History of the Jews (35 page)

These books, whose real authors concealed their identities behind the names of Enoch, Moses, Noah, Baruch and other great historical figures, were xenophobic, nationalist and inflammatory, as we have seen; they were the angry, bitter refuge of an oppressed people calling down cataracts and hurricanes on their heavily armed enemies. They wrote of angels, devils, hell, heaven, firestorms and the end of time, when Greeks and Romans would be smitten. These texts dealt in secret knowledge, denied to all except the most trustworthy and zealous Jews—it was typical of the fierce Qumran monks that they had the Book of Enoch in both Hebrew and Aramaic—and hidden sources of power, which could be conjured up to overwhelm the
kittim
and other hated opponents of God. Chapter 14 of the Book of Enoch, dealing with the mysteries of the Throne, lying on its chariot—itself suggested by Chapter 1 of Ezekiel—led to the emergence of a whole school of
Merkabah
(chariot) mystics. They unloaded on credulous Jews masses of information about the angels who ‘stood before the chariot’, the descent of fire from above, and the ascent of the pious soul to the chariot through ecstasy. Unlike Torah-teaching, which was publicly conducted in noisy chanting, chariot-knowledge was imparted covertly, in a whisper, to specially chosen pupils who had to display some specified ethical qualities, possess certain facial characteristics and have palms which satisfied the chiromancers. Expositors of the lore were sometimes surrounded by fire, or a nimbus, or went into trances.
They entered paradise miraculously, like Elijah—one ‘looked and died’, another ‘looked and was smitten’, a third ‘ascended in peace and descended in peace’.
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Aspirants to the ecstatic state placed their heads between their knees and recited songs about the Throne of Glory or early sacred poems.

In addition to the practical magic of direct communion with God through mystical states, the esoteric books from the first century onwards poured forth a torrent of information about the deity and paradise. Since the Torah was holy, letters were holy; so were numbers; if the key were found, secret knowledge could be obtained. One key was Psalms 147:5: ‘Great is our Lord, and of great power’, which was used to give the dimensions of divinity—using the letter-figure code as 236 multiplied by 10,000 celestial leagues to provide the basic measurements of head and limbs, and their secret names. These secret names for God—Adiriron, Zavodiel, Akhtriel, Tazash, Zoharariel, for instance—were important because they formed passwords allowing the celestial doorkeepers to let the ascending soul into the fantastic series of eight palaces which led up to paradise. Eight was a magic number pinched from the Greek gnostics, and the chariot, the power and emanation of God, was the equivalent of the Greek aeon. But twenty-two, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, was a magic number also, since creation itself was enacted through combinations of Hebrew letters and, when discovered, these codings revealed the secrets of the universe.

The sages were both fascinated and repelled by this egregious superstition. The anthropomorphism of God’s bodily measurements went against the basic Judaic teaching that God is non-created and unknowable. The sages advised Jews to keep their eyes firmly fixed on the law and not to probe dangerous mysteries: ‘Whosoever ponders on four things it were better for him if he had never been born—what is above, what is below, what is before time, what will be hereafter.’ But they then proceeded to do just that themselves; and, being elitists, they tended to fall in with the idea of special knowledge conveyed to the elect: ‘The story of creation should not be expounded before two persons, and the chapter on the chariot before even one person, unless he is a sage and already has an independent understanding of the matter.’ That was the Talmud; indeed the Talmud and other holy writings contained a good deal of this suspect material.

