Born under Saturn: Astrology, Magic, and the Construction of Jewish and Christian Identities in Early Modern Europe

Speakers: Moshe Idel, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

Moderator: David Ruderman, The University of Pennsylvania

Moshe Idel is Max Cooper Professor in Jewish Thought, Department of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and Senior Researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Born in 1947 in Romania, he arrived in 1963 to Israel and has lectured since 1975 at the Hebrew University. He received the Israel Prize for Jewish Thought in 1999, the Emmet Prize in 2002, and is a member of the Israeli Academy since 2006. He has served as visiting Professor at the JTS of America, UCLA, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and College de France. Among his publications are Old Worlds, New Mirror, On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought, (Penn UP, 2010), Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale UP 1988), Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation (Yale UP 2002), and Ben Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (Continuum, 2007).

Anthony Grafton is interested in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe, the history of books and readers, the history of scholarship and education in the West from Antiquity to the 19th century, and the history of science from Antiquity to the Renaissance. He joined the Princeton History Department in 1975 after earning his A.B. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) in history from the University of Chicago and spending a year at University College London, where he studied with Arnaldo Momigliano. Professor Grafton likes to see the past through the eyes of influential and original writers, and has accordingly written intellectual biographies of a 15th-century Italian humanist, architect, and town planner, Leon Battista Alberti; a 16th-century Italian astrologer and medical man, Girolamo Cardano; and a 16th-century French classicist and historian, Joseph Scaliger. He also studies the long term history of scholarly practices, such as forgery and the citation of sources, and has worked on many other topics in cultural and intellectual history. Professor Grafton is the author of ten books and the coauthor, editor, coeditor, or translator of nine others.