Very few readers today will have heard of Menasseh ben Israel; but in the 17th century he was arguably the most famous Jew in the world, in no small part for trying to move Jews and Christians past centuries of mistrust and hatred.

Menasseh was one of the most accomplished and cosmopolitan rabbis of his time, and a pivotal intellectual figure in early modern Jewish history. He was among the three rabbis of the “Portuguese Nation” in Amsterdam, a community founded at the beginning of the 17th century that would quickly earn great renown (and envy) worldwide for its mercantile and scholarly vitality. Menasseh played an essential role in that community’s reputation because his books and other writings—in Hebrew, Latin, Portuguese, Spanish, and English—reached a broad and very appreciative audience, among both Jews and gentiles.

Menasseh, a true Renaissance man, did more than anybody in the 17th century to advance the Jewish cause, whether in learning or in politics, and to educate Christians about Jewish religion, literature, and history. He was a scholar, philosopher, diplomat, educator (he was the philosopher Spinoza’s elementary school teacher), editor, translator, printer, and bookseller; no activity seems to have been outside his considerable talents. His network of friends and admirers stretched across the continent. He was, for many, the go-to person for all things Judaic.

And yet, Menasseh felt that, somehow, he did not receive the respect he deserved from his own local community.

He was right.

Menasseh was born Manoel Diaz Soeiro in Lisbon in 1604. His father had suffered horribly there under the Inquisition’s torturers, and there was reason to believe that he would be arrested again; even though his family was converso and ostensibly Catholic, the authorities suspected them of secret Judaizing. As soon as they could, the family fled Iberia, first to Madeira, then to La Rochelle, in southwestern France, and finally, around 1610, to Amsterdam. The Portuguese authorities’ suspicions of Judaizing were well grounded—when the family reached Holland, the men were all circumcised and took the name “ben Israel,” son of Israel.

Unlike almost everywhere else in 17th-century Europe, Jews in the Dutch Republic were allowed to live where they wanted and practice their religion openly. There was no ghetto, and while there were some restrictions on Jewish activities—they were excluded from most guilds—they could socialize and do business as they wished. It was a remarkable display of toleration in a generally intolerant era. Over the course of the century, Amsterdam and other Dutch towns became a haven for Jews fleeing persecution in Iberia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

Menasseh’s family joined the Beth Jacob congregation, the oldest in Amsterdam’s Portuguese-Jewish community, founded just a few years before their arrival in the city. Manoel, now Menasseh, was a precocious student and had a particularly fine command of both Portuguese and Hebrew. By the age of 18, he was appointed rabbi (hakham) of the Neve Shalom congregation. Many non-Jews came to the synagogue to hear his sermons, which were reportedly both rhetorically splendid and intellectually stimulating. He was also praised for his knowledge of Scripture.

Other rabbis of the community, however, had doubts about his skills as a Talmudist. And he took it as a great insult when, in 1639, with the merger of the three congregations, he was appointed third in rank among the rabbis. His relations with the congregation’s lay leadership were rocky, and he chafed under what he believed were undignified limitations put upon him—such as not being allowed to preach as often as he would have liked, and being required to teach in the elementary school. The highlight of his career occurred in 1642, when he was chosen to deliver the welcoming address on the occasion of a visit to the synagogue on the Houtgracht by Stadholder Frederik Hendrik (the highest political and military officer in the Dutch provinces) and Queen Henrietta Maria of England (wife of Charles I). It was one of the few times that Menasseh was actually given a position of honor.

With the narrow scope of his rabbinical duties, as well as his meager compensation, Menasseh had no choice but to direct his energies into other projects. He ran one of the community’s yeshivot, sponsored by the brothers Abraham and Isaac Pereira (Spinoza, as a young adult but before his excommunication in 1656, may have been one of its attendees), and was a beloved teacher. But his work there demanded much of his time.

Menasseh, like the other rabbis, also engaged in business. With his brother and brother-in-law, he imported goods from the West Indies and Brazil. But he felt that having to supplement his salary as a rabbi in this and other ways was demeaning. “At present, in complete disregard of my personal dignity, I am engaged in trade … What else is there for me to do?”

Menasseh’s real love was his printing press. He was the first printer of Hebrew books in Amsterdam, and he quickly gained an international reputation for the quality of his work. He published Pentateuchs, Hebrew Bibles, prayer books, and editions of the Mishnah, as well as numerous treatises and literary works in Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Latin. He even collaborated on various projects with gentile scholars and artists, including, it seems, Rembrandt. Because of Menasseh ben Israel, Amsterdam was, for a time, the center of the Jewish publishing world in Europe.

