Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City by Demetz Peter

Author:Demetz, Peter [Demetz, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1998-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Jewish intellectual most openly sensitive to the new scientific thought of the Renaissance was Joseph Salomon Delmedigo, who spent his last years in Prague and was buried at the old cemetery in 1655. The inscription on his gravestone praises the many achievements of the “glorious rabbi, scholar, and philosopher, and one mighty among physicians.” His life symbolizes the all-embracing thirst for knowledge that fired Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike in the mid-seventeenth century, and his life was more restless and productive than most. Born on Crete to a family of renowned rabbis, he was admitted to the University of Padua when he was fifteen years old; among others, he worked with Galileo Galilei, who allowed the young Jewish student to observe the stars through his telescope, the favor never extended to Kepler. By 1613, Delmedigo returned to Crete as a practicing physician, only to leave again, perhaps frustrated by an unhappy marriage or the island’s narrow world. He traveled most of his life, briefly settling in Cairo, Constantinople, Poland (where he was appointed private physician to Prince Radziwill), Hamburg, and Frankfurt; he probably arrived in Prague by the mid-1640s and died there ten years later. He was a rather controversial figure, disliked by the orthodox (possibly because of his friends among the Karaite groups opposed to the rabbinical tradition), and, being able to study and converse in eight languages, he felt inspired to widen the intellectual horizon of the Jewish communities; he was certainly not averse to disputing ideas with Arab and Christian colleagues. Preferring Plato to Aristotle, Copernicus to Ptolemy, a critical reader of the Kabbalah and an untiring author of thirty or forty scientific and philosophical books, he is said to be a forerunner of the Jewish Enlightenment. Emperor Rudolf, if he had had a chance to talk to him (he died as Delmedigo concluded his studies in Padua), would have found him a wide-ranging and tolerant partner in dialogue.

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