Wandering Through the Wonderland of Rabbinic Literature: Science and the Supernatural in Halakhic Writing of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This essay examines Maoz Kahana’s A Heartless Chicken: Religion and Science in Early Modern Rabbinic Culture. Against familiar narratives that explain change in early modern Judaism primarily through rupture, conflict, and defensive retrenchment, it argues that Kahana uncovers a more expansive intellectual world in which halakhic writing became a site for negotiating science, natural philosophy, and supernatural phenomena. It follows Kahana’s treatment of the “heartless chicken” controversy, bodily anomalies and medical testimony, and discussions of demons, spirits, and other wondrous beings, while advancing several new interpretations. Particular attention is devoted to R. Jonathan Eybeschütz’s consultations with the universities of Prague and Halle. Rather than subordinating Halakhah to external scientific expertise, Eybeschütz enlisted institutional science to confirm established halakhic norms. Yet in cases involving individual suffering or urgent social consequences, he set aside general scientific claims and employed halakhic mechanisms that enabled exceptional rulings. More broadly, the essay emphasizes that theoretical positions expressed in halakhic form should not automatically be read as operative legal rulings or straightforward evidence of a rabbi’s attitude toward science. At a moment when forms of wonder seem to be re-emerging in the age of artificial intelligence, Kahana’s book serves not only as a historical study of eighteenth-century rabbinic culture but also as a suggestive guide to thinking anew about the relation between nature and magic, science and religion.