Avner Ben‐Zaken . Cross‐Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–1660 . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010. Pp. 246. $60.00.

Abstract

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. Chapter one focuses on Taqī al-Dīn, who has been characterized as “the Tycho Brahe of the Ottoman Empire” (p. 9). Countering earlier claims of Taqī's purely Muslim provenance, the author shows that he gained expertise in astronomy from Christian and Jewish thinkers, at first in Italy and subsequently from a captured Italian Jewish astronomer. While showing the importance of the capture and exchange of prisoners between the West and the Ottoman Empire, this chapter also offers a very useful discussion of the role of apocalypticism in the encouragement of astronomy by kings and emperors (East and West). Chapter two offers a new perspective on the Galileo affair, showing how attempts to find lost Holy Scriptures (in particular an early version of the Book of Job) were motivated by desires to vindicate Galileo through a scriptural endorsement of heliocentrism. The Galileo affair, therefore, “generated travels for the purposes of collecting ancient manuscripts of ‘lost scriptures’” (p. 75). This broad theme is continued in chapter three in a discussion of Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, a Jewish student of Galileo who collected ancient Jewish manuscripts with a view to confirming Copernicanism.