Menasseh also acquired great fame for his own writings, especially among Christians, to whom some of them were directly addressed. He was seen among non-Jews as the foremost Jewish spokesman of his time. Gentiles sought him out as a teacher and consultant. “[He is] a learned and pious man”, wrote Gerard Joannes Vossius, the celebrated Dutch scholar and theologian whose son studied Hebrew and Jewish literature with Menasseh. “If only he were a Christian.”

Menasseh, more than anyone else, assumed responsibility for explaining the doctrines and beliefs of Judaism to the gentile world. He never shied away from controversy, and he was willing to be the Jewish representative in exactly the kinds of polemical debates that many Christians sought (to convince the Jews of the error of their ways and lead them toward salvation) and most Jews feared. For many of the Portuguese Jews in Holland, Menasseh’s international celebrity was a source of pride. These wealthy Sephardic merchants and professionals appreciated the renown he brought to the community.

His extracurricular activities, however, caused the rabbis and lay leaders of the Amsterdam Portuguese no small amount of concern. They were constantly warning congregants that, since they were still technically refugee-guests in the Netherlands, it would be best to keep a low profile. They were especially cautious about crossing the line that the Dutch had explicitly drawn regarding theological debates between Jews and Christians. Menasseh’s cosmopolitanism and many relationships outside the community may explain the troubles he had with the other rabbis and with the members of the ma’amad, or governing board. (He was even issued an excommunication (herem) on one occasion for a disturbance he had been making over the way one of his relatives had been treated by the board.)

Throughout his life, Menasseh was guided by the Messianic hope for divine redemption and the idea that this would not happen until the people of Israel were completely scattered across the globe. Only then could they be reunited and restored to their kingdom by God’s anointed one. This conviction was behind what Menasseh hoped would be the crowning achievement of his life: arranging for the readmission of the Jews to England, from which they had been banished since 1290.

Accompanied by his son Samuel, Menasseh crossed the English Channel to make his petition for readmission in 1655. In his presentation to the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, he appealed to both theological and (perhaps more importantly) economic considerations. He wanted to bring to Cromwell’s attention the financial benefits that usually accrue to a country with a thriving Jewish community. After noting that “merchandising is, as it were, the proper profession of the nation of the Jews,” Menasseh went on to remind Cromwell that “there riseth an infallible Profit, commodity, and gain to all those Princes in whose Lands they dwell above all other strange Nations whatsoever.”

Cromwell was quite taken with the Dutch rabbi and gave him a sympathetic hearing. Public opinion, however, was by no means so well-disposed toward readmission. Some argued that strong and humiliating restrictions should be imposed on the Jews; they would certainly not be granted many of the privileges or rights that they had been enjoying for decades in Holland.

After several sessions, the conference convened by Cromwell to consider the issue was deadlocked, and in the summer of 1657 it adjourned before anything was formally resolved.

Menasseh was greatly disappointed by this turn of events, particularly since he had devoted several years of his life (two of them in England) to this project. Cromwell’s tacit permission for Jewish settlement would not begin evolving into formal readmission for another decade or so, but Menasseh did not live to see it.

He was devastated by the sudden death of his son Samuel in London that September, and as Menasseh bore Samuel’s body back to across the Channel for burial two months later, he was a broken man. He died several weeks later.

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Even the mathematically averse among us today recognize the basic geometry that Radolph and Ragimbold failed to grasp, for we live in a numerate society, surrounded by countless manifestations of mathematics. Broadly defined as the ability to reason with numbers and other mathematical concepts, numeracy underlies our current information explosion. Its clichés dot popular speech: “do the math,” “crunch the numbers,” “figure the odds.” From birth to death, numbers track our lives institutionally and demographically. Some scorn such customs (think of Mark Twain’s “figures” of “lies, damned lies, and statistics”), but we all acknowledge numeracy as a cultural given, and agree that mathematics fuels the science, technology, and industry of our world.

Still, as the story of Radolph and Ragimbold suggests, it wasn’t always so.

Before the modern era, whose origins we often date from the Renaissance (circa 1250 to 1600), folks certainly counted and measured. But, bluntly put, the abstractions of numeracy and mathematics mattered not a whit in any practical sense.

Instead, literacy—not numeracy—ruled. For our progenitors, it was the invention of writing, probably between 3200 and 3100 B.C., that served the human impulse to order and manage the flux of experience and its “givens” or “data” (from the Latin, datum, “thing given”). Early scripts provided the first information technology, creating the first “information age”—that of literacy. Its apogee occurred with the phonetic alphabet, devised by the Greeks, who correlated the sounds of speech with individual letter symbols so that each symbol stands for a single vowel or consonant.

The alphabet provided the substrate, the symbols for framing nouns and adjectives, and thus the means of creating definitions, which connected thought to the objects and processes of the world. For Aristotle, science would organize and explain data taken in through the senses, abstracted into words, classified into general and specific categories, and bound together with the formal tools of logic.

