History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Maimonides’ capacity to absorb masses of difficult material, sacred and secular, was developed very early in life. So was his determination to re-present it to the Jewish world in orderly and rational form. He was not yet sixteen when he finished his Treatise on Logic. Then, in 1158, followed his astronomical Treatise on the Calendar. When he was twenty-two he began his first major work, his Commentary on the Mishna, completing it at Fustat in 1168. This was the equivalent of the summae of the Christian schoolmen and included a vast amount of secular material, on animals, plants, flowers and natural history, as well as human psychology. Much of it was written when he and his family were trying to find a safe place to live: ‘I was driven from one end of the world to the other,’ he notes, ‘…God knows that I have explained some chapters whilst on my wanderings, and others on board ship.’31 Thereafter he turned to the major task of codifying talmudic law, the Mishneh Torah, in fourteen volumes, which took him ten years and was finished in 1180. By this time the death of David had forced him to take up the practice of medicine. He was also an active judge, and in due course became head of the Egyptian Jewish community, though never with the official title of nagid. A great many people from all over the Jewish world consulted him by letter, and over 400 of his Hebrew responsa have been printed. But he found time in 1185 to begin his most famous and remarkable work, his three-book Guide of the Perplexed, explaining the fundamental theology and philosphy of Judaism, which he finished in about 1190.

  Maimonides took his medical career with great seriousness, and in the non-Jewish world it was his chief claim to fame. He wrote extensively on diet, drugs and treatment: ten of his medical works survive and there may be more. He also lectured on physiology and therapeutics, as well as Judaic religion and law. He doctored Saladin’s vizier, Al-Fadi al-Baisami, who paid him an annual salary, and later Saladin’s son, who became sultan in 1198. He was invited, but declined, to become court doctor to ‘the Frankish King’ (either Richard Lionheart of England or Amalric King of Jerusalem). The Arabic sources make it clear that he was regarded as one of the world’s leading doctors, with a particular skill in treating psychosomatic cases. An Arabic verse circulated: ‘Galen’s medicine is only for the body, but that of [Maimonides] is for both body and soul.’32

  He led a life of heroic industry and public service, for he visited patients in the big public hospitals as well as receiving them at home. To his favourite pupil, Joseph ibn Aknin, he wrote:

  I have acquired a high reputation among the great, such as the chief kadi, the emirs, the house of Al-Fadr and other city nobles, who do not pay much. The ordinary people find it too far to come and see me in Fustat, so I have to spend my days visiting the sick in Cairo and when I get home I am too tired to pursue my studies in the medical books—you know the amount of time a conscientious man needs in our art to check his sources, so that he can be sure all his statements can be supported by argument and proper authority.

  To another correspondent, Samuel ibn Tibbon, he wrote in 1199:

  I dwell in Fustat and the sultan in Cairo itself and the distance between the two places is a double Sabbath-day journey [i.e. 1.5 miles]. My duties to the sultan are heavy. I must visit him early every morning. If he feels ill, or any of his children or harem are sick, I do not leave Cairo but spend the greater part of the day in the palace. If some of the court officials are ill I am there the whole day…even if there is nothing, I do not get back to Fustat until afternoon. Then I am tired and hungry and find the courtyard of my house full of people, high and low, gentiles, theologians and judges, waiting for my return. I dismount, wash my hands and beg them to wait while I eat, my only meal of the twenty-four hours. Then I attend to the patients. They are queueing up until nightfall, sometimes till 2 a.m. I talk to them lying on my back because I am weak. When night falls I am sometimes too weary to speak. So no Israelites can have a private talk with me except on the Sabbath. Then they all come to me after the services, and I advise them what to do during the coming week. Afterwards, they study a little till noon, then depart. Some of them come back and study again until the evening prayers. This is my routine.33

  The year after this was written, Maimonides found it impossible to continue visiting the sultan in person, instead issuing written instructions to his physicians. But he continued to hold his medical, judicial and theological court until his death in 1204, in his seventieth year.

