On the Beginnings of Hebrew Scientific Literature and on Studying History Through "Maqbilot" (Parallels)

Abstract

My own investigations have led me to include Sefer yesirah among a group of texts that together constitute the first chapter in the history of Hebrew scientific literature. I must emphasize right away that I am not asking when Jews first began to evince an interest in science. The question I want to answer is when Jews first wrote Hebrew texts whose primary purpose was the exposition of scientific knowledge. I have found that a group of Hebrew texts affiliated with different scientific disciplines share some significant literary featuresa fact that indicates that their authors worked in the same temporal and cultural milieu and decided to produce texts on science based on a certain literary model. These texts appear to have been composed in the eighth or ninth centuries, somewhere in the Middle East. Each of these texts has a weighty bundle of philological problems associated with it. Only one of them can be dated with any precision; all of them may contain several layers of accretions. Although I am not oblivious to these issues, I feel that, from the perspective of the history