Hence rationalists like Maimonides were embarrassed, indeed exasperated, by much of what they found in the Talmud. There was, for instance, the
Shi’ur Qoma
or ‘Measure of the Divine Body’, which interpreted the Song of Solomon as a divine allegory of God’s love for
Israel and gives astounding detailed dimensions for God’s limbs, as well as their secret names. The Karaites, who rejected talmudic Judaism completely, sneered at this text and used it to attack the rabbis. They claimed that it measured God’s face down to the tip of his nose as 5,000 ells. This was an invention; but there was material in the book equally bad. Moslems, too, used it to attack the Jews and justify persecution. One later commentator tried to explain it away by saying the figures were actually the dimensions of the universe. Maimonides’ distaste at having to deal with the text can be imagined. At first he took refuge in the phrase: ‘It would take a hundred pages to discuss the topic.’ Then he crossed it out—the manuscript of his Mishnah commentary in which this occurs survives. Later, he persuaded himself that the whole thing was the work ‘of one of the Byzantine preachers, nothing else’, and denounced it as a forgery.
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The rationalism for which Maimonides stood was, in part, a reaction to the growth of esoteric literature and its penetration of Jewish intellectual life. And rationalism did have some effect. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it forced the leading mystics, at any rate those with a claim to intellectual respectability, to refine their literature and corpus of belief, purge it of its magical dross and the gnostic clutter of centuries, and turn it into a coherent system. The higher kabbalah, as we might call it, began to emerge in Provençal France in the second half of the twelfth century. It was drawn from many elements. One was poetry, and especially the poems of the great Spanish lyricist Judah Halevi (1075-1141), whose 800 known poems include 350
piyyutim
. Halevi was a religious Zionist, an unusual thing to be at that time, and his most famous group of thirty-four lyrics are termed
Poems of Zion
. He thought that life in Spain, however comfortable it might be between bursts of persecution, was slavery compared to the true Jewish existence in Palestine, and he eventually went there. He saw the Jews as a tragic and injured people, and he called his one philosophical work, an apologia for Judaism, a book ‘in defence of the despised faith’. It was an attack on Aristotelian rationality as well as Christianity and Islam, and he took the view strongly that, for suffering humanity, and the cruelly treated Jews in particular, deductive reasoning, however desirable in a perfect world, was no substitute for direct experience of God.
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This was a hard point for even a highly educated, wealthy Jew to answer in time of persecution, and there is no doubt that mysticism appealed more strongly whenever the Christian or Islamic net tightened round the Jews.

The Provençal mystics also drew on neo-Platonism and developed
imposing philosophic theories of their own—even Maimonides was forced to admit that some of them were learned. One, Abraham ben David, or Rabad, wrote a scholarly work attacking Maimonides’
Mishneh Torah
. Abraham’s son, Isaac the Blind (
c
. 1160-1235), created something approaching a coherent system of kabbalah, based on the ten
sefirot
or attributes of God, and the theory that all creation was, and is, a mere linguistic development, the materialization of divine speech. This uses the neo-Platonist concept of the
logos
(as in the opening of St John’s Gospel) but recasts it in terms of Torah study and prayer. From Narbonne, where Isaac lived, mystical kabbalah spread south across the Pyrenees to Gerona, Burgos and Toledo. Its standing was immeasurably improved by the patronage of the great rabbi Moses ben Nahman, known as Nahmanides or Ramban (1194-1270), who became a convert to the system in youth and later rose to be the leading judicial authority in Spain.

Nahmanides produced at least fifty works, mostly Talmud and halakhic commentary, and in his old age he wrote a famous commentary on the Torah. None is specifically kabbalistic but there are throughout hints of the system, especially in the Bible commentary, and the effect was to carry the kabbalah into the mainstream of orthodox Jewish scholarship, above all in Spain. Nahmanides made it possible for the kabbalists to pose as the conservatives, tracing the origin of their ideas back to the Bible and Talmud, and upholding the best and most ancient Jewish traditions. It was the rationalists who were the innovators, bringing to the study of the Torah the pagan ideas of the ancient Greeks. In this respect, the campaign against the works of Maimonides could be described as the last squeak of the anti-Hellenists.

