History of the Jews (31 page)

 

If we nowadays allow interest to be taken from non-Jews it is because there is no end of the yoke and the burden kings and ministers impose upon us, and everything we take is the minimum for our subsistence; and anyhow we are condemned to live in the midst of the nations and cannot earn our living in any other manner except by money dealings with them; therefore the taking of interest is not to be prohibited.
¹⁴

 

This was the most dangerous argument of all because financial oppression of Jews tended to occur in areas where they were most disliked, and if Jews reacted by concentrating on moneylending to gentiles, the unpopularity—and so, of course, the pressure—would increase. Thus the Jews became an element in a vicious circle. The Christians, on the basis of the Biblical rulings, condemned interest-taking absolutely, and from 1179 those who practised it were excommunicated. But the Christians also imposed the harshest financial burdens on the Jews. The Jews reacted by engaging in the one business where Christian laws actually discriminated in their favour, and so became identified with the hated trade of moneylending. Rabbi Joseph Colon, who knew both France and Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century, wrote that the Jews of both countries hardly engaged in any other profession.
¹⁵

In the Arab-Moslem territories, which in the early Middle Ages included most of Spain, all of North Africa, and the Near East south of Anatolia, the Jewish condition was easier as a rule. Islamic law to non-Moslems was based on the arrangements Mohammed made with the Jewish tribes of the Hijaz. When they refused to acknowledge his prophetic mission, he applied the principle of what he called the
jihad
. This divides the world into the
dar al-Islam
, the peaceful territory of Islam, where the law reigns, and the
dar al-Harb
, the ‘territory of war’, controlled temporarily by non-Moslems. The
jihad
is the necessary and permanent state of war waged against the
dar al-Harb
, which can only end when the entire world submits to Islam. Mohammed waged
jihad
against the Jews of Medina, beat them, decapitated their menfolk (save one, who converted) in the public square, and divided their women, children, animals and property among his followers. Other Jewish tribes were treated rather more leniently, but at Mohammed’s discretion, since God gave him absolute rights over the infidel, rather as Yahweh permitted Joshua to deal with Canaanite cities as he saw fit. Mohammed, however, sometimes found it politic to make a treaty, or
dhimma
, with his beaten foes, under which he spared their lives and permitted them to continue to cultivate their oases, provided they gave him half the proceeds. The
dhimma
eventually took a more sophisticated form, the
dhimmi
, or one who submitted, receiving the right to his life, the practice of his religion, even protection, in return for special taxes—the
kharaj
or land-tax to the ruler, the
jizya
or poll-tax, higher commercial and travel taxes than the believers in the population, and special taxes at the ruler’s pleasure. Moreover, the status of the
dhimmi
was always at risk, since the
dhimma
merely suspended the conqueror’s natural right to kill the conquered and confiscate his property; hence it could be revoked unilaterally whenever the Moslem ruler wished.
¹⁶

In theory, then, the status of Jewish
dhimmi
under Moslem rule was worse than under the Christians, since their right to practise their religion, and even their right to live, might be arbitrarily removed at any time. In practice, however, the Arab warriors who conquered half the civilized world so rapidly in the seventh and eighth centuries had no wish to exterminate literate and industrious Jewish communities who provided them with reliable tax incomes and served them in innumerable ways. Jews, along with Christian
dhimmis
, constituted a large proportion of the administrative intelligentsia of the vast new Arab territories. The Arab Moslems were slow to develop any religious animus against the Jews. In Moslem eyes, the Jews had sinned by rejecting Mohammed’s claims, but they had not crucified him.
Jewish monotheism was as pure as Islam’s. The Jews had no offensive dogmas. Their laws on diet and cleanliness were in many ways similar. There is, then, very little anti-Jewish polemic in Islamic religious writing. Nor had the Arabs inherited the vast pagan-Greek corpus of anti-Semitism, on which to superimpose their own variety. Finally, Judaism, unlike Christianity, never constituted a political and military threat to Islam, as did the Byzantine East and later the Latin West. For all these reasons the Jews found it easier to live and prosper in Islamic territories. Sometimes they flourished. In Iraq, in addition to the great academies, the Jews constituted a wealthy quarter of the new city of Baghdad which the Abbasid dynasty founded in 762 as their capital. The Jews provided court doctors and officials. They learned spoken and written Arabic, first as a demotic trading device, then as a language of scholarship, even sacred commentary. The Jewish masses spoke Arabic, as they had once learned to speak Aramaic, though some knowledge of Hebrew was treasured in almost all Jewish families.

