by Will Durant
X. ISLAM AND CHRISTENDOM
The rise and decline of Islamic civilization is one of the major phenomena of history. For five centuries, from 700 to 1200, Islam led the world in power, order, and extent of government, in refinement of manners, in standards of living, in humane legislation and religious toleration, in literature, scholarship, science, medicine, and philosophy. In architecture it yielded the palm, in the twelfth century, to the cathedrals of Europe; and Gothic sculpture found no rival in inhibited Islam. Moslem art exhausted itself in decoration, and suffered from narrowness of range and monotony of style; but within its self-imposed limits it has never been surpassed. In Islam art and culture were more widely shared than in medieval Christendom; kings were calligraphers, and merchants, like physicians, might be philosophers.
In sexual morality during these centuries Christendom probably excelled Islam, though there was not much to choose; Christian monogamy, however evaded in practice, kept the sexual impulse within bounds, and slowly raised the status of woman, while Islam darkened the face of woman with purdah and the veil. The Church succeeded in limiting divorce; and homosexual diversions seem never to have attained, even in Renaissance Italy, the spread and freedom allowed them not in Mohammedan law but in Moslem life. The Moslems seem to have been better gentlemen than their Christian peers; they kept their word more frequently, showed more mercy to the defeated, and were seldom guilty of such brutality as marked the Christian capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Christian law continued to use ordeal by battle, water, or fire while Moslem law was developing an advanced jurisprudence and an enlightened judiciary. The Mohammedan religion, less original than the Hebrew, less embracing in eclecticism than the Christian, kept its creed and ritual simpler and purer, less dramatic and colorful, than the Christian, and made less concession to the natural polytheism of mankind. It resembled Protestantism in scorning the aid and play that Mediterranean religion offered to the imagination and the senses; but it bowed to popular sensualism in its picture of paradise. It kept itself almost free from sacerdotalism, but fell into a narrow and dulling orthodoxy just when Christianity was entering into the most exuberant period of Catholic philosophy.
The influence of Christendom on Islam was almost limited to religion and war. Probably from Christian exemplars came Mohammedan mysticism, monasticism, and the worship of the saints. The figure and story of Jesus touched the Moslem soul, and appeared sympathetically in Moslem poetry and art.120
The influence of Islam upon Christendom was varied and immense. From Islam Christian Europe received foods, drinks, drugs, medicaments, armor, heraldry, art motives and tastes, industrial and commercial articles and techniques, maritime codes and ways, and often the words for these things—orange, lemon, sugar, syrup, sherbet, julep, elixir, jar, azure, arabesque, mattress, sofa, muslin, satin, fustian, bazaar, caravan, check, tariff, traffic, douane, magazine, risk, sloop, barge, cable, admiral. The game of chess came to Europe from India via Islam, and picked up Persian terms on the way; checkmate is from the Persian shah mat—“the king is dead.” Some of our musical instruments bear in their names evidence of their Semitic origin—lute, rebeck, guitar, tambourine. The poetry and music of the troubadours came from Moslem Spain into Provence, and from Moslem Sicily into Italy; and Arabic descriptions of trips to heaven and hell may have shared in forming The Divine Comedy. Hindu fables and numerals entered Europe in Arabic dress or form. Moslem science preserved and developed Greek mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine, and transmitted this Greek heritage, considerably enriched, to Europe; and Arabic scientific terms—algebra, zero, cipher, azimuth, alembic, zenith, almanac—still lie imbedded in European speech. Moslem medicine led the world for half a millennium. Moslem philosophy preserved and corrupted Aristotle for Christian Europe. Avicenna and Averroës were lights from the East for the Schoolmen, who cited them as next to the Greeks in authority.