  Maimonides’ life was devoted wholeheartedly to the service of the Jewish community and, to a more limited extent, to the human community as a whole. This was in accord with the central social tenet of Judaism. Yet helping the Fustat community—or even the wider gentile community of Cairo—was not enough. Maimonides was conscious of possessing great intellectual powers; and, equally important, the energy and concentration needed to put those powers to huge productive use. The Jews had been created to leaven the dough of humanity, to enlighten the gentiles. They did not have state power, or military force, or wide territories. But they had brains. The intellect, and the reasoning process, were their weapons. The scholar thus had outstanding status in their society, and so peculiar responsibilities; the leading scholar had the most exacting duties it was possible to imagine—he must take the lead in turning a savage and irrational world into a reasonable one, conforming to the divine and perfect intellect.

  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. Philo, who was a precursor of Maimonides in many ways, saw the object of Jewish scholarship in the same way. It was a protective shield for the Jews in the first place—for they were the ‘race of suppliants’ who interceded with God on behalf of humanity—and in the second it was the means whereby a terrifyingly irrational world could be civilized. Philo took a sombre view of the unreformed human condition. He had lived through an appalling pogrom in Alexandria, which he described in his historical works, In Flaccum and the fragmentary Legatio in Gaium. Lack of reason could turn men into monsters, worse than animals. Anti-Semitism was a kind of paradigm of human evil because it was not only irrational in itself but a rejection of God, the epitome of folly. But Jewish intellectuals, by their writings, could fight folly. That was why, in his De Vita Mosis, he tried to present Jewish rationality to a gentile readership and why, in his Legum Allegoriarum, he sought to rationalize, by the use of allegory, some of the more bizarre elements of the Pentateuch for Jewish readers.34

  Maimonides stood half-way between Philo and the modern world. Like Philo, he had no illusions about humanity in its godless, irrational state. He had no direct knowledge of Christian persecution, but he had bitter, first-hand experience of Islamic savagery, and even in his tranquil haven of Fustat, his correspondents—in the Yemen, for instance—reminded him that atrocities were constantly being perpetrated against Jews; his letter to the Yemenis reflects his profound contempt for Islam as an answer to the world’s unreason.35 Unlike Philo, he did not have the benefit of the broad panoply of Greek rationalism available in the great Alexandrine library. But Aristotelianism was being spread again by Arab intermediaries—Avicenna (980-1035) and Maimonides’ older Spanish contemporary, Averroes (1126-98). Moreover, he was the beneficiary of a thousand years of Judaic commentary, much of which was another form of rationalism.

  Then too, Maimonides was a rationalist by temperament. Like Philo, his writings exude caution, moderation and distrust of enthusiasm. He was always anxious to avoid rows, and odium theologicum most of all: ‘Even when men insult me I do not mind, but answer politely with friendly words, or remain silent.’ He was a little vain but certainly not proud: ‘I do not maintain that I never m
ake mistakes. On the contrary, when I discover one, or if I am convicted of error by others, I am ready to change anything in my writings, in my ways and even in my nature.’ In a famous letter of reply to the comments on his Mishneh Torah by the scholars of southern France, he admits errors, says he has already made some corrections and will insert others, and insists they are quite right to challenge his work: ‘Do not humble yourselves. You may not be my teachers but you are my equals and friends and all your questions were worth raising.’36 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.

  Maimonides had a clear view of what the truthful and rational—and therefore divine—society would be like. It would not consist of physical or material satisfaction. Ultimate happiness lay in the immortal existence of the human intellect contemplating God.37 In the last chapter of the Mishneh Torah he describes messianic society: ‘His rule will be firmly established and then the wise will be free for the study of the Law and its wisdom and in those days there will be no hunger or war, no hatred or rivalry…and no toil on earth but for the knowledge of the Lord alone.’ The guarantor of perfect society is divine law. A good state, by definition, is one under the rule of law; the ideal state is under divine law.38

  That, of course, had to await the coming of the Messiah, and Maimonides, being the cautious scientist, was the last man to raise eschatological visions. In the meantime, however, good societies could be produced by law. 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.39 One is tempted to guess that Maimonides saw the age of the Messiah coming, not out of the blue, in a sudden clap of thunder, but as a result of progressing, unmiraculous improvements in human rationality.

