by Simon Schama
Despite the confident announcement in the Guide to the Perplexed, that apparent contradictions and what seemed to be unresolvable inconsistencies in both the Torah and Talmud would yield to his reasoning, Maimonides was increasingly struck by the provisional nature of his own methodology. The knottiest of problems resisted unravelling, and there was in any case an unresolved tension between the logician and the believer. Often he found his own disciples running ahead of him, especially when he learned that they claimed he disbelieved in the return of the soul to the body on the day of its resurrection. He thought nothing of the kind, he made clear. His name was being taken in vain. But then he should not have been surprised to be occasionally misunderstood, for he had enabled a new way of being Jewish to come into existence, one that had been anticipated by Philo in Alexandria and Saadia in Babylon but never so completely or forcefully articulated until Maimonides. That way presupposed it was not just possible to be both devout and rationally alert, but impossible to be truly devout unless the questioning intellect was working full-time. From such rationalist optimism, a rejuvenated Judaism would take strength. Whether the result was, as Maimonides had hoped, the kind of invigoration that could withstand the attacks on Jewish minds and bodies that seemed to be the lot of his envied and despised people, it was hard to tell, short of the longed-for appearance of the Messiah. Even then, he had warned, the true Messiah of the House of David was just a man, not a demi much less a full God, and when he had rebuilt a purified Jerusalem, the rest of the world would turn on its normal course. The lion and the wolf would not lie down with the lamb. But perhaps, at least, they could be made to desist from their ceaseless, bloody, ravening?
II. Smoke
It takes a while to reduce parchment, vellum and ink to ash. Unlike paper, which embraces the fire, animal skins resist their destruction, smouldering as they curl and shrivel, surrendering to the incineration only after releasing beads of vestigial oil locked within the dermis. So it wasn’t until two days had passed that the public executioner could report to his superiors in Paris that all the Talmuds, convicted of blasphemy by a jury of the University of Paris the year before, had been satisfactorily cremated. All through a day and a night in June 1242, twenty-four cartloads of them had bumped and jolted over the cobbles towards the place de Grève and their appointment with the public executioner; more than 10,000 manuscripts, thrown this way and that, the most precious bindings made from the uterine vellum of foetal calves, only the flesh side, still the milky colour of shrouds, used. The bigger books were so densely packed with leaves that at night they took on an amber glow, thickening the Paris air with a sweetish animal stink. A mass of spectators had come to goggle and shout as the big books were pitched onto the crackling pyres. Every so often a breeze would pick up from the Seine, and flames bearing Hebrew letters, their edges lit with curls of fire, would do an aerial dance over the crowd before descending on the heads of canting friars as clots of soot.
Somewhere amid the hooting throng was a mourner, wanting to give vent to his grief, not least because he came from a tradition that treated sacred books with as much respect as human bodies. The aged and the damaged books were sent to a geniza or allowed to decompose slowly and peacefully, some were even buried in a formal ceremony. Judaism did not shred, tear or burn the word of God. To set fire to a book was as if a living body had been burned on the pyre. Such thoughts may have been running through the distressed mind of the young pious student Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg, who had come to Paris precisely to study the Talmud he was watching being consumed by the flames.12 The Pope, Gregory IX, had ordered the confiscation; the king, Louis IX, he of such Christian zeal, had ordered the burning. Meir had come to France because it was there that the scholarly disciples from Rashi’s school in Troyes – the ‘Tosafists’ most respected for interpretations and judgements in the oral law – had gathered to perpetuate the exhaustive work of their master. But faced with new challenges the Tosafists were also composers of the liturgical poems, the piyyutim, which since the seventh century had been sung or recited in synagogue services. Many of them were laments, and as soon as he could, Meir ben Baruch added another to the litany, a poem owing much to another penned centuries earlier by Yehudah Halevi, which played with the terrible arc connecting the fires of Mount Sinai with the immolations of Paris:
How could it be that you who were given in the divine all-consuming fire
Could be consumed by mortal fire while your alien enemies were not even scorched by those hot coals? . . .
Moses shattered the tablets, another repeated his folly
Burning the law in flames . . . is this the end of the double penance?
