osiander, Andreas, 5, 295n13, 333n60 Ozar Hokhmat Hateva Haklalit (Rabinowitz), 236–238, 356n55

Padua, University of, 55 Cohen and, 88, 104, 280 Copernicus and 14, Delmedigo and, 67, 68, 104, 278 Galileo teaching at, 25, 73, 74 Hutwitz and, 154 Lampronti and, 101 Nieto and, 108 uniqueness for Jews, 67 Pahad Yizhak (Lampronti), 102 Paine, Thomas, on other life in the universe, 338n36 Panitz, Michael, 7 parallax, 5, 21–22, 23, 72, 73, 80, 96, 243, 250, 281, 339n5, 352 Bessel and measurement of, 180, 200, 206, 241 Copernicus and problem of, 180 see also stellar aberration peer review, lack of 11, 154 and Freischule, 126–127 pendulum, 195, 196, 204, 250, 339n6, 345n83, 357n76 as proof of Earth’s movement, 181, 241, 270, 281, 339n8, 361n11, 364n58 Foucault and, 181, 196, 200, 212–213, 241, 245 personality, power of, 277–280 Petuchowski, Jakob, 8 Philosophia Libera (Cardoso), 83 Pnei Tevel (Mendelsohn), 330n13 Pollak, Hayyim Yosef, 40

392

Index

Pope, Benedict XIV, 145 Gregory, XIII, 98 Gregory XVI, 179 Paul III, 15–16 Pius VII, 179 Poswoler, Abraham, 343n50 Prague, 42 Jewish quarter, 44 size of Jewish community, 43, 305n3 principle of charity, 230, 354nn27,29,31 Ptolemy, 7, 15, 17–19, 23, 35, 38, 40, 52, 54, 57–59, 64, 70, 73, 110, 111, 174, 202, 203, 209–209, 237, 245, 254, 258, 260, 263, 264, 271, 298n21, 306n19, 364n61 in Ammudei Hashamayim, 118 in Etz Avot, 159–160 in Mosdot Tevel, 174 in Sefer Mareh Ha’ofanim, 147 in Zurat Ha’artetz, 147 taught by Levi Hannover, 153

Rabinowitz, Ari, 259–260 Rabinowitz, Aryeh, 348n35 Rabinowitz, Dan, 297n36 Rabinowitz, Moses, 352n6 Rabinowitz, Zadok Hacohen of Lublin, see Zadok Rabinowitz, Zevi Hirsch, 236–238 rakia, 29, 31, 35, 55 Rapport, Hayyim, 297n28 Rav Pe’alim (Hayyim), 248–250 Rees, Martin, 222, 271 Reform movement, 236, 240 Reggio, Isaac, biography of, 182 Iggrot Yashar, 182–184 science, religious requirement to study, 183 science, truth claims of 184 spheres, non-existence of, 182 Reinhold, Erasmus, 15, 23, 299n27 relativity, theory of, 256, 257, 259–260, 264–265, 269 misunderstandings of, 266 see also Einstein Reshit Limmudim (Lindau), 126, 323n8, 324n27 and peer review of, 126 plagiarism of 130–131 reception of, 127–129 review by Hame’assef, 129 as a religious text, 127 retrograde motion, 17–20, 21 Rheticus, Joachim Georg, 14–15, 97, 301, 298n5 Narratio Prima, 14, 281 Riswasch, Judah, 349n64 Rock of Ages (Gould), 274 Rohashei Lev (Gloskin), 360n6

Rosenberg, Shragah, 360n6 Rosenberg, Yudel, 232, 283 Rozenbloom, Noah, 96 Ruah Hen (Israel of Zamosc), 117 Rudeman, David, xvii, on Abraham Yagel, 64, 310n86 on the Ahuz letter, 311n1 on the air-pump, 322n60 on Delmedigo and kabbalah, 311n8 on Gans, 309n60 on Hurwirtz, 327n46 on Levison, 119, 322n68 on medicine in Padua, 67 on need for analysis of Jewish responses to new astronomy, 8 on Nehmad Vena’im, 308n43 on Tuviah Cohen vs. Zahalon, 99 Rukenstein, Dov Baer, 181

