Sir Isaac’s Jewish writings enter the 21st Century

 In the 17th and 18th Century, there was much animosity towards Jews in Christian Europe. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and were just returning from English exile in Newton’s time. However, some Christian theologians secretly approached Jewish thought as a supplement to enhance their Christian interpretations of God and the Universe. Isaac Newton was one of these individuals. But Newton went far beyond what these few studied. The economist John Maynard Keynes who possessed many of Newton’s unpublished notes and papers called Newton “a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides. He arrived at this conclusion, not on so-to-speak rational or skeptical grounds, but entirely on the interpretation of ancient authority.” Newton became proficient in reading and writing Biblical Hebrew (as a Jew I must say his Hebrew handwriting is quite beautiful) and studied Talmud and Kabbalah. In his annotated copy of Maimonides’ Mishne Torah (still today a central commentary for Jews around the world) he makes reference to the Zohar, the foundational book of Jewish mystical thought, and mentions famous Jewish Rabbis like Hillel and Shammai. Newton’s close friend John Locke recounted a conversation in which Newton explained the creation of matter by God as a process of withdrawing, which Locke, a scholar of theology, recognized as the Jewish mystical concept known as tzimtzum.