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In short, as one historian has put it, to acquire authority, family mattered and commercial success was useful, but scholarship was essential.25
The Jewish rationalization process had begun by the introduction of monotheism and by linking it to ethics. This was primarily the work of Moses. It was typical of Maimonides that he not only gave Moses a unique role–he was the only prophet, he argued, who had communicated directly with God–but saw him as a great intellectual ordering force, creating law out of chaos. Clearly, it was the continuing function of the Jews to push forward the frontiers of reason, always adding more territory to God’s kingdom of the mind.
He was an elitist, of course. He said he would rather please one intelligent man than ten thousand fools. But he was also tolerant: he thought all pious men would be saved, whatever their faith. He was wonderfully urbane, irenic, calm, judicious. Above all, he was a scientist, looking for truth, confident it would prevail in the end.
A good state, by definition, is one under the rule of law; the ideal state is under divine law.38
In his Guide of the Perplexed, he sets out his intensely rationalistic view of the Torah: ‘The law as a whole aims at two things–the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body.’ The first consists in developing the human intellect, the second in improving men’s political relations with each other. The Law does this by setting down true opinions, which raise the intellect, and by producing norms to govern human behaviour. The two interact. The more stable and peaceful we make our society, the more time and energy men have for
improving their minds, so that in turn they have the intellectual capacity to effect further social improvements. So it goes on–a virtuous circle, instead of the vicious circle of societies which have no law.
Hence, 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.
Pious Jews saw heaven as a vast library, with the Archangel Metatron as the librarian:
Temperate in all things save learning, Maimonides had a passion for books, which he wished all Jews to share. ‘All Jews’ included women and working men.
reason and the Law were the only real defences a Jew had, and the only means whereby the world could become a more civilized place,
His lifework then was twofold: to reduce the Law to order, and to re-present it on a thoroughly rational basis.
At every stage in the code and commentary, he was rationalizing. But 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. Here he was following in the steps of Saadiah ben Joseph (882-942), the famous and controversial gaon of the Sura academy, the first Jewish philosopher since Philo to try to place Judaism on a rational basis. Maimonides did not agree with everything in Saadiah Gaon’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions, but it
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What in effect Maimonides was doing was to reduce the area of irrationality in Judaism but not to eliminate it: he isolated certain core areas of belief which reason could not explain–though he was reluctant to admit it. He would, however, concede that certain issues were almost beyond man’s powers of reason.
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. Reason, once let out of the bottle of pure faith, develops a life and will of its own.
In a sense, he played the same role in Judaism as Erasmus in Christianity: he laid dangerous eggs which hatched later. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
they were the angry, bitter refuge of an oppressed people calling down cataracts and hurricanes on their heavily armed enemies.
Aspirants to the ecstatic state placed their heads between their knees and recited songs about the Throne of Glory or early sacred poems.
Since the Torah was holy, letters were holy; so were numbers; if the key were found, secret knowledge could be obtained.
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.
Judah Halevi
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.
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.
Nahmanides or Ramban
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.
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
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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 an...
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But that was for the future: in medieval Jewry, with its wide dispersal of religious 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 t...
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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 k...
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Keeping family corporations together was the best Jewish defence. The extended family was far more important than the nuclear family.
To keep the family strong, marriage was in effect compulsory for men, and for women of child-bearing age;
It was a great economic and social strength of Judaism, as opposed to Islam, that it rejected polygamy.
Marriage was a social and business transaction designed to keep society cohesive, so the contract or ketubbah was read out at the ceremony and it was drawn up, like a partnership agreement, to avoid disputes or make dissolution uncontentious.
The Bible said ‘God…hateth putting away’ (i.e. divorce),63 but it was part of the strength of the extended, as opposed to nuclear, family system that divorce was easy provided the contract was properly drawn up.
Jewish legal definition of a town as opposed to a village was that it had at least ten batlanim, ‘persons who do not work’, foregoing private profit to study on behalf of the community.
The community revolved around the school-synagogue complex.
Jewish law was strict, and this caused a constant, though largely unrecorded, leakage into the host communities, but it was the discipline which also kept the Jews together and their heads high. Sabbath (root-verb shabath) meant to cease. All work was forbidden, Exodus specifically prohibiting kindling a fire and the Mishnah listing thirty-nine categories of labour used in making it. The Oral Law principle of erecting ‘fences round the law’, to prevent even accidental breaches, spread the area of prohibition still further.
From Temple times, the kuppah or collecting box was a pivot around which the Jewish welfare-community revolved,
The genizah documents show that the jizya or poll-tax, the worst aspect of Moslem rule, was the real terror of the poor,
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.
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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.79 Therein, of course, lay a terrible problem for the Jews. One of their greatest gifts was the critical faculty. They had always had it. It was the source of their rationality, one of the factors which brought them to monotheism in the first place, for their critical sense would not allow them to accept the follies of polytheism. But they were not only critical; they were, perhaps above
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accept God’s law, though they know it. The Jews, in fact, produced the evidence f...
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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. There were stories that the Jews had concealed tails, suffered from a bloody flux, had a peculiar smell–which instantly disappeared when they were baptized. This in turn led to reports that Jews
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