Rosh Hashanah 26a~ How Does a Cow Grow Her Horn?

Among the several reasons given by the Talmud for not using the horn of a cow as a shofar, there is this one, stated by the great sage Abayye.

ראש השנה כו, א

שׁוֹפָר אָמַר רַחֲמָנָא, וְלֹא שְׁנַיִם וּשְׁלֹשָׁה שׁוֹפָרוֹת. וְהָא דְּפָרָה, כֵּיוָן דְּקָאֵי גִּילְדֵי גִּילְדֵי — מִיתְחֲזֵי כִּשְׁנַיִם וּשְׁלֹשָׁה שׁוֹפָרוֹת

This is the reasoning of the Rabbis: The Merciful One says to sound a single shofar, and not two or three shofarot together, but this horn of a cow, since it is comprised of layers, looks like two or three shofarot.

Rashi adds explains this passage like this:

גילדי גילדי - בכל שנה ושנה ניכרת תוספתו והוא כמין גלד מוסיף על גלד ראשון בתכליתו של ראשון תחילת השני

It grows in layers: The new growth can be seen every year. It is an additional layer over the first layer with each year adding another.

Stages in horn development in cattle(Bos taurus). (A)In the newborn calf there is no tangible protrusion on the skull, but the site of the future horn site is covered by a pair of hairy spots. Beneath the epidermis, mesenchymal structures and sebaceous glands accumulate. Elevation of the underlying frontal bone begins. (B, C) In the juvenile between 2 and 6 months of age a protrusion is visible and the primitive core develops under the epidermis and above the frontal bone. Keratinization has already begun on the epidermis. The core undergoes ossification and then is fused to the underlying protruding (dome-shaped) frontal bone. (D) From 6 months of age to adulthood, the frontal sinus enters the base of the core and pneumatization proceeds until 3 or 4 years of age. Keratinization continues incrementally on the epidermis. *It is not clear at what stage the periosteum is formed around the core bone. In the adult the core bone is overlaid by the periosteum. From Nasoori A. Formation, structure, and function of extra-skeletal bones in mammals. Biol. Rev. (2020).

A helpful paper from the School of Veterinary Medicine in Hokkaido, Japan published last year reviewed the formation, structure, and function of bony compartments like horns (and other bits too) in mammals. It tells you everything you need to know about how reindeer grow their antlers, giraffe their ossicones, and rhinoceri their incredible horns. It also details how cows grow their horns, so it seems the right place to look for help in understanding today’s page of Talmud.

In cattle, the horns begin early in gestation as primitive horn buds, but there is no ossification (the process by which something becomes bone) until after the calf is born. Then, a pair of primitive cores develop above the frontal area (see the figure above, B). These connective-tissue-like cores will later form the bony core of the horn. But these primitive cores have no adhesion to the underlying frontal bone until they fuse with it at around two months of age (C). Subsequently, the core begins to grow upwards and ossifies, and there are changes in the layer of skin over it, called the epidermis. which becomes keratinized to generate a hard surface. The middle of the growing horn has a hollow base much like the sinuses we have on our faces, so that, other than at its tip, the horn has a spongy hollow, structure (D). “Keratinization of the epidermis” this paper notes, “continues throughout the animal’s life and, depending on the species, the horns can take various lengths, sizes, and shapes.” There was some dispute as to whether a cow’s horn grows from the base of from the tip. But in their 1983 review paper The Interrelationships of Higher Ruminant Families with Special Emphasis on the Members of the Cervoidea, Janis and Scott conclude that “in fact, neither the core nor the sheath grow from the base.The bony core grows both from the tip and by appositional growth over the surface and the sheath is continually produced over the entire surface of the core.”

We can conclude therefore that the horn of a cow does indeed grow continually, although not annually, like the rings of a tree. Abayye, who died in 337, knew cows. But there is one problem with his explanation. Sheep belong to the same family as cows. It is called the Bovidae and includes cattle, sheep, and antelope, as you can see below in the diagram from a group of Israeli researchers. And sheep grow their horns just like cattle, which means that they also grow them “גִּילְדֵי גִּילְדֵי" or in layers. Which would make them just as forbidden as cow’s horns. Just don’t tell that to the person who blows shofar.

