by Simon Schama
Perhaps the rule of the Crusaders turned out to be more onerous and upsetting than he had bargained for. Palestine had been Christian for some seventy years and would stay that way until Saladin’s conquest in 1187 – though significantly this reversion to Islam, and the possibility that Jews would be allowed to live in Jerusalem once more, was not enough to persuade Maimonides to return. Compared with the place he ended up in – Egypt – he may have felt Palestine a cultural backwater. Acre, where they arrived in May 1165, would have been his first experience of a Christian city, albeit of a very distinctive kind: a massively fortified port; streets that were a lot wider and grander than anything in Fez, or even Cordoba; grandiose buildings for the orders of the Knights Templar and Hospitaller; churches everywhere. In the middle of it, a Jewish community of a few hundred (in a city of 40,000) led by three rabbis, one of whom, Tzadok, was master of the local yeshiva. In all likelihood Rabbi Maimon and his sons would have been well received. It’s possible that the local Jews might even have known Moses’ early work on logic and the famous letter on forced conversion. But there would already have been a well-trodden route of piety for the family to follow: across Galilee to Tiberias, Sepphoris and Safed, the home of a gathering of Kabbalistically inclined mystics. Tomb tourism had been established and would have begun with the site where the first author of the Mishnah, Yehudah Hanasi, ‘saint and prince’ as Maimonides called him, was said to have been buried just outside Sepphoris. ‘Guides’ with a gleam in their eye and their promise of bargain-price accompaniment had to be brushed away like buzzing flies. The tombs of Rachel, the prophet Jonah son of Amitai, the one in the valley of Kidron said to be the resting place of David’s rebellious son Absalom, and the ‘Cave of the Patriarchs’ in Hebron were all obligatory stops, as they still are today.
Jerusalem of course was the ultimate destination, the point of it all, but for whatever reasons it took Maimonides six months before he finally got there. Perhaps the prospect of measuring reality against sacred poetry, inevitable to his sharp intellect, was itself a reason for procrastination. For he was no exception to the rule that the Jerusalem of the grieving imagination preceded and conditioned any actual experience. Maimonides doubtless did follow his own advice that, on beholding its ruins, Jews should utter lines from the Book of Isaiah on the laying waste of the Temple. He might have recalled Halevi’s words that for their sins Jews had been punished by the transformation of the city of David and Solomon into the ‘lair of owls and jackals’. His first view, like all those who approached, would have been from the Mount of Olives, from where he would have seen the area that had been the Haram al-Sharif, and once the Temple, turned into a congregation of churches. He was much given to introspection about whether or not, even in this state of degradation, Jews should actually enter the precincts of the ruined Temple, impure as they were, but he seems anyway to have done so, perhaps also rending raiment like a mourner, as he prescribed – and not just a token snip or snag either, but a fierce ripping into shreds and rags, layer after layer ‘until the very heart is laid bare’. Maimonides made sure to add that what was left of the garment could only be repaired with a crude ladder-stitch, the kind that would fall apart at the merest tug.
It was hard, perhaps impossible, to live in the sight of such rack and ruin. A handful of Jews did so, outside the walls, but they were shouters, beggars, spongers, draggers to rocks and tombs, exploiters of the Torah to the credulous. Better to keep the holy vision in the mind. And there was something else that might have made him want to move off again. His father had died, and was buried in the land of Israel as he doubtless had wished. But prayers could be said for him wherever the brothers were. Why should they stay forever at his tomb? So Moses was off again a year after he had come, travelling south to the place he would describe to a Yemeni correspondent as ‘home’, the place Jews were endlessly instructed to leave but to which they somehow always returned: Egypt. Where else should he go? Fez had become intolerable under the Almohades or whatever variation of Berber ferocity succeeded them. Al-Andalus was lost forever. Since the Almohades conquest, a Jewish emigration from the Maghreb centres – Kairouan, Marrakech and Fez – east to Fustat had been gathering pace. Egypt was still in the hands of the Shi’ite Fatimid caliphs, though not for very much longer. Yet Fustat was not just a thriving centre of commerce and culture but also one in which piety and philosophy were inseparable, and that may have been one of the attractions for Maimonides.
