A Forgotten Scientific Renaissance: Astronomy, Astrology, and Related Sciences in Eighth-Century Palestine

The eighth century was a period of remarkable Jewish production in astronomy and related sciences (cosmology, astrology, calendar computation) – a phenomenon that has not been given the attention it deserves. Most important are Baraita de-Shemuel, Baraita de-Mazzalot, and chapters 6-8 of Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliezer. Further Jewish texts datable to this century have been recently surfacing from the Cairo Genizah, mostly on astrology and calendar computation. These texts are all Palestinian (there is little or nothing from Babylonia), and the sphere of influence, for both astronomy and calendar computation, is decidedly Byzantine. Although arguably on the level of ‘popular science’, Jewish interest in astronomy in this period is most likely what prompted the adoption, by the early ninth century, of precise, cutting-edge astronomical values for fixing the rabbinic calendar calculation (the molad and the spring equinox) – an unprecedented use of secular science for halakhic purposes.

The context of this eighth-century ‘renaissance’ is a similar eruption of scientific production in other parts of the formerly Roman Near East, in Syriac and Armenian languages, in the seventh-eighth centuries (e.g. Severus Sebokht and Anania of Shirak, respectively). Syriac, Armenian, and Jewish adoption of Hellenistic astronomy, paradoxically after the end of Roman rule in the Near East, may reflect increasing self-confidence among local cultures after the Muslim conquest, together with an assertion a non-Islamic identity through the appropriation and domestication of cultural capital from the Hellenistic scientific tradition.

In the ninth century, the Jews did not join in the Abbasid renaissance, when Islamic astronomy picked up and rose to its height; in this century and later, there is no trace of Jewish astronomical activity in the Near East. It remains to be explained why it was only in western Europe, from the mid-tenth century, that astronomy and related sciences were gradually reclaimed by Jewish scholarship.