The ribbed vault is older in Islam than in Europe,121 though we cannot trace the route by which it came into Gothic art. Christian spire and belfry owed much to the minaret,122 and perhaps Gothic window tracery took a lead from the cusped arcading of the Giralda tower.123 The rejuvenation of the ceramic art in Italy and France has been attributed to the importation of Moslem potters in the twelfth century, and to the visits of Italian potters to Moslem Spain.124 Venetian workers in metal and glass, Italian bookbinders, Spanish armorers, learned their techniques from Moslem artisans;125 and almost everywhere in Europe weavers looked to Islam for models and designs. Even gardens received a Persian influence.
We shall see later by what avenues these influences came: through commerce and the Crusades; through a thousand translations from Arabic into Latin; through the visits of scholars like Gerbert, Michael Scot, and Adelard of Bath to Moslem Spain; through the sending of Christian youths by their Spanish parents to Moslem courts to receive a knightly education126—for the Moslem aristocrats were accounted “knights and gentlemen, albeit Moors”;127 through the daily contact of Christians with Moslems in Syria, Egypt, Sicily, and Spain. Every advance of the Christians in Spain admitted a wave of Islamic literature, science, philosophy, and art into Christendom. So the capture of Toledo in 1085 immensely furthered Christian knowledge of astronomy, and kept alive the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth.128
Behind this borrowing smoldered an undying hate. Nothing, save bread, is so precious to mankind as its religious beliefs; for man lives not by bread alone, but also by the faith that lets him hope. Therefore his deepest hatred greets those who challenge his sustenance or his creed. For three centuries Christianity saw Islam advance, saw it capture and absorb one Christian land and people after another, felt its constricting hand upon Christian trade, and heard it call Christians infidels. At last the potential conflict became actual: the rival civilizations clashed in the Crusades; and the best of the East or West slew the best of the West or East. Back of all medieval history lay this mutual hostility, with a third faith, the Jewish, caught between the main combatants, and cut by both swords. The West lost the Crusades, but won the war of creeds. Every Christian warrior was expelled from the Holy Land of Judaism and Christianity; but Islam, bled by its tardy victory, and ravaged by Mongols, fell in turn into a Dark Age of obscurantism and poverty; while the beaten West, matured by its effort and forgetting its defeat, learned avidly from its enemy, lifted cathedrals into the sky, wandered out on the high seas of reason, transformed its crude new languages into Dante, Chaucer, and Villon, and moved with high spirit into the Renaissance.
The general reader will marvel at the length of this survey of Islamic civilization, and the scholar will mourn its inadequate brevity. Only at the peaks of history has a society produced, in an equal period, so many illustrious men—in government, education, literature, philology, geography, history, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, philosophy, and medicine—as Islam in the four centuries between Harun al-Rashid and Averroës. Part of this brilliant activity fed on Greek leavings; but much of it, above all in statesmanship, poetry, and art, was original and invaluable. In one sense this zenith of Islam was a recovery of the Near East from Greek domination; it reached back not only to Sasanian and Achaemenid Persia, but to the Judea of Solomon, the Assyria of Ashurbanipal, the Babylonia of Hammurabi, the Akkad of Sargon, the Sumeria of unknown kings. So the continuity of history reasserts itself: despite earthquakes, epidemics, famines, eruptive migrations, and catastrophic wars, the essential processes of civilization are not lost; some younger culture takes them up, snatches them from the conflagration, carries them on imitatively, then creatively, until fresh youth and spirit can enter the race. As men are members of one another, and generations are moments in a family line, so civilizations are units in a larger whole whose name is history; they are stages in the life of man. Civilization is polygenetic—it is the co-operative product of many peoples, ranks, and faiths; and no one who studies its history can be a bigot of race or creed. Therefore the scholar, though he belongs to his country through affecti
onate kinship, feels himself also a citizen of that Country of the Mind which knows no hatreds and no frontiers; he hardly deserves his name if he carries into his study political prejudices, or racial discriminations, or religious animosities; and he accords his grateful homage to any people that has borne the torch and enriched his heritage.
