Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe Michael Heyd David B. Ruderman. Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. xi + 392 pp. Ill. $30.00. The relationship between science and religion in the early modern period has been a hot topic of debate for two generations now. Discussion has centered mostly on Protestant attitudes toward science, but increased attention has nevertheless been given in recent years to Catholic—especially Jesuit—responses to, and participation in, scientific activity. Yet hardly any attention has been paid to Jewish reactions to the new culture of experimental philosophy. Ruderman’s book, which provides a very broad survey and analysis of Jewish encounters with science in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, is therefore a most important and significant contribution to the historiography of the subject. Its value is enhanced by the author’s impressive mastery of the historiography of the scientific revolution, on the one hand, and of the Jewish sources of that period and the scholarship that deals with them, on the other. Against the background of medieval Jewish attitudes toward natural philosophy, Ruderman proceeds to deal with the cultural space given to the investigations of nature by late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century rabbis in Poland (Isserles), Bohemia (the Maharal), and Italy (Modena, Luzzatto, Figo, del Bene, and many others), and by Jewish physicians (who were often also rabbis)—beginning with Joseph Delmedigo in the early seventeenth century, through the many Converso physicians of that century, continuing with Tobias Cohen and Samson Morpurgo in Italy and David Nieto in England in the early eighteenth century, and ending with Mordechai Levison, who in many ways belongs already to the Enlightenment. The chronological order is not strictly adhered to, however, and the book should be read as a series of essays, rather than as one consecutive story. Ruderman shows that Jewish intellectuals attempted to integrate the new science into their more traditional religious worldview in ways remarkably similar to those of their Christian contemporaries. On the one hand, unlike their medieval predecessors, they tended to ignore metaphysics and to separate natural philosophy from religious pursuits, thus providing science with a measure of “negative” autonomy. On the other hand, some of them regarded the investigation of nature as a way of knowing God by getting acquainted with the works of creation, and thus they gave a positive religious sanction to scientific activity. Moreover, kabbalistic, even millenarian, orientations were sometimes inextricably mingled with attitudes toward nature in the Jewish world (see especially chapters 4 and 7), just as they had been in the Christian world. Indeed, the boundaries of “science” in the early modern period were very fuzzy—a point on which the author should perhaps have put more emphasis. Most pertinent to readers of the Bulletin, however, the Jewish intellectuals interested in natural philosophy in the early modern period were predominantly physicians—whether from Italy or Eastern Europe, or the “New Christians” from Spain and Portugal who returned to Judaism. Many of them studied medicine in Padua (see especially chapter 3), and it was there that they also encountered some of the new scientific ideas. Ruderman’s book thus also raises the complex [End Page 704] problem of the relationship between medicine and the new natural philosophy, and the question of the role of physicians as carriers and disseminators of science in the early modern period. Yet, although there were quite a few Jews who were interested in science and who popularized it for their own audiences, there were hardly any who actively participated in scientific research in the early modern period. Whether this was merely the result of the lack of institutional support, as Ruderman argues, or whether the cultural legitimacy given to the new science was more limited in Jewish society before the Enlightenment than it had been in Christian society remains, it seems to me, an open question. The case of Jewish attitudes toward science is nevertheless highly instructive, not only for Jewish cultural history, but for the history of the relationship between science, medicine, and religion as a whole. Michael Heyd Hebrew University of Jerusalem Copyright © 1996 The Johns

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