Avner Ben-Zaken. Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–1660. Cross‐Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–1660 by Avner Ben‐ Zaken Review by: John Henry The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 5 (December 2011), pp. 1445-1446 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.5.1445 . Accessed: 26/12/2011 09:17 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The University of Chicago Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org Comparative/World Pirate raids on merchant vessels are the events that captured Greene’s interest. She analyzes them for what they reveal about Mediterranean economic history in general, and the impact of Ottoman and Venetian maritime trade on contemporary notions of sovereignty and subjecthood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her book is organized around lawsuits brought by Christian Ottoman subjects against the Knights of Malta for loss of property taken in their pirate raids on Ottoman vessels. The Ottoman subjects pressing suit are the Greek merchants of the title. The Catholic pirates are the Knights, who preyed on Ottoman commerce in their never-ending war against Islam. Greene advances the idea that in the period during which Venice and the Ottoman state began to direct their commercial energies away from maritime commerce, the Knights of Malta and the papacy filled the vacuum created by their withdrawal. The religious order and the papacy held out the possibility of legal redress to all Christians, thereby encouraging Christian Ottoman subjects to emphasize their Greek Christian identity over their status as Ottoman subjects in specific contexts. Christian merchants who were subjects of the sultan had recourse to legal redress in the court of the Knights. Their Muslim colleagues and fellow victims did not. Meanwhile, frustrated by schism in northern Europe, the Counter-Reformation papacy was very willing to support the Christian identity of Greek Ottoman subjects in a renewed effort to bring the Eastern Church under its authority. The papacy’s impulse to promote religious identity that transcended subject status, Greene argues, ran counter to the tendencies of early modern empires. The Ottoman and the Venetian states each imposed its sovereignty on religiously and ethnically diverse subjects by means of newly emerging territorial law. In the Tribunale degli Armamenti, the military order’s court in Malta, to which those seeking restitution of their property from the military order applied, personal law still obtained. In other words, in those court cases Greene sees the epitome of a more widespread struggle between a “transnational” (for want of a more historically appropriate word) ethnoreligious identity and the economic and social practicalities of subject status. The contradiction between territorial law, in which subjects have benefit of the sovereign power’s protection, and personal law, which divides protected groups according to either religion or ethnicity, exacerbated already tense relations between the Knights and Christian sovereign states like Venice, which strenuously objected when the Catholic Knights attacked any of its subjects, even Jewish ones. These are very weighty arguments to rest on fourteen court cases, but Greene makes the most of her opportunity. Most of her book is historiographical and synthetic. In the first three chapters, she applies the subtle interpretative skills we have come to expect from her to published sources and the great body of scholarship on the economic history of the early modern Mediterranean. Then she analyzes the unpublished court cases in AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW 1445 the following three chapters. The last chapter contains her insights into the place of the Counter-Reformation in the early modern Mediterranean. Given the ambitious and multifaceted scope of the work, it is disappointing that the path to her conclusion repeatedly veers off in one direction and then another, as signaled by the numerous times she explicitly invites the reader to return to a previous subject or embark on a new one. Such twists and turns make reading this book more of a chore than it need have been. For all her skill at producing a well-turned phrase, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants is repetitious and awkwardly argued. (Why entitle two sections in the same chapter “Istanbul,” even if one is a subsection of a section?) Whether the sum of these chapters constitutes a coherent book is the question readers are likely to ponder after finishing it. Perhaps this stimulating book’s parts would have been better appreciated each one on its own. SALLY MCKEE University of California, Davis AVNER BEN-ZAKEN. Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560–1660. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2010. Pp. 246. $60.00. This finely textured book offers fresh and fascinating perspectives on the development of science in the early modern period. In five substantial chapters Avner BenZaken indicates the extent of, and thereby establishes the importance of, cross-cultural exchanges between Christians and Muslims. Chapter one focuses on Taqı៮ al-Dı៮n, who has been characterized as “the Tycho Brahe of the Ottoman Empire” (p. 9). Countering earlier claims of Taqı៮ ’s purely Muslim provenance, the author shows that he gained expertise in astronomy from Christian and Jewish thinkers, at first in Italy and subsequently from a captured Italian Jewish astronomer. While showing the importance of the capture and exchange of prisoners between the West and the Ottoman Empire, this chapter also offers a very useful discussion of the role of apocalypticism in the encouragement of astronomy by kings and emperors (East and West). Chapter two offers a new perspective on the Galileo affair, showing how attempts to find lost Holy Scriptures (in particular an early version of the Book of Job) were motivated by desires to vindicate Galileo through a scriptural endorsement of heliocentrism. The Galileo affair, therefore, “generated travels for the purposes of collecting ancient manuscripts of ‘lost scriptures’ ” (p. 75). This broad theme is continued in chapter three in a discussion of Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, a Jewish student of Galileo who collected ancient Jewish manuscripts with a view to confirming Copernicanism. Chapter