Throughout the Arab world, the Jews were traders. From the eighth to the early eleventh century, Islam constituted the main international economy and the Jews supplied one of its chief networks. From the East they imported silks, spices and other scarce goods. From the West they brought back pagan slaves, taken by Christians and called ‘Canaanites’ by the Jews, who were sold in Islam: in 825 Archbishop Agobard of Lyons claimed that the slave trade was run by Jews. Both Moslem sources and Jewish
responsa
show that, at this time, Jewish merchants were operating in India and China, where most of the luxuries originated. From the tenth century, especially in Baghdad, the Jews served as bankers to Moslem courts. They accepted deposits from Jewish traders, then lent large sums to the caliph. Granted the vulnerability of the Jewish
dhimmis
, this was a risky trade. There was no shame in a Moslem sovereign repudiating his debts or even decapitating his creditors—as sometimes happened—but it was more convenient to keep the bankers in being. Some of the profits from the banks went to support the academies, which the heads of the banking houses quietly manipulated behind the scenes. Jews were very influential at court. Their exilarch was honoured by the Arabs, who addressed him as ‘Our Lord, the Son of David’. When Benjamin of Tudela came to Baghdad in 1170, he found, he said, 40,000 Jews living there in security, with twenty-eight synagogues and ten
yeshivot
or places of study.

Another centre of Jewish prosperity was Kairouan in Tunisia, founded in 670 and capital of the Aghlabid, Fatimid and Zirid
dynasties in succession. The city may originally have been settled by the transfer of Jewish, as well as Christian-Copt, families from Egypt, for throughout the Dark and early Middle Ages Jewish tradesmen and merchants made by far the most efficient urban colonists in both the Mediterranean area and north and west Europe. In the eighth century, an academy was founded there by disgruntled scholars from Babylonia, and for the next 250 years Kairouan was one of the great centres of Jewish scholarship. It was also an important link in East-West trade, and here again successful Jewish merchants made a rich academic life possible. Jews also supplied the court with doctors, astronomers and officials.

From the eighth to the eleventh centuries, however, the most successful area of Jewish settlement was Spain. Jewish communities had prospered here under the Roman empire and to some extent under the Byzantine rule, but under the Visigoth kings a church-state policy of systematic anti-Semitism was pursued. A succession of royal ecclesiastical councils at Toledo, brushing aside orthodox Christian policy, either decreed the forcible baptism of the Jews or forbade circumcision, Jewish rites and observance of the Sabbath and festivals. Throughout the seventh century, Jews were flogged, executed, had their property confiscated, were subjected to ruinous taxes, forbidden to trade and, at times, dragged to the baptismal font. Many were obliged to accept Christianity but continued privately to observe the Jewish laws. Thus the secret Jew, later called the
marrano
, emerged into history—the source of endless anxiety for Spain, for Spanish Christianity, and for Spanish Judaism.
¹⁷

Hence when the Moslems invaded Spain in 711, the Jews helped them to overrun it, often garrisoning captured cities behind the advancing Arab armies. This happened in Córdoba, Granada, Toledo and Seville, where large and wealthy Jewish communities were soon established. Indeed later Arab geographers refer to Granada, as well as Lucena and Tarragona, as ‘Jewish cities’. Córdoba became the capital of the Ummayid dynasty, who made themselves caliphs, and treated the Jews with extraordinary favour and tolerance. Here, as in Baghdad and Kairouan, the Jews were not only craftsmen and traders but doctors. During the reign of the great Ummayid caliph Abd al-Rahman
III
(912-61), his Jewish court doctor, Hisdai ibn Shaprut, brought to the city Jewish scholars, philosophers, poets and scientists, and made it the leading centre of Jewish culture in the world. There were substantial and well-to-do Jewish communities in no fewer than forty-four towns in Ummayid Spain, many with their own
yeshiva
. The rapport the educated Jewish community established with the
liberal caliphs recalled the age of Cyrus and brought to Spanish Jewry a gracious, productive and satisfying way of life the Jews were not, perhaps, to find anywhere else until the nineteenth century.