As with so many Jews before him it was his fame as a learned and skilled physician which opened doors for Maimonides at the court of the caliphate. In what seems to have been no time at all, he became doctor to the caliph’s vizier, Shawar, and the powerful minister al-Qadi al-Fadil, who saw in the young Jew a fellow scholar and philosopher. It did no harm to his prospects that Maimonides wrote in elegantly rhymed prose. Nor that he was a doctor with a complete set of skills, one of which, like Hasdai ibn Shaprut before him, was a speciality in antidotes for poisons, always a popular talent in the dangerous world of competing Muslim powers. Maimonides would go on to write treatises on practically anything that ailed people, from impotence (rubbing the challenged member with crushed saffron ants suspended in an emulsion of oils was his secret recipe for securing and sustaining a strong erection) to haemorrhoids and asthma.
Dr Maimonides was evidently so good that, probably to curry favour with his Crusader ally Amalric I, the vizier Shawar wanted Maimonides to go and treat the Christian king of Jerusalem then camped at Askelon. And Maimonides was already sufficiently indispensable to be able to decline without suffering negative consequences. After all, wrote another friend and admirer of his, the poet ibn Sana al-Mulk, ‘were the moon to ask him for treatment . . . it would receive it to perfection . . . and on the day of the full moon he would deliver a cure for its freckles’.7
Nor did the overthrow of the Fatimids by the next power along the line – the Kurdish dynasty of the Ayyubids – damage his career prospects, not least because the incoming warriors were Sunni and as it happened Maimonides’ patron and friend al-Qadi al-Fadil was himself a Sunni even when he had been working for the Shi’ite Fatimids. When the minister nimbly switched allegiance, his brightest and best protégé went along with him. Maimonides settled in the district of Mamsusa, close to the old Roman fortress, and – strikingly late for a Jew – got married in his mid thirties, to the daughter of an old Fustat family. His affiliation was with the ‘Iraqi’ synagogue rather than the ‘Palestinian’, each, one need hardly say, worshipping in their different chants and styles with no love lost between them, though Maimonides appears to have preferred praying at smaller places of study. In any event he became enough of an authoritative figure in the community that he was called on as a ‘rav’ to issue legal judgements on inquiries laid before the religious courts and, more startlingly, to become for a short time ra’is al yahudiya or head of the entire community of Jews in Egypt, responsible for mediating between them and the government, not least in matters of taxes. Maimonides may have been flattered by the confidence but he also knew it was a thankless job, a guarantee of hatred from both sides, and extricated himself from it by 1172 after only a year. There was only so much multitasking even he could manage, and being doctor, religious judge and authority – while also working at night on his great study of the Mishnah and much besides – was consuming his hours and, as the physician knew, his health. But the appointment as ra’is was evidence that Maimonides was admired and trusted by his counterparts in the Muslim world and he in his turn drew deeply from their translations and editions of Greek philosophy, above all Aristotle.
Every so often, though, something happened to pull Maimonides out of any complacency that he was living in some sort of unforced cultural community with Muslims. In 1172, he received a letter from Yemen – the place that had once been a Jewish kingdom – reporting on an appalling campaign of coercion inflicted on the Jews by a messianic rebel, whose regime made the Almohades seem by comparison positively lenient. O
f such evil tidings he quoted the Book of Samuel: ‘“Whoever hears of them has both ears tingle.” Indeed our hearts are weakened, our minds are confused and the powers of our body are wasted because of the dire misfortunes which have brought persecutions on us from the two ends of the world, East and West.’8 In Yemen, Jews were being subjected en masse to forced conversion, but the penalty for any sort of heterodoxy – not to mention failing to pray at the appointed times, drinking or other such iniquities – was death, applied by the Mahdist rebels with brutal enthusiasm. The letter was evidently so distressing and painted a picture of such suffering that Maimonides put down everything else to respond in an Epistle, meant in the first instance as consolation and reaffirmation to the beleaguered Yemeni Jews, but also circulated far beyond them as a kind of defiant reassertion of the superiority of Judaism over the pretences of competing monotheisms of ‘Jesus the Nazarene’ and ‘the Ishmaelite’ (Muhammad). Within the long essay is a poignant but forceful enquiry into the perennial character of Judeophobia, rooted as Maimonides believed in the insecurity the other religions had when facing the incontrovertible and simple majesty of Judaic faith and the Mosaic Law. It was the doctor’s cure for misery: for once an explanation of suffering not merely based on punishment for their own sins, but on the vicious obtuseness of the newcomer monotheisms with their bizarre quasi-pagan demands to worship some entity