Joseph Solomon Delmedigo and the Ideal of the Jewish Physician Natural Philosopher Padua was a forge for a particular sort of early modern Jewish intellectual. Its graduates were an eccentric cast, and an influential one. Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (1591–1655), a distant relative of Elijah Delmedigo, was born in Candia, Crete, to a rabbinic dynasty. He spent his early years receiving rabbinic education, but by fifteen, he began medical studies in Padua. This was less than three years after the city’s Jews were required by statute to live in a walled ghetto. In Padua, Delmedigo encountered Galileo, in the final years of his tenure at the university and just as he embarked on his first research with his newly crafted telescope. Delmedigo wrote of this: My teacher Galileo testified that he observed Mars when near to earth, and saw that its light was much greater than that of Jupiter, though its body is smaller. Indeed, its light was so strong that he could not look at it through the tube. I asked permission to observe it through the telescope, and it appeared to me elongated, not round...Jupiter, however, I found to be round, and Saturn...egg-shaped. Thus, if the light of Mars, when in the proximity of the earth, is greater and redder than the light of Jupiter, which is whiter, and the light of Jupiter is greater than that of Saturn which is like lead and dull, and Venus, which is closer to the sun, glitters more than all of them, and Mercury, although the smallest of the planets, is nevertheless bright—we must conclude that they obtain light from the sun, if not all of it, [at least] the observed increase of it. (Barzilay 1974, 161) Astronomy would remain a passion throughout Delmedigo’s life, as would the other mathematical disciplines. At the university, he studied metaphysics and natural philosophy until he was eighteen, concentrating after that on medicine. Over the course of his seven years in Padua, he received a broad liberal education, and apparently a fine one. It served him well throughout his career. After completing his degree, Delmedigo returned to Candia and stayed for several years. But it was not long, his disciple Moshe Metz wrote, before he ____À ____0 ____þ ________________ 1____ 0 ____ 1____ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 116 was ‘‘hounded and embittered by a bunch of evildoers, hated by ignorant fanatics,’’ leading him to flee to ‘‘circle the globe to discover the unknown and the obscure’’ (in Barzilay 1974, 50). By 1616, Delmedigo set out for Cairo. From there he made his way to Constantinople. By 1621, Delmedigo had relocated to eastern Europe, passing through Vilnius (where he complained of the ‘‘terrible cold of these districts’’) and then Lublin and Krakow, and eventually returning to Vilnius. During this time, Delmedigo earned his living as a physician, and watched his reputation grow among his well-heeled clientele. He later reminisced that [a]ll those years I lived in Russia, Poland and Lithuania, I had no rest for even one week. All year round I had to go to the countryside to heal the sick. Because of their large retinues of servants and animals, it is not customary among the dukes and princes to live in the big cities, but in the villages. Elsewhere he complained about his wealthy clients, who were inevitably [p]rinces and noblemen, whose servants, young and old, throng at my door at the very early hours of the day, ready to carry me in their wagons from town to town. They shower upon me presents and flatteries and surround me with honor and glory, interrupting my meditations, wasting my precious time and frustrating my serious projects. (In Barzilay 1974, 63) His protests aside, Delmedigo did find time for scholarship, and to forge scholarly friendships. Visiting Krakow again in 1624, he struck up a relationship with Jan Broz ́ek (Brocius was his nom de plume), an omnivorous bibliophile and restless intellectual, who had just returned from the medical school in Padua. Broz ́ek, who was six years older than Delmedigo, had abandoned his career teaching mathematics to study medicine, but chose the priesthood instead of the life of a doctor. An enthusiastic Copernican, Broz ́ek acquired for himself three editions of de Revolutionibus. He and Delmedigo would remain friends and correspondents for some years to come. From Poland, Delmedigo continued on to Hamburg, a small Jewish community already well served by converso physicians such as the aging Rodrigo de Castro (1546–1627) and his youthful son, Benedict de Castro (1597–1684), himself a 1622 graduate of Padua Medical School. Delmedigo earned his living as a preacher and religious teacher, and chief justice of the local rabbinic tribunal. But by 1626 he had already relocated to Amsterdam, where he was a haham, or rabbi, at congregation Bet Israel. There he befriended Menasse ben Israel (1604–1657), a young rabbi of growing ________________ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 117 Jews and Early Modern Natural Philosophy 117 influence, and the proprietor of a print shop. Ben Israel agreed to publish Delmedigo’s greatest natural philosophical work, Sefer Elim, and the book saw print in 1629 (or at least parts of it did). Delmedigo’s unconventional views—his recommendation that Jewish children be taught Latin, for instance, and his refusal to credit stories of wonders worked by rabbis— raised doubts about him in the mind of Amsterdam Jewish authorities, and his book was scrutinized by an imposta board, and passages censored. It may have been with these Hahamim and parnasim (lay leaders) in mind that Delmedigo wrote: [T]hese bad, foolish people should have realized that the will cannot dominate the forces of the soul like a master over his slaves, but only as a king over his subjects....Sometimes there may exist conceptions in the soul so strong that the will is unable to dispel them....The will is not what one pretends to say, but what one wills in his heart. How can we disapprove of someone who does not want to believe that which is contrary to what he imagines in his mind or something the impossibility of which reason has demonstrated? (in Swetschinski 2000, 264) By 1630, Delmedigo had already resettled in Frankfurt-am-Main. There he impressed a Danish student (later a prominent ecclesiastic) named Hans Svane (1606–1668), who described Delmedigo in a letter to the Basle Christian Hebraist Johan Buxtorf the younger (1599–1664): [H]e speaks fluently, without an interpreter, rabbinic Hebrew with the learned Jews, Spanish with his wife, and Latin with me. I admire the strength of his memory and his fluency in languages....How highly proficient he is in the medical art—the qualified should judge. If one may trust, however, the crowns, he has already attained the highest honors in it a long time ago. That he has been extremely devoted to the study of mathematics is attested by an excellent sample of his mind, written in Hebrew, illustrated by drawings and published in Amsterdam....He asserts to have had as disciples men of great repute in Belgium. (In Barzilay 1974, 79) Around this time, Delmedigo sent Broz ́ek a Latin prospectus for Elim, and Broz ́ek replied with the suggestion that Delmedigo translate the entire book into Latin, for ‘‘the fountains of his mind should open up not only for Palestine but for Latium’’ (in Barzilay 1974, 80). In structure, Elim was an unusual book, organized around twelve general questions, and seventy specific queries, submitted to Delmedigo by a friend, the Karaite Zerah . ben Natan. In Cairo and Constantinople, Delmedigo had forged links to the Karaite intellectuals, whom he admired for their curiosity about natural philosophy. (This in contrast to the rabbis ____À ____0 ____þ ________________ 1____ 0 ____ 1____ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 118 of more traditional provenance, among whom one finds, Delmedigo complained, ‘‘those who ask what a million is, and who are confused by it. Every one of them wants only to count their sheep and their money, and nothing else’’—Barzilay 1974, 309). Zerah . ben Natan’s questions ranged over mathematics, physics, medicine, Kabbalah, astronomy, astrology, alchemy and more. The book is unsystematic, but contains a wealth of information and enthusiastic descriptions of recent innovations in these fields, from a description of Copernican astronomy, to an admiring notice of Kepler (whom he judged ‘‘the greatest mathematician of our time’’), to praise of logarithms, to a mention of Galileo’s telescope and the first description in print of the liquid-in-glass thermometer (Adler 1997). Had he been able to read the book, Broz ́ek would likely have been impressed. Delmedigo replied to Broz ́ek at length, beginning by mentioning a mathematical query that the Polish priest had sent earlier: I have submitted your arithmetical problem, my most beloved doctor and greatest of philosophers, to all Italian, French, Spanish, German, English, Belgian logicians and mathematicians, to all—I say—most known and famous: to Willebord Snellius, the magnificent and marvelous Sybrand of Amsterdam, Michael Mu ̈ller, Philip Landsberg, Albert Girard, Jost Byrgius, Johann Faulhaber, Johann Kepler, Metius, Golius, and to a thousand others, all maters of the highest order; not however succeeded in solving it. (Barzilay 1974) Delmedigo then described his fortunes in Frankfurt: By the grace of God, I carry on a medical practice, for which I am handsomely remunerated, my enthusiasm revived. The spark for it was supplied by a certain German knight, who is no less a scholar than an adept in the military art and, having fallen sick, he made use of my help and medical skill. (Barzilay 1974) Around this time, in March 1631, Delmedigo entered a five-year contract to serve as the official physician of the Jewish community of Frankfurt. He remained there for the better part of two decades, moving to Prague in about 1650. Delmedigo died and was buried in Prague in September 1655. He left behind dozens of books in print and manuscript (the precise number is difficult to say with certainty because he published disparate essays under a single cover, and because some of his works—no one knows quite how many—were lost). No individual as eccentric as Delmedigo can be taken as truly representative of any group. Still, though unique, Delmedigo’s career, society and writing were in some ways similar to those of other Jews who studied medicine at Padua and elsewhere in Italy in early modern times. ________________ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 119 Jews and Early Modern Natural Philosophy 119 For one thing, most of these Jewish physician natural philosophers achieved eminence among Jews. This was conspicuous in Delmedigo’s case. While his rabbinic training was imperfect (by fifteen he was already at the University of Padua), Demedigo was accepted as a scholar and an authority in community after Jewish community, serving for a spell as a preacher and later as the chief of a rabbinic court. He wrote relatively little on subjects that usually absorbed Jewish scholars, halakhah and biblical exegesis (though he did write about Kabbalah). It is fair to conclude that Delmedigo was admired by Jews, as by Christians, above all for his achievements as a natural philosopher, mathematician and doctor. His status among Jews accrued in two ways. His natural philosophical achievements were respected for their own sake, at least among some of his contemporaries. At the same time, the esteem that these achievements generated for Delmedigo among Christians almost certainly increased Delmedigo’s status among Jews. Being fetched to the palaces of princes and knights left an impression on Jews, probably no less (and perhaps more) than it did on anyone else. This was true for other Jewish physician natural philosophers as well. A good number of them worked as rabbis as well as doctors. Moses Fishel served as rabbi of the Polish community in Krakow. were all religious Joseph H _ amiz, authorities Isaac Cantarini, with David Neito and Isaac Lampronti hearty reputations. These reputations probably owed more to their natural knowledge, and their links to Christian intellectuals, as it did to their narrow accomplishments in Jewish law and letters. One sign of the high esteem that these physicians enjoyed among Jews, and the influence that came with it, was the decision of the leaders of Frankfurt’s Jewish community—the largest in Germany—to forbid Jewish physicians from inviting other physicians to settle in the city without the community’s consent. These physicians were clearly seen as a threat to traditional rabbinic and lay