e, Jews again attained to
prominence in the king's favorite science of astronomy. The Alfonsine
Tables were chiefly the work of Isaac ibn Sid, a Toledo _chazan_
(precentor). In general, the results reached by Jewish scholarship at
Alfonso's court were of the utmost importance, having been largely
instrumental in establishing in the age of Tycho de Brahe and Kepler the
fundamental principles of astronomy and a correct view of the orbits of
the heavenly bodies. Equal suggestiveness characterizes Jewish research
in mathematics, a science to which, rising above the level of
intermediaries and translators, Jews made original contributions of
importance, the first being Isaac Israeli's "The Foundation of the
Universe." Basing his observations on Maimuni's and Abraham ben Chiya's
statement of the sphericity of the earth, Israeli showed that the
heavenly bodies do not seem to occupy the place in which they would
appear to an observer at the centre of the earth, and that the two
positions differ by a certain angle, since known as parallax in the
terminology of science. To Judah Hakohen, a scholar in correspondence
with Alfonso the Wise, is ascribed the arrangement of the stars in
forty-eight constellations, and to another Jew, Esthori Hafarchi, we owe
the first topographical description of Palestine, whither he emigrated
when the Jews were expelled from France by Philip the Fair.

Meanwhile the condition of the Jews, viewed from without and from
within, had become most pitiable. The Kabbala lured into her charmed
circle the strongest Jewish minds. Scientific aspirations seemed
completely extinguished. Even the study of the Talmud was abandoning
simple, undistorted methods of interpretation, and espousing the
hairsplitting dialectics of the northern French school. Synagogue poetry
was languishing, and general culture found no votaries among Jews.
Occasionally only the religious disputations between Jews and Christians
induced some few to court acquaintance with secular branches of
learning. In the fourteenth century Chasdai Crecas was the only
philosopher with an original system, which in its arguments on free
will and the nature of God anticipated the views of one greater than
himself, who, however, had a different purpose in view. That later and
greater philosopher, to whom the world is indebted for the evangel of
modern life, was likewise a Jew, a descendant of Spanish-Jewish
fugitives. His name is Baruch Spinoza.

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