Freudenthal, Gad
Senior Fellow: April–August 2021
Research Project: The Long Life of Scientific Non-Facts in Jewish Cultures: Ṣel ha-‘Olam (the Hebrew Adaptation of L’Image du monde; 1245) and Its Un/sceptical Readers in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
L’Image du monde was written in 1245 by Gossouin of Metz in French. A Hebrew version of it appeared in Amsterdam in 1733 under the title Ṣel ha-‘Olam. The text is a kind of encyclopedia that blends an exposition of Ptolemaic cosmology and with a great deal of fantastic lore about humankind and the fauna and flora in the three continents. Ten re-editions of Ṣel ha-‘Olam appeared during the nineteenth century, evincing a keen interest on the part of readers.
How did these Eastern European Jewish readers receive this text six hundred years after it was composed? With what perspectives did they approach it? Were they aware of the fact that the book they read consisted of errors, even superstitions, wrapped in scientific garments? The project reviews the milieus in which the book was consumed and will analyse how it was perceived. Attitudes may be classified according to whether a writer read Ṣel ha-‘Olam (i) as a source of information about the world or (ii) as a source of inspiration for reflections about the relationship between man and the deity. The first group includes sceptics like the writer Mendele Mokher Seforim (1836–1917), who in his book Toldot ha-teva‘ (1862)—an adaptation of Harald Othmar Lenz’s Naturgeschichte (1834–1839)—castigated his coreligionists for their reading of books like Ṣel ha-‘Olam. In his The Travels of Benyamin the Third (1878), he ridiculed the naïveté of a common Jew who is fascinated by the marvels recounted in this book. The second group includes figures like R. Nathan b. Amram (1791–1870), who adopted several of Ṣel ha-‘Olam’s statements about the relationship between the deity and humankind.
Gad Freudenthal is a senior research fellow emeritus of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.