A Jew Among Romans

by Frederic Raphael

  In Halevi’s maturity, the effervescence of his love poetry, and his spirited use of Arabic themes, no longer satisfied him. Abandoning worldly ambition, he turned his thoughts, like those of many contemporary Arab poets, to the fate of his soul. The decision to jettison the comforts of the convivencia and to set off, alone, for Zion was, no doubt, primed by piety. Despite María Rosa Menocal’s seductive depiction of the caliphate as a haven of tolerance,3 the convivencia never welded the three monotheisms, still less their celebrants, into a cohesive “nationality.” Nevertheless, its persistent obsession with pura sangre hints at Christian Spain’s later and unrelieved apprehension that Jewish and Arab blood must flow in many Iberian veins. Halevi’s love songs suggest how great was the lure to cross the line.

  As instability and the intolerance of the Almohads, a dynasty of Muslim fundamentalists from Morocco, began to pinch out the Jews, Halevi sought a resolution of his polymorphous life. For whatever amalgam of motives, he set out to honor his nostalgic dream of Jewish election by emigrating to Palestine. In 1140, he sailed for Egypt. The Alexandrians’ enthusiasm for his by now famous company tempted him to linger where Maimonides himself would come to die.s In his last poem, however, Halevi praises the favorable wind that, he prays, will carry him on to Zion. His final journey was from the crusaders’ port of Acre to the gates of Jerusalem, where, as he prayed at the Wailing Wall (all that was left of the Second Temple), tradition says that he was almost immediately trampled to death by an Arab horseman. Saint Teresa of Ávila (the turreted city not far from Halevi’s putative birthplace, Tuleda) might have reminded him of the dangers of answered prayers.

  Halevi’s vision of humanity is scarcely “liberal.” He regards other religions as akin to “medical mountebankery,” a subject with which he was familiar since, like Moses Maimonides a generation later, he was a practicing physician (as well as a Levite). Halevi “qualified” as a doctor (to do so a man had only to announce that he was one) by reading Greek medical texts, in Arabic translations; he had no clinical training. In the tenth century, Salerno, south of Naples in Italy, had the sole practical medical school in Europe.t Since medieval medicine was largely a matter of prescribing herbal remedies, combined with a soothing or impressive bedside manner, its practice rarely did much harm.

  Maimonides’s own knowledge of medicine may have encouraged him in his view that “any human being can be a prophet,” depending only on God’s will. In some Orthodox circles, the accusation still attaches to him that he dismantled the traditional specificity of the Jews by his willingness to admit converts. Here he challenged The Kuzari, in which Halevi, for all his literary eclecticism, claimed that only a born Jew is biologically capable of prophecy: “Its influence can be bestowed only on those high enough on the ladder of Being to receive it.” Hillel Halkin maintains that this “unprecedented” chauvinism derives less from conceit than from intimations of despair over the morale of the Jews. Having for centuries been useful civil (and military) servants to both Christian and Muslim caliphs and princes, the Jews in Halevi’s day were increasingly marginalized as religious absolutism (mostly Christian) carved deeper dividing lines between once more or less compatible communities.

  Halevi’s urgent defense of Jewish priority in God’s scheme was almost certainly excited by the massacre, in 1099, by the first crusaders, of all the Jews (and Muslims) in Jerusalem. He implored God to roast the crusaders “in coals made from their Cross,” an imprecation that sorts ill with the notion, common in the later Diaspora, that Jews never entertained active hostility toward those who persecuted them. Maimonides, for all his aloof intelligence, refers to Muhammad as “the Madman” and hopes that the bones of Jesus will be “ground to dust.” Echoes of classical Greco-Roman rhetoric and disdain (as practiced by Seneca, the greatest of Cordoban émigrés) lingered in the prose style of the intellectuals of Muslim Spain.

  Maimonides tried to steer a middle course between oral and confidential teaching, which was permitted, and teaching in writing, which—in the Pharisaic tradition—was not. Private correspondence with a close friend was taken to resemble confidential conversation; hence Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed appears to be addressed to his friend and favorite pupil, Joseph (yet another of the same name). In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Leo Strauss describes how, in the following decades:

  the continuity of oral tradition presupposes a certain normality of political conditions. That is why the secrets of the Torah were perfectly understood only as long as Israel lived in its own country in freedom, not subjugated by the ignorant nations of the world. Particularly.… when the supreme political authority rested in the hands of King Solomon who—according to Maimonides III, 26—had an almost complete understanding of the secret reasons of the commandments. After Solomon, wisdom and political power were no longer united; decline and, finally, loss of freedom followed.