leadership of the community (Efron 2001, 31). Another trait shared by these physicians trained in Italian universities was enthusiasm for natural philosophy itself. Though Delmedigo earned his keep as a healer, and boasted of his ability to make a good living anywhere he traveled, clinical medicine was never what mattered most to him. He produced only one medical book, a Hebrew translation of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, printed in Prague as an appendix to a Yiddish medical handbook written by an apprentice of Delmedigo, Issachar bar Teller. Delmedigo viewed medicine as his profession, but like many other Jews who matriculated in Padua, his vocation was far broader. He was an intellectual. He viewed himself as a citizen of the Republic of Letters. Delmedigo corresponded with Catholic and Protestant intellectuals throughout Europe, attended book fairs and befriended booksellers and mastered European languages. The boastful list of correspondents that ____À ____0 ____þ ________________ 1____ 0 ____ 1____ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 120 Delmedigo sent Broz ́ek is an emblem of the sort of intellectual society of which he considered himself a part. His link to these men was mathematics. In this, he continued a tradition that included Abraham ben Meir de Balmes (c. 1440–1523), whose reputation as an intellectual owed to works such as Liber de Mundo and Epistola expeditionis, and whom the famous printer Daniel Bomberg pressed to publish his research on grammar, and Lazaro de Frigeis, from whose work Vesalius drew Hebrew and Arabic anatomical terms for his own De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Other Jewish doctors from Italian universities also published in Latin— Jacob ben Samuel Mantino (d. 1549) and Isaac Vita ha-Kohen Cantarini (1644–1723), for example. And many of these physicians frequently maintained collegial relationships with Christian scholars, as when Judah Winkler (graduated from Padua in 1629) corresponded with the famous Christian Hebraist Johann Christoph Wagenseil (who was himself outspokenly disparaging of Jewish physicians and of Jews in general). Most of these men viewed themselves not simply as physicians, but as members of a Republic of Letters that extended far beyond whatever town they happened to find themselves in (and it is no coincidence that most of these doctors wandered far over the course of their careers), far beyond the confines of the Jewish community, and far beyond the parochial languages of Hebrew and Judeo-German. Tobias Cohen The author of the most enduring Hebrew book of natural philosophy and medicine, Tobias Cohen (1652–1729), felt none of this camaraderie, and viewed himself as anything but a member of a European Republic of Letters that transcended confession. Cohen spent most of his youth in Krakow, where he was sent after his father, the rabbi of Metz, died. But the ‘‘poverty and displacement and war’’ he found in Poland dismayed him, and he traveled to Frankfurt where he persuaded local scholars to allow him to study medicine in the university. Once admitted, however, he faced unremitting hostility. (‘‘Every day they Louse, from Tobias Cohen’s compendium of medicine and natural philosophy, Ma’aseh Tuviah (1707). Cohen’s attitudes toward the scholarship he canvassed was an ambivalent mix of wonder and hostility. (Book 3, Chapter 3) ________________ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 121 would admonish our people about matters of faith sharply and at great length, as is their custom,’’ he wrote. ‘‘We were abused daily. We were filled with shame, instead of glory.’’) Finally, he quit Frankfurt, and matriculated in Padua, but his fury over this experience in Frankfurt would never fully dampen. After graduation from Padua in 1683, he traveled to Turkey, where he worked as a court physician in Constantinople and Adrianople. It was there that he wrote the book he had sworn to write more than two decades earlier, and Ma‘aseh Tuviah was finally published in Venice in 1707. (It would be reprinted in 1715, 1721, 1728, 1769, 1850, 1867, 1875, 1909, 1967, 1974 and 1978, a publishing record that testifies to the book’s lasting appeal.) In scope, the book is expansive; its five sections cover ‘‘The Upper World’’ (or the divine), ‘‘The World of the Spheres,’’ (or astronomy), ‘‘The Lower World’’ (or geography), ‘‘The Microcosm’’ (or human anatomy and health) and ‘‘The Elements of the World’’ (or physics). The brief passage that has gotten the most attention over the years is a chapter heading in which Cohen dismisses Copernicus: ‘‘Chapter Four: which presents all the arguments and evidence of Copernicus and his camp about the sun remaining stationary and the earth moving, and know what to reply to him, because he is the first born Son of the devil’’ (Cohen 1707, 44b). Cohen’s objection to Copernicus’ heliocentric astronomy seemed to be that it was inconsistent with the position put forth in the Talmud. This sort of concern was at the same time representative of Cohen’s general approach and highly unrepresentative. It fit well with Cohen’s general tenor of defending the honor of Jewish Jews and Early Modern Natural Philosophy 121 Illustrations of the strength and versatility of the vacuum, a phenomenon subject to vigorous study throughout Europe in Tuviah’s day. (Ma’aseh Tuviah, Book 4, Chapter 3) ____À ____0 ____þ ________________ 1____ 0 ____ 1____ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 122 scholars and the Jewish intellectual tradition. But it also creates the mistaken impression that Cohen was some sort of head-in-the-sand fundamentalist, who rejected new information as a matter of custom and principle. This was not the case. He was enthusiastic about ‘‘the new medicine that resides in the bosom of the physicians of our day,’’ including paracelsian iatrochemistry, which he endorsed. He included chapters on medical wonders issuing from the New World, such as coffee, sassafras and sarsaparilla. In the end, what drove Cohen was precisely what he said drove him. Just as he had promised, he produced a handbook that would help Jews demonstrate to Christians that they were not innocent of natural wisdom, and neither was their intellectual legacy, the Jewish tradition. Sassafras and sarsaparilla, he hoped, might spare his readers of