A Newly Discovered Letter by Galileo Galilei: Contacts Between Galileo and Jacob Rosales (Manoel Bocarro Francês), a Seventeenth-Century Jewish Scientist and Sebastianist

A letter of presentation by Galileo Galilei for the book, Luz pequena lunar e estellifera da Monarchia Lusitana (Small lunar and stellar light of the Portuguese monarchy), printed in Rome in 1626, is here published for the first time. Its author was the Jewish physician, mathematician, and astrologer Jacob Rosales (Lisbon 1593-Livorno 1662), who went by the Christian name of Manoel Bocarro Francês. Rosales was a millenarist and one of the most outstanding intellectuals of Sebastianism, a Portuguese messianic movement.

The existence of the letter was referred to by Rosales himself and by later authors, but it had never been published or analyzed until its recent discovery in a manuscript copy of Rosales' book.

The original Latin preface is published, along with an English translation. The connections between one of the fathers of modern science and a Jewish millenarist scientist of the seventeenth century are discussed.