~35 دقیقه مطالعه • بروزرسانی ۱۰ فروردین ۱۴۰۵
Literature
In every age the Jewish spirit wavered between the pursuit of material security in a hostile world or the thirst for intellectual questions. The Jewish merchant was a dead scholar; he envied the man who had freed himself from the grip of greed and pursued the love of knowledge and the mirage of wisdom with a free mind, and he honored him with complete generosity. Jewish merchants and moneychangers who set out for the fairs of Troyes in France would stop on the way to hear the sermons of Rashi, the great commentator on the Talmud. Thus, amid the heat of commercial occupation, or degrading poverty, or great insult, the Jews of the Middle Ages continued to train grammarians, theologians, mystics, poets, scholars, and philosophers; and for half a century (1150–1200) only the Muslims equaled them in intellectual richness and the number of literate people. The advantage the medieval Jews had was their association and contact with the Islamic world. Many of them were able to read Arabic books, and thus the rich treasury of medieval Muslim culture was open to them. What they had given to Muhammad and the Quran in the field of religious teachings and ideas, they took back in return from Islamic natural sciences, medicine, and philosophy, and through their mediation they stimulated the minds of the people of the Christian West with Muslim thought.
In the Islamic realm, Jews used Arabic in daily conversation and in writing; their poets still composed poetry in Hebrew, but they adopted the meters and rhythms of Arab poets. In the Christian world, Jews spoke the language of the people wherever they lived, but Jewish literature and the rites of worship of Yahweh were in the language of their ancestors. After Maimonides, the Jews of Spain, who had fled from the persecution of the Almohad dynasty, abandoned Arabic and made Hebrew the vehicle for their literary purposes. The revival of the Hebrew language was made possible by the tireless efforts of Jewish linguists. Understanding the text of the Old Testament had become difficult due to the lack of vowel points and punctuation. After three centuries of research, from the seventh to the tenth century, the “Masoretic” text (based on tradition) appeared, in which vowel signs, punctuation marks, signs for separating verses, and marginal notes and comments were added. Thereafter every literate Jew could read the sacred book of his people.
These studies made the completion and development of Hebrew grammar and lexicography inevitable. The poetry and scholarship of Menahem ben Saruk (910–970) attracted the attention of Hasdai ibn Shaprut; that exalted vizier summoned Menahem to Cordoba and encouraged him to compile a dictionary of the words of the “Holy Scriptures” in Hebrew. His student Judah ben David Hayyuj (c. 945–c. 1000) established Hebrew grammar on a scientific basis with three books in Arabic on the language of the “Holy Scriptures.” Hayyuj’s student Jonah ibn Janah (995–1050) of Saragossa surpassed his master with the compilation of the “Book of Criticism” in Arabic, which elevated Hebrew lexicography and grammar. Judah ibn Quraysh of Morocco (d. 900), by investigating the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic languages, founded comparative Semitic linguistics. Abraham al-Fasi [of Fez, c. 980], from the Karaite sect of Jews, following this series of investigations, collected all the words of the “Old Testament” with their origins and roots in alphabetical order and published them as a dictionary. Nathan ben Jehiel of Rome (d. 1106) surpassed all lexicographers with the dictionary he arranged for the “Talmud.” In Narbonne, Joseph Kimhi and his two sons Moses and David (1160–1235) labored for several generations on this subject. The book that David wrote under the title “Mikhlol” or “The Perfection” remained a reliable reference for Hebrew grammar for several centuries and was a constant aid to the translators who undertook the translation of the “Holy Scriptures” during the reign of James I. The names we have mentioned are only a drop in the ocean.
