The Age of Faith
Page 63
Rabbinical schools, especially in southern France, gave courses in medicine, partly to provide rabbis with a secular income. Jewish physicians trained in the Hebrew academy at Montpellier helped to develop the famous Montpellier school of medicine. The appointment of a Jew as regent of the faculty in 1300 drew upon his people the wrath of the medical authorities in the University of Paris; the Montpellier school was forced to close its doors to Jews (1301), and the Hebrew physicians of the city shared in the banishment of the Jews from France in 1306. By this time, however, Christian medicine had been revolutionized by Jewish and Moslem example and influence. The Semitic practitioners had long since put behind them the theory of sickness as “possession” by demons; and the success of their rational diagnosis and therapy had weakened the belief of the people in the efficacy of relics and other supernatural means of cure.
The monks and secular clergy whose abbeys and churches housed relics and drew pilgrims found it hard to accept this revolution. The Church condemned the intimate reception of Jewish doctors into Christian homes; she suspected that these men had more physic than faith, and she dreaded their influence upon sick minds. In 1246 the Council of Béziėrs forbade Christians to employ Jewish physicians; in 1267 the Council of Vienna forbade Jewish physicians to treat Christians. Such prohibitions did not prevent some prominent Christians from availing themselves of Jewish medical skill; Pope Boniface VIII, suffering from an eye ailment, called in Isaac ben Mordecai;24 Raymond Lully complained that every monastery had a Jewish physician; a papal legate was shocked to find that this was also the fate of many nunneries; and Christian kings of Spain enjoyed Jewish medical care down to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Sheshet Benveniste of Barcelona, physician to King James I of Aragon (1213-76), wrote the chief gynecological treatise of his time. The Jews lost their ascendancy in the medical practice of Christendom only when Christian universities, in the thirteenth century, adopted rational medicine.
For so mobile and scattered a people the Jews contributed little to the science of geography. Nevertheless the outstanding travelers of the twelfth century were two Jews—Petachya of Ratisbon and Benjamin of Tudela—who wrote valuable Hebrew narratives of their journeys through Europe and the Near East. Benjamin left Saragossa in 1160, leisurely visited Barcelona, Marseilles, Genoa, Pisa, Rome, Salerno, Brindisi, Otranto, Corfu, Constantinople, the Aegean Isles, An-tioch, every important city in Palestine, and Baalbek, Damascus, Baghdad, and Persia. He returned by ship through the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to Egypt, Sicily, and Italy, and thence overland to Spain; he reached home in 1173, and died soon afterward. His main interest was in the Jewish communities; but he described with fair accuracy and objectivity the geographic and ethnic features of each country on his route. His account is less fascinating, but probably more reliable, than the reports made by Marco Polo a century later. It was translated into nearly all European languages, and remained till our time a favorite book with the Jews.25
IV. THE RISE OF JEWISH PHILOSOPHY
The life of the mind is a composition of two forces: the necessity to believe in order to live, and the necessity to reason in order to advance. In ages of poverty and chaos the will to believe is paramount, for courage is the one thing needful; in ages of wealth the intellectual powers come to the fore as offering preferment and progress; consequently a civilization passing from poverty to wealth tends to develop a struggle between reason and faith, a “warfare of science with theology.” In this conflict philosophy, dedicated to seeing life whole, usually seeks a reconciliation of opposites, a mediating peace, with the result that it is scorned by science and suspected by theology. In an age of faith, where hardship makes life unbearable without hope, philosophy inclines to religion, uses reason to defend faith, and becomes a disguised theology. Among the three faiths that divided white civilization in the Middle Ages this was least true of Islam, which had most wealth, truer of Christendom, which had less, truest of Judaism, which had least. And Jewish philosophy ventured from faith chiefly in the prosperous Jewry of Moslem Spain.