  When the nation was led into captivity [in Babylon], it sustained further loss in the perfect knowledge of the secrets. Whereas Isaiah’s contemporaries understood his brief hints, those of Ezekiel required many more details.… to grasp the sacred doctrine.…. Decline of knowledge became even more marked with the discontinuation of prophecy itself. Still more disastrous was the victory of the Romans, since the new Diaspora was to last so much longer than the first. As time went on, the external conditions for oral communication of the secrets of the Torah.… grew increasingly precarious.u

  As the Cordoban convivencia was increasingly menaced by the Almohads, the moment was imminent when it would be impossible to speak without fear. For that reason, Maimonides decided he had to write down the secret teaching. He thought it his duty, despite Talmudic prohibition, to give such written explanations of biblical secrets as would meet the conditions required for an oral tradition. As Strauss puts it, Maimonides had to become “a master of the art of revealing by not revealing and of not revealing by revealing.”

  Maimonides took the Bible to be the work of a single author, not so much Moses as God Himself. It is on this issue that Spinoza would part company both with Maimonides and with Judaism. Orthodoxy offered him no choice: doubt of God’s authorship was tantamount to apostasy. The law is, in this respect, less elastic than faith, and less mutable than myth: for Maimonides, the Torah had to be perfect, hence homogeneous, in content and form. He could never accept that what seemed to be its formal deficiencies—abrupt changes of subject, repetition with variations—were due to compilation by unknown redactors from divergent sources, as Spinoza’s philology claimed to have proved (and few scholars would now deny). The text’s disjunctions were taken by Maimonides to be “purposeful irregularities, intended to hide and betray a deeper order, a deep, nay, divine meaning.” According to Leo Strauss, the Guide mimics the Bible’s lack of manifest order and abrupt changes of topic.4 In a mutation of Josephan ambiguity, Maimonides offers a cryptic version of the cryptic.

  As the convivencia broke up, under the pressure of militant Catholicism, Spanish Jews usually sided with the “Moors,” with whom, if Shlomo Sand is even slightly right, they had racial, dietetic and communal affinities. Leo Strauss emphasized that revelation has for both (religious) Jews and Muslims “the character of Law (torah, shari’a) rather than of Faith.… [it is] not a creed or a set of dogmas, but a social order, if not an all-comprehensive order, which regulates not merely actions but thoughts or opinions as well.” Muslim hostility to Jews—for instance, in eleventh-century Granada—had more to do with resentment of their ascendancy than with ideology.v The increasing militancy of the Christian church expressed itself, in the years before the Reconquista, by seeking to evict Judaism from its theological primacy and the Jews from any influence in the world’s game. The force of argument, circumstance and force itself led to the increasingly beleaguered condition of Jewish communities, Sephardic as well as Ashkenazi (Christian soldiers who enrolled for the First Crusade did their basic training, as it were, by massacring the Jewish civilian population in the Rhineland).

&nb
sp; In thirteenth-century Spain, the Jewish apostates Pablo Christiani and Petrus Alfonsi were prototypes of those who deserted their ancient faith, albeit for reasons of conviction, and transformed themselves into its evangelizing enemies. Saint Paul is the God-struck prototype of such enthusiasts. His vision of Jesus is proof that the dead can be remodeled into the antithesis of their living selves.w In 1263, the great Rabbi Nachmanides was conscripted to take part in a disputation with a Dominican friar in Barcelona. Before it began, he was warned by his friend (and medical patient) King Jaime I of Aragon that he might defend Judaism but that he must never, on pain of death, dispute the veracity of Christianity. The Jew was confined, metaphysically, to “playing for a draw.” A winning argument was likely to cost him his life. In the case of Nachmanides, even a draw put him in danger. Thanks only to Jaime I, he was able to get away before the Dominicans laid hands on him.x

