Even the mystics sang of love, but we have their solemn assurance that the passion they portrayed was but a symbol for the love of God. Muhammad ibn Ibrahim, known to literature as Farid al-Din Attar (“Pearl of Faith, Druggist”), was born near Nishapur (1119), and received his final name from vending perfumes. Feeling a call to religion, he left his shop and entered a Sufi monastery. His forty books, all in Arabic, include 200,000 lines of poetry. His most famous work was the Mantiq al-Tayr, or Discourse of the Birds. Thirty birds (i.e., Sufis) plan a united search for the king of all birds, Simurgh (Truth). They pass through six valleys: Search, Love, Knowledge, Detachment (from all personal desire), Unification (where they perceive that all things are one), and Bewilderment (from losing all sense of individual existence). Three of the birds reach the seventh valley, Annihilation (of the self), and knock at the door of the hidden king. The royal chamberlain shows each of them a record of its deeds; they are overcome with shame, and collapse into the dust. But from this dust they rise again as forms of light; and now they realize that they and Simurgh (which means thirty birds) are one. They lose themselves henceforth in Simurgh, as shadows vanish in the sun. In other works Attar put his pantheism more directly: reason cannot know God, for it cannot understand itself; but love and ecstasy can reach to God, for He is the essential reality and power in all things, the sole source of every act and motion, the spirit and life of the world. No soul is happy until it loses itself as a part in this spirit as the whole; longing for such union is the only true religion; self-effacement in that union is the only true immortality.45 The orthodox denounced all this as heresy; a crowd attacked Attar’s house and burned it to the ground. However, he was relatively indestructible; tradition claims for him a life of 110 years. Before he died, we are told, he laid his hands in blessing upon the child who would hail him as master, and eclipse his fame.
Jalal-ud-Din Rumi (1201–73) was a native of Balkh, but lived most of his life at Konya. A mysterious Sufi, Shams-i-Tabrizi, came there to preach, and Jalal was so moved by him that he founded the famous order of Mawlawi, or Dancing Dervishes, which still makes Konya its capital. In a comparatively short life Jalal wrote several hundred poems. The shorter ones, collected as his Divan or Book of Odes, are marked by such depth of feeling, sincerity, and richness, yet naturalness, of imagery as place them at the top of all religious poetry composed since the Psalms, Jalal’s main work, the Mathnawi-i-Ma’nawi (Spiritual Couplets), is a diffuse exposition of Sufism, a religious epic outweighing in bulk all the legacy of “Homer.” It has passages of great beauty, but a thing of beauty, laden with words, is not a joy forever. The theme again is universal unity.
One knocked at the Beloved’s door, and a Voice asked from within, “Who is there?”—and he answered, “It is I.” Then the Voice said, “This house will not hold Me and Thee,” and the door stayed shut. Then went the Lover into the desert, and in solitude fasted and prayed. After a year he returned, and knocked again at the door. And again the Voice asked, “Who is there?” And the Lover said, “It is Thyself!” And the door was opened to him.46
I looked about me to find him. He was not on the Cross. I went to the idol temple, to the ancient pagoda; no trace of Him was visible there…. I bent the reins of search to the Kaaba; He was not in that resort of old and young. I questioned Ibn Sina [Avicenna] of His state; He was not in Ibn Sina’s range. I gazed into my own heart. There I saw Him. He was nowhere else.
Every form you see has its archetype in the placeless world;
If the form perishes, no matter, since its original is everlasting.
Every fair shape you have seen, every deep saying you have heard—
Be not cast down that it perished, for that is not so….
While the fountains flow, the rivers run from it.
Put grief out of your head, and keep quaffing this river-water;
Do not think of the water failing, for this water is without end.
From the moment you came into the world of being
A ladder was placed before you that you might escape.
First you were mineral; later you turned to plant;
Then you became animal; how should this be a secret to you?
Afterwards you were made man, with knowledge, reason, faith….
When you have traveled on from now, you will doubtless become an angel….
Pass again from angelhood; enter that ocean,
That your drop may become a sea….
Leave aside this “Son”; say ever “One,” with all your soul.48
And lastly Sa’di. His real name, of course, was much longer—Musharrit ud-Din ibn Muslih ud-Din Abdallah. His father held a post at the court of the Atabeg Sad ibn Zangi at Shiraz; when the father died the Atabeg adopted the boy, and Sa’di, following Moslem custom, added his patron’s name to his own. Scholars debate the dates of his earthly stay—1184–1283,49 1184–1291,50 1193–1291;51 in any case he almost spanned a century. “In my youth,” he tells us, “I was overmuch religious … scrupulously pious and abstinent.”52 After graduating from the Nizamiya College at Baghdad (1226) he began those extraordinary Wanderjahre which took him for thirty years through all the Near and Middle East, India, Ethiopia, Egypt, and North Africa. He knew every hardship, and all degrees of poverty; he complained that he had no shoes, until he met a man without feet, “whereupon I thanked Providence for its bounty to myself.”53 In India he exposed the mechanism of a miracle-working idol, and killed the hidden Brahmin who was the god of the machine; in his later rollicking verse he recommended a like summary procedure with all quacks:
You too, should you chance to discover such trick,
Make away with the trickster; don’t spare him; be quick!
For if you should suffer the scoundrel to live,
Be sure that to you he no quarter will give.
So I finished the rogue, notwithstanding his Avails,
With stones, for dead men, as you know, tell no tales.54
He fought against the Crusaders, was captured by the “Infidels,” and was ransomed. Gratefully he married the daughter of his ransomer. She turned out to be an intolerable vixen. “The ringlets of the lovely,” he wrote, “are a chain on the feet of reason.”55 He divorced her, encountered more ringlets, assumed more chains. He outlived this second wife, retired at fifty to a garden hermitage in Shiraz, and stayed there the last fifty years of his life.
Having lived, he began to write; all his major works, we are told, were composed after this retirement. The Pandnama is a Book of Wisdom; the Divan is a collection of short poems, mostly in Persian, some in Arabic, some pious, some obscene. The Bustan, or Orchard, expounds in didactic verse Sa’di’s general philosophy, relieved by passages of tender sensuality:
Never had I known moments more delicious. That night I clasped my lady to my breast and gazed into her eyes swimming with sleep. … I said to her: “Beloved, my slender cypress tree, now is not the time to sleep. Sing, my nightingale! Let thy mouth open as unfolds the rosebud. Sleep no more, turmoil of my heart! Let thy lips offer me the philter of thy love.” And my lady looked upon me and murmured low: “Turmoil of thy heart? Yet dost thou wake me?” … Thy lady has repeated all this time that she has never belonged to another. … And thou dost smile, for thou knowest that she lies. But what matter? Are her lips less warm beneath thy lips? Are her shoulders less soft beneath thy caress? … They say the breeze of May is sweet, as the perfume of the rose, the song of the nightingale, the green plain, and the blue sky. O thou who knowest not, all these are sweet only when one’s lady is there!56
The Gulistan, or Rose Garden (1258), is a medley of instructive anecdotes interspersed with delectable poetry.
An unjust king asked a holy man, “What is more excellent than prayer?” The holy man said: “For you to remain asleep till midday, that for this one interval you may not afflict mankind.”57 Ten dervishes can sleep on one rug, but two kings cannot be accommodated in a whole kingdom.58 If you court riches, ask not for contentment.59 The religious man who can be vexed by an injury is as yet a shallow brook.60 Never has anyone acknowledged his own ignorance, except that person who, while another is talking and has not yet finished, begins to speak.61 Had you but one perfection and seventy faults, your lover would discern only that one perfection.62 Hurry not … learn deliberation. The Arab horse makes a few stretches at full speed, and breaks down; the camel, at its deliberate pace, travels night and day, and gets to the end of its journey.63 Acquire knowledge, for no reliance can be placed on riches or possessions…. Were a professional man to lose his fortune, he need not feel regret, for his knowledge is of itself a mine of wealth.64 The severity of the schoolmaster is more useful than the indulgence of the father.65 Were intellect to be annihilated from the face of the earth, nobody could be brought to say, “I am ignorant.”*66 Levity in a nut is a sign of its being empty.67
Sa’di was a philosopher, but he forfeited the name by writing intelligibly. His was a healthier philosophy than Omar’s; it understood the consolations of faith, and knew how to heal the sting of knowledge with the simple blessings of a kindly life; Sa’di experienced all the tragedies of the human comedy, and yet insisted on a hundred years. But he was a poet as well as a philosopher: sensitive to the form and texture of every beauty from a woman’s “cypress limbs” to a star that for a moment possesses by itself all the evening sky; and capable of expressing wisdom or platitude with brevity, delicacy, and grace. He was never at a loss for an illuminating comparison or an arresting phrase. “To give education to the worthless is like throwing walnuts upon a dome”;68 “a friend and I were associating like two kernels in one almond shell”;69 “if the orb of the sun had been in the wallet” of this stingy merchant, “nobody would have seen daylight in the world till Judgment Day.”70 In the end, despite his wisdom, Sa’di remained the poet, surrendering his wisdom with a whole heart to the rich slavery of love.
Fortune suffers me not to clasp my sweetheart to my breast,
Nor lets me forget my exile long in a kiss on her sweet lips pressed.
The noose wherewith she is wont to snare her victims far and wide
I will snatch away, that so one day I may lure her to my side.
Yet I shall not dare caress her hair with a hand that is overbold,
For snared therein, like birds in a gin, are the hearts of lovers untold.
A slave am I to that gracious form, which, as I picture it,
Is clothed in grace with a measuring rod, as tailors a garment fit.
O cypress tree, with silver limbs, this color and scent of thine
Have shamed the scent of the myrtle plant and the bloom of the eglantine.
Judge with thine eyes, and set thy foot in the fair and free,
And tread the jasmine under thy foot, and the flowers of the Judas tree….
O wonder not if in time of spring thou dost rouse such jealousy
That the cloud doth weep while the flowrets smile, and all on account of thee!
If o’er the dead thy feet should tread, those feet so fair and fleet,
No wonder it were if thou shouldst hear a voice from his winding sheet.
Distraction is banned from this our land in the time of our lord the King,
Save that I am distracted with love of thee, and men with the songs I sing.71
VI. MOSLEM SCIENCE: 1057–1258
Moslem scholars divided the medieval peoples into two classes—those that cultivated science, and those that did not. In the first class they named the Hindus, Persians, Babylonians, Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, and Arabs. These, in their view, were the elite of the world; the others, of whom the Chinese and the Turks were the best, resembled animals rather than men.72 The judgment sinned chiefly against the Chinese.
The Moslems continued, in this period, their unchallenged ascendancy in science. In mathematics the most signal advances were made in Morocco and Azerbaijan; we see here again the range of Islamic civilization. In 1229 Hasan al-Marraqushi (i.e., of Marraqesh) published tables of sines for each degree, and tables of versed sines, arc sines, and arc cotangents. A generation later Nasir ud-Din al-Tusi (i.e., of Tus) issued the first treatise in which trigonometry was considered as an independent science rather than an appendage to astronomy; this Kitab shakl al-qatta remained without a rival in its field until the De Triangulis of Regiomontanus two centuries later. Perhaps Chinese trigonometry, which appears in the second half of the thirteenth century, was of Arabic origin.73
The outstanding work of physical science in this age was the Kitab mizan al-hikmah, or Book of the Balance of Wisdom, written about 1122 by a Greek slave from Asia Minor, Abu’l Fath al-Khuzini. It gave a history of physics, formulated the laws of the lever, compiled tables of specific gravity for many liquids and solids, and proposed a theory of gravitation as a universal force drawing all things towards the center of the earth.74 Water wheels, known to the Greeks and Romans, were improved by the Moslems; the Crusaders saw such wheels raising water from the Orontes, and introduced them into Germany.75 Alchemists flourished; they knew, said al-Latif, “300 ways of making dupes.”76 One alchemist drew from Nur-ud-din a substantial loan for alchemical research, and disappeared; a wit, apparently unreproved, published a list of fools in which Nurud-din’s name led all the rest; and offered, if the alchemist would return, to substitute his name for that of the Sultan.77
In 1081 Ibrahim al-Sahdi of Valencia constructed the oldest known celestial globe, a brass sphere 209 millimeters (81.5 inches) in diameter; upon its surface, in forty-seven constellations, were engraved 1015 stars in their respective magnitudes.78 The Giralda of Seville (1190) was an observatory as well as a minaret; there Jabir ibn Aflah made the observations for his Islah al-majisti, or Correction of the Almagest (1240). The same reaction against Ptolemaic astronomy marked the works of Abu Ishaq al-Bitruji (Alpetragius) of Cordova, who paved the way for Copernicus by destructively criticizing the theory of epicycles and eccentrics through which Ptolemy had sought to explain the paths and motions of the stars.
The age produced two geographers of universal medieval renown. Abu Abdallah Muhammad al-Idrisi was born at Ceuta (1100), studied at Cordova, and wrote in Palermo, at the behest of King Roger II of Sicily, his Kitab al-Rujari (Roger’s Book). It divided the earth into seven climatic zones, and each zone into ten parts; each of the seventy parts was illustrated by a detailed map; these maps were the crowning achievement of medieval cartography, unprecedented in fullness, accuracy, and scope. Al-Idrisi, like most Moslem scientists, took for granted the sphericity of the earth. Rivaling him for the honor of being the greatest medieval geographer was Abu Abdallah Yaqut (1179–1229). Born a Greek in Asia Minor, he was captured in war and enslaved; but the Baghdad merchant who bought him gave him a good education, and then freed him. He traveled much, first as a merchant, then as a geographer fascinated by places and their diverse populations, dress, and ways. He rejoiced to find ten libraries at Merv, one containing 12,000 volumes; the discriminating curators allowed him to take as many as 200 volumes at a time to his room; those who have loved books as the lifeblood of great men will sense the dusty joy he felt in these treasuries of the mind. He moved on to Khiva and Balkh; there the Mongols almost caught him in their murderous advance; he fled, naked but clutching his manuscripts, across Persia to Mosul. While buttering the bread of poverty as a copyist, he completed his Mu’jam al-Buldan (1228)—a vast geographical encyclopedia which summed up nearly all medieval knowledge of the globe. Yaqut included almost everything—astronomy, physics, archaeology, ethnography, history, giving the co-ordinates of the cities and the lives and works of their famous men. Seldom has any man so loved the earth.
Botany, almost forgotten since Theophrastus, revived with the Moslems of this age. Al-Idrisi wrote a herbal, but stressed the botanical rather than merely the medicinal interest of 360 plants. Abu’l Abbas of Seville (1216) earned the surname of al-Nabati, the Botanist, by his studies of plant life from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. Abu Muhammad ibn Baitar of Malaga (1190–1248) gathered all Islamic botany into a vast work of extraordinary erudition, which remained the standard botanical authority till the sixteenth century, and marked him as the greatest botanist and pharmacist of the Middle Ages.79 Ibn al-Awan of Seville (1190) won a like pre-eminence in agronomy; his Kitab al-Falaha (Book of the Peasant) analyzed soils and manures, described the cultivation of 585 plants and fifty fruit trees, explained methods of grafting, and discussed the symptoms and cures of plant diseases. This was the most complete treatment of agricultural science in the whole medieval period.80
In this as in the preceding age the Moslems produced the leading physicians of Asia, Africa, and Europe. They excelled especially in ophthalmology, perhaps because eye diseases were so prevalent in the Near East; there, as elsewhere, medicine was paid most to cure, least to prevent. Operations for cataract were numerous. Khalifah ibn-abi’l-Mahasin of Aleppo (1256) was so confident of his skill that he operated for cataract on a one-eyed man.81 Ibn Baitar’s Kitab al-Jami made medicinal-botanical history; it listed 1400 plants, foods, and drugs, 300 of them new; analyzed their chemical constitution and healing power; and added acute observations on their use in therapy. But the greatest name in this acme of Moslem medicine is Abu Marwan ibn Zuhr (1091–1162) of Seville, known to the European medical world as Avenzoar. He was the third in six generations of famous physicians, all of one family line, and each at the top of his profession. His Kitab al-Tasir, or Book of Simplification on Therapeutics and Diet, was written at the request of his friend Averroës, who (himself the greatest philosopher of the age) considered him the greatest physician since Galen. Ibn Zuhr’s forte was clinical description; he left classical analyses of mediastinal tumors, pericarditis, intestinal tuberculosis, and pharyngeal paralysis.82 Translations of the Tasir into Hebrew and Latin deeply influenced European medicine.
Islam led the world also in the equipment and competence of its hospitals. One founded by Nur-ud-din at Damascus in 1160 gave free treatment and drugs during three centuries; for 267 years, we are told, its fires were never extinguished.83 Ibn Jubayr, coming to Baghdad in 1184, marveled at the great Bimaristan Adadi, a hospital rising like some royal palace along the banks of the Tigris; here food and drugs were given to the patients without charge.84 In Cairo, in 1285, Sultan Qalaun began the Maristan al-Mansur, the greatest hospital of the Middle Ages. Within a spacious quadrangular enclosure four buildings rose around a courtyard adorned with arcades and cooled with fountains and brooks. There were separate wards for diverse diseases and for convalescents; laboratories, a dispensary, out-patient clinics, diet kitchens, baths, a library, a chapel, a lecture hall, and particularly pleasant accommodations for the insane. Treatment was given gratis to men and women, rich and poor, slave and free; and a sum of money was disbursed to each convalescent on his departure, so that he need not at once return to work. The sleepless were provided with soft music, professional storytellers, and perhaps books of history.85 Asylums for the care of the insane existed in all the major cities of Islam.
VII. AL-GHAZALI AND THE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL
Amid these advances of science the old orthodoxy fought to keep the loyalty of the educated classes. The conflict between religion and science led many to skepticism, some to open atheism. Al-Ghazali divided Moslem thinkers into three groups—theists, deists or naturalists, and materialists—and denounced all three groups alike as infidels. The theists accepted God and immortality, but denied creation and the resurrection of the body, and called heaven and hell spiritual conditions only; the deists acknowledged a deity but rejected immortality, and viewed the world as a self-operating machine; the materialists completely rejected the idea of God. A semi-organized movement, the Dahriyya, professed a frank agnosticism; several of these doubting Thomases lost their heads to the executioner. “You torment yourself for nothing,” said Isbahan ibn Qara to a pious faster during Ramadan; “man is like a seed of grain that sprouts and grows up and is then mowed down to perish forever…. Eat and drink!”86
It was in reaction against such skepticism that Mohammedanism produced its greatest theologian, the Augustine and the Kant of Islam. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was born at Tus in 1058, lost his father early, and was reared by a Sufi friend. He studied law, theology, and philosophy; at thirty-three he was appointed to the chair of law at the Nizamiya College in Baghdad; soon all Islam acclaimed his eloquence, erudition, and dialectical skill. After four years of this glory he was laid low by a mysterious disease. Appetite and digestion failed, paralysis of the tongue occasionally distorted his speech, and his mind began to break down. A wise physician diagnosed his case as mental in origin. In truth, as al-Ghazali later confessed in his remarkable autobiography, he had lost belief in the capacity of reason to sanction the Mohammedan faith; and the hypocrisy of his orthodox teaching had become unbearable. In 1094 he left Baghdad, ostensibly on a pilgrimage to Mecca; actually he went into seclusion, seeking silence, contemplation, and peace. Unable to find in science the support he sought for his crumbling faith, he turned from the outer to the internal world; there, he thought, he found a direct and immaterial reality, which offered a firm basis for belief in a spiritual universe. He subjected sensation—on which materialism seemed to rest—to critical scrutiny; accused the senses of making the stars appear small when, to be so visible from afar, they must be vastly larger than the earth; and concluded from a hundred such examples that sensation by itself could be no certain test of truth. Reason was higher, and corrected one sense with another; but in the end it too rested on sensation. Perhaps there was in man a form of knowledge, a guide to truth, surer than reason? Al-Ghazali felt that he had found this in the introspective meditation of the mystic: the Sufi came closer than the philosopher to the hidden core of reality; the highest knowledge lay in gazing upon the miracle of mind until God appeared within the self, and the self itself disappeared in the vision of an all-absorbing One.87
In this mood al-Ghazali wrote his most influential book—Tahafut al-Filasifa (The Destruction of Philosophy). All the arts of reason were turned against reason. By a “transcendental dialectic” as subtle as Kant’s, the Moslem mystic argued that reason leads to universal doubt, intellectual bankruptcy, moral deterioration, and social collapse. Seven centuries before Hume, al-Ghazali reduced reason to the principle of causality, and causality to mere sequence: all that we perceive is that B regularly follows A, not that A causes B. Philosophy, logic, science, cannot prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul; only direct intuition can assure us of these beliefs, without which no moral order, and therefore no civilization, can survive.88
In the end al-Ghazali returned through mysticism to all orthodox views. The old fears and hopes of his youth flowed back upon him, and he professed to feel the eyes and threats of a stern deity close over his head. He proclaimed anew the horrors of the Mohammedan hell, and urged their preaching as necessary to popular morality.89 He accepted again the Koran and the Hadith. In his Ihya Ulum al-Din (Revival of the Science of Religion) he expounded and defended his renovated orthodoxy with all the eloquence and fervor of his prime; never in Islam had the skeptics and the philosophers encountered so vigorous a foe. When he died (1111), the tide of unbelief had been effectually turned. All orthodoxy took comfort from him; even Christian theologians were glad to find, in his translated works, such a defense of religion, and such an exposition of piety, as no one had written since Augustine. After him, and despite Averroës, philosophy hid itself in the remote corners of the Moslem world; the pursuit of science waned; and the mind of Islam more and more buried itself in the Hadith and the Koran.