As a result of these comprehensive investigations, Hebrew poetry was freed from the meters and rhythms it had adopted in imitation of Arabic verse, developed its own subjects and forms, and produced only three notable poets in the land of Spain who fully equaled any three other poets one could find among the Muslims or Christians of that age. Solomon ibn Gabirol, who among Christians was famous under the pseudonym Avicebron the philosopher, was, because of his tragic life story, suited to become the voice of the Jewish people. This man, whom Heine, the German poet, called “a poet among philosophers and a philosopher among poets,” was born around 1021 in Malaga. He was still a child when he lost his father and mother and grew up in such poverty that it drove him to bitter thoughts. His poems impressed Yekutiel ben Hasan, who held an important position in the Muslim city-state of Saragossa. Thus Ibn Gabirol enjoyed security and comfort for a while and benefited from the pleasures of life. But the enemies of the emir of that region killed Yekutiel, and Ibn Gabirol went into hiding. For many years he wandered as a destitute and emaciated man through Muslim Spain and became so thin from lack of food that, in his own words, “a mosquito could now easily carry me on its back.” Samuel ibn Nagrela, who was himself a poet, gave him shelter in Granada. There Solomon devoted himself to writing his philosophical works and dedicated his poems to the praise of wisdom:
How can I forget wisdom?
I have made a covenant with wisdom.
She is my mother and I am her dearest child;
She has fastened her jewels around my neck. ...
While life is mine, my soul yearns
To ascend the peaks of her heaven. ...
I will not rest until I find her origin.
Apparently Solomon, because of the intense pride he had, quarreled with Samuel and, although he was not yet twenty-seven or eight years old, again became a wandering pauper; misfortune humbled his rebellious spirit, so he abandoned wisdom and turned to religion:
O Lord God, what is man? A filthy and trampled corpse,
A harmful creature, full of deceit,
A faded flower that dries and wrinkles from heat.
Sometimes his poems took on the same sorrowful majesty that is characteristic of the Psalms:
O Lord, establish peace for us,
Grant us the benefit of eternity,
Do not let us fall into fear of You—
For You are our refuge.
We are constantly wandering and striving,
Or in the gloomy corner of exile in chains;
Yet, wherever we are, we say aloud
That the glory of our Lord is here.
His masterpiece, Keter Malkhut (The Royal Crown), is in praise of the station of God, just as the subject of his early poems is the praise and glorification of the poet’s own station:
From You I flee to You
To find shelter and
In Your shadow I hide from Your wrath,
Until Your anger passes.
I will not let go of the threshold of Your mercy
Until You have mercy on me;
And I will not release You
Until Your favor descends upon me.
The richness and variety of the culture of the Jews of Muslim Spain is summarized in the existence of the Ibn Ezra family who resided in Granada. Jacob ibn Ezra attained an important position in the government of Samuel ibn Nagrela, vizier to King Habus. His house was a gathering place for the literati and philosophers of that age. Of his four sons who grew up in such an environment of learning, three became famous and respected: Joseph rose to a high position in government circles and became the leader of the Jewish community. Isaac was a poet, naturalist, and Talmudic jurist; Moses ibn Ezra (1070–1139) was a scholar, philosopher, and the greatest poet of the generation before Halevi. The joyful period of his childhood ended when he fell in love with his beautiful niece. The girl’s father (his younger brother Isaac) gave her to his younger brother Abraham. Moses left Granada and wandered through foreign lands and quenched the fire of his unfruitful emotions by composing poetry. “Though your lips drip honey for others, be steadfast and exhale the scent of myrrh from your soul so that others may inhale it. Though you are unfaithful to me, I will remain faithful to you until the dark earth reclaims me. My heart rejoices at the songs of the nightingale, though the singer is above my head and far from me.” Finally Moses too, like Ibn Gabirol, tuned his harp to religion and sang psalms of mystical submission.
Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra—that is, the one whom the great English poet Robert Browning considered the spokesman of Victorian-era philosophy—was a distant relative but a close friend of Moses ibn Ezra. Abraham was born in 1093 in the city of Toledo. In his childhood he had an intense desire for all subjects and sciences. He too wandered from city to city and from job to job, succeeding in none; he himself said with the bitter humor characteristic of Jews: “If I traded in candles, the sun would never set; if I sold shrouds, people would live forever.” He traveled through Egypt and Iraq to Iran and perhaps to India and then to Italy and from there to France and England. Upon returning to Spain, he died at the age of seventy-five; although he lived in poverty until his death, he was admired and praised among all the Jews of the world for his poetry and prose. His works were as varied as his residences—in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and religion; his poems covered subjects from love and friendship to God and nature, anatomy and the seasons, and chess and the stars. He gave poetic form to ideas that were common everywhere in the age of faith and surpassed Cardinal Newman in a Hebrew melody:
O Lord of earth and heaven
Spirit and body are Yours!
