In the year 1168 an exceptionally observant Jewish traveller from Spain–probably a gem-merchant–visited the great Byzantine capital city of Constantinople. We know virtually nothing about Benjamin of Tudela save that he wrote a Book of Travels about his extensive journeys around the northern Mediterranean and the Middle East in the years 1159-72. It is the most sensible, objective and reliable of all travel books written during the Middle Ages, was published as early as 1556, thereafter translated into almost all European languages, and became a primary source-book for scholars of the period.1
Benjamin made careful notes on the conditions of Jewish communities wherever he stopped, but he seems to have spent more time in Constantinople than anywhere else, and his description of this great city, then by far the largest in the world, is particularly full. He found that there were about 2,500 Jews there, divided into two distinct communities. The majority, 2,000, were Jews in the rabbinical tradition, who accepted the Mishnah, the Talmud and the whole multi-layered superstructure of commentary. The remaining 500 were Karaites, who followed the Pentateuch alone, rejecting the Oral Law and everything which flowed from it. They had organized themselves as a distinct body since the eighth century and throughout the diaspora they were regarded by rabbinic Jews with such hostility that, says Benjamin, a high fence divided the two sections of the Jewish quarter.
Benjamin wrote that the Jews were ‘craftsmen in silk’ and merchants of all kinds. They included ‘many rich men’. But none was allowed by law to ride a horse, ‘except for Rabbi Solomon the Egyptian, who is the King’s doctor. Through him, the Jews find much relief in their oppression–for they live under heavy oppressions.’ Under the Justinian code, and subsequent statutes, the Jews of Byzantium, unlike pagans and heretics, enjoyed legal status. In theory at least, Jewish synagogues were legally protected places of worship. The state also recognized Jewish courts of law, and its magistrates enforced their decisions between Jews. Jews who went about their lawful business were supposed to be safe, since the law specifically forbade anti-Semitic acts and stated that ‘the Jew is not to be trampled upon for being Jewish and not to suffer contumely for his religion…the law forbids private revenge’.2 None the less, the Jews were second-class citizens; scarcely citizens at all, in fact. They lost their right to serve in government posts completely in 425, though they were forced to serve as decurions on city councils, as this cost money. The Jews were not allowed to build any new synagogues. They had to shift the date of their Passover so that it always took place after the Christian Easter. It was an offence for Jews to insist that their scriptures be read in Hebrew even in their own communities. The law made it as easy as possible to convert Jews, though the baptismal formula contained a statement by each Jewish convert that he had not been induced by fear or hope of gain. Any Jew caught molesting a convert was burned alive, and a converted Jew who reverted to his faith was treated as a heretic.3
Yet Benjamin suggests that popular hostility towards the Jews was as much occupational as religious: ‘Most of the hatred towards them comes because of the tanners who pour out their dirty water outside their houses and thus defile the Jewish quarter. For this the Greeks hate the Jews, whether good or bad, and hold them under a heavy yoke. They strike them in the streets and give them hard employment.’ All the same, concluded Benjamin, ‘the Jews are rich, kind and charitable. They observe the commandments of the scriptures and cheerfully bear the yoke of their oppression.’4
Benjamin of Tudela travelled through north-eastern Spain, Barcelona, Provence, and then by way of Marseilles, Gerona and Pisa to Rome. He visited Salerno, Amalfi and other south Italian towns, then crossed via Corfu to Greece, and, after seeing Constantinople, passed through the Aegean to Cyprus, then via Antioch into Palestine, and through Aleppo and Mosul into Babylonia and Persia. He visited Cairo and Alexandria, returning to Spain via Sicily. He noted Jewish conditions and occupations carefully, and though he describes one Jewish agricultural colony at Crisa on Mount Parnassus, the picture he gives is of an overwhelmingly urban people–glassworkers in Aleppo, silkweavers in Thebes, tanners in Constantinople, dyers in Brindisi, merchants and dealers everywhere.
Some Jews had always been town-dwellers, but in the Dark Ages they became almost exclusively so. Their European settlements, nearly all in towns, were very ancient. The First Book of Maccabees gives a list of Jewish colonies scattered through the Mediterranean. As the historian Cecil Roth put it, culturally the Jews could be termed the first Europeans.5 In the early Roman empire, there were distinctive Jewish communities as far north as Lyons, Bonn and Cologne, and as far west as Cadiz and Toledo. During the Dark Ages, they spread further north and east–into the Baltic and Poland, and down into the Ukraine. Yet though the Jews were widely scattered, they were not numerous. From being about eight million at the time of Christ, including 10 per cent of the Roman empire, they had fallen by the tenth century to between one million and one and a half million. Of course the population of all the former Roman territories fell during this period, but Jewish losses were proportionately much higher than the population as a whole. Under Tiberius, for instance, there were 50,000 to 60,000 Jews in Rome alone, out of a total population of one million, plus forty other Jewish settlements in Italy. In the late empire, the number of Italian Jews collapsed, and even by 1638 there were no more than 25,000 in total, only 0.2 per cent of the population. These losses were only partly due to general economic and demographic factors. In all areas, and at all periods, Jews were being assimilated and blending into the surrounding populace.6
Yet the social importance of the Jews, especially in Dark Age Europe, was much greater than their tiny numbers suggest. Wherever towns survived, or urban communities sprang up, Jews would sooner or later establish themselves. The near destruction of Palestinian Jewry in the second century AD turned the survivors of Jewish rural communities into marginal town-dwellers. After the Arab conquest in the seventh century, the large Jewish agricultural communities in Babylonia were progressively wrecked by high taxation, so that there too the Jews drifted into towns and became craftsmen, tradesmen and dealers. Everywhere these urban Jews, the vast majority literate and numerate, managed to settle, unless penal laws or physical violence made it impossible.
Indeed in Europe, the Jews played a critically important role in Dark Age urban life. The evidence is hard to come by but much can be gleaned from the responsa literature. In many ways the Jews were the only real link between the cities of Roman antiquity and the emerging town communes of the early Middle Ages–indeed, it has been argued that the very word commune is a translation of the Hebrew kahal.7 The Jews carried with them certain basic skills: the ability to compute exchange-rates, to write a business letter and, perhaps even more important, the ability to get it delivered along their wide-spun family and religious networks. Despite its many inconvenient prohibitions, their religion was undoubtedly a help to them in their economic life. The ancient Israelite religion had always supplied a strong motivation to work hard. As it matured into Judaism, the stress on work became greater. With the rise of rabbinic Judaism after 70 AD, its economic impact increased. Historians have frequently noticed, at different periods and in diverse societies, that the weakening of clericalism tends to strengthen economic dynamism. During the second century AD, clericalism virtually disappeared from Jewish societies. The Temple priests, the Sadducees, the teeming servitors of a state-supported religion all vanished. The rabbis, who replaced the clerics, were not a parasitic caste. It is true that some scholars were supported by the community, but even scholars were encouraged to acquire a trade. Rabbis as a whole were specifically enjoined to do so. Indeed rabbis were often the most assiduous and efficient traders. The routes by which they communicated their decisions and responsa were trading routes too. Rabbinical Judaism was a gospel of work because it demanded that Jews make the fullest possible use of God’s gifts. It required the fit and able to be industrious and fruitful not least so they could fulfil their philanthropic duties. Its intellectual approach pushed in the same direction. Economic progress is the product of rationalization. Rabbinical Judaism is essentially a method whereby ancient laws are adapted to modern and differing conditions by a process of rationalization. The Jews were the first great rationalizers in world history. This had all kinds of consequences as we shall see, but one of its earliest, in a worldly sense, was to turn Jews into methodical, problem-solving businessmen. A great deal of Jewish legal scholarship in the Dark and Middle Ages was devoted to making business dealings fair, honest and efficient.
One of the great problems was usury, or rather lending money at interest. This was a problem the Jews had created for themselves, and for the two great religions which spring from Judaism. Most early religious systems in the ancient Near East, and the secular codes arising from them, did not forbid usury. These societies regarded inanimate matter as alive, like plants, animals and people, and capable of reproducing itself. Hence if you lent ‘food money’, or monetary tokens of any kind, it was legitimate to charge interest.8 Food money in the shape of olives, dates, seeds or animals was lent out as early as c. 5000 BC, if not earlier. Cuneiform documents show that loans for fixed amounts in the form of bills of exchange were known from at least the time of Hammurabi–the usual creditors being temples and royal officials. Babylonian cuneiform records indicate interest-rates of 10-25 per cent for silver, 20-35 per cent for cereals. Among the Mesopotamians, Hittites, Phoenicians and Egyptians, interest was legal and often fixed by the state. But the Jews took a different view of the matter. Exodus 22:25 laid down: ‘If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt thou lay upon him usury.’ This is evidently a very early text. If Jewish law had been drawn up during the more sophisticated times of the kingdom, interest would not have been forbidden. But the Torah was the Torah, valid for eternity. The Exodus text was reinforced by Leviticus 25:36: ‘Take thou no usury of [thy brother], or increase’; and clarified by Deuteronomy 23:24: ‘Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury.’