The medieval world of Radolph and Ragimbold inherited this word-based technology and culture, assimilating the classifying temper into the curriculum of its new universities. Seven liberal arts anchored the course of studies—three linguistic (the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and four mathematical (the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy). The latter were taught primarily as stepping stones to contemplation of spiritual realities, for example the divine order that infused numerical proportions, musical harmonies, spatial beauty, and heavenly motion.

Medieval mathematics was everywhere “enchanted,” its numerology animated with allegorical, generally theological meanings. (Witness the bizarre practice of scapulimancy—divination according to the geometry of sheep shoulder blades.) Its categories, nonetheless, remained separate and distinct from one another. Arithmetic, the subject of discrete things, was incommensurable with geometry, which treated continuous things. And so, the topics of “thing” numeracy stayed tucked away in the cubby holes of literacy.

But then came the Renaissance centuries, and two dominant trends that would dramatically challenge the classifying temper and its embedded mathematics.

The first was an information explosion, begun earlier but powered after 1455 by that great engine of learning, the printing press. The mind-boggling proliferation of printed works (roughly 200 million books by the end of the 16th century) leant cheap paper and ink to spreading the humanists’ recovery of ancient texts, the New World discoveries, and the mounting harvest of information gleaned from nature. There was, in the words of Harvard’s Ann Blair, “too much to know,” too much to classify. The surfeit of new information swamped traditional classes, fractured categories, and overwhelmed the classifying temper. The world lay “all in pieces, all coherence gone,” intoned poet John Donne in 1611, gazing rearward at a more intellectually comforting age.

A second trend was intertwined with this overwhelming volume of facts: the advent of a new information technology. Arising largely from practical activities, new ways to encode information brought forth new and different ways of seeing, imagining, and analyzing nature. In each category of the quadrivium—arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy—these new means of data collection and processing laid the foundations of modern numeracy.

In arithmetic, from the 13th century forward, the growing presence of Hindu-Arabic numerals habituated Europeans to a new counting system. Employed initially by merchants, bankers, and accountants, it steadily crept into the procedures of mathematicians and natural philosophers, craftsmen and artisans, musicians, and artists. The new system showcased a much simplified, functional notation of nine ciphers, the numerals 1 through 9, in contrast to the cumbersome Greek scheme of 27 alphanumeric letters or to Roman numerals with their vertical strokes and letters. Further, it featured a place-value arrangement of numerals, our familiar decimal system for determining a numeral’s value by its place in the ones, tens, or hundreds column (and continuing). And the symbolic representation of zero as an empty placeholder greatly facilitated arithmetic computations. All these innovations contributed to perceiving numbers as abstract relations, not just collections of things or objects. By Shakespeare’s day, the character of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice was figuring his pound of flesh with the new, more efficient Hindu-Arabic numerals.

In the world of music, a newly invented and abstract notation accompanied the rise of polyphonic singing, which evolved from Gregorian chant. With their longs, breves, semibreves, minims, fusas, and other equivalents of modern musical notes, composers and musicians caged and managed as information the elusive, ephemeral data of rhythm and pitch. For the first time in human history, time itself was measured by means of an independent system of symbols—standardized units of sound (notes) and silence (rests) that corresponded to physical, acoustical reality. Here, too, Hindu-Arabic numerals described the fluid, irrational proportionalities and harmonies comprising the dynamics of musical tone, and gave rise to new tuning systems, including the equalized temperament of modern pianos and other instruments with fixed, musical intervals.

Turning to geometry, the discovery of linear perspective in the visual arts yielded new expression and shape to visual information. Novel geometric techniques offered alternatives to definitions as a means of seeing objects in the world. Perspective grids tied spatial proportionalities to the changing viewpoints of a world in motion. This was a world of the “winged eye” in the memorable phrase of the Renaissance man himself, Leon Battista Alberti. One-to-one mappings between objects and their representations (two-dimensional drawings or three-dimensional sculptures) provided a new context for situating objects in space. Forerunners of modern geometry’s graphs, these techniques led eventually to separating and analyzing the vertical and horizontal axes of motion.

And in astronomy, new technologies brought heavenly motion and eternal time down to earth, enabling the amalgamation of terrestrial and celestial branches of knowledge, physics and astronomy. Before it became money, time became information. Its “inaudible and noiseless foot” (Shakespeare) succumbed to the technological mastery supplied by that “fallen angel,” the oscillating mechanical clock. Pope Gregory’s solar calendar (1582) and subsequent linear chronologies put the capstone on “clock time” writ large. Time’s mystery was converted to time’s problem, at least in part, as time itself increasingly became an abstract variable expressed in mathematical formulas, such as in Galileo’s laws of free fall, pendulums, and projectiles.

