History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

the academy.

discussed and pronounced rulings on questions sent from abroad,

Babylonian academies,

the exilarch, who was, as it were, the executive arm of the academies.

The academic gaons and their senior doctors

formed a hereditary sacral-academic nobility, not unlike the mandarins in China.

In practice, however, the power of the Babylonian cathedocrats lasted only so long as the vast Moslem empire stuck together.

Local centres of authoritative scholarship sprang up in Spain and North Africa around emigrant scholars from the old academies.

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.

family mattered and commercial success was useful, but scholarship was essential.

the best way to improve the human condition in general–and ensure the survival of the Jewish vanguard in particular–was to spread knowledge of the Law, because the Law stood for reason and progress.

Maimonides was an elitist but he thought in terms of an ever-expanding elite. Every man could be a scholar according to his lights.

Maimonides was also painfully aware that the Law itself, after a thousand years of legal accretions and unco-ordinated commentary, was in an appalling state of confusion and penetrated by grossly irrational elements. His lifework then was twofold: to reduce the Law to order, and to re-present it on a thoroughly rational basis. To achieve the first, he wrote his Mishnah commentary, which for the first time made clear the underlying principles of mishnaic legislation, and he codified talmudic law, with the object, as he put it, to make it quick and easy to find a decision ‘in the sea of the Torah’.

in addition he wrote his Guide of the Perplexed to show that Jewish beliefs were not just a set of arbitrary assertions imposed by divine command and rabbinical authority, but could be deduced and proved by reason too.

What Maimonides was trying to do was to strengthen the faith by stripping it of superstition and buttressing what remained by reason. But of course in doing so he introduced and popularized a critical approach to its mysteries which would eventually tempt men much further.

To the science of medicine he brought the Judaic doctrine of the one-ness of body and soul, mind and matter, which gave him important insights into the sickness of the psyche, thus foreshadowing Freud. To theology he brought a confidence in the compatibility of faith and reason which fitted his own calm and majestic mind but which was in due course to carry Spinoza outside Judaism completely.

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 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

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.

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.

mysticism appealed more strongly whenever the Christian or Islamic net tightened round the Jews.

mystical kabbalah

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 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-...

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 k...

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.

The rulers responded. They regarded Jews as an exceptionally law-abiding and wealth-producing element in the community. The stronger authority was, the more likely the Jews were to be safe. Trouble came, in both Christian and Moslem lands, during waves of religious enthusiasm, when fundamentalist priests overawed the ruler or, worse still, turned him into a zealous convert.

The Jews could never be sure when these moments would come. They prepared against them. They had renounced resistance by force in the second century, and did not resume it until the twentieth in Palestine. But there were other methods. One was for their ablest members to adopt professions which made them useful to the host communities but also kept them mobile.

In Islam this was not usually difficult. Able Jew...

genizah document of 1121 describes decrees in Baghdad forcing Jews to wear: two yellow badges, one on the headgear and one on the neck. Furthermore, each Jew must hang round his neck a piece of lead weighing [3 grammes] with the word dhimmi on it. He also has to wear a belt round his waist. The women have to wear one red and one black shoe and have a small bell on their necks or shoes….

If the treatment of the Jews under Islam varied, from place to place and from time to time, it was always bad under Byzantine rule.

In Latin Christendom, it was tolerable until the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095; thereafter the position of the Jews deteriorated almost everywhere. As in Islam, the powers-that-be always favoured Jews, other things being equal. They were the best of all urban colonists, had useful trading networks, possessed rare skills, accumulated wealth quickly and were easy to tax.

Yet there was a growing ambivalence in the official attitude to Jews. The secular lords tended to treat the Jews as personal property, to be farmed; not only their incomes but, in case of necessity, their capital too were there to be plundered. The ecclesiastical lords, as the rulers of cities, appreciated the economic value of the Jewish presence; as churchmen they abhorred it. Pope Gregory the Great (reigned 590-604) protected the Jews of Rome; but at the same time he created the ideology of a Christian anti-Judaism which was to lead directly to physical attacks on Jews. What he argued, in effect, was that the Jews were not blind to the claims of Christianity. They knew Jesus was the Messiah, was the son of God. But they had rejected Him, and continued to reject Him because their hearts were corrupt. And it had always been thus–the evidence against the Jews was all there in the Bible, which they had written themselves.

Therein, of course, lay a terrible problem for the Jews.

they were not only critical; they were, perhaps above all, self-critical. And they were, or at any rate had been in ancient times, superb historians. They saw the truth, sometimes the ugly truth, about themselves, and they told it in the Bible. Whereas other peoples produced their national epics to endorse and bolster their self-esteem, the Jews wanted to discover what had gone wrong with their history, as well as what had gone right. That is why the Bible is littered with passages in which the Jews are presented as a sinful people, often too wicked or obstinate to accept God’s law, though they know it. The Jews, in fact, produced the evidence for their own prosecution.

Christian apologists did not, on the whole, believe that Jews should be punished for the crime of their ancestors in killing Christ. They made a different point. Jewish contemporaries of Jesus had witnessed his miracles, seen the prophecies fulfilled and had refused to acknowledge him because he was poor and humble.

They were constantly concealing the truth, tampering with it, or suppressing the evidence.

It was not ignorance. It was malice.

The tragedy of this Christian line of argument was that it led directly to a new kind of anti-Semitism. That the Jews could know the truth of Christianity and still reject it seemed such extraordinary behaviour that it could scarcely be human. Hence the notion that the Jews were quite different to ordinary people, an idea reinforced by their laws about food, slaughtering, cooking and circumcision.

even fervent crusaders did not attack the Jews in their own neighbourhoods, whose inhabitants they knew to be ordinary people like themselves. But once on the march, they readily turned on the Jews of other cities. Then the Christian townspeople, caught up in the frenzy and the lust for loot, would sometimes join in. Local rulers were taken by surprise at the sudden fury and lost control.

As the crusading host, often no better than a mob, gathered, any Jewish community on its line of march was in jeopardy.

The ancient, rich and populous Jewish communities of the Rhineland were destroyed,

Norwich,

William,

ritual murder charge and the blood libel.

another milestone in the destruction of Latin Jewry. The rise of organized heresy in the twelfth century led an increasingly authoritarian and triumphalist papacy to look with suspicion on any non-orthodox form of religious activity, not least on Judaism.

Innocent III (pope 1198-1216),