by Will Durant
In everlasting grace,
Nor let us be of Thee abhorred,
Who art our dwelling place.
We wander ever to and fro,
Or sit in chains in exile drear;
Yet still proclaim, where’er we go,
The splendor of our Lord is here.7
His masterpiece, Kether Malkuth (Royal Crown), celebrated the greatness of God as his early poems had celebrated his own:
From Thee to Thee I fly to win
A place of refuge, and within
Thy shadow from Thy anger hide,
Until Thy wrath be turned aside.
Unto Thy mercy I will cling
Until Thou hearken pitying;
Nor will I quit my hold of Thee
Until Thy blessing light on me.8
The richness and variety of Jewish culture in Moslem Spain were summed up in the Ibn Ezra family at Granada. Jacob ibn Ezra held an important post in the government of King Habbus under Samuel ibn Naghdela. His home was a salon of literature and philosophy. Of his four sons, reared in this atmosphere of learning, three reached distinction: Joseph rose to high office in the state, and to leadership of the Jewish community; Isaac was a poet, a scientist, and a Talmudist; Moses ibn Ezra (1070-1139) was a scholar, a philosopher, and the greatest Jewish poet of the generation before Halevi. His happy youth ended when he fell in love with a beautiful niece, whose father (his older brother Isaac) married her to his younger brother Abraham. Moses left Granada, wandered through strange lands, and fed his hopeless passion with poetry. “Though thy lips drop honey for others to sip, live on, breathe myrrh for others to inhale. Though thou art false to me, yet shall I be true to thee till the cold earth claims her own. My heart rejoices in the nightingale’s song, though the singer soars above me and afar.”9 In the end, like Gabirol, he tuned his harp to piety, and sang psalms of mystic surrender.
Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra—whom Browning used as a mouthpiece of Victorian philosophy—was a distant relative, but an intimate friend, of Moses ibn Ezra. Born in Toledo in 1093, his youth knew hunger, and thirsted for knowledge in every field. He too wandered from town to town, from occupation to occupation, luckless in all; “were candles my merchandise,” he said, with the wry humor of the Jew, “the sun would never set; if I sold burial shrouds, men would live forever.” He traveled through Egypt and Iraq to Iran, perhaps to India, back to Italy, then to France and England; at seventy-five he was returning to Spain when he died, still poor, but acclaimed throughout Jewry for both his poetry and his prose. His works were as varied as his domiciles—on mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, religion; his poems ranged through love and friendship, God and nature, anatomy and the seasons, chess and the stars. He gave poetic form to ideas ubiquitous in the Age of Faith, and he anticipated Newman in a Hebrew melody:
O God of earth and heaven,
Spirit and flesh are Thine!
Thou hast in wisdom given
Man’s inward light divine
My times are in Thy hand,
Thou knowest what is best;
And where I fear to stand
Thy strength brings succor blest.
Thy mantle hides my sins,
Thy mercies are my sure defense;
And for Thy bounteous providence
Thou wilt demand no recompense.10
His contemporaries valued him chiefly for his Biblical commentaries on every book of the Old Testament. He defended the authenticity and divine inspiration of the Hebrew Scriptures, but interpreted as metaphors the anthropomorphic phrases applied to the Deity. He was the first to suggest that the Book of Isaiah was the work of two prophets, not one. Spinoza considered him a founder of rational Biblical criticism.11
The greatest European poet of his age was Jehuda Halevi (1086-1147?). Born at Toledo a year after its capture by Alfonso VI of Castile, he grew up in security under the most enlightened and liberal Christian monarch of the time. One of his early poems pleased Moses ibn Ezra; the older poet invited Jehuda to come and stay with him in Granada; there Moses and Isaac ibn Ezra entertained him for months in their homes. His verses were read, his epigrams were repeated, in every Jewish community in Spain. His poetry reflected his genial character and his fortunate youth; he sang of love with all the skill and artifice of a Moslem or Provençal troubadour, and with the sensuous intensity of the Song of Songs. One poem—“The Garden of His Delight”—put into fervent verse the frankest passages of that erotic masterpiece:
Come down, her beloved; why tarriest thou
To feed amid her gardens?
Turn aside to the couch of love,
To gather her lilies.
