New Heavens and a New Earth: The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought
Jeremy Brown
Abstract
This book analyses the Jewish reception of the Copernican revolution. It traces four hundred years of Jewish writings and describes the ways in which Jews ignored, rejected or accepted the Copernican model, and the theological and societal underpinnings of their choices. The review is chronological, beginning with the early seventeenth century responses and ends with a description and analysis of modern Jewish geocentrists and the contemporary debate in the ultra-orthodox community about the Copernican model. Throughout the book each figure is placed into a historical context which allows a co ... More
This book analyses the Jewish reception of the Copernican revolution. It traces four hundred years of Jewish writings and describes the ways in which Jews ignored, rejected or accepted the Copernican model, and the theological and societal underpinnings of their choices. The review is chronological, beginning with the early seventeenth century responses and ends with a description and analysis of modern Jewish geocentrists and the contemporary debate in the ultra-orthodox community about the Copernican model. Throughout the book each figure is placed into a historical context which allows a comparison between Jewish writings on Copernicus to those in the Christian world of the same period. This allows the reader to understand the ways in which the Jewish reception of Copernicus was really the story of local factors that nurtured a local response. The book concludes with a number of new and important lessons that may be learned from the history of the Jewish reception of Copernican thought, and describes how religions make room for new scientific descriptions of reality without undermining their most cherished beliefs.
Keywords:
Copernicus,
Judaism,
heliocentric,
geocentric,
science and religion
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199754793 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2014 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199754793.001.0001 |