You, in Your wisdom, have granted man
An inner eye. ...
My moments are in Your hand,
You know what is best for me;
And where I fear to remain
Your power grants me a blessed aid.
Your cloak hides my sins
Your mercies are my safe refuge;
And for Your gracious guidance
You will ask no reward.
His importance in the eyes of his contemporaries was greater for the commentaries he wrote on each of the books of the Old Testament. He defended the originality and divine inspiration of the Jewish Scriptures, but considered all expressions in that book that attributed human attributes to God as metaphorical. He was the first to claim that the book of the prophet Isaiah is the work of two prophets, not one. Spinoza found him one of the founders of rational criticism of the Holy Scriptures.
Judah Halevi (1086–?1147) was the greatest poet of his age in Europe. He was born in Toledo one year after the city was conquered by Alfonso VI, king of Castile, and grew up during the reign of the most liberal and enlightened Christian king of that age. One of the poems he composed early in his career pleased Moses ibn Ezra; this poet, who was older than Judah, invited him to come to Granada and reside there with him. In Granada, Moses and his brother Isaac ibn Ezra hosted Judah for several months in their home with honor and hospitality. In all Jewish communities of Spain his poems were recited and his sayings repeated. His poems reflected his pleasant character and fortunate youth. His ghazals were filled with all the skills and subtleties of Muslim ghazal writers or Provençal troubadours in addition to the emotional power present in the Song of Songs. In one of his ghazals—“The Garden of His Pleasure”—the boldest expressions of that amorous masterpiece appear in the most sensual verses:
Descend, O beloved of that beauty; why do you linger
And not sate yourself with the gardens of his?
Turn toward the bed of love,
To pluck the lilies of his garden.
The hidden apples of her breasts
Diffuse their fragrance.
For you, in her bosom
She hides precious fruits that shine like light. ...
If she did not cast that veil over her face,
She would shame all the stars of heaven.
After enjoying the humble hospitality of the Ibn Ezra family for a while, Judah went to Lucena and spent several years studying medicine in the Jewish academy of that city until he became a physician like most physicians of the age. In Toledo he founded a Hebrew school and himself lectured there on the Holy Scriptures. He married and had four children. The older he became, the more he became aware of the sufferings of the people of Israel than of his own pleasures; therefore he began to compose poems about his people, their sorrows and their faith. Like many Jews, he too longed to spend the last days of his life in Palestine.
O city of the world (Jerusalem), O beauty whose glory is worthy of pride!
Would that I had the wings of an eagle to fly toward you,
To wet your soil with my tears!
My heart is in the East, and I linger in the West.
The prosperous Jews of Muslim Spain accepted such poems only as a poetic display, but Halevi was sincere in what he said. In 1141, after placing his wife and children in a safe place, he undertook the difficult journey to visit Jerusalem. Contrary winds diverted his ship from its main course and drove it toward Alexandria. The Jewish community of Alexandria honored his arrival and asked him to refrain from going to Jerusalem, which at that time was in the hands of the Crusaders. After some delay, he went to Damietta and Tyre and then, for unknown reasons, to Damascus. And there he disappeared from the pages of history. According to one account, he reached Jerusalem and as soon as he saw the outline of the city he knelt, kissed the soil, and died under the hoof of an Arab horseman. We do not know for certain whether this Jewish poet ever reached the city that was the Kaaba of his desires, but we know that in Damascus, perhaps in the last year of his life, he composed a poem entitled “Ode to Zion” that Goethe considered one of the greatest poems in world literature.
O Zion, do you not have the head
To send your greetings from your holy rock
To the caravan of your captive disciples
Who are the remnants of your flock and greet you? ...