Medieval Jewish philosophy had two sources: Hebrew religion and Moslem thought. Most Jewish thinkers conceived of religion and philosophy as similar in content and result, differing only in method and form: what religion taught as divinely revealed dogma, philosophy would teach as rationally demonstrated truth. And most Jewish thinkers from Saadia to Maimonides made this attempt in a Moslem milieu, derived their knowledge of Greek philosophy from Arabic translations and Moslem commentaries, and wrote in Arabic for Moslems as well as Jews. Just as Ashari turned against the Mutazilites the weapons of reason, and saved the orthodoxy of Islam, so Saadia, who left Egypt for Babylonia in the very year (915) of Ashari’s conversion from skepticism, saved Hebrew theology by his polemic industry and skill; and Saadia followed not only the methods of the Moslem mutakallimun, but even the details of their arguments.26
Saadia’s victory had the same effect in Eastern Judaism as al-Ghazali’s in Eastern Islam: it combined with political disorder and economic decline to smother Hebrew philosophy in the Orient. The rest of the story belongs to Africa and Spain. At Qairwan Isaac Israeli found time, amid his medical practice and writing, to compose some influential philosophical works. His Essay on Definitions gave several terms to Scholastic logic; his treatise On the Elements introduced Aristotle’s Physics to Hebrew thought; his Book of Soul and Spirit replaced the creation story of Genesis with a Neoplatonist scheme of progressive emanations (“splendors”) from God to the material world; here was one source of the Cabala.
Ibn Gabirol had more influence as a philosopher than as a poet. It is one of the jeux d’esprit of history that the Scholastics quoted him with respect as Avicebron, and thought him a Moslem or a Christian; not till 1846 did Salomon Munk discover that Ibn Gabirol and Avicebron were one.27 The misunderstanding had almost been prepared by Gabirol’s attempt to write philosophy in terms fully independent of Judaism. His anthology of proverbs —Choice of Pearls— took nearly all its quotations from non-Jewish sources, though Hebrew folklore is peculiarly rich in pointed and pithy apothegms. One pearl is quite Confucian: “How shall one take vengeance on an enemy? By increasing one’s good qualities.”28 This is practically a summary of the treatise On the Improvement of the Moral Qualities, which Gabirol seems to have composed at twenty-four, when philosophy is unbecoming. By an artificial schematism the young poet derived all virtues and vices from the five senses, with platitudinous results; but the book had the distinction of seeking to construct, in the Age of Faith, a moral code unsupported by religious belief.29
With like audacity Gabirol’s chef-d’oeuvre—Mekor Hayim—refrained from quoting either the Bible, the Talmud, or the Koran. It was this unusual supernationalism that made the book so offensive to the rabbis and, when translated into Latin as Fons vitae (The Fountain of Life), so influential in Christendom. Gabirol accepted the Neoplatonism that permeated all Arabic philosophy, but he imposed upon it a voluntarism that stressed the action of the will in God and man. We must, said Gabirol, assume the existence of God as first substance, first essence, or primary will, in order to understand the existence or motion of anything at all; but we cannot know the attributes of God. The universe was not created in time, but flows in continuous and graduated emanations from God. Everything in the universe except God is composed of matter and form; these always appear together, and can be separated only in thought.30 The rabbis repudiated this Avicennian cosmology as a disguised materialism; but Alexander of Hales, St. Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus accepted the universality of matter under God, and the primacy of will. William of Auvergne nominated Gabirol as “the noblest of all philosophers,” and thought him a good Christian.
Jehuda Halevi rejected all speculation as vain intellectualism; like al-Ghazali he feared that philosophy was undermining religion—not merely by questioning dogma, or ignoring it, or interpreting the Bible metaphorically, but even more by substituting argument for devotion. Against the invasion of Judaism by Plato and
Aristotle, and the seduction of Jews by Mohammedanism, and the continuing attacks of Qaraite Jews upon the Talmud, the poet wrote one of the most interesting books of medieval philosophy—the Al-Khazari (c. 1140). He presented his ideas in a dramatic mise-en-scène— the conversion of the Khazar king to the Jewish faith. Luckily for Halevi the book, though written in the Arabic language, used the Hebrew alphabet, which confined its audience to educated Jews. For the story, bringing a bishop, a mullah, and a rabbi before the curious king, makes short work of both Mohammedanism and Christianity. When the Christian and the Moslem quote the Hebrew Scriptures as the word of God, the king dismisses them and keeps the rabbi; and most of the book is the conversation of the rabbi instructing a docile and circumcised king in Judaic theology and ritual. Says the royal pupil to his teacher: “There has been nothing new since your religion was promulgated, except certain details concerning paradise and hell.”31 So encouraged, the rabbi explains that Hebrew is the language of God, that God spoke directly only to the Jews, and that only the Jewish prophets were divinely inspired. Halevi smiles at philosophers who proclaim the supremacy of reason, and subject God and the heavens to their syllogisms and categories, while obviously the human mind is merely a fragile and infinitesimal fraction of a vast and complex creation. The wise man (who is not necessarily learned) will recognize the weakness of reason in transmun-dane affairs; he will keep to the faith given him in the Scriptures; and he will believe and pray as simply as a child.32
