I started with picking up The Jeweled Style (Michael Roberts) from where I left it a few days ago, but he kept quoting Late Antique Latin poems with (often intentionally) unusual vocabulary, so I spent all the time looking words up in the dictionary, so I put it down.
Then I picked up Moshe Idel's monograph Saturn's Jews. His argument is basically that at the same time that Maimonides was re-defining Judaism as an Aristotelian system, other Jews, such as Abraham ibn Ezra, were re-defining Judaism in terms of astro-magic -- specifically, that what makes Jews Jewish is their relationship to the planet Saturn. Maimonides and Ibn Ezra are each engaged in an "intercorporal reading" of the corpus of Torah/mitzvoth along with another either Aristotelian philosophy or The Planets.
Anyway, Ibn Ezra says, ultimately based on some earlier, Muslim astrologer Al-Kabi‘si (Alcabitius), that Saturn is associated with / has power over Saturday, Jews, and sorcery.
And the association of these three concepts -- Saturday, Jews, and sorcery / bad magic -- becomes a strong tradition later on in Jewish tradition. And then the Christian idea of the Witches' Sabbath is an anti-Semitic mis-understanding of this.
Ibn Ezra says that the reason that we aren't supposed to do melakha on the Sabbath is that "Saturn and Mars are maleficent planets, and whoever will commence a certain labor, or start a journey during one of the two, will be damaged [...] Behold, you will not find in any of the days of the week a consecutive night and day when these two maleficent planets are presiding, but only during this day [Shabbath, i.e. Friday Night under Mars and Saturday Day under Saturn -- this being the reason why it is not worthwhile to be preoccupied by things relating to this world, but by things related to the fear of God." (p. 11)
This book is hard, and not particularly rewarding. I think I'm not going to finish it.
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