A Remembrance of His Wonders
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The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an explosion of Christian interest in the meaning and workings of the natural world—a «discovery of nature» that profoundly reshaped the intellectual currents and spiritual contours of European society—yet to all appearances, the Jews of medieval northern Europe (Ashkenaz) were oblivious to the shifts reshaping their surrounding culture. Scholars have long assumed that rather than exploring or contemplating the natural world, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were preoccupied solely with the supernatural and otherworldly: magic and mysticism, demonology and divination, as well as the zombies, werewolves, dragons, flying camels, and other monstrous and wondrous creatures that destabilized any pretense of a consistent and encompassing natural order. In A Remembrance of His Wonders , David I. Shyovitz disputes this long-standing and far-reaching consensus. Analyzing a wide array of neglected Ashkenazic writings on the natural world in general, and the human body in particular, Shyovitz shows how Jews in Ashkenaz integrated regnant scientific, magical, and mystical currents into a sophisticated exploration of the boundaries between nature and the supernatural. Ashkenazic beliefs and practices that have often been seen as signs of credulity and superstition in fact mirrored—and drew upon—contemporaneous Christian debates over the relationship between God and the natural world. In charting these parallels between Jewish and Christian thought, Shyovitz focuses especially upon the mediating role of polemical texts and encounters that served as mechanisms for the transmission of religious doctrines, scientific facts, and cultural mores. Medieval Jews' preoccupation with the apparently «supernatural» reflected neither ignorance nor intellectual isolation but rather a determined effort to understand nature's inner workings and outer limits and to integrate and interrogate the theologies and ideologies of the broader European Christian society.
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A Remembrance of His Wonders
Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania
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But despite “bending over backward to contain randomness itself within the ambit of a purposeful natural order,”151 the scholastics found that, despite their best efforts, there remained observable phenomena stubbornly impervious to rational inquiry.152 These thinkers arrived, by necessity, at a compromise position. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, posited the existence of a middle ground between the natural and the supernatural, which he called the “preternatural.”153 In theory, preternatural objects and phenomena had natural qualities and operated in accordance with reason; but in practice, the scholastics admitted that they remained ignorant of the inner workings of these marvels. The invention of the category of the preternatural was to some extent a face-saving measure—it allowed the scholastics to remain committed to the proposition that everything had a rational explanation, while nonetheless admitting that there were phenomena that still needed to be more completely understood.
An object or phenomenon could fall into the category of the preternatural for a variety of reasons: for example, it might be subject to chance, to an unpredictable confluence of natural forces that cause it to behave as it does. The most common explanation, however, for why a preternatural phenomenon behaves as it does was the imputation to it of “occult qualities.” This designation, which continued to be invoked until well into the early modern period,154 essentially meant that the reason an object behaved in a certain manner was natural but inexplicable according to the known laws of natural causation. Or, to use the more technical language of the scholastics themselves, an occult quality was the “specific form” of an object or phenomenon, which conferred its particulars upon it; this stood in contrast to the “manifest properties” of natural objects, which could be accounted for by reference to their elemental composition. Scholastic thinkers sought to account in this manner for the routine, predictable, yet mysterious workings of seemingly supernatural phenomena.155
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