other than God Himself, or heed spurious prophecy. At one point, the darling of the Ayyubid elite (to whom he was, by 1172, giving lessons in science and philosophy in his perfect Arabic), celebrated for his thoughtful courtesies and studious decorum, sweeps aside his counsel to others to be moderate in all things and turns fiercely immoderate, emitting a cry of pain and rage against the majority culture. ‘Be angry only for a grave cause that rightly calls for indignation,’ Maimonides wrote in his Mishneh Torah. What was happening in the Yemen seemed just such a cause and made him reflect, when he thought of the Almohades’ persecution of the west as well as the oppression of the east, that this could happen anywhere in the Muslim world; that the politeness and even the trust extended to such as he was merely a concession given on the condition of institutionalised subjection, cultural crumbs thrown from the fist of masters. ‘Remember,’ he writes to all the readers around the Muslim world he knew would be reading copies of the Epistle,
on account of the vast number of our sins, God has thrown us into the midst of this people, the Arabs, who have persecuted us severely and passed baneful humiliating legislation against us . . . never did a nation molest, degrade, debase and hate us as much as they . . . We have borne their humiliations and falsehoods and the absurdities that are beyond the powers of humans to bear . . . we have trained ourselves young and old to endure this humiliation as Isaiah decreed ‘I offered my back to those who flogged it and my cheeks to those who tore out my hair’ and still we do not escape their constant outbursts. We prefer peace with them yet they prefer strife and war.9
A year later, in 1173, Maimonides was overwhelmed by a calamity that could not be blamed on the Arabs: the death of his brother David while crossing the Indian Ocean on a business journey. Eleven years younger than Moses, David had been the great man’s particular love, his ‘son, brother, pupil’ as he wrote, still stricken in inconsolable sorrow eight years later, to a correspondent in Acre. While an apt and precocious scholar of the Talmud himself, it had been David, trading in gems, particularly pearls, who had carried on the business that had allowed Moses to get on with all his other work, not least the great studies on the Mishnah. This had been especially important since Maimonides refused to accept any payment for his work for the community as religious judge and scholar, and in fact heaped scorn on those who, declaring ‘I am a great sage’, added ‘now support me’. Maimonides believed the sages of Jewish antiquity had all had working jobs – drawers of water and hewers of wood – and still managed to study at night, and he took pride that his own working day as a doctor would be in that tradition of the nobility of labour. So David’s business was needed to put food on the table for two families, especially since Moses made much of the obligation on the Sabbath to have a full three meals of as much lavish splendour as the household could afford.
So it was to be expected that, every so often, David would have to undertake the long journeys east to buy precious goods that could be sold on the Egyptian market or re-exported. At the same time Moses was beset by the anxieties that went along with such perilous ventures. On the desert section of the route, gangs of murderous thugs waited to set upon the slow-moving camel caravans. By sea, pirates descended on ships, carried off cargo and captives for ransom (on the same waters where they still flourish). The vessels themselves were notoriously leaky and prone to foundering in storms. Doubtless David himself shared many of these qualms, but there were Jewish long-distance traders who did the journey all the time and he put a good face on the dangers.
The first leg was the uneventful journey on the Nile from Fustat to Cus, then further upstream to Luxor. Thereafter the route was overland, an arduous three-week camel-plod across the desert, distances between the oases stretching ever further, the travellers attempting to protect themselves from the murderous sun as best they could. Eventually they made it to the port of Aydhab on the Red Sea from where David sent his brother a letter (miraculously surviving to this day) describing his exhaustion, the dismay at seeing the main body of the caravan straggling into the port as the victims of a violent robber attack, his disappointment at finding nothing except a little indigo to take back to Egypt, and his decision as a result to take ship down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean where there was a thriving community of Jews on the Malabar coast, from which he was confident he could find proper goods and cargo to take back home. Knowing his older brother well, the great swoops and plunges of Moses’ moods (despite being the world’s most famous champion of even-tempered moderation), David did what he could to ease Moses’ anxieties even as he couldn’t help describing the privations he had endured. ‘He who saved me from the desert will save me from the sea.’ But at the end, a slightly chilling note of fatalism creeps in as if somehow the younger brother had a presentiment he might never see the older again. ‘Wa-ma fat fat,’ he concluded, using an ancient Arabic proverb, ‘what is done is done’.