  The Jews, with their arcane language, weird paraphernalia and exclusive rites, had a reputation for recherché powers that accompanied them down the ages, arming their medicine with a tincture of diabolical knowledge. Jewish doctors were both privileged and suspect. Stalin arrested, and would have murdered, all the “Jewish doctors” who had been convoked, because of their expertise, to service the Kremlin. When they proved incapable of immortalizing its paranoid occupant, it remained plausible, to the Soviet public, and to Joseph the Terrible, that Jews should be given to devious duplicity.y

  In sixteenth-century London, Ruy López, Queen Elizabeth I’s Marrano physician, was executed on suspicion of being a spy; treachery was taken to be the mark of the Jew, not least when he swore that he no longer was one. The queen herself could not save López from the scaffold. As he was publicly disemboweled, the London crowd was amused that he repeatedly proclaimed himself as good a Christian as his tormentors. Shylock is said to have been based on López. However “humanely” Shakespeare allowed the baited Shylock to speak for himself, the English of his day treated “the Jews” with much less generosity than did the Venetians, whom Shakespeare was pleased to satirize. While Jews were formally banned from entering England, the Serene Republic had the mercantile sense to make Jews somewhat welcome, although they were sequestered in their ghetto.

  Shakespeare may have had firsthand experience of Jews, since a small community of Marranos were his neighbors in Elizabethan London, but they were well-advised to keep their heads down and their identity secret. It remains typical of the fissile habits of Jews of differing provenance or shades of practice that the ghetto in Venice contains synagogues from which Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews excluded those who did not share their origins or adhere to the distinct minutiae of their rites.

  The ghettoization of Jews in Christian Europe was forced upon them, but there was also a certain acquiescence: Judaism was an esoteric faith. The tradition of the minyan, which Josephus saw institutionalized among the Essenes, requires the presence of other Jews for valid wor-ship. In the Christian imagination, the ghetto created a cloche for bogeymen, for necromancy and for conspiracy; for the pinched Jews, it was also a home from home, albeit joyless and menaced by pogroms. The ghetto became a pressure cooker, heated from without by the sleepless imagination of the persecuting church. The blood libel, for which there was never the smallest evidence, was of a piece with the Christian capacity for believing what was incredible.z The burning of witches and Jews was a vindication of faith that was also an acknowledgment of doubt.

  Spanish inquisitors and poets such as Lope de Vega “seriously” believed that Jewish males could be detected because they menstruated and, so the story went, had tails.aa Jews are still sometimes said to be “racially” prone to hemorrhoids and, of course, to have telltale noses.bb Yosef Yerushalmi describes how, in seventeeth-century Spain, Isaac Cardoso—a Marrano physician who later escaped to the freedom of the Italian ghettos, where he reverted to Judaism—treated an alcalde of the court, Don Juan de Quiñones, for hemorrhoids.cc 5 Quiñones had used his learning and library to compile a treatise proving that Jews had tails, were “subject to menstrual periods, and blood, as punishment for the grave sin which they committed.” The author’s own piles were “so huge and great, and accompanied by blood and pain, that they actually seemed tail-like.…. I then said to him: ‘Your honor must also be liable in the sin of that [Jesus’s] death.’…. He began to laugh and said he did not agree with this, for he has been well proved to be an hidalgo of La Mancha.” The absurdity of anti-Semitic myths is often conceded in polite circumstances; but they are too serviceable to be forgotten.

  In 1492, the conclusion of the Reconquista drove the mass of unconverted Jews out of Spain. On the face of things, those who remained had no choice but to embrace Catholicism. Their sincerity was soon questioned. The so-called Marranos, or Judaizers, were easy targets for neighborly malice. A distaste for pork or a reluctance to work (or even to light a fire) on a Saturday was enough to excite suspicion. Many Jews who fled from Spain and, later, from Portugal found refuge in the Netherlands, where the Christian population, which included many Protestants, had fought a brave battle, physical and spiritual, to emancipate themselves from Catholic Spain.

  With rare if wary grace, the Dutch authorities tolerated the immigrant Jews forming their own communities and building synagogues. In return, Jews were expected to keep to themselves and not attract attention to their idiosyncratic habits. Tolerance had its repressive consequences: the Amsterdam Jewish authorities formed a petty Sanhedrin. Their inquisitorial vigilance over their congregations’ orthodoxy reciprocated the Gentiles’ watch over them.