The conversion of al-Ghazali to mysticism was a great victory for Sufism. Orthodoxy now accepted Sufism, which for a time engulfed theology. The mullahs—learned exponents of Moslem doctrine and law—still dominated the official religious and legal world; but the field of religious thought was yielded to Sufi monks and saints. Strangely contemporary with the rise of the Franciscans in Christendom, a new monasticism took form in twelfth-century Islam. Sufi devotees now abandoned family life, lived in religious fraternities under a sheik or master, and called themselves dervish or faqir—a Persian and an Arabic word for poor man or mendicant. Some by prayer and meditation, some by ascetic self-denial, others in the exhaustion that followed wild dancing, sought to transcend the self and rise to a wonder-working unity with God.
Their doctrine received formulation in the 150 books of Muhyi al-Din ibn al-Arabi (1165–1240)—a Spanish Moslem domiciled in Damascus. The world was never created, said al-Arabi, for it is the external aspect of that which in inward view is God. History is the development of God to self-consciousness, which He achieves at last in man. Hell is temporary; in the end all will be saved. Love is mistaken when it loves a physical and transitory form; it is God Who appears in the beloved, and the true lover will find and love the author of all beauty in any beautiful form. Perhaps recalling some Christians of Jerome’s time, al-Arabi taught that “he who loves and remains chaste unto death dies a martyr,” and achieves the highest reach of devotion. Many married dervishes professed to live in such chastity with their wives.90
Through the gifts of the people some Moslem religious orders became wealthy, and consented to enjoy life. “Formerly,” complained a Syrian sheik about 1250, “the Sufis were a fraternity dispersed in the flesh but united in the spirit; now they are a body well clothed carnally, and ragged in divine mystery.”91 The populace smiled tolerantly at these sacred worldlings, but lavished worship upon sincere devotees, ascribed to them miraculous deeds and powers, honored them as saints, celebrated their birthdays, prayed for their intercession with Allah, and made pilgrimages to their tombs. Mohammedanism, like Christianity, was a developing and adjustable religion, which would have startled a reborn Mohammed or Christ.
As orthodoxy triumphed, toleration waned. From Harun al-Rashid on, the so-called “Ordinance of Omar,” formerly ignored, was increasingly observed. Theoretically, though not always in practice, non-Moslems were now required to wear distinguishing yellow stripes on their clothing; they were forbidden to ride on horseback, but might use an ass or a mule; they were not to build new churches or synagogues, but might repair old ones; no cross was to be displayed outside a church, no church bell should ring; non-Moslem children were not to be admitted to Moslem schools, but could have schools of their own: this is still the letter of the law—not always enforced—in Islam.92 Nevertheless there were 45,000 Christians in tenth-century Baghdad;93 Christian funeral processions passed unharmed through the streets;94 and Moslem protests continued against the employment of Christians and Jews in high office. Even in the heat and challenge of the Crusades Saladin could be generous to the Christians in his realm.
VIII. AVERROËS
For a time philosophy survived in Moslem Spain by judiciously sprinkling professions of orthodoxy among the timid tentatives of critique; and thought found a precarious freedom in the courts of rulers who enjoyed in private the speculations that they accounted harmful to the populace. So the Almoravid governor of Saragossa chose as his minister and friend Abu Bekr ibn Bajja, who had been born there about 1106. Avempace, as Europe would call him, had reached even in youth an extraordinary proficiency in science, medicine, philosophy, music, and poetry. Ibn Khaldun tells how the governor so admired some verses of the young scholar that he vowed the poet should always walk on gold when entering his presence; whereupon ibn Bajja, lest this vow should abate his welcome, put a gold coin in each of his shoes. When Saragossa fell to the Christians the poet-scientist-minister fled to Fez, where he found himself destitute among Moslems who accused him of atheism. He died at the age of thirty, allegedly by poison. His lost treatise on music was accounted the masterpiece on that subtle subject in the literature of Western Islam. His most famous work, A Guide to the Solitary, renewed a basic theme of Arabic philosophy. The human intellect, said Ibn Bajja, is composed of two parts: the “material intellect,” which is bound up with the body and dies with it; and the “Active Intellect,” or impersonal cosmic mind, which enters into all men, and is alone immortal. Thought is man’s highest function; by thought, rather than by mystic ecstasy, man can attain to knowledge of, and union with, the Active Intellect, or God. But thinking is a perilous enterprise, except in silence. The wise man will live in quiet seclusion, shunning doctors, lawyers, and the people; or perhaps a few philosophers will form a community where they may pursue knowledge in tolerant companionship, far from the maddened crowd.95
Abu Bekr (Europe’s Abubacer) ibn Tufail (1107?–1185) continued the ideas of Ibn Bajja, and almost realized his ideals. He too was scientist, poet, physician, and philosopher. He became the doctor and vizier of the Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf at Marraqesh, the Almohad capital in Morocco; he managed to spend most of his waking hours in the royal library, and found time to write, among more technical works, the most remarkable philosophical romance in medieval literature. It took its title from Ibn Sina, and (through Ockley’s English translation in 1708) may have suggested Robinson Crusoe to Defoe.
Hayy ibn Yaqzan (“Alive, Son of Vigilant”), who gives his name to the tale, was cast in infancy upon an uninhabited island. Nursed by a she-goat, he grew in intelligence and skill, made his shoes and clothes from animal skins, studied the stars, dissected animals alive or dead, and “arrived at the highest degree of knowledge, in this kind, which the most learned naturalists ever attained.”96 He passed from science to philosophy and theology, demonstrated to himself the existence of an all-powerful Creator, practiced asceticism, forswore meat, and achieved an ecstatic union with the Active Intellect.97 Hayy was now forty-nine, and ripe for an audience. Fortunately a mystic named Asal now had himself deposited on the island, seeking solitude. He met Hayy, who for the first time discovered the existence of mankind; Asal taught him language, and rejoiced to find that Hayy had arrived unaided at a knowledge of God. He confessed to Hayy the coarseness of the popular religion in the land from which he, Asal, had come, and mourned that a modicum of morality had been achieved only by promises of heaven and threats of hell. Hayy resolved to go and convert this benighted people to a higher and more philosophical religion. Arrived, he preached his pantheism in the market place. The populace ignored him, or did not understand him. Hayy concluded that Mohammed was right: that the people can be disciplined to social order only by a religion of myth, miracle, ceremony, and supernatural punishments and rewards. He apologized for his intrusion, returned to his island, and lived there with Asal in daily companionship with placid animals and the Active Intellect; and “thus they continued serving God until they died.”
It was with a rare absence of jealousy that Ibn Tufail, about 1153, introduced to the favor of Abu Yakub Yusuf a young lawyer and physician, known to Islam as Abu al-Walid Muhammad ibn Rushd (1126–98), and to medieval Europe as Averroës—the most influential figure in Islamic philosophy. His grandfather and his father had in turn been chief justice of Cordova, and had lavished on him all the education that the old capital could provide. One of his pupils has transmitted what purports to be Averroës’ own account of his first interview with the Emir.
When I was presented to the Prince of Believers I found him alone with Ibn Tufail, who … sounded my praises to him with compliments that I did not deserve…. The Emir opened the conversation by asking, “What opinion did the philosophers hold about the heavens? Are they eternal, or did they have a beginning?” I was overcome with terror and confusion, and sought some pretext for not answering … but the Emir, perceiving my trouble, turned to Ibn Tufail, and began to discourse with him on the question, recalling the opinions of Plato and Aristotle and other philosophers, and the objections that had been made to them by Moslem theologians; all with such fullness of memory as I should not have expected even of professional philosophers. The Emir put me at my ease, and tested my knowledge. When I had retired he sent me a sum of money, a riding horse, and a costly robe of honor.98
In 1169 Averroës was appointed chief justice of Seville; in 1172, of Cordova. Ten years later Abu Yaqub called him to Marraqesh to serve as court physician; and he continued in this capacity when (1184) Yaqub was succeeded by Yaqub al-Mansur. In 1194 he was banished to Lucena, near Cordova, to satisfy public resentment of his heresies. He was forgiven and recalled in 1198, but died in that year. His tomb may still be seen at Marraqesh.
His work in medicine has been almost forgotten in his fame as a philosopher; he was, however, “one of the greatest physicians of his time,” the first to explain the function of the retina, and to recognize that an attack of smallpox confers subsequent immunity.99 His encyclopedia of medicine (Kitab al-Kulliyat fi-l-tibb), translated into Latin, was widely used as a text in Christian universities. Meanwhile the Emir Abu Yaqub had expressed the wish that someone would write a clear exposition of Aristotle; and Ibn Tufail recommended the task to Averroës. The suggestion was welcomed, for Averroës had already concluded that all philosophy was contained in the Stagirite, who merely needed interpretation to be made contemporary with any age.* He resolved to prepare for each major work of Aristotle first a summary, then a brief commentary, then a detailed commentary for advanced students—a mode of progressively complex exposition habitual in Moslem universities. Unfortunately he knew no Greek, and had to rely on Arabic translations of Syriac translations of Aristotle; nevertheless his patience, perspicuity, and keen analyses won him throughout Europe the name of the Commentator, and placed him at once near the head of Moslem philosophy, second only to the great Avicenna himself.
To these writings he added several works of his own on logic, physics, psychology, metaphysics, theology, law, astronomy, and grammar, and a reply to al-Ghazali’s Destruction of Philosophy under the title of Destruction of the Destruction (Tahafut al-Tahafut). He argued, as Francis Bacon would, that though a little philosophy might incline a man to atheism, unhindered study would lead to a better understanding between religion and philosophy. For though the philosopher cannot accept in their literal sense the dogmas of “the Koran, the Bible, and other revealed books,”100 he perceives their necessity in developing a wholesome piety and morality among the people, who are so harassed with economic importunities that they find no time for more than incidental, superficial, and dangerous thinking on first and last things. Hence the mature philosopher will neither utter nor encourage any word against the established faith.101 In return the philosopher should be left free to seek the truth; but he should confine his discussions within the circle and comprehension of the educated, and make no propaganda among the populace.102 Symbolically interpreted, the doctrines of religion can be harmonized with the findings of science and philosophy;103 such interpretation of sacred texts through symbol and allegory has been practiced, even by divines, for centuries. Averroës does not explicitly teach, he merely implies, the doctrine imputed to him by Christian critics—that a proposition may be true in philosophy (among the educated) and false (harmful) in religion (and morals).104 Hence the opinions of Averroës must be sought not in the minor treatises which he composed for a general audience, but in his more recondite commentaries on Aristotle.
He defines philosophy as “an inquiry into the meaning of existence,” with a view to the improvement of man.105 The world is eternal; the movements of the heavens never began, and will never end; creation is a myth.
The partisans of creation argue that the agent [God] produces a [new] being without needing for its production any pre-existing material…. It is such imagining that has led the theologians of the three religions existing in our day to say that something can issue from nothing.106 … Motion is eternal and continuous; all motion has its cause in a preceding motion. Without motion there is no time. We cannot conceive of motion having either a beginning or an end.107
Nonetheless God is the creator of the world in the sense that it exists at any moment only through His sustaining power, and undergoes, so to speak, a continuous creation through the divine energy.108 God is the order, force, and mind of the universe.
From this supreme order and intelligence there emanates an order and intelligence in the planets and the stars. From the intelligence in the lowest of the celestial circles (that of the moon) comes the Active or Effective Intellect, which enters into the body and mind of individual men. The human mind is composed of two elements. One is the passive or material intellect—a capacity and possibility of thought, forming a part of the body, and dying with it (the nervous system?). The other is the Active Intellect—a divine influx which activates the passive intellect into actual thought. This Active Intellect has no individuality; it is the same in all men; and it alone is immortal.109 Averroës compares the operation of the Active Intellect upon the individual or passive intellect with the influence of the sun, whose light makes many objects luminous, but remains everywhere and permanently one.110 And as fire reaches out to a combustible body, so the individual intellect aspires to be united with the Active Intellect. In this union the human mind becomes like unto God, for it holds all the universe potentially in the grasp of its thought; indeed the world and its contents have no existence for us, and no meaning, except through the mind that apprehends them.111 Only the perception of truth through reason can lead the mind to that union with God which the Sufis think to reach by ascetic discipline or intoxicating dance. Averroës has no use for mysticism. His notion of paradise is the quiet and kindly wisdom of the sage.112
This was Aristotle’s conclusion too; and of course the theory of the active and passive intellect (nous poietikos and nous pathetikos) goes back to Aristotle’s De Anima (iii, 5) as interpreted by Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius of Alexandria, transformed into the emanation theory of the Neoplatonists, and transmitted in philosophic dynasty through al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Ibn Bajja. Here at the end, as in its beginning, Arabic philosophy was Aristotle Neoplatonized. But whereas in most Moslem and Christian philosophers Aristotle’s doctrines were retailored to meet the needs of theology, in Averroës Mohammedan dogmas were reduced to a minimum to reconcile them with Aristotle. Hence Averroës had more influence in Christendom than in Islam. His Moslem contemporaries persecuted him, Moslem posterity forgot him, and allowed most of his works to be lost in their Arabic form. Jews preserved many of them in Hebrew translation, and Maimonides followed in Averroës’ steps in seeking to reconcile religion and philosophy. In Christendom the Commentaries, translated into Latin from the Hebrew, fed the heresies of Siger de Brabant, and the rationalism of the School of Padua, and threatened the foundations of Christian belief. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summae to stem this Averroistic tide; but he followed Averroës in the method of his Commentaries, in divers interpretations of Aristotle, in choosing matter as the “principle of individuation,” in the symbolical explanation of anthropomorphic Scriptural texts, in admitting the possible eternity of the world, in rejecting mysticism as a sufficient basis for theology, and in recognizing that some dogmas of religion are beyond reason, and can be accepted by faith alone.113 Roger Bacon ranked Averroës next to Aristotle and Avicenna, and added, with characteristic exaggeration, “The philosophy of Averroës today [c. 1270] obtains the unanimous suffrage of wise men.”114
In 1150 the Caliph Mustanjid, at Baghdad, ordered burned all the philosophical works of Avicenna and the Brethren of Sincerity. In 1194 the Emir Abu Yusuf Yaqub al-Mansur, then at Seville, ordered the burning of all works by Averroës except a few on natural science; he forbade his subjects to study philosophy, and urged them to throw into a fire all books of philosophy wherever found. These instructions were eagerly carried out by the people, who resented attacks upon a faith that for most of them was the dearest solace of their harassed lives. About this time Ibn Habib was put to death for studying philosophy.115 After 1200 Islam shunned speculative thought. As political power declined in the Moslem world, it sought more and more the aid of the theologians and lawyers of orthodoxy. That aid was given, but in return for the suppression of independent thought. Even so, the aid did not suffice to save the state. In Spain the Christians advanced from city to city, until only Granada remained Moslem. In the East the Crusaders captured Jerusalem; and in 1258 the Mongols took and destroyed Baghdad.
IX. THE COMING OF THE MONGOLS: 1219–58
Once again history illustrated the truism that civilized comfort attracts barbarian conquest. The Seljuqs had brought new strength to Eastern Islam; but they too had succumbed to ease, and had allowed the empire of Malik Shah to break down into autonomous kingdoms culturally brilliant and militarily weak. Religious fanaticism and racial antipathies divided the people into bitter sects, and frustrated any united defense against the Crusades.
Meanwhile, on the plains and deserts of northwestern Asia, the Mongols thrived on hardships and primitive fertility. They lived in tents or the open air, followed their herds to fresh pastures, clothed themselves in oxhides, and studied with relish the arts of war. These new Huns, like their kin of eight centuries back, were experts with dagger and sword, and arrows aimed from their flying steeds. If we may believe the Christian missionary Giovanni de Piano Carpini, “they eat anything edible, even lice”;116 and they had as little repugnance to feeding on rats, cats, dogs, and human blood as our most cultured contemporaries to eating eels and snails. Jenghiz Khan (1167–1227)—i.e., the Great King—disciplined them with severe laws into an irresistible force, and led them to the conquest of Central Asia from the Volga to the Chinese Wall. During the absence of Jenghiz Khan from his capital at Karokorum, a Mongol chieftain rebelled against him, and formed a league with Ala al-Din Muhammad, the Shah of the independent state of Khwarizm. Jenghiz suppressed the rebellion, and sent the Shah an offer of peace. The offer was accepted; but shortly thereafter two Mongol merchants in Transoxiana were executed as spies by Muhammad’s governor of Otrar. Jenghiz demanded the extradition of the governor; Muhammad refused, beheaded the chief of the Mongol embassy, and sent its other members back without their beards. Jenghiz declared war, and the Mongol invasion of Islam began (1219).
An army under the Khan’s son Juji defeated Muhammad’s 400,000 troops at Jand; the Shah fled to Samarkand, leaving 160,000 of his men dead on the field. Another army, under Jenghiz’ son Jagatai, captured and sacked Otrar. A third army, under Jenghiz himself, burned Bokhara to the ground, raped thousands of women, and massacred 30,000 men. Samarkand and Balkh surrendered at his coming, but suffered pillage and wholesale slaughter; a full century later Ibn Batuta described these cities as still largely in ruins. Jenghiz’ son Tule led 70,000 men through Khurasan, ravaging every town on their march. The Mongols placed captives in their van, and gave them a choice between fighting their fellow men in front, or being cut down from behind. Merv was captured by treachery, and was burned to the ground; its libraries, the glory of Islam, were consumed in the conflagration; its inhabitants were allowed to march out through the gates with their treasures, only to be massacred and robbed in detail; this slaughter (the Moslem historians aver) occupied thirteen days, and took 1,300,000 lives.117 Nishapur resisted long and bravely, but succumbed (1221); every man, woman, and child there was killed, except 400 artisan-artists who were sent to Mongolia; and the heads of the slain were piled up in a ghastly pyramid. The lovely city of Rayy, with its 3000 mosques and its famous pottery kilns, was laid in ruins, and (a Moslem historian tells us) its entire population was put to death.118 Muhammad’s son Jalal ud-Din collected a new army of Turks, gave Jenghiz battle on the Indus, was defeated, and fled to Delhi. Herat, having rebelled against its Mongol governor, was punished with the slaughter of 60,000 inhabitants. This ferocity was part of the military science of the Mongols; it sought to strike a paralyzing terror into the hearts of later opponents, and to leave no possibility of revolt among the defeated. The policy succeeded.
