Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe

by David B. Ruderman, Moshe Idel (Foreword by)

Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe is a major contribution in understanding the cultural processes involved in the emergence and development of the consumer phase of science. It covers many Jewish authors and their writings from the middle of the 16th until the late 18th centuries in Europe. The book's combined approach to the history of science and Jewish thought strongly emphasises analysis of the mentalities that informed some of the prominent figures of Jewish thought in this time period. Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe takes a comprehensive look at the processes taking place in the minds of European Jewish intellectuals in Italy, Amsterdam, Prague, and London. The main purpose of this book is the description of the modalities of reception of the new sciences, complicated by the traditional reticence toward "alien sciences" found in many medieval Jewish writers still influential in the early modern period.

Genres: Jewish

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

David B. Ruderman is the Joseph Meyerhoff Professor of Modern Jewish History at the University of Pennsylvania, Emeritus. From 1994 to 2014 he was the Ella Darivoff Director of Penn's Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, where he also held a fellowship from 2017 to 2018. He was trained at the City College of New York, the Teacher's Institute of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Columbia University. He earned rabbinical ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and his doctorate in Jewish History from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prior to taking his position at the University of Pennsylvania, he held teaching positions at Yale University and the University of Maryland.

Reviews

[Tamar Marvin]

This dense study of Jewish responses to scientific discovery in early modern Europe, focusing on the seventeenth century, is made up of detailed examinations of sets of thinkers. Written in the first half of Ruderman's career, it hews more closely to scholarly debate, and is more technical, than his later studies, especially the synthetic ones. The cast of characters here is colorful, not least because it shines a light on lesser-known figures, some of which I was surprised to have encountered only dimly or not at all prior to reading the book. Though not a narrative history of Jewish involvement in scientific endeavor in the early modern period, the reader comes away with detailed, fascinating knowledge of a rich array of Jewish views on the emerging modern science.

[Michael Lewyn]

This is a very scholarly set of essays that focuses on Jewish attitudes towards science in 16th-18th century Europe- that is, between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. By and large, Jewish thinkers valued science, but (as they do today) drew "boundaries between the domains of scientific activity and religious faith so that the two could live peacefully and harmoniously with each other." Jewish scholars, like Christian ones, tended to emphasize the limits of what was scientifically knowable, and to use religious tradition to understand what was beyond those limits. Because science, unlike philosophy, could easily be sealed off from religion, scientific inquiry was less controversial than secular philosophy.

Unlike in more recent centuries, Jews were not major participants in science, primarily because the Church was affluent enough to support universities and monasteries where men could focus on the life of the mind, while Jews were pretty much on their own. Jews were often not admitted to universities (except a few medical schools) - and even when they were, they were not subsidized by Church or State.

[Michel Van Goethem]

Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe
by David B. Ruderman