the sort of humiliation he himself suffered at the medical school in Frankfurt. David Ruderman put it nicely when he wrote that ‘‘like Nieto, Morpurgo, Cardoso, and others, Tobias believed that a knowledge of contemporary science could profitably be employed to bolster and rehabilitate Jewish culture in an age of intellectual and religious turmoil exacerbated by frenetic messianic enthusiasm’’ (Ruderman 1995, 244). Medicine and Social Mobility Tobias Cohen may have believed that natural knowledge could improve the station of adept Jews because of his own experience. Medicine and natural philosophy had opened doors for Cohen himself, transforming an orphan boy from Metz into a courtier in Constantinople. In this he was not alone, and he knew it. Cohen wrote of his friend and mentor Solomon Conegliano, ‘‘I will testify as well to the multitude of students of my teacher, the encompassing scholar, the hero of the physicians, Solomon Conegliano,, some of whom have become Rabbis and some physicians to great kings and nobles’’ (Cohen 1707, 82b). Cohen was right that a great many of the Jews who studied medicine at Prague maintained relations with the titled and monied of European courts. Delmedigo served as personal physician to Prince Radziwill in Vilna and, as he complained and bragged at the same time, in Hamburg and Frankfurt and elsewhere, he was forever at the beck and call of local nobility. He enjoyed a powerful reputation as a doctor, and this likely owed as much to his reputation as a scholar as it did to his reputation as a healer. In this, too, Delmedigo’s experience was shared by dozens of Jews over generations who completed medical degrees in Padua. Moses de Medici Bonavoglia (d. 1446), an early graduate of Padua, went on to become the personal physician of Alfonso V. Abraham de Balmes, according to the chronicler Gedaliah ibn Yahya, was well loved among the Christians who worked and studied in Prague, and when he died, many joined his funeral procession. Bonet de Lattes (d. 1515) served as doctor to Popes Alexander VI and Leo X. Jacob Mantino served as personal ________________ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 123 Jews and Early Modern Natural Philosophy 123 physician to Pope Paul III beginning in 1534, and beginning in 1539 as a medical professor at the Sapienza in Rome. David de Pomis (1525–1593) of Spoleto served as doctor to Pope Pius IV. Philotheus Eliajus Montalto (d. 1616) became physician to the Grand Duke Ferdinand of Florence in 1606 and personal physician to Queen Marie de Medici of France five years later. Benjamin Mussafia (c. 1606–1675) became personal physician to King Christian IV of Denmark. Israel Conegliano (c. 1650–1717) was physician and secretary for Venetian envoy to the Ottoman Empire, Carlo Ruzzini, and traveled on diplomatic missions; he was honored by the Venetian senate and released from his obligation to wear a badge indicating his religion. A Jew named Hayyim (Vitalis) Felix graduated from Padua in 1658 and some years later, but within living memory of the horrid Chmielnicki uprising and massacres of 1648–1649, found himself ministering to the Polish king John III Sobieski. These physicians witnessed the privilege of Europe’s upper crust from a proximity reached by only the richest of his Jewish contemporaries, and they did so by virtue of their natural wisdom. Historians have argued about what to make of the careers of these doctors. Some insist that Delmedigo and his ilk—though they were few in number and limited in influence—demonstrate that Catholic and Protestant societies in early modern Europe were not foreclosed to Jews (as they have often been portrayed), nor were they as foreign and forbidding as we tend to imagine. A friendship like that between Delmedigo and Broz ́ek, at the very least, demonstrates that such a friendship was possible in the seventeenth century, with all the warmth and mutual respect that comes through in the letters the two men exchanged. And if such friendships were possible, then perhaps they occurred more often than we have allowed ourselves to believe. Other historians see figures like Delmedigo as exceptions that prove a rule. As they see it, certain Christian intellectuals and nobles absorbed the long-standing belief that Jews had a particular knack for medicine. (This belief, which seems friendly enough, was sometimes the result of bigoted mythology, which attributed to Jews powers denied more pious Christians.)2 As a result, in early modern Europe there was a place for a very small number of Jews educated in the medical arts, who were viewed as exceptional exemplars of their wretched race. That these few were treated well ought not suggest that their fellow Jews were well regarded or even that they themselves were well regarded for anything but their technical expertise. Even at medical schools, Jews and Christians may not have spoken much about matters of substance; historian Yosef Kaplan found that many of the Jews who earned degrees at the University of Leiden, which began accepting Jews early in the seventeenth century, arrived with thesis in hand, fully educated. These Jews came for an examination and to ____À ____0 ____þ ________________ 1____ 0 ____ 1____ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 124 submit research they completed earlier; some of them received their degrees only days after first entering the city. ‘‘These studies did not provide opportunity for the creation of close social contacts between the Jewish and non-Jewish students,’’ Kaplan wrote in dry understatement. ‘‘Even as the Sephardi students’ intellectual background and higher education paved the way for them towards the values of culture and science in Europe, the walls of alienation that separated between them and their Christian Dutch surroundings still stood firmly in place’’ (Kaplan 2000, 210). In the end, the question of whether or not Jews were able to participate meaningfully in the societies of early-modern-century central Europe and Italy is simply too encompassing to answer. In any case, the careers of Delmedigo and other Jews who studied medicine at Padua demonstrate neither proposition. What they do demonstrate, however, is that among Jews seeking discourse with Christian intellectuals of the day, natural philosophy, mathematics and similar disciplines were