by Will Durant
All in all, Talmudic law, like the Mohammedan, was man-made law, and favored the male so strongly as to suggest, in the rabbis, a very terror of woman’s power. Like the Christian Fathers, they blamed her for extinguishing the “Soul of the World” through Eve’s intelligent curiosity. They considered woman “light-minded,”99 and yet admitted in her an instinctive wisdom missing in man.100 They deplored the loquacity of women at great length (“Ten measures of speech descended to the world; women took nine, men one”101); they condemned their addiction to the occult,102 to rouge and kohl.103 They approved of a man spending generously on his wife’s raiment, but wished she would beautify herself for her husband rather than for other men.104 In law, according to one rabbi, “a hundred women are equal to only one witness.”105 Their property rights were as limited in the Talmud as in eighteenth-century England; their earnings, and the income from any property they might own, belonged to their husbands.106 Woman’s place was in the home. In the Utopian “Days of the Messiah,” said a hopeful rabbi, woman “will bear a child every day.”107 “A man who has a bad wife will never see the face of hell.”108 On the other hand no man is so rich, said Akiba, as one who has a wife noted for her good deeds.109 “Everything derives from the woman,” says a midrash.110 According to Hebrew proverbs: “All the blessings of a household come through the wife; therefore should her husband honor her… Let men beware of causing women to weep; God counts their tears.”111
In the most delightful part of the Talmud, the little treatise Pirke Aboth, an unknown editor gathered the maxims of the great rabbis of the last two centuries before, and the first two centuries after, Christ. Many of these apothegms praise wisdom, and some define it.
Ben Zoma said: Who is wise? He who learns from every man.… Who is mighty? He who subdues his (evil) inclination.… He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city. Who is rich? He who rejoices in his lot…When thou eatest of the labor of thy hands, happy shalt thou be. … Who is honored? He who honors his fellow men.112… Despise not any man, nor anything; for there is no man that has not his hour, and there is nothing that has not its place.113 … All my days I grew up among the sages, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence….114
Rabbi Eleazar used to say: One whose wisdom exceeds his deeds may be compared to a tree whereof the branches are many and the roots few, so that when the winds come it is uprooted and turned upon its face.… But one whose deeds exceed his wisdom may be compared to a tree whereof the branches are few and the roots many, so that even if all the winds in the world blow upon it they move it not from its place.115
IV. LIFE AND THE LAW
The Talmud is not a work of art. The task of reducing the thought of a thousand years into a coherent system proved too much even for a hundred patient rabbis. Several tractates are obviously in the wrong seder or order; several chapters are in the wrong tractate; subjects are taken up, dropped, and lawlessly resumed. It is not the product of deliberation, it is the deliberation itself; all views are recorded, and contradictions are often left unresolved; it is as if we had crossed fifteen centuries to eavesdrop on the most intimate discussions of the schools, and heard Akiba and Meir and Jehuda Hanasi and Rab in the heat of their debates. Remembering that we are interlopers, that these men and the others have had their casual words snatched from their mouths and cast into uncalculated contexts and sent hurtling down the years, we can forgive the casuistry, sophistry, legends, astrology, demonology, superstition, magic, miracles, numerology, and revelatory dreams, the Pelion on Ossa of argument crowning a web of fantasy, the consolatory vanity forever healing frustrated hope.
If we resent the stringency of these laws, the intrusive minuteness of these regulations, the Oriental severity of punishment for their violation, we must not take the matter too much to heart; the Jews made no pretense to keeping all these commandments, and the rabbis winked on every other page at the gap between their counsels of perfection and the stealthy frailties of men. “If Israel should properly observe a single Sabbath,” said a cautious rabbi, “the Son of David would come immediately.”116 The Talmud was not a code of laws requiring strict obedience; it was a record of rabbinical opinion, gathered for the guidance of leisurely piety. The untutored masses obeyed only a choice few of the precepts of the Law.