Jenghiz now returned to Mongolia, enjoyed his 500 wives and concubines, and died in bed. His son and successor Ogotai sent a horde of 300,000 men to capture Jalal ud-Din, who had formed another army at Diarbekr; Jalal was defeated and killed, and the unhindered Mongols ravaged Azerbaijan, northern Mesopotamia, Georgia, and Armenia (1234). Hearing that a rebellion, led by the Assassins, had broken out in Iran, Hulagu, a grandson of Jenghiz, led a Mongol army through Samarkand and Balkh, destroyed the Assassin stronghold at Alamut, and turned toward Baghdad.
Al-Mustasim Billah, last of the Abbasid caliphs of the East, was a learned scholar, a meticulous calligrapher, a man of exemplary gentleness, devoted to religion, books, and charity: this was an enemy to Hulagu’s taste. The Mongol accused the Caliph of sheltering rebels, and of withholding promised aid against the Assassins; as penalty he demanded the submission of the Caliph to the Great Khan, and the complete demilitarization of Baghdad. Al-Mustasim returned a boastful refusal. After a month of siege, al-Mustasim sent Hulagu presents and an offer of surrender. Lured by a promise of clemency, he and his two sons gave themselves up to the Mongol. On February 13, 1258, Hulagu and his troops entered Baghdad, and began forty days of pillage and massacre; 800,000 of the inhabitants, we are told, were killed. Thousands of scholars, scientists, and poets fell in the indiscriminate slaughter; libraries and treasures accumulated through centuries were in a week plundered or destroyed; hundreds of thousands of volumes were consumed. Finally the Caliph and his family, after being forced to reveal the hiding place of their secret wealth, were put to death.119 So ended the Abbasid caliphate in Asia.
Hulagu now returned to Mongolia. His army remained behind, and under other generals it advanced to the conquest of Syria. At Ain Jalut it met an Egyptian army under the Mamluk leaders Qutuz and Baibars, and was destroyed (1260). Everywhere in Islam and Europe men of all faiths rejoiced; the spell of fear was broken. In 1303 a decisive battle near Damascus ended the Mongol threat, and saved Syria for the Mamluks, perhaps Europe for Christianity.
Never in history had a civilization suffered so suddenly so devastating a blow. The barbarian conquest of Rome had been spread over two centuries; between each blow and the next some recovery was possible; and the German conquerors respected, some tried to preserve, the dying Empire which they helped to destroy. But the Mongols came and went within forty years; they came not to conquer and stay, but to kill, pillage, and carry their spoils to Mongolia. When their bloody tide ebbed it left behind it a fatally disrupted economy, canals broken or choked, schools and libraries in ashes, governments too divided, poor, and weak to govern, and a population cut in half and shattered in soul. Epicurean indulgence, physical and mental exhaustion, military incompetence and cowardice, religious sectarianism and obscurantism, political corruption and anarchy, all culminating in piecemeal collapse before external attack—this, and no change of climate, turned Western Asia from world leadership to destitution, from a hundred teeming and cultured cities in Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, the Caucasus, and Transoxiana into the poverty, disease, and stagnation of modern times.
X. ISLAM AND CHRISTENDOM
The rise and decline of Islamic civilization is one of the major phenomena of history. For five centuries, from 700 to 1200, Islam led the world in power, order, and extent of government, in refinement of manners, in standards of living, in humane legislation and religious toleration, in literature, scholarship, science, medicine, and philosophy. In architecture it yielded the palm, in the twelfth century, to the cathedrals of Europe; and Gothic sculpture found no rival in inhibited Islam. Moslem art exhausted itself in decoration, and suffered from narrowness of range and monotony of style; but within its self-imposed limits it has never been surpassed. In Islam art and culture were more widely shared than in medieval Christendom; kings were calligraphers, and merchants, like physicians, might be philosophers.
In sexual morality during these centuries Christendom probably excelled Islam, though there was not much to choose; Christian monogamy, however evaded in practice, kept the sexual impulse within bounds, and slowly raised the status of woman, while Islam darkened the face of woman with purdah and the veil. The Church succeeded in limiting divorce; and homosexual diversions seem never to have attained, even in Renaissance Italy, the spread and freedom allowed them not in Mohammedan law but in Moslem life. The Moslems seem to have been better gentlemen than their Christian peers; they kept their word more frequently, showed more mercy to the defeated, and were seldom guilty of such brutality as marked the Christian capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Christian law continued to use ordeal by battle, water, or fire while Moslem law was developing an advanced jurisprudence and an enlightened judiciary. The Mohammedan religion, less original than the Hebrew, less embracing in eclecticism than the Christian, kept its creed and ritual simpler and purer, less dramatic and colorful, than the Christian, and made less concession to the natural polytheism of mankind. It resembled Protestantism in scorning the aid and play that Mediterranean religion offered to the imagination and the senses; but it bowed to popular sensualism in its picture of paradise. It kept itself almost free from sacerdotalism, but fell into a narrow and dulling orthodoxy just when Christianity was entering into the most exuberant period of Catholic philosophy.
The influence of Christendom on Islam was almost limited to religion and war. Probably from Christian exemplars came Mohammedan mysticism, monasticism, and the worship of the saints. The figure and story of Jesus touched the Moslem soul, and appeared sympathetically in Moslem poetry and art.120
The influence of Islam upon Christendom was varied and immense. From Islam Christian Europe received foods, drinks, drugs, medicaments, armor, heraldry, art motives and tastes, industrial and commercial articles and techniques, maritime codes and ways, and often the words for these things—orange, lemon, sugar, syrup, sherbet, julep, elixir, jar, azure, arabesque, mattress, sofa, muslin, satin, fustian, bazaar, caravan, check, tariff, traffic, douane, magazine, risk, sloop, barge, cable, admiral. The game of chess came to Europe from India via Islam, and picked up Persian terms on the way; checkmate is from the Persian shah mat—“the king is dead.” Some of our musical instruments bear in their names evidence of their Semitic origin—lute, rebeck, guitar, tambourine. The poetry and music of the troubadours came from Moslem Spain into Provence, and from Moslem Sicily into Italy; and Arabic descriptions of trips to heaven and hell may have shared in forming The Divine Comedy. Hindu fables and numerals entered Europe in Arabic dress or form. Moslem science preserved and developed Greek mathematics, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine, and transmitted this Greek heritage, considerably enriched, to Europe; and Arabic scientific terms—algebra, zero, cipher, azimuth, alembic, zenith, almanac—still lie imbedded in European speech. Moslem medicine led the world for half a millennium. Moslem philosophy preserved and corrupted Aristotle for Christian Europe. Avicenna and Averroës were lights from the East for the Schoolmen, who cited them as next to the Greeks in authority.
The ribbed vault is older in Islam than in Europe,121 though we cannot trace the route by which it came into Gothic art. Christian spire and belfry owed much to the minaret,122 and perhaps Gothic window tracery took a lead from the cusped arcading of the Giralda tower.123 The rejuvenation of the ceramic art in Italy and France has been attributed to the importation of Moslem potters in the twelfth century, and to the visits of Italian potters to Moslem Spain.124 Venetian workers in metal and glass, Italian bookbinders, Spanish armorers, learned their techniques from Moslem artisans;125 and almost everywhere in Europe weavers looked to Islam for models and designs. Even gardens received a Persian influence.
We shall see later by what avenues these influences came: through commerce and the Crusades; through a thousand translations from Arabic into Latin; through the visits of scholars like Gerbert, Michael Scot, and Adelard of Bath to Moslem Spain; through the sending of Christian youths by their Spanish parents to Moslem courts to receive a knightly education126—for the Moslem aristocrats were accounted “knights and gentlemen, albeit Moors”;127 through the daily contact of Christians with Moslems in Syria, Egypt, Sicily, and Spain. Every advance of the Christians in Spain admitted a wave of Islamic literature, science, philosophy, and art into Christendom. So the capture of Toledo in 1085 immensely furthered Christian knowledge of astronomy, and kept alive the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth.128
Behind this borrowing smoldered an undying hate. Nothing, save bread, is so precious to mankind as its religious beliefs; for man lives not by bread alone, but also by the faith that lets him hope. Therefore his deepest hatred greets those who challenge his sustenance or his creed. For three centuries Christianity saw Islam advance, saw it capture and absorb one Christian land and people after another, felt its constricting hand upon Christian trade, and heard it call Christians infidels. At last the potential conflict became actual: the rival civilizations clashed in the Crusades; and the best of the East or West slew the best of the West or East. Back of all medieval history lay this mutual hostility, with a third faith, the Jewish, caught between the main combatants, and cut by both swords. The West lost the Crusades, but won the war of creeds. Every Christian warrior was expelled from the Holy Land of Judaism and Christianity; but Islam, bled by its tardy victory, and ravaged by Mongols, fell in turn into a Dark Age of obscurantism and poverty; while the beaten West, matured by its effort and forgetting its defeat, learned avidly from its enemy, lifted cathedrals into the sky, wandered out on the high seas of reason, transformed its crude new languages into Dante, Chaucer, and Villon, and moved with high spirit into the Renaissance.
The general reader will marvel at the length of this survey of Islamic civilization, and the scholar will mourn its inadequate brevity. Only at the peaks of history has a society produced, in an equal period, so many illustrious men—in government, education, literature, philology, geography, history, mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, philosophy, and medicine—as Islam in the four centuries between Harun al-Rashid and Averroës. Part of this brilliant activity fed on Greek leavings; but much of it, above all in statesmanship, poetry, and art, was original and invaluable. In one sense this zenith of Islam was a recovery of the Near East from Greek domination; it reached back not only to Sasanian and Achaemenid Persia, but to the Judea of Solomon, the Assyria of Ashurbanipal, the Babylonia of Hammurabi, the Akkad of Sargon, the Sumeria of unknown kings. So the continuity of history reasserts itself: despite earthquakes, epidemics, famines, eruptive migrations, and catastrophic wars, the essential processes of civilization are not lost; some younger culture takes them up, snatches them from the conflagration, carries them on imitatively, then creatively, until fresh youth and spirit can enter the race. As men are members of one another, and generations are moments in a family line, so civilizations are units in a larger whole whose name is history; they are stages in the life of man. Civilization is polygenetic—it is the co-operative product of many peoples, ranks, and faiths; and no one who studies its history can be a bigot of race or creed. Therefore the scholar, though he belongs to his country through affectionate kinship, feels himself also a citizen of that Country of the Mind which knows no hatreds and no frontiers; he hardly deserves his name if he carries into his study political prejudices, or racial discriminations, or religious animosities; and he accords his grateful homage to any people that has borne the torch and enriched his heritage.
BOOK III
JUDAIC CIVILIZATION
135–1300
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK III
1–220:
The Tannaim
189:
The Mishna of Jehuda Hanasi
219:
Jewish academy at Sura
220:
Jewish academy at Pumbeditha
220–500:
The Amoraim
280–500:
Compilation of the Talmuds
359:
Hillel II fixes Jewish calendar
500–650:
The Saboraim
658–1040:
The Gaonate in Babylonia
815:
d. of Mashallah, astronomer
855–955:
Isaac Israeli, philosopher
892–942:
Saadia Gaon, philosopher
915–70:
Hasdai ibn Shaprut, statesman
1000:
Monogamy edict of Rabbi Gershom
1021–70:
Ibn Gabirol, poet & philosopher
1038–55:
Samuel ibn Naghdela, vizier
1040–1105:
Shelomoh ben Yitzhak (Rashi), Talmudic commentator
1055–66:
Joseph ibn Naghdela, vizier
1065–1136:
Abraham bar Hiyya, mathematician
1070–1139:
Moses ibn Ezra, poet
1086–1147:
Jehuda Halevi, poet
1093–1168:
Abraham ibn Ezra, poet
1096:
Pogroms of First Crusade
1110–80:
Abraham ibn Daud, philosopher
1135–1204:
Maimonides
1147:
Pogroms of Second Crusade
1160:
David Alrui, false messiah
1160–73:
Travels of Benjamin of Tudela
1170:
The Mishna Torah of Maimonides
1181, 1254, 1306:
Jews expelled from France
1190:
The Guide to the Perplexed
1190:
Rise of the Cabala
1190:
Pogroms in England
1215:
Fourth Council of the Lateran orders Jewish badge
1234:
Books of Maimonides burned at Montpellier
1242:
Burning of Talmud at Paris
1290:
Jews expelled from England
c. 1295:
The Sefer ha-Zohar of Moses of Leon
CHAPTER XV
The Talmud
I. THE EXILES: 135–565
WITHIN Islam and Christendom a remarkable people maintained through every adversity its own unique culture, consoled and inspired by its own creed, living by its own laws and morality, producing its own poets, scientists, scholars, and philosophers, and serving as the living carriers of fertile seeds between two hostile worlds.
The rebellion of Bar Cocheba (132-5) was not the last effort of the Jews to regain for Judea the freedom that Pompey and Titus had destroyed. Under Antoninus Pius (138-61) they tried again, and failed. Their holy city was forbidden them except on the bitter anniversary of its destruction, when they were allowed, for a consideration, to come and mourn by the walls of their shattered Temple. In Palestine, where 985 towns had been wiped out, and 580,000 men and women had been slain, in Bar Cocheba’s revolt, the Jewish population had sunk to half its former volume, and to such an abyss of poverty that cultural life was almost wholly dead. Nevertheless, within a generation after Bar Cocheba, the Beth Din or Jewish National Council—a court of seventy-one rabbinical scholars and legists—was established in Tiberias, synagogues and schools were opened, and hope rose again.
The triumph of Christianity brought new difficulties. Before his conversion Constantine had placed the religion of the Jews on a footing of legal equality with those of his other subjects. After his conversion the Jews were oppressed with new restrictions and exactions, and Christians were forbidden to associate with them.1 Constantius banished the rabbis (337), and made the marriage of a Jew with a Christian woman a capital crime.2 Julian’s brother Gallus taxed the Jews so heavily that many of them sold their children to meet his demands. In 352 they rebelled again, and were again suppressed; Sepphoris was razed to the ground, Tiberias and other cities were partly destroyed, thousands of Jews were killed, thousands were enslaved. The condition of the Palestinian Jews now (359) sank so low, and their communication with other Jewish communities was so difficult, that their patriarch Hillel II resigned their right to determine for all Jews the dates of the Jewish festivals, and issued, for the independent computation of these dates, a calendar that remains in use among the Jews of the world to this day.
From these afflictions the Jews were saved for a moment by the accession of Julian. He reduced their taxes, revoked discriminatory laws, lauded Hebrew charity, and acknowledged Yahveh as “a great god.” He asked Jewish leaders why they had abandoned animal sacrifice; when they replied that their law did not permit this except in the Temple at Jerusalem, he ordered that the Temple should be rebuilt with state funds.3 Jerusalem was again opened to the Jews; they flocked to it from every quarter of Palestine, from every province of the Empire; men, women, and children gave their labor to the rebuilding, their savings and jewelry to the furnishing, of the new Temple;4 we can imagine the happiness of a people that for three centuries had prayed for this day (361). But as the foundations were being dug, flames burst from the ground, and burnt several workmen to death.5 The work was patiently resumed, but a repetition of the phenomenon—probably due to the explosion of natural gas—interrupted and discouraged the enterprise. The Christians rejoiced at what seemed a divine prohibition; the Jews marveled and mourned. Then came Julian’s sudden death; state funds were withdrawn; the old restrictive laws were re-enacted and made more severe; and the Jews, again excluded from Jerusalem, returned to their villages, their poverty, and their prayers. Soon thereafter Jerome reported the Jewish population of Palestine as “but a tenth part of their previous multitude.”6 In 425 Theodosius II abolished the Palestinian patriarchate. Greek Christian churches replaced the synagogues and schools; and after a brief outburst in 614, Palestine surrendered its leadership of the Jewish world.
The Jews could hardly be blamed if they hoped to fare better in less Christian lands. Some moved east into Mesopotamia and Persia, and reinvigorated that Babylonian Jewry which had never ceased since the Captivity of 597 B.C. In Persia too the Jews were excluded from state office; but as all Persians except the nobility were likewise excluded, there was less offense in the restriction.7 And there were several persecutions of Jews in Persia. But taxation was less severe, the government was normally co-operative, and the exilarch, or head of the Jewish community, was recognized and honored by the Persian kings. The soil of Iraq was then irrigated and fertile; the Jews there became prosperous farmers as well as clever traders. Some, including famous scholars, grew rich by brewing beer.8 The Jewish communities in Persia multiplied rapidly, for Persian law permitted, and the Jews practiced, polygamy, for reasons that we have seen under Mohammedan law. The good rabbis Rab and Nahman, when traveling, were accustomed to advertise in each city for temporary wives, to give local youth an exemplar of matrimonial, as against a promiscuous, life.9 In Nehardea, Sura, and Pumbeditha schools of higher education rose, whose scholarship and rabbinical decisions were honored throughout the Dispersion.
Meanwhile the dispersion of the Jews continued through all the Mediterranean lands. Some went to join old Jewish communities in Syria and Asia Minor. Some went to Constantinople despite the hostility of Greek emperors and patriarchs. Some turned south from Palestine into Arabia, dwelt in peace and religious freedom with their Arab fellow-Semites, occupied whole regions like Khaibar, almost equaled the Arabs in Yathrib (Medina), made many converts, and prepared the Arab mind for the Judaism of the Koran. Some crossed the Red Sea into Abyssinia, and multiplied so rapidly there that in 315 they were reputed to be half the population.10 Jews controlled half the shipping of Alexandria, and their prosperity in that excitable city fed the flames of religious animosity.
Jewish communities developed in all the North African cities, and in Sicily and Sardinia. In Italy they were numerous; and though occasionally harassed by the Christian population, they were for the most part protected by pagan emperors, Christian emperors, Theodoric, and the Popes. In Spain there had been Jewish settlements before Caesar, and they had developed there without molestation under the pagan Empire; they prospered under the Arian Visigoths, but suffered disheartening persecutions after King Recared (586-601) adopted the Nicene Creed. We hear of no persecution of Jews in Gaul until the severe enactments of the third and fourth Councils of Orléans (538, 541), a generation after the conquest of Arian Visigothic Gaul by the orthodox Christian Clovis. About 560 the Christians of Orléans burned down a synagogue. The Jews petitioned Gunthram, King of the Franks, to rebuild it at public cost, as Theodoric in like case had done. Gunthram refused. “O King glorious for wonderful wisdom!” exclaimed Bishop Gregory of Tours.11
From such tribulations the Jews of the Dispersion always recovered. Patiently they rebuilt their synagogues and their lives; toiled, traded, lent money, prayed and hoped, increased and multiplied. Each settlement was required to maintain at communal expense at least one elementary and one secondary school, both of them usually in the synagogue. Scholars were advised not to live in any town that lacked such schools. The language of worship and instruction was Hebrew; the language of daily speech was Aramaic in the East, Greek in Egypt and Eastern Europe; elsewhere the Jews adopted the language of the surrounding population. The central theme of Jewish education was religion; secular culture was now almost ignored. Dispersed Jewry could maintain itself, in body and soul, only through the Law; and religion was the study and observance of the Law. The faith of their fathers became more precious to the Jews the more it was attacked; and the Talmud and the synagogue were the indispensable support and refuge of an oppressed and bewildered people whose life rested on hope, and their hope on faith in their God.
II. THE MAKERS OF THE TALMUD
In the Temple, the synagogues, and the schools of Palestine and Babylonia the scribes and the rabbis composed those enormous bodies of law and commentary known as the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. Moses, they held, had left to his people not only a written Law in the Pentateuch, but also an oral Law, which had been handed down and expanded from teacher to pupil, from generation to generation. It had been the main point of issue between the Pharisees and the Sadducees of Palestine whether this oral Law was also of divine origin and binding force. As the Sadducees disappeared after the Dispersion of A.D. 70, and the rabbis inherited the tradition of the Pharisees, the oral Law was accepted by all orthodox Jews as God’s commandment, and was added to the Pentateuch to constitute the Torah or Law by which they lived, and in which, quite literally, they had their being. The thousand-year-long process by which the oral Law was built up, given form, and put into writing as the Mishna; the eight centuries of debate, judgment, and elucidation that accumulated the two Gemaras as commentaries on the Mishna; the union of the Mishna with the shorter of these Gemaras to make the Palestinian, and with the longer to make the Babylonian, Talmud—this is one of the most complex and astonishing stories in the history of the human mind. The Bible was the literature and religion of the ancient Hebrews; the Torah was the life and blood of the medieval Jews.
