Jews have a weird habit that I’d go as far as to say is a nasty vicious little habit of trying to claim by implication they were involved in – or created – things they really weren’t such as - weirdly – popularizing the pet hamster, (1) the Indy 500 (2) and the Tour de France. (3)
Now Seth Rogovoy writing for the ‘Jewish Daily Forward’ has written about how Pi has a ‘secret jewish history’, which aside from some silly warbling about the kabbala and rabbis often liking numbers later in his article. His point - such as it is - is largely contained within the first four paragraphs of his piece:
‘In an episode of the original Star Trek, Mr. Spock — played by the late, great Jewish actor Leonard Nimoy — commands an evil computer that has taken over the life support system of the Starship Enterprise to compute pi to the last digit. Spock therefore outwitted the murderous cyborg, which wound up self-destructing, because, as Spock explained, “the value of pi is a transcendental figure without resolution.” Being totally logical, Spock wasn’t suggesting that pi had some sort of spiritual quality of transcendence. Rather, transcendental is a math term, and I’m going to spare you the definition in hopes that you keep reading beyond this paragraph. But in spite of Spock and his logic, pi just may have a spiritual quality of transcendence.
The circumference of a circle is always 3.14 x its diameter. Except 3.14 — what we now call pi — is only an approximation. The decimals actually keep flowing. Pi is not only an irrational number – it’s infinite and ultimately unknowable. Yet while the number itself always evades our grasp, we also know that it’s always true and always reliable. Pi always expresses the mathematical relationship between the diameter and the circumference of a circle, no matter how small or how large the circle.
And we know this not from computations of the digital age. The ancients were onto this from the beginning. Every major civilization had its theories of pi and its mathematicians who tried to explain it. Ancient Egypt and Babylon and India. The Greek Archimedes, the Greco-Roman Ptolemy, the ancient Chinese and Indians — all figured out this ratio, which exists both on paper and, as if by some sort of divine plan, throughout nature.
The relationship between a circle’s diameter — a line running straight through cutting it into two equal halves — and its circumference — the distance around the circle – was originally mentioned in the Hebrew Book of Kings in reference to a ritual pool in King Solomon’s Temple. The relevant verse (1 Kings 7:23) states that the diameter of the pool was ten cubits and the circumference 30 cubits. In other words, the Bible rounds off pi to about three, as if to say that’s good enough for horseshoes and swimming pools.’ (4)
Rogovoy’s implied point here – such as it is – is that because the Tanakh in 1 Kings 7:23 is arguably referring to the concept of Pi and the Tanakh comes from Yahweh then because the jews are ‘Yahweh’s chosen people’ therefore they likely got it first before they are closer to the divine than the Egyptians, Babylonians, Chinese, Indians and not to mention the Greeks.
Yet this is complete and utter implied jewish supremacist drivel because Pi is attested in Babylonian clay tablets between 1,600 to 1,900 B.C. (5) and the Egyptian Rhind Papyrus – dated to circa 1,650 B.C. but a copy of another papyrus dated circa 1,850 B.C. – (6) specifically mention Pi, while Indian sources similarly dating between 1,000 and 2,000 B.C. possibly also mention it. (7)
Indeed, the dating difference is well over a millennium between the first mentions of Pi in Babylonian and Egyptian texts that we have – Arndt and Haenel believe the Babylonians probably first discovered Pi – (8) and thus renders Rogovoy’s snide implied argument for jewish supremacism and thus priority over Pi as the nonsense that it is.
I do wish jews would stop trying to invent claims about how they invented things!
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-the-pet-hamster
(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-not-so-jewish-history-of-the
(3) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-anti-semitic-origins-of-the-tour
(4) https://forward.com/culture/465702/the-secret-jewish-history-of-pi/
(5) Joerg Arndt, Christoph Haenel, 2000, ‘Pi – Unleashed’, 2nd Edition, Springer Verlag: Berlin, pp. 6; 69; 173; 181
(6) Ibid., pp. 167; 211
(7) Kim Plofker, 2009, ‘Mathematics in India: 500 BCE–1800 CE’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, p. 27
(8) Arndt, Haenel, Op. Cit., p. 181