Some Jewish Contributions to Iberian Astronomy

J. D. North Essay Review: Some Jewish Contributions to Iberian Astronomy José Chabás and Bernard R. Goldstein, Astronomy in the Iberian Peninsula: Abraham Zacut and the Transition from Manuscript to Print (Philadelphia, 2000). Asked to name the cultural capital of medieval Europe, few historiansassuming that they are denied the luxury of qualifying their answerwould have any hesitation in naming Rome. Given the great wealth and political power of that great center of western Christianity, it is ironic that Rome plays such a relatively small part in the story told by historians of the sciences. The educational resources of the Roman Church were considerable even before the rise of the great cathedral schools and universities; but classical Latin culture hindered rather than helped the recognition of the enormous value of the scientific legacy of Greece and Alexandria. We do not need to be reminded how the virtues of that great scientific tradition eventually reached the West, chiefly through the medium of translations of oriental works, or that some of the key Aleph 2 (2002)271 writings were translated many times over in the course of their transmission . History is awash with ideas that changed in subtle ways as they passed from one language and culture to another—Greek into Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, or Pahlavi, say, with an accretion of Persian and Indian notions along the way, before perhaps passing back into Greek and shooting off into Latin from at least three of those languages. It is no cause for surprise that the history of this extraordinarily complex movement has largely been written from a philological point of view. This may be fortunate, to the extent that the subtle changes in question are unlikely to be perceived by scholars who concentrate on texts in a single language only; but if there were no more to science than translation, it would cease to merit the name of science. Comparative studies must be supplemented by accounts of new ideas that emerged along the way. Nowhere is this truer than in astronomy. There are few richer hunting grounds for medieval scientific originality than astronomy as practiced in the Iberian peninsula. One thinks here of the pioneering work of J. M. Millàs-Vallicrosa and his successors Juan Vernet and Julio Samsó and the members of their Barcelona school. They have never been guilty of ignoring the Jewish contribution —Millas, after all, was a noted Hebraist; but their main astronomical focus has been on Islamic practice. The contributions by Bernard Goldstein and José Chabás to the study of Jewish astronomy in the peninsula have therefore been especially welcome. The aim of these brief notes is to draw attention to them. Goldstein's contributions in this area go back to the 1960s, with his study of the two Hebrew versions of Ibn al-Muthannä's commentary on the astronomical tables of al-Khwarizmï. The tables were a ninthcentury blend of older ingredients, incorporating Greek and Hindu data and procedures. While the original Khwarizmï tables are not extant , the commentary by the tenth-century Spanish scholar Ibn alMuthann ä is preserved in the Hebrew versions that Goldstein edited.1 A few years later, Goldstein published a study of the astronomical 272 J. D. North tables of Levi ben Gerson (1288-1344), the foremost Jewish astronomer of the later Middle Ages, who lived in southern France. Of necessity Goldstein again had to turn his attention to Spain and Spanish influences . From the eighth to the eleventh centuries Spain was largely under Muslim control, and from the ninth century onwards it served as the chief port of entry of Arabic astronomical works into the West. (Europeans are inclined to say "into Latin," but it would be better to say into all Iberian languages—Latin, Hebrew, and even native dialects.) Chabás' first publications on Andalusian Jewish astronomy, in the early 1990s, were studies of the astronomical tables of Jacob ben David Bonjorn; he has since added accounts of the Barcelona tables, of a perpetual almanac of Ferrand Martines (1391), and of the Tabulae resolutae in fifteenth-century Salamanca. Since 1992, he and Goldstein have joined their expertise and collaborated in six publications of a related sort, now supplemented by...