  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. This was not impossible in an intensely bookish society. It was a Jewish axiom: ‘One should sell all he possesses and buy books, for as the sages put it, “He who increases books, increases wisdom.” ’ A man who lent his books, particularly to the poor, earned merit with God. ‘If a man has two sons, one of whom dislikes lending his books, while the other is eager, a man should leave all his library to the second, even if he be younger,’ wrote one of Maimonides’ contemporaries, Judah of Regensburg. Pious Jews saw heaven as a vast library, with the Archangel Metatron as the librarian: the books in the shelves there pressed themselves together to make room for a newcomer. Maimonides disapproved of this anthropomorphic nonsense but he agreed with the notion of the world to come being an abstract version of a heavenly academy. He would have agreed, too, with Judah’s practical injunctions that a man should never kneel on a big folio to fasten its clasps, or use pens as bookmarks, or employ the books themselves as missiles or instruments to chastise scholars—and with his splendid maxim: ‘A man should have regard to the honour of his books.’40 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. Maimonides said that it was not required of a woman to study, but she earned merit if she did so. Every man should study according to his capacity: thus, a clever artisan could devote three hours to his trade, leaving nine for the Torah—‘three in studying the written law, three in the Oral Law, and three reflecting on how to deduce one rule from another’. This little analysis, which he termed ‘the beginning of learning’, gives some indication of his standards of industry.41

  However, it was little use bidding the Jewish people to study without at the same time doing everything possible to make that study productive. Convinced as he was that 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, Maimonides was also painfully aware that the Law itself, after a thousand years of legal accretions and unco-ordinated commentary, was in an appalling state of confusion and penetrated by grossly irrational elements. His lifework then was twofold: to reduce the Law to order, and to re-present it on a thoroughly rational basis. To achieve the first, he wrote his Mishnah commentary, which for the first time made clear the underlying principles of mishnaic legislation, and he codified talmudic law, with the object, as he put it, to make it quick and easy to find a decision ‘in the sea of the Torah’. Maimonides observed: ‘You either write a commentary or a code—each is a distinct task in itself.’ Being an intellectual giant, he did both. He wrote with a sense of urgency, against a background (as he saw it) of danger to the Jews: ‘In times of persecution like the present,’ he said, ‘people lack the mental equanimity to devote themselves to intricate studies, and nearly every one finds serious difficulties in deriving a clear-cut decision from the works of the earlier codifiers, where the arrangement is as unsystematic as in the Talmud itself. Still fewer persons are able to deduce the law directly from the talmudic sources.’ What he produced was clear, orderly, concise and uncluttered by endless source-listing. It was not, as he hoped, definitive. Like every other attempt to say the last word on the Law, it merely detonated another huge avalanche of tomes—in 1893, a list (itself incomplete) was compiled of 220 major commentaries on Maimonides’ Code.42 But it was highly effective: a Spanish contemporary said judges opposed the work precisely because it enabled laymen to check their decisions. That was exactly what Maimonides wanted—for the Law, the sword and armour of the Jews, to become the working property of all of them.

  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 encouraged him to marry Jewish faith and philosophy. Avicenna and Averroes had performed the same task for Islam and Thomas Aquinas was soon to do it for Christianity. But Maimonides was the greatest rationalist of them all. On the key issue of prophecy, for instance, he used metaphor, analogy and parable to explain the prophets’ communications with God and their miracles as ‘natural’. He had a theory of divine emanations, which the prophets tapped. The so-called angels who helped to produce the vision were the imaginative faculty of the prophet; he used the word cherub to signify the intellect.43

  However, there was a point at which Maimonides’ rationalism stopped. He felt he had to differentiate between Moses and the other prophets. He dismissed them as amphibolous or analogical, but Moses ‘did not, like the other prophets, prophesy by means of parables’; he actually spoke to God ‘as a presence to another presence, without an intermediary’. He tried to explain away Moses’ uniqueness by arguing that the highest possible degree of perfection natural to the human species must be reached in one indivi
dual—and Moses was the man. 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. On the apparent conflict between free will and predestination, he quoted Ecclesiastes—‘exceeding deep, who can find it out?’44—and in his writings there are passages which favour both absolute freedom of the will to obey or disobey the Law, and strict determinism. He attacked astrologers, for rendering the Law futile. On the other hand, the first of his thirteen principles of faith is: ‘God alone performed, performs and will perform all actions.’45 It is possible to point to other contradictions in his vast body of work though there are surprisingly few of them.

  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. Maimonides was a great harbinger of the Jewish future; indeed, of the human future. His Guide of the Perplexed continued to shift Jewish minds for centuries—not always in the direction he wished. 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.