When I mourn your afflictions, my voice is harsh;
But when in the dream of imagination
I see your freedom, a melody flows,
So sweet like the sound of harps hung by the rivers of Babylon. ...
There where the spirit of the Lord formerly
Breathed into the bodies of your holy children, there too
I am ready to sacrifice my spirit!
The palaces of kings and the throne of God were yours;
So what has happened that now
Slaves sit on the throne that was formerly the seat of kings?
Ah, who will guide me
To seek the places where in ages long past
Angels, with their glory, descended
Upon your prophets and messengers?
Ah, who will give me wings,
To fly away from this place with spread wings,
And there, free from all wanderings
My heart’s ruins may rest in your ruins?
I will rub my face on your dust and
Preserve your stones like precious gold. ...
Your air gives life to my soul
Your dust is myrrh to me, your streams flow with honey;
Naked and barefoot, to your ruined temples
How with heart and soul I will go!
To the place where they preserved Noah’s ark like a treasure
And in its hidden corners heavenly cherubim dwelt. ...
Zion, O perfection of beauty, in you
Love and dignity have become one!
The souls of your companions turn with love toward you,
Your joy was their happiness,
And now, in distant exile, with weeping eyes
They lament over your ruins, they yearn for your blessed peaks,
And during prayer they bow toward your gates.
The Lord desires you for His dwelling
Forever; and blessed is he whom
His Lord has graciously chosen
To rest in the courts of your palaces.
Blessed is he who beholds you, draws near to you,
Until he sees the glorious lights of your heights before him,
And your dawn rises perfectly bright
Over the expanses of the eastern skies.
But the most blessed of all is he who with joyful eyes
Beholds the happiness of your redeemed,
And sees that you have again, as in ancient times, regained your youth.
The Adventures of the Talmud
The Jews of that golden age of Spain were too successful to follow their poets in the years of decline with all their hearts; they composed joyful poems based on sensual pleasures and pleasing ones and expressed a philosophy that, with confidence, reconciled Greek thought with the Jewish Scriptures. Even when the zeal of the Almohad dynasty drove the Jews from Muslim Spain to Christian Spain, that community still enjoyed prosperity; the Jewish academies, in the thirteenth century, under the tolerant shadow of Christianity, flourished greatly in Toledo, Gerona, and Barcelona; but in France and Germany the Jews had less fortune. The Jews of these regions crowded modestly in their narrow and confined quarters and devoted all their effort to the study of the Talmud. They were not at all thinking of proving the validity of their faith to the secular world. They never doubted the principles of their religion and devoted themselves wholeheartedly to learning the commandments of the Law of Moses.
The academy of Mainz, founded by Rabbi Gershom, became one of the most influential schools of its time. Hundreds of students gathered there and, for two generations, shared with him in editing the text of the Talmud and labored hard. In France Rabbi Shelomo ben Yitzhak (1040–1105)—whom the Jews, by joining the first two letters of the title [Rabbi] and the first letters of his name [Shelomoh Isaac], eagerly called “Rashi” [RASHI]—played a similar role. Rashi was born in Troyes in Champagne and studied in the Jewish academies of Worms, Mainz, and Speyer; after returning to Troyes, he helped his family by selling wine, but devoted every hour of his free time to the study of the Talmud and the Holy Scriptures. Although he was not officially a rabbi, he founded an academy in Troyes and taught there for forty years and gradually composed commentaries on the Old Testament, the Mishnah, and the Gemara. His effort was not, like some Spanish Jewish scholars, to extract philosophical ideas from the religious texts; his work was merely explanation, and his explanations were so easy and understandable that his Talmudic commentaries are now printed in the margin of the Talmud. The modest purity in his character and life made him respected among the Jewish people like the saints. Jewish communities throughout Europe sent religious questions and legal issues to him and considered his answers authoritative. The old age of his life was filled with sorrow by the massacres of the First Crusade. After his death, his descendants Samuel, Jacob, and Isaac ben Meir continued his work. For five generations after Rashi, the Talmudic jurists of France and Germany, by writing a series of Tosafot or “Additions,” reviewed and emended his commentaries, and Jacob ben Meir was the first of the “Addition writers.”