Secret apples of her breasts
Give forth their fragrance;
For thee she hideth in her necklaces
Precious fruits shining like light….
She would shame, but for her veil,
All the stars of heaven.12
Leaving the Ibn Ezras’ courteous hospitality, Halevi went to Lucena, and studied for several years in the Jewish academy there; he took up medicine, and became an undistinguished practitioner. He founded a Hebrew institute in Toledo, and lectured there on the Scriptures. He married, and had four children. As he grew older he became more conscious of Israel’s misfortunes than of his own prosperity; he began to sing of his people, their sorrows, and their faith. Like so many Jews, he longed to end his days in Palestine.
O City of the World [Jerusalem], beauteous in proud splendor!
Oh, that I had eagle’s wings that I might fly to thee,
Till I wet thy dust with my tears!
My heart is in the East, while I tarry in the West.13
Comfortable Spanish Jews accepted such verses as a poetical pose, but Halevi was sincere. In 1141, leaving his family in good hands, he began an arduous pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Unfavorable winds drove his ship off course to Alexandria. There the Jewish community feted him, and begged him not to venture into Jerusalem, then in the Crusaders’ hands. After some delay he went on to Damietta and Tyre, and thence, for some unknown reason, to Damascus. There he disappeared from history. Legend says that he made his way to Jerusalem, knelt at the first sight of it, kissed the earth, and was trampled to death by an Arab horseman.14 We do not know if he ever reached the city of his dreams. We do know that at Damascus, perhaps in the last year of his life, he composed an ‘Ode to Zion” that Goethe ranked among the greatest poems in world literature.15
Art thou not, Zion, fain
To send forth greetings from thy sacred rock
Unto thy captive train
Who greet thee as the remnants of thy flock?…
Harsh is my voice when I bewail thy woes;
But when in fancy’s dream
I see thy freedom, forth its cadence flows,
Sweet as the harps that hung by Babel’s stream.…
I would that, where God’s Spirit was of yore
Poured out unto thy holy ones, I might
There too my soul outpour!
The house of kings and throne of God wert thou;
How comes it then that now
Slaves fill the throne where sat thy kings before?
Oh, who will lead me on
To seek the posts where, in far distant years,
The angels in their glory dawned upon
Thy messengers and seers?
Oh, who will give me wings
That I may fly away,
And there, at rest from all my wanderings,
The ruins of my heart among thy ruins lay?
I’ll bend my face unto thy soil, and hold
Thy stones as precious gold….
Thy air is life unto my soul, thy grains
Of dust are myrrh, thy streams with honey flow;
Naked and barefoot, to thy ruined fanes
How gladly would I go!
To where the ark was treasured, and in dim
Recesses dwelt the holy cherubim…
Perfect in beauty, Zion, how in thee
>
Do love and grace unite!
The souls of thy companions tenderly
Turn unto thee; thy joy was their delight,
And weeping they lament thy ruin now
In distant exile; for thy sacred height
They long, and toward thy gates in prayer they bow.
The Lord desires thee for His dwelling place
Eternally; and blest
Is he whom God has chosen for the grace
Within thy courts to rest.
Happy is he that watches, drawing near,
Until he sees thy glorious lights arise,
And over whom thy dawn breaks full and clear
Set in the orient skies.
But happiest he who, with exultant eyes
The bliss of thy redeemed ones shall behold,
And see thy youth renewed as in the days of old.16
II. THE ADVENTURES OF THE TALMUD
The Jews of that golden age in Spain were too prosperous to be as deeply religious as their poets became in declining years; they produced verses joyous and sensuous and graceful, and expressed a philosophy that confidently reconciled the Holy Scriptures with Greek thought. Even when Almohad fanaticism drove the Jews from Moslem into Christian Spain they continued to prosper; and Jewish academies flourished under Christian tolerance in Toledo, Gerona, and Barcelona in the thirteenth century. But in France and Germany the Jews were not so fortunate. They crowded their narrow quarters timidly, and gave their best minds to the study of the Talmud. They did not bother to justify their faith to the secular world; they never questioned its premises; they consumed themselves in the Law.