Despite Halevi, the fascination of reason survived, and the Aristotelian invasion continued. Abraham ibn Daud (1110-80) was as deeply Jewish as Halevi; he defended the Talmud against the Qaraites, and proudly narrated the History of the Jewish Kings in the Second Commonwealth. But along with countless Christians, Moslems, and Jews of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, he aspired to prove his faith with philosophy. Like Halevi, he was born in Toledo, and made his living as a physician. His Arabic Kitab al-aqidah al-rafiah (Book of the Sublime Faith) gave the same answer to Halevi that Aquinas would give to the Christian enemies of philosophy: the peaceful defense of a religion against nonbelievers requires reasoning, and cannot rest upon simple faith. A few years before Averroës (1126-98), a generation before Maimonides (1135-1204), a century before St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-74), Ibn Daud labored to reconcile the faith of his fathers with the philosophy of Aristotle. The Greek would have been amused to find himself the recipient of such a triple compliment, or to learn that the Jewish philosophers knew him only in the summaries of al-Farabi and Avicenna, who knew him through imperfect translations and a Neoplatonist forgery. Truer than St. Thomas to their common Aristotelian source, Ibn Daud, like Averroës, claimed immortality only for the universal psyche, not for the individual soul;33 here, Halevi might have complained, Aristotle triumphed over the Talmud as well as the Koran. Jewish philosophy, like medieval philosophy in general, had begun with Neoplatonism and piety, and was culminating in Aristotle and doubt. Maimonides would take his start from this Aristotelian stand of Ibn Daud, and would face with courage and skill all the problems of reason in conflict with faith.
V. MAIMONIDES: 1135—1204
The greatest of medieval Jews was born in Cordova, son of the distinguished scholar, physician, and judge Maimon ben Joseph. The boy received the name of Moses, and it became an adage among Jews that “from Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses.” His people knew him as Moses ben Maimon, or, more briefly, Maimuni; when he became a famous rabbi the initials of his title and his name were combined into the fond appellation Rambam; and the Christian world expressed his parentage by terming him Maimonides. A probably legendary story tells how the boy showed a distaste for study, and how the disappointed father, calling him “the butcher’s son,” packed him off to live with the father’s former teacher, Rabbi Joseph ibn Migas.34 From this poor beginning the second Moses became adept in Biblical and rabbinical literature, in medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy; he was one of the two most learned men of his time. His only rival was Averroës. Strange to say, these outstanding thinkers, born in the same city only nine years apart, seem never to have met; and apparently Maimonides read Averroës only in old age, after his own books had been written.35
In 1148 Berber fanatics captured Cordova, destroyed churches and synagogues, and gave Christians and Jews a choice between Islam and exile. In 1159 Maimonides, with his wife and children, left Spain; for nine years they lived in Fez, pretending to be Moslems;36 for there, too, no Jews or Christians were allowed. Maimonides justified superficial adherence to Islam among endangered Jews in Morocco by arguing that “we are not asked to render active homage to heathenism, but only to recite an empty formula; the Moslems themselves know that we utter it insincerely in order to circumvent bigots.”37 The head rabbi of Fez did not agree with him, and suffered martyrdom in 1165. Fearing the same fate, Maimonides left for Palestine; thence he moved to Alexandria (1165) and old Cairo, where he lived till his death. Soon recognized as one of the ablest practitioners of his time, he became personal physician to Saladin’s eldest son, Nur-ud-Din Ali, and to Sal-adin’s vizier al-Qadi al-Fadil al-Baisani. He used his favor at court to secure protection for the Jews of Egypt; and when Saladin conquered Palestine Maimonides persuaded him to let the Jews settle there again.38 In 1177 Maimonides was made Nagid or head of the Jewish community in Cairo. A Moslem jurist indicted him (1187) as an apostate from Islam, and demanded the usual death penalty; Maimonides was saved by the vizier, who ruled that a man converted to Mohammedanism by force could not rightly be considered a Moslem.39