among the subjects most likely to support such dialogue. There were several reasons for this. One was the belief, shared by early modern Jews and Christians, that these subjects were first revealed by God to the Jews of the Bible, and that their living descendants might be in a position to partially recover that Prisca Sapientia, or ‘‘ancient wisdom.’’3 Still another was the persuasion, steeled by the religious battles following the Reformation, that natural philosophy might, by its nature, be a subject about which agreement might be reached even by people who would never see eye to eye about God and Jesus. Many graduates of Italian medical schools shared a vaguely universal natural theology, or sense, that nature was worthy of study because in nature were traces of God’s handiwork. Ruderman observed as much some years ago. Jacob ben Isaac Zahalon (1630–1693) composed a ‘‘physicians’ prayer’’ that went, ‘‘I pray...that I may discover the secrets of Thy wonderful deeds and that I may know the peculiar curative powers which Thou has placed in herbs and minerals...and that through them I shall tell of Thy might.’’ David Nieto (1654–1728) wrote that ‘‘there is not a single creature, even among the least of them, that does not show in some form 1676) insisted of its constitution the that ‘‘one must understand impress of natural God.’’ Jacob things in order H _ amiz to _ (d. c. know what is beyond nature.’’ And Delmedigo himself wrote that ‘‘contemplating every one of [God’s] creatures leads man to recognize his exalted Creator’’ (in Ruderman 1987, 536–537). These views have the unusual virtue of being theological in nature, but are still views about which Jews and Christians might agree. Natural theology was the only theology Jews and Christians could share (save, perhaps, bits of Kabbalah or Cabala). In ________________ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 125 Jews and Early Modern Natural Philosophy 125 an epoch in which theology remained the ‘‘queen of the sciences,’’ it is perhaps no surprise that natural philosophy—which might serve as a foundation of belief, but not of polemic—remained the subject most earnestly shared by Jews and Christians. Medicine, Natural Philosophy, Kabbalah and Jewish ‘‘Otherness’’ Cabala, Kabbalah and ‘‘Otherness’’ Not only did some early modern intellectuals view natural philosophy as a kind of bedrock common ground, they viewed it as inherently civilizing. It may have been for this reason that Francis Bacon made certain to include a Jew in the cast of his New Atlantis, as his narrator describes: I was fallen into strait acquaintance with a merchant of that city, whose name was Joabin. He was a Jew, and circumcised, for they have some few stirps of Jews yet remaining among them, whom they leave to their own religion. Which they may the better do, because they are of a far differing disposition from the Jews in other parts. For whereas they hate the name of Christ, and have secret inbred rancour against the people amongst whom they live, these (contrariwise) give unto our Savior many high attributes, and love the nation of Bensalem extremely....For the country of Bensalem, this man would make no end of commending it, being desirous, by tradition among the Jews there, to have it believed that the people thereof were of the generations of Abraham by another son, whom they called Nachoran, and that Moses by a secret cabala ordained the laws of Bensalem which they now use. (Bacon 1974, 474–475) Bacon’s traveler was left to conclude that the natural philosophical paradise he and his compatriots discovered had somehow managed to do what centuries of Christian persuasion and coercion in Europe had failed to do: to civilize the Jews and turn them into patriots. The New Atlantis had managed to do what centuries of Jewish pleading had failed to do: create a society where Jews could live without sanction or hardship. And the systematic study of nature had done what a millennium and a half of theology had failed to do: it had transformed Jews into human beings. Bacon’s Jew dramatized the notion that science properly pursued transcends the vexations of partisanship, that it offers a brand of truth, denuded so as to be obvious to all and embraced by all. Francis Yates, the splendid historian of early modern occult philosophies, saw in The New Atlantis ‘‘a Christian Cabalist utopia.’’ Jaobin the Jew ‘‘was able to assimilate with such enthusiasm,’’ she suggested, ‘‘because Bensalem was a Christian Cabalist country.’’ As Yates saw it, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were rife with efforts ‘‘to soften with ____À ____0 ____þ ________________ 1____ 0 ____ 1____ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 126 Christian Cabala the rigidities of the Shylock situation,’’ efforts that led as well to renewed enthusiasm for natural philosophy (Yates 1979, 174–175). This four-way link between Jewish scholars, Christian scholars, Kabbalah (or Cabala) and natural philosophy turned up time and again in the lives and work of Jewish physician natural philosophers. For example, Joseph Solomon between their Delmedigo, natural Joseph philosophical H _ amiz _ and others saw deep connections and kabbalistic studies. They also discovered that the same was true for their Christian correspondents and compatriots. A quick census of the Christian correspondents of the Jewish physicians shows that many, perhaps most, of these correspondents were, in fact, Christian Kabbalists. As Yates saw it, there was good reason for this, because in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Europe occult philosophies seized the attention of many European intellectuals, laying the groundwork for the scientific revolution. These philosophies added up to a worldview that expressed ‘‘both the scientific outlook, penetrating into new worlds of discovery, and also an attitude of religious expectation, of penetrating into new fields of religious experience....It was the effort to avoid doctrinal differences, to turn from them to exploration of nature in a religious spirit, which constituted the atmosphere in which science could advance’’ (Yates 1972, 270–271). This atmosphere, which probably found its fullest expression in Prague during the reign of Rudolph II, spurred natural philosophy, Kabbalah and scholarly exchange between Jews