Liberal Arts

""Ben-Zaken’s book offers an intriguing
approach, empirically richer and more innovative..Doubtless Ben-Zaken has demonstrated with much inventive ingenuity that during these first decades of the Scientific Revolution a variety of remarkable encounters took place in the Eastern basin of the Mediterranean.""

In 1637, a cosmographer named Noel Durret published Novae motuum caelestium ephemerides Richelianae in Paris. The book includes astronomical tables and deals with astrology, hermeticism, and mysticism, and merely in passing mentions the heliocentric Copernican system. It reworked an earlier short work of Durret composed in French and titled Novvelle theorie des planetes in which one can find the same tables that were calculated according to the observations of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho and Lansbergen.  In 1660 an Ottoman scholar named Ibrāhīm Efendi al-Zigetvari Tezkerci translated the two books into one Arabic manuscript. For more than three centuries his manuscript was buried in an Ottoman archive in Constantinople until it resurfaced at the beginning of the 1990s. In order to capture a local reading of Durret’s book by this unknown translator, we use philological and cultural clues — the translator’s name, and the book’s title and introduction. Why, how, and for what purposes did Ibrāhīm Efendi embrace Durret’s book?

How do we exchange things? Or what does it take to have a transmission and reception of natural philosophy? We certainly need to have a two-sided connection - either two cultures or two languages or even two historical epochs. This could be the cultural medium through which natural philosophy propagates across civilizations. But ideas of natural philosophy are not divine and they do not exist out there until someone (or simultaneously some people) discovers them. Natural philosophy is the conceptualization of cultural practices, theological premises, particular socio-political structures, tacit knowledge and various values of trust into a coherent world-view of nature. These epistemic objects, in turn, are articulated in scientific objects or textual objects that carry mathematical models, observational data and autobiographical insertions. But to put these objects in motion across cultures we need an agency - a force by which scientific objects move. Usually, we identify the agency with the people who, acting on particular and often peculiar agendas, put those objects in motion. this paper aims to show that Jewish Salonikian astronomers played a crucial role in bridging European and Muslim scientific networks of trust.
In the late sixteenth century, European and Islamic practitioners of natural philosophy were experiencing a shift in the cultural hegemony in the field of astronomy. The medieval Arabic astronomical texts were cultivated in Europe and generated new theories and observations. Sacrobosco in the late thirteenth century, Peuerbach and Regiomontanus in the late fifteenth century and then Copernicus in the early sixteenth, shifted the centers of astronomy from East to the West.  In the Islamic world, practitioners of astronomy distrusted and ignored these new astronomical writings and kept fidelity to their medieval traditions. Two separate networks of trust, Islamic and European, became an obstacle for the exchange of theories and observational data. However, in late 16th-century Salonika, Jews who had fled the persecutions of the inquisition in Spain and Italy, and who were versed in Latin and European natural philosophical writings, bridged this cultural gap by translating the works of Sacrobosco and Peuerbach from Latin into Hebrew. I hope that my paper shows that the translators were not only versed in intellectual trends, but were also in close connection to the Ottoman chief astronomer and high officials. I, therefore, argue that these seemingly insurmountable cultural gaps of trust could be bridged by a third party and by personal connections that made these “culturally untrustworthy” texts available to Islamic practitioners of astronomy.

The historiography of Ottoman Egypt is a largely uncharted field. This article traces the development and current state of the field and offers new directions for research. Since the fifties, the field has been developed by scholars who have been interested in the corpus of texts which can be used as a source for the writing of political, economic and cultural histories of Ottoman Egypt. However, historians of Islamic science, who have focused on medieval technical texts have ignored this corpus. I propose that this corpus is a rich source for writing the cultural history of science in the early modern Islamic world. It sheds light on how natural phenomena and new European science and technologies were conceived by a great intellectual culture. Methodologically this allows not only for a cultural history of science but also for an all-encompassing approach that combines economic, political, cultural and natural histories into a mélange that represents the everyday practices of the intellectual culture of Otto-man Egypt

In 1574 the Ottoman Sultan Murād III invited Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad Ibn-Maʻārūf to build an observatory in Istanbul. Using his exceptional knowledge in the mechanical arts, Taqī al-Dīn constructed instruments and built mechanical clocks that he used in his observations of the comet of 1577. Such astronomical and mechanical activity was documented, in 1580, by an anonymous painter who illustrated some miniatures in a manuscript titled Shāhinshāhnāma. In the same decade, European astronomers, such as Tycho Brahe, built instruments and promoted a mechanical worldview of the celestial bodies. Although the scientific cultures coexisted for years, current historiography tends to present them as developing along separate linear paths. Yet, if we examine closely the peculiarities in one of the miniatures, we extract clues about a possible connection between Taqī al-Dīn’s and the European mechanical culture.