The Talmud had not yet ended when Justinian declared that book illegal as “a bunch of childish words, fables, errors, insults, curses, heresies, and blasphemies” (553). Thereafter it seemed as though the Church had forgotten that a Talmud even existed. Very few of the Latin Church theologians could read this book written in Hebrew or Aramaic, and for seven hundred years the Jews were free to read with ease the volumes of the book that was extremely dear to them—as though they too, in turn, had forgotten the existence of the Christian Bible. But in 1239 Nicholas Donin, a French Jew who had converted to Christianity, complained before Pope Gregory IX that the Talmud contained shameful insults against Christ and the Virgin Mary and incited Jews to dishonesty in dealing with Christians. Some of these accusations were true because the diligent authors of the Talmud, out of the great respect they held for the Tannaim (teachers of the oral law) and Amoraim (expounders of the law), had recorded without omission or addition the allusions that angry rabbis had occasionally brought in rejecting Christian criticisms in the legendary or popular section of the Gemara. But Nicholas Donin, who had become more Catholic than the Pope, added other accusations that had no basis; one was that the Talmud permitted deceiving a Christian person and considered it worthy to kill him, no matter how good a person he might be; second, that the Jews, according to the rabbis’ ruling, were permitted to break oaths that had been affirmed by swearing; and third, that any Christian who studied the Jewish commandments had his blood permitted. Gregory ordered that all copies of the Talmud found in France, England, and Spain be delivered to the Dominicans or Franciscans; and he ordered the monks to examine those copies carefully; and he commanded that if the truth of the aforementioned accusations was proven, those books should be burned. No record of the results of this decree has been found. In France, Louis IX ordered all Jews to deliver their copies of the Talmud to government officials, and declared that the punishment for violators was death. Meanwhile he summoned four rabbis to Paris to defend the Talmud in a public debate in the presence of the king, Blanche of Castile (queen of France), Donin, and two great scholars of scholastic philosophy—Guillaume de Paris (William of Auvergne) and Magnus (Albertus Magnus). After three days of questioning, the king ordered that all copies of the Talmud be burned (1240). Walter Cornutus, archbishop of Sens, interceded for the Jews, and the king of France allowed many copies to be returned to their owners. But shortly afterward the archbishop passed away, and some monks believed that this event was a divine decree regarding the king’s tolerance. Louis was persuaded by them and ordered the confiscation of all copies of the Talmud; twenty-one cartloads of this book were brought to Paris and committed to the flames (1242). In 1248, by order of a papal legate, possession of the Talmud was forbidden in France, and after that rabbinic studies and Hebrew literature declined everywhere in France except in Provence.
In 1263 a similar debate took place in Barcelona. Raymond de Penyafort, a Dominican monk who was in charge of the Inquisition in Aragon and Castile, undertook to compel the Jews of these two regions to accept Christianity. To prepare his preachers for this task, Raymond de Penyafort arranged for the teaching of Hebrew in Christian religious schools. A converted Jew named Paul Christian helped him in this matter, and with the information he had in both Christian and Jewish theology, he so astonished Raymond de Penyafort that this monk arranged a debate between Paul and Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, the great rabbi of Gerona, in the presence of King James I of Aragon. Ibn Nachman, who feared victory in such a debate as much as defeat, came reluctantly. The debate lasted four days, and this matter pleased the king. Apparently mildness and gentleness were duly observed in this assembly. In 1264, a church committee collected all copies of the Jewish Talmud in Aragon, removed the anti-Christian passages, and returned the copies to their owners. In the account that Ibn Nachman wrote of his debate for the Jewish communities of Aragon, he spoke of Christianity with expressions that in the eyes of Raymond de Penyafort were gross blasphemy. The aforementioned monk protested to the king, but until 1266 James took no action, and only in that year did he yield to the Pope’s insistence and exile Ibn Nachman from Spain. One year later, the aforementioned rabbi died in Palestine.
