The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  At this formative moment, not just in his own career but in the long history of his people, Maimonides stood at the apex of Jewish experience, viewing it as if from Mount Sinai itself. There was a strong element of self-consciousness about the import of what he was doing, a donning of the mantle of vocation. ‘I Moses the son of Maimon the Sephardi’ was both Moses the legislator and Maimonides the Greek-named philosopher. He was Moses the Israelite tending to the welfare of the Jews and Maimonides the famed man of science invoking principles that were universal, to be understood and thus accepted by the rest of the world. He was both Jew and the personification of common humanity too, and the history of all this rushed through his articulate eloquence. Faith would stand supported by the pillars of reason and the temple of wisdom so constructed would stand forever until another was built in Jerusalem by the liberating Messiah.

  His challenge, then, one which occupied the rest of his life (he died in 1204 in his late sixties), was first to clarify and fortify the essence of Jewish life embodied in the Torah so that it could be internalised in everyday conduct; second, to construct a body of argument that could armour-plate the Jews from the coming attack, almost certainly violent, on their beliefs, perhaps on their very existence. He had begun the first part of the work, the Commentary on the Mishnah, while still in Fez. That great foundation stone had been so thickly covered by the organic burgeoning of Talmudic interpretation that it had been obscured. Reverting to the Hebrew of late antiquity in which it had been written (neither the Hebrew of the Bible nor that of the hyperbolic synagogue poetic liturgy), Maimonides wanted to create – or recreate – a pure, classical language, a strong but transparent vessel for the communication of fundamental truths. To do this meant clearing away the huge clutter of rabbinical opinions and counter-opinions, forgoing the long trail of conversations for the heart of the matter, an economy he practised in the extended version, the supreme expression of his intentions, the Mishneh Torah. That work was both philosophical statement and, in the spirit of the original Mishnah, a practical guide for Jewish living.

  Maimonides must have known the philosophical introduction, the Sefer HaMada (Book of Knowledge), would be controversial, replacing as it did a recitation of the generations of sages, although at its core was an unimpeachable statement of the origins of Jewish law in the Mosaic theophany at Sinai. In his later work, the Guide to the Perplexed, written in Arabic and intended, Maimonides wrote in rather Platonic mode, for the already sophisticated (open-ended enquiry being fraught with dangers for the ignorant), he took on the issue of God’s act of Creation itself, against those like Aristotle who believed in the un-caused eternity of the universe. (Maimonides also took a sideswipe at all those who cringed before the authority of the Greek, and who thought it a disgrace to disagree with him.) For Maimonides, the existence of the world without the presupposition of a prime cause and prime mover was logically unsustainable, however the matter of the world came into being. Biblical description should be understood every so often allegorically as much as in other places (the story of the exodus above all) historically. But in both the introduction to the Mishneh Torah and the Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides was the first great master of Jewish hermeneutics, believing that an enquiry into the nature of understanding and knowledge was not at war with faith but, on the contrary, its indispensable condition.

  The Mishneh Torah simplifies and clarifies the categories of commandment and practice of the original, and although it purports to abide by blessings, the calendar of festivals, the timings of prayer, the rules of purity, matters of tort, at almost every place along the way Maimonides adds instances of why the prescriptions should find support in reason. And there are passages – the long paradoxically impassioned argument for moderation and a golden mean – which had no place in the original Mishnah at all. But Maimonides felt himself to be both the repository of ancestral wisdom and its refurbisher for contemporary life. The polemic against immoderation was directed to asceticism, much in vogue as a result of the Sufism that had flourished under the Fatimids, and threatening to become an influence on Judaism as well. There was, Maimonides felt, something self-indulgent in the fanatical other-worldliness of extreme ascetic practices that he hated almost as much as the relentless literalism of the Karaites or the default traditionalism of the ultra-Talmudists. God and His Mosaic legislation were about this world and how to live in it, and everything in its exhaustive content was amenable to the intellect. This was Dr Maimonides speaking, for whom sound health of mind was an intrinsic element in the body of belief and practice.