The academy founded by Rabbi Gershom at Mainz became one of the most influential schools of its time; hundreds of students gathered there, and shared with Gershom in editing and clarifying, through two generations of labor, the Talmudic text. A similar role was played in France by Rabbi Shelomoh ben Yitzhak (1040-1105), fondly called Rashi from the first letters of his title and his name. Born at Troyes in Champagne, he studied in the Jewish academies of Worms, Mainz, and Speyer; returning to Troyes, he supported his family by selling wine, but gave every leisure hour to the Bible and the Talmud. Though not officially a rabbi, he founded an academy at Troyes, taught there for forty years, and gradually composed commentaries on the Old Testament, the Mishna, and the Gemara. He did not try, as some Spanish scholars had done, to read philosophical ideas into the religious texts; he merely explained these with such lucid learning that his Talmudic commentaries are now printed with the Talmud. The modest purity of his character and his life won him reverence among his people as a saint. Jewish communities everywhere in Europe sent him questions in theology and law, and gave legal authority to his replies. His old age was saddened by the pogroms of the First Crusade. After his death his grandsons Samuel, Jacob, and Isaac ben Meir continued his work. Jacob was the first of the “tosaphists”: for five generations after Rashi the French and German Talmudists revised and amended his commentaries with tosafoth or “supplements.”
The Talmud had hardly been completed when Justinian outlawed the book (553) as “a tissue of puerilities, fables, iniquities, insults, imprecations, heresies, and blasphemies.”17 Thereafter the Church seems to have forgotten the existence of the Talmud; few theologians of the Latin Church could read the Hebrew or Aramaic in which it was written; and for 700 years the Jews were free to study the cherished volumes—so sedulously that they in turn seem almost to have forgotten the Bible. But in 1239 Nicholas Donin, a French Jew converted to Christianity, laid before Pope Gregory IX an indictment of the Talmud as containing shameful insults of Christ and the Virgin, and incitations to dishonesty in dealing with Christians. Some of the charges were true, for the assiduous compilers had so reverenced the tannaim and amoraim as to include in the haggadic or popular portion of the Gemara occasional remarks in which irate rabbis had struck back at Christian critiques of Judaism.18 But Donin, now more Christian than the Pope, added several charges that could not be substantiated: that the Talmud considered it permissible to deceive, and meritorious to kill, a Christian, no matter how good; that the Jews were allowed by their rabbis to break promises made under oath; and that any Christian who studied the Jewish Law was to be put to death. Gregory ordered all discoverable copies of the Talmud in France, England, and Spain to be turned over to the Dominicans or the Franciscans; bade the monks examine the books carefully; and commanded that the books be burned if the charges proved true. No record has been found of the aftermath of this order. In France Louis IX directed all Jews to surrender their copies of the Talmud on pain of death, and summoned four rabbis to Paris to defend the book in public debate before the King, Queen Blanche, Donin, and two leading Scholastic philosophers—William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus.19 After three days’ inquiry the King ordered all copies of the Talmud to be burned (1240). Walter Cornutus, Archbishop of Sens, interceded for the Jews, and the King allowed many copies to be restored to their owners. But the Archbishop died soon afterward, and some monks were of opinion that this was the judgment of God on the royal lenience. Convinced by them, Louis ordered the confiscation of all copies of the Talmud; twenty-four cartloads were brought to Paris, and were committed to the flames (1242). The possession of the Talmud was prohibited in France by a papal legate in 1248; and thereafter rabbinical studies and Hebrew literature declined in all of France except Provence.
A similar debate took place in Barcelona in 1263. Raymond of Peñafort, a Dominican monk in charge of the Inquisition in Aragon and Castile, undertook to convert the Jews of these states to Christianity. To equip his preachers he arranged for the teaching of Hebrew in the seminaries of Christian Spain. A converted Jew, Paul the Christian, assisted him, and so impressed Raymond with his knowledge of both Christian and Jewish theology that the monk arranged a disputation between Paul and Rabbi Moses ben Nachman of Gerona before King James I of Aragon. Nachmanides came reluctantly, fearing victory as much as defeat. The debate continued for four days, to the delight of the King; apparently the amenities were reasonably observed. In 1264 an ecclesiastical commission commandeered all copies of the Talmud in Aragon, obliterated the anti-Christian passages, and returned the books to their owners.20 In an account that Nachmanides wrote of his debate for the Jewish synagogues of Aragon he spoke of Christianity in terms that seemed to Raymond grossly blasphemous.21 The monk protested to the King, but it was not till 1266 that James, yielding to papal insistence, banished Nachmanides from Spain. A year later the rabbi died in Palestine.