The Jews were thus burdened with a religious law which forbade them to lend at interest among themselves, but permitted it towards strangers. The provision seems to have been designed to protect and keep together a poor community whose chief aim was collective survival. Lending therefore came under philanthropy–but you were not obliged to be charitable towards those you did not know or care for. Interest was thus synonymous with hostility. As a settled community in Palestine, of course, the Jews needed to borrow money from each other like anyone else. The Biblical record shows that the law was constantly evaded.9 The papyri from the Jewish community in Elephantine tell the same tale. Yet the religious authorities tried to enforce the law strictly. They laid down that not only the principals to a usurious transaction but any accessory committed a sin. Concealed interest was wrong too. Rent-free premises supplied by the borrowers, gifts, useful information–all these were termed ‘the dust of interest’ and banned; talmudic rulings show amazing efforts over the years to block loopholes created by cunning usurers or desperate would-be borrowers.10
At the same time, the talmudic casuists tried hard to make possible fair business dealings which in their view did not violate the Torah. These included an increased price for repayment, business partnerships which paid the lender a salary, or gave him a share of the profits, or devices which allowed a lender to lend money to a non-Jew who in turn lent it to a Jew. But Jewish courts which detected a clear interest-transaction could fine the creditor; debts which included capital and interest were declared unenforceable, and moneylenders as such were forbidden to bear witness in court and threatened with hell.11
However, the more strictly and intelligently the law was enforced and obeyed, the more calamitous it was for the Jews in their relations with the rest of the world. For, in a situation where the Jews were small, scattered communities in a gentile universe, it not merely permitted Jews to serve as moneylenders to non-Jews but in a sense positively encouraged them to do so. It is true that some Jewish authorities recognized this danger and fought against it. Philo, who understood perfectly well why a primitive law-code differentiated between brothers and strangers, argued that the prohibition of usury extended to anyone of the same nation and citizenship, irrespective of religion.12 One ruling said that if possible interest-free loans should be made to Jews and gentiles alike, though the Jews should have priority. Another praised a man who would not take interest from a foreigner. A third disapproved of charging foreigners interest and said it was lawful only when a Jew could live in no other way.13
On the other hand, some authorities stressed the difference between Jews and non-Jews. A midrash on the Deuteronomy text, probably written by the nationalistic Rabbi Akiva, seemed to say that Jews were obliged to charge interest to foreigners. The fourteenth-century French Jew Levi ben Gershom agreed: it was a positive commandment to burden the gentile with interest ‘because one should not benefit an idolator…and cause him as much damage as possible without deviating from righteousness’; others took this line. But the most common justification was economic necessity:
If we nowadays allow interest to be taken from non-Jews it is because there is no end of the yoke and the burden kings and ministers impose upon us, and everything we take is the minimum for our subsistence; and anyhow we are condemned to live in the midst of the nations and cannot earn our living in any other manner except by money dealings with them; therefore the taking of interest is not to be prohibited.14
This was the most dangerous argument of all because financial oppression of Jews tended to occur in areas where they were most disliked, and if Jews reacted by concentrating on moneylending to gentiles, the unpopularity–and so, of course, the pressure–would increase. Thus the Jews became an element in a vicious circle. The Christians, on the basis of the Biblical rulings, condemned interest-taking absolutely, and from 1179 those who practised it were excommunicated. But the Christians also imposed the harshest financial burdens on the Jews. The Jews reacted by engaging in the one business where Christian laws actually discriminated in their favour, and so became identified with the hated trade of moneylending. Rabbi Joseph Colon, who knew both France and Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century, wrote that the Jews of both countries hardly engaged in any other profession.15
In the Arab-Moslem territories, which in the early Middle Ages included most of Spain, all of North Africa, and the Near East south of Anatolia, the Jewish condition was easier as a rule. Islamic law to non-Moslems was based on the arrangements Mohammed made with the Jewish tribes of the Hijaz. When they refused to acknowledge his prophetic mission, he applied the principle of what he called the jihad. This divides the world into the dar al-Islam, the peaceful territory of Islam, where the law reigns, and the dar al-Harb, the ‘territory of war’, controlled temporarily by non-Moslems. The jihad is the necessary and permanent state of war waged against the dar al-Harb, which can only end when the entire world submits to Islam. Mohammed waged jihad against the Jews of Medina, beat them, decapitated their menfolk (save one, who converted) in the public square, and divided their women, children, animals and property among his followers. Other Jewish tribes were treated rather more leniently, but at Mohammed’s discretion, since God gave him absolute rights over the infidel, rather as Yahweh permitted Joshua to deal with Canaanite cities as he saw fit. Mohammed, however, sometimes found it politic to make a treaty, or dhimma, with his beaten foes, under which he spared their lives and permitted them to continue to cultivate their oases, provided they gave him half the proceeds. The dhimma eventually took a more sophisticated form, the dhimmi, or one who submitted, receiving the right to his life, the practice of his religion, even protection, in return for special taxes–the kharaj or land-tax to the ruler, the jizya or poll-tax, higher commercial and travel taxes than the believers in the population, and special taxes at the ruler’s pleasure. Moreover, the status of the dhimmi was always at risk, since the dhimma merely suspended the conqueror’s natural right to kill the conquered and confiscate his property; hence it could be revoked unilaterally whenever the Moslem ruler wished.16
In theory, then, the status of Jewish dhimmi under Moslem rule was worse than under the Christians, since their right to practise their religion, and even their right to live, might be arbitrarily removed at any time. In practice, however, the Arab warriors who conquered half the civilized world so rapidly in the seventh and eighth centuries had no wish to exterminate literate and industrious Jewish communities who provided them with reliable tax incomes and served them in innumerable ways. Jews, along with Christian dhimmis, constituted a large proportion of the administrative intelligentsia of the vast new Arab territories. The Arab Moslems were slow to develop any religious animus against the Jews. In Moslem eyes, the Jews had sinned by rejecting Mohammed’s claims, but they had not crucified him. Jewish monotheism was as pure as Islam’s. The Jews had no offensive dogmas. Their laws on diet and cleanliness were in many ways similar. There is, then, very little anti-Jewish polemic in Islamic religious writing. Nor had the Arabs inherited the vast pagan-Greek corpus of anti-Semitism, on which to superimpose their own variety. Finally, Judaism, unlike Christianity, never constituted a political and military threat to Islam, as did the Byzantine East and later the Latin West. For all these reasons the Jews found it easier to live and prosper in Islamic territories. Sometimes they flourished. In Iraq, in addition to the great academies, the Jews constituted a wealthy quarter of the new city of Baghdad which the Abbasid dynasty founded in 762 as their capital. The Jews provided court doctors and officials. They learned spoken and written Arabic, first as a demotic trading device, then as a language of scholarship, even sacred commentary. The Jewish masses spoke Arabic, as they had once learned to speak Aramaic, though some knowledge of Hebrew was treasured in almost all Jewish families.
Throughout the Arab world, the Jews were traders. From the eighth to the early eleventh century, Islam constituted the main international economy and the Jews supplied one of its chief networks. From the East they imported silks, spices and other scarce goods. From the West they brought back pagan slaves, taken by Christians and called ‘Canaanites’ by the Jews, who were sold in Islam: in 825 Archbishop Agobard of Lyons claimed that the slave trade was run by Jews. Both Moslem sources and Jewish responsa show that, at this time, Jewish merchants were operating in India and China, where most of the luxuries originated. From the tenth century, especially in Baghdad, the Jews served as bankers to Moslem courts. They accepted deposits from Jewish traders, then lent large sums to the caliph. Granted the vulnerability of the Jewish dhimmis, this was a risky trade. There was no shame in a Moslem sovereign repudiating his debts or even decapitating his creditors–as sometimes happened–but it was more convenient to keep the bankers in being. Some of the profits from the banks went to support the academies, which the heads of the banking houses quietly manipulated behind the scenes. Jews were very influential at court. Their exilarch was honoured by the Arabs, who addressed him as ‘Our Lord, the Son of David’. When Benjamin of Tudela came to Baghdad in 1170, he found, he said, 40,000 Jews living there in security, with twenty-eight synagogues and ten yeshivot or places of study.
Another centre of Jewish prosperity was Kairouan in Tunisia, founded in 670 and capital of the Aghlabid, Fatimid and Zirid dynasties in succession. The city may originally have been settled by the transfer of Jewish, as well as Christian-Copt, families from Egypt, for throughout the Dark and early Middle Ages Jewish tradesmen and merchants made by far the most efficient urban colonists in both the Mediterranean area and north and west Europe. In the eighth century, an academy was founded there by disgruntled scholars from Babylonia, and for the next 250 years Kairouan was one of the great centres of Jewish scholarship. It was also an important link in East-West trade, and here again successful Jewish merchants made a rich academic life possible. Jews also supplied the court with doctors, astronomers and officials.