BOOK III
JUDAIC CIVILIZATION
135–1300
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK III
1–220:
The Tannaim
189:
The Mishna of Jehuda Hanasi
219:
Jewish academy at Sura
220:
Jewish academy at Pumbeditha
220–500:
The Amoraim
280–500:
Compilation of the Talmuds
359:
Hillel II fixes Jewish calendar
500–650:
The Saboraim
658–1040:
The Gaonate in Babylonia
815:
d. of Mashallah, astronomer
855–955:
Isaac Israeli, philosopher
892–942:
Saadia Gaon, philosopher
915–70:
Hasdai ibn Shaprut, statesman
1000:
Monogamy edict of Rabbi Gershom
1021–70:
Ibn Gabirol, poet & philosopher
1038–55:
Samuel ibn Naghdela, vizier
1040–1105:
Shelomoh ben Yitzhak (Rashi), Talmudic commentator
1055–66:
Joseph ibn Naghdela, vizier
1065–1136:
Abraham bar Hiyya, mathematician
1070–1139:
Moses ibn Ezra, poet
1086–1147:
Jehuda Halevi, poet
1093–1168:
Abraham ibn Ezra, poet
1096:
Pogroms of First Crusade
1110–80:
Abraham ibn Daud, philosopher
1135–1204:
Maimonides
1147:
Pogroms of Second Crusade
1160:
David Alrui, false messiah
1160–73:
Travels of Benjamin of Tudela
1170:
The Mishna Torah of Maimonides
1181, 1254, 1306:
Jews expelled from France
1190:
The Guide to the Perplexed
1190:
Rise of the Cabala
1190:
Pogroms in England
1215:
Fourth Council of the Lateran orders Jewish badge
1234:
Books of Maimonides burned at Montpellier
1242:
Burning of Talmud at Paris
1290:
Jews expelled from England
c. 1295:
The Sefer ha-Zohar of Moses of Leon
CHAPTER XV
The Talmud
I. THE EXILES: 135–565
WITHIN Islam and Christendom a remarkable people maintained through every adversity its own unique culture, consoled and inspired by its own creed, living by its own laws and morality, producing its own poets, scientists, scholars, and philosophers, and serving as the living carriers of fertile seeds between two hostile worlds.
The rebellion of Bar Cocheba (132-5) was not the last effort of the Jews to regain for Judea the freedom that Pompey and Titus had destroyed. Under Antoninus Pius (138-61) they tried again, and failed. Their holy city was forbidden them except on the bitter anniversary of its destruction, when they were allowed, for a consideration, to come and mourn by the walls of their shattered Temple. In Palestine, where 985 towns had been wiped out, and 580,000 men and women had been slain, in Bar Cocheba’s revolt, the Jewish population had sunk to half its former volume, and to such an abyss of poverty that cultural life was almost wholly dead. Nevertheless, within a generation after Bar Cocheba, the Beth Din or Jewish National Council—a court of seventy-one rabbinical scholars and legists—was established in Tiberias, synagogues and schools were opened, and hope rose again.
The triumph of Christianity brought new difficulties. Before his conversion Constantine had placed the religion of the Jews on a footing of legal equality with those of his other subjects. After his conversion the Jews were oppressed with new restrictions and exactions, and Christians were forbidden to associate with them.1 Constantius banished the rabbis (337), and made the marriage of a Jew with a Christian woman a capital crime.2 Julian’s brother Gallus taxed the Jews so heavily that many of them sold their children to meet his demands. In 352 they rebelled again, and were again suppressed; Sepphoris was razed to the ground, Tiberias and other cities were partly destroyed, thousands of Jews were killed, thousands were enslaved. The condition of the Palestinian Jews now (359) sank so low, and their communication with other Jewish communities was so difficult, that their patriarch Hillel II resigned their right to determine for all Jews the dates of the Jewish festivals, and issued, for the independent computation of these dates, a calendar that remains in use among the Jews of the world to this day.