Into the public square like booty taken from an apostate city, they burned the spoils of God on high.13
Worse, a matter for the wringing of hands, was the fact that Jews had been the abettors, unwitting or not, to the destruction. Its immediate prosecutor was an apostate Jew, Nicholas Donin, who had brought thirty-five charges of blasphemous abuse against the Talmud and set them before the king and the Pope. At some point Donin may have been a Karaite, the sect which rejected the authority of any ‘oral law’ and adhered only to the strictures of the written Torah. The conviction of the Karaites (mostly concentrated in the Muslim world) that the Talmud was actually a usurping impediment to the observance of true Torah Judaism, and that the tradition claiming Moses had been given an oral as well as a written law on Sinai was false, found a receptive audience among Christian theologians wanting to separate contemporary Jewish practices (rabbinically indoctrinated and bad) from their shared common scripture (prophetic of Jesus and good). But no Karaites had gone so far as to propose burning the offending work, much less – like Pope Gregory IX writing to Louis IX – declaring that ‘no punishment would be sufficiently great or sufficiently worthy of the crime’ of those who perpetuated the fraud.14
Yet the notion that Christian authorities might take offending Jewish works out of circulation, if not destroy them physically, came from rabbinical, not anti-rabbinical quarters, most prominently in southern France, and their target was not of course the Talmud but the radically subversive works of Maimonides. As far as Rabbi Solomon bar Abraham of Montpellier and his pupils were concerned, the latter-day Moses had a cheek to imagine himself the heir to the original model when everything he wrote, and especially the way he wrote it, undid the epiphany on Sinai. By presuming to uncouple the Mishnah from its cladding in the great richly woven garment of the Talmudic commentaries and supplements, and by setting it forth in naked simplicity, as if it were the entirety of the oral law, had he not made the Talmud appear redundant in the eyes of the Gentiles? In addition, by introducing the alien reasoning of the Greeks into the holy texts, had he not compromised their purity and made them fodder for enemy sophists? It was, they thought, as if he had dragged the Talmud into a pagan temple, making it the philosophical plaything of those who wished it no good. It had got so bad that any jumped-up yeshiva boy with a saucy tongue in his head could quote half-digested gobbets of Rabbi Aristotle as if he were the equal of Rabbi Gamaliel and Rashi, may they rest in peace! Jews of good faith argued among themselves in their own way, with respect for the accumulated wisdom of the sages, but Maimonides had exposed the Talmud to the malicious questioning of outsiders. He had imagined himself to be giving tonic to the oral law but who, if you don’t mind, had asked him to the bedside of the Talmud anyway?
Maimonidean loyalists blamed these blinkered, carping critics for the flames of Paris. Hillel of Verona (albeit writing sixty years later) claimed that not even forty days had elapsed between the burning of Maimonides’ books and the inferno of the Talmud.15 They had been so shocked at the perpetual anathema, applying to all Jews everywhere, put on the works of their master – especially the Book of Knowledge and the Guide to the Perplexed (now in ibn Tibbon’s Hebrew translation widely circulating in France) – that they had issued a counter-ban, a kherem, against Solomon bar Abraham and those who thought and spoke like
him. Things got so bad that the anti-Maimonideans who were actively trying to recruit support in northern France claimed to have been physically assaulted in Orleans.
It was at this point, with the culture war bitterly escalating, that the anti-Maimonideans took the extreme step of asking the heresy-hunting friars stationed in the south where the Cathar heretics had been strongest, to extend their inquisition to Maimonides. In the polemical account of their approach given by the passionate Maimonideans the ibn Hisdai brothers, the Jewish heresy hunters had asked why the friars bothered crusading at the ends of the earth pursuing heretics when the Jews too had their own dangerous philosophers who were leading people astray? And since Aristotle was regarded as a dangerous influence on Christians too, the friars are likely to have been receptive to the appeal. If the Jews were divided, that itself might give them an opening for converting one or other of the estranged parties. Whether or not Maimonides’ books were actually burned, there is no question that their destruction was what the aggrieved rabbis had in mind.