Because the Law of the Pentateuch was written, it could not meet all the needs and circumstances of a Jerusalem without freedom, or a Judaism without Jerusalem, or a Jewry without Palestine. It was the function of the Sanhedrin teachers before the Dispersion, and of the rabbis after it, to interpret the legislation of Moses for the use and guidance of a new age or place. Their interpretations and discussions, with majority and minority opinions, were transmitted from one generation of teachers to another. Perhaps to keep this oral tradition flexible, possibly to compel its memorizing, it was not written down. The rabbis who expounded the Law might on occasion call in the help of persons who had accomplished the feat of committing it to memory. In the first six generations after Christ the rabbis were called tannaim—“teachers of the oral Law.” As the sole experts in the Law, they were at once the teachers and the judges of their communities in Palestine after the fall of the Temple.
The rabbis of Palestine and of the Dispersion constituted the most unique aristocracy in history. They were no closed or hereditary class; many of them rose from the poorest ranks; most of them earned their living as artisans even after achieving international repute; and until near the end of this period they received no payment for their work as teachers and judges. Rich men sometimes made them silent partners in business enterprises, or took them into their homes, or married their daughters to them to free them from toil. A few of them were spoiled by the high status accorded to them in their communities; some were humanly capable of anger, jealousy, hatred, undue censoriousness, pride; they had frequently to remind themselves that the true scholar is a modest man, if only because wisdom sees the part in the light of the whole. The people loved them for their virtues and their faults, admired them for their learning and their devotion, and told a thousand stories about their judgments and their miracles. To this day no people so honors the student and the scholar as do the Jews.
As rabbinical decisions accumulated, the task of memorizing them became unreasonable. Hillel, Akiba, and Meir attempted various classifications and mnemonic devices, but none of these received general acceptance. Disorder in the transmission of the Law became the order of the day; the number of men who knew the entire oral Law by heart was dangerously reduced, and dispersion was scattering these few to distant lands. About the year 189, at Sepphoris in Palestine, Rabbi Jehuda Hanasi took over and transformed the work of Akiba and Meir, rearranged the whole oral Law, and wrote it down, with some personal additions, as the “Mishna of Rabbi Jehuda.” * It was so widely read that it became in time the Mishna, the authoritative form of the oral Law of the Jews.
As we have it, the Mishna (i.e., oral teaching) is the result of much editing and interpolation since Jehuda; even so it is a compact summary, designed for memorizing by repetition, and therefore tantalizingly terse and obscure to one who comes to it from any background except that of Jewish life and history. Babylonian and European as well as Palestinian Jews accepted it, but each school placed upon its maxims an individual interpretation. As six “generations” (A.D. 10–220) of rabbinical tannaim had shared in formulating the Mishna, so now six “generations” (220–500) of rabbinical amoraim (“expounders”) accumulated those two masses of commentary, the Palestinian and the Babylonian Gemaras. The new teachers did to the Mishna of Jehuda what the tannaim had done to the Old Testament: they debated, analyzed, explained, amended, and illustrated the text to apply it to the new problems and circumstances of their place and time. Towards the end of the fourth century the schools of Palestine co-ordinated their commentaries in the form known as the Palestinian Gemara. About the same time (397) Rab (Rabbi) Ashi, head of the Sura college, began to codify the Babylonian Gemara, and worked on it for a generation; a hundred years later (499) Rabina II bar (son of) Samuel, also at Sura, brought this work to completion. If we note that the Babylonian Gemara is eleven times as long as the Mishna, we shall begin to understand why its compilation spanned a century. Through an additional 150 years (500-650) rabbinical saboraim (“reasoners”) revised this vast commentary, and gave the finishing touches to the Babylonian Talmud.
The word talmud means teaching. Among the amoraim it was applied only to the Mishna; in modern usage it includes both the Mishna and the Gemara. The Mishna is the same in both the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmuds; the two differ only in the Gemara or commentary, which is four times longer in the Babylonian than in the Palestinian form.* The language of the two Gemaras is Aramaic; that of the Mishna is Neo-Hebraic, with many borrowings from neighbor languages. The Mishna is concise, stating a law in a few lines; the Gemaras are deliberately discursive, giving the diverse opinions of leading rabbis on the Mishna text, describing the circumstances that might require modification of the law, and adding illustrative material. The Mishna is mostly halacha, law; the Gemaras are partly halacha—restating or discussing a law—and partly haggada (“story”). Haggada has been lazily defined as anything in the Talmud that is not halacha. For the most part haggada includes illustrative anecdotes or examples, bits of biography, history, medicine, astronomy, astrology, magic, and theosophy, and exhortations to virtue and obedience to the Law. Often a haggada relieved the minds of the students after some complex and tiring debate. So, we read,
Rab Ami and Rab Assi were conversing with Rabbi Isaac Napcha, when one of them said to him: “Tell us, sir, some pretty legend”; and the other said: “Pray explain to us, rather, some nice point of law.” When he began the legend he displeased the one, and when he began to explain a point of law he offended the other. Whereupon he took up this parable: “I am like the man with the two wives, the one young and the other old. The young one plucked out all his gray hairs, that he might look young; the old wife pulled out all his black hairs, that he might look old; and so between the two he became bald. So it is with me between you.”13
III. THE LAW
If now, with offensive brevity and ecumenical ignorance, we attempt to sketch some phases of this immense Talmud that entered into every cranny of medieval Hebrew life, let us confess that we are but scratching a mountain, and that our external approach condemns us to error.
1. Theology
First, said the rabbis, one must study the Law, written and oral. “Greater is study of Torah than the rebuilding of the Temple.”14 “Every day when a man busies himself with the study of the Law he should say to himself, ‘It is as if this day I received it from Sinai.’”15 No other study is necessary; Greek philosophy, secular science, may be studied only “at that hour which is neither day nor night.”16 Every word of the Hebrew Scriptures is literally the word of God; even the Song of Songs is a hymn inspired by God—to portray allegorically the union of Yahveh with Israel as His chosen bride.*17 Since without the Law there would be moral chaos, the Law must have existed before the creation of the world, “in the bosom or mind of God”; † only its communication to Moses was an event in time. The Talmud, so far as it is halacha, is also God’s eternal word; it is the formulation of laws orally communicated to Moses by God, and by Moses to his successors; and its decrees are as binding as anything in the Scriptures.‡ Some rabbis ranked the Mishna above the Scriptures in authority, as being a later and revised form of the Law.18 Certain rabbinical edicts frankly voided laws of the Pentateuch, or interpreted them into harmlessness.19 During the Middle Ages (476-1492) the Jews of Germany and France studied the Talmud far more than the Scriptures.
The Talmud, like the Bible, takes for granted the existence of an intelligent and omnipotent God. There were occasional skeptics among the Jews, like the learned Elisha ben Abuyah whom the pious Rabbi Meir befriended; but they were apparently a tiny and hardly vocal minority. The Talmud’s God is frankly anthropomorphic: He loves and hates, gets angry,20 laughs,21weeps,22 feels remorse,23 wears phylacteries,24 sits on a throne surrounded by a ministering hierarchy of cherubim and seraphim, and studies the Torah three times a day.25 The rabbis acknowledged that these human attributes were a bit hypothetical; “we borrow terms from His creatures to apply to Him,” they said, “in order to assist the understanding”;26 it was not their fault if the commonalty could think only in pictures. They also represented God as the soul of the universe, invisible, pervasive, vitalizing, at once transcendent and immanent, above the world and yet present in every nook and fragment of it. This universal divine presence, the Shekinah (dwelling), is especially real in sacred places, persons, and things, and in moments of study or prayer. Nevertheless this omnipresent God is one. Of all ideas the most distasteful to Judaism is that of a plurality of gods. The unity of God is passionately reiterated against the polytheism of the pagans and the apparent tritheism of the Christian Trinity; it is proclaimed in the most famous and universal of Jewish prayers, the Shema Yisrael: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one” (Shema Yisrael adonoi elohenu, adonoi ehad).27 No messiah, no prophet, no saint is to have a place beside Him in His temple or worship. The rabbis forbade, except on rare occasions, the utterance of His name, hoping to deter profanity and magic; to avoid the sacred tetragrammaton JHVH they used the word Adonai, Lord, and recommended even for this such substitutions as “The Holy One,” “The Merciful One,” “The Heavens,” and “Our Father which is in heaven.” God can and does work miracles, especially through great rabbis; but these marvels are not to be thought of as infractions of nature’s laws; there are no laws but the will of God.
Everything created has a divine and beneficent purpose. “God created the snail as a cure for the scab, the fly as a cure for the sting of the wasp, and the gnat as a cure for the bite of the serpent, and the serpent as a cure for a sore.”28 Between God and man there is a continuous relation; every step of man’s life is taken in the inescapable sight of God; every deed or thought of man’s day honors or dishonors the divine presence. All men are descended from Adam; nevertheless, “man was first created with a tail like an animal”;29 and “up to the generation of Enoch the faces of the people resembled those of monkeys.”30 Man is composed of body and soul; his soul is from God, his body is of the earth. The soul impels him to virtue, the body to sin. Or perhaps his evil impulses come from Satan, and that multitude of malignant spirits which lurks about everywhere.31 Every evil, however, may be ultimately good; without his earthy desires man might neither toil nor breed; “Come,” says a jolly passage, “let us ascribe merit to our ancestors, for if they had not sinned we should not have come into the world.”32
Sin is natural, but its guilt is not inherited. The rabbis accepted the doctrine of the fall of man, but not of original sin or divine atonement. A man suffers only for his own sins. If he suffers more on earth than his sins seem to warrant, that may be because we do not know the full measure of his sins; or such excess of punishment may be a great blessing, as entitling the sufferer to exceptional rewards in heaven; therefore, said Akiba, a man should rejoice in the multitude of his misfortunes.33 As for death, it came into the world through sin; a really sinless person would never die.34 Death is a debt owed by a sinful humanity to the author of all life. A midrash tells a touching story of death and Rabbi Meir:
While Rabbi Meir was holding his weekly discourse on a Sabbath afternoon, his two beloved sons died suddenly at home. Their mother covered them with a sheet, and forbore to mourn on the sacred day. When Rabbi Meir returned after evening services he asked for his sons, whom he had not seen in the synagogue. She asked him to recite the habdalah [a ceremony marking the close of the Sabbath], and gave him his evening meal. Then she said: “I have a question to ask thee. A friend once gave me jewels to keep for him; now he wishes them again; shall I return them?” “Beyond doubt thou must,” said Rabbi Meir. His wife took him by the hand, led him to the bed, and drew back the sheet. Rabbi Meir burst into bitter weeping, and his wife said: “They were entrusted to us for a time; now their Master has taken back His very own.”35
The Hebrew Scriptures had said little of an immortality of reward and punishment; but that idea now played a major role in rabbinical theology. Hell was pictured at Ge Hinnom or Sheol,* and divided like heaven into seven stories, with graduated degrees of torment. Only the most wicked of the circumcised would enter it,36 and even confirmed sinners would not be punished forever. “All who go down to hell shall come up again, except these three: he who commits adultery, he who shames another in public, and he who gives another a bad name.”37 Heaven was called Gan Eden, and was represented as a garden of every physical and spiritual delight; the wine there would be of a vintage preserved from the six days of the creation; perfumes would bless the air; and God Himself would join the saved in a banquet whose supreme joy would be the sight of His face. However, some rabbis confessed that no man can say what lies beyond the grave.38
The Jews thought of salvation in terms of the nation rather than of the individual. Driven across the earth with apparently irrational ruthlessness, they strengthened themselves with the belief that they were still the chosen and favored people of God. He was their father, and a just God; it could not be that He would break covenant with Israel. Was it not to them that He had given those Scriptures which both the Christians and the Moslems accepted and revered? In the depths of their despair they mounted to such compensatory pride that their rabbis, who had exalted them, had to humble them with reproof. Then, as now, they longed for the land of their nation’s birth, and idealized it in loving memory. “He who walks four ells in Palestine is sure of everlasting life,” they said; “he who lives in Palestine is without sin”;39 “even the merest talk of those who dwell in Palestine is Torah.”40 The central part of the daily prayers, the Shemoneh Esreh (“eighteen paragraphs”), included a petition for the coming of the son of David, the Messiah King who would make the Jews a nation again, united, free, worshiping God in their own Temple with the ancient ritual and song.
2. Ritual
What distinguished the Jews in this Age of Faith, what kept them one in their scattering, was not theology but ritual, not a creed that Christianity had merely extended and that Islam would substantially adopt, but a ceremonial law of such burdensome complexity that only this proud and high-strung people showed the humility and patience required to obey it. Christianity sought unity through uniform belief, Judaism through uniform ritual. The laws “were given,” said Abba Areca, “only for the purpose of disciplining and refining men by their observance.”41
The ritual was first of all a law of worship. When the synagogue succeeded the Temple, animal sacrifice was replaced by offerings and prayer. But no more in the synagogue than in the Temple was any image of God or man allowed. Every approach to idol worship was shunned; and instrumental music, permitted in the Temple, was forbidden in the synagogue. Here Christianity diverged, Mohammedanism stemmed, from Judaism; the Semites developed a somber piety, the Christians a somber art.
Prayer made every day, almost every hour, a religious experience for the orthodox Jew. Morning prayers were to be said with phylacteries (small cases containing passages from the Scriptures) affixed to the forehead and the arms. No meal was to be eaten without a brief grace before it, and a longer prayer of thanksgiving at its close. But these domestic prayers were not enough; men can be held together only by doing things together; and the rabbis argued, with Oriental hyperbole, that “a man’s prayer is heard by God only when offered in a synagogue.”42 The public liturgy consisted mainly of the Shemoneh Esreh, the Shema Yisrael, readings from the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Psalms, a homily of Scriptural explanation, the Kaddish (prayers of praise and blessing for the living and the dead), and a concluding benediction. This remains the essential synagogue ritual to the present day.
Far more detailed than these regulations of worship were the rules for cleanliness or ritual purity. Physical hygiene was considered favorable to spiritual health.43 The rabbis forbade living in a city in which there was no bathhouse,44 and gave almost medical instructions for the bath. “If one bathes with hot water, and does not follow it with cold water, it is like iron which is inserted into a furnace and not afterward plunged into cold water”;45 the body, like the iron, must be tempered and steeled. Anointing should follow the bath.46 Hands were to be washed immediately upon rising, before and after each meal, and before ceremonial prayer or any other ritual observance. Corpses, sexual functions, menstruation, childbirth, vermin, pigs, and leprosy (i.e., various skin diseases) were ritually (i.e., by religious law) unclean. Persons touched or affected by any of these were to go to the synagogue and perform a purification ceremonial. A woman was considered unclean (not to be sexually approached) for forty days after bearing a son, eighty days after bearing a daughter.47 In accord with the Biblical injunction (Gen. xvii, 9-14), a boy was to be circumcised on his eighth day. This was represented as a sacrifice to, and a covenant with, Yahveh; but the prevalence of the custom among Egyptians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians, Syrians, and Arabs suggests that it was a hygienic measure indicated in a climate more favorable to sexual precocity and excitability than to cleanliness; and this conclusion is reinforced by the rabbinical command that no Jew should keep beyond twelve months an uncircumcised slave.48
The Talmud occasionally reads like a manual of home medicine rather than a code of religious laws; it had to be an encyclopedia of advice for its people. The Jews of the fourth and fifth centuries, like most Mediterranean peoples, were slipping back into the medical superstitions and makeshifts of the isolated and the poor; and a good deal of this popular and superstitious medicine entered into the Talmud. Nevertheless we find in the Babylonian Gemara excellent descriptions of the esophagus, larynx, trachea, lungs, meninges, and genitals; tumors of the lungs, cirrhosis of the liver, caseous degeneration, and many other diseases are accurately described; the rabbis note that flies and drinking cups may carry infection;49 and hemophilia is recognized as an hereditary ailment making circumcision of the offspring inadvisable. Mingled with these ideas are magical formulas for exorcising demons supposed to cause disease.
The rabbis, like all of us, were experts on diet. Dietary wisdom begins with the teeth. These should never be extracted, no matter how they ache,50 for “if a man chews well with his teeth his feet will find strength.”51 Vegetables and fruits, except the date, are highly recommended. Meat is a luxury, which only the well washed should have.52 The animal is to be killed in such a way as to minimize its pain, and draw the blood out of the meat; to eat flesh with blood is an abomination. Hence the slaughter of animals for food must be left to trained persons, who will also examine the viscera to make sure that the animal is not diseased. Meat and milk, and dishes prepared with them, must not be eaten at the same meal, or even placed near each other in the kitchen.53 The flesh of swine is to be abhorred. Eat no eggs, onions, or garlic that have been left overnight without their shell or peel.54 Eat at stated hours only; “don’t peck all day like hens.”55 “More people die from overeating than from undernourishment.”56 “Up to forty eating is beneficial; after that age, drinking is beneficial.”57 Moderation in drinking is better than total abstinence; wine is often a good medicine,58 and “there is no gladness without it.”59 Pursuing the subject of diet to its end, the rabbis argued that he “who prolongs his stay in a privy lengthens his years,” and recommended a prayer of thanksgiving after every answer to nature’s call.60
They frowned upon asceticism, and counseled their people to enjoy the good things of life where no sin was involved.61 Fasts were obligatory at certain periods and on some holydays; but perhaps here too religion was used as a prod to health. The wisdom of the race bade the Jews keep festival and make feast now and then, despite the overtones of sorrow and longing that sounded even in their joys. “On a festival a man must make glad his wife and household”; if possible he must outfit them with new clothes.62 The Sabbath—greatest of Jewish inventions—was apparently a burden in Talmudic days; the pious Jew was then expected to speak as little as possible, light no fire in his home, and spend hours at the synagogue and in prayer. A long tractate discussed with head-splitting hair-splitting just what might and what might not be done on the Sabbath. But the casuistry of the rabbis was directed to mitigating, rather than increasing, the terrors of piety. Their subtlety devised convincing reasons for doing what one had to do on the day of rest. More-over the good Jew discovered a secret happiness in observing the ancient Sabbath ritual. He began it with a little ceremony of “sanctification” (kid-dush). Surrounded by his family and his guests (for this was a favorite day for entertaining friends), he took a full cup of wine, pronounced a benediction over it, drank, and passed the cup along for guests and wife and children to drink. Then he took bread and blessed it, thanking the God “who bringeth forth bread from the earth,” and passed portions of it to all who shared his table. No fasting or mourning was permitted on the Sabbath.