From these afflictions the Jews were saved for a moment by the accession of Julian. He reduced their taxes, revoked discriminatory laws, lauded Hebrew charity, and acknowledged Yahveh as “a great god.” He asked Jewish leaders why they had abandoned animal sacrifice; when they replied that their law did not permit this except in the Temple at Jerusalem, he ordered that the Temple should be rebuilt with state funds.3 Jerusalem was again opened to the Jews; they flocked to it from every quarter of Palestine, from every province of the Empire; men, women, and children gave their labor to the rebuilding, their savings and jewelry to the furnishing, of the new Temple;4 we can imagine the happiness of a people that for three centuries had prayed for this day (361). But as the foundations were being dug, flames burst from the ground, and burnt several workmen to death.5 The work was patiently resumed, but a repetition of the phenomenon—probably due to the explosion of natural gas—interrupted and discouraged the enterprise. The Christians rejoiced at what seemed a divine prohibition; the Jews marveled and mourned. Then came Julian’s sudden death; state funds were withdrawn; the old restrictive laws were re-enacted and made more severe; and the Jews, again excluded from Jerusalem, returned to their villages, their poverty, and their prayers. Soon thereafter Jerome reported the Jewish population of Palestine as “but a tenth part of their previous multitude.”6 In 425 Theodosius II abolished the Palestinian patriarchate. Greek Christian churches replaced the synagogues and schools; and after a brief outburst in 614, Palestine surrendered its leadership of the Jewish world.
The Jews could hardly be blamed if they hoped to fare better in less Christian lands. Some moved east into Mesopotamia and Persia, and reinvigorated that Babylonian Jewry which had never ceased since the Captivity of 597 B.C. In Persia too the Jews were excluded from state office; but as all Persians except the nobility were likewise excluded, there was less offense in the restriction.7 And there were several persecutions of Jews in Persia. But taxation was less severe, the government was normally co-operative, and the exilarch, or head of the Jewish community, was recognized and honored by the Persian kings. The soil of Iraq was then irrigated and fertile; the Jews there became prosperous farmers as well as clever traders. Some, including famous scholars, grew rich by brewing beer.8 The Jewish communities in Persia multiplied rapidly, for Persian law permitted, and the Jews practiced, polygamy, for reasons that we have seen under Mohammedan law. The good rabbis Rab and Nahman, when traveling, were accustomed to advertise in each city for temporary wives, to give local youth an exemplar of matrimonial, as against a promiscuous, life.9 In Nehardea, Sura, and Pumbeditha schools of higher education rose, whose scholarship and rabbinical decisions were honored throughout the Dispersion.
Meanwhile the dispersion of the Jews continued through all the Mediterranean lands. Some went to join old Jewish communities in
Syria and Asia Minor. Some went to Constantinople despite the hostility of Greek emperors and patriarchs. Some turned south from Palestine into Arabia, dwelt in peace and religious freedom with their Arab fellow-Semites, occupied whole regions like Khaibar, almost equaled the Arabs in Yathrib (Medina), made many converts, and prepared the Arab mind for the Judaism of the Koran. Some crossed the Red Sea into Abyssinia, and multiplied so rapidly there that in 315 they were reputed to be half the population.10 Jews controlled half the shipping of Alexandria, and their prosperity in that excitable city fed the flames of religious animosity.
Jewish communities developed in all the North African cities, and in Sicily and Sardinia. In Italy they were numerous; and though occasionally harassed by the Christian population, they were for the most part protected by pagan emperors, Christian emperors, Theodoric, and the Popes. In Spain there had been Jewish settlements before Caesar, and they had developed there without molestation under the pagan Empire; they prospered under the Arian Visigoths, but suffered disheartening persecutions after King Recared (586-601) adopted the Nicene Creed. We hear of no persecution of Jews in Gaul until the severe enactments of the third and fourth Councils of Orléans (538, 541), a generation after the conquest of Arian Visigothic Gaul by the orthodox Christian Clovis. About 560 the Christians of Orléans burned down a synagogue. The Jews petitioned Gunthram, King of the Franks, to rebuild it at public cost, as Theodoric in like case had done. Gunthram refused. “O King glorious for wonderful wisdom!” exclaimed Bishop Gregory of Tours.11