  Steven Nadler cites Shabbatai Bass, a Polish scholar who visited the Amsterdam community in the 1640s.6 He reported seeing “giants [in scholarship]; tender children as small as grasshoppers.… kids who have become he-goats.… prodigies because of their unusual familiarity with the entire Bible and with the science of grammar. They possessed the ability to compose verses and poems in meter and to speak a pure Hebrew.” It was in this forcing house of heads-down intellectual precociousness that Baruch Spinoza began to distinguish himself.

  The rabbis were close to being the absolute rulers of the community. The discipline that produced prodigies also demanded obedience, not only from the student. It was vital to avoid exciting the disapproval of the Dutch authorities. The result was a kind of voluntary ghettoization. Dissent from orthodoxy was visited with punishment that echoed the practice of the Inquisition from which so many of the community had fled. The story of Uriel (or Gabriel) da Costa exemplifies the fate of transgressors. His father had been an authentic Christian, his mother a “Judaizer”: publicly Christian, but secretly cleaving to the old religion. Da Costa studied canon law and began a career within the church, leading a pious life. He was, however, riven by doubts concerning the afterlife and by the difficulty of reconciling Catholicism with reason. In his early twenties, he resigned his benefice and, with his mother and two brothers, repaired to Amsterdam, where he recrossed the line into Judaism. His three brothers were circumcised and studied Jewish rituals and duties. The Torah had trumped the Gospel.

  Quite soon, Uriel grew disillusioned by rabbinic practice. He found that the Law of Moses had been distorted and embellished by the “inventions of the so-called Jewish sages.… additions totally foreign to the Law.” In attacking the Talmudic annexes to the Torah, he was as much an antique Sadducee as a modern rationalist. He argued that the soul was mortal and that there could be no afterlife, no eternal reward or punishment: “Once he is dead, nothing remains of a man, nor does he ever return to life.” When he published his heretical opinions, they also offended the Dutch authorities, who arrested and fined him. His book was publicly burned (one copy survives). Da Costa wandered around Protestant Europe but found no welcome. When he returned to Amsterdam, he tried to reconcile himself with the local rabbinate, but soon reverted to his militant heterodoxy. He concluded that the Mosaic law itself was a human fabrication: “it contradicts the law of nature in many respects and God, the author of the law o
f nature, cannot contradict himself.”dd

  This seemed to portend a final breach with the Jews, but da Costa soon retracted his words and tried, he wrote, to “reunite myself with them and fall into step.… aping the apes, as they say.” He did not prove steadfast in that effort. He was soon denounced for having sought to dissuade two Christians from conversion to Judaism: “they did not know the yoke they were about to put around their necks.” In 1633, a year after Baruch Spinoza was born, da Costa was again told that he would be expelled from the community, unless he submitted to a flogging. He refused and was cut off from all Jewish contact.

  Seven years later, poor and lonely, he agreed to be humiliated. According to his own account, in the Exemplar Humanae Vitae, he was stripped to the waist, in front of the assembled community, tied to a pillar and given thirty-nine lashes, “as required by tradition.… a psalm was sung during the flagellation.” He was then allowed to dress but led to the threshold of the synagogue. “There I laid myself out.… and all who came down to exit the synagogue passed over me, stepping with one foot over the lower parts of my body. Everyone, young and old, took part in this ceremony. Not even monkeys could exhibit to the eyes of the world such shocking actions or more ridiculous behaviour.”

  The account is so stark and so vile that it might include interpolations by an anti-Semite, as has indeed been suggested, though with small conviction. It is sadly unsurprising that the vindictiveness with which Jews have been treated, from at least the time of Joseph ben Mattathias, should be assumed into their conduct toward each other. It was rarely marked by magnanimity even before the sack of Jerusalem. Da Costa’s brave vacillations, into and out of and back into Judaism, recall the words which Blaise Pascal ascribes to men as a whole: “Does he exalt himself? I lay him low; does he humble himself? I exalt him and continue to contradict him until he comprehends that he is an incomprehensible monstrosity.” A few days after writing the Exemplar, in which he also chided the Amsterdam magistrates for not protecting him from “the Pharisees,” Uriel da Costa killed himself.