  The Mishneh Torah is thus packed full of behavioural doctoring. Do not ask someone to dinner knowing they will decline; avoid the odiousness of flattery; when you disagree with someone never ever do it in such a way that it exposes the corrected to public shame and humiliation; eat and drink well (especially on the Sabbath) but do not gorge yourself senseless for bear in mind the injunction against gluttony in Malachi, ‘Behold, I will spread dung on your face.’ Right. Reside only in towns or villages where you know the following are available: a physician, a surgeon, a bathhouse, a lavatory, reliable sources of flowing water, a school, a teacher, a scribe, an honest treasurer of charity and a court. Prayer is all-important and therefore must not be idly or habitually undertaken, not, for instance, when one is drunk, or still chortling at a joke, or when the words that come out of the mouth are at odds with the thoughts in one’s head of business. Write your own personal scroll of the Torah so that it can become as much yours as the tefillin on your head and arm, and if you cannot, hire a scribe to do it for you. Honour the Sabbath with a meal that stands out from the run-of-the-mill food of the week, two loaves three times a day, plenty of good wine, but of course adjust to your means as best you can. Husbands, share in the preparation for the Sabbath: shop, clean, be a good helper. The Sabbath, to be sure, was made to remind us that on the seventh day God rested from His Creation – but in a typically Maimonidean fashion, he went from the philsophically worrying notion of a seven-day creation to the historical exodus when arguing that the Sabbath was also made to remind the Jews that they had been slaves, unable to determine how long they would labour or when they might take a respite from its rigours. In that spirit, too, it behoved employers to pay their workers on time, never withholding wages. In business, the highest degree of ethics was commanded. Maimonides would not have approved of intra-corporate short-selling since he abhorred any attempt to conceal blemishes in whatever you were selling to a potential customer. To acquire something and not pay for it right away, he stated, was tantamount to a desecration of God’s name, yet he also detested the raw swagger of money and insisted that of the many acts of charity commanded, none was more sacred or pleasing to God than bestowing generosity on the poor. Not for nothing, he observed, are those who refuse it called ‘Belial’, the Hebrew name for a particularly atrocious species of demon. But – and this is Maimonides the social behaviourist at his most attentive – never bestow that charity in a spirit of haughtiness or with a brusque or downcast demeanour, but in agreeable cheerfulness. To find employment for the poor was to fulfil a great mitzvah. And perhaps the ethical wisdom of the Torah was most profoundly exemplified in the obligation to eschew any kind of finery in the burial of the dead, no matter how rich the deceased and their family. God wished, indeed commanded, only the simplest of shrouds so that the poor, already distraught in such circumstances, should not have to be further humiliated. Indeed the rich man should be honoured to be buried in the same fashion as the impoverished.

  Choose life. Sacred though the Sabbath was, violate it to save a life and do not, as some suggest, wait until it is over before starting treatment for the sick. Begin at once and without hesitation or reservation. Choose life. Never condemn a man to death on his own testimony alone, but only on the strength of at least two witnesses.

  Maimonides was both exceptional and typical of Jewish thought and writing in that he was torn, every day, between the demands of the physical
and the political. Close as he was to the powerful in Saladin’s government and even to the ruler himself whom he attended, he understood politics on a practical as well as a philosophical level. (He warned against kings falling into the vices of drunkenness and concupiscence lest they undo not just their authority in the eyes of their own subjects but the handling of public affairs.) And he thought of the Laws of Moses as, in their way, constituting a true polity on the notoriously self-dividing Israelites. But he did not want his immense gloss in the Mishneh Torah to be merely what he called a nomos, akin to a Greek vade mecum on civic governance: a compendium of ethically charged usefulness. In the end, Maimonides was after bigger game, indeed the biggest: the quest for perfection.

  This step-by-step programme was set out in the Guide to the Perplexed, a work which while wonderful in its intellectual intensity, yields as many perplexities and inconsistencies as it claims to resolve. Yet such is the sharpness and, occasionally, beauty of Maimonides’ thinking and the prose in which it is set that readers can’t help but be swept along for the ride. Increasingly those readers were Jews, especially after Maimonides consented to have the work translated into Hebrew by a younger friend, Samuel ibn Tibbon. Three kinds of self-perfection are well understood, he writes. The first, of course the vainest, most vulgar and self-deceiving, is perfection in property, goods and the like, for this is but the dross of life. The second, physical perfection of body, should have as its end soundness and vigour of constitution and is needful in that (as he had had many occasions to observe, not least when he was his own patient) it is impossible to turn one’s mind to the higher things when attacked by sickness. Yet this too is but a feebly blinkered search for perfection, for inevitably all bodies decay as time and God decree. The third search, as indicated in the readings of the Torah to which his own work drew attention, was more significant, in that it led to the Good Life, lived both by individuals and communities. But even this was not the true end. Right and fitting, indeed unequalled in the world, though the commandments and prohibitions of the Torah were, their surface prescription concealed deeper meanings, the purpose of which was to lead the observant to the ultimate and only perfection: closeness to the nature of God. If this sounds suspiciously metaphysical coming from an old Aristotelian (who took issue with the Greek master), that is because it indeed was. Maimonides was at pains to insist that the essence of God would always remain shrouded from the intellect, just as his ancestral namesake had been denied knowledge of the essence of God, who had refused him His face and shown him merely a glimpse of His back. Moses and the Israelites who studied the Torah would get no nearer than God’s attributes, divined through the exercise of what he called the ‘rational virtues’. But for Maimonides that itself would be a numinous revelation, and would bring men to a kind of blessed proximity. Strikingly elegant and forceful writer though he was, Maimonides was no poet, not at any rate in the league of the great patriarchs of Hebrew verse – Shmuel ibn Naghrela, Solomon ibn Gabirol, Moshe ibn Ezra and Yehudah Halevi. Yet the poetic chord in him responded with complete understanding to the Song of Songs in which the yearning of Israel for union with God takes the form of a graphically erotic poem. That was it, he thought, and counselled those who sought nearness to love God, consummately, physically, exactly as a lover obsessively dwells every minute of the day and night on the features of the beloved, all in high-coloured close-up. Thought, then, even of the exacting kind Maimonides took to be an act of gratitude to God for having endowed humans with the power of reflection, had its limits. Even knowing they might never be exceeded, his advice was to press against them, to catch even a ray of celestial godliness of the kind that made the face of Moses shine with the radiance of the shekhina. A whole book of the Mishneh Torah, the one concerned with daily prayer and devotion, was called Sefer Ahavah, the Book of Love.

