Almost 400 years ago, in 1629, one of my ancestors, Rabbi Yom Tov Lippman Heller (also known as the Tosefot Yom Tov, after his well known commentary on the Mishnah) was arrested in Vienna, where he had become the Jewish community’s Chief Rabbi in 1625.
Rabbi Yom Tov was one of the preeminent scholars of his generation, and he was also known far beyond the Jewish community for his breadth of knowledge, especially in the fields of mathematics and astronomy. He wrote about the new solar-based...