R. Pinchas Eliyahu Hurwitz · 1797
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A sweeping Hebrew encyclopedia of science and mysticism, among the most widely read Hebrew books of its era.
The work is in two parts, and the division is the whole design. The first surveys the natural sciences of the late Enlightenment — astronomy, physics, geography, chemistry, biology, and medicine — drawing on contemporary European learning and presenting it to a Hebrew readership that had, for the most part, no other route to it.
The second part turns to metaphysics, ethics, the soul, prophecy, and Kabbalah, integrating the new science with Lurianic mystical thought. Hurwitz does not treat these as rival accounts to be kept apart; the point of putting them in one book is that he takes them to be describing one world.
Its chapters on cosmology and on the possibility of extraterrestrial life are among the earliest Jewish treatments of the subject — a question that only becomes askable once the plurality of worlds is on the table, and which Hurwitz addresses with the seriousness of someone who has read the astronomy.
Sefer HaBris was a bestseller in Hebrew, reprinted many times, and for a great many readers it was where the sciences of the eighteenth century were first encountered. That gives it an influence out of proportion to its originality: what Hurwitz chose to include, and how he framed it against the mystical tradition, shaped what a large Hebrew-reading public understood modern science to be.
It also marks the far end of the arc this corpus traces. Where bar Ḥiyya had to invent a Hebrew vocabulary for astronomy in the twelfth century, Hurwitz inherits one and can spend his effort on reconciliation instead.
This volume presents the expanded HaShalem (“Complete”) edition; the work was first published in 1797. It is quoted in the front matter of every book in this corpus — the passage on the duty owed to those who invent useful instruments and good books.