Conciliation and Confession: The Struggle for Unity in the Age of Reform, 1415-1648 (review)
than “Renaissance” in its orientation, even though Heller and some of his colleagues were aware of the new astronomy that began to dismantle medieval cosmology. Davis notes that the Maharal’s “new curriculum” did not include the studia humanitatis and for this reason he resists calling Heller a “Jewish humanist.” However, Davis also shows that Heller shared the Renaissance attention to neglected ancient texts as a focus of study, in his case the Mishnah, the close attention to the omnisignificance of the biblical text, attention to editorial work involved in production of sacred texts, both biblical and rabbinic, correction and emendations of earlier commentaries on the Mishnah, and a collection of manuscripts of certain medieval Ashkenazi works on dietary laws. As rich and satisfying as this portrait is, without a conclusion the reader is left to wonder why was the revival of philosophy and natural sciences among Ashkenazi Jews so short (about fifty years)? Why did the opposition to philosophy and the natural sciences among Ashkenazi Jews diminish in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries only to be renewed with vigor in the early seventeenth century? Why did Lurianic kabbalah win and medieval rationalism lose the minds and hearts of Ashkenazi Jews, even though the worldview of Ashkenazi Jews remained decidedly medieval? Davis is so knowledgeable about Ashkenazi Jewry that I would have welcomed an attempt on his part to explore these questions. Nonetheless, this is an exemplary study of Ashkenazi Jewry in the early modern period through the lens of one of its leading personalities. HAVA TIROSH-SAMUELSON Arizona State University