III. SCIENCE AMONG THE JEWS
Jewish science and philosophy in the Middle Ages were almost entirely domiciled in Islam. Isolated and scorned, and yet influenced by their neighbors, the Jews of medieval Christendom took refuge in mysticism, superstition, and Messianic dreams; no situation could have favored science less. Religion, however, encouraged the study of astronomy, for on this depended the correct determination of the holydays. In the sixth century the Jewish astronomers of Babylonia substituted astronomic calculation for direct observation of the heavens; they based the year on the apparent movements of the sun, and the months on the phases of the moon; gave Babylonian names to the months; made some months “full” with thirty days, some “defective” with twenty-nine; and then reconciled the lunar with the solar calendar by inserting a thirteenth month every third, sixth, eighth, eleventh, fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth year in a nineteen-year cycle. In the East the Jews dated events by the Seleucid calendar, which began at 312 B.C.; in Europe, in the ninth century, they adopted the present “Jewish era,” anno mundi—“year of the world”—beginning with the supposed creation in 3761 B.C. The Jewish calendar is as clumsy and sacred as our own.
One of the earliest astronomers in Islam was the Jewish scholar Mashallah (d. c. 815). His De scientia motus orbis was translated from Arabic into Latin by Gerard of Cremona, and won wide acclaim in Christendom. His treatise De mercibus (On Prices) is the oldest extant scientific work in the Arabic tongue. The foremost
mathematical treatise of the age22 was the Hibbur ha-meshihah— on algebra, geometry, and trigonometry—of Abraham ben Hiyya of Barcelona (1065-1136), who also composed a lost encyclopedia of mathematics, astronomy, optics, and music, and the earliest surviving Hebrew treatise on the calendar. Abraham ibn Ezra, in the next generation, found no conflict between writing poetry and advancing combinatorial analysis. These two Abrahams were the first Jews to write scientific works in Hebrew rather than in Arabic. Through such books, and a flood of translations from Arabic into Hebrew, Moslem science and philosophy invaded the Jewish communities of Europe, and broadened their intellectual life beyond purely rabbinical lore.
Profiting in some measure from Islamic science, but also recapturing their own traditions of the healing art, the Jews of this period wrote outstanding treatises on medicine, and became the most esteemed physicians in Christian Europe. Isaac Israeli (c. 855-c. 955) acquired such fame as an ophthalmologist in Egypt that he was appointed physician to the Aghlabid court at Qairwan. His medical works, translated from Arabic into Hebrew and Latin, were acclaimed as classics throughout Europe; they were used as textbooks at Salerno and Paris, and were quoted, after 700 years of life, in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Tradition describes Isaac as indifferent to wealth, an obstinate bachelor, and a centenarian. Probably contemporary with him was Asaf ha-Jehudi, the obscure author of a recently discovered manuscript reckoned to be the oldest extant medical work in Hebrew, and remarkable for its teaching that the blood circulates through the arteries and the veins; had he surmised the function of the heart he would have completely anticipated Harvey.23
In Egypt, after the arrival of Maimonides (1165), the medical art was dominated by Jewish practitioners and texts. Abu al-Fada of Cairo wrote the principal ophthalmological treatise of the twelfth century, and al-Kuhin al-Attar composed (c. 1275) a pharmacopoeia still used in the Moslem world. The Jewish physicians of southern Italy and Sicily served as one medium through which Arabic medicine entered Salerno. Shabbathai ben Abraham (913-70), called Donnolo, born near Otranto, was captured by Saracens, studied Arabic medicine at Palermo, and then returned to practice in Italy. Benvenutus Grassus, a Jerusalem Jew, studied at Salerno, taught there and at Montpellier, and wrote a Practica oculorum (c. 1250) which Islam and Christendom alike accepted as the definitive treatise on diseases of the eye; 224 years after its publication it was chosen as the first book to be printed on its theme.