Nahmanides himself never joined the witch-hunt against rationalism—on the contrary, he opposed it—but he made it possible for the kabbalists to escape similar charges of heresy, which in fact would have been much better grounded. For kabbalah not only introduced gnostic concepts which were totally alien to the ethical monotheism of the Bible, it was in a sense a completely different religion: pantheism. Both its cosmogony—its account of how creation was conceived in God’s words—and its theory of divine emanations led to the logical deduction that all things contain a divine element. In the 1280s, a leading Spanish kabbalist, Moses ben Shem Tov of Guadalajara, produced a
summa
of kabbalistic lore, the
Sefer-ha-Zohar
, generally known as the
Zohar
, which became the best-known treatise on the subject. Much of this work is explicitly pantheist: it insists repeatedly that God ‘is everything’ and everything is united in Him, ‘as is known
to the mystics’. But if God is in everything, and everything is in God, how can God be a single, specific being, non-created and absolutely separate from creation, as orthodox Judaism had always emphatically insisted? There is no answer to this question, except the plain one that
Zohar
-kabbalah is heresy of the most pernicious kind. Yet it is a fact that this kind of mystic pantheism exercises a curious appeal to very clever people whose customary approach to thought is soberly rational. By a remarkable paradox, the current of speculation which was to carry Spinoza out of Judaism brought him to pantheism too, so that he was the end-product both of the rationalism of Maimonides and the anti-rationalism of his opponents.

But that was for the future: in medieval Jewry, with its wide dispersal of religious authority, these rival currents were able to coexist. In a harsh world, the poor looked to superstition and folk religion for comfort; the rich, if they had the strength of mind, to rationalism, if not, to mystic kabbalah. Judaism had too many external enemies to want to risk its internal harmony by imposing a uniformity no one really wanted. Indeed, one can see medieval Judaism as essentially a system designed to hold Jewish communities together in the face of many perils: economic disaster, plague, arbitrary rule, above all the assault of two great imperialist religions.

The state, whether Christian or Islamic, was not as a rule the main enemy. Often, indeed, it was the best friend. The Jews were staunchly loyal to duly constituted authority, for religious reasons and from plain self-interest: they were a minority dependent on the ruler for protection. Geniza documents of 1127-31 show that Jews said regular public prayers for Islamic rulers 200 years before the text surfaced in the Jewish prayer-book. In contrast to Moslem sources of the same period, the geniza reveals no criticism of authority. The rulers responded. They regarded Jews as an exceptionally law-abiding and wealth-producing element in the community. The stronger authority was, the more likely the Jews were to be safe. Trouble came, in both Christian and Moslem lands, during waves of religious enthusiasm, when fundamentalist priests overawed the ruler or, worse still, turned him into a zealous convert.

The Jews could never be sure when these moments would come. They prepared against them. They had renounced resistance by force in the second century, and did not resume it until the twentieth in Palestine. But there were other methods. One was for their ablest members to adopt professions which made them useful to the host communities but also kept them mobile. In Islam this was not usually difficult. Able Jews became doctors. Islamic rulers made daily use of
their services; so did humble people if they could, consulting them even for minor complaints such as constipation and diarrhoea, as prescriptions which survive in the geniza show. In Egypt there was a Jewish doctor in every town and often in every village in areas of Jewish settlement. Jewish doctors were popular. They attended the big public hospitals and often had small private ones of their own. They could go anywhere, have access to anybody. So they were nearly always the leaders of the Jewish community. The first family of Egyptian
nagids
were all doctors. Medicine was the profession not only of Maimonides but of his son, probably his grandson, and his great-grandson. The al-Amman family were doctors for eight generations, and in one of them the father and all five sons were in the profession. So, occasionally, were daughters, at any rate as oculists. Judah Halevi was a doctor. So was Nahmanides. These medical families also traded in related products: drugs, opium, medical herbs, perfumes, scientific books. The trading networks thus developed enabled a medical family to switch from one country to another whenever persecution threatened. Jewish doctors were welcome everywhere except in phases of religious frenzy—when, of course, they were frequently accused of poisoning.
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Keeping family corporations together was the best Jewish defence. The extended family was far more important than the nuclear family. The genizah sources show that primary loyalty went to fathers, sons, brothers, sisters, not spouses. Letters between brothers and sisters were much commoner than between husbands and wives. A woman’s proverb went: ‘A husband I can get, children I can bear, but a noble brother—where can I find him?’
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Wills show that when a man died without children, his estate went to his brother, or the closest member of the ‘House of the Father’, not the wife, who got only her own dowry. As one will put it, ‘the balance of the estate returns to my father’s house’.
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