There was in the Talmud a strong emphasis on ritual; but that was in part the Jew’s reaction to the attempts of Church and state to make him abandon his Law; the ritual was a mark of identity, a bond of unity and continuity, a badge of defiance to a never-forgiving world. Here and there, in these twenty volumes, we find words of hatred for Christianity; but they were for a Christianity that had forgotten the gentleness of Christ; that persecuted the adherents of the Law that Christ had bidden His followers to fulfill; and that had, in the view of the rabbis, abandoned the monotheism which was the inalienable essence of the ancient faith. Amid these ceremonial complexities and controversial barbs we find hundreds of sage counsels and psychological insights, and occasional passages recalling the majesty of the Old Testament or the mystical tenderness of the New. The whimsical humor characteristic of the Jew lightens the burden of the long lesson. So one rabbi tells how Moses entered incognito into Akiba’s classroom, sat in the last row, and marveled at the many laws derived by the great teacher from the Mosaic code, and of which its amanuensis had never dreamed.117
For 1400 years the Talmud was the core of Jewish education. Seven hours a day, through seven years, the Hebrew youth pored over it, recited it, sank it into his memory by sound and sight; and like the Confucian classics similarly memorized, it formed mind and character by the discipline of its study and the deposit of its lore. The method of teaching was not by mere recitation and repetition; it was also by disputation between master and pupil, between pupil and pupil, and the application of old laws to the circumstances of the new day. The result was a sharpness of intellect, a retentiveness of memory, that gave the Jew an advantage in many spheres requiring clarity, concentration, persistence, and exactitude, while at the same time it tended to narrow the range and freedom of the Jewish mind. The Talmud tamed the excitable nature of the Jew; it checked his individualism, and molded him to fidelity and sobriety in his family and his community. Superior minds may have been hampered by the “yoke of the Law,” but the Jews as a whole were saved.
The Talmud can never be understood except in terms of history, as an organ of survival for a people exiled, destitute, oppressed, and in danger of utter disintegration. What the Prophets had done to uphold the Jewish spirit in the Babylonian Captivity, the rabbis did in this wider dispersion. Pride had to be regained, order had to be established, faith and morals maintained, health of body and mind rebuilt after a shattering experience.118 Through this heroic discipline, this rerooting of the uprooted Jew in his own tradition—stability and unity were restored through continents of wandering and centuries of grief. The Talmud, as Heine said, was a portable Fatherland; wherever Jews were, even as fearful enclaves in alien lands, they could put themselves again into their own world, and live with their Prophets and rabbis, by bathing their minds and hearts in the ocean of the Law. No wonder they loved this book, to us more undulant and diverse than a hundred Montaignes. They preserved even fragments of it with fierce affection, took their turns in reading snatches of the enormous manuscript, paid great sums, in later centuries, to have it printed in all its fullness, wept when kings and popes and parliaments banned or confiscated or burned it, rejoiced to hear Reuchlin and Erasmus defend it, and made it, even to our own time, the most precious possession of their temples and their homes, the refuge, solace, and prison of the Jewish soul.
CHAPTER XVI
The Medieval Jews
565–1300
I. THE ORIENTAL COMMUNITIES
ISRAEL now had a law, but no state; a book, but no home. To 614 Jerusalem was a Christian city; till 629, Persian; till 637, again Christian; then, till 1099, a Moslem provincial capital. In that year the Crusaders besieged Je
rusalem; the Jews joined the Moslems in its defense; when it fell, the surviving Jews were driven into a synagogue, and were burned to death.1 A rapid growth of Palestinian Jewry followed the recapture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187; and Saladin’s brother, the Sultan al-Adil, welcomed the 300 rabbis who in 1211 fled from England and France. Fifty-two years later, however, Nachmanides found there a mere handful of Jews;2 the Holy City had become overwhelmingly Mohammedan.
Despite conversions and occasional persecutions, Jews remained numerous in Moslem Syria, Babylonia (Iraq), and Persia, and developed a vigorous economic and cultural life. In their internal affairs they continued, as under the Sasanian kings, to enjoy self-government under their exilarch and the directors of their rabbinical academies. The exilarch was accepted by the caliphs as the head of all the Jews in Babylonia, Armenia, Turkestan, Persia, and Yemen; according to Benjamin of Tudela all subjects of the caliphs were required “to rise in the presence of the Prince of the Captivity and to salute him respectfully.”3 The office of exilarch was hereditary in one famly, which traced its lineage to David; it was a political rather than a spiritual power; and its efforts to control the rabbinate led to its decline and fall. After 762 the directors of the academies elected and dominated the exilarch.