Common to all these arenas—commerce and arithmetic, polyphonic sound and music, art and geometry, timekeeping and astronomy—a novel means of creating and managing information made its appearance. The phonetic letters of definitions, which were the foundation of literacy, gave way to numerals, notes and rests, grid lines, and linear chronologies that would undergird a new numeracy.

These were not the enchanted symbols of allegory associated with words and meanings. As new ways of abstracting, encoding, storing, and manipulating bits of information, these empty symbols—curlicue marks and lines on a page—were purely functional. They guided reasoning with their rules of combination and with their algorithms.

Strangely enough, these symbols even captured “nothing” and made it useful. The placeholding zero (null quantity) in arithmetic enabled “borrowing” and “carrying” amounts from column to column, the basis of adding, subtracting, and myriad further computations. The rest (absence of sound) in music made it possible for composers to develop and depict sophisticated, dynamical musical rhythms. The visual vanishing point in the gridlines of artistic perspective provided focus, thereby giving instructions for the spatial arrangements of objects. And in clock time, the instant (point of no time lapse) separated the flow of time past from that of time future, allowing one to plot events, large or small, on a linear continuum. Later, the 18th-century French philosopher Jean le Rond d’Alembert would summarily refer to the empty symbols of numeracy as “phantoms.”

Mapped onto various dimensions of experience, the new techniques of information coding framed new understandings of phenomena and transformed our ways of seeing. And they provided the tools for a new, logical layering of abstraction upon abstraction that became the higher reaches of mathematics.

By Galileo’s lifetime (1564–1642) these practices had mushroomed and coalesced into the information technology of numeracy. Henceforth, as Galileo wrote in a passage often cited, the book of nature would be understood increasingly as “written in the language of mathematics.” With his own experiments and investigations, this “father of modern physics” led a new generation of natural philosophers into the mathematical analysis of matter and motion. Fermat and Descartes followed with their analytical geometries, joining the discreteness of arithmetic with the continuity of geometry. A generation later the calculus of Newton and Leibniz united the forces and motions of matter. On the cornerstones of numeracy, laid in the Renaissance, would be constructed the entire edifice of modern science … and with it our numerate culture, our own phantom world.

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In 2012, art collector Ed Sweeney noted that the street artists he knew often carried black books filled with ideas for and drafts of their own art, plus tags by other graffiti artists. He approached Marcia Reed, chief curator at the Getty Research Institute, to see whether the institute would be interested in creating a compendium of works on paper from local graffiti and tattoo artists. The book would provide a snapshot of the ideas bubbling up on the current Los Angeles-area street art scene.

The answer was yes—with a twist. Reed brought in rare books curator David Brafman, who saw similarities between a contemporary street artist’s black book and a liber amicorum (“book of friends”) from centuries ago. European emissaries and members of royal travel groups filled their books with coats of arms or drawings from the people they encountered throughout Europe. Brafman showed Sweeney a 400-year-old book of friends owned by a Nuremburg merchant, Johann Heinrich Gruber, and a handful of other rare books that he thought might have resonances with contemporary street art. What would happen if the black books and these books collided? The collector and curators hatched a plan to invite about 25 graffiti and tattoo artists to the institute that summer to discover tomes from the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

With the help of assistant curator Lisa Cambier, artists Big Sleeps, Chaz, Heaven, Prime, and others pored over emblem books, examples of Arabic calligraphy, Albrecht Dürer’s Introduction to Measurement (which demonstrates how the artistic imagination can transform lines, circles, and S-curves into 3-D illusions), and Wenzel Jamnitzer’s Perspective of Regular Bodies (which features engraved illustrations that progress from the imagined shapes of the elemental particles of fire, air, earth, and water to surreal, complex, imaginary geometric molecules).

Over the course of a few months the artists came back with 143 works on paper that were bound together alphabetically in a book they proposed to call L.A. Liber Amicorum, also known as the Getty Black Book. The book inspired the ESMoA exhibition, in which six artists (Axis, Cre8, Defer, Eyeone, Fishe, and Miner) were invited to bring crews to paint the laboratory’s walls with works loosely based on the L.A. Liber Amicorum. Pages from that book—and the inspirational rare books—can be seen on iPads in the exhibition hall. Seventeen of the actual rare books and manuscripts will be displayed in cases, too.

“It’s exciting to have such a variety of artists from different parts of the city that once might have been in rival gangs in the ’80s and ’90s who are all bound together in this book and on these walls,” Cambier said. “The viewer can see the inspiration of these rare books on form, shape, and lettering, and see these street artists are part of a long tradition of writing and creativity.”

The exhibition at ESMoA opens on June 8, 2014 and runs through September 21, 2014.

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