From the eighth to the eleventh centuries, however, the most successful area of Jewish settlement was Spain. Jewish communities had prospered here under the Roman empire and to some extent under the Byzantine rule, but under the Visigoth kings a church-state policy of systematic anti-Semitism was pursued. A succession of royal ecclesiastical councils at Toledo, brushing aside orthodox Christian policy, either decreed the forcible baptism of the Jews or forbade circumcision, Jewish rites and observance of the Sabbath and festivals. Throughout the seventh century, Jews were flogged, executed, had their property confiscated, were subjected to ruinous taxes, forbidden to trade and, at times, dragged to the baptismal font. Many were obliged to accept Christianity but continued privately to observe the Jewish laws. Thus the secret Jew, later called the marrano, emerged into history–the source of endless anxiety for Spain, for Spanish Christianity, and for Spanish Judaism.17
Hence when the Moslems invaded Spain in 711, the Jews helped them to overrun it, often garrisoning captured cities behind the advancing Arab armies. This happened in Córdoba, Granada, Toledo and Seville, where large and wealthy Jewish communities were soon established. Indeed later Arab geographers refer to Granada, as well as Lucena and Tarragona, as ‘Jewish cities’. Córdoba became the capital of the Ummayid dynasty, who made themselves caliphs, and treated the Jews with extraordinary favour and tolerance. Here, as in Baghdad and Kairouan, the Jews were not only craftsmen and traders but doctors. During the reign of the great Ummayid caliph Abd al-Rahman III (912-61), his Jewish court doctor, Hisdai ibn Shaprut, brought to the city Jewish scholars, philosophers, poets and scientists, and made it the leading centre of Jewish culture in the world. There were substantial and well-to-do Jewish communities in no fewer than forty-four towns in Ummayid Spain, many with their own yeshiva. The rapport the educated Jewish community established with the liberal caliphs recalled the age of Cyrus and brought to Spanish Jewry a gracious, productive and satisfying way of life the Jews were not, perhaps, to find anywhere else until the nineteenth century.
But it was not without menace. The dynamic of Islamic politics was the conflict of the great religious dynasties exacerbated by doctrinal disputes over rigour and purity. The richer and more liberal a Moslem dynasty, the more vulnerable it became to the envy and fanaticism of a fundamentalist sect. If it fell, the Jews under its aegis were immediately exposed to the evil logic of their dhimmi status. The primitive Berber Moslems took Córdoba in 1013. The Ummayids disappeared. Prominent Jews were assassinated. At Granada there was a general massacre of Jews. The Christian armies were pushing southwards, and under pressure from them the Moslems put their trust in fierce and zealous warriors rather than leisured patrons of culture. In the closing decades of the eleventh century, another Berber dynasty, the Almoravids, became dominant in southern Spain. They were violent and unpredictable. They threatened the large and rich Jewish community of Lucena with forcible conversion, then settled for a huge ransom. The Jews were adroit at turning away Moslems by judicious bribes and negotiations. They had much to offer each successive wave of conquerors in terms of financial, medical and diplomatic skills. They served the new masters as tax-farmers and advisers, as well as doctors. But from this time onwards, Jews were sometimes safer in Spain under Christian rulers. It was the same story in Asia Minor, where the Byzantines might offer Jewish communities more security than they could find as dhimmis.
Early in the twelfth century a new wave of Moslem fundamentalism arose in the Atlas Mountains, creating a dynasty of zealots, the Almohads. Their aim was to stamp out Islamic corruption and backsliding. But in the process they extinguished Christian communities which had existed in north-west Africa for nearly a millennium. Jews too were given a choice between conversion and death. The Almohads carried their fanaticism into Spain from the year 1146. Synagogues and yeshivot were shut down. As under the Visigoth Christians, Jews converted at sword-point often practised their religion secretly and were distrusted by the Moslems. They were forced to wear a special blue tunic with absurdly wide sleeves and, instead of a turban, a long blue cap in the shape of a donkey’s packsaddle. If they were spared this garb, and a special sign of infamy called the shikla, their clothes, though normal in cut, had to be yellow in colour. They were forbidden to trade except on a small scale. The splendid Jewish settlements of southern Spain did not survive this persecution, at least in any of their old dignity and grandeur. Many Jews fled north into Christian territory. Others moved into Africa in search of more tolerant Moslem rulers.
Among the refugees was a young and brilliant scholar called Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides or to Jews as Rambam from the acronym Rabbi Moses ben Maimon. He was born in Córdoba on 30 March 1135, the son of a scholar. When the Almohads took the city he was just thirteen, a prodigy already possessed of astonishing learning. He and his family wandered in Spain, possibly in Provence also, and finally settled in Fez in 1160. Five years later, a revival of forced conversion led them to move again, first by sea to Acre, from whence Maimonides made a tour of the Holy Places, then to Egypt, where they settled in Fustat, the Old City of Cairo. There Maimonides gradually acquired a world-wide reputation both as a doctor and as a scholar-philosopher. He was recognized as head of the Fustat community in 1177, was appointed court physician in 1185 and became, in the words of one Moslem chronicler, ‘very great in wisdom, learning and rank’. His scholarly output was of immense variety and impressive both in quantity and quality. He was supported by his trading brother, David, who dealt chiefly in jewels, and after David’s death he traded on his own account or lived by his medical fees. When he died on 13 December 1204, his remains were, on his instructions, taken to Tiberias, where his grave is still a place of pilgrimage for pious Jews.
Maimonides is worth examining in detail not only because of his intrinsic importance but because no one illustrates better the paramount importance of scholarship in medieval Jewish society. He was both the archetype and the greatest of the cathedocrats. Ruling and knowledge were intimately associated in rabbinical Judaism. Of course by knowledge was meant, essentially, knowledge of the Torah. The Torah was not just a book about God. It pre-existed creation, in the same way as God did. In fact, it was the blueprint of creation.18 Rabbi Akiva thought it was ‘the instrument of creation’, as though God read out of it like a magician reading from his book. Simeon ben Lakish said it preceded the world by 2,000 years while Elizer ben Yose taught that it had lain in God’s bosom for 974 generations before God used it to create the universe. Some sages believed it had been offered simultaneously to seventy different nations in seventy languages, but all had refused. Israel alone had accepted it. Hence it was in a peculiar sense not just the Law and religion but the wisdom of Israel and the key to the ruling of Jews. Philo called it the ideal law of the philosophers, as Moses was the ideal lawgiver. Torah, he wrote in his book on Moses, was ‘stamped with the seals of nature’ and ‘the most perfect picture of the cosmic polity’.19 It followed that the greater the knowledge of Torah, the greater the right to rule, especially over Jews.
Ideally, then, every public personality ought to be a distinguished scholar, and every scholar should help to rule. The Jews never took the view–beloved of the Anglo-Saxon mind–that intellectual capacity, a passion for books and reading, somehow debilitated a man for office. On the contrary. Nor did they see Torah scholarship, as outsiders tended to do, as dry, academic, remote from real life. They saw it as promoting precisely the kind of wisdom needed to rule men, while also inculcating the virtues of humility and piety which prevented the corruptions of power. They quoted Proverbs: ‘Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom: I am understanding; I have strength.’20
The problem, as Jews saw it, was how to combine study with the exercise of government. When, during the Hadrian persecution, the sages of Lydda met to debate the most pressing problems facing their imperilled community, one of those at the head of their list was: ‘Is studying more important or doing?’ After hearing arguments they voted unanimously for Rabbi Akiva’s view that study must come first since ‘studying leads to doing’. In terms of spiritual merit, acquiring wisdom through study and exercising it to serve communal needs were ruled equally deserving. But the sages said that if a widow or an orphan came to a sage for advice, and he replied that he was too busy studying to give it, God would be angry and say, ‘I impute to you as if you had destroyed the world.’ A scholar who buried his nose in his book was accused of ‘causing the destruction of the world’–because the Jews believed that the world without applied wisdom would fall to pieces. A Levite might retire from active life at fifty and do nothing but study, but a leading scholar had to be available till death. Philo wrote earnestly of the conflicting claims of study and public service. His life was a case in point because, in addition to his prolific writings, he had to serve as a communal leader and went on at least one embassy to Rome. Such a noted scholar, especially one with his wide reputation, had an endless stream of callers seeking advice. Fortunately, Philo could serve the duties of ruling with his brother, one of the richest men in the diaspora, whom Josephus refers to as Alabarch.21
The notion of two brothers helping each other to resolve the conflicting claims of study and commentary, on the one hand, and judicial administration and other public duties on the other, is one reason why the Jewish cathedocracy was usually a family affair. Scholastic dynasties sprang originally from scribal lines and were already a feature of Jewish life in the second century BC. In some Jewish societies they lasted until the First World War–and even beyond it.
In Babylonia, the exilarch had to come from the family of David, but all the men of importance in the academies and yeshivot were chosen from an acknowledged group of academic families. The phrase, ‘not of the scholarly families, being of the merchants’, was dismissive–even though the merchant’s cash kept the academies going. In Babylonia, the gaon or head of each academy came from one of six families, and in Palestine he had to be descended from Hillel, Ezra the Scribe, or David himself. An outsider of colossal learning could be accepted, but this was rare. Within the hierarchical grades of the academy, too, birth was usually decisive. By origin, of course, the major or ecumenical academies were not so much places where the young were instructed, as councils–the term yeshivah is the Hebrew version of synhedrion or Sanhedrin. In fact, during the early Middle Ages they were still called ‘Grand Sanhedrin’ in official Torah documents. The Palestine academy also referred to itself as ‘The Righteous Corporation’. They were places where scholars sat together to produce authoritative rulings–academy, parliament, supreme court in one.