From Dekelet al. Dispersal of an ancient retroposon in the TP53promoter of Bovidae: phylogeny, novel mechanisms, and potential implications for cow milk persistency. BMC Genomics (2015) 16:53.

Rosh Hashanah 25 ~ The Length of the Lunar Month

ראש השנה כה, א

תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן: פַּעַם אַחַת נִתְקַשְּׁרוּ שָׁמַיִם בְּעָבִים, וְנִרְאֵית דְּמוּת לְבָנָה בְּעֶשְׂרִים וְתִשְׁעָה לַחֹדֶשׁ. כִּסְבוּרִים הָעָם לוֹמַר רֹאשׁ חֹדֶשׁ, וּבִקְּשׁוּ בֵּית דִּין לְקַדְּשׁוֹ. אָמַר לָהֶם רַבָּן גַּמְלִיאֵל: כָּךְ מְקוּבְּלַנִי מִבֵּית אֲבִי אַבָּא — אֵין חִדּוּשָׁהּ שֶׁל לְבָנָה פְּחוּתָה מֵעֶשְׂרִים וְתִשְׁעָה יוֹם וּמֶחֱצָה וּשְׁנֵי שְׁלִישֵׁי שָׁעָה וְשִׁבְעִים וּשְׁלֹשָׁה חֲלָקִים

The Sages taught in a baraita: Once the sky was covered with clouds, and the form of the moon was visible on the twenty-ninth of the month. The people thought to say that the day was the New Moon, and the court sought to sanctify it. However, Rabban Gamliel said to them: This is the tradition that I received from the house of my father’s father: The monthly cycle of the renewal of the moon takes no less than twenty-nine and a half days, plus two-thirds of an hour, plus seventy-three of the 1,080 subsections of an hour.

According to Rabban Gamliel, a lunar month cannot be shorter than 29 days, 12 hours and 792 chalakim (where one chelek is 1/1080 parts of an hour). If witnesses claim to have seen a new moon before this time has elapsed after the previous new moon, they must be mistaken. According to the medieval commentator Menachem ben Solomon (1249–1315)known as the Meiri, this period is also the longest period for a lunar month.

How the Lunar Month varies

The average length of a lunar month, that is, the period between two new moons, is 29.53059 days, which is 29 days 12 hours and 44 minutes. But this is an average, and the actual length of the month varies. This is because the moon’s rotation around the earth is not uniform. When the moon is closest to the earth (called the lunar perigee) it speeds up, and when it is furthest from the earth (at the lunar apogee) it slows down, though only by a little in each case.

From here.

Here are the lengths of the lunar months for this calendar year. Note the longest month marked in red, and the shortest month, shown in green. They differ by six hours and twenty minutes!

Lengths of the lunar months in 2021
Successive new moons	Length of lunar month
Dec 14, 2020, to Jan 13, 2021	29 days 12 hours 44 min
Jan 13 to Feb 11	29 days 14 hours 06 min
Feb 11 to Mar 13	29 days 15 hours 15 min
Mar 13 to Apr 12	29 days 16 hours 10 min
Apr 12 to May 11	29 days 16 hours 29 min
May 11 to Jun 10	29 days 15 hours 53 min
Jun 10 to Jul 9	29 days 14 hours 24 min
Jul 9 to Aug 8	29 days 12 hours 34 min
Aug 8 to Sep 6	29 days 11 hours 02 min
Sep 6 to Oct 6	29 days 10 hours 14 min
Oct 6 to Nov 4	29 days 10 hours 09 min
Nov 4 to Dec 4	29 days 10 hours 28 min
Dec 4, 2021, to Jan 2, 2022	29 days 10 hours 50 min

The corrupted text in today’s Page of Talmud

In bis book Calendar and Community, the British scholar Sacha Stern pointed out that the period of the lunar moth, called a lunation, is exactly the same as in the present day rabbinic calendar. “However, the phrase אֵין חִדּוּשָׁהּ שֶׁל לְבָנָה פְּחוּתָה (‘not …less than’) which implies a minimal value, is inappropriate for what should represent a fixed value.” He continues:

Moreover, the mean lunation is totally out of context in this passage. The context of this passage is the Mishnaic, empirical calendar, which is based on the appearance of the new moon; calculation of the molad is therefore irrelevant. R. Gamliel was only establishing that the moon could not have been sighted before the 29th day of the previous month. All he could have stated, therefore, was the minimal number of days in an empirical lunar month.

Other scholars like David Gans (1743), Hayyim Slonimsky (1852) and Hayyim Yehiel Bornstein (1904) also recognized this problem. Stern therefore suggests that the text we have in our Talmud is a later addition.

Originally the text would have read: אֵין חִדּוּשָׁהּ שֶׁל לְבָנָה פְּחוּתָה מֵעֶשְׂרִים וְתִשְׁעָה יוֹם (‘not after less than 29 days’) - and no more. The interpolation שְׁנֵי שְׁלִישֵׁי שָׁעָה וְשִׁבְעִים וּשְׁלֹשָׁה חֲלָקִים (‘and a half, two-thirds of an hour and 73 parts’) would have been made by an editor who thought that the mean lunation - not the minimal number of days in the month - was meant in this passage. The absence of manuscript evidence does not undermine this argument; it only suggests that the interpolation must have been made relatively early, perhaps in the late Geonic period.

The origin of 29-12-793

If Professor Stern and his intellectual predecessors are correct, the origin of the 29-12-793 period for a lunation is not in fact in the Talmud. So where does it come from? In the twelfth century Rabbi Avraham bar Hiyya acknowledged that the calculation is identical to that found in the Almagest, a Greek language compendium on mathematics and astronomy which was composed by Ptolemy in the second century. In that book Ptolemy gives the lunation in the standard Babylonian sexagesimal system as 29d, 31i, 50ii and 20iv, (where one i=1/60 of the day, one ii is a sixtieth part of that and so on). It is exactly the same length as the rabbinic lunation. Rabbbi Avraham bar Hiyya claimed that Hipparchus (the second century B.C.E scholar who Ptolemy used has his source) had taken this value from the Jewish sages - the ancestors of Rabban Gamliel referred to on today’s page of Talmud. But, as Sacha Stern noted, “it seems far more plausible to assume on the contrary, that it was the rabbis who borrowed their lunation from Ptolemy.” This assumption led a number of Jewish scholars to conclude that the molad calculation of 29- 12-793 could not have been instituted before the ninth century.

This is because Ptolemy’s Almagest was not known to astronomers in the Near East before its translation into Arabic in the early ninth century…It is likely that Ptolemy’s calculation of the conjunction was only then transmitted to the Jews, who soon incorporated it into the fixed rabbinic calendar. Although somewhat conjectural, this theory remains completely plausible, particularly as evidence of the present day molad calculation only begins to emerge in the ninth century.

Stern also admits that it is also possible that rabbinic calendar makers took their lunation period of 29-12-793 directly from the Babylonians, without resorting to Ptolemy’s Almagest. If that happened, “the rabbinic lunation could have been adopted long before the ninth century.” Either way, we got it from the Babylonians.

“Whether the molad calculation was borrowed from Babylonian astronomers, or from an Arabic translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest that would have been made at the ninth century Abbasid capital of Baghdad, in the heartland of Babylonia, the geographical origins of this molad would have been the same. It was in Babylonia, indeed, that this molad would have become known to the Jews and incorporated into the present-day rabbinic calendar. ”

— Sacha Stern Calendar and Community. Oxford University Press 2001; 209-210.

Where does that 1/1080 measure come from?

In 1989, shortly before his death, Otto Neugebauer (d. 1990), who was described as “the most original and productive scholar of the history of the exact sciences, perhaps of the history of science, of our age” published a paper that reviewed the transmission of the standard Babylonian value for the lunation. In it, he noted that in the third century B.C.E (!) in Mesopotamia, there existed a small unit of measure called “barleycorn” which represented a fraction of 1/6 of a finger breadth. The finger breadth is in turn a faction of a palm, and the palm of the cubit, so that 1 cubit = 180 barleycorns. But, noted Neugebauer, “measures can lose their specific meaning and become terms for fractional parts in general….Similarly, the barleycorn, embedded in a sequence of sexagesimally arranged units, retains only its fractional significance as 18 units of 60ths, ie 1/1080.” And so the Babylonians used this measure, which we inherited as halakim (parts). representing 1/1080 of an hour.

The Babylonians also discovered the nineteen year cycle around 600 B.C.E. which today is known as the Metonic cycle. It is is the period after which the phases of the moon recur at the same time of the year. They kept careful records of the time for a number of lunar cycles, and used these to calculate the average lunation. These were later adopted by the Romans. And by us.

No, It’s not a miracle

Some organizations, keen to spread the word about Judaism, have looked to today’s page of Talmud as proof of the divine origins of the oral law. Here is an excerpt from the Aish Hatorah Discovery Book:

So just how long is a lunar month, according to the reckoning of the Talmudic sages? The Talmud in Rosh Hashanah 25a tells us: Rabban Gamliel said...I have it on the authority of my father’s father that the renewal of the moon takes place after not less than twenty-nine and a half days, two-thirds of an hour and seventy-three parts of an hour.

Okay, class, you do the math. Two-thirds of an hour remembering that an hour is divided into 1,080 parts equals 720 parts. Add to that another 73 parts and you have 793 parts. So that according to the ancient calculation of the Sages of the Talmud, a lunar month is 29 and days plus 793 out of 1,080 parts of an hour. 793 out of 1,080 equals 0.734259 hours, which equals 0,03059 days. Add to that 29.5 days, and the average length of the lunar month according to the Rabbis is 29.53059 days.

What is so incredibly amazing about all this is the fact that, in our own times, the scientists and researchers at NASA have spent years of research using satellites, hairline telescopes, laser beams and supercomputers and all this in order to determine the exact length of the synodic (lunar) month. And the calculation they came up is that the length of the lunar month is 29.530588 days. The difference between this figure and that used by the Sages is .0000006, or one sixth millionth of a day!!!

Incredible! How could the Sages of millennia ago have been able to calculate the exact length of the lunar month with such incredible precision, enabling them to accurately and successfully balance the solar and lunar cycles for so many thousands of years?! With absolutely no modern technological tools and equipment, how could the Rabbis of old have had access to such accurate information way ahead of their time?! [Can you say G-d?]

We actually have a tradition, based on an ancient Midrash, that when G-d commanded Moses regarding the establishment of the calendar and the Jewish holidays based on the sanctification of the New Moon, He also gave to Moses all the secrets and vital information necessary to accurately calculate and balance the solar and lunar cycles.

Maybe accepting the Torah as G-d’s truth doesn’t require such a leap of faith after all?

There may be lots of good reasons to follow traditional Jewish practice, but, contra Aish Hatorah, the knowledge of the length of the lunar month is not one of them. It was an inheritance we took from the Babylonians, and unless Aish is suggesting that God revealed the average length of the lunar month to them, knowing the history of the Jewish lunation reveals something else and just as impressive. It is the ingenuity of the human mind.

Rosh Hashanah 24b ~ Starry Images in Synagogues

On today’s page of Talmud, the Mishnah tells the story of Rabban Gamliel who had some special charts which he used to question the witnesses who claimed to have seen the new moon:

ראש השנה כד, ב

דְּמוּת צוּרוֹת לְבָנָה הָיוּ לוֹ לְרַבָּן גַּמְלִיאֵל בְּטַבְלָא וּבְכוֹתֶל בַּעֲלִיָּיתוֹ, שֶׁבָּהֶן מַרְאֶה אֶת הַהֶדְיוֹטוֹת, וְאוֹמֵר: הֲכָזֶה רָאִיתָ אוֹ כָּזֶה

Mishnah: Rabban Gamliel had a diagram of the different forms of the moon drawn on a tablet that hung on the wall of his attic, which he would show to the laymen who came to testify about the new moon (but were unable to describe adequately what they had seen). And he would say to them: Did you see a form like this or like this?

The Talmud asks why these charts with pictures of the moon were permitted. “Isn’t it written: “You shall not make with Me gods of silver, or gods of gold” (Exodus 20:19), which is interpreted as teaching: You shall not make images of My attendants, i.e., those celestial bodies that were created to serve God, including the sun and the moon?” This introduces an interesting discussion about precisely what images of the sun, the moon, and the stars are permitted. After a couple of tangential discussions, the Talmud gives three reasons why Rabban Gamliel was permitted to keep these charts: First, he was always surrounded by other people, so there was no suspicion that he would be worshipping the images. Second, perhaps the image of the moon was incomplete (דִּפְרָקִים הֲוָה), and it is only complete images of the moon that are forbidden, and finally perhaps he kept these charts to study and learn from them. This would be permitted “as it is written: “You shall not learn to do (לֹא תִּלְמַד לַעֲשׂוֹת) after the abominations of those nations” (Deuteronomy 18:9), which indicates that you may learn to understand and to teach.”

The Code of Jewish Law, the Shulhan Arukh codifies these rulings:

שולחן ערוך יורד דעה 141:4

וצורת חמה ולבנה וכוכבים אסור בין בולטת בין שוקעת ואם הם להתלמד להבין ולהורות כולן מותרות אפי' בולטות (ויש מתירין בשל רבים דליכא חשדא) (טור בשם הרא"ש)

It is forbidden to make any kind of model representation of the sun, the moon and the stars, whether in positive or negative relief, but if the models or images are to study from, they are all permitted.

It is clear from the Shulhan Arukh that it would be forbidden to make images of the sun and the moon and the stars as decorations. And yet this is precisely what has been uncovered in several ancient synagogues in Israel.

The Zodiac in the Shul

As a recent article published in Ha’artez noted, there are at several ancient synagogues in which pagan images of the zodiac can be found on floor mosaics. For example, they are the synagogues in Zippori, Hammat Tiberias, Hosefa (Usfiyya) and Huqoq in the north, and in Susya and Naaran in Judea. Perhaps the most famous is the excavation in Beit Alfa. Here is its mosaic:

In the center, wrote the eminent Israeli archeologist Rachel Hachili, the sun god  - Sol invictus - is represented by his bust and crown, his horses by their legs and heads, and his chariot by its front and two wheels.  Let us let Prof. Hachili walk us through the typical features of these remarkable mosaics:

The outer circle of the design contains the 12 signs of the zodiac, identified with the 12 months of the year. Aries is the first sign, being the first month of spring. According to his position in the circle, we see that at Nacaran and Husaifa the goes clockwise, while at Beth-Alpha and Tiberias, it goes counterclockwise. The signs (representing months) do not correspond to the seasons except at Tiberias and Antioch, where the zodiacal signs and seasons are coordinated, although at Antioch we have the personifications of the months rather than of the zodiacal signs.

There are a number of differences between these Jewish images of the Zodiac and those found in Roman Temples, but she noted that “by comparing the zodiacs of the four Jewish synagogue mosaic floors and tracing their origin and development from Roman art, it may be concluded that the Jewish zodiacal panel is a liturgical calendar. In every Jewish calendar, the form, composition, and balance of the three-part scheme are identical, suggesting the existence of a prototype…The design has its roots in the art of the preceding period with the two major designs which are part of the Jewish calendar: the astronomical zodiac and the agricultural calendar.

The Jewish scheme unified both of these into the distinctive design of the seasons, zodiacal signs, and sun god, signifying a liturgical calendar. When the synagogue replaced the Temple, the annual ritual acts, performed by the priests, were represented symbolically in synagogue art. The calendar became the frame of the annual rites now enacted by the community. Thus, it was guaranteed a central location in Jewish synagogue mosaic floors.

“Clearly by the time of these synagogues, the fourth to sixth centuries C.E., the local Jews were comfortable with representational art. They would have presumably objected to representations of pagan gods, however, hence the solar deity in the synagogues was meant to represent the God of Israel, most scholars agree.”

— Ha'aretz, September 16, 2020

Hellenists or Mainstream?

Some have seen these mosaics as evidence that the synagogues with them practiced a different form of Jewish worship. “It was not Rabbinic Judaism, which would eventually become Judaism as we know it” wrote Elon Gilad and Ruth Schuster in their article in Haaretz, “but at the time was only taking shape on the sidelines of the Jewish world. The Jews who prayed in these and other synagogues belonged to what was then the mainstream of Judaism but is now long forgotten: Hellenistic Judaism.” They suggest that “these shuls and their mosaics only seem strange when compared to the later synagogues of Rabbinic Judaism, but they are perfectly in line with the Roman cults of the period. Indeed, Hellenistic Judaism is best understood as a Roman cult.”

Gilad and Schuster continue:

The evolution of Judaism is quite similar to the evolution of biological species. It's not a neat progression from First Temple Judaism to Second Temple Judaism and then to Rabbinic Judaism, as Jewish history is often viewed. Rather, the religion evolved with time and some forms were false starts, while others spread and continue to evolve to this day, like Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, Samaritanism, and Karaite Judaism.

To return to the metaphor of the dinosaurs and the tiny furry animals from which we evolved, we could say that Hellenistic Judaism with its zodiac mosaics was like the dinosaurs: great at the time but destined to go extinct – in the calamitous Early Middle Ages. It was the small, at the time almost imperceptible, Rabbinic Judaism that survived these disasters and became the Judaism of later periods, much like the rodents that survived the dinosaur-killing disaster from which we eventually evolved.

But others are not so sure. In his classic work Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, the archeologist Erwin Goodenough (1893-1965) wrote that “the Zodiac in the synagogues, with Helios in the center, accordingly, seems to me to proclaim that the God worshiped in the synagogue was the God who had made the stars, and revealed himself through them in cosmic law and order and right, but who was himself the Charioteer guiding the universe and all its order and law.” He continued:

Actually the floor of Beth Alpha as a whole, the only one that shows the zodiac in its full original setting, seems to me to outline an elaborate con­ception of Judaism. In the center is presented the nature of God as the cosmic ruler. Above are the symbols of his specific revelation to the Jews, primarily the Torah in the Torah shrine; below in the sacrifice of Isaac is, I suspect, the atonement offered in the Akedah. All this is surrounded by familiar mystic symbols: birds, animals, and baskets within the intersticies of the vine. At the top of all inconspicuously stand the little fish and the bunch of grapes.

We are unlikely to ever determine which explanation is correct, but the zodiac mosaics certainly represented a Judaism quite different from that described in todays’ page of Talmud, in which there is an almost absolute prohibition against making images of the sun, the moon and the stars. Once upon a time, these images were part of synagogue decorations.

Rosh Hashanah 22a ~ Another Tuviah the Doctor

In today’s page of Talmud there is the story told about a physician named Tuviah.

ראש השנה כב, א

מַעֲשֶׂה בְּטוֹבִיָּה הָרוֹפֵא שֶׁרָאָה אֶת הַחֹדֶשׁ בִּירוּשָׁלַיִם, הוּא וּבְנוֹ וְעַבְדּוֹ מְשׁוּחְרָר, וְקִבְּלוּ הַכֹּהֲנִים אוֹתוֹ וְאֶת בְּנוֹ וּפָסְלוּ אֶת עַבְדּוֹ. וּכְשֶׁבָּאוּ לִפְנֵי בֵּית דִּין — קִבְּלוּ אוֹתוֹ וְאֶת עַבְדּוֹ, וּפָסְלוּ אֶת בְּנוֹ

There was an incident with Tuviah the doctor. When he saw the new moon in Jerusalem, he and his son and his freed slave all went to testify. The priests accepted him and his son as witnesses and disqualified his slave, for they ruled stringently that the month may be sanctified only on the basis of the testimony of those of Jewish lineage. And when they came before the court, they accepted him and his slave as witnesses and disqualified his son, due to the familial relationship.

The story is told to demonstrate a disagreement over whether a father and son may jointly testify about having seen the new moon, because ordinarily witnesses must not be related. It also demonstrates another disagreement over whether a slave may give testimony about the new moon. But for our purposes we will not focus on either of these issues. Instead we will discuss a namesake of the Tuviah mentioned in this Mishnah. He was Tuviah Cohen, born in the town of Metz in northeastern France in 1652, and like the Tuviah in the Mishnah he was a physician “who saw the new.”

The Other Tuviah

Portrait of Tuviah Cohen, from his work  Ma’aseh Tuviah, Venice, 1708.

This Tuviah Cohen has long been a favorite of historians of science and Judaism. Perhaps this is because he was a reformer of sorts, ready to sweep away old superstitions and replace them with scientific knowledge. Perhaps it is because his book, Ma’aseh Tuviah, was “ ... the best-illustrated Hebrew medical work of the pre-modern era,” full of wonderful drawings about astronomy and anatomy. Perhaps it is because his book is so clearly printed and a pleasure to read in the original. Or perhaps it is because Cohen was so adamantly opposed to Copernicus that he called him the “Son of Satan”—which made his the first Hebrew work to attack Copernicus and his heliocentric system.

In fact, introducing new science was of such importance that it was the motivation behind the name of Cohen’s book, Ma’aseh Tuviah. Cohen reminded his readers of the Mishnah on Today’s page of Talmud: “It happened (ma’aseh) to Tuviah the doctor who saw the new [Moon] . . . and the Bet Din [rabbinic court] accepted his testimony.” Cohen saw himself as another doctor who would “see the new.

After his father’s untimely death, Tuviah’s mother remarried in 1664 when he was twelve years old. He studied in a yeshivah in Cracow, and at the age of twenty-six, entered the University of Frankfurt, where he began to study medicine. Despite being taken under the wing of Fredrick William, the elector of Brandenburg, and receiving a stipend from him, anti-Jewish sentiment prevented Cohen from graduating. As a result, he left for the University of Padua, where he graduated with a degree in medicine in 1683 and soon found employment as a physician in Turkey. He published his only work, Ma’aseh Tuviah (The Work of Tuviah), in Venice in 1708 and moved in 1715 to Jerusalem, where he died in 1729.

Front page of the first edition of Ma’aseh Tuviah, Venice 1707.

Tuviah’s Famous Encyclopedia

Tuviah painfully remembered one particular area in which he lacked knowledge: the discipline of astronomy. It was astronomy that the Talmud considered to be the example par excellence of Jewish wisdom that would be acknowledged by Gentiles. Examining the verse “For this is your wisdom and understanding among the nations” [Deut. 4:6], the Talmud had concluded that it referred to “the calculation of the seasons and the constellations,” that is, the ability to create an accurate calendar and to forecast the positions of the stars and planets. Tuviah was especially troubled by the taunts that Jews had no proper astronomical understanding, given the pride of place of astronomy in the Talmud. He recalled his days in the university:

We would undertake long debates with us every day about questions of belief, and would many times embarrass us asking “where is your wisdom and understanding—it has been taken from you and given to us!” Although we were knowledgeable in Bible, Talmud and Midrashim, we were like paupers when we debated them. This is why I became a zealot for the Lord and swore that before I died I would neither sleep nor rest until I had written a work that included knowledge and skills...for although we walk in this dark and bitter exile God has been our light and there are still wise and learned men among us. . . .

He therefore addressed this topic in detail in his encyclopedic Ma’aseh Tuviah.

The first depiction of the heliocentric system in Hebrew literature. From Ma’aseh Tuviah, Venice, 1708, 50b.

Copernicus is “the Firstborn of Satan”

Tuviah’s section on astronomy included the first depiction in Hebrew literature of the new(wish) heliocentric model of the universe, first published by Nicolas Copernicus in 1542. But having explained the new model (which by then was nearly two centuries old) he rejected it in favor of the traditional earth centered or geocentric model. And he did so with an unforgettable chapter title:

Chapter Four.
Bringing all the claims and proofs used by Copernicus and his supporters

showing that the Sun is at rest and the Earth is mobile;

and know how to refute him, for he is the First born of Satan.

The Rest of Tuviah’s Encyclopedia

Besides astronomy, the Tuviah’s encyclopedia contains dozens of other topics, all of which demonstrate that Tuviah was a product of his time (for how could he be anything other?) Ma’aseh Tuviah (which you can read and download here) contains a section on Hokmat HaPartzuf, which today we might recognize as an amalgam of phrenology, physiognomy and palm-reading. Tuviah defined Hokmat HaPartzuf as “the ability to divine the future, by understanding the form, size and limbs of the body, the way a person looks, his color, size, nature, intelligence, his spirit whether it be large or small, and many other qualities like this.” All of these, wrote Tuviah, were reliable predictors of a person’s future, as was generally accepted in his day. He also described the nature of giants, which were described in the Bible as Nefilim or Refa’im, and noted that giants (anakim) were to be found in a number of different climates. For the sake of brevity, he wrote, he would only describe one event to which he was an eye-witness. In 1694 in Salonika in northern Greece, workers in a salt mine uncovered the remains of a giant “thirty-three amot in length”. Tuviah describes seeing two bones of the forearm and one tooth, “which weighed 350 drachmas”, or about 1.5kg. It was most likely that Tuviah had seen fossilized prehistoric remains, which he attributed to the bones of a giant human.

Tuviah also found no reason to doubt the existence of centaurs, mermaids and sirens, and creatures who were nourished through an umbilical cord that attached them to the earth. The latter, which resembled a sheep and which grew from the Boramets tree, were to be found in Africa and although Tuviah had not personally seen them he relied on new but unnamed works of geography to inform his own readers of the existence of these fantastic creatures.

In the section on medicine, Tuviah, Like all the physicians of his time, he recommended bloodletting, and in another he discussed “The French Disease”, which today we call syphilis. Tuviah described it as being recently introduced from India or the newly discovered America:

In 1496 the great explorer Christopher Columbus returned with his sailors from exploring the new world, but they began to act immorally with the women of Italy which angered God greatly and He brought about a great calamity and a great sickness. And the French army which was then fighting around Naples also became sick, which is why the disease is known today as mal francese, although it is in fact an Indian or an Italian disease. Some Latin books call it lues veneris or pudendagra.[1]But I call it the small plague because it attacks women and men. I call it this for three reasons: First, it is the result of immorality. Second its poison is like that of a plague. It is spread by a man having intercourse with an infected woman, and in an instant it spreads throughout the body. Thirdly, it acts just like a plague but a plague kills, and this is not usually lethal…but rather causes suffering that is worse than death.

There are, Tuviah noted, a number of theories as to the etiology of the French disease. Galen believed it was from rotting blood and the alchemists thought it was caused by an acidic poison. “However” he concludes, “it is sufficient for us to know that it is caused by unclean intercourse [bi’ah teme’ah] that transmits an uncleanliness through contact. This causes God to become angry, for he abhors immorality.”

Tuviah’s famous illustration

Ma’aseh Tuviah was a work that relied on ancient medical teachings that had never been challenged, together with a few more recent sources, but all of Tuviah’s choices reflected the general medical consensus of his time. Perhaps more innovative was Tuviah’s image of the body as a house, an image that is certainly more well-known than is the book in which it appears. On the left of the image is a schematic of the torso of a dissected body, and on the right a four-story house with a roof and chimney. The eyes on the body correspond to the upper windows of the house, and the shoulders correspond to the roof. The liver and gall bladder were drawn as an oven, the heart is oddly identified hidden behind a lattice, and the kidneys correspond to a fountain. The smoking cauldron that appears in the center of the house represents the stomach. The British medical historian Nigel Allan noted that such analogies were not new. William Harvey had also described the stomach as the kitchen, and “the furnaces that draw away the phlegm” but this would not have been known to Tuviah. Even if identifying the workings of the body with the technology of the era was not unique to Tuviah, this image is nonetheless a striking one, and a perennial favorite in discussions of pre-modern Jewish medicine. This image did much to suggest a spirit of innovation in Ma’aseh Tuviah, when in truth the work was far more conservative than innovative.

Tuviah “who saw the new”

Tuviah saw himself as an iconoclast. This was the motivation behind the name of his book, Ma’aseh Tuviah, and it was reflected in the titles he gave to some of the sections in his book: A New Land, or A New House. A careful reading of the text, however, reveals that there was little in Tuviah’s approach to medicine that was new. In fact, much of it contained the ancient classic teachings of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen, and many of the more “recent” plant remedies that Tuviah cited were about one hundred and fifty years old by the time that he published them. Even William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood could not be considered a novel idea by the time it was mentioned by Tuviah. Harvey has first published his discovery in Frankfurt in 1628, and by 1650 it had been widely discussed throughout Europe and cited in books published in Frankfurt, Venice, Leyden, Rotterdam and London. Rene Descartes cited Harvey’s work in some detail in his Discourse published in 1637. The Pope’s own physician defended the Harverian hypothesis in 1642, and it was discussed by Italian physicians soon after. In 1650 another graduate of the medical school at Padua, Paul Slegel, published a book on the circulation and by 1656 at least thirty-six printed books had mentioned the discovery of the circulation. It is therefore far from surprising that Tuviah also mentioned William Harvey, and doing so makes his early eighteenth century textbook up to date, rather than pioneering.

Ma’aseh Tuviah is a fascinating read, but it is not something you’d like your physician or science teacher to be using as a guide book. Still, his book is an insight to the world of an eighteenth century Jewish physician that is now, thankfully, of historic interest alone.

[Want to read more about Ma’aseh Tuviah? Checkout Chapter Five of this book.]