It is not known exactly when or where on the journey David was lost, only, according to Maimonides’ heart-rending letter, that he was drowned. With him, Maimonides added, was more or less the family fortune needed to buy the gems. Now the main breadwinner of the extended family was gone, and Moses would himself have to provide for his widow and children. But the loss of the person he loved most in the world brought on a kind of traumatic paralysis that left him ‘prostrate and in bed’ for over a year with severe inflammation, fever and mental confusion. This was the malady which Egypt’s greatest doctor could not cure. Every time he came across a letter or a piece of business in David’s handwriting, he was broken in pieces all over again.
When he slowly, painfully, emerged from the darkness, Maimonides was irreversibly changed by the twin disasters: the collective one inflicted on his people in Yemen and the personal in the form of his terrible loss. Now, even though he was still only in his late thirties, he felt a fierce urgency to address himself to the matter of survival and endurance; to cut to the quick of Jewish life, undeluded by complacency or superficially protected by ritual routine. The essence of his position was this: that survival in adversity required thought and not just fidelity to habit or to unexamined tradition. The greatest gift that God had bestowed on men, and particularly on his people, was the intellect. It was what distinguished men from beasts, and it was made to be used. ‘It is by virtue of it that we are constituted as substances.’ In the Guide to the Perplexed he endorsed the opinion of Alexander of Aphrodisias, a commentator on Aristotle, that the appetite for dispute arose from three prime causes: first, the impulse to dominate; second, the sheer knotty subtlety of the matter under debate; and third, the ignorance of those contending
for an unanswerable conclusion. To that list Maimonides added the dead weight of habit, to which he attached a vehement criticism of ‘those wretched preachers and commentators who think that a knowledge of words and interpretation of words is science and in whose opinion wordiness . . . is perfection’.10
Maimonides was not rejecting the Talmudic way, its limitless appetite for chatty dispute, multiple contradiction, abrupt yet interminable divagations and digressions, its relish of the incidental, its lip-smacking, fist-punching relish for detail, its procedure through indirection, its endless and unresolvable enquiries into what some sage must have meant by his comment on an obscure passage in the Bible only to be confounded by an equally viable counter-interpretation. But all this wordiness, Maimonides implied, was a luxury, an abstruse game for the initiated, an endless hunt for the ultimate aha, pursued moreover in a language – Aramaic – that was not authentically ‘Israelite’ and which fewer and fewer Jews could comprehend and which had ever less meaning in their own daily lives. And it was, above all else, directed to the interior of Jewish life, though Maimonides had always stood facing outward as well as inward, dealing with the powers that be – indeed serving them as best he could without ever compromising the staunchness of his Judaism. From this outward-facing position, he drew both a sense of defensive urgency and the intellectual sustenance to deal with the crisis of his people, a crisis that seemed to have lasted as long as their post-biblical history. He believed that the narrow straits into which the Jews had been confined by the two monotheistic powers were getting ever narrower, for all the courtly good humour of Saladin’s government and its cultivated literati. Given the darkening horizon, it was not enough simply for Jews to retract still further into their esoteric puzzling. They were going to have to defend themselves in trial with something more powerful than turning their backs and pulling on their beards, namely with the minds that God had given them. It was to sell the Torah, the Bible and the Mishnah short to imagine that it could not be strengthened rather than vitiated by the exercise of philosophy; insulting, in fact, to the divine endowment of the intellect. To be sure, as he had said and would say again, there were categories of laws that defied rational analysis and had to be accepted; but for the most part, God had given the laws to and through Moses so that their ethical and social rationality would command observance, not just dumb obedience.