Sacks, Jonathan, 285 Sagan, Carl, 176 Saturn, 39, 58, 71, 72, 112, 137, 159, 176 mentioned in the Bible, 31 moons of, 122, 218, 278, 290 rings of, 313n34, 323n11 size of, 204, 213 sphere of, 35 and vernal equinox, 33 Schick, Barukh , 118–119, 322n53 Schlesinger, Israel, 165–166, 334n73, 349n57 contrasted with Neusatz, 280 Schneerson, Menachem Mendel, see Lubavitcher Rebbe Schwardon, Shalom, 352 Schwartz, Martin, 355n50 science, and religion debate, 1–4, 274–276, 280, 285 as a legitimate source of knowledge, 116, 120, 174, 321n41 cannot be learned from the Bible, 185, 341n30 changing truths of, 141, 165, 212, 218, 231, 249, 250, 329n77, 334n71, 348n39 demonstrating Aristotle was wrong, 122 myth of the Jewish origins of, 49, 50, 118, 174, 186, 245, 249, 269–270, 307n30, 321n52 need to separate from religion, 120, 174 poor knowledge of among Jews, 53, 308n43 reconciliation of Talmud with, 193, 344n66 rabbis as expert in, 109, 212, 270 rabbis as lacking expertise in, 166 religious requirement to study, 183 as superseding religious beliefs, 236, 238, 239, 240 use of by Nieto to defend Judaism, 109 see also astronomy

Index scientist, use of term 10–11 secular age, 236 secular Jewish works, 236–243 Sefer Elim, see Delmedigo Sefer Evronot (Ashkenazi), 145–146 Sefer Haberit (Hurwitz), 123 anonymous authorship of, 327n52 anthropocentric universe, 141 Copernican model in, 137–143 acceptable belief in, 140 experimental evidence against, 140–141 rejection of, 139, 142 Hatam Sofer and, 162 influence of, 134, 217, 326n42, 349n64 kabbalah and, 135, 142 Kant and limits of skepticism, 137 Neusatz’s criticism of, 166 publication of, 135, 327n58 as source for other writers, 217–218, 220, 248, 249, 349nn63,64 Sofer and, 162 Spitzer on, 222 Tychonic model in, 140 unauthorized editions of, 135–136, 327n57 Uranus, discovery of, 13 see also Pinhas Hurwitz Sefer Yezirah, 252 Sefer Yirat Shamayim (Firdah), 331n22 Selected Essays (Ahad Ha’am), 229 Settele affair, 179 Sha’ar Bat Rahamim (Rabinowitz), 352 Sha’arei Kedusha (Vital), 135, 327n53 Shalom Yerushalayim (Adeni), 246–248 Shatz, David, xvii, 296n19 She’erit Ya’akov (Haberman), 344n66 Shevilei Derakia (Riswasch), 349n64 Shevilei Derakia (Hokheim), 335n76, 336n19 Sheyorei Haminhah (Ehrentreu), 300n14 Shmuel, 33, 301n26 Shpilrein, Zevi Joseph, 352 Shulhan Arukh, 30, 46, 300n14 skepticism, 48, 60, 137, 155, 208–210, 211–212, 218, 249, 250, 307n29, 309n71, 348n39 Landau and, 209, 212–213 Montaigne, Michel and, 209–210 Zadok Hacohen and, 211–212 Slifkin, Natan, 301n15 Slonimski, Hayyim Zelig, biography of, 188–190, 342nn41,42,44,45 frustration with traditional society, 194–195 on Copernican model, 191, 192 on discovery of Neptune, 196 Humboldt, relationship with, 190, 343n55 works of, 190 Sofer, Moses (Hatam Sofer), biography of, 161–162

393

on rejection of Copernicus, 162, 164 on Sefer Haberit 162 on Sun having motion, 165 students of, 165, 280 Sphere of Sacroboso, 147, 330n9 spheres Reggio on the non-existence of, 182 Sofer on, 164 still exist, 261 Spinoza, Baruch, 76, 78–81, 282 as a Jewish thinker, 80, as a pantheist, 108, 319n10 responses to Copernican support by, 79–80, 314n67, 315n69 Spitzer, Hiyyah David, 219–222 Steinhart, Joseph, 168 Steinhart, Moses, 169 stellar aberration, 193, 344n69, see also parallax Sternbuch, Moshe, 268 Sternhertz, Nathan, 348n39 Sun, 32, 89 blessing on, 33–34, 269–271 Hama’or Hagadol Hashemesh, 238–239 motion of, 165, 227, 239, 334n70, 357n76 natural position in the center of the universe, 72, 84 path of, 301n15 in the Talmud, 29–31 halakhic ramifications of, 30, 300n14 stationary, 127 see also Birkat Hahamah Sungenis, Robert, 260, 362n16 supernova, 44–45, 306n13 Supino, Eliezer, 114