and Christians, all at the same time. Yates’ interpretation stirred up impassioned controversy among scholars of early modern religion and of natural philosophy and even now, after forty years and thousands of academic colloquia, journal articles and dissertations, it rages on. Many historians feel that Yates exaggerated the importance of occult and kabbalistic enthusiasms, giving short shrift to the more ‘‘rational’’ elements of early modern science. They are probably right. But Yates was among the first scholars to observe that deep interest in mysticism and natural philosophy often went hand in hand in early modern Europe, one supporting the other. And she was one of the first scholars to notice that it was among these natural philosophers of a mystical bent that Jewish wisdom about nature and occult was most enthusiastically sought. The careers of sixteenthand seventeenth-century Jewish physician natural philosophers suggest that, about these basic matters, Yates was right. This is not to say that there was a consensus among early modern Jews about Kabbalah or natural philosophy or, especially, the relationship between the two. Attitudes vary greatly. Some, as we have seen, were much as Yates described; enthusiastic about both natural philosophy and Kabbalah, and confident that there was a profound, mutually reinforcing ________________ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 127 Jews and Early Modern Natural Philosophy 127 relationship between the two. As David Ruderman wrote, no small number of Jews of the time were devoted to ‘‘merging the physical sciences with Jewish esoteric pursuits. Among the prominent Italian Jews with similar proclivities we might include Abraham Portaleone, Abraham Yagel, Isaac Cardoso and even his brother Abraham, Azariah Figo, Solomon Basilea, Isaac Lampronti, David Nieto and many others’’ (Ruderman 1995, 121). Others, however, were critical of Kabbalah for philosophical reasons. Leone Modena (1571–1648), a Venetian rabbi of towering reputation disparaged Kabbalah in scorching terms. Modena hosted and befriended Padua medical students an approbation for Delmedigo’s (Delmedigo Elim. and Despite H _ amiz _ among them) and wrote his celebrated rabbinic learning, Modena was not beyond renaissance enthusiasms—he gambled, advocated the introduction of baroque polyphonic music into the synagogue, versified brilliantly, was an accomplished Latinist, and for a time maintained an alchemy laboratory. But he had no sympathy for Kabbalah, which he regarded as misguided and misleading. Addressing who had embraced Kabbalah to Modena’s consternation, Modena H relayed _ amiz _ , this telling anecdote about the ‘‘wonderfully scholarly doctor R. Elijah Montalto, who was sick on his deathbed.’’ By Modena’s report, Montalto received a visitor from the Holy Land, who bloviated about the wonders worked by the renowned Safed Kabbalist Isaac Luria, which produced the following result: The physican, of blessed memory, gathered his strength, sat up in bed, and began to scream in a loud voice. We did not know what had happened to him and thought that he had been seized by pains due to his illness. And in his shouting, he uttered the following in Spanish: ‘‘I can no longer be silent and endure this any longer. Let the truth live! All this is a lie and a falsehood!’’ Modena endorsed Montalto’s opinion. ‘‘All knowledge that you are able to know as a person living on this earth can only be a posteriori,’’ he wrote, ‘‘especially with respect to the reality of God and His unity and other divine matters. There is no knowledge that can be a priori except that of a prophet...and a scholar is preferred to a prophet’’ (Ruderman 1995, 122–123). Modena devoted much of his writing to debunking Kabbalah, and this epistemic complaint—that knowledge gained through mystical means could never be truly reliable—was at the heart of his criticism. Modena challenged contemporaries who believed that Kabbalah and natural philosophy were mutually reinforcing, claiming in the end that, if anything, they are mutually exclusive. It might be possible to conclude from Modena’s arguments that these two ways of understanding the ____À ____0 ____þ ________________ 1____ 0 ____ 1____ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 128 relationship of Kabbalah and natural philosophy—they either complement or oppose one another—were the only available options. But it was not so. There was another way to see the relationship, and over time it was the one most often adopted by early modern Jews. This view had been put forth best, and most influentially, by Judah Loew ben Bezalel, or Maharal. As I have already described, Maharal recognized the value of natural philosophy (comparing it to a craft, like shoemaking), but insisted that its purview was the realm of the purely material. Maharal recoiled against contemporaries for whom natural philosophy had rich theological value, shedding light on the nature of God, or on the nature of spirit. He insisted that the world of nature be viewed as theologically barren, devoid of spirit, purely material. In so doing he created a rigid dichotomy: a realm of matter versus a realm of spirit, with no mediating links between them. Natural philosophy might best describe the realm of matter but it was more parochially Jewish wisdom (Kabbalah first among them, at least this was the conclusion that many of Maharal’s followers reached) that described the realm of spirit. Matter was common to all people, and the scholarship that described it was ‘‘the wisdom of every man,’’ though for two thousand years, Maharal recognized, has been best attained by pagans, Muslims and Christians. Spirit, however, was intelligible through revelation and scholarship that was the possession of Jews alone. Once an inflexible ‘‘either-or’’ ontology like Maharal’s was established, it was not surprising that Jews with increasing frequency turned their attention exclusively to the realm of the spirit, and to the wisdom dedicated to elucidating this realm: the Kabbalah. By warranting natural philosophy, but shearing it of any deep spiritual value, Maharal essentially rendered it a matter of technical or academic interest, but of no religious interest. This dampened the interest of Jewish intellectuals, for whom (like most of their Christian contemporaries) matters