History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  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 lowes
t 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 an
ything 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