Talmud reconciliation of passages with science, 193, 344n66 shape of the Earth, 27–28, 29, 300nn7–8 structure of, 27–28 study of, 120 Sun, path of, 29–30 Teitelbaum, Moses, 170, 172, 336n19 Tekhelet Mordekhai (Schwardon), 352 Tekhunot Hashamayim (Hannover), 150–151, 219 provenance of 331n24 telescope, 21, 23, 26, 53, 63–65, 72, 112, 122, 17, 147,166, 175, 196, 203, 204, 218, 221 Delmedigo’s use of, 72 Teli, 252–253, 359n116 The Evolution of Physics (Einstein), 264 Theoricae Novae Planetarum (Peuerbach), 46 theory, scientific vs. law, 4 tides, explanation of, 100, 104, 270, 283, 328n76

394

Tikkun Nivreshet (Spitzer), 221–222, 350n87 Torah speaks in everyday language, 110, 111, 121, 123, 167, 185, 186, 267, 270–271, 283 see also Bible Torah from Heaven (Solomon), 354n31 torah im derekh erez, 168, 184 Torat Ha’olah (Isserles), 46, 58, 304n60 Torat Ha’olam Vehayahadut (Rabinowitz), 348n35, 351 n 6 Torat Mosheh (Sofer), 162 tower, ball dropped from, 140, 207, 220, 308n46, 347n35 Tursch, Dov Ber, 225–228 Tychonic model, see Brahe, Tykocin, Moses, see Yekutiel, Moses ben

Ujhely, 170 universe, immense size of, 71 other life in, 71, 110, 172, 175, 227, 352 rejection of, 218–219, 338n36 Uno Mirada A Los Sielos (Castro), 243–244 Uranus, 137, 175, 247, 323n11

Vaberman, Pinhas, 254–255 Venice, 67 Venus, 70, 222 phases of, 21, 74, 113–114, 203, 320n29 Vital, Hayyim, 135, 254 Voliva, Wilbur, 353 volvelle, 251, 359n108

Waltch, Shimon, 153 Warshavsky, Abraham, 197–199

Index Waxman, Abraham, 274, 275, 360n6 Waxman, Meyer, 296n20 Weiser, Meir Leibush, see Malbim Wessely, Naphtali Hertz, 76, 323n22 Westman, Robert, 279 Wieseltier, Leon, 80 Wooton, David, 281

Yad Haketanah (Gottleib), 334n71 Yad Vashem (Israel), 352 Yafe’ah Leketz (Schlesinger), 165–166, 267 Yagel, Abraham ben Hananiah, 62–65, 125, 278 Yediot Hateva (Bernstein), 240–241, 245 Yekutiel, Moses ben, 150–151, 331n24, see also Hannover, Raphael, Levi Yemen, Jews of and the new astronomy, 244–248 Yeshua, Shmuel, 247–248 Yeshuah Beyisrael ( Jonathan ben Joseph), 116 Yiddish books, 169, 242–243 Yose ben Halafta, Rabbi, 27–28

Zadok, Reb, 211–212 Zahalon, Jacob, 99 Zamosc, Israel Halevi of, 116–118 works of, 116, 321n45 reluctance to embrace Copernicanism, 118 Zeh Sefer Hazikhronot (Zadok), 211–212 zemirah for the solar system, 176, 287–293 Zikhron Yosef, (Steinhart) 335n1 Zikoni, Ethan, 269, 363n30 Zinberg, Israel, on Delmedigo, 74, 77, 312n23 Zofnat Pe’aneah (Gutmacher), 350n64 Zohar, 118, 233 authorship of, 233 shape of the Earth in, 140, 233, 234 Zurat Ha’aretz (bar Hiyya), 59