During these busy years in Cairo he composed most of his books. Ten medical works in Arabic transmitted the ideas of Hippocrates, Galen, Dioscorides, al-Razi, and Avicenna. Medical Aphorisms reduced Galen to 1500 short statements covering every branch of medicine; it was translated into Hebrew and Latin, and was frequently quoted in Europe under the formula Dixit Rabbi Moyses. For Saladin’s son he wrote a treatise on diet; and for Saladin’s nephew al-Muzaffar I, Sultan of Hamah, he composed an Essay on Intercourse (Maqala fi-l-jima)— on sexual hygiene, impotence, priapism, aphrodisiacs… The introduction to this work struck an unhackneyed note:
Our Lord His Majesty [al-Muzaffar]—may God prolong his power!—ordered me to compose a treatise that would help him increase his sexual powers, as he … had some hardship in this way…. He does not wish to depart from his customs concerning sexual intercourse, is alarmed by the abatement of his flesh, and desires an augmentation [of his virility] on account of the increasing number of his female slaves.40
To these writings Maimonides added several monographs—on poisons, asthma, hemorrhoids, and hypochondria—and a learned Glossary of Drugs. Like all books, these medical works contain several items not in accord with the passing infallibilities of our time—e.g., if the right testis is larger than the left, the first child will be male;41 but they are marked by an earnest desire to help the sick, by a courteous consideration of contrary opinions, and by wisdom and moderation of prescription and advice. Maimonides never prescribed drugs where diet could serve.42 He warned against overeating: “The stomach must not be made to swell like a tumor.”43 He thought that wine was healthful in moderation.44 He recommended philosophy as a training in the mental and moral balance and calm conducive to health and longevity.45
At the age of twenty-three Maimonides began a commentary on the Mishna, and labored on it for a decade amid commerce, medicine, and perilous journeys by land and sea. Published at Cairo (1158) as Kitab al-siraj, or Book of the Lamp, its clarity, erudition, and good judgment at once placed Maimonides, still a youth of thirty-three, next to Rashi as a commentator on the Talmud. Twelve years later he issued his greatest work, written in Neo-Hebraic, and provocatively called Mishna Torah. Here, in logical order and lucid brevity, were arranged all the laws of the Pentateuch, and nearly all those of the Mishna and the Gemaras. “I have entitled this work Mishna Torah [Repetition of the Law],” said the introduction, “for the reason that a person who first reads t
he written Law [the Pentateuch] and then this compilation, will know the whole oral Law, without needing to consult any other book.”46 He omitted some Talmudic regulations concerning omens, amulets, and astrology; he was among the few medieval thinkers who rejected astrology.47 He classified the 613 precepts of the Law under fourteen heads, devoted a “book” to each head, and undertook not only to explain each law, but to show its logical or historical necessity. Only one of the fourteen books has been translated into English; it forms a substantial volume; we may judge the immensity of the original.
It is clear from this work, and from the later Guide to the Perplexed, that Maimonides was not openly a freethinker. He endeavored as far as he could to reduce Scriptural miracles to natural causes, but he taught the divine inspiration of every word in the Pentateuch, and the orthodox rabbinical doctrine that the whole oral Law had been transmitted by Moses to the elders of Israel.48 Perhaps he felt that the Jews could not claim less for their Scriptures than the Christians and Moslems claimed for them; perhaps he, too, considered social order impossible without belief in the divine origin of the moral code. He was a stern and dictatorial patriot: “All Israelites are bound to follow everything in the Babylonian Talmud, and we should force the Jews of every land to adhere to the customs established by the Talmudic sages.”49 A bit more liberal than most Moslems and Christians of the time, he thought that a virtuous and monotheistic non-Jew would go to heaven, but he was as severe as Deuteronomy or Torquemada on heretics within the Hebrew pale; any Jew who repudiated the Jewish Law should be put to death; and “according to my opinion, all members of an Israelite community which has insolently and presumptuously transgressed any of the divine precepts must be put to death.”50 He anticipated Aquinas in defending death for heresy on the ground that “cruelty against those who mislead the people to seek vanity is real clemency to the world”;51 and he accepted without trouble the Scriptural penalty of death for witchcraft, murder, incest, idolatry, violent robbery, kidnaping, filial disobedience, and breaking the Sabbath.52 The condition of the Jews migrating from ancient Egypt and trying to form a state out of a destitute and homeless horde may have warranted these laws; the precarious status of the Jews in Christian Europe or Moslem Africa, always subject to attack, conversion, or demoralization, required a hard code to forge order and unity; but in these matters (and before the Inquisition) Christian theory, and probably Jewish practice, were more humane than Jewish law. A better side of this stern spirit shows in Maimonides’ advice to the Jews of his age: “If heathens should say to Israelites, ‘Surrender one of your number to us that we may put him to death,’ they should all suffer death rather than surrender a single Israelite to them.”53