The rabbinical colleges at Sura and Pumbeditha provided religious and intellectual leadership for the Jews of Islam, and in less degree for those of Christendom. In 658 the Caliph Ali freed the academy of Sura from the jurisdiction of the exilarch; thereupon its head, Mar-Isaac, took the title Gaon, or Excellency, and inaugurated the Gaonate, the epoch of the Geonim in Babylonian religion and scholarship.4 As the college of Pumbeditha rose in revenues and dignity from its proximity to Baghdad, its directors also assumed the title of Gaon. From the seventh to the eleventh century, questions in Talmudic law were addressed to these Geonim from all the Jewish world; and their responsa created a new legal literature for Judaism.
The rise of the Geonim coincided with—perhaps in some measure it was necessitated by—a heresy that now shook and divided Oriental Jewry. In 762, when the Exilarch Solomon died, his nephew Anan ben David stood in line for the succession; but the heads of Sura and Pumbeditha, discarding the hereditary principle, installed as exilarch Anan’s younger brother Chananya. Anan denounced the two Geonim, fled to Palestine, established his own synagogue, and called upon Jews everywhere to reject the Talmud and obey only the law of the Pentateuch. This was a return to the position of the Sadducees; it corresponded to the repudiation of the “traditions,” and exaltation of the Koran, by the Shia sect in Islam, and to the Protestant abandonment of Catholic traditions for a return to the Gospels. Anan went further, and reexamined the Pentateuch in a commentary that marked a bold advance in the critical study of the Biblical text. He protested against the changes that the Talmudic rabbis had made in the Mosaic Law by their adaptive interpretations, and insisted on the strict fulfillment of the Pentateuch decrees; hence his followers received the name of Qaraites *—“adherents of the text.” Anan praised Jesus as a holy man who had wished to set aside not the written Law of Moses but only the oral Law of the scribes and the Pharisees; Jesus, in Anan’s view, had aimed not to found a new religion but to cleanse and strengthen Judaism.5 The Qaraites became numerous in Palestine, Egypt, and Spain; they declined in the twelfth century, and only a vanishing remnant survives in Turkey, South Russia, and Arabia. Qaraites of the ninth century, presumably influenced by the Mutazilites of Islam, abandoned Anan’s principle of literal interpretation, and proposed that the resurrection of the body, and certain physical descriptions of God in the Bible, should be taken with a metaphorical grain of salt. The orthodox “Rabbanite” Jews, reverting to literalism in their turn, insisted, like orthodox Moslems, that phrases like “God’s hand” or “God sitting down” were to be taken literally; some expositors calculated the precise measurements of God’s body, members, and beard.6A few Jewish freethinkers, like Chivi al-Balchi, rejected even the Pentateuch as a binding law.7 It was in this environment of economic prosperity, religious freedom, and lively debate that Judaism produced its first famous medieval philosopher.
Saadia ben Joseph al-Fayyumi was born at Dilaz, a village of the Faiyûm, in 892. He grew up in Egypt, and married there. In 915 he migrated to Palestine, then to Babylonia. He must have been an apt student and sound teacher, for at the youthful age of thirty-six he was made Gaon or director of the college at Sura. Perceiving the inroads that Qaraism and skepticism had made upon orthodox Judaism, he set himself the same task that the mutakal-limun had undertaken in Islam—to demonstrate the full accord of the traditional faith with reason and history. In his brief life of fifty years Saadia produced—mostly in Arabic—a mass of writings rivaled only by those of Maimonides in the record of medieval Jewish thought. His Agron, an Aramaic dictionary of Hebrew, founded Hebrew philology; his Kitab al-Lugah, or Book of Language, is the oldest known grammar of the Hebrew tongue; his Arabic translation of the Old Testament remained to our time the version used by Arabic-speaking Jews; his several commentaries on books of the Bible rank him as “perhaps the greatest Bible commentator of all time”;8 his Kitab al-Amanat, or Book of Philosophical Doctrines and Beliefs (933), is the Summa contra Gentiles of Jewish theology.