Many holydays divided the year, and gave new occasions for pious remembrance or grateful rest. Pesach, beginning on the fourteenth of Nisan (April), commemorated through eight days the escape of the Jews from Egypt. In Biblical times it had been called the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because the Jews had fled with the dough of their bread still unleavened; Talmudic times called it Pesach, i.e., Passover, because Yahveh, smiting the firstborn of the Egyptians, “passed over” those houses whose doorposts had been sprinkled, by the Jewish occupants, with the blood of the lamb.63 On the first day of the feast the Jews celebrated the Paschal meal (Seder); each father acted as leader of the service for his gathered family, performed with them a ritual recalling those bitter Mosaic days, and passed on, by questions and answers, their treasured story to the young. At Pentecost, seven weeks after Passover, the feast of Shavuot celebrated the wheat harvest, and the revelation on Mt. Sinai. On the first day of Tishri—the seventh month of the ecclesiastical, the first month of the Jewish civil year, corresponding roughly with the autumnal equinox—the Jews celebrated Rosh-ha-Shana, the Feast of the New Year and of the month’s new moon, and blew the ram’s horn (shofar) to commemorate the revealing of the Torah, to call men to repentance, and to anticipate the happy day when such a blast would summon all the Jews of the world to worship their God in jerusalem. From the eve of Rosh-ha-Shana to the tenth day of Tishri were penitential days; on all but the ninth of those days pious Jews fasted and prayed; and on the tenth, Yom-ha-Kippurim, the Day of Atonement, from sunset to sunset, they were not to eat or drink or wear shoes or labor or bathe or indulge in love; all day long they attended services in the synagogue, confessed and mourned their sins and those of their people, even from the worship of the Golden Calf. On the fifteenth day of Tishri came Sukkoth, the Feast of Tabernacles; for seven days the Jews were supposed to live in booths, to commemorate the tents in which, it was said, their ancestors had slept during their forty years’ sojourn in the wilderness. In the Dispersion a literal fulfillment of this old vintage or harvest festival offered difficulties, and the rabbis showed their good will by redefining sukka to mean almost anything that could symbolize a habitation. On the twenty-fifth of the ninth month, Kislev (December), and for seven days thereafter, the festival of Hanukkah, or Dedication, recalled the purification of the Temple by the Maccabees (165 B.C.) after its defilement by Antiochus Epiphanes. And on the fourteenth of Adar (March) the Jews celebrated Purim (“lots”), the deliverance of their people from the wiles of the Persian minister Haman by Esther and Mordecai. Gifts and good wishes were exchanged in a joyful and vinous feast; on that day, said Rab Raba, a man should drink until he could no longer distinguish between “Cursed be Haman!” and “Cursed be Mordecai!”64
We must not think of those Talmudic Jews as dour pessimists, sick with the pangs of despised talents, tossed about by the storms of doctrine, and lost in longing for their ravished fatherland. Amid dispersion and oppression, atonement and poverty, they kept their heads erect, relished the tang and strife of life, the brief beauty of their burdened women, and the abiding splendor of earth and sky. “Every day,” said Rabbi Meir, “a man should utter a hundred benedictions.”65 And another said, for all of us: “To walk even four ells without bowing the head is an offense to Heaven; for is it not written, ‘The whole earth is full of His glory’?”66
3. Ethics of the Talmud
The Talmud is not only an encyclopedia of Jewish history, theology, ritual, medicine, and folklore; it is also a treatise on agriculture, gardens, industry, the professions, commerce,67 finance, taxation, property, slavery, inheritance, theft, legal procedure, and penal law. To do the book justice it would be necessary with polymathic wisdom to survey its judgments in all these fields.
The Talmud is above all a code of ethics, so different from the Christian, and so like the Moslem, that even a running acquaintance with it challenges the view of the Middle Ages as merely the story of medieval Christianity. The three religions agreed in rejecting the practicability of a natural—non religious—morality; most men, they believed, can be persuaded to tolerable behavior only by the fear of God. All three based their moral code on identical conceptions: the all-seeing eye and all-recording hand of God, the divine authorship of the moral code, and the ultimate equalization of virtue with happiness by post-mortem punishments and rewards. In the two Semitic cultures law, as well as ethics, was inseparable from religion; no distinction was admitted between crime and sin, between civil and ecclesiastical law; every discreditable act is an offense against God, a profanation of His presence and Holy Name.
The three religions agreed further on certain elements of morality: the sanctity of the family and the home, the honor due to parents and the old, the loving care of children, and charity to all. No people has surpassed the Jews in the order of beauty of family life. In Judaism, as in Islam, voluntary celibacy or childlessness was a major sin;68 to make a home and a family was a religious mandate,69 the first of the 613 precepts of the Law; “a childless person,” says a midrash,70 “is accounted as dead.” Jew, Christian, and Moslem agreed that the adequate continuance of the group is endangered when the religious command to parentage loses its force. Under certain circumstances, however, the rabbis permitted family limitation, preferably by contraception. “There are three classes of women who should employ an absorbent: a minor, lest pregnancy should prove fatal; a pregnant woman, lest abortion should result; and a nursing mother, lest she become pregnant and prematurely wean the child so that it dies.”71
The Jews, like their contemporaries, were reluctant to have daughters, but rejoiced at the birth of a son; he, not she, could carry on the father’s name, family, and property, and tend his grave; the daughter would marry into another, perhaps a distant, household, and be lost to her parents as soon as her rearing was complete. But once children came, they were cherished without favoritism, and with a wise mixture of discipline and love. “If thou must strike a child,” said one rabbi, “do it with a shoestring”;72 “if one refrains from punishing a child,” says another, “it will end by becoming utterly depraved.”73 Every sacrifice must be made to give the child an education—i.e., to instruct the mind and train the character by a knowledge of “the Law and the Prophets.” “The world is saved,” said a Hebrew proverb, “by the breath of school children”;74 the Shekinah, or divine presence, shines in their faces. The child in turn must honor and protect the parents, under all conditions, to the end.
Charity was an inescapable obligation. “Greater is he who practices charity than” he who performs “all the sacrifices.”75 Some Jews were niggardly, some were miserly, but by and large no other people has ever given as generously as the Jews. The rabbis had to forbid men to give more than a fifth of their property to charity; yet some were found, at their death, to have given half.76 “On Abba Umna’s face there was always a holy peace. He was a surgeon, but would never accept with his hands any payment for his service. He had a box placed in a corner of his consulting room, so that those who were able to pay could deposit what they wished… and those who could not afford to pay would not be shamed.”77 Rab Huna, “when he sat down to a meal, would open the doors and exclaim, ‘Let whoever is in need enter and eat’”78 Chama ben Ilai gave bread to all who sought it, and kept his hand in his purse when he walked abroad, so that none need hesitate to ask.79 But the Talmud reproved conspicous giving, and counseled a modest secrecy: “He who dispenses charity in private is greater than Moses.”80
To the institution of marriage the rabbis addressed all their learning and eloquence; on it and religion rested the whole structure of Jewish life. They did not condemn the sexual appetite, but they feared its force, and labored to control it. Some advised that salt be eaten with bread “to lessen the seminal fluid”;81 others felt that the only recourse against sexual temptation was hard work combined with study of the Torah. If this availed not, “let him go to a place where he is unknown, put on black clothes, and do what his heart desires; but let him not publicly profane the Name.”82 A man should avoid any situation that may excite his passions; he should not talk much with women; and he “should never walk behind a woman along the road, not even his own wife. … A man should walk behind a lion rather than behind a woman.”83 The delightful humor of the rabbis appears again in the story of Reb Kahan. He
was once selling ladies’ baskets when he was exposed to temptation. He pleaded with his tempter to let him off, and promised to return. But instead of returning he went up to the roof of a house and threw himself down. Before he reached the ground Elijah came and caught him, and reproached him with having brought him a distance of 400 miles to save him from self-destruction.84
The rabbis apparently felt that virginity is all right in its place, but that perpetual virginity is arrested development; in their view the supreme perfection of a woman is perfect motherhood, as the supreme virtue of man is perfect fatherhood. Every father was urged to save and provide a dowry for each of his daughters, and a marriage settlement for each son, lest their marriage be unhealthily delayed. Early marriage was recommended—at fourteen for the girl, eighteen for the man. A girl might legally marry at twelve years and six months, a man at thirteen. Postponement of marriage was permitted to students engaged in the study of the Law. Some rabbis argued that a man should get his economic footing before marrying—“A man should first build a house, then plant a vineyard, then marry”85—but this was a minority opinion, and perhaps involved no contradiction if the parents provided the expected financial aid. The youth was advised to choose his mate not for her beauty but for her prospective qualities as a mother.86 “Descend a step in choosing a wife, ascend a step in choosing a friend”;87 to marry a woman above one’s rank is to invite contumely.
The Talmud, like the Old Testament and the Koran, allowed polygamy. “A man may marry as many wives as he pleases,” said one rabbi; but another passage in the same tractate limited the number to four; and a third required the husband, when taking a second wife, to give a divorce to the first wife if she should ask for it.88 The institution of the levirate, by which a Jew was required to marry his brother’s widow, presumed polygamy, and was probably due not only to kindly sentiment but also to a desire for a high birth rate in a community which, like all ancient and medieval societies, suffered high mortality. Having allowed such freedom of mating for the man, the rabbis made adultery a capital crime. Some of them agreed with Jesus that “one may commit adultery with the eyes”;89 some went further, saying, “Whoever regards even the little finger of a woman hath already sinned in his heart.”90But Rab Areca was more humane: “A man will have a demerit in his record on Judgment Day for everything he beheld with his eyes and declined to enjoy.91
Divorce by mutual consent was allowed. The husband could be divorced only with his consent; the wife without her consent. To divorce an adulterous wife was mandatory, and divorce was recommended where the wife had remained childless ten years after marriage.92 The school of Shammai had allowed the husband to put away his wife only for adultery; the school of Hillel allowed it if the husband found in her “anything unseemly.” Hillel’s view prevailed in the Talmudic period; and Akiba went so far as to say that a husband “may divorce his wife if he finds another woman more beautiful.”93 A man might, without surrendering the marriage settlement, divorce “a woman who transgresses Jewish law, such as going in public with uncovered head, spinning in the street, or conversing with all sorts of men”; or “a loud-voiced woman—i.e., one who talks in her house and her neighbors can hear what she says.”94 Desertion by the husband gave no ground for divorce.95 Some rabbis permitted the wife to ask the court for divorce from a cruel, impotent, or unwilling husband, or one who did not support her properly,96 or was maimed, or stank.97 The rabbis did something to discourage divorce by requiring complex legal formalities, and, in all but a few cases, the forfeiture of both dowry and marriage settlement to the wife. “The very altar sheds tears,” said Rabbi Eleazar, “on him who divorces the wife of his youth.”98
All in all, Talmudic law, like the Mohammedan, was man-made law, and favored the male so strongly as to suggest, in the rabbis, a very terror of woman’s power. Like the Christian Fathers, they blamed her for extinguishing the “Soul of the World” through Eve’s intelligent curiosity. They considered woman “light-minded,”99 and yet admitted in her an instinctive wisdom missing in man.100 They deplored the loquacity of women at great length (“Ten measures of speech descended to the world; women took nine, men one”101); they condemned their addiction to the occult,102 to rouge and kohl.103 They approved of a man spending generously on his wife’s raiment, but wished she would beautify herself for her husband rather than for other men.104 In law, according to one rabbi, “a hundred women are equal to only one witness.”105 Their property rights were as limited in the Talmud as in eighteenth-century England; their earnings, and the income from any property they might own, belonged to their husbands.106 Woman’s place was in the home. In the Utopian “Days of the Messiah,” said a hopeful rabbi, woman “will bear a child every day.”107 “A man who has a bad wife will never see the face of hell.”108 On the other hand no man is so rich, said Akiba, as one who has a wife noted for her good deeds.109 “Everything derives from the woman,” says a midrash.110 According to Hebrew proverbs: “All the blessings of a household come through the wife; therefore should her husband honor her… Let men beware of causing women to weep; God counts their tears.”111
In the most delightful part of the Talmud, the little treatise Pirke Aboth, an unknown editor gathered the maxims of the great rabbis of the last two centuries before, and the first two centuries after, Christ. Many of these apothegms praise wisdom, and some define it.
Ben Zoma said: Who is wise? He who learns from every man.… Who is mighty? He who subdues his (evil) inclination.… He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city. Who is rich? He who rejoices in his lot…When thou eatest of the labor of thy hands, happy shalt thou be. … Who is honored? He who honors his fellow men.112… Despise not any man, nor anything; for there is no man that has not his hour, and there is nothing that has not its place.113 … All my days I grew up among the sages, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence….114
Rabbi Eleazar used to say: One whose wisdom exceeds his deeds may be compared to a tree whereof the branches are many and the roots few, so that when the winds come it is uprooted and turned upon its face.… But one whose deeds exceed his wisdom may be compared to a tree whereof the branches are few and the roots many, so that even if all the winds in the world blow upon it they move it not from its place.115
IV. LIFE AND THE LAW
The Talmud is not a work of art. The task of reducing the thought of a thousand years into a coherent system proved too much even for a hundred patient rabbis. Several tractates are obviously in the wrong seder or order; several chapters are in the wrong tractate; subjects are taken up, dropped, and lawlessly resumed. It is not the product of deliberation, it is the deliberation itself; all views are recorded, and contradictions are often left unresolved; it is as if we had crossed fifteen centuries to eavesdrop on the most intimate discussions of the schools, and heard Akiba and Meir and Jehuda Hanasi and Rab in the heat of their debates. Remembering that we are interlopers, that these men and the others have had their casual words snatched from their mouths and cast into uncalculated contexts and sent hurtling down the years, we can forgive the casuistry, sophistry, legends, astrology, demonology, superstition, magic, miracles, numerology, and revelatory dreams, the Pelion on Ossa of argument crowning a web of fantasy, the consolatory vanity forever healing frustrated hope.
If we resent the stringency of these laws, the intrusive minuteness of these regulations, the Oriental severity of punishment for their violation, we must not take the matter too much to heart; the Jews made no pretense to keeping all these commandments, and the rabbis winked on every other page at the gap between their counsels of perfection and the stealthy frailties of men. “If Israel should properly observe a single Sabbath,” said a cautious rabbi, “the Son of David would come immediately.”116 The Talmud was not a code of laws requiring strict obedience; it was a record of rabbinical opinion, gathered for the guidance of leisurely piety. The untutored masses obeyed only a choice few of the precepts of the Law.
There was in the Talmud a strong emphasis on ritual; but that was in part the Jew’s reaction to the attempts of Church and state to make him abandon his Law; the ritual was a mark of identity, a bond of unity and continuity, a badge of defiance to a never-forgiving world. Here and there, in these twenty volumes, we find words of hatred for Christianity; but they were for a Christianity that had forgotten the gentleness of Christ; that persecuted the adherents of the Law that Christ had bidden His followers to fulfill; and that had, in the view of the rabbis, abandoned the monotheism which was the inalienable essence of the ancient faith. Amid these ceremonial complexities and controversial barbs we find hundreds of sage counsels and psychological insights, and occasional passages recalling the majesty of the Old Testament or the mystical tenderness of the New. The whimsical humor characteristic of the Jew lightens the burden of the long lesson. So one rabbi tells how Moses entered incognito into Akiba’s classroom, sat in the last row, and marveled at the many laws derived by the great teacher from the Mosaic code, and of which its amanuensis had never dreamed.117
For 1400 years the Talmud was the core of Jewish education. Seven hours a day, through seven years, the Hebrew youth pored over it, recited it, sank it into his memory by sound and sight; and like the Confucian classics similarly memorized, it formed mind and character by the discipline of its study and the deposit of its lore. The method of teaching was not by mere recitation and repetition; it was also by disputation between master and pupil, between pupil and pupil, and the application of old laws to the circumstances of the new day. The result was a sharpness of intellect, a retentiveness of memory, that gave the Jew an advantage in many spheres requiring clarity, concentration, persistence, and exactitude, while at the same time it tended to narrow the range and freedom of the Jewish mind. The Talmud tamed the excitable nature of the Jew; it checked his individualism, and molded him to fidelity and sobriety in his family and his community. Superior minds may have been hampered by the “yoke of the Law,” but the Jews as a whole were saved.
The Talmud can never be understood except in terms of history, as an organ of survival for a people exiled, destitute, oppressed, and in danger of utter disintegration. What the Prophets had done to uphold the Jewish spirit in the Babylonian Captivity, the rabbis did in this wider dispersion. Pride had to be regained, order had to be established, faith and morals maintained, health of body and mind rebuilt after a shattering experience.118 Through this heroic discipline, this rerooting of the uprooted Jew in his own tradition—stability and unity were restored through continents of wandering and centuries of grief. The Talmud, as Heine said, was a portable Fatherland; wherever Jews were, even as fearful enclaves in alien lands, they could put themselves again into their own world, and live with their Prophets and rabbis, by bathing their minds and hearts in the ocean of the Law. No wonder they loved this book, to us more undulant and diverse than a hundred Montaignes. They preserved even fragments of it with fierce affection, took their turns in reading snatches of the enormous manuscript, paid great sums, in later centuries, to have it printed in all its fullness, wept when kings and popes and parliaments banned or confiscated or burned it, rejoiced to hear Reuchlin and Erasmus defend it, and made it, even to our own time, the most precious possession of their temples and their homes, the refuge, solace, and prison of the Jewish soul.
CHAPTER XVI
The Medieval Jews
565–1300
I. THE ORIENTAL COMMUNITIES
ISRAEL now had a law, but no state; a book, but no home. To 614 Jerusalem was a Christian city; till 629, Persian; till 637, again Christian; then, till 1099, a Moslem provincial capital. In that year the Crusaders besieged Jerusalem; the Jews joined the Moslems in its defense; when it fell, the surviving Jews were driven into a synagogue, and were burned to death.1 A rapid growth of Palestinian Jewry followed the recapture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187; and Saladin’s brother, the Sultan al-Adil, welcomed the 300 rabbis who in 1211 fled from England and France. Fifty-two years later, however, Nachmanides found there a mere handful of Jews;2 the Holy City had become overwhelmingly Mohammedan.
Despite conversions and occasional persecutions, Jews remained numerous in Moslem Syria, Babylonia (Iraq), and Persia, and developed a vigorous economic and cultural life. In their internal affairs they continued, as under the Sasanian kings, to enjoy self-government under their exilarch and the directors of their rabbinical academies. The exilarch was accepted by the caliphs as the head of all the Jews in Babylonia, Armenia, Turkestan, Persia, and Yemen; according to Benjamin of Tudela all subjects of the caliphs were required “to rise in the presence of the Prince of the Captivity and to salute him respectfully.”3 The office of exilarch was hereditary in one famly, which traced its lineage to David; it was a political rather than a spiritual power; and its efforts to control the rabbinate led to its decline and fall. After 762 the directors of the academies elected and dominated the exilarch.
The rabbinical colleges at Sura and Pumbeditha provided religious and intellectual leadership for the Jews of Islam, and in less degree for those of Christendom. In 658 the Caliph Ali freed the academy of Sura from the jurisdiction of the exilarch; thereupon its head, Mar-Isaac, took the title Gaon, or Excellency, and inaugurated the Gaonate, the epoch of the Geonim in Babylonian religion and scholarship.4 As the college of Pumbeditha rose in revenues and dignity from its proximity to Baghdad, its directors also assumed the title of Gaon. From the seventh to the eleventh century, questions in Talmudic law were addressed to these Geonim from all the Jewish world; and their responsa created a new legal literature for Judaism.
The rise of the Geonim coincided with—perhaps in some measure it was necessitated by—a heresy that now shook and divided Oriental Jewry. In 762, when the Exilarch Solomon died, his nephew Anan ben David stood in line for the succession; but the heads of Sura and Pumbeditha, discarding the hereditary principle, installed as exilarch Anan’s younger brother Chananya. Anan denounced the two Geonim, fled to Palestine, established his own synagogue, and called upon Jews everywhere to reject the Talmud and obey only the law of the Pentateuch. This was a return to the position of the Sadducees; it corresponded to the repudiation of the “traditions,” and exaltation of the Koran, by the Shia sect in Islam, and to the Protestant abandonment of Catholic traditions for a return to the Gospels. Anan went further, and reexamined the Pentateuch in a commentary that marked a bold advance in the critical study of the Biblical text. He protested against the changes that the Talmudic rabbis had made in the Mosaic Law by their adaptive interpretations, and insisted on the strict fulfillment of the Pentateuch decrees; hence his followers received the name of Qaraites *—“adherents of the text.” Anan praised Jesus as a holy man who had wished to set aside not the written Law of Moses but only the oral Law of the scribes and the Pharisees; Jesus, in Anan’s view, had aimed not to found a new religion but to cleanse and strengthen Judaism.5 The Qaraites became numerous in Palestine, Egypt, and Spain; they declined in the twelfth century, and only a vanishing remnant survives in Turkey, South Russia, and Arabia. Qaraites of the ninth century, presumably influenced by the Mutazilites of Islam, abandoned Anan’s principle of literal interpretation, and proposed that the resurrection of the body, and certain physical descriptions of God in the Bible, should be taken with a metaphorical grain of salt. The orthodox “Rabbanite” Jews, reverting to literalism in their turn, insisted, like orthodox Moslems, that phrases like “God’s hand” or “God sitting down” were to be taken literally; some expositors calculated the precise measurements of God’s body, members, and beard.6A few Jewish freethinkers, like Chivi al-Balchi, rejected even the Pentateuch as a binding law.7 It was in this environment of economic prosperity, religious freedom, and lively debate that Judaism produced its first famous medieval philosopher.