"In 1623 an Italian traveller, Pietro della Valle, reached the Portuguese colony of Goa in western India, after nine years of travel in the Near East. That same year, Christopher Borrus, a Jesuit on his way back to Italy from doing missionary work
in Cochin-China (southern Vietnam), also stopped in Goa. The two men — della Valle, who was trained in Near Eastern languages, and Borrus, who was skilled in astronomy, cartography and mathematics — worked together to translate into Persian a short Latin work of Borrus’s on the Tychonic system. As it has come down to us, the translation takes the form of a Persian-Italian manuscript letter made into a booklet. Addressed to a Persian astronomer named Zayyn al-dīn al-Lārī, it eventually became part of the collections of the Vatican Library. Such a collocation of evidence fused the vast geographical and cultural gaps among the three men and extended to the East what has become known as ‘the Galileo affair’."

"This is a serious, and remarkable, work of scholarship, and as such it very much deserves to be the starting point for further debate."
"This finely textured book offers fresh and fascinating
perspectives on the development of science in the early
modern period. In five substantial chapters Avner Ben-
Zaken indicates the extent of, and thereby establishes
the importance of, cross-cultural exchanges between
Christians and Muslims. .... This is a serious, and remarkable, work of scholarship, and as such it very much deserves to be the starting point for further debate."

"In Communism as Cultural Imperialism Avner Ben-Zaken examines, through a cross-cultural prism, the circulation of the communist Ideology and movement in the Middle-East, exposing the cultural nerves which offset the interactions between European Jewish communists on the one hand, and local communists, Jews and Arabs, on the other hand. He shows that local activists perceived Marxist discourse as a nuanced European imperialism, as a cultural imperialism, particularly for its universal pretention and claims for “scientific” and “objective” social science. In this sense, the “objective-scientific truth” of Marxism fueled the self-conviction of European-Jewish Marxists that it is possible to bridge the cultural gaps, to spread Marxism, and to transform local cultures. Such self-conviction generated a somewhat paradoxical development, in which European Jewish Marxists established the Middle Eastern Communist Parties, and for some decades regulated their public discourse and political strategies.
Local communist culture, however, was not harmonious at all. In deconstructing the mechanisms of circulation of Marxist ideology and movement, Ben-Zaken shows that cross-cultural encounters stimulate “sensations of estrangement”, pushing and pulling the various actors to opposing directions. “International” political ideologies, Ben-Zaken argues, are not necessarily perceived as scientific and as culturally neutral. He, thus, call to re-write the history of Marxism in the Middle East as the history of the various attempts to culturally adjust universal values to local practices."

Avner Ben-Zaken reconsiders the fundamental question of how early modern scientific thought traveled between Western and Eastern cultures in the age of the so-called Scientific Revolution.Through five meticulously researched case studies—in which he explores how a single obscure object or text moved in the Eastern world—Ben-Zaken reveals the intricate ways that scientific knowledge moved across cultures. His diligent exploration traces the eastward flow of post-Copernican cosmologies and scientific discoveries, showing how these ideas were disseminated, modified, and applied to local cultures. Ben-Zaken argues that early modern science did not develop along separate, linear paths, with each culture drawing only on its own “monadic” nature, but rather was cultivated by streams of fresh ideas and objects that came through exchanges at the cultural margins. The principle of the “incommensurability of cultures” would, perhaps, best give way to a more continuative and dialogic approach that sets its eyes not on “cultural centers” but on the hazy yet fertile “cultural margins” that necessarily overlap with other “cultural margins,” creating a stimulating, mutually embraced zone where intensive cross-cultural exchanges transpire. A focus on “mutually embraced zones” is critical not only to drawing a widely prismatic history, but also to uncovering the precise locus and essential mechanisms for cultural construction. His findings reshape our understanding of scientific revolution.

in Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: a Cross-Cultural History of Audodidacticism, Avner Ben-Zaken shows that pleas for autodidacticism echoed not only within close philosophical discussions. Struggles over relations of control between individuals and establishments were the ground from which such pleas grew and the field where they were displayed. The deeply buried and convoluted migration, circulation, and reception of Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān, illustrates the intricate evolution of social and individual control. In twelve century Marrakesh, Ibn-Tufayl struggled to tame uncontrolled religious enthusiasm of mystics, subjecting them to philosophical procedures; In fourteenth century Barcelona, Narbonni called to liberate adolescences from communal control, confining them to self-disciplined life of solitude; In fifteenth century Florence, Pico della Mirandola detonated the spiritual chains of the heavens, grounding man to the physical reality of nature; the sixteenth century utopian societies and scientific societies defied the authority of institutional discipline, but called its members to follow restricted and sometimes ascetic way of life; and finally seventeenth century experimentalists liberated man from metaphysics and from constructed categories of knowledge, confining them to self-discovery of nature based on facts and personal credibility.
The various historical nexuses mutually chained one another through the growing process of shifting social control from establishments to the individuals themselves, creating the “modern man” as a solitary self-controlled individual that utilizes reason to foresee the future outcomes and repercussions of his deeds. The rejection of traditional authorities, thus, did not exclaim chaos, anarchism or complete freedom. In a mishap, it led to internalization of institutional mechanisms of control. Rather than loss of control, autodiadactism highlighted the need for self-control. It relocated the mechanisms of control from society to the individual, replacing history, tradition and metaphysics with nature, reason and natural instincts as the ultimate sources of knowledge.

The current preliminary draft aims to excavate the circulation of the Picatrix, a magical Andalusian treatise, as it traveled across the Mediterranean in early modern Europe, stirring up natural magic not only as an alternative program for science, but also identifying it as an alternative culture located in the East. It follows the readings of Ficino, Agrippa and Campanella of the Picatrix, particularly of its notion of ‘acting at a distance’ as the philosophical foundation for the rise of notions of forces in nature. The tracing of the readings of the Picatrix unfolds a latent cultural process, incepting with Ficino attempting to philosophize concept of magic, through Agrippa laboring to legitimate the practice of magic, up to Campanella venturing to transformed natural magic not only as the prime program for natural sciences, but for political science.

Jewish migration to Salonika is mostly attributed to a religious motive – escape from religious persecution. It is surely the case for most parts of the migration during the early 16th century when Jews moved from Spain through Italy, Eastward to Salonika and Istanbul. From the mid-16th century after Salonika turned into an intellectual and cultural center, however, it attracted Jews for other reasons as well.  Amatus Lusitanus, a renowned physician and natural historian moved across Europe from one Intellectual center to another, publishing books and treating local nobilities and clergies from Kings and Cardinals up to the Pope. Why such a major intellectual figure who felt comfortable among Christian elites would arrive in 1558 at an intellectual province like Salonika?  His arrival at Salonika, where he openly confessed his Jewish origins, is often portrayed as an exemplar of how it turned into a refuge city for conversos. As this paper will show, Lusitanus was indeed persecuted, but for quarrels over intellectual authorship, not for religious reasons. Salonika was not only a refuge city for religiously persecuted Jews, but also a ‘center of calculation’ free of intellectual restrictions, where scholars could freely translate, cite, publish and circulate scientific works beyond the rigid borders of intellectual cultures. Salonika, then, was not only a "trading-zone" where cultural goods exchanged hands, but also a "twilight-zone" where copyright claims were insignificant.

A piece I published in the magazine of Haaraetz Newspaper, in which I explore an alleged signature of Shakespeare on a copy of Cornelius Agrippa, The Vanity of Sciences (1569). Along the investigation, I show that Shakespeare silently used Agrippa as a source for his plays and that people from his surroundings, like Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and others, most probably, introduced him to the works of Agrippa. I argued that just as Agrippa shifted the major focus from the "philosopher"  to the experimentalist-magician, so as Shakespeare shifted the focus from the writer-poet to the actor-playwriter, introducing a much more sophisticated and experimentalist writings in literature. I also stressed that the English exprimentalists, seemed to appropriate the writing form of the Shakespearean plays, in a sense that a report of an experiment does not have an internal logic, but actually describe an external reality. And thus, just like in a play the philosophizing part comes at the end in the "conclusion",  similarly  to the soliloquies we find in plays.