A scholar from one of the Babylonian academies, writing in Egypt just before Maimonides’ time, described the hierarchy of learning as follows. The ordinary Jewish literate masses learned the five books of Moses and the prayer-book, which also contained material on the Oral Law, the Sabbath and feasts. Scholars in addition must have mastered the rest of the Bible as well as ‘ordinances’ and codified law. The doctors knew all this, plus the Mishnah, the Talmud and the commentaries. A scholar could give a sermon, write an expository epistle and serve as an assistant judge. But only a doctor, with the title of Member of the Academy, understood the sources of Law and the literature expounding them, and could deliver a learned judgement.22
Doctors and senior scholars constituted the academy. In Babylonia, the governing triumvirate was the gaon, the president of the court, who acted as his deputy, and the scribe, who wrote down the judgments. The body of the academy sat facing the gaon, in seven rows. Each row had ten places, and the most distinguished scholar in each row was called the rosh ha-seder, head of the row. Every member of the academy had a fixed seat in order of precedence, which was originally determined by birth. But he could be promoted or demoted, according to performance, and his stipend varied accordingly. For most of them, however, belonging to the academy was not a full-time job. They served the community as officials, or earned their living by crafts and trade. The full academy gathered twice a year for a month each, at the end of summer and the end of winter. The plenary session, or kallah, which took place in the early spring, discussed and pronounced rulings on questions sent from abroad, so that the answers could be carried off by merchants who set out immediately after Passover. Both plenaries also included teaching sessions, at which the gaon himself expounded sections of the Talmud to 2,000 squatting students, his interpreter or turgeman (a term which survives as dragoman) acting as his loudspeaker. There were various grades of teachers, the lowest being the ‘repeaters’, often blind from birth, who had been trained to repeat by heart immense passages of the scriptures with the exact cantillation, or punctuation-pauses and stresses. A doctor puzzled by a disputed text might summon a repeater to sing it out correctly. A great deal of this public learning was by heart, conducted in noisy choruses. This was the method pursued by Moslem universities, such as Cairo’s al-Azhar, until a generation ago. Until recently, indeed, Jewish schoolboys in Morocco could recite by heart lengthy legal rulings in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, and even today Yemeni Jews possess an oral repetitive tradition which has enabled them to conserve the exact pronunciation of the ancient text, long since lost by European Jews.23
The Babylonian academies, with their hereditary ranks of carefully graded sages, had absorbed much of the atmosphere and obsequious ceremonial of the oriental court. They took their cue from the exilarch, who was, as it were, the executive arm of the academies. The Hebrew chronicler Joseph ben Isaac Sambari (1640-1703), quoting a tenth-century tradition, has this description of the nasi:
He has extensive dominion over all the Jewish communities by authority of the Commander of the Faithful. Jews and gentiles alike rise before him and greet him. Whoever does not rise before him receives one hundred lashes, for so the caliph has ordered. Whenever he goes to have an audience with the caliph, he is accompanied by Jewish and Moslem horsemen who ride in front calling out in Arabic, ‘Make way for Our Lord, the Son of David’. He himself is mounted, and wears an embroidered silk robe and a large turban. From it hangs a white scarf with a chain on it. When he gets to the caliph’s court, the royal eunuchs come forth to greet him and run ahead of him until he reaches the throne-room. A servant precedes the nasi carrying a purse of gold which he distributes in honour of the caliph. Before the caliph, the nasi prostrates himself, then stands, to show he is humble as a slave. Then the caliph makes a sign to his eunuchs to seat the nasi on the chair closest to him on the left side and solicits his petition. When the nasi presents his petition he again stands, blesses the caliph, and departs. He levies on the merchants a fixed annual tax, as well as the gifts they bring him from the ends of the earth. This is the custom they follow in Babylonia.24
The academic gaons and their senior doctors demanded similar treatment. They were addressed with sonorous titles and gave elaborate blessings and curses. They formed a hereditary sacral-academic nobility, not unlike the mandarins in China.
In the Dark Ages, this Babylonian cathedocracy was also a hereditary judiciary, the final court of appeal for the entire diaspora. Strictly speaking it had no physical power of enforcement–no army, none but a local police. But it had the power of excommunication, an impressive, even terrifying, ceremony, which went back at least to the age of Ezra. It had the authority of its learning too. In practice, however, the power of the Babylonian cathedocrats lasted only so long as the vast Moslem empire stuck together. As the territorial sway of the Baghdad caliph contracted, so did theirs. Local centres of authoritative scholarship sprang up in Spain and North Africa around emigrant scholars from the old academies. Around 1060, for instance, Cairo became a halakhic centre, thanks to the arrival of Nahrai ben Nissim from Kairouan and Judah ha-Kohen ben Joseph, the famous Rav. In the next generation their authority went to a scholar from Spain, Isaac ben Samuel, ‘in whose hands’, according to a contemporary document, ‘authority over all of Egypt reposes’. Such men usually claimed gaonic descent from one of the great academies. They were often, in addition, successful traders, or related to such. But a leading academic family did not retain its prestige, however rich it might be, unless it could produce a regular quota of distinguished scholars. For in practice a Jewish community could not govern itself unless it had the benefit of regular halakhic rulings which were accepted as authoritative precisely because they came from men of unchallengeable learning. In short, as one historian has put it, to acquire authority, family mattered and commercial success was useful, but scholarship was essential.25
Maimonides had all three. In one of his works, his commentary on the Mishnah, he listed seven generations of his forefathers. Most Jews could do the same, and the practice has been preserved to this day in many Yemeni Jewish families, even very poor ones. The point of these memorial lists was to display the academic ancestors, and they usually began with a scholar of distinction. Women were not listed, but their genealogies were, if distinguished enough. Thus in the case of Maimonides’ father-in-law, his mother’s lineage was listed back through fourteen generations, while only six of his father’s was given, albeit quite impressive. Fame could be won in various ways, but scholarship was the talisman. The faith the Jews had in learning was unshakeable. A notation survives from Maimonides’ time: ‘This document must be correct, for the father of its writer was the son of the daughter of the head of the yeshivah.’26 Maimonides himself could be quite content with his lineage: those seven generations had included four important scholar-judges.