Saadia ben Joseph al-Fayyumi was born at Dilaz, a village of the Faiyûm, in 892. He grew up in Egypt, and married there. In 915 he migrated to Palestine, then to Babylonia. He must have been an apt student and sound teacher, for at the youthful age of thirty-six he was made Gaon or director of the college at Sura. Perceiving the inroads that Qaraism and skepticism had made upon orthodox Judaism, he set himself the same task that the mutakal-limun had undertaken in Islam—to demonstrate the full accord of the traditional faith with reason and history. In his brief life of fifty years Saadia produced—mostly in Arabic—a mass of writings rivaled only by those of Maimonides in the record of medieval Jewish thought. His Agron, an Aramaic dictionary of Hebrew, founded Hebrew philology; his Kitab al-Lugah, or Book of Language, is the oldest known grammar of the Hebrew tongue; his Arabic translation of the Old Testament remained to our time the version used by Arabic-speaking Jews; his several commentaries on books of the Bible rank him as “perhaps the greatest Bible commentator of all time”;8 his Kitab al-Amanat, or Book of Philosophical Doctrines and Beliefs (933), is the Summa contra Gentiles of Jewish theology.
Saadia accepts both revelation and tradition, the written and the oral Law; but he also accepts reason, and proposes to prove by reason the truth of revelation and tradition. Wherever the Bible clearly contradicts reason, we may assume that the passage is not meant to be taken literally by adult minds. Anthropomorphic descriptions of the deity are to be understood metaphorically; God is not like a man. The order and law of the world indicate an intelligent creator. It is unreasonable to suppose that an intelligent God would fail to reward virtue, but obviously virtue is not always rewarded in this life; consequently there must be another life, which will redeem the apparent injustice of this one. Perhaps the sufferings of the virtuous here are punishments for their occasional sins, so that they may enter paradise at once when they die; and the earthly triumphs of the wicked are rewards for their incidental virtues, so that… But even those who achieve the highest virtue, prosperity, and happiness on earth feel in their hearts that there is a better state than this one of indefinite possibilities and limited fulfillments; and how could a God intelligent enough to create so marvelous a world allow such hopes to form in the soul if they were never to be realized?9 Saadia took a leaf or two from Moslem theologians, and followed their methods of exposition, even, now and then, the details of their argument. In turn his work permeated the Jewish world, and influenced Maimonides. “Were it not for, Saadia,” said ben Maimon, “the Torah would almost have disappeared.”10
It must be admitted that Saadia was a man of some acerbity, and that his quarrel with the Exilarch David ben Zakkai injured Babylonian Jewry. In 930 David excommunicated Saadia, and Saadia excommunicated David. In 940 David died, and Saadia appointed a new exilarch; but this appointee was assassinated by Moslems on the ground that he had disparaged Mohammed. Saadia appointed the victim’s son to succeed him, whereupon this youth also was slain. The discouraged Jews decided to leave the office unfilled; and in 942 the Babylonian exilarchate closed its career of seven centuries. In that year Saadia died. The disintegration of the Baghdad caliphate, the establishment of Egypt, North Africa, and Spain as independent Moslem states, weakened the bonds between Asiatic, African, and European Jewry. The Babylonian Jews shared in the economic decline of Eastern Islam after the tenth century; the college of Sura closed its doors in 1034, that of Pumbeditha four years later; and in 1040 the Gaonate came to an end. The Crusades further isolated the Babylonian from the Egyptian and European Jews; and after the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 the Babylonian Jewish community almost disappeared from history.
Long before these catastrophes many Oriental Jews had migrated to further Asia, Arabia, Egypt, North Africa, and Europe. Ceylon had 23,000 Hebrews in 1165;11 several Jewish communities in Arabia survived the hostility of Mohammed; when Amr conquered Egypt in 641 he reported “40,000 tributary” (taxpaying) Jews in Alexandria. As Cairo spread its proliferations, its Jewish population, orthodox and Qaraite, increased. The Egyptian Jews enjoyed self-government in internal affairs under their nagid, or prince; they rose to wealth in commerce and to a high place in the administration of the Moslem state.12 In 960, according to a tradition, four rabbis sailed from Bari in Italy; their vessel was captured by a Spanish Moslem admiral, and they were sold into slavery: Rabbi Moses and his son Chanoch at Cordova, Rabbi Shemaria at Alexandria, Rabbi Hushiel at Qairwan. Each rabbi, we are told, was freed, and founded an academy in the city where he had been sold. It is usually assumed, but not certain, that they were scholars from Sura; in any case they brought the learning of Eastern Jewry to the West, and while Judaism declined in Asia it entered upon its halcyon days in Egypt and Spain.
II. THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES
Jews made their way into medieval Russia from Babylonia and Persia through Transoxiana and the Caucasus, and up the Black Sea coast from Asia Minor through Constantinople. In that capital, and in the Byzantine realm, the Jews enjoyed a harassed prosperity from the eighth to the twelfth century. Greece had several substantial Jewish communities, notably at Thebes, where their silk manufactures earned high repute. Up through Thessaly, Thrace, and Macedonia the Jews migrated into the Balkans, and followed the Danube into Hungary. A handful of Hebrew merchants came to Poland from Germany in the tenth century. Jews had been in Germany since pre-Christian times. In the ninth century there were considerable Jewish settlements at Metz, Speyer, Mainz, Worms, Strasbourg, Frankfort, and Cologne. These groups were too busy and mobile with commerce to contribute much to cultural history; however, Gershom ben Jehuda (960-1028) founded a rabbinical academy at Mainz, wrote a Hebrew commentary on the Talmud, and acquired such authority that German Jewry addressed to him, rather than to the Geonim of Babylonia, their questions on Talmudic law.
There were Jews in England in 691,13 Many more came in with William the Conqueror, and were at first protected by the Norman rulers as providers of capital and collectors of revenue. Their communities in London, Norwich, York, and other English centers were outside the jurisdiction of the local authorities, and were subject only to the king. This legal isolation widened the barrier between Christian and Jew, and played a part in the pogroms of the twelfth century.
Gaul had had Jewish merchants from the time of Caesar. By 600 there were Jewish colonies in all the major cities. The Merovingian kings persecuted them with pious ferocity; Chilperic ordered them all to accept Christianity or have their eyes torn out (581).14 Charlemagne, while maintaining discriminatory laws against the Jews, protected them as useful and enterprising farmers and craftsmen, merchants, doctors, and financiers, and employed a Jew as his personal physician. In 787, according to a disputed tradition, he brought the Kalonymos family from Lucca to Mainz to encourage Jewish scholarship in the Frank realm. In 797 he sent a Jew as interpreter or as dragoman with an embassy to Harun al-Rashid. Louis the Pious favored the Jews as stimulators of commerce, and appointed a magister ludaeorum to guard their rights. Despite hostile legends, legal disabilities, and occasional minor persecutions, the Jews enjoyed in France in the ninth and tenth centuries a degree of prosperity and peace hardly known again by the Jews of Europe before the French Revolution.15
All through Italy there were little Jewish enclaves, from Trani to Venice and Milan. Jews were especially numerous in Padua, and may have influenced the growth of Averroism in the university there. Salerno, home of the first medieval school of scientific medicine in Latin Christendom, contained 600 Jews,16 several of them noted physicians. The Emperor Frederick II had Jewish scholars at his court in Foggia, and Pope Alexander III (1159-81) had several Jews in high position in his household;17 but Frederick joined with Pope Gregory IX in oppressive measures against the Jews of Italy.
The Spanish Jews called themselves Sephardim, and traced their origin to the royal tribe of Judah.* After the conversion of King Recared (586-601) to orthodox Christianity the Visigothic government united with the powerful hierarchy of the Spanish Church to make life less attractive to the Jews. They were excluded from public office, and were forbidden to marry Christians or have Christian slaves. King Sisebut ordered all Jews to accept Christianity or emigrate (613); his successor repealed this decree, but the Council of Toledo of 633 ruled that those Jews who had submitted to baptism and then returned to Judaism should be separated from their children and sold into slavery. King Chintila renewed Sisebut’s decree (638); and King Egica prohibited Jewish ownership of land, and any business transaction between Christian and Jew (693). When the Moors and Arabs invaded the peninsula (711) the Jews helped them at every turn.
The conquerors, to repopulate the land, invited immigration; 50,000 Jews came from Asia and Africa,18 some towns, like Lucena, were inhabited almost wholly by Jews. Freed from economic disabilities, the Jews of Moslem Spain spread into every field of agriculture, industry, finance, and the professions. They adopted the dress, language, and customs of the Arabs, garbed themselves in turbans and silk robes, rode in carriages, and were hardly distinguishable from their Semitic cousins. Several Jews became court physicians, and one of these was made adviser to the greatest of the caliphs of Cordova.
Hasdai ibn Shaprut (915-70) was to Abd-er-Rahman III what Nizam al-Mulk in the next century would be to Malik Shah. Born in the wealthy and cultured Ibn Ezra family, his father taught him Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin; he studied medicine and other sciences at Cordova, cured the Caliph’s ailments, and showed such wide knowledge and good judgment in politics that he was appointed to the diplomatic staff, apparently at the age of twenty-five. He was entrusted with ever larger responsibilities over the financial and commercial life of the state. He had no official title; the Caliph hesitated to arouse resentment by making him officially vizier; but Hasdai performed his many functions with such tact that he won the good will of Arabs, Jews, and Christians alike. He encouraged learning and literature, provided students with scholarships and books, and gathered about him a salon of poets, savants, and philosophers. When he died, Moslems vied with Jews in honoring his memory.
There were similar, if lesser, figures, elsewhere in Moslem Spain. At Seville al-Mutamid invited to his court the scholar and astronomer Isaac ben Baruch, gave him the title of Prince, and made him head rabbi of all the Jewish congregations there.19 At Granada Samuel Halevi ibn Naghdela rivaled the power and wisdom, and exceeded the learning, of Hasdai ibn Shaprut. Born (993) and reared in Cordova, he combined the study of the Talmud with that of Arabic literature, and both with the selling of spices. When Cordova fell to the Berbers he moved to Malaga, and there added to his modest income by composing letters for petitioners to King Habbus of Granada. Struck with the calligraphy and diction of these letters, the King’s vizier visited Samuel, took him to Granada, and installed him in the Alhambra as his secretary. Soon Samuel was also his adviser, and the vizier said that “when Samuel gave counsel the voice of God was heard.” Dying, the vizier recommended Samuel as his successor; and in 1027 Samuel became the only Jew openly to hold the office and name of vizier in a Moslem state; this was the more feasible in Granada, where half the population in the eleventh century was Jewish.20 The Arabs soon applauded the choice, for under Samuel the little state flourished financially, politically, and culturally. He himself was a scholar, poet, astronomer, mathematician, and linguist, knowing seven tongues; he wrote (chiefly in Hebrew) twenty treatises on grammar, several volumes of poetry and philosophy, an introduction to the Talmud, and an anthology of Hebrew literature. He shared his fortune with other poets, came to the rescue of the poet and philosopher Ibn Gabirol, financed young students, and contributed to Jewish communities in three continents. While vizier to the King he was also rabbi to the Jews, and lectured on the Talmud. His grateful people conferred upon him the title of Nagid—Prince (in Israel). When he died (1055) he was succeeded as vizier and Nagid by his son Joseph ibn Naghdela.
Those centuries—the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth—were the golden age of Spanish Jewry, the happiest and most fruitful period in medieval Hebrew history. When Moses ben Chanoch (d. 965), one of the Bari émigrés, was ransomed in Cordova, he organized there, with Hasdai’s help, an academy that soon acquired the intellectual leadership of the Jewish world. Similar schools were opened at Lucena, Toledo, Barcelona, Granada …; and whereas the schools of Eastern Jewry had almost confined themselves to religious education, these gave instruction also in literature, music, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and philosophy.21 Such education gave to the upper half of the Jewish population in Spain a breadth and depth of culture and refinement at that time equaled only by their Moslem, Byzantine, and Chinese contemporaries. It was then a disgrace for a man of wealth or political position to be unacquainted with history, science, philosophy, and poetry.22 A Jewish aristocracy took form, graced by beautiful women; perhaps it was too keenly conscious of its superiority, but it redeemed its pride by its sense that good birth and fortune are an obligation to generosity and excellence.
The decline of Spanish Jewry might be dated from the fall of Joseph ibn Naghdela. He served the king almost as ably as his father had done, but not with the modest tact that had reconciled a population half Moorish to be ruled by a Jew. He took all power in his hands, dressed as royally as the king, and laughed at the Koran; gossip called him an atheist. In 1066 the Arabs and Berbers revolted, crucified Joseph, massacred 4000 Jews in Granada, and plundered their homes. The remaining Jews were compelled to sell their lands and emigrate. Twenty years later the Almoravids came from Africa, aflame with orthodoxy; and the long honeymoon of Spanish Moslems and Jews was ended. A Mohammedan theologian announced that the Jews had promised Mohammed to accept Islam at the end of 500 years after the Hegira, if by that time their expected Messiah had not come; the five centuries were up in 1107 by Mohammedan reckoning; the Emir Yusuf demanded the conversion of all the Jews in Spain, but excused them on payment of an enormous sum into his treasury.23 When the Almohads replaced the Almoravids as rulers of Morocco and Moslem Spain (1148), they gave the Jews and the Christians the same choice that King Sisebut had allowed the Jews 535 years before—apostasy or exile. Many Jews pretended conversion to Islam; many followed the Christians into northern Spain.
There, at first, they found a royal tolerance as magnanimous as that which they had enjoyed for four centuries under Islam. Alfonso VI and VII of Castile treated the Jews well, made Jew and Christian equal before the law, and sternly repressed an anti-Semitic outbreak in Toledo (1107), where there were then 72,000 Jews.24 A like entente between the mother and daughter religions prevailed for a century in Aragon; indeed King James I invited Jews to settle in Majorca, Catalonia, and Valencia, and in many cases gave Jewish settlers free homes and lands.25 In Barcelona they dominated commerce in the twelfth century, and owned a third of the soil.26 The Jews of Christian Spain were severely taxed, but they prospered, and enjoyed internal autonomy. Trade flowed freely between Christian, Jew, and Moor; the three exchanged gifts on holidays; now and then a king contributed to a synagogue building fund.27 From 1085 even to 1492, Jews could be found in high public office in Spanish Christian states as fiscal agents and diplomats, sometimes as ministers.28 During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Christian clergy joined in this Christian amity.29
The first outbreak of intolerance was among the Jews themselves. In 1149 Jehuda ibn Ezra, steward of the palace to Alfonso VII of Leon and Castile, turned the powers of his master’s government against the Qaraite Jews of Toledo; the details are unknown, but from that time the once numerous Spanish Qaraites are heard of no more.30 In 1212 some Christian crusaders entered Spain to help free it from the Moors; for the most part they treated the Jews well; one group attacked the Jews of Toledo and killed many of them; but the Christians of the city rose to the defense of their fellow citizens, and stopped the persecution.31 Alfonso X of Castile included anti-Judaic legislation in his law code of 1265, but the code was not put into effect till 1348; meanwhile Alfonso employed a Jewish physician and treasurer, presented to the Jews of Seville three mosques to be turned into synagogues,32 and basked in the splendor that Jewish and Moslem scholarship shed upon his genial reign. In 1276 the military enterprises of Pedro III of Aragon required insufferable taxes; his finance minister and several other officials were Jews; a revolt of nobles and cities against the monarchy compelled the King to dismiss his Jewish aides, and to confirm a resolution of the Cortes (1283) against further employment of Jews in the government. The era of toleration ended when the ecclesiastical Council of Zamora (1313) decreed the imposition of the badge, the segregation of the Jewish from the Christian population, and a ban against the employment of Jewish physicians by Christians, or of Christian servants by Jews.33
III. JEWISH LIFE IN CHRISTENDOM
1. Government
Excepting Palermo and a few towns in Spain, the cities of medieval Christendom required no segregation of their Jewish population. Usually, however, the Jews lived in a voluntary isolation for social convenience, physical security, and religious unity. The synagogue was the geographical, social, and economic center of the Jewish quarter, and drew most Jewish dwellings toward it. There was in consequence much overcrowding, to the detriment of public and private sanitation. In Spain the Hebrew sections contained handsome residences as well as hovels and tenements; in the rest of Europe they verged on slums.34
Allowing for the universally greater influence of the rich in elections and appointments, the Jewish communities were semidemocratic enclaves in a monarchical world. The taxpaying members of a congregation chose the rabbis and officers of the synagogue. A small group of elected elders sat as a Beth Din or communal court; this levied taxes, fixed prices, administered justice, issued ordinances—not always observed—on Jewish diet, dancing, morals, and dress. It was empowered to try Jewish offenders against Jewish law, and had executive officers to carry out its decrees. Penalties ranged from fines to excommunication or banishment. Capital punishment was rarely within the power or custom of the Beth Din; in its stead the Jewish court used the herem or full excommunication—a majestic and frightening ceremony of charges, curses, and candles extinguished one by one as a symbol of the culprit’s spiritual death. The Jews, like the Christians, used excommunication too frequently, so that in both faiths it lost its terror and effectiveness. The rabbis, like the Church, prosecuted heretics, outlawed them, and on rare occasions burned their books.35
Normally the Jewish community was not subject to local authority. Its only master was the king; him it paid liberally for a charter protecting its religious and economic rights; later it paid the liberated communes to confirm its autonomy. The Jews, however, were subject to the law of the state, and made it a principle to obey it; “the law of the kingdom is law,” said the Talmud.36 “Pray for the welfare of the government,” said another passage, “since but for fear thereof men would swallow one another alive.”37
The state laid upon the Jews a poll or head tax, property taxes running up to 33%, and taxes on meat, wine, jewelry, imports, and exports; in addition it required “voluntary” contributions from them to help finance a war, a coronation, or a royal “progress” or tour. The English Jews, numbering in the twelfth century one quarter of one per cent of the population, paid eight per cent of the national taxes. They raised a fourth of the levy for the crusade of Richard I, and donated 5000 marks toward his ransom from German captivity—thrice the amount given by the city of London.38 The Jew was also taxed by his own community, and was periodically dunned for charity, education, and the support of the harassed Jews in Palestine. At any moment, for cause or without, the king might confiscate part or all of the property of “his Jews,” for in feudal law they were all his “men.” When a king died, his agreement to protect the Jews expired; his successor could be induced to renew it only by a large gift; sometimes this was a third of all Jewish property in the state.39 In 1463 Albrecht III, Margrave of Brandenburg, declared that every new German king “may, according to old usage, either burn all the Jews, or show them his mercy, and, to save their lives, take the third penny” (i.e., one third) “of their property.”40 Bracton, the leading English jurist of the thirteenth century, summed up the matter simply: “A Jew cannot have anything of his own, because whatever he acquires he acquires not for himself but for the king.”41
2. Economy
To these political inconveniences were added economic restrictions. The Jews were not legally or generally prevented from owning land; at one time or another in the Middle Ages they owned considerable tracts in Moslem or Christian Spain, in Sicily, Silesia, Poland, England, and France.42 But circumstances made such ownership increasingly impractical. Forbidden by Christian law to hire Christian slaves, and by Jewish law to hire Jewish slaves, the Jew had to work his holding with free labor, hard to get and costly to retain. Jewish law forbade the Jew to work on Saturday, Christian law usually forbade him to work on Sunday; such leisure was a hardship. Feudal custom or law made it impossible for a Jew to find a place within the feudal system; any such position required a Christian oath of fealty, and military service; but the laws of nearly all Christian states forbade the Jews to carry arms.43 In Visi-gothic Spain King Sisebut revoked all grants of land made to Jews by his predecessors; King Egica “nationalized” all Jewish holdings that had at any time belonged to Christians; and in 1293 the Cortes of Valladolid prohibited the sale of land to Jews. The ever-present possibility of expulsion or attack persuaded the Jews, after the ninth century, to avoid landed property or rural solitude. All these conditions discouraged Jewish agriculture, and inclined the Jew to urban life, to industry, trade, and finance.
