Jacob’s Staff is a rather famous surveying instrument often used in marine navigation historically speaking that is usually attributed as appearing in the late medieval period in Europe and is often claimed to be a ‘jewish invention’ and has even featured on an Israeli postage stamp to that effect in 2009. (1)
For the record a ‘Jacob’s Staff’ looks – and works – like this:
The problem with claiming it is a ‘jewish invention’ however is that it is based merely on (bad) surmise not evidence. This was explained rather well by Charles Singer in 1927 when he wrote that:
‘The well-known surveying instrument usually called Jacob’s staff may be named after Jacob ben Makir. The first description of it that we have is, however, by his countryman Gersonides.’ (2)
The typically dishonest jewish historian Cecil Roth (3) then transmogrified this claim from a speculative possibility into an ascertained fact writing in his best-selling and still widely cited book ‘Jewish Contribution to Civilization’ that:
‘A more important invention was due to Rabbi Levi ben Gershom of Bagnols, in South France, the most eminent Jewish philosopher and exegete of the fourteenth century. His magnum opus was a philosophical work, The Wars of the Lord, which covered also a considerable part of the field of natural science. An entire section, compromising no less than 136 chapters out of a total of 237, is devoted to astronomy. The reputation which the author enjoyed was so great that almost as soon as the book was put into circulation, Pope Clement VI had the astronomical portion translated into Latin. This was indeed fortunate since, when the original Hebrew was published, that part was not considered to be of sufficient theological importance to warrant inclusions. In this treatise the author described an improved quadrant which he had invented, and which could be handled more easily than the cumbersome old affair. The great Regiomontanus, reading this account, was so impressed that he constructed an instrument according to the Rabbi’s recommendations, which he named Jacob’s Staff.’ (4)
We can see two things here in that Roth has attributed the creation of ‘Jacob’s Staff’ to Gersonides (Rabbi Levi ben Gershom also sometimes known in medieval Christian sources as Magister Leo Hebraeus [basically ‘Leo the Hebrew’]) because he included a description of it in his 1329 book ‘The Wars of the Lord’ (‘Sefer Milhamot Ha-Shem’) – to be fair David Krehbiel has done the same as late as 1990 – (5) when we can see that Singer is doubtful that Geronsides invented ‘Jacob’s Staff’ as he never states that he did so in ‘The Wars of the Lord’ but rather seems to simply be passing on a useful invention he knew of to his readers and had he invented ‘Jacob’s Staff’ we would have expected that he would have mentioned as much in ‘The Wars of the Lord’.
Singer’s claim that it was actually invented by Jacob ben Makir – Gersonides’ fellow jewish resident of Provence – is also entirely apocryphal since as Roth points out the first mention of the name ‘Jacob’s Staff’ given to the instrument is from Regiomontanus (the Latin pen name of the German mathematician Johannes Muller von Konigsberg in the mid-to-late fifteenth century) not by Gersonides in 1329 as the latter actually called it the ‘Revealer of Profundities’ not ‘Jacob’s Staff’ despite Goldstein’s desperate attempts to claim otherwise. (6)
Thus the ‘link’ to Jacob ben Makir is entirely fictious and based on a false assumption – i.e., Gersonides called it ‘Jacob’s Staff’ therefore it was named after Jacob ben Makir who Gersonides probably knew and thus Jacob ben Makir probably invented it – and can be completely discarded.
So, if ‘Jacob’s Staff’ wasn’t invented by Gersonides or Jacob ben Makir then who invented it?
Well, it seems to have quite possibly been invented by the Chinese inventor Shen Kuo in 1088 as he described a ‘Jacob’s Staff’ type instrument in his ‘Dream Pool Essays’ (7) and the invention may well have travelled along the Silk Road from China to Europe or Shen Kuo may have re-developed something that already had been invented by the Persian Empire circa 400 B.C. (8)
Thus, we can see that while ‘Jacob’s Staff’ is widely claimed by jews – including the state of Israel to be a ‘jewish invention’ (rather like the cherry tomato as it happens) – (9) it is almost certainly not.
References
(1) Bernard Goldstein, 2011, ‘Levi ben Gerson and the Cross Staff Revisited’, Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 365
(2) Charles Singer, 1948, [1927] ‘The Jewish Factor in Medieval Thought’, p. 234 in Edwyn Bevan, Charles Singer (Eds.), 1948, [1927], ‘The Legacy of Israel’, 1st Edition, Clarendon Press: Oxford, p. 234
(3) On this see Elliot Horowitz, 2006, ‘Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, pp. 150-151
(4) Cecil Roth, 1940, ‘The Jewish Contribution to Civilization’, 1st Edition, Harper & Brothers: New York, p. 79
(5) http://www.surveyhistory.org/jacob’s_staff1.htm
(6) Goldstein, Op. Cit., pp. 366-381
(7) Joseph Needham, 1959, ‘Science and Civilization in China’, Vol. 3, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 373-375
(8) https://exploration.marinersmuseum.org/object/cross-staff/
(9) On this please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-the-cherry
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