History of the Jews (34 page)

Hence, the best way to improve the human condition in general—and ensure the survival of the Jewish vanguard in particular—was to spread knowledge of the Law, because the Law stood for reason and progress. Maimonides was an elitist but he thought in terms of an ever-expanding elite. Every man could be a scholar according to his lights. This was not impossible in an intensely bookish society. It was a Jewish axiom: ‘One should sell all he possesses and buy books, for as the sages put it, “He who increases books, increases wisdom.” ’ A man who lent his books, particularly to the poor, earned merit with God. ‘If a man has two sons, one of whom dislikes lending his books, while the other is eager, a man should leave all his library to the second, even if he be younger,’ wrote one of Maimonides’ contemporaries, Judah of Regensburg. Pious Jews saw heaven as a vast library, with the Archangel Metatron as the librarian: the books in the shelves there pressed themselves together to make room for a newcomer. Maimonides disapproved of this anthropomorphic nonsense but he agreed with the notion of the world to come being an abstract version of a heavenly academy. He would have agreed, too, with Judah’s practical injunctions that a man should never kneel on a big folio to fasten its clasps, or use pens as bookmarks, or employ the books themselves as missiles or instruments to chastise scholars—and with his splendid maxim: ‘A man should have regard to the honour of his books.’
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Temperate in all things save learning, Maimonides had a passion for books, which he wished all Jews to share.

‘All Jews’ included women and working men. Maimonides said that it was not required of a woman to study, but she earned merit if she did so. Every man should study according to his capacity: thus, a clever artisan could devote three hours to his trade, leaving nine for the Torah—‘three in studying the written law, three in the Oral Law, and three reflecting on how to deduce one rule from another’. This little analysis, which he termed ‘the beginning of learning’, gives some indication of his standards of industry.
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However, it was little use bidding the Jewish people to study without at the same time doing everything possible to make that study productive. Convinced as he was that reason and the Law were the only real defences a Jew had, and the only means whereby the world could become a more civilized place, Maimonides was also painfully
aware that the Law itself, after a thousand years of legal accretions and unco-ordinated commentary, was in an appalling state of confusion and penetrated by grossly irrational elements. His lifework then was twofold: to reduce the Law to order, and to re-present it on a thoroughly rational basis. To achieve the first, he wrote his Mishnah commentary, which for the first time made clear the underlying principles of mishnaic legislation, and he codified talmudic law, with the object, as he put it, to make it quick and easy to find a decision ‘in the sea of the Torah’. Maimonides observed: ‘You either write a commentary or a code—each is a distinct task in itself.’ Being an intellectual giant, he did both. He wrote with a sense of urgency, against a background (as he saw it) of danger to the Jews: ‘In times of persecution like the present,’ he said, ‘people lack the mental equanimity to devote themselves to intricate studies, and nearly every one finds serious difficulties in deriving a clear-cut decision from the works of the earlier codifiers, where the arrangement is as unsystematic as in the Talmud itself. Still fewer persons are able to deduce the law directly from the talmudic sources.’ What he produced was clear, orderly, concise and uncluttered by endless source-listing. It was not, as he hoped, definitive. Like every other attempt to say the last word on the Law, it merely detonated another huge avalanche of tomes—in 1893, a list (itself incomplete) was compiled of 220 major commentaries on Maimonides’ Code.
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But it was highly effective: a Spanish contemporary said judges opposed the work precisely because it enabled laymen to check their decisions. That was exactly what Maimonides wanted—for the Law, the sword and armour of the Jews, to become the working property of all of them.

At every stage in the code and commentary, he was rationalizing. But in addition he wrote his
Guide of the Perplexed
to show that Jewish beliefs were not just a set of arbitrary assertions imposed by divine command and rabbinical authority, but could be deduced and proved by reason too. Here he was following in the steps of Saadiah ben Joseph (882-942), the famous and controversial
gaon
of the Sura academy, the first Jewish philosopher since Philo to try to place Judaism on a rational basis. Maimonides did not agree with everything in Saadiah Gaon’s
Book of Beliefs and Opinions
, but it encouraged him to marry Jewish faith and philosophy. Avicenna and Averroes had performed the same task for Islam and Thomas Aquinas was soon to do it for Christianity. But Maimonides was the greatest rationalist of them all. On the key issue of prophecy, for instance, he used metaphor, analogy and parable to explain the prophets’ communications with God and their miracles as ‘natural’. He had a theory
of divine emanations, which the prophets tapped. The so-called angels who helped to produce the vision were the imaginative faculty of the prophet; he used the word cherub to signify the intellect.
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However, there was a point at which Maimonides’ rationalism stopped. He felt he had to differentiate between Moses and the other prophets. He dismissed them as amphibolous or analogical, but Moses ‘did not, like the other prophets, prophesy by means of parables’; he actually spoke to God ‘as a presence to another presence, without an intermediary’. He tried to explain away Moses’ uniqueness by arguing that the highest possible degree of perfection natural to the human species must be reached in one individual—and Moses was the man. What in effect Maimonides was doing was to reduce the area of irrationality in Judaism but not to eliminate it: he isolated certain core areas of belief which reason could not explain—though he was reluctant to admit it. He would, however, concede that certain issues were almost beyond man’s powers of reason. On the apparent conflict between free will and predestination, he quoted Ecclesiastes—‘exceeding deep, who can find it out?’
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—and in his writings there are passages which favour both absolute freedom of the will to obey or disobey the Law, and strict determinism. He attacked astrologers, for rendering the Law futile. On the other hand, the first of his thirteen principles of faith is: ‘God alone performed, performs and will perform all actions.’
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It is possible to point to other contradictions in his vast body of work though there are surprisingly few of them.

What Maimonides was trying to do was to strengthen the faith by stripping it of superstition and buttressing what remained by reason. But of course in doing so he introduced and popularized a critical approach to its mysteries which would eventually tempt men much further. Reason, once let out of the bottle of pure faith, develops a life and will of its own. Maimonides was a great harbinger of the Jewish future; indeed, of the human future. His
Guide of the Perplexed
continued to shift Jewish minds for centuries—not always in the direction he wished. In a sense, he played the same role in Judaism as Erasmus in Christianity: he laid dangerous eggs which hatched later. To the science of medicine he brought the Judaic doctrine of the one-ness of body and soul, mind and matter, which gave him important insights into the sickness of the psyche, thus foreshadowing Freud. To theology he brought a confidence in the compatibility of faith and reason which fitted his own calm and majestic mind but which was in due course to carry Spinoza outside Judaism completely.

There were many learned Jews at the time who feared the direction in which Maimonides was taking Judaism. In Provence, where
Christianity was torn apart by the Albigensian heresy and where the new agency of the Dominican Inquisition was being forged to impose orthodoxy, many rabbis wanted the Judaic authorities to adopt a similar approach. They detested Maimonides’ allegorical explanation of the Bible and wanted his books banned. In 1232 the Dominicans, intervening in this internal Jewish dispute, actually burned them. But this, of course, spurred the rationalists into a counter-attack. ‘The hearts of the people’, wrote the followers of Maimonides, ‘cannot be turned away from philosophy and the books devoted to it so long as they have a soul in their bodies…they intend to fight for the honour of the Great Rabbi and his books, and will dedicate their money, their offspring and their spirits to his holy doctrines so long as the breath of life is in their nostrils.’
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Despite this flourishing of verbal fists, few actual blows were struck. In theory Jewish law was severe on heterodoxy—if two Jews testified they saw a third worshipping an image, he could be sentenced to death—but in practice, being a cathedocracy, not an autocracy, it allowed for varying views over a surprisingly wide area. Even a man declared to be a heretic incurred no physical punishment unless he systematically sought to convert others to his views. Hence rationalism and superstition continued to coexist in uneasy harmony, sometimes in the same person.