In the Near East and in southern Europe the Jews were active in industry; indeed in several cases it was they who brought advanced handicraft techniques from Islam or Byzantium to Western lands. Benjamin of Tudela found hundreds of Jewish glassworkers at Antioch and Tyre; Jews in Egypt and Greece were renowned for the excellence of their dyed and embroidered textiles; and as late as the thirteenth century Frederick II called in Jewish craftsmen to manage the state’s silk industry in Sicily. There and elsewhere Jews engaged in the metal trades, especially in goldsmithing and jewelry; they worked the tin mines of Cornwall until 1290.44 Hebrew artisans in southern Europe were organized in strong guilds, and competed successfully with Christian craftsmen. But in northern Europe the Christian guilds acquired a monopoly in many trades. State after state forbade the Jews to serve Christians as smiths, carpenters, tailors, shoemakers, millers, bakers, or physicians, or to sell wine, flour, butter, or oil in the markets,45 or to buy a home anywhere except in the Jewish quarter.
So restricted, the Jews took to trade. Rab, the Babylonian Talmudist, had given his people a shrewd motto: “Trade with a hundred florins, and you will afford meat and wine; put the same sum into agriculture, and at most you may have bread and salt.”46 The Jewish pedlar was known in every city and town; the Jewish merchant at every market and fair. International commerce was their specialty, almost their monopoly, before the eleventh century; their packs, caravans, and ships crossed deserts, mountains, and seas; and in most instances they accompanied their goods. They served as commercial links between Christendom and Islam, between Europe and Asia, between the Slavic and the Western states. They handled most of the trade in slaves.47 They were helped by their skill and patience in learning languages; by the understanding of Hebrew, and the similarity of laws and customs, among widely separated Jewish communities; and by the hospitality of the Jewish quarter in every city to any foreign Jew; so Benjamin of Tudela traveled halfway across the world, and found himself everywhere at home. Ibn Khordadbeh, director of the post for the Baghdad caliphate in 870, told in his Book of Routes of Jewish merchants who spoke Persian, Greek, Arabic, Frank, Spanish, and Slavonic; and he described the land and sea routes by which they traveled from Spain and Italy to Egypt, India, and China.48 These merchants took eunuchs, slaves, brocades, furs, and swords to the Far East, and brought back musk, aloes, camphor, spices, and silks.49The capture of Jerusalem by the Crusades, and the conquest of the Mediterranean by the fleets of Venice and Genoa, gave the Italian merchants an advantage over the Jews; and Jewish commercial leadership ended with the eleventh century. Even before the Crusades Venice had forbidden the transport of Jewish merchants on Venetian ships, and soon afterward the Hanseatic League closed its ports on the North Sea and the Baltic to Jewish trade.50 By the twelfth century Jewish commerce was mostly domestic; and even within that narrow scope it was limited by laws prohibiting the sale of divers goods by Jews.51
They turned to finance. In a hostile environment where popular violence might destroy, or royal cupidity confiscate, their immovable goods, the Jews were forced to the conclusion that their savings should be in liquid and mobile form. They took first to the simple business of money-changing, then to receiving money for commercial investment, then to lending money at interest. The Pentateuch52 and the Talmud53 had forbidden this among Jews, but not between Jew and non-Jew. As economic life grew more complex, and the need for financing became more acute with the expansion of commerce and industry, the Jews lent one another money through a Christian intermediary,54 or through silent partnerships in an enterprise and its profits—a device allowed by the rabbis and several Christian theologians.55 Since both the Koran and the Church forbade the charging of interest, and Christian moneylenders were consequently scarce before the thirteenth century, Moslem and Christian borrowers—including ecclesiastics, churches, and monasteries56—applied to Jews for loans; so Aaron of Lincoln financed the building of nine Cistercian monasteries and the great abbey of St. Albans.57In the thirteenth century Christian bankers invaded the field, adopted the methods that had been developed by the Jews, and soon surpassed them in wealth and range. “The Christian usurer, although he did not have to safeguard himself to anything like the same extent against the chances of murder and pillage, was no less exacting” than the Jew.58 Both alike pressed the debtor with Roman severity, and the kings exploited them all.
All moneylenders were subject to high taxation, and, in the case of the Jews, to occasional outright confiscation. The kings made it a principle to allow high interest rates, and periodically to squeeze the profits out of the financiers. The cost of collection was high, and in many cases the creditor had to bribe officials to allow him to capture his due.59 In 1198 Innocent III commanded all Christian princes, in preparation for the Fourth Crusade, to compel full remission of interest demanded of Christians by Jews.60 Louis IX, the saintly king of France, “for the salvation of his own soul and those of his ancestors,” freed all his subjects from a third of whatever they owed to Jews.61English kings on occasion granted letters of release—canceling interest or principle or both—to subjects owing money to Jews; not rarely the kings sold such letters, and noted in their registers the sums they received for their vicarious philanthropy.62 The British government required a copy of every loan agreement; an Exchequer of the Jews was formed to file and supervise these agreements, and to hear cases concerning them; when a Jewish banker could not meet the taxes or levies laid upon him, the government, checking its record of his loans, confiscated all or part of them, and notified the debtors to pay not the lender but the government.63 When, in 1187, Henry II levied a special tax upon the people of England, the Jews were compelled to pay one fourth, the Christians one tenth, of their property; nearly half the entire tax was paid by the Jews.64 At times “the Jews financed the kingdom.”65 In 1210 King John ordered all Jews in England—men, women, and children—to be imprisoned; a “tallage” of 66,000 marks was taken from them;66 those suspected of concealing the full amount of their hoards were tortured by having a tooth pulled out each day till they confessed.67 * In 1230 Henry III, charging that the Jews had clipped the coin of the realm (apparently some had), confiscated a third of all the movable property of the English Jews. The operation having proved profitable, it was repeated in 1239; two years later 20,000 silver marks were exacted from the Jews; 60,000 marks—a sum equal to the whole yearly revenue of the Crown—were exacted in 1244. When Henry III borrowed 5000 marks from the Earl of Cornwall, he consigned to him all the Jews of England as security.68 A series of imposts from 1252 to 1255 drove the Jews to such desperation that they begged permission to leave England en masse; permission was refused.69 In 1275 Edward I strictly prohibited lending at interest. Loans continued nevertheless; and as the risk was greater, interest rates rose. Edward ordered all Jews in England arrested and their goods seized. Many Christian lenders were also arrested, and three of them were hanged. Of the Jews 280 were hanged, drawn, and quartered in London; there were additional executions in the counties; and the property of hundreds of Jews was confiscated to the state.70
In the uneasy intervals between confiscations the Jewish bankers prospered, and some became too visibly rich. They not only advanced capital to build castles, cathedrals, and monasteries, but they raised for themselves substantial houses; in England their homes were among the first dwellings built of stone. There were rich and poor among the Jews, despite Rabbi Eleazar’s dictum that “all men are equal before God—women and slaves, rich and poor.”71 The rabbis sought to mitigate poverty, and check profiteering wealth, by a variety of economic regulations. They emphasized the responsibility of the group for the welfare of all, and softened the stings of adversity with organized charity. They did not denounce riches, but they succeeded in giving to learning a prestige equal to that of wealth. They branded monopoly and “corners” as sins;72 they forbade the retailer to profit by more than a sixth of the wholesale price;73 they watched over weights and measures; they fixed maximum prices and minimum wages.74 Many of these regulations failed; the rabbis could not isolate the economic life of the Jews from that of their neighbors in Islam or Christendom; and the law of supply and demand of goods and services found a way around all legislation.
3. Morals
The rich tried to atone for their accumulations by abundant charity. They acknowledged the social obligations of wealth, and perhaps they feared the curse or fury of the poor. No Jew is known to have died of hunger while living in a Jewish community.75 Periodically, and as early as the second century after Christ, each member of the congregation, however poor, was assessed by official overseers for a contribution to the kupah or “community chest,” which took care of the old, poor, or sick, and the education and marriage of orphans.76 Hospitality was accorded freely, especially to wandering scholars; in some communities incoming travelers were billeted in private homes by officers of the congregation. Jewish philanthropic societies grew to a great number as the Middle Ages advanced; not only were there many hospitals, orphanages, poorhouses, and homes for the aged, but there were organizations providing ransoms for prisoners, dowries for poor brides, visits to the sick, care for destitute widows, and free burial for the dead.77 Christians complained of Jewish greed, and tried to stir Christians to charity by citing the exemplary generosity of the Jews.78
Class differences disported themselves in dress, diet, speech, and a hundred other ways. The simple Jew wore a long-sleeved and girdled robe or caftan, usually black as if in mourning for his ruined Temple and ravished land; but in Spain the well-to-do Jews proclaimed their prosperity with silks and furs; and the rabbis deplored in vain the handle given to hostility and discontent by such displays. When the king of Castile banned finery in raiment the Jewish males obeyed, but continued to array their wives in splendor; when the king demanded an explanation they assured him that the royal gallantry could never have meant the restrictions to apply to women;79 and the Jews continued throughout the Middle Ages to robe their ladies well. But they forbade them to appear in public with uncovered hair; such an offense was ground for divorce; and the Jew was instructed not to pray in the presence of a woman whose hair was visible.80
The hygienic features of the Law alleviated the effects of congested settlements. Circumcision, the weekly bath, the prohibition of wine or putrid meat as food, gave the Jews superior protection against diseases rampant in their Christian vicinities.81 Leprosy was frequent among the Christian poor, who ate salted meat or fish, but was rare among the Jews. Perhaps for like reasons the Jews suffered less than Christians from cholera and kindred ailments.82 But in the slums of Rome, infested with mosquitoes from the Campagna marshes, Jew and Christian alike shivered with malaria.
The moral life of the medieval Jew reflected his Oriental heritage and his European disabilities. Discriminated against at every turn, pillaged and massacred, humiliated and condemned for crimes not his own, the Jew, like the physically weak everywhere, resorted to cunning in self-defense. The rabbis repeated again and again that “to cheat a Gentile is even worse than to cheat a Jew,”83 but some Jews took the chance;84 and perhaps Christians too bargained as shrewdly as they knew. Some bankers, Jewish or Christian, were ruthless in their resolve to be paid; though doubtless there were in the Middle Ages, as in the eighteenth century, moneylenders as honest and faithful as Meyer Anselm of the rote Schild. Certain Jews and Christians clipped coins or received stolen goods.85 The frequent use of Jews in high financial office suggests that their Christian employers had confidence in their integrity. Of violent crimes—murder, robbery, rape—the Jews were seldom guilty. Drunkenness was rarer among them in Christian than in Moslem lands.
Their sex life, despite a background of polygamy, was remarkably wholesome. They were less given to pederasty than other peoples of Eastern origin. Their women were modest maidens, industrious wives, prolific and conscientious mothers; and early marriage reduced prostitution to a human minimum.86 Bachelors were rarities. Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel ruled that a bachelor of twenty, unless absorbed in study of the Law, might be compelled to marry by the court.87 Marriages were arranged by the parents; few girls, says a Jewish document of the eleventh century, were “indelicate or impudent enough to express their own fancies or preference”;88 but no marriage was fully legal without the consent of both parties.89 The father might give his daughter in marriage in her early years, even at six; but such child marriages were not consummated till maturity, and when the daughter came of age she could annul it if she wished.90 The betrothal was a formal act, making the girl legally the man’s wife; they could not thereafter separate except by a bill of divorce. At the betrothal a contract (ketuba) was signed for the dowry and the marriage settlement. The latter was a sum set aside out of the husband’s estate to be paid his wife in case the husband should divorce her or die. Without a marriage settlement of at least 200 zuzas (which could buy a one-family house), no marriage with a virgin bride was valid.
Polygamy was practiced by rich Jews in Islamic lands, but was rare among the Jews of Christendom.91 Post-Talmudic rabbinical literature refers a thousand times to a man’s “wife,” never to his “wives.” About the year 1000 Rabbi Gershom ben Judah of Mainz decreed the excommunication of any polygamous Jew; and soon thereafter, in all Europe except Spain, polygamy and concubinage became almost extinct among the Jews. Cases continued to occur, however, where a wife barren for ten years after marriage allowed her husband to take a concubine or an additional wife;92 parentage was vital. The same decree of Gershom abolished the old right of the husband to divorce his wife without her consent or guilt. Divorces were probably less frequent in medieval Jewry than in modern America.
Despite the comparative looseness of the marriage bond in law, the family was the saving center of Jewish life. External danger brought internal unity; and hostile witnesses testify to the “warmth and dignity … thoughtfulness, consideration, parental and fraternal affection,” that marked and mark the Jewish family.94 The young husband, merged with his wife in work, joy, and tribulation, developed a profound attachment for her as part of his larger self; he became a father, and the children growing up around him stimulated his reserve energies and engaged his deepest loyalties. He had probably known no woman carnally before marriage, and had, in so small and intimate a community, few chances for infidelity afterward. Almost from their birth he saved to provide a dowry for his daughters and a marriage settlement for his sons; and he took it for granted that he should support them in the early years of their married life; this seemed wiser than to let youth prepare with a decade of promiscuity for the restrictions of monogamy. In many cases the bridegroom came to live with the bride in her father’s home—seldom to the increment of happiness. The authority of the oldest father in the home was almost as absolute as in republican Rome. He could excommunicate his children, and might beat his wife within reason; if he seriously injured her the community fined him to the limit of his resources. Usually his authority was exercised with a sternness that never quite concealed a passionate love.
The position of woman was legally low, morally high. Like Plato, the Jew thanked God that he had not been born a woman; and the woman replied humbly, “I thank God that I was made according to His will.”95 In the synagogue the women occupied a separate place in the gallery or behind the men—a clumsy compliment to their distracting charms; and they could not be counted toward making a quorum. Songs in praise of a woman’s beauty were considered indecorous, though the Talmud allowed them.96 Flirtation, if any, was by correspondence; public conversation between the sexes—even between man and wife—was forbidden by the rabbis.97 Dancing was permitted, but only of woman with woman, of man with man.98 While the husband was by law the sole heir of his wife, the widow did not inherit from her husband; when he died she received the equivalent of her dowry and the marriage settlement; for the rest her sons, the natural heirs, were relied upon to support her decently. Daughters inherited only in the absence of sons; otherwise they had to depend upon brotherly affection, which seldom failed.99 Girls were not sent to school; in their case a little knowledge was accounted an especially dangerous thing. However, they were allowed to study privately; we hear of several women who gave public lectures on the Law—though sometimes the lecturer screened herself from her audience.100Despite every physical and legal disadvantage, the deserving Jewish woman received after marriage full honor and devotion. Judah ben Moses ibn Tibbon (1170) quoted approvingly a Moslem sage: “None but the honorable honor women, none but the despicable despise them.”101
The parental relation was more nearly perfect than the marital. The Jew, with the vanity of the commonplace, prided himself on his reproductive ability and his children; his most solemn oath was taken by laying his hand upon the testes of the man receiving the pledge; hence the word testimony. Every man was commanded to have at least two children; usually there were more. The child was reverenced as a visitor from heaven, a very angel become flesh. The father was reverenced almost as a vicar of God; the son stood in his father’s presence until bidden to be seated, and gave him a solicitous obedience that fully comported with the pride of youth. In the ceremony of circumcision the boy was dedicated to Yahveh by the covenant of Abraham; and every family felt obligated to train one son for the rabbinate. When the boy had completed his thirteenth year he was received into manhood, and into all the obligations of the Law, by a solemn ceremony of confirmation.* Religion cast its awe and sanctity over every stage of development, and eased the tasks of parentage.
4. Religion
In like manner religion stood as a spiritual policeman over every phase of the moral code. Doubtless loopholes were found in the Law, and legal fictions were concocted to restore the freedom of adaptation indispensable to an enterprising people. But apparently the medieval Jew accepted the Law, by and large, as a bulwark saving him not only from eternal damnation but, more visibly, from group disintegration. It harassed him at every turn, but he honored it as the very home and school of his growth, the vital medium of his life.
Every home in Judaism was a church, every school was a temple, every father was a priest. The prayers and ritual of the synagogue had their briefer counterparts in the home. The fasts and festivals of the faith were celebrated there with educative ceremonies that bound the present with the past, the living with the dead and the yet unborn. Every Friday eve of the Sabbath the father called his wife, children, and servants around him, blessed them individually, and led them in prayer, religious readings, and sacred songs. To the doorpost of each major room was attached a tube (mezuzah) containing a parchment roll inscribed with two passages from Deuteronomy (vi, 4-9; xi, 13-21), reminding the Jew that his God is one, and must be loved “with all thy heart and soul and strength.” From the age of four the child was brought to the synagogue; and there religion was impressed upon him in his most formative years.
The synagogue was not merely a temple, it was the social center of the Jewish community; synagoge, like ecclesia, synod, and college, meant an assemblage, a con-greg-ation. In pre-Christian days it had been essentially a school; it is still called Schule by Ashkenazic Jews. In the Dispersion it took on a strange variety of functions. In some synagogues it was the custom to publish, on the Sabbath, the decisions reached by the Beth Din during the week; to collect taxes, advertise lost articles, accept complaints of one member against another, and announce the coming sale of property so that any claimant on it might protest the sale. The synagogue dispensed communal charity, and, in Asia, served as a lodging for travelers. The building itself was always the finest in the Jewish quarter; sometimes, especially in Spain and Italy, it was an architectural masterpiece, expensively and lovingly adorned. Christian authorities repeatedly forbade the erection of synagogues equaling in height the tallest Christian church in the city; in 1221 Pope Honorius III ordered the destruction of such a synagogue in Bourges.103 Seville had twenty-three synagogues in the fourteenth century, Toledo and Cordova almost as many; one built in Cordova in 1315 is now maintained as a national monument by the Spanish government.
Every synagogue had a school (Beth ha-midrash— House of Study—the Arabic madrasa); in addition there were private schools and personal tutors; probably there was a higher relative literacy among the medieval Jews than among the Christians,104 though lower than among the Moslems. Teachers were paid by the community or the parents, but all were under communal supervision. Boys went off to school at an early hour—in winter before dawn; some hours later they returned home for breakfast; then they went back to school till eleven, then home for lunch, back to school at noon, a respite between two and three, then more schooling till evening; then at last they were released to their homes for supper, prayers, and bed. Life was a serious matter for the Jewish boy.105
Hebrew and the Pentateuch were the primary studies. At the age of ten the student took up the Mishna, at thirteen the major tractates of the Talmud; those who were to be scholars continued the study of Mishna and Gemara from thirteen to twenty or later. Through the diversity of subjects in the Talmud the student received a smattering of a dozen sciences, but almost nothing of non-Jewish history.106 There was much learning by repetition; the chorus of recitation was so vigorous that some localities excluded schools.107 Higher education was given in the Yeshibah or academy. The graduate of such an academy was called talmid hakam— scholar of the Law; he was usually freed from community taxes; and though he was not necessarily a rabbi, all nonscholars were expected to rise on his coming or going.108
The rabbi was teacher, jurist, and priest. He was required to marry. He was paid little or nothing for his religious functions; usually he earned a living in the secular world. He seldom preached; this was left to itinerant preachers (maggidim) schooled in sonorous and frightening eloquence. Any member of the congregation might lead it in prayer, read the Scriptures, or preach; usually, however, this honor was granted to some prominent or philanthropic Jew. Prayer was a complex ceremony for the orthodox Hebrew. To be properly performed it required that he should cover his head as a sign of reverence, strap upon his arms and his forehead small cases containing passages from Exodus (xiii, 1-16) and Deuteronomy (vi, 4-9; xi, 13-21), and wear on the borders of his garments fringes inscribed with the basic commandments of the Lord. The rabbis explained these formalities as necessary reminders of the unity, presence, and laws of God; simple Jews came to look upon them as magical amulets possessed of miraculous powers. The culmination of the religious service was a reading from the scroll of the Law, contained in a little ark above the altar.