But it was not without menace. The dynamic of Islamic politics was the conflict of the great religious dynasties exacerbated by doctrinal disputes over rigour and purity. The richer and more liberal a Moslem dynasty, the more vulnerable it became to the envy and fanaticism of a fundamentalist sect. If it fell, the Jews under its aegis were immediately exposed to the evil logic of their
dhimmi
status. The primitive Berber Moslems took Córdoba in 1013. The Ummayids disappeared. Prominent Jews were assassinated. At Granada there was a general massacre of Jews. The Christian armies were pushing southwards, and under pressure from them the Moslems put their trust in fierce and zealous warriors rather than leisured patrons of culture. In the closing decades of the eleventh century, another Berber dynasty, the Almoravids, became dominant in southern Spain. They were violent and unpredictable. They threatened the large and rich Jewish community of Lucena with forcible conversion, then settled for a huge ransom. The Jews were adroit at turning away Moslems by judicious bribes and negotiations. They had much to offer each successive wave of conquerors in terms of financial, medical and diplomatic skills. They served the new masters as tax-farmers and advisers, as well as doctors. But from this time onwards, Jews were sometimes safer in Spain under Christian rulers. It was the same story in Asia Minor, where the Byzantines might offer Jewish communities more security than they could find as
dhimmis
.

Early in the twelfth century a new wave of Moslem fundamentalism arose in the Atlas Mountains, creating a dynasty of zealots, the Almohads. Their aim was to stamp out Islamic corruption and backsliding. But in the process they extinguished Christian communities which had existed in north-west Africa for nearly a millennium. Jews too were given a choice between conversion and death. The Almohads carried their fanaticism into Spain from the year 1146. Synagogues and
yeshivot
were shut down. As under the Visigoth Christians, Jews converted at sword-point often practised their religion secretly and were distrusted by the Moslems. They were forced to wear a special blue tunic with absurdly wide sleeves and, instead of a turban, a long blue cap in the shape of a donkey’s packsaddle. If they were spared this garb, and a special sign of infamy called the
shikla
, their clothes, though normal in cut, had to be yellow in colour. They were forbidden to trade except on a small scale. The splendid Jewish settlements of southern Spain did not survive this persecution, at least in any of their
old dignity and grandeur. Many Jews fled north into Christian territory. Others moved into Africa in search of more tolerant Moslem rulers.

Among the refugees was a young and brilliant scholar called Moses ben Maimon, better known as Maimonides or to Jews as Rambam from the acronym
R
abbi
M
oses
b
en
M
aimon. He was born in Córdoba on 30 March 1135, the son of a scholar. When the Almohads took the city he was just thirteen, a prodigy already possessed of astonishing learning. He and his family wandered in Spain, possibly in Provence also, and finally settled in Fez in 1160. Five years later, a revival of forced conversion led them to move again, first by sea to Acre, from whence Maimonides made a tour of the Holy Places, then to Egypt, where they settled in Fustat, the Old City of Cairo. There Maimonides gradually acquired a world-wide reputation both as a doctor and as a scholar-philosopher. He was recognized as head of the Fustat community in 1177, was appointed court physician in 1185 and became, in the words of one Moslem chronicler, ‘very great in wisdom, learning and rank’. His scholarly output was of immense variety and impressive both in quantity and quality. He was supported by his trading brother, David, who dealt chiefly in jewels, and after David’s death he traded on his own account or lived by his medical fees. When he died on 13 December 1204, his remains were, on his instructions, taken to Tiberias, where his grave is still a place of pilgrimage for pious Jews.