Bearing in mind the misery and fear in which Jews were often forced to live, the persistence of irrationalism was not surprising. Maimonides saw intellect and reason as the Jew’s best weapons, and they were—for the self-confident elite. For the mass of ordinary Jews, tales of miracles past, hope of those to come, were a surer comfort in time of trouble. Jewish sacred literature catered for both needs, for alongside its intellectually satisfying commentarial method was the sprawling mass of aggadic stories, the
piyyut
or poetry, and endless weird superstitions children learned at their mother’s knee. The more the Jews were persecuted and economically depressed, the more they turned to sacred fairy tales. ‘At one time’, a midrash notes, ‘when money was not scarce, people longed to hear Mishnah, halakhah and Talmud. Nowadays money is scarce and, worse, people sicken under their slavery, and all they want to hear are blessings and consolation.’
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The Jews suffered severely, under both Islam and Christianity. It might be true, as one of Abelard’s pupils enviously observed, ‘A Jew, however poor, if he has ten sons, will put them all to letters, not for gain as the Christians do, but for the understanding of God’s law—and not only his sons but his daughters too.’
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But the kind of Judaic
rationalism Maimonides advocated was really possible only for the upper class, and remained largely its property. As the genizah documents show, the folk religion he detested and denounced flourished under his nose in Fustat. Jews practised both white and black magic. They did fire-tricks, made birds cease to fly, then fly again, conjured up both good and evil spirits in ceremonies which sometimes lasted the entire night, then held fumigation sessions to get rid of them. They went into trances. They held seances. There were abracadabra spells for protection on journeys, ridding a house of lice, making women or men fall in love, or ‘swearing in of the angels’. There were even secret manuals, written in Judaeo-Arabic, purporting to guide Jews to the secret tomb-treasures of the ancient Egyptians.
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Such an irrational approach to religion was not confined to the Jewish masses, however. It appealed also to the upper classes, among whom it took the form of mysticism. Maimonides’ own wife was an emotional believer who came from a long line of pietist-mystics. His son and heir, Abraham, took after his mother rather than his father. Though he seems to have been devoted to his father’s memory and zealously defended his views, his own
magnum opus
, a gigantic tome called
The Complete Guide for the Pious
, presents pietism or
hasidut
as a way of life, a counter-science to rationalism.
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He became known as the
rosh kol ha-hasidim
, the ‘head of all the pietists’, and attracted letters and disciples from all over the Jewish world. These
dévots
fasted all day and stood in prayer all night. Abraham even admired the Moslem mystics, or
sufis
, and said they were worthier disciples of the prophets of Israel than the Jews of his day.
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This would have angered his father, who wanted to ban the works of Jewish mystics, let alone Moslem ones.

Unfortunately for the rationalists, mysticism had deep roots in Judaism; indeed, it might be said to have roots in Yahweh-worship. The notion that, in addition to the written law of the Pentateuch given by God to Moses, God had also given him Oral Law was convenient to the religious authorities. But it was also exceedingly dangerous for it led to the belief there was a mass of special knowledge about God, handed down orally and secretly, which only the privileged few were permitted to learn. In the Talmud the word ‘kabbalah’ simply means ‘received [doctrine]’ or ‘tradition’—the latter part of the Bible, after the Pentateuch and the oral teaching. However, it gradually came to mean esoteric teaching, enabling the privileged few either to make direct communion with God or to acquire knowledge of God through non-rational means. Chapter 8 of Proverbs and Chapter 28 of the Book of Job, which treat by metaphor and analogy of wisdom as a
creative living force, giving the key to God and the universe, seem to lend authority to the idea. In later ages, whenever a rationalist Jew tried to stamp on mysticism, he found its exponents could always quote the Bible at him.

Still more so could they quote the Talmud, because by that stage Judaism had picked up a multitude of esoteric elements. Some scholars argue that they were acquired from Persia, during the Exile; others, more plausibly, that they came from Greek gnosticism. Gnosticism, or the lore of secret knowledge-systems, is an extremely insidious parasitic growth, which attaches itself like a poisonous ivy to the healthy trunk of a major religion. In Christianity, the early church fathers had to fight desperately to prevent it from smothering the faith. It attacked Judaism too, especially in the diaspora. Philo, in
De Vita Contemplativa
, wrote of a sect called The Worshippers of God, who had developed the theory of the Torah as a living body, a typically gnostic idea.
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It penetrated circles in Palestine who were normally most resistant to Greek ideas—the Pharisees, the Essenes, the Qumran sect, and later the tannaim and amoraim. Josephus says the Essenes had a magic literature. Its first real efflorescence was in apocalyptic.