This unhappy outcome would have caused Maimonides the deepest anguish (mixed in with a burst of rage), as it did his son, Abraham, the custodian and perpetuator of his father’s legacy. Instead of allowing philosophy to arm Judaism against Christian attacks, obtuse and doctrinaire traditionalists had indicted it as anathema to God’s law. Riding a wave of hostility towards Aristotle’s learning, they had invited Christians into a Jewish dispute, and had handed them a stick with which to beat rabbinic Judaism in its entirety. This misguided opportunism, as the Maimonideans saw it, would have consequences all Jews would rue, especially since the new orders of preaching friars, Dominicans and Franciscans, were fast acquiring the Hebrew which would allow them to pore, prosecutorially, deep into the texts of the oral law. Worse, they would get expert, learned help from a cohort of converts who had been brought up in traditional Judaism: Nicholas Donin and the Aragonese convert who had once been Saul and now called himself Pablo Cristiani, Paul the Christian. These men would be the zealots of the war on the Talmud and by the thirteenth century they felt they had Church authority on their side. In 1215, at the Fourth Lateran Council, Pope Innocent III, the militant champion of an undivided Crusading Christian dominion, not only imposed dress distinctions on the Jews, by way of making the price of ‘obstinacy’ as punitive as possible, but also gave his blessing to a campaign of aggressive proselytising that would accelerate the timetable of the Last Days and the longed-for Second Coming of Christ.
This newly hostile scrutiny of Hebrew texts from within resulted in an ominous shift of attitude towards the place of Jews in a Christian society. For centuries, the approach set out by St Augustine – that Jews must be protected in their own observances and traditions, as living witnesses to the consequences of their own error – had set the guidelines for the Church. It had been acknowledged as a matter of course that there could have been no New Testament without the Old, and that the Hebrew Bible was full of prophecies of which Christ’s life and death were the realisation. Hence popes and bishops had repeatedly sought to protect and even sustain the Jews until the moment of their conversion, and had issued expressions of abhorrence against the misguided who inflicted violence and harassment against them.
Though popes, kings and bishops still paid lip service to this principle of protection, over the course of the thirteenth century the ancient dispensation retreated and all but disappeared. Once Christians, guided by apostates, became aware of the extent to which rabbinic Judaism rested on the authority of the Talmud, they began to argue that the Jews had disqualified themselves from protection by leaving Bible Judaism behind and adopting instead an entirely new religion: Talmud Judaism. Even in the twelfth century the powerful abbot of the Cistercian order at Cluny, Peter the Venerable, stigmatised the Talmud as the true Jewish enemy, threatening to ‘drag the monstrous beast from its lair and show him off in the theatre of the world for everyone to see’.16 Increasingly, the theological shock troops of militant Christianity uncoupled Talmud from Torah, representing the former as the nemesis of the latter. While the Jews might argue that the Talmud’s purpose was to illuminate the Bible, it was evident to these new readers that it actually obscured it. If there was no doubt that God had indeed revealed the written law to Moses on Sinai, there was equally no doubt that the rabbinical claim that he had also received a similarly divine ‘oral law’, which later generations committed to writing for the benefit of posterity, was a fraud and a fable, concocted to legitimise the usurpation of those who called themselves ‘sages’. Unlike the Torah, the Talmud was merely and purely the work of men, fraudulently masquerading as the interlocutors of God. Not only that, but the concocters of the work had the temerity to make their Talmud much longer than the Bible itself! Sidestepping the inconvenience of biblical prophecies foretelling the coming of Christ, the Talmudists then had the impertinence to set their sages above the authority of biblical prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel.
Their heretical presumption had snapped the chain binding Jews and Christians together in reverence to the Hebrew Bible, to the Laws of Moses, the House of David, the visions of the prophets. The reason for the imperviousness of the Jews was at last crystal clear. Enslavement to the usurping Talmud explained why they remained blind to the otherwise obvious message that Christ’s life was the consummation of what had been prophesied to the Israelites. They had been kept from the gospel truth by the falsehoods, insults and circumlocutions of the Talmud. Indeed, as Pope Innocent IV, Gregory’s successor, explained, Jewish children were actively discouraged from studying the Bible and delivered instead to the casuistical, ensnaring net of the Talmud. The rabbis claimed theirs was the most ancient of one-God religions and that Christianity was a spurious novelty, but in fact theirs was the upstart religion. Was it not, then, incumbent on Christians to destroy the fraudulent authority of the Talmud for the sake of the Jews themselves?
