The year was 1843, and the theme of English meteorology was measurement. Sir ‘Thunder-and-lightning’ William Snow Harris was given his last British Association for the Advancement of Science grant to complete the Plymouth series of over 120,000 thermometric observations, publication of which proved a costly venture, not least because the series implied no meteorological theory whatsoever.

In July of that year, however, John Herschel wrote to William Radcliffe Birt that the atmosphere might be considered ‘a vehicle for wave like movement which may embrace in their single swell & fall a whole quadrant of a globe’. The idea of ‘atmospheric wave’, thought Herschel, might well make sense of the odd series of London barometric readings made in September 1836, but, more significantly, it might also lead towards solving the notorious ‘storm controversy’ of the 1830s between the American meteorologists William Redfield and James Pollard Espy. If Birt would accept, Herschel would propose him to the British Association as the director of the new project to discover laws of weather behaviour.

David Gans (1541–1613), a German Jew who was educated in Poland and spent his adulthood in Prague, produced over his lifetime a large and unprecedented corpus of Hebrew introductions to various liberal disciplines, chiefly astronomy. Gans believed that the disciplines he described might help to mediate between Christians and Jews, by serving as a shared subject of study. He considered these subjects to be uniquely apt for shared study because they took them to be theologically neutral.

Gans's hopes went unfulfilled, and most of his books remained unpublished and ignored. Still, his own firm belief in the plausibility of his project implies that it was not a foregone conclusion near the start of the seventeenth century that astronomy and other liberal disciplines would find no purchase among Central European Jews. It also suggests that the mutual alienation between intellectuals of different confessions that has been emphasized by some historians might have been less pronounced than is often imagined. Further, Gans's belief that these disciplines could encourage interdenominational discourse and respect, and his intimation that such beliefs were shared by Kepler and Brahé, suggest the intriguing possibility that natural philosophy was valued by at least some of its early modern practitioners as an irenic undertaking.

Conventional wisdom has it that Ashkenazic rabbinic culture was far less receptive to non-Jewish learning and worldly disciplines than its Sephardic counterpart. Whereas great Sephardic rabbis such as Maimonides and many others were masters of philosophy, medicine, and science, Ashkenazic rabbis usually restricted their intellectual horizons to talmudic literature and, in the best of cases, “broadened” them to include the Bible and/or Kabbalah. Ashkenazic rabbinic culture was, according to this image, insular and unidimensional.

Between 1550 and 1650, the intellectual elite of Ashkenazic (German-andYiddish-speaking) Jews, including rabbis such as Yom Tov Lipmann Heller(1578–1654), showed a marked interest in astronomy, and to a lesserdegree in the natural sciences generally. This is one aspect of the assimilationof medieval Jewish rationalism by that group. Passages from Heller‘swritings show his familiarity with medieval and early modern Hebrew astronomicaltexts, and his belief that astronomy should be studied by all Jewish schoolboys.Heller‘s astronomical views were then influenced by the discoveriesand debates of his period. Between 1614 and the 1630‘s, Heller movedfrom an Aristotelian to a Tychonic view of the nature of the celestial bodies.Inspired, furthermore, by the notion of a natural order subject to change, andbasing himself on the exegesis of ancient rabbinic texts, Heller offered what wehave termed” midrashic natural histories”: namely, ahypothesis concerning the development of a certain type of animal, and anotherconcerning the dimming of the moon and its movement into a lower orbit.

The article studies a small Hebrew book called “The Wars of God” composed by an Anglo-Jewish jeweler who lived in London at the end of the eighteenth century. The book is interesting in further documenting the Jewish response to Newtonianism, that amalgam of scientific, political, and religious ideas that pervaded the culture of England and the Continent throughout the century. Hart, while presenting Newton in a favorable light, departs from other Jewish Newtonians in voicing certain reservations about Newton's alleged religious orthodoxy, specifically his fear that the force of gravitation might be explained independent of God's divine providence. The key to understanding Hart's unique stance is his reliance on two eighteenth-century Christian theologians: William Whiston and Robert Greene, particularly the latter. In staking out this position, Hart also endorsed the theological position of his more well known Jewish colleague David Levi, the publisher of his Hebrew text. Both men reveal together the capacity of Jewish thinkers to absorb the dominant trends of thinking by the majority culture while defending honestly and defiantly the integrity of their religious faith and community.

In 1903 Rabbi Philipp Bloch, of Posen (Poznan), published a unique Ashkenazic sixteenth-century polemical pamphlet which attested, so it seemed, to a heated controversy in yeshivah circles in the larger cities of the Ashkenazi cultural sphere in the late 1550s (Bloch 1903). Revolving around the place of philosophy in Judaism, the dispute reached one of its peaks in Prague some time before April 1559, probably in a public debate before a yeshivah audience, basically similar to the Disputationes then popular in European universities. The disputants were two young scholars, one of whom, the writer of the pamphlet, enthusiastically supported the teaching of classical philosophical texts in Ashkenazi yeshivot, while the other fiercely opposed what he called “philosophy.” He accused Maimonides of heresy and unbelief, as he did anything that he associated with either “philosophy” or Maimonides. The resolution adopted by the yeshivah audience — at least, so we read in the pamphlet, our only source for the event — was unequivocal: the opponent of Maimonides and philosophy was forbidden, from that time on, to broadcast his views.

This paper focuses on several Italian Jewish philosophers in the second half of the sixteenth century and the first third of the seventeenth century. It argues that their writings share a certain theology of nature. Because of it, the interest of Jews in the study of nature was not a proto-scientific but a hermeneutical activity based on the essential correspondence between God, Torah, and Israel. While the theology of nature analyzed in the paper did not prevent Jews from being informed about and selectively endorsing the first phase of the scientific revolution, it did render the Jews marginal to it. So long as Jewish thinkers adhered to this theology of nature, Jews could not adopt the scientific mentality that presupposed a qualitative distinction between the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture.