Is it written in the stars?

Jewish History’s Ambivalent Relationship with Astrology.

Astrolabe from Ma’aseh Tovia, 1707

The 3rd book of the Sibylline Oracles, written probably in the 1^st century BCE, describes the Israelites as a race who ‘do not practise the astrological predictions of the Chaldeans. . . . for these things are erroneous. . . .’ Jews, according to the Egyptian author of this prophetic book, do not practise astrology.

It is not quite true though; at least it wasn’t in ancient times. Although the Bible is adamantly opposed to divination and soothsaying, and the prophet Isaiah (47,13) mocks those Babylonian astrologers who predict what the coming month will hold, the belief in astrology was nevertheless a feature of ancient Jewish life. Archaeologists have found a 4th century synagogue in in the Galilee with a mosaic floor featuring a circle depicting the signs of the zodiac and an image of the Greek sun-god in the centre. Similar zodiac mosaics have been uncovered in other nearby excavations.

The Talmudic literature (roughly between the 2^nd and 6^th centuries CE), contains a variety of views about the validity of astrology. In the Book of Genesis (44,12), God had told Abraham to look at the heavens and count the stars. This meant, according to one Talmudic view, that God lifted Abraham up above the stars to show him that he was not under their influence, telling him that he was a prophet, not an astrologer. In other words, astrology is not something to get too excited about.  On the other hand another Talmudic passage says that Abraham was said to be so knowledgeable about astrology that all the kings of the world would come to consult him.

Abraham’s name often crops up in Talmudic discussions about astrology. It’s because he came from Chaldea, near Babylon. Babylon was the ancient birthplace of astrology: a vast, flat, largely cloudless land where, in an age long before artificial light, the stars were visible each night as if they were shining through a giant screen. The movement of the planets across the skies and the shifting stars served as a gigantic clock, an eternal calendar overhanging the earth, not merely indicating the procession of the seasons and the years, but guiding and influencing everything that lived beneath; people, animals and plants. There is no blade of grass, says the Midrash, that does not have a star in heaven telling it to grow.

Unsurprisingly, it was the ancient mystics who were most interested in astrology. The Sefer Yetzirah, or Book of Creation, an obscure, cryptic composition of unknown date and authorship lists the twelve signs of the zodiac and associates them variously with the twelve months, the twelve tribes of Israel, twelve bodily organs and a mysterious celestial object known as the teli, of which we know nothing at all. The even more obscure Sefer Raziel  is very specific about the influence of the different astrological constellations. It spells out in detail how long we will live and what our fortunes will be, depending on whichever planet is in the ascendant at our birth.

The Zohar, the principal text of kabbalah, is full of astrological images and allusions. However, by the 12^th century or so, around the time the Zohar was beginning to be compiled, people were beginning to wonder just how powerful the stars really were. Like the Talmud, the Zohar contains a range of opinions about astrology but overall it doesn’t seem to accept that the stars and planets have their own independent authority. They are under the control of heaven and have no will of their own.

The uncertainties about the power of the stars and the validity of astrology grew more pronounced during the Middle Ages. Some Jews were employed by monarchs as court astrologers while others were adamant that it was nonsense. Abraham ibn Ezra, who is best known for his incisive bible commentaries and his poetry, stands out among medieval thinkers as astronomy’s greatest advocate. He described it as a “sublime science” and wrote dozens of books and treaties on the subject. Most of his books have never been printed, but a few have recently been translated into English, though you would have to be particularly dedicated to the subject to make much sense of what he is writing about. He introduced astrological ideas into his bible commentaries too, but he followed the idea first mooted in the Talmud, that the stars only have an influence over a person’s life if that individual does not ‘attach themselves to a superior power’. Astrology has no power, even for ibn Ezra, over those who study the Torah and live a religious life.

It was the great rationalist philosopher Maimonides who came down most strongly against astrology. He tried to eradicate all trace of it from Jewish life. In a letter he wrote to the Jews of Marseilles he dismissed it as an illusion of fools, a baseless deception that was subversive to the teachings of Judaism. He said that thousands of books had been written on the subject and that many ignorant people had wasted years of their lives studying them, “mistaking vanity for knowledge and ascribing consummate wisdom to their authors.” He had studied astrology extensively in his youth, he claimed to have read and investigated in depth every single book on astrology written in his native tongue of Arabic. In a warning to those of us who read, and even more to those who write, he complained about the ‘fatal disease’ of assuming that everything in a book is true, especially if the book is ancient. Astrology was dangerous; he argued that the fascination with it had led to the collapse of the kingdom of Israel, the destruction of the Temple and the prolongation of the exile. Maimonides was never one to mince his words.

Maimonides railed against astrology philosophically but it was first Copernicus and then Galileo who sounded its death knell. The realisation that the earth was not the centre of the universe encouraged those who were interested in the heavens to study them scientifically rather than mystically. David Gans, who was born in 1541, studied the new science of astronomy just as it was becoming popular. He wasn’t fully committed to it, he refused to accept Copernicus’s theory that the earth revolved around the sun; he still believed in the old system, in which the earth was at the centre. He must have had his doubts though. He had moved to Prague as a young man and lived there during the rule of Rudolf II, at a time when the city was Europe’s most exciting venue for art, science, alchemy and magic. He knew the astronomers Johannes Keppler and Tycho Brahe, had translated some Hebrew astrological tables into German for Brahe and he spent at least three days studying in their Prague observatory. Keppler and Brahe were both scientific astronomers although they still held to the astrological belief that the stars have an influence over human life. Gans, who probably held a similar view, has gone down in history as the first Jew to take a serious interest in astronomy.

Maimonides, Copernicus and Galileo removed astrology from the Jewish intellectual world view. But we can still detect an echo. My friend Howard Smith is an astrophysicist at Harvard, he is one of the world’s leading experts in his field. In 2006 he published Let There Be Light: Modern Cosmology and Kabbalah. In his book he explains how the modern scientific understanding of the cosmos bears some similarity to the mystical approach of the Zohar and Sefer Yetzirah. He shows that the theory of the Big Bang was anticipated to an extent by ideas expressed in Kabbalah. He is not arguing for the scientific validity of kabbalah but he is saying that some of the theories the mystics came up with all those centuries ago, including their astrological images, are reminiscent of current scientific theory.

And astrology is still with us in everyday life, though we don’t always recognise it. When we congratulate someone, on a birth, or an anniversary or just something to celebrate we say mazal tov. It means ‘a good planet’.