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The Attitude of Ashkenazi Society to the New Science in the Sixteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Elchanan Reiner
Elchanan Reiner
Affiliation:
Department of Jewish HistoryTel Aviv University
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Extract

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.

Type
Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , Winter 1997 , pp. 589 - 603
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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