Science Among the Jews
In the Middle Ages natural sciences and Jewish philosophy were almost entirely concentrated in the Islamic world. The Jews of medieval Christian Europe, isolated and insulted, and yet under the influence of their neighbors, took refuge in mysticism, superstition, and dreams of the coming of the Messiah. No worse situation could exist for the maturation and progress of science. Nevertheless, religion encouraged the learning of astronomy, because the precise determination of Jewish holy days depended on this science. In the sixth century, Babylonian astronomers, instead of observing celestial bodies, made astronomical calculation customary; they based the year on the apparent movements of the sun, and the months on the different phases of the moon’s disk; they gave Babylonian names to the months; they designated some months as thirty “full” days and others as twenty-nine “deficient” days; and then, in a nineteen-year cycle, they added a thirteenth month to the third, sixth, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth years and thus reconciled the lunar calendar with the solar one. In the East, Jews calculated events according to the Seleucid calendar that began in 312 BC. In Europe, in the ninth century, they adopted the “Jewish era,” “Anno Mundi” or “Year of the World,” whose beginning was the supposed creation of the world in 3761 BC. The Jewish calendar, like our own Christian calendar, is as graceless and sacred.
One of the pioneering astronomers of the Islamic world was the Jewish scholar Mashallah (d. c. 815). His book “On the Science of the Movements of the Spheres” was translated from Arabic into Latin by Gerard of Cremona and was highly admired in the Christian world. His treatise “On Prices” is the oldest extant scientific work in Arabic. The earliest mathematical treatise of this age was “Hibbur ha-Meshihah ve-ha-Tishboret” on algebra, geometry, and trigonometry—composed by Abraham bar Hiyya of Barcelona (1065–1136), who wrote an encyclopedia on mathematics, astronomy, optics, and music, which has completely disappeared; he also wrote the oldest extant Hebrew treatise on the calendar. Abraham ibn Ezra, of the next generation, saw no contradiction between composing poetry and presenting synthetic analysis. Both Abrahams were the first Jews to write their scientific works in Hebrew rather than Arabic. With the help of such books, and a flood of Arabic translations into Hebrew, Muslim philosophy and science swept through the Jewish communities of Europe and expanded the scope of their intellectual life beyond the limits of the knowledge of the rabbis.
The Jews of this age, who not only benefited to some extent from Islamic sciences but also regained the lost traditions of their own in the art of healing the sick, composed very important treatises on medicine and became the most honored physicians of Christian Europe. Isaac Israeli (c. 855–c. 955) gained such fame in ophthalmology in Egypt that he was appointed court physician to the Aghlabid Arab sultans in Kairouan. His medical books, which were translated from Arabic into Latin and Hebrew, were recognized throughout Europe as classic works on ophthalmology; they were used as textbooks in Salerno and Paris and, seven hundred years after they were written, were cited in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621). According to accounts, Isaac was a man indifferent to worldly goods and strongly opposed to marriage, who lived beyond a hundred years. Perhaps contemporary with him was Asaf the Jew [or Asaf “ha-Rofe” (= Asaf the Physician)], the anonymous author of a manuscript recently discovered and believed to be the oldest extant medical work in Hebrew; a very noteworthy point about this book is that it describes the flow of blood in arteries and veins; if the author had understood the function of the heart, he would have completely preceded Harvey on the subject of blood circulation.
In Egypt, after the arrival of Maimonides (1165), the art of medicine came entirely under the control of Jewish physicians and texts. Abu al-Fida of Cairo wrote the most important ophthalmological treatise of the twelfth century, and Cohen the Pharmacist (c. 658 AH, 1275 AD) compiled a pharmacopeia that is still used in the Islamic world. Jewish physicians from southern Italy and Sicily served as the sole means of transmitting Arabic medicine to the Salerno school of learning. Shabbetai ben Abraham (913–c. 982), nicknamed Donnolo, was born near Otranto, was captured by the Saracens, studied Arabic medicine in Palermo, and then returned to Italy to practice medicine again. A Jew from Jerusalem named Benvenutus Grapheus studied medicine in Salerno, taught there and in Montpellier, and wrote a treatise called “On the Treatment of the Eye” (c. 1250) that scholars of both the Islamic and Christian worlds accepted equally as a definitive treatise on eye diseases. Two hundred and twenty-four years after the publication of this book, it was chosen for printing as the first work on eye diseases.