He also came from a family able to sustain itself, and support its scholar-members, by skilful trading. As a rule, our knowledge of individual Jews and even of whole Jewish societies, from the second century AD to early modern times, is fragmentary. The Jews had stopped writing history, and their disturbed, wandering and often persecuted existence meant that few documents survived. As it happens, however, we know a lot about Maimonides and his background in twelfth-century Egyptian Jewry. All synagogues contained a room called a genizah. This room was used to store old ritual objects and prayer-books which were no longer usable but which, under Jewish law, could not be destroyed because they contained God’s name. In some cases these semi-sacred dumps also contained masses of documents, including secular ones. Damp and rot made them unreadable in a generation or two. But Egypt, with its amazingly dry climate, is famous among scholars for its propensity to preserve fragments of paper and papyrus going back to the first millennium BC and beyond. At Fustat, Maimonides worshipped and taught at the Ezra Synagogue, built in 882 on the ruins of a Coptic church sold to the Jews. Its genizah was in the attic, and there vast quantities of medieval documents remained virtually undisturbed until the end of the nineteenth century, when the great Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter began their systematic recovery. About 100,000 pages went to the Cambridge University Library, and another 100,000 pages or more are deposited in academic centres across the world. The information they reveal is almost inexhaustible. The great scholar S. D. Goitein has already used them to brilliant effect to recreate the eleventh- and twelfth-century society which formed the background to Maimonides’ work and ideas.27
The Cairo genizah contains at least 1,200 complete business letters, which show that Egyptian Jews, including Maimonides’ younger brother David, travelled immense distances and handled a remarkable variety of products. Dyes were a Jewish trading speciality, but they also concentrated on textiles, medicaments, precious stones and metals, and perfumes. The immediate trading area was Upper and Lower Egypt, the Palestine coast and Damascus in Syria. One big Fustat trader, Moses ben Jacob, who dealt in dried fruit, paper, oil, herbs and coins, ranged this region so frequently he was known as ‘the Commuter’. But a note in the handwriting of Maimonides’ son Abraham shows that Fustat traders went as far as Malaysia, and he also handled the case of a man who died in Sumatra. The scale too could be impressive: the great eleventh-century merchant Joseph ibn Awkal handled one shipment of 180 bales, and his network allowed him to act as official agent of the two big Babylonian academies, carrying their rulings throughout the Jewish world. Thus a small Jewish community in the Indies could keep in touch, even if a decision took a long time–Cairo to Sumatra was four months.28
David Maimonides was on such a long trip when he perished. A letter from him to his elder brother survives, recounting various misfortunes in Upper Egypt, from whence he was travelling direct to the Red Sea to take ship to India. After that: silence. Maimonides wrote:
The greatest misfortune that has befallen me during my entire life, worse than anything else, was the death of the saint (may his memory be blest), who drowned on the Indian Sea, carrying much money belonging to me, to him and to others, and leaving me with a little daughter and his widow. On the day I received that terrible news I fell ill and remained in bed about a year, suffering from a sore boil, fever and depression, and was almost given up. About eight years have since passed but I am still mourning and unable to accept consolation. And how should I console myself? He grew up at my knee, he was my brother, my student, he traded in the markets and earned and I could safely sit at home. He was well versed in the Talmud and the Bible, and knew [Hebrew] grammar well, and my joy in life was to look at him…. Whenever I see his handwriting or one of his letters my heart turns upside down and all my grief returns again. In short, ‘I shall go down to the nether world to my son in mourning.’29
This letter is very characteristic, in its warmth of heart and melancholy. We can dismiss Maimonides’ assertion that he spent a year in bed. He was prone to stress his ailments and physical weaknesses, but he was in fact a hyperactive man with a prodigious output of work. We do not know what this greatest of medieval Jews looked like: the portrait used for the first volume of his collected works published in 1744–though endlessly reproduced since–is pure invention. But his letters and books, and the material found in the genizah, tell us a good deal about him. He was part of the great twelfth-century pre-Renaissance which marked the first real emergence from the Dark Ages and which affected Jewry as well as the Arabic world and Christian Europe. He was cosmopolitan. He wrote in Arabic but he was familiar with other tongues and usually answered his correspondents in their own language. All his life he was an omnivorous reader. He claims in one letter to have read every known treatise on astronomy, and in another that there is nothing in idolatry with which he is not familiar.30
Maimonides’ capacity to absorb masses of difficult material, sacred and secular, was developed very early in life. So was his determination to re-present it to the Jewish world in orderly and rational form. He was not yet sixteen when he finished his Treatise on Logic. Then, in 1158, followed his astronomical Treatise on the Calendar. When he was twenty-two he began his first major work, his Commentary on the Mishna, completing it at Fustat in 1168. This was the equivalent of the summae of the Christian schoolmen and included a vast amount of secular material, on animals, plants, flowers and natural history, as well as human psychology. Much of it was written when he and his family were trying to find a safe place to live: ‘I was driven from one end of the world to the other,’ he notes, ‘…God knows that I have explained some chapters whilst on my wanderings, and others on board ship.’31 Thereafter he turned to the major task of codifying talmudic law, the Mishneh Torah, in fourteen volumes, which took him ten years and was finished in 1180. By this time the death of David had forced him to take up the practice of medicine. He was also an active judge, and in due course became head of the Egyptian Jewish community, though never with the official title of nagid. A great many people from all over the Jewish world consulted him by letter, and over 400 of his Hebrew responsa have been printed. But he found time in 1185 to begin his most famous and remarkable work, his three-book Guide of the Perplexed, explaining the fundamental theology and philosphy of Judaism, which he finished in about 1190.
Maimonides took his medical career with great seriousness, and in the non-Jewish world it was his chief claim to fame. He wrote extensively on diet, drugs and treatment: ten of his medical works survive and there may be more. He also lectured on physiology and therapeutics, as well as Judaic religion and law. He doctored Saladin’s vizier, Al-Fadi al-Baisami, who paid him an annual salary, and later Saladin’s son, who became sultan in 1198. He was invited, but declined, to become court doctor to ‘the Frankish King’ (either Richard Lionheart of England or Amalric King of Jerusalem). The Arabic sources make it clear that he was regarded as one of the world’s leading doctors, with a particular skill in treating psychosomatic cases. An Arabic verse circulated: ‘Galen’s medicine is only for the body, but that of [Maimonides] is for both body and soul.’32
He led a life of heroic industry and public service, for he visited patients in the big public hospitals as well as receiving them at home. To his favourite pupil, Joseph ibn Aknin, he wrote:
I have acquired a high reputation among the great, such as the chief kadi, the emirs, the house of Al-Fadr and other city nobles, who do not pay much. The ordinary people find it too far to come and see me in Fustat, so I have to spend my days visiting the sick in Cairo and when I get home I am too tired to pursue my studies in the medical books–you know the amount of time a conscientious man needs in our art to check his sources, so that he can be sure all his statements can be supported by argument and proper authority.
To another correspondent, Samuel ibn Tibbon, he wrote in 1199:
I dwell in Fustat and the sultan in Cairo itself and the distance between the two places is a double Sabbath-day journey [i.e. 1.5 miles]. My duties to the sultan are heavy. I must visit him early every morning. If he feels ill, or any of his children or harem are sick, I do not leave Cairo but spend the greater part of the day in the palace. If some of the court officials are ill I am there the whole day…even if there is nothing, I do not get back to Fustat until afternoon. Then I am tired and hungry and find the courtyard of my house full of people, high and low, gentiles, theologians and judges, waiting for my return. I dismount, wash my hands and beg them to wait while I eat, my only meal of the twenty-four hours. Then I attend to the patients. They are queueing up until nightfall, sometimes till 2 a.m. I talk to them lying on my back because I am weak. When night falls I am sometimes too weary to speak. So no Israelites can have a private talk with me except on the Sabbath. Then they all come to me after the services, and I advise them what to do during the coming week. Afterwards, they study a little till noon, then depart. Some of them come back and study again until the evening prayers. This is my routine.33
The year after this was written, Maimonides found it impossible to continue visiting the sultan in person, instead issuing written instructions to his physicians. But he continued to hold his medical, judicial and theological court until his death in 1204, in his seventieth year.
Maimonides’ life was devoted wholeheartedly to the service of the Jewish community and, to a more limited extent, to the human community as a whole. This was in accord with the central social tenet of Judaism. Yet helping the Fustat community–or even the wider gentile community of Cairo–was not enough. Maimonides was conscious of possessing great intellectual powers; and, equally important, the energy and concentration needed to put those powers to huge productive use. The Jews had been created to leaven the dough of humanity, to enlighten the gentiles. They did not have state power, or military force, or wide territories. But they had brains. The intellect, and the reasoning process, were their weapons. The scholar thus had outstanding status in their society, and so peculiar responsibilities; the leading scholar had the most exacting duties it was possible to imagine–he must take the lead in turning a savage and irrational world into a reasonable one, conforming to the divine and perfect intellect.
The Jewish rationalization process had begun by the introduction of monotheism and by linking it to ethics. This was primarily the work of Moses. It was typical of Maimonides that he not only gave Moses a unique role–he was the only prophet, he argued, who had communicated directly with God–but saw him as a great intellectual ordering force, creating law out of chaos. Clearly, it was the continuing function of the Jews to push forward the frontiers of reason, always adding more territory to God’s kingdom of the mind. Philo, who was a precursor of Maimonides in many ways, saw the object of Jewish scholarship in the same way. It was a protective shield for the Jews in the first place–for they were the ‘race of suppliants’ who interceded with God on behalf of humanity–and in the second it was the means whereby a terrifyingly irrational world could be civilized. Philo took a sombre view of the unreformed human condition. He had lived through an appalling pogrom in Alexandria, which he described in his historical works, In Flaccum and the fragmentary Legatio in Gaium. Lack of reason could turn men into monsters, worse than animals. Anti-Semitism was a kind of paradigm of human evil because it was not only irrational in itself but a rejection of God, the epitome of folly. But Jewish intellectuals, by their writings, could fight folly. That was why, in his De Vita Mosis, he tried to present Jewish rationality to a gentile readership and why, in his Legum Allegoriarum, he sought to rationalize, by the use of allegory, some of the more bizarre elements of the Pentateuch for Jewish readers.34
Maimonides stood half-way between Philo and the modern world. Like Philo, he had no illusions about humanity in its godless, irrational state. He had no direct knowledge of Christian persecution, but he had bitter, first-hand experience of Islamic savagery, and even in his tranquil haven of Fustat, his correspondents–in the Yemen, for instance–reminded him that atrocities were constantly being perpetrated against Jews; his letter to the Yemenis reflects his profound contempt for Islam as an answer to the world’s unreason.35 Unlike Philo, he did not have the benefit of the broad panoply of Greek rationalism available in the great Alexandrine library. But Aristotelianism was being spread again by Arab intermediaries–Avicenna (980-1035) and Maimonides’ older Spanish contemporary, Averroes (1126-98). Moreover, he was the beneficiary of a thousand years of Judaic commentary, much of which was another form of rationalism.
Then too, Maimonides was a rationalist by temperament. Like Philo, his writings exude caution, moderation and distrust of enthusiasm. He was always anxious to avoid rows, and odium theologicum most of all: ‘Even when men insult me I do not mind, but answer politely with friendly words, or remain silent.’ He was a little vain but certainly not proud: ‘I do not maintain that I never make mistakes. On the contrary, when I discover one, or if I am convicted of error by others, I am ready to change anything in my writings, in my ways and even in my nature.’ In a famous letter of reply to the comments on his Mishneh Torah by the scholars of southern France, he admits errors, says he has already made some corrections and will insert others, and insists they are quite right to challenge his work: ‘Do not humble yourselves. You may not be my teachers but you are my equals and friends and all your questions were worth raising.’36 He was an elitist, of course. He said he would rather please one intelligent man than ten thousand fools. But he was also tolerant: he thought all pious men would be saved, whatever their faith. He was wonderfully urbane, irenic, calm, judicious. Above all, he was a scientist, looking for truth, confident it would prevail in the end.
Maimonides had a clear view of what the truthful and rational–and therefore divine–society would be like. It would not consist of physical or material satisfaction. Ultimate happiness lay in the immortal existence of the human intellect contemplating God.37 In the last chapter of the Mishneh Torah he describes messianic society: ‘His rule will be firmly established and then the wise will be free for the study of the Law and its wisdom and in those days there will be no hunger or war, no hatred or rivalry…and no toil on earth but for the knowledge of the Lord alone.’ The guarantor of perfect society is divine law. A good state, by definition, is one under the rule of law; the ideal state is under divine law.38
That, of course, had to await the coming of the Messiah, and Maimonides, being the cautious scientist, was the last man to raise eschatological visions. In the meantime, however, good societies could be produced by law. In his Guide of the Perplexed, he sets out his intensely rationalistic view of the Torah: ‘The law as a whole aims at two things–the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body.’ The first consists in developing the human intellect, the second in improving men’s political relations with each other. The Law does this by setting down true opinions, which raise the intellect, and by producing norms to govern human behaviour. The two interact. The more stable and peaceful we make our society, the more time and energy men have for improving their minds, so that in turn they have the intellectual capacity to effect further social improvements. So it goes on–a virtuous circle, instead of the vicious circle of societies which have no law.39 One is tempted to guess that Maimonides saw the age of the Messiah coming, not out of the blue, in a sudden clap of thunder, but as a result of progressing, unmiraculous improvements in human rationality.
Hence, the best way to improve the human condition in general–and ensure the survival of the Jewish vanguard in particular–was to spread knowledge of the Law, because the Law stood for reason and progress. Maimonides was an elitist but he thought in terms of an ever-expanding elite. Every man could be a scholar according to his lights. This was not impossible in an intensely bookish society. It was a Jewish axiom: ‘One should sell all he possesses and buy books, for as the sages put it, “He who increases books, increases wisdom.” ’ A man who lent his books, particularly to the poor, earned merit with God. ‘If a man has two sons, one of whom dislikes lending his books, while the other is eager, a man should leave all his library to the second, even if he be younger,’ wrote one of Maimonides’ contemporaries, Judah of Regensburg. Pious Jews saw heaven as a vast library, with the Archangel Metatron as the librarian: the books in the shelves there pressed themselves together to make room for a newcomer. Maimonides disapproved of this anthropomorphic nonsense but he agreed with the notion of the world to come being an abstract version of a heavenly academy. He would have agreed, too, with Judah’s practical injunctions that a man should never kneel on a big folio to fasten its clasps, or use pens as bookmarks, or employ the books themselves as missiles or instruments to chastise scholars–and with his splendid maxim: ‘A man should have regard to the honour of his books.’40 Temperate in all things save learning, Maimonides had a passion for books, which he wished all Jews to share.
‘All Jews’ included women and working men. Maimonides said that it was not required of a woman to study, but she earned merit if she did so. Every man should study according to his capacity: thus, a clever artisan could devote three hours to his trade, leaving nine for the Torah–‘three in studying the written law, three in the Oral Law, and three reflecting on how to deduce one rule from another’. This little analysis, which he termed ‘the beginning of learning’, gives some indication of his standards of industry.41
However, it was little use bidding the Jewish people to study without at the same time doing everything possible to make that study productive. Convinced as he was that reason and the Law were the only real defences a Jew had, and the only means whereby the world could become a more civilized place, Maimonides was also painfully aware that the Law itself, after a thousand years of legal accretions and unco-ordinated commentary, was in an appalling state of confusion and penetrated by grossly irrational elements. His lifework then was twofold: to reduce the Law to order, and to re-present it on a thoroughly rational basis. To achieve the first, he wrote his Mishnah commentary, which for the first time made clear the underlying principles of mishnaic legislation, and he codified talmudic law, with the object, as he put it, to make it quick and easy to find a decision ‘in the sea of the Torah’. Maimonides observed: ‘You either write a commentary or a code–each is a distinct task in itself.’ Being an intellectual giant, he did both. He wrote with a sense of urgency, against a background (as he saw it) of danger to the Jews: ‘In times of persecution like the present,’ he said, ‘people lack the mental equanimity to devote themselves to intricate studies, and nearly every one finds serious difficulties in deriving a clear-cut decision from the works of the earlier codifiers, where the arrangement is as unsystematic as in the Talmud itself. Still fewer persons are able to deduce the law directly from the talmudic sources.’ What he produced was clear, orderly, concise and uncluttered by endless source-listing. It was not, as he hoped, definitive. Like every other attempt to say the last word on the Law, it merely detonated another huge avalanche of tomes–in 1893, a list (itself incomplete) was compiled of 220 major commentaries on Maimonides’ Code.42 But it was highly effective: a Spanish contemporary said judges opposed the work precisely because it enabled laymen to check their decisions. That was exactly what Maimonides wanted–for the Law, the sword and armour of the Jews, to become the working property of all of them.
At every stage in the code and commentary, he was rationalizing. But in addition he wrote his Guide of the Perplexed to show that Jewish beliefs were not just a set of arbitrary assertions imposed by divine command and rabbinical authority, but could be deduced and proved by reason too. Here he was following in the steps of Saadiah ben Joseph (882-942), the famous and controversial gaon of the Sura academy, the first Jewish philosopher since Philo to try to place Judaism on a rational basis. Maimonides did not agree with everything in Saadiah Gaon’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions, but it encouraged him to marry Jewish faith and philosophy. Avicenna and Averroes had performed the same task for Islam and Thomas Aquinas was soon to do it for Christianity. But Maimonides was the greatest rationalist of them all. On the key issue of prophecy, for instance, he used metaphor, analogy and parable to explain the prophets’ communications with God and their miracles as ‘natural’. He had a theory of divine emanations, which the prophets tapped. The so-called angels who helped to produce the vision were the imaginative faculty of the prophet; he used the word cherub to signify the intellect.43
However, there was a point at which Maimonides’ rationalism stopped. He felt he had to differentiate between Moses and the other prophets. He dismissed them as amphibolous or analogical, but Moses ‘did not, like the other prophets, prophesy by means of parables’; he actually spoke to God ‘as a presence to another presence, without an intermediary’. He tried to explain away Moses’ uniqueness by arguing that the highest possible degree of perfection natural to the human species must be reached in one individual–and Moses was the man. What in effect Maimonides was doing was to reduce the area of irrationality in Judaism but not to eliminate it: he isolated certain core areas of belief which reason could not explain–though he was reluctant to admit it. He would, however, concede that certain issues were almost beyond man’s powers of reason. On the apparent conflict between free will and predestination, he quoted Ecclesiastes–‘exceeding deep, who can find it out?’44–and in his writings there are passages which favour both absolute freedom of the will to obey or disobey the Law, and strict determinism. He attacked astrologers, for rendering the Law futile. On the other hand, the first of his thirteen principles of faith is: ‘God alone performed, performs and will perform all actions.’45 It is possible to point to other contradictions in his vast body of work though there are surprisingly few of them.
What Maimonides was trying to do was to strengthen the faith by stripping it of superstition and buttressing what remained by reason. But of course in doing so he introduced and popularized a critical approach to its mysteries which would eventually tempt men much further. Reason, once let out of the bottle of pure faith, develops a life and will of its own. Maimonides was a great harbinger of the Jewish future; indeed, of the human future. His Guide of the Perplexed continued to shift Jewish minds for centuries–not always in the direction he wished. In a sense, he played the same role in Judaism as Erasmus in Christianity: he laid dangerous eggs which hatched later. To the science of medicine he brought the Judaic doctrine of the one-ness of body and soul, mind and matter, which gave him important insights into the sickness of the psyche, thus foreshadowing Freud. To theology he brought a confidence in the compatibility of faith and reason which fitted his own calm and majestic mind but which was in due course to carry Spinoza outside Judaism completely.
There were many learned Jews at the time who feared the direction in which Maimonides was taking Judaism. In Provence, where Christianity was torn apart by the Albigensian heresy and where the new agency of the Dominican Inquisition was being forged to impose orthodoxy, many rabbis wanted the Judaic authorities to adopt a similar approach. They detested Maimonides’ allegorical explanation of the Bible and wanted his books banned. In 1232 the Dominicans, intervening in this internal Jewish dispute, actually burned them. But this, of course, spurred the rationalists into a counter-attack. ‘The hearts of the people’, wrote the followers of Maimonides, ‘cannot be turned away from philosophy and the books devoted to it so long as they have a soul in their bodies…they intend to fight for the honour of the Great Rabbi and his books, and will dedicate their money, their offspring and their spirits to his holy doctrines so long as the breath of life is in their nostrils.’46
Despite this flourishing of verbal fists, few actual blows were struck. In theory Jewish law was severe on heterodoxy–if two Jews testified they saw a third worshipping an image, he could be sentenced to death–but in practice, being a cathedocracy, not an autocracy, it allowed for varying views over a surprisingly wide area. Even a man declared to be a heretic incurred no physical punishment unless he systematically sought to convert others to his views. Hence rationalism and superstition continued to coexist in uneasy harmony, sometimes in the same person.