Hence the pyres of Paris. But they were merely the sentence passed after a full-scale trial, launched by Louis IX and convened under the auspices of the University of Paris under its chancellor Odo of Chateauroux, following the order from Pope Gregory to round up and confiscate the offending Talmud. Although (according to Louis IX) an unnamed rabbi had been invited to Cluny to debate with a convert and had been been struck by the crutch of an elderly Christian knight for daring to deny the divinity of Christ, this was the first time that representatives of French Jewry had been formally summoned to answer the apostate Donin’s charges laid against the Talmud. The most serious offences amounted to gross blasphemy against Christ, the Virgin and the holy Church. And those blasphemies and insults put in question whether such inveterate enemies of the gospel could be tolerated amid the Congregation of the Faithful. It was pointed out that Pope Innocent III had reaffirmed protection for Judaism on condition that it did no harm to Christianity. But now it appeared that the observance of Talmudic Judaism actually required the Jews to offend and harm Christianity and, Donin claimed at one point, it actively encouraged them to kill Christians. In this reading, there was a plain connection between Talmudic insults against the Virgin and the Saviour, and the increasingly common reports of Jews said to have desecrated holy images and especially the Eucharistic host – the wafers in which Christ’s presence was physically embodied at Communion. Now that properly informed Christians understood what was at stake – an apparently implacable mutual war – was it not the case that rabbinically led Jews were not just an anomaly but an actual threat, and as such had forfeited their protection? The Jews, some said, were a more immediate danger than the Saracens, for their abominations were committed in the very heart of Christendom.
Thus it was that in 1240 in Paris and 1263 in Barcelona the Talmud was put in the dock in a show trial of Judaism, with the object of extracting admissions of its guilt. Unlike in Paris, where the existence of the Talmud was imperilled, the Barcelona trial did not necessarily involve confiscations, much less burnings. But it was a tournament of belief all the same, s
taged with the ardent hope that the Jewish champion, Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman (known as Nahmanides), would be so confounded that his moral destruction would trigger a mass conversion. Observing the spectacle were the princes of the Church, leading theologians of the Dominicans and Franciscans (including those learned in Hebrew) and members of the blood royal. Louis IX’s mother, Blanche of Castile, who yielded nothing to her son in her hatred of the Jews, was present at the Paris proceedings, and in Barcelona King Jaime I of Aragon presided in person. Needless to say, Jewish and Christian, Hebrew and Latin accounts of how the contests went diverge about as far as they could. The Christian narrative includes two of the three rabbis in Paris ‘confessing’ to the crimes and sins of the Talmud, while the Hebrew version features an indomitable and ingenious Rabbi Yehiel ben Joseph fighting his way out of his corner. The Christian account of the Barcelona disputation has the convert zealot Pablo Cristiani routing Nahmanides, while in the rabbi’s retelling in his own Vikuah (meaning debate or disputation), he triumphs conclusively over everything thrown at him and the Talmud.17
In some details, though, the reports converge. At both the Paris and Barcelona disputations, the rabbis refuted the notion that the Talmud was some sort of recent innovation (while slightly overdoing its antiquity). Since that same Talmud had been known and found unobjectionable through many Christian centuries and by unimpeachable popes and bishops, how was it, they argued, only now that it apparently posed such a threat to Christianity itself? Knowing that most of the incriminating evidence would be taken from the more extravagant passages of the Talmud, the rabbis were at pains to disabuse the Christians of any notion that the aggadic portions from which offending passages were lifted were in any way binding on Jewish readers. There were two kinds of Talmudic writing, Yehiel and Nahmanides patiently but pointedly explained: halakha, which was indeed binding law; and the play of comment and opinion in aggadah, which Jews could take or leave as they thought fit. Invariably the choice items of abuse against Jesus or the Virgin belonged to the latter category. Look, said Nahmanides, I don’t believe much of this stuff myself, and I don’t need to; it’s just catnip for debate. Another tactic adopted by Yehiel ben Joseph in Paris was to concede that some of the more abusive passages singled out by Donin did indeed occur within the aggadah, but that he had misunderstood entirely to whom they applied. The ‘Jesus’ who was said to be standing in boiling excrement in the underworld was not Jesus of Nazareth, or he would have been so identified, for there were many other Jesuses at large in those preachy days (as indeed there were). When Donin snorted at the disingenuousness of the reply, Yehiel cheekily asked whether or not there were, after all, many Louis in France other than the king. Pushing the mistaken-identity line further he asked in wide-eyed innocence whether it was remotely conceivable that ‘Miriam the hairdresser’, who was the object of further insults including the suggestion that she was a harlot, could be the mother of Jesus for no Jew had ever described Mary as established in the beauty business. Nor should the ‘Gentiles’, on whom curses and imprecations were rained, be understood as Christians but rather pagans, those same ‘heathens’ upon whom the Almighty was asked to ‘pour out thy wrath’ on the Day of Atonement.