In Jewish academies, especially in southern France, medicine was part of the curriculum, partly so that the rabbis could earn income through medical practice. Jewish physicians who had studied in the Hebrew academy of Montpellier helped create the famous medical school of Montpellier. The appointment of a Jew in 1300 as head of the medical school aroused the fire of anger of the medical authorities of the University of Paris against all Jews; as a result, the Montpellier school was forced to close its doors to Jews (1301), and the Hebrew physicians of that city, like all the Jews of France, were expelled from the country in 1306. But by this time, as a result of the existence and influence of Muslim and Jewish physicians, Christian world medicine had undergone a revolution. Semitic physicians had long proven the fallacy of the hypothesis that disease is caused by the “entry” of demons into the human body; and their victory in the rational diagnosis and treatment of diseases caused the weakening of people’s belief in the efficacy of relics of past saints and other supernatural means of curing diseases.
Monks and priests of the free orders, whose monasteries and churches were treasuries of relics of past saints and pilgrimage sites for visitors, found it difficult to accept this transformation. The Church forbade Jewish physicians from clinical examinations in Christian homes, because it believed that such physicians had more science than faith, and feared their influence on the minds of the sick. In 1246 the Council of Béziers prohibited the employment of Jewish physicians for Christians; in 1267 the Council of Vienne barred Jewish physicians from treating Christians. These restrictions did not prevent some prominent Christians from benefiting from the skill of Jewish physicians; for example, Pope Boniface VIII, who suffered from an eye disease, sought the help of Isaac ben Mordecai. Ramon Llull (Raymond Lully), one of the scholars and learned men of Spain, complained that every monastery had a Jewish physician; a similar situation in the convents belonging to groups of nuns horrified and angered one papal legate; the Christian kings of Spain, until the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, enjoyed the medical care of Jews. Shem Tov ben Isaac of Barcelona, court physician to James I of Aragon (1213–1276), wrote the most important treatise on women’s diseases of his age. The Jews lost their superiority in the medicine of the Christian world only when Christian universities in the thirteenth century established medicine on rational foundations.
A people like the Jews, who were so mobile and dispersed, naturally had a small share in the science of geography. Nevertheless, the two outstanding travelers of the twelfth century were Jews—Pethahiah of Regensburg and Benjamin of Tudela—who wrote valuable Hebrew accounts of their travels through Europe and the Near East. Benjamin left the city of Saragossa in 1160 and with leisure visited Barcelona, Marseille, Genoa, Pisa, Rome, Salerno, Brindisi, Otranto, Corfu, Constantinople, the Aegean islands, Antioch, all the important cities of Palestine and Baalbek, Damascus, Baghdad, and Iran. Then by ship from the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea he went to Egypt, Sicily, and Italy and from there by land set out for Spain; in 1173 he returned to his birthplace and died shortly afterward. The main purpose of these travels was to see Jewish communities; but with relatively great accuracy and without personal bias, he described the geographical and ethnic characteristics of every country on his way. His account is not as interesting as the reports Marco Polo wrote a century later, but it is probably more reliable. Benjamin’s travel book was translated into almost all European languages and remained a favorite book among Jews until modern times.
The Progress of Jewish Philosophy
Human mental life is made of two forces: the need for belief to live, and the need for reason to progress. In times of poverty and chaos the inclination toward belief takes precedence over the other, because courage is the only essential virtue. In times of wealth, rational forces take precedence over everything else, because they bring advancement and progress. As a result, a civilization that passes from the valley of poverty and reaches the destination of wealth tends to provoke a conflict between reason and faith and “ignite the fire of war between science and theology.” In this struggle, philosophy, whose task is only to observe life as a whole, usually seeks a reconciliation between the two opposing poles, a mediating peace, and as a result is insulted by science and viewed with suspicion by theology. In an age of faith, where hardships make life unbearable without hope, philosophy turns to religion, uses reason in defense of faith, and itself becomes theology in disguise. This was less true for Islam, which was the richest of all, among the three faiths that divided white civilization in the Middle Ages; it was more true for Christianity, which was less wealthy; and it was most true for Judaism, which was the poorest of all. Jewish philosophy in general was in Muslim Spain that it broke away from religion and went its own way, because the Jews of that region were wealthier than their coreligionists in other lands.