of spirit were still of paramount importance. It was in this way that, just as Cabala was (as Yates described) a spur to natural philosophy, so too, for some early modern Jews, the interpretation of natural philosophy as the wisdom of the purely material proved to be a spur to Kabbalah. For, once natural philosophy was severed from spiritual concerns (as it was for Maharal and many, though of course not all, early modern Jews), it came to seem an arid pursuit at which Gentiles excel, and less worthy of sustained and impassioned attention than the halakha and Kabbalah, pursuits at which Jews excel. Converso Physicians and Otherness As we have seen, Jewish physicians occupied extraordinary roles in early modern Europe. They were citizens of both the Jewish communities in which they lived and the scholarly community with whom they studied and corresponded and, in a way, they were citizens of neither. While they often held positions of some influence among Jews, they were subject to suspicions and most ________________ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 129 Jews and Early Modern Natural Philosophy 129 often found themselves moving from place to place with great frequency. And while they often wrote in Latin and vernacular languages, corresponded warmly with Christian colleagues and found that their services were sought by kings, they were at the same time aware that their scholarship and their probity were subject to suspicion because they were Jews. Jewish doctors seemed to have entre ́e to the learned and the leaders of both Jewish and Christian societies, and yet to be fully at home in neither. They seemed to live both in the center and at the margins of two societies at once. And if this was true for some doctors of unquestioned and uninterrupted Jewish background, it may have been all the more so for some converso physicians. Philosopher Yirmiahu Yovel hypothesized that a tension between different identities was a, perhaps the, defining characteristic of what he called the ‘‘Marrano experience.’’ [There was] a specific internal schism inherent in the Morrano experience, per se. Wherever he turns, the Marrano is an outsider and someone ‘‘new’’ (he is a New Christian or a New Jew). He does not belong to any cultural context simply or naturally, and feels both inside and outside of any one of them.... Hence he is doomed to a life of mental ferment and upheaval, to manifestations of doubt, and to rupture with himself, his past, and his future. (Yovel 1989, i, 49) Yovel’s description captures something important, but inverts it. For the most part, conversos and ex-conversos did not evince irremediable angst (‘‘a life of mental ferment and upheaval’’) as they did demonstrate a remarkable facility or comfort in more than one world. In this way, as Kaplan put it, ‘‘[T]he Jewish life they created for themselves possessed new characteristics which one might consider harbingers of modern European Jewry’’ (in Swetschinski 2000, 6). Kaplan’s careful phrasing, in calling the conversos ‘‘harbingers,’’ may understate their significance. As we have seen, perhaps as many as a quarter million Jews were baptized in Spain and Portugal in the century between 1391 and 1497. The Spanish Inquisition was set in motion in 1480 to weed out the insincere among the converts in that country, and the Portuguese Inquisition set out to do the same thing beginning in 1536. All new Christians were subject to suspicion, and both sincere Catholics and crypto-Jews alike experienced mounting pressure to escape. Most of those who left went to four destinations: Italy, southern France, northern Europe and the overseas colonies, including those in the New World. In the colonies, new Christians remained under suspicion, though initially at least under less rigorous scrutiny until an Inquisition was started up in Goa, India, in 1560. In France as well, most new Christians continued to ____À ____0 ____þ ________________ 1____ 0 ____ 1____ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 130 live as Christians, at least nominally. In Italy, however, there was greater opportunity for new Christians to reembrace Judaism (often the Judaism of their parents or even more distant ancestors). And this was the case in northern Europe as well, where Portuguese new Christians began to arrive in the 1590s, settling in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Cologne, Middelburg, London and Rouen. In these settlements, especially in the Dutch and German cities, new Christians found that they could identify themselves as Jews without fear of punishment or coercion, and a great many did (Swetschinski 2000). For a variety of reasons, ex-conversos enjoyed economic success and the high status that inevitably goes with it. More than anything, ex-conversos maintained intricate Spanish-Portuguese trading networks (that included other ex-conversos, new Christians and old Christians). They were also relatively well educated, literate and enthusiasts of such expressions of European culture as plays, poetry, music and so forth. Not surprisingly, among the ex-conversos were physicians who earned lofty reputations both from their learned books and from their noble, and occasionally royal, clientele. ‘‘These physicians of Spanish and Portuguese origin,’’ David Ruderman has written, found a common professional and cultural agenda with other Jewish graduates of medical schools in Italy an elsewhere in Europe, creating a kind of informal medical and scientific fellowship among Jews, and projecting themselves as a kind of intellectual and cultural elite within their own communities. They helped to define a Jewish cultural identity along strictly secular and professional lines. (Ruderman 1995, 276) Converso and ex-converso physicians were conspicuous among physicians and Jews both. Though only just over 3 percent of Amsterdam’s Portuguese Jews were physicians or surgeons in the second half of the seventeenth century (a time for which data are available), they supplied ‘‘quite a large number ofparnasim,’’ or leaders of the Jewish community. And this was true despite the fact that they were men of much more modest means than the brokers alongside whom they served (Swetchinski 2000, 103, 195, 196). Clearly, it was their profession from which their status derived. Radical and Jewish Enlightenments