Foreword / Moshe Idel -- Medieval Jewish Attitudes toward Nature and Scientific Activity -- The Legitimation of Scientific Activity among Central and Eastern European Jews -- Padua and the Formation of a Jewish Medical Community in Italy -- Can a Scholar of the Natural Sciences Take the Kabbalah Seriously? The Divergent Positions of Leone Modena and Joseph Delmedigo -- Science and Skepticism: Simone Luzzatto on Perceiving the Natural World -- Between High and Low Cultures: Echoes of the New Science in the Writings of Judah Del Bene and Azariah Figo -- Kabbalah, Science, and Christian Polemics: The Debate between Samson Morpurgo and Solomon Aviad Sar Shalom Basilea -- On the Diffusion of Scientific Knowledge within the Jewish Community: The Medical Textbook of Tobias Cohen -- Contemporary Science and Jewish Law in the Eyes of Isaac Lampronti and His Rabbinic Interlocutors -- The Community of Converso Physicians: Race, Medicine, and the Shaping of a Cultural Identity -- A Jewish Thinker in Newtonian England: David Nieto and His Defense of the Jewish Faith -- Physico-Theology and Jewish Thought at the End of the Eighteenth Century: Mordechai Schnaber Levison and Some of His Contemporaries -- Bibliographic Essay: The Study of Nature in Ancient Judaism
Summary
A study on the scientific dimension of Jewish intellectual history in the early modern world