  The intensity with which he felt this was, however, in inverse proportion to his capacity to reach such a consummation himself. This was not from a want of desire, but a lack of time. There were just so many hours in the day and they all seemed to be filled by the needs of everyone who wanted him, and they wanted him non-stop. So while at one moment he was given to a little gentle boasting about his reputation far and near as a great master of medicine, someone moreover who treated it as a humane art and would minister gratis to the poor as well as the mighty, he also proved himself, in a long letter to Samuel ibn Tibbon preserved in the Cairo Geniza, a consummate moaner, a king of the kvetch:

  I dwell in Fustat while the king [Saladin] lives in Cairo and there are four thousand cubits, two Sabbath limits separating the two [somewhat over a mile]. I have a very difficult appointment to the king. I have to see him at the beginning of every day. When he is weak or one of his sons or concubines are sick I cannot leave Cairo and spend most of the day in the palace. Then I have to attend to the officers of the king as well every day. One or two of them are invariably ill and I have to see to their treatment.

  So in sum I go up to Cairo every morning and if there are no mishaps I get back to Fustat by midday . . . As soon as I arrive, ravenously hungry, I find the halls of my house packed with Gentiles, the grand and the humble, judges and magistrates, a mixed crowd who all know exactly when I am showing up. I get down from my mount, wash my hands and go and persuade them to wait a little while I manage a light meal . . . Then I go to heal them and write whatever prescriptions they need. Sometimes they are coming and going all hours until two hours into the evening falls and . . . sometimes my fatigue is so great that I have to speak to them while lying down . . . When night falls I am so totally wiped out that I can’t say a word.

  The result of all this is that no Israelite can manage to speak to me except on the Sabbath when they all come after the morning prayer and I instruct the community on what should be done for the coming week. They study light matters until noon then go on their way but some come back and study again until the evening service.

  So this is what my daily schedule is like, and I have told you only some of what you would actually see, with the help of God, may he be exalted.11

  He was not exaggerating. Among the work omitted from the letter were his daily obligation to render judgements on whatever questions, complaints and suits that came his way in the majlis, or council. Some of these that survive in the Geniza are as brief as they possibly can be, sometimes indeed barely more than a word but with the precious signature attached. But then delegation seems not to have been an option. Anyone failing to render judgement in such matters, he had written, a little grandly, makes the divine presence shrink from the room. And then of course there was the work of editing his own commentaries on the Torah and Mishnah which was an ongoing task, as well as the many volumes of medical advice concerning different ailments, including the impotence of Saladin’s nephew (if no saffron ants are available try black pepper, honey and wine for pumping up the blood flow). Maimonides thought wine the best medicine for most things, which was yet another instance of the obtuseness of Islam in prohibiting its consumption.

  The price of all this Mosaic omniscience was a kind of Mount Nebo exhaustion, cumulatively debilitating as his years advanced. With all the demands on his time and presence, he routinely declined to see the many people who wanted nothing better than to stand in his presence and perhaps put one of their own perplexities to him. His diet – in which chickens and eggs featured prominently, the latter cooked with a little cinnamon in oil, the Egyptian way – thinned out. Insomnia overtook him and wine was of little avail against the affliction of manifold aches and pains. Writing his book The Causes of Symptoms around 1200, he was himself a mass of them, seemingly multiplying out of his control, dictating from his bed, unable to attend the sultan. Egypt itself, hit by epidemics and even a famine at the end of the century, seemed to be waning along with his own vigour. Sometimes Maimonides would get frantic at the loss of time to study, think and write, reproaching himself for getting bogged down with trivia. His two sons, Abraham and David, could take some of th
e strain; David was the money-earner and Abraham a scholar and commentator in his own right, and after his father’s death rav of the community and faithful, though not uncontroversial, custodian of his teachings. Some of Abraham’s Maimonidean reforms, like the adoption of Muslim worshipping practices (all of which had originally been Jewish) – full prostration and the raising of palms – were bound to provoke resistance, and confirm the hostility of those who had been suspicious of Maimonidean openness to other cultures all along.