and Natural Philosophy Dutch Jews, the Radical Enlightenment and Natural Philosophy The high regard with which these ex-converso physicians were held was not without ambivalence. One of these physicians, Isaac Orobio de Castro (1620–1687), offered the following in 1665: ________________ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 131 Jews and Early Modern Natural Philosophy 131 Those who withdraw from Idolatry to the [United] Provinces where liberty is granted to Judaism are of two kinds: Some who, upon reaching the desired haven and receiving the seal [of circumcision], direct all their will to love the Divine Law and try to learn, within the grasp of their understanding, that which is necessary in order to scrupulously observe the sacred precepts, laws and ceremonies, which they and their forebears had forgotten in Captivity. They humbly listen to those who, raised in Judaism and having learned the Law, are able to explain it.... They come ill with ignorance but, since they are not accompanied by the horrible sickness of pride, they recuperate easily, tasting the holy and healing medicine which the compassion of their brothers offers to them.... Others come to Judaism who, while in Idolatry, had studied various profane sciences such as logic, physics, metaphysics, and medicine. These arrive no less ignorant of the Law of God than the first, but they are full of vanity, pride, and haughtiness, convinced that they are learned in all matters, and that they know everything; and even though they are ignorant of that which is most essential, they believe that they know it all. They enter under the felicitous yoke of Judaism and begin to listen to those who know that of which they are ignorant, [but] their vanity and pride do not permit them to receive instruction so that they may emerge from their ignorance. It seems to them that their reputation as learned men will diminish if they allow themselves to be taught by those who are truly learned in the Holy Law. They make a show of great science in order to contradict what they do not understand, even though it be all true, all holy, all divine. It seems to them that, by making sophistic arguments without foundation, they are reputing themselves to be ingenious and wise. And the worst of it is that they also spread this opinion among some who, because of either their youth or bad nature, presume themselves clever, and who, even though they don’t understand a thing that the foolish philosopher says against the Law of God, act nonetheless as if they understood him, in order not to admit that they do not understand him, and thus still to be regarded as understanding. These succeed in making such a philosopher even more prideful. His pride grows, so does his impiety, so that without much effort the ignorant philosopher, as well as those who hold him in affection, falls into the abyss of apostasy and heresy. (In Swetschinski 2000, 261–262) Orobio himself was born in Portugal, to converso parents. He studied medicine and philosophy, eventually accepting a professorship in metaphysics in Salamanca. It was there that he was arrested for practicing Judaism by the Inquisition, tortured and jailed for three years until he confessed. After he was released, he emigrated to France, becoming a professor of pharmacy in Toulouse. He then made his way to Amsterdam in 1662, where he took the name Isaac and joined the Jewish community. Working as a physician, he was soon one of the leading members of the ____À ____0 ____þ ________________ 1____ 0 ____ 1____ 29250_Part-2.3d 08/14/06 5:56pm Page 132 community, and a productive philosopher and polemicist, forging links with the Protestant theologian Philip van Limborch (whom he publicly debated about the ‘‘truth of the Christian religion’’) and, through him, meeting the likes of John Locke (who published a long review of the debate). Both as a scholar and as a Jewish communal leader, Orobio pursued two goals. He sought to discredit the Christianity with which he had nominally grown up, and he sought to discredit ‘‘freethinkers’’ who had recently appeared from within the Amsterdam Jewish community. It was in service of this second goal that Orobio wrote the withering criticism of the conversos who, before returning to Judaism, ‘‘had studied various profane sciences such as logic, physics, metaphysics, and medicine.’’ Though he spoke in general terms, his criticism was aimed at one physician above all, a man named Daniel de Prado. De Prado (c. 1614–c. 1670) was born in Andalusia. After completing his medical studies in Toulouse in 1638, he moved to Picardy, in France, and then, in 1654, to Hamburg before continuing on, in the following year, to Amsterdam. There he declared himself a Jew, changing his given name, Juan, to Daniel. Only one year passed before, in 1656, he was put under h removed _ erem, or excommunication, by after de Prado publicly Amsterdam’s parnasim. This herem was apologized for his ‘‘bad opinions and having shown little zeal in the service of God and His sacred Law’’ and for having ‘‘sinned and committed crimes, both in words and in deeds.’’ These sins and crimes included kindling flames, smoking, carrying money on the Sabbath, eating nonkosher food and ridiculing religious observances. To make matters worse, these breaches of tradition and decorum were grounded in a comprehensive philosophy. The core of Mosaic law as attainable by natural reason; what the Torah added was empty ceremony and ritual. What is more, these rituals were corrupt. Moses ‘‘made such precepts as he made for his own profit and that of his brother such as the tithes, evaluations of person promised to God, redemptions and primacy, priesthood, and the best and most profitable offices of the nation.’’ Halakha is a sham. The notion of an immortal soul is a sham. All these things suppress human reason, yet it is human reason, above all, that deserves unencumbered rein (Swetschinski 2000, 266–277). De Prado’s crimes and heresies were all the worse because he gathered a small group of younger enthusiasts around him who were willing to share in his impieties, the most famous of whom was Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). In 1657, de Prado was placed under herem again. In the brief span between de Prado’s two excommunications, Spinoza, too, earned a herem of his own.