Jewish philosophy in the Middle Ages had two sources: the religion of Moses and the ideas of Muslim philosophers. Most Jewish thinkers considered religion and philosophy similar in content and result, and saw their difference only in method and form: what religion taught as divine commandments sent from God, philosophy taught as truth proven according to rational standards. And most Jewish thinkers, from Saadia to Maimonides, undertook such an operation in an Islamic environment; through Arabic translations and Islamic commentaries they became familiar with Greek philosophy; and they wrote their ideas, in addition to Jews, for Muslims as well in Arabic. Just as Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari attacked the Mu’tazilite group with the weapon of argument and saved the orthodoxy of the Islamic faith, in the same way Saadia, who in the same year of Ash’ari’s release from the bonds of skepticism (915) had moved from Egypt toward Babylonia, saved Hebrew theology with his skill and mastery in debate; and interestingly, Saadia not only followed the methods of the Islamic theologians but even the details of their discussions.
Saadia’s victory in Eastern Judaism had the same effect as Ghazali’s triumph in Eastern Islam: that is, it joined hands with political chaos and economic decline to suffocate Hebrew philosophy in the Eastern world. The rest of this story belongs to Africa and Spain. In Kairouan, the capital of the Aghlabids, Isaac Israeli, who was busy with medicine and writing, found an opportunity to compose several reputable philosophical works. His treatise on definitions added several terms to scholastic logic; his treatise on elements explains Aristotle’s “Physics” or natural hearing for Jewish thinkers; his book on soul and substance, instead of the story of creation in Genesis, presents a new Neoplatonic model according to which creation is explained as continuous emanations (“rays”) from God to the material world; in fact, this mental concept became a source for the Kabbalah.
Ibn Gabirol the philosopher had more influence than Ibn Gabirol the poet. Of course, it is one of the jokes of history that the scholastics cited him with respect under the name Avicebron, and thought he was a Muslim or Christian sage. This secret remained hidden until 1846, when Salomon Munk discovered that Ibn Gabirol and Avicebron were the same person. This misunderstanding almost arose because Ibn Gabirol tried to compose his philosophical works with terms that had no connection with the Jewish religion. In his Choice of Pearls—a masterpiece—he almost brought all quotations from non-Jewish sources, whereas Hebrew folklore, especially in terms of witty and profound sayings, is a rich treasury. One of these sayings is completely Confucian: “How should a man take revenge on his enemy? By adding to his praiseworthy qualities.” This is in fact a summary of Ibn Gabirol’s treatise on the improvement of moral qualities, which he apparently composed at the age of twenty-four, that is, at an age when wisdom does not yet suit a young man. The young poet, on the basis of an artificial table, attributed all virtues and vices to the five senses, which also produced vulgar results; but his book was distinguished by the fact that it tried, in an age of faith, to create a set of ethical principles that did not rely on religious belief.
Ibn Gabirol’s masterpiece—Mekor Hayyim—with the same boldness, avoided quoting from the Holy Scriptures, the Talmud, or the Quran. It was precisely this unusual extreme nationalism that made this book so insulting in the eyes of the rabbis and, after being translated into Latin under the title Fons Vitae (The Fountain of Life), gave it influence and prestige in the Christian world. Ibn Gabirol accepted Neoplatonism, which all Arab philosophy had been influenced by, but imposed voluntarism on it that emphasized the role of will in God and man. Ibn Gabirol said that to understand the existence or movement of anything, one must first assume the existence of God as the first substance, the first absolute being, or the
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