Saadia accepts both revelation and tradition, the written and the oral Law; but he also accepts reason, and proposes to prove by reason the truth of revelation and tradition. Wherever the Bible clearly contradicts reason, we may assume that the passage is not meant to be taken literally by adult minds. Anthropomorphic descriptions of the deity are to be understood metaphorically; God is not like a man. The order and law of the world indicate an intelligent creator. It is unreasonable to suppose that an intelligent God would fail to reward virtue, but obviously virtue is not always rewarded in this life; consequently there must be another life, which will redeem the apparent injustice of this one. Perhaps the sufferings of the virtuous here are punishments for their occasional sins, so that they may enter paradise at once when they die; and the earthly triumphs of the wicked are rewards for their incidental virtues, so that… But even those who achieve the highest virtue, prosperity, and happiness on earth feel in their hearts that there is a better state than this one of indefinite possibilities and limited fulfillments; and how could a God intelligent enough to create so marvelous a world allow such hopes to form in the soul if they were never to be realized?9 Saadia took a leaf or two from Moslem theologians, and followed their methods of exposition, even, now and then, the details of their argument. In turn his work permeated the Jewish world, and influenced Maimonides. “Were it not for, Saadia,” said ben Maimon, “the Torah would almost have disappeared.”10
It must be admitted that Saadia was a man of some acerbity, and that his quarrel with the Exilarch David ben Zakkai injured Babylonian Jewry. In 930 David excommunicated Saadia, and Saadia excommunicated David. In 940 David died, and Saadia appointed a new exilarch; but this appointee was assassinated by Moslems on the ground that he had disparaged Mohammed. Saadia appointed the victim’s son to succeed him, whereupon this youth also was slain. The discouraged Jews decided to leave the office unfilled; and in 942 the Babylonian exilarchate closed its career of seven centuries. In that year Saadia died. The disintegration of the Baghdad caliphate, the establishment of Egypt, North Africa, and Spain as independent Moslem states, weakened the bonds between Asiatic, African, and European Jewry. The Babylonian Jews shared in the economic decline of Eastern Islam after the tenth century; the college of Sura closed its doors in 1034, that of Pumbeditha four years later; and in 1040 the Gaonate came to an end. The Crusades further isolated the Babylonian from the Egyptian and European Jews; and after the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 the Babylonian Jewish community almost disappeared from history.
Long before these catastrophes many Oriental Jews had migrated to further Asia, Arabia, Egypt, North Africa, and Europe. Ceylon had 23,000 Hebrews in 1165;11 several Jewish communities in Arabia survived the hostility of Mohammed; when Amr conq
uered Egypt in 641 he reported “40,000 tributary” (taxpaying) Jews in Alexandria. As Cairo spread its proliferations, its Jewish population, orthodox and Qaraite, increased. The Egyptian Jews enjoyed self-government in internal affairs under their nagid, or prince; they rose to wealth in commerce and to a high place in the administration of the Moslem state.12 In 960, according to a tradition, four rabbis sailed from Bari in Italy; their vessel was captured by a Spanish Moslem admiral, and they were sold into slavery: Rabbi Moses and his son Chanoch at Cordova, Rabbi Shemaria at Alexandria, Rabbi Hushiel at Qairwan. Each rabbi, we are told, was freed, and founded an academy in the city where he had been sold. It is usually assumed, but not certain, that they were scholars from Sura; in any case they brought the learning of Eastern Jewry to the West, and while Judaism declined in Asia it entered upon its halcyon days in Egypt and Spain.
II. THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES
Jews made their way into medieval Russia from Babylonia and Persia through Transoxiana and the Caucasus, and up the Black Sea coast from Asia Minor through Constantinople. In that capital, and in the Byzantine realm, the Jews enjoyed a harassed prosperity from the eighth to the twelfth century. Greece had several substantial Jewish communities, notably at Thebes, where their silk manufactures earned high repute. Up through Thessaly, Thrace, and Macedonia the Jews migrated into the Balkans, and followed the Danube into Hungary. A handful of Hebrew merchants came to Poland from Germany in the tenth century. Jews had been in Germany since pre-Christian times. In the ninth century there were considerable Jewish settlements at Metz, Speyer, Mainz, Worms, Strasbourg, Frankfort, and Cologne. These groups were too busy and mobile with commerce to contribute much to cultural history; however, Gershom ben Jehuda (960-1028) founded a rabbinical academy at Mainz, wrote a Hebrew commentary on the Talmud, and acquired such authority that German Jewry addressed to him, rather than to the Geonim of Babylonia, their questions on Talmudic law.