The Jews of the Dispersion at first frowned upon music in religion as hardly suited to a mood of grief for their lost home. But music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of the arts. Music returned to the synagogue through poetry. In the sixth century the paitanim or “Neo-Hebraic” poets began to write religious verse, confused with acrostic and alliterative artificialities, but uplifted with the resounding splendor of Hebrew, and filled with that religious ardor which in the Jew now served for both patriotism and piety. The crude but powerful hymns of Eleazar ben Kalir (eighth century) still find a place in some synagogue rituals. Similar poetry appeared among the Jews of Spain, Italy, France, and Germany. One such hymn is sung by many Jews on the Day of Atonement:
With the coming of Thy Kingdom
The hills shall break into song,
And the islands laugh exultant
That they to God belong.
And all their congregations
So loud Thy praise shall sing
That the farthest peoples, hearing,
Shall hail Thee crowned King.109
When such piutim or sacred poems were introduced into the synagogue service they were sung by a precentor, and music re-entered the ritual. Furthermore the scriptural readings and the prayers were in many synagogues chanted by a cantor or by the congregation in a “cantillation” whose musical tones were largely improvised, but occasionally followed patterns set in the plain song of the Christian chant.110 From the singing school of the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, at some time before the eleventh century, came the complex chant for the famous Hebrew song Kol Nidre— “All Vows.”111
The synagogue never fully replaced the Temple in the heart of the Jew, The hope that he might some day offer sacrifice to Yahveh before the Holy of Holies on Zion’s hill inflamed his imagination, and left him open to repeated deception by false messiahs. About 720 Serene, a Syrian, announced himself to be the expected redeemer, and organized a campaign to recapture Palestine from the Moslems. Jews from Babylonia and Spain abandoned their homes to join his adventure. He was taken prisoner, exposed as a charlatan by the Caliph Yezid II, and was put to death. Some thirty years later Obadiah Abu Isa ben Ishaq of Isfahan led a similar revolt; 10,000 Jews took up the sword and fought bravely under his lead; they were defeated, AbuIsa was slain in battle, and the Isfahan Jews suffered indiscriminate punishment. When the First Crusade excited Europe, Jewish communities dreamed that the Christians, if victorious, would restore Palestine to the Jews;112 they awoke from this fantasy to a succession of pogroms. In 1160 David Alrui aroused the Jews of Mesopotamia with the announcement that he was the Messiah, and would restore them to Jerusalem and liberty; his father-in-law, fearing disaster for the Jews from such an insurrection, slew him in his sleep. About 1225 another Messiah appeared in southern Arabia, and stirred the Jews to mass hysteria; Maimonides, in a famous “Letter to the South,” exposed the impostor’s claims, and reminded the Arabian Jews of the death and destruction that had followed such reckless attempts in the past.112a Nevertheless he accepted the Messianic hope as an indispensable support to the Jewish spirit in the Dispersion, and made it one of the thirteen principal tenets of the Jewish faith.113
IV. ANTI-SEMITISM: 500–1306
What were the sources of the hostility between non-Jew and Jew?
The main sources have ever been economic, but religious differences have given edge and cover to economic rivalries. The Moslems, living by Mohammed, resented the Jewish rejection of their prophet; the Christians, accepting the divinity of Christ, were shocked to find that His own people would not acknowledge that divinity. Good Christians saw nothing unchristian or inhuman in holding an entire people, through many centuries, responsible for the actions of a tiny minority of Jerusalem Jews in the last days of Christ. The Gospel of Luke told how “throngs” of Jews welcomed Christ into Jerusalem (xix, 37); how, when He carried His cross to Golgotha, “there followed Him a great company of people, and of women, who also bewailed and lamented Him” (xxiii, 27); and how, after the crucifixion, “all the people that came together to that sight… smote their breasts” (xxiii, 48). But these evidences of Jewish sympathy for Jesus were forgotten when, in every Holy Week, the bitter story of the Passion was related from a thousand pulpits; resentment flared in Christian hearts; and on those days the Israelites shut themselves up in their own quarter and in their homes, fearful that the passions of simple souls might be stirred to a pogrom.114
Around that central misunderstanding rose a thousand suspicions and animosities. Jewish bankers bore the brunt of the hostility aroused by interest rates that reflected the insecurity of loans. As the economy of Christendom developed, and Christian merchants and bankers invaded fields once dominated by Jews, economic competition fomented hate; and some Christian moneylenders actively promoted anti-Semitism.115 Jews in official positions, especially in the finance department of governments, were a natural target for those who disliked both taxes and Jews. Given such economic and religious enmity, everything Jewish became distasteful to some Christians, and everything Christian to some Jews. The Christian reproached the Jew for clannish exclusiveness, and did not excuse it as a reaction to discrimination and occasional physical assault. Jewish features, language, manners, diet, ritual all seemed to the Christian eye offensively bizarre. The Jews ate when Christians fasted, fasted when Christians ate; their Sabbath of rest and prayer had remained Saturday as of old, while that of the Christians had been changed to Sunday; the Jews celebrated their happy deliverance from Egypt in a Passover feast that came too close to the Friday on which Christians mourned the death of Christ. Jews were not allowed by their Law to eat food cooked, to drink wine pressed, or to use dishes or utensils that had been touched, by a non-Jew,116 or to marry any but a Jew;117 the Christian interpreted these ancient laws—formulated long before Christianity—as meaning that to a Jew everything Christian was unclean; and he retorted that the Israelite himself was not usually distinguished by cleanliness of person or neatness of dress. Mutual isolation begot absurd and tragic legends on both sides. Romans had accused Christians of murdering pagan children to offer their blood in secret sacrifice to the Christian God; Christians of the twelfth century accused Jews of kidnaping Christian children to sacrifice them to Yahveh, or to use their blood as medicine or in the making of unleavened bread for the Passover feast. Jews were charged with poisoning the wells from which Christians drank, and with stealing consecrated wafers to pierce them and draw from them the blood of Christ.118 When a few Jewish merchants flaunted their opulence in costly raiment the Jews as a people were accused of draining the wealth of Christendom into Jewish hands. Jewish women were suspected as sorceresses; many Jews, it was thought, were in league with the Devil.119 The Jews retaliated with like legends about Christians, and insulting stories about the birth and youth of Christ. The Talmud counseled the extension of Jewish charity to non-Jews;120 Bahya praised Christian monasticism; Maimonides wrote that “the teachings of Christ and Mohammed tend to lead mankind toward perfection”;121 but the average Jew could not understand these courtesies of philosophy, and returned all the hatred that he received.
There were some lucid intervals in this madness. Ignoring state and Church laws that forbade it, Christians and Jews often mingled in friendship, sometimes in marriage, above all in Spain and southern France. Christian and Jewish scholars collaborated—Michael Scot with Anatoli, Dante with Immanuel.122 Christians made gifts to synagogues; and in Worms a Jewish park was maintained through a legacy from a Christian woman.123 In Lyons the market day was changed from Saturday to Sunday for the convenience of the Jews. Secular governments, finding the Jews an asset in commerce and finance, gave them a vacillating protection; and in several cases where a state restricted the public movements of Jews, or expelled them from its territory, it was because it could no longer safeguard them from intolerance and violence.124
The attitude of the Church in these matters varied with place and time. In Italy she protected the Jews as “guardians of the Law” of the Old Testament, and as living witnesses to the historicity of the Scriptures and to “the wrath of God.” But periodically Church councils, often with excellent intentions, and seldom with general authority, added to the tribulations of Jewish life. The Theodosian Code (439), the Council of Clermont (535), and the Council of Toledo (589) forbade the appointment of Jews to positions in which they could impose penalties upon Christians. The Council of Orléans (538) ordered Jews to stay indoors in Holy Week, probably for their protection, and prohibited their employment in any public office. The Third Council of the Lateran (1179) forbade Christian midwives or nurses to minister to Jews; and the Council of Béziers (1246) condemned the employment of Jewish physicians by Christians. The Council of Avignon (1209) retaliated Jewish laws of cleanliness by enjoining “Jews and harlots” from touching bread or fruit exposed for sale; it renewed Church laws against the hiring of Christian servants by Jews; and it warned the faithful not to exchange services with Jews, but to avoid them as a pollution.125 Several councils declared null the marriage of a Christian with a Jew. In 1222 a deacon was burned at the stake for accepting conversion to Judaism and marrying a Jewess.126 In 1234 a Jewish widow was refused her dower on the ground that her husband had been converted to Christianity, thereby voiding their marriage.127 The Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215), arguing that “at times through error Christians have relations with the women of Jews or Saracens, and Jews or Saracens with Christian women,” ruled “that Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other people through the character of their dress”: after their twelfth year they were to wear a distinctive color—the men on their hats or mantles, the women on their veils. This was in part a retaliation against older and similar laws of Moslems against Christians and Jews. The character of the badge was determined locally by state governments or provincial Church councils; ordinarily it was a wheel or circle of yellow cloth, some three inches in diameter, sewn prominently upon the clothing. The decree was enforced in England in 1218, in France in 1219, in Hungary in 1279; it was only sporadically carried out in Spain, Italy, and Germany before the fifteenth century, when Nicholas of Cusa and San Giovanni da Capistrano campaigned for its full observance. In 1219 the Jews of Castile threatened to leave the country en masse if the decree should be enforced, and the ecclesiastical authorities consented to its revocation. Jewish physicians, scholars, financiers, and travelers were often exempted from the decree. Its observance declined after the sixteenth century, and ended with the French Revolution.
By and large, the popes were the most tolerant prelates in Christendom. Gregory I, though so zealous for the spread of the faith, forbade the compulsory conversion of Jews, and maintained their rights of Roman citizenship in lands under his rule.128 When bishops in Terracina and Palermo appropriated synagogues for Christian use, Gregory compelled them to make full restitution.129 To the bishop of Naples he wrote: “Do not allow the Jews to be molested in the performance of their services. Let them have full liberty to observe and keep all their festivals and holydays, as both they and their fathers have done for so long.”130 Gregory VII urged Christian rulers to obey conciliar decrees against the appointment of Jews. When Eugenius III came to Paris in 1145, and went in pomp to the cathedral, which was then in the Jewish quarter, the Jews sent a delegation to present him with the Torah, or scroll of the Law; he blessed them, they went home happy, and the Pope ate a paschal lamb with the king.131 Alexander III was friendly to Jews, and employed one to manage his finances.132 Innocent III led the Fourth Lateran Council in its demand for a Jewish badge, and laid down the principle that all Jews were doomed to perpetual servitude because they had crucified Jesus.133 In a softer mood he reiterated papal injunctions against forcible conversions, and added: “No Christian shall do the Jews any personal injury … or deprive them of their possessions … or disturb them during the celebration of their festivals … or extort money from them by threatening to exhume their dead,”134 Gregory IX, founder of the Inquisition, exempted the Jews from its operation or jurisdiction except when they tried to Judaize Christians, or attacked Christianity, or reverted to Judaism after conversion to Christianity;135 and in 1235 he issued a bull denouncing mob violence against Jews.136 Innocent IV (1247) repudiated the legend of the ritual murder of Christian children by Jews:
Certain of the clergy and princes, nobles and great lords… have falsely devised godless plans against the Jews, unjustly depriving them of their property by force, and appropriating it to themselves; they falsely charge them with dividing among them on the Passover the heart of a murdered boy…. In fact, in their malice, they ascribe to Jews every murder, wherever it chance to occur. And on the ground of these and other fabrications, they are filled with rage against them, rob them… oppress them by starvation, imprisonment, torture, and other sufferings, sometimes even condemning them to death; so that the Jews, though living under Christian princes, are in worse plight than were their ancestors under the Pharaohs. They are driven to leave in despair the land in which their fathers have dwelt since the memory of man. Since it is our pleasure that they shall not be distressed, we ordain that you behave toward them in a friendly and kind manner. Whenever any unjust attacks upon them come under your notice, redress their injuries, and do not suffer them to be visited in the future by similar tribulations.137
This noble appeal was widely ignored. In 1272 Gregory X had to repeat its denunciation of the ritual murder legend; and to give his words force he ruled that thereafter the testimony of a Christian against a Jew should not be accepted unless confirmed by a Jew.138 The issuance of similar bulls by later popes till 1763 attests both the humanity of the popes and the persistence of the evil. That the popes were sincere is indicated by the comparative security of the Jews, and their relative freedom from persecution, in the Papal States. Expelled from so many countries at one time or another, they were never expelled from Rome or from papal Avignon. “Had it not been for the Catholic Church,” writes a learned Jewish historian, “the Jews would not have survived the Middle Ages in Christian Europe.”139
Before the Crusades the active persecution of Jews in medieval Europe was sporadic. The Byzantine emperors continued for two centuries the oppressive policies of Justinian toward the Jews. Heraclius (628) banished them from Jerusalem in retaliation for their aid to Persia, and did all he could to exterminate them. Leo the Isaurian sought to disprove the rumor that he was Jewish by a decree (723) giving Byzantine Jews a choice between Christianity or banishment. Some submitted; some burned themselves to death in their synagogues rather than yield.140 Basil I (867-86) resumed the campaign to enforce baptism upon the Jews; and Constantine VII (912-59) required from Jews in Christian courts a humiliating form of oath—more Judaico—which continued in use in Europe till the nineteenth century.141
When, in 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade, some Christians thought it desirable to kill the Jews of Europe before proceeding so far to fight Turks in Jerusalem. Godfrey of Bouillon, having accepted the leadership of the crusade, announced that he would avenge the blood of Jesus upon the Jews, and would leave not one of them alive; and his companions proclaimed their intention to kill all Jews who would not accept Christianity. A monk further aroused Christian ardor by declaring that an inscription found on the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem made the conversion of all Jews a moral obligation of all Christians.142 The Crusaders planned to move south along the Rhine, where lay the richest settlements in northern Europe. The German Jews had played a leading part in the development of Rhenish commerce, and had behaved with a restraint and piety that had won the respect of Christian laity and clergy alike. Bishop Rüdiger of Speyer was on cordial terms with the Jews of his district, and gave them a charter guaranteeing their autonomy and security. In 1095 the Emperor Henry IV issued a similar charter for all the Jews of his realm.143 Upon these peaceful Jewish congregations the news of the crusade, its proposed route, and the threats of its leaders, broke with paralyzing terror. The rabbis proclaimed several days of fasting and prayer.
Arrived at Speyer, the Crusaders dragged eleven Jews into a church, and ordered them to accept baptism; refusing, the eleven were slain (May 3, 1096). Other Jews of the city took refuge with Bishop Johannsen, who not only protected them but caused the execution of certain Crusaders who had shared in the murders at the church. As some Crusaders neared Trier, its Jews appealed to Bishop Egilbert; he offered protection on condition of baptism. Most of the Jews consented; but several women killed their children and threw themselves into the Moselle (June 1, 1096). At Mainz Archbishop Ruthard hid 1300 Jews in his cellars; Crusaders forced their way in, and killed 1014; the Bishop was able to save a few by concealing them in the cathedral (May 27, 1096). Four Mainz Jews accepted baptism, but committed suicide soon afterward. As the Crusaders approached Cologne, the Christians hid the Jews in their homes; the mob burned down the Jewish quarter, and killed the few Jews upon whom they could lay their hands. Bishop Hermann, at great danger to himself, secretly conveyed the Jews from their Christian hiding places to Christian homes in the country; the pilgrims discovered the maneuver, hunted their prey in the villages, and killed every Jew they found (June, 1096). In two of these villages 200 Jews were slain; in four others the Jews, surrounded by the mob, killed one another rather than be baptized. Mothers delivered of infants during these attacks slew them at birth. At Worms Bishop Allebranches received such of the Jews as he could into his palace, and saved them; upon the rest the Crusaders fell with the savagery of anonymity, killing many, and then plundering and burning the homes of the Jews; here many Jews committed suicide rather than repudiate their faith. Seven days later a crowd besieged the episcopal residence; the Bishop told the Jews that he could no longer hold back the mob, and advised them to accept baptism. The Jews asked to be left alone for a while; when the Bishop returned he found that nearly all of them had killed one another. The besiegers broke in and slew the rest; all in all, some 800 Jews died in this pogrom at Worms (August 20, 1096). Similar scenes occurred at Metz, Regensburg, and Prague.144
The Second Crusade (1147) threatened to better the example of the First. Peter the Venerable, the saintly Abbot of Cluny, advised Louis VII of France to begin by attacking the French Jews. “I do not require you to put to death these accursed beings… God does not wish to annihilate them; but, like Cain the fratricide, they must be made to suffer fearful torments, and be preserved for greater ignominy, for an existence more bitter than death.”145Abbot Suger of St. Denis protested against this conception of Christianity, and Louis VII contented himself with capital levies on rich Jews. But the German Jews were not let off with mere confiscation. A French monk, Rodolphe, leaving his monastery without permission, preached a pogrom in Germany. At Cologne Simon “the Pious” was murdered and mutilated; at Speyer a woman was tortured on the rack to persuade her to Christianity. Again the secular prelates did all they could to protect the Jews. Bishop Arnold of Cologne gave them a fortified castle as refuge, and allowed them to arm themselves; the Crusaders refrained from attacking the castle, but killed any unconverted Jew that fell into their clutches. Archbishop Henry at Mainz admitted into his house some Jews pursued by a mob; the mob forced a way in, and killed them before his eyes. The Archbishop appealed to St. Bernard, the most influential Christian of his time; Bernard replied with a strong denunciation of Rodolphe, and demanded an end to violence against the Jews. When Rodolphe continued his campaign Bernard came in person to Germany, and forced the monk to return to his monastery. Shortly thereafter the mutilated body of a Christian was found at Würzburg; Christians charged Jews with the crime, attacked them despite the protests of Bishop Embicho, and killed twenty; many others, wounded, were tended by Christians (1147); and the Bishop buried the dead in his garden.146 From Germany the idea of beginning the Crusades at home passed back to France, and Jews were massacred at Carentan, Rameru, and Sully. In Bohemia 150 Jews were murdered by Crusaders. After the terror had passed, the local Christian clergy did what it could to help the surviving Jews; and those who had accepted baptism under duress were allowed to return to Judaism without incurring the dire penalties of apostasy.147
These pogroms began a long series of violent assaults, which continued till our time. In 1235 an unsolved murder at Baden was laid to the Jews, and a massacre ensued. In 1243 the entire Jewish population of Belitz, near Berlin, was burned alive on the charge that some of them had defiled a consecrated Host.148 In 1283 the accusation of ritual murder was raised at Mainz, and despite all the efforts of Archbishop Werner, ten Jews were killed, and Jewish homes were pillaged. In 1285 a like rumor excited Munich; 180 Jews fled for refuge to a synagogue; the mob set fire to it, and all 180 were burned to death. A year later forty Jews were killed at Oberwesel on the charge that they had drained the blood of a Christian. In 1298 every Jew in Rottingen was burned to death on the charge of desecrating a sacramental wafer. Rind-fleisch, a pious baron, organized and armed a band of Christians sworn to kill all Jews; they completely exterminated the Jewish community at Würzburg, and slew 698 Jews in Nuremberg. The persecution spread, and in half a year 140 Jewish congregations were wiped out.149 The Jews of Germany, having repeatedly rebuilt their communities after such attacks, lost heart; and in 1286 many Jewish families left Mainz, Worms, Speyer, and other German towns, and migrated to Palestine to live in Islam. As Poland and Lithuania were inviting immigrants, and had not yet experienced pogroms, a slow exodus of Jews from the Rhineland began to the Slavic East.
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