Bearing in mind the misery and fear in which Jews were often forced to live, the persistence of irrationalism was not surprising. Maimonides saw intellect and reason as the Jew’s best weapons, and they were–for the self-confident elite. For the mass of ordinary Jews, tales of miracles past, hope of those to come, were a surer comfort in time of trouble. Jewish sacred literature catered for both needs, for alongside its intellectually satisfying commentarial method was the sprawling mass of aggadic stories, the piyyut or poetry, and endless weird superstitions children learned at their mother’s knee. The more the Jews were persecuted and economically depressed, the more they turned to sacred fairy tales. ‘At one time’, a midrash notes, ‘when money was not scarce, people longed to hear Mishnah, halakhah and Talmud. Nowadays money is scarce and, worse, people sicken under their slavery, and all they want to hear are blessings and consolation.’47
The Jews suffered severely, under both Islam and Christianity. It might be true, as one of Abelard’s pupils enviously observed, ‘A Jew, however poor, if he has ten sons, will put them all to letters, not for gain as the Christians do, but for the understanding of God’s law–and not only his sons but his daughters too.’48 But the kind of Judaic rationalism Maimonides advocated was really possible only for the upper class, and remained largely its property. As the genizah documents show, the folk religion he detested and denounced flourished under his nose in Fustat. Jews practised both white and black magic. They did fire-tricks, made birds cease to fly, then fly again, conjured up both good and evil spirits in ceremonies which sometimes lasted the entire night, then held fumigation sessions to get rid of them. They went into trances. They held seances. There were abracadabra spells for protection on journeys, ridding a house of lice, making women or men fall in love, or ‘swearing in of the angels’. There were even secret manuals, written in Judaeo-Arabic, purporting to guide Jews to the secret tomb-treasures of the ancient Egyptians.49
Such an irrational approach to religion was not confined to the Jewish masses, however. It appealed also to the upper classes, among whom it took the form of mysticism. Maimonides’ own wife was an emotional believer who came from a long line of pietist-mystics. His son and heir, Abraham, took after his mother rather than his father. Though he seems to have been devoted to his father’s memory and zealously defended his views, his own magnum opus, a gigantic tome called The Complete Guide for the Pious, presents pietism or hasidut as a way of life, a counter-science to rationalism.50 He became known as the rosh kol ha-hasidim, the ‘head of all the pietists’, and attracted letters and disciples from all over the Jewish world. These dévots fasted all day and stood in prayer all night. Abraham even admired the Moslem mystics, or sufis, and said they were worthier disciples of the prophets of Israel than the Jews of his day.51 This would have angered his father, who wanted to ban the works of Jewish mystics, let alone Moslem ones.
Unfortunately for the rationalists, mysticism had deep roots in Judaism; indeed, it might be said to have roots in Yahweh-worship. The notion that, in addition to the written law of the Pentateuch given by God to Moses, God had also given him Oral Law was convenient to the religious authorities. But it was also exceedingly dangerous for it led to the belief there was a mass of special knowledge about God, handed down orally and secretly, which only the privileged few were permitted to learn. In the Talmud the word ‘kabbalah’ simply means ‘received [doctrine]’ or ‘tradition’–the latter part of the Bible, after the Pentateuch and the oral teaching. However, it gradually came to mean esoteric teaching, enabling the privileged few either to make direct communion with God or to acquire knowledge of God through non-rational means. Chapter 8 of Proverbs and Chapter 28 of the Book of Job, which treat by metaphor and analogy of wisdom as a creative living force, giving the key to God and the universe, seem to lend authority to the idea. In later ages, whenever a rationalist Jew tried to stamp on mysticism, he found its exponents could always quote the Bible at him.
Still more so could they quote the Talmud, because by that stage Judaism had picked up a multitude of esoteric elements. Some scholars argue that they were acquired from Persia, during the Exile; others, more plausibly, that they came from Greek gnosticism. Gnosticism, or the lore of secret knowledge-systems, is an extremely insidious parasitic growth, which attaches itself like a poisonous ivy to the healthy trunk of a major religion. In Christianity, the early church fathers had to fight desperately to prevent it from smothering the faith. It attacked Judaism too, especially in the diaspora. Philo, in De Vita Contemplativa, wrote of a sect called The Worshippers of God, who had developed the theory of the Torah as a living body, a typically gnostic idea.52 It penetrated circles in Palestine who were normally most resistant to Greek ideas–the Pharisees, the Essenes, the Qumran sect, and later the tannaim and amoraim. Josephus says the Essenes had a magic literature. Its first real efflorescence was in apocalyptic.
These books, whose real authors concealed their identities behind the names of Enoch, Moses, Noah, Baruch and other great historical figures, were xenophobic, nationalist and inflammatory, as we have seen; they were the angry, bitter refuge of an oppressed people calling down cataracts and hurricanes on their heavily armed enemies. They wrote of angels, devils, hell, heaven, firestorms and the end of time, when Greeks and Romans would be smitten. These texts dealt in secret knowledge, denied to all except the most trustworthy and zealous Jews–it was typical of the fierce Qumran monks that they had the Book of Enoch in both Hebrew and Aramaic–and hidden sources of power, which could be conjured up to overwhelm the kittim and other hated opponents of God. Chapter 14 of the Book of Enoch, dealing with the mysteries of the Throne, lying on its chariot–itself suggested by Chapter 1 of Ezekiel–led to the emergence of a whole school of Merkabah (chariot) mystics. They unloaded on credulous Jews masses of information about the angels who ‘stood before the chariot’, the descent of fire from above, and the ascent of the pious soul to the chariot through ecstasy. Unlike Torah-teaching, which was publicly conducted in noisy chanting, chariot-knowledge was imparted covertly, in a whisper, to specially chosen pupils who had to display some specified ethical qualities, possess certain facial characteristics and have palms which satisfied the chiromancers. Expositors of the lore were sometimes surrounded by fire, or a nimbus, or went into trances. They entered paradise miraculously, like Elijah–one ‘looked and died’, another ‘looked and was smitten’, a third ‘ascended in peace and descended in peace’.53 Aspirants to the ecstatic state placed their heads between their knees and recited songs about the Throne of Glory or early sacred poems.
In addition to the practical magic of direct communion with God through mystical states, the esoteric books from the first century onwards poured forth a torrent of information about the deity and paradise. Since the Torah was holy, letters were holy; so were numbers; if the key were found, secret knowledge could be obtained. One key was Psalms 147:5: ‘Great is our Lord, and of great power’, which was used to give the dimensions of divinity–using the letter-figure code as 236 multiplied by 10,000 celestial leagues to provide the basic measurements of head and limbs, and their secret names. These secret names for God–Adiriron, Zavodiel, Akhtriel, Tazash, Zoharariel, for instance–were important because they formed passwords allowing the celestial doorkeepers to let the ascending soul into the fantastic series of eight palaces which led up to paradise. Eight was a magic number pinched from the Greek gnostics, and the chariot, the power and emanation of God, was the equivalent of the Greek aeon. But twenty-two, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, was a magic number also, since creation itself was enacted through combinations of Hebrew letters and, when discovered, these codings revealed the secrets of the universe.
The sages were both fascinated and repelled by this egregious superstition. The anthropomorphism of God’s bodily measurements went against the basic Judaic teaching that God is non-created and unknowable. The sages advised Jews to keep their eyes firmly fixed on the law and not to probe dangerous mysteries: ‘Whosoever ponders on four things it were better for him if he had never been born–what is above, what is below, what is before time, what will be hereafter.’ But they then proceeded to do just that themselves; and, being elitists, they tended to fall in with the idea of special knowledge conveyed to the elect: ‘The story of creation should not be expounded before two persons, and the chapter on the chariot before even one person, unless he is a sage and already has an independent understanding of the matter.’ That was the Talmud; indeed the Talmud and other holy writings contained a good deal of this suspect material.
