Worldviews split at ruptures in commonly acknowledged truths, diverging and coexisting in tension. Cosmopolitanism can exist side by side with an atavistic longing for an insulated, ‘authentic’ tradition. The Hellenistic Mediterranean world produced Jewish communities of both types, Platonic philosophers like Philo of Alexandria and the hermetic community of the Dead Sea Scrolls.7 Microcontexts coexist in stark contrast. The pious but disquieting peripatetic teacher Giulio Vanini was executed for heresy and atheism in the zealous French city of Toulouse in 1619. Meanwhile, a professor in the
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