four deals with the origins of English Orientalism through a highly nuanced study of John Greaves, Savilian Chair of Astronomy at Oxford, and founder of what is now called “pyramidology.” The chapter is enhanced by the author’s discussion of Greaves’s conviction that the pre-Babel language had DECEMBER 2011 1446 Reviews of Books to be recovered in order to establish philosophical and religious truths. Ben-Zaken also analyzes the ideas of John Wilkins, who believed, like many others, in the possibility of a universal “natural” language that could be reconstructed by reason, rather than by historical scholarship. Chapter five provides another highly nuanced account of the background to the translation of Noël Duret’s Nouvelle théorie des planètes into Arabic by an Ottoman scholar, Ibra៮ hı៮m Efendi al-Zigetvari. Here, the text is enriched by an exposition of the mystical Sufi element in al-Zigetvari’s works. The author’s fresh perspective will likely open up new areas of debate. I note, for example, a possible weakness in his claims about the importance of the Sufi concept of idra៮ k, “an intuitive mode of cognition, a direct knowledge of something, whether through sensation or intuition” (p. 148). I do not intend to diminish Ben-Zaken’s achievement. This is a serious, and remarkable, work of scholarship, and as such it very much deserves to be the starting point for further debate. In the meantime, this book has much to offer specialists of the early modern period. Although the main cast of characters consists of comparatively obscure thinkers, their minor roles in more significant movements ensures the importance of Ben-Zaken’s scholarship. Certainly, this is a book that will need to be read by those interested in exchanges between science and the Abrahamic religions. BenZaken is also alert to, and astute about, occult traditions in the thought of his protagonists. For those interested in the relations between magic and science, therefore, it should also be essential reading. BenZaken does an excellent job of showing how and why the to and fro of information exchange, and of expertise, results not just in distortion but sometimes in embellishment or enhancement. JOHN HENRY University of Edinburgh MIRIAM R. LEVIN et al. Urban Modernity: Cultural Innovation in the Second Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press. 2010. Pp. x, 272. $30.00. This work of insightful comparative scope explores the rise of a modern civic culture between 1851 and 1930. The role of new metropolitan institutions, ambitious corporate elites, expanding municipal infrastructures, and especially the prominence of international expositions as both cultural and industrial emporia form the basis of this eclectic collection of essays, which will be of interest to scholars assessing the relationship of urban history and the structures of modernity. The essays also will appeal to students of international expositions, themselves an expression of the very phenomena the authors describe. The book is comprised of six chapters highlighting five urban centers in an era of deep change and transformation: London, Paris, Chicago, Berlin, and Tokyo. In a thoughtful opening chapter devoted to the place of expositions, museums, universities, and other institu- AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW tions in the emerging new urban landscape, Miriam R. Levin defines modernity as “a condition of existence whose major feature is acceptance of historical change as a given” (p. 8). This sense of “living in the future” (p. 9), we are told, contributed to a new consciousness that is reflected in each of the cities under consideration. Enlightenment notions of human progress and forward motion shaped an understanding of the emerging milieu and the triumph of novel social, political, and economic institutions. Each of these essays explores aspects of the general trend, as well as a “new civic ideology” (p. 160) that lent credence to the sharp break with traditional modes of existence. Taken on their individual merits, each chapter offers important insights into the rise of local urban elites and the close relationship between corporate and civic culture. It is the comparative dimensions, however, that make this collection especially noteworthy. The manner in which the essays demand an enlarged perspective on both urban culture and the triumph of industrial capitalism also deserves praise. Sophie Forgan offers a compelling explanation of how London’s elite “became imbedded in the fabric of the city’s life and culture” (p. 77) following the Crystal Palace Exhibition. Robert H. Kargon’s chapter on Chicago offers an excellent synthesis of scholarship on America’s “Second City” in the age of the great Columbian Exposition. Berlin as a “laboratory of modernity” (p. 167), to borrow Martina Hessler’s expression, reminds readers that cities were “constructed realities” shaped by elite aspirations and ordered by influential social, scientific, and educational institutions. Levin’s chapter on Paris and its 1889 and 1900 expositions makes the clearest claim to world’s fairs as “novel fiscal arrangements that wedded democratic government and industrial capitalist objectives” (p. 39). Morris Low’s essay on Tokyo between 1870 and 1930 provides a helpful corrective that draws this book beyond an exclusively transatlantic focus. There is much to recommend in this book, and it is a case where the sum is greater than its individual parts. Some scholars will quarrel with the emphasis on expositions as oriented exclusively to the future, seeing instead a deep tension between past and future imbedded in the very nature of such ambitious enterprises. Quite unintentionally, perhaps, world’s fairs exposed deep fissures in urban-industrial life. I also think that the present collection would have been improved by including essays on other urban centers, like Philadelphia and New York City, that championed exhibitions as a way to extol their commercial and cultural sophistication, with mixed results. None of this detracts for the value of these essays, nor the important contribution the volume as a whole makes to our understanding of urban institutions and the rise of a new social order. DENNIS B. DOWNEY Millersville University JOHN TULLY. The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber. New York: Monthly Review Press. 2011. Pp. 480. $24.95. DECEMBER 2011