Hence rationalists like Maimonides were embarrassed, indeed exasperated, by much of what they found in the Talmud. There was, for instance, the Shi’ur Qoma or ‘Measure of the Divine Body’, which interpreted the Song of Solomon as a divine allegory of God’s love for Israel and gives astounding detailed dimensions for God’s limbs, as well as their secret names. The Karaites, who rejected talmudic Judaism completely, sneered at this text and used it to attack the rabbis. They claimed that it measured God’s face down to the tip of his nose as 5,000 ells. This was an invention; but there was material in the book equally bad. Moslems, too, used it to attack the Jews and justify persecution. One later commentator tried to explain it away by saying the figures were actually the dimensions of the universe. Maimonides’ distaste at having to deal with the text can be imagined. At first he took refuge in the phrase: ‘It would take a hundred pages to discuss the topic.’ Then he crossed it out–the manuscript of his Mishnah commentary in which this occurs survives. Later, he persuaded himself that the whole thing was the work ‘of one of the Byzantine preachers, nothing else’, and denounced it as a forgery.54
The rationalism for which Maimonides stood was, in part, a reaction to the growth of esoteric literature and its penetration of Jewish intellectual life. And rationalism did have some effect. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it forced the leading mystics, at any rate those with a claim to intellectual respectability, to refine their literature and corpus of belief, purge it of its magical dross and the gnostic clutter of centuries, and turn it into a coherent system. The higher kabbalah, as we might call it, began to emerge in Provençal France in the second half of the twelfth century. It was drawn from many elements. One was poetry, and especially the poems of the great Spanish lyricist Judah Halevi (1075-1141), whose 800 known poems include 350 piyyutim. Halevi was a religious Zionist, an unusual thing to be at that time, and his most famous group of thirty-four lyrics are termed Poems of Zion. He thought that life in Spain, however comfortable it might be between bursts of persecution, was slavery compared to the true Jewish existence in Palestine, and he eventually went there. He saw the Jews as a tragic and injured people, and he called his one philosophical work, an apologia for Judaism, a book ‘in defence of the despised faith’. It was an attack on Aristotelian rationality as well as Christianity and Islam, and he took the view strongly that, for suffering humanity, and the cruelly treated Jews in particular, deductive reasoning, however desirable in a perfect world, was no substitute for direct experience of God.55 This was a hard point for even a highly educated, wealthy Jew to answer in time of persecution, and there is no doubt that mysticism appealed more strongly whenever the Christian or Islamic net tightened round the Jews.
The Provençal mystics also drew on neo-Platonism and developed imposing philosophic theories of their own–even Maimonides was forced to admit that some of them were learned. One, Abraham ben David, or Rabad, wrote a scholarly work attacking Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. Abraham’s son, Isaac the Blind (c. 1160-1235), created something approaching a coherent system of kabbalah, based on the ten sefirot or attributes of God, and the theory that all creation was, and is, a mere linguistic development, the materialization of divine speech. This uses the neo-Platonist concept of the logos (as in the opening of St John’s Gospel) but recasts it in terms of Torah study and prayer. From Narbonne, where Isaac lived, mystical kabbalah spread south across the Pyrenees to Gerona, Burgos and Toledo. Its standing was immeasurably improved by the patronage of the great rabbi Moses ben Nahman, known as Nahmanides or Ramban (1194-1270), who became a convert to the system in youth and later rose to be the leading judicial authority in Spain.
Nahmanides produced at least fifty works, mostly Talmud and halakhic commentary, and in his old age he wrote a famous commentary on the Torah. None is specifically kabbalistic but there are throughout hints of the system, especially in the Bible commentary, and the effect was to carry the kabbalah into the mainstream of orthodox Jewish scholarship, above all in Spain. Nahmanides made it possible for the kabbalists to pose as the conservatives, tracing the origin of their ideas back to the Bible and Talmud, and upholding the best and most ancient Jewish traditions. It was the rationalists who were the innovators, bringing to the study of the Torah the pagan ideas of the ancient Greeks. In this respect, the campaign against the works of Maimonides could be described as the last squeak of the anti-Hellenists.
Nahmanides himself never joined the witch-hunt against rationalism–on the contrary, he opposed it–but he made it possible for the kabbalists to escape similar charges of heresy, which in fact would have been much better grounded. For kabbalah not only introduced gnostic concepts which were totally alien to the ethical monotheism of the Bible, it was in a sense a completely different religion: pantheism. Both its cosmogony–its account of how creation was conceived in God’s words–and its theory of divine emanations led to the logical deduction that all things contain a divine element. In the 1280s, a leading Spanish kabbalist, Moses ben Shem Tov of Guadalajara, produced a summa of kabbalistic lore, the Sefer-ha-Zohar, generally known as the Zohar, which became the best-known treatise on the subject. Much of this work is explicitly pantheist: it insists repeatedly that God ‘is everything’ and everything is united in Him, ‘as is known to the mystics’. But if God is in everything, and everything is in God, how can God be a single, specific being, non-created and absolutely separate from creation, as orthodox Judaism had always emphatically insisted? There is no answer to this question, except the plain one that Zohar-kabbalah is heresy of the most pernicious kind. Yet it is a fact that this kind of mystic pantheism exercises a curious appeal to very clever people whose customary approach to thought is soberly rational. By a remarkable paradox, the current of speculation which was to carry Spinoza out of Judaism brought him to pantheism too, so that he was the end-product both of the rationalism of Maimonides and the anti-rationalism of his opponents.
But that was for the future: in medieval Jewry, with its wide dispersal of religious authority, these rival currents were able to coexist. In a harsh world, the poor looked to superstition and folk religion for comfort; the rich, if they had the strength of mind, to rationalism, if not, to mystic kabbalah. Judaism had too many external enemies to want to risk its internal harmony by imposing a uniformity no one really wanted. Indeed, one can see medieval Judaism as essentially a system designed to hold Jewish communities together in the face of many perils: economic disaster, plague, arbitrary rule, above all the assault of two great imperialist religions.
The state, whether Christian or Islamic, was not as a rule the main enemy. Often, indeed, it was the best friend. The Jews were staunchly loyal to duly constituted authority, for religious reasons and from plain self-interest: they were a minority dependent on the ruler for protection. Geniza documents of 1127-31 show that Jews said regular public prayers for Islamic rulers 200 years before the text surfaced in the Jewish prayer-book. In contrast to Moslem sources of the same period, the geniza reveals no criticism of authority. The rulers responded. They regarded Jews as an exceptionally law-abiding and wealth-producing element in the community. The stronger authority was, the more likely the Jews were to be safe. Trouble came, in both Christian and Moslem lands, during waves of religious enthusiasm, when fundamentalist priests overawed the ruler or, worse still, turned him into a zealous convert.
The Jews could never be sure when these moments would come. They prepared against them. They had renounced resistance by force in the second century, and did not resume it until the twentieth in Palestine. But there were other methods. One was for their ablest members to adopt professions which made them useful to the host communities but also kept them mobile. In Islam this was not usually difficult. Able Jews became doctors. Islamic rulers made daily use of their services; so did humble people if they could, consulting them even for minor complaints such as constipation and diarrhoea, as prescriptions which survive in the geniza show. In Egypt there was a Jewish doctor in every town and often in every village in areas of Jewish settlement. Jewish doctors were popular. They attended the big public hospitals and often had small private ones of their own. They could go anywhere, have access to anybody. So they were nearly always the leaders of the Jewish community. The first family of Egyptian nagids were all doctors. Medicine was the profession not only of Maimonides but of his son, probably his grandson, and his great-grandson. The al-Amman family were doctors for eight generations, and in one of them the father and all five sons were in the profession. So, occasionally, were daughters, at any rate as oculists. Judah Halevi was a doctor. So was Nahmanides. These medical families also traded in related products: drugs, opium, medical herbs, perfumes, scientific books. The trading networks thus developed enabled a medical family to switch from one country to another whenever persecution threatened. Jewish doctors were welcome everywhere except in phases of religious frenzy–when, of course, they were frequently accused of poisoning.56
Keeping family corporations together was the best Jewish defence. The extended family was far more important than the nuclear family. The genizah sources show that primary loyalty went to fathers, sons, brothers, sisters, not spouses. Letters between brothers and sisters were much commoner than between husbands and wives. A woman’s proverb went: ‘A husband I can get, children I can bear, but a noble brother–where can I find him?’57 Wills show that when a man died without children, his estate went to his brother, or the closest member of the ‘House of the Father’, not the wife, who got only her own dowry. As one will put it, ‘the balance of the estate returns to my father’s house’.58
To keep the family strong, marriage was in effect compulsory for men, and for women of child-bearing age; the genizah documents reveal no word for a spinster. It was a great economic and social strength of Judaism, as opposed to Islam, that it rejected polygamy. The Pentateuch did not actually prohibit it, but Proverbs 31:10-31 appeared to uphold monogamy and it was the rule from post-Exilic times; from the age of Rabbi Gershom (960-1028), bigamy and polygamy were punished by the severest type of excommunication in European Jewry.59 Bigamy led to excommunication in Egypt too, though in the case of compulsory levirate marriage, Maimonides sanctioned bigamy provided the wives were equally treated–‘one night with this one, one night with that’.60 A male became adult at thirteen, when he could make up a quorum for the services and put on phylacteries, and from the early thirteenth century this point was marked by the bar-mitzvah, meaning he had come under the yoke of the commandments.61 Then he was married as soon as convenient–Maimonides was most unusual in not marrying until he was past thirty.
Marriage was a social and business transaction designed to keep society cohesive, so the contract or ketubbah was read out at the ceremony and it was drawn up, like a partnership agreement, to avoid disputes or make dissolution uncontentious. Here is a Karaite contract dated 26 January 1028: