by Paul Johnson
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 poe
ms.
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 religiou
s 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.
