The Golden Age of Sephardic Jewry
Much had come together within medieval Judaism. Islam and Arabic had changed the practices and teachings of Babylonia. By replacing Aramaic, a new world of thought was opened up within a benign environment.
The Christian Goths in Spain had oppressed the Jews, but the Arab conquest gave the Jews entrance into commerce, the professions, literature, science and philosophy. Islam and Judaism met, and there was much to share, including the Greek philosophers who had been preserved in Arabic texts. Together, they built the Alhambra and a better society. Samuel Ha-Nagid (993-1055) was the Vizier of Granada, its general, statesman, and a grammarian and poet. A golden age of Jewish life developed in Spain. Jewish philosophy and theology utilised the rational teachings of Muslim Kalam; but Bachya ibn Pakuda’s Chovot Ha-Levavot (Duties of the Heart), published in Saragossa in 1040, drew upon Neoplatonism and ascetic Sufi mysticism. This text was a model of personal piety and ethics, set within a Jewish tradition which kept the individual firmly within the community and prevented a full flight into mysticism.Poets could be philosophers in this world. Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021-69) celebrated his vision of God as the metaphysical absolute, united with the world by his divine will, in poetry still recited in the synagogue. His Keter Malchut (Royal Crown) remains a poetic adornment to the liturgy, while his great philosophic work Fountain of Life strayed into Christian theology as the Fens Vitae, assumed to be the teaching of a Christian scholar Avicebron—a mistake not corrected until the nineteenth century. Moses ibn Ezra (1080-1139) was a poet and religious thinker of delicate sadness, overshadowed by his great contemporary Judah Halevi (10861143). Halevi reassured Israel of its special role in God’s plan, as a people endowed with the gift of prophecy, with the ability to hear God.
His poems sing of Israel’s love for God and for Zion. His philosophic dialogue Kuzari is a brilliant religious polemic, telling the story of the Black Sea kingdom of the Khazars who chose Judaism over Islam and Christianity. Against their opponents, Judaism could claim the direct revelation given on Mount Sinai, witnessed by the multitudes and preserved by the people through the millennia. Faith, not reason, was the way to God; yet reason had its role, subordinated to the experience and faith of the Jewish people who had known God and his miracles through the ages. This emphasis on religious experience (partially influenced by the Muslim al-Ghazali) and upon Jewish life again stressed the special nature of Israel as ‘the heart of the nations’ with its suffering as the badge of its election.The greatest teacher of this Jewish world was Moses Maimonides (1135—1204), who was born in Cordoba, taken to Morocco by his father, and finally settled in Egypt, where he was the first physician of his day at the court of Saladin. His medical treatises still command respect; but it is through his life as the Jewish leader of his time, as the philosopher and theologian within all of Jewish history, that he personifies the greatness of Sephardic Jewry. His Mishne Torah (Repetition of the Torah) is a compendium of rabbinic law up to his time, together with a statement of Jewish beliefs, ethical attitudes and ideals of Jewish practice. It contains a statement of thirteen principles of faith which later entered the liturgy (although no Jewish community has ever agreed upon the authority ofa firm set of dogmas or a ‘catechism’):
Maimonides taught that every Jew should accept
1. That God exists.
2. That He is One in a unique and perfect sense.
3. That He is immaterial, and not be compared to anything else.
4. That He is eternal.
5. That prayer must be addressed to Him alone.
6. That God revealed Himself to the prophets.
7. That the prophecy of Moses is unique and superior to all other revelations.
8. That through Moses God gave us the Torah.
9. That God will never change or revoke the Torah.
10.That God’s providence observes our actions and our inner motives.
11.That man is rewarded or punished according to his deserts.
12.The coming of the Messiah.
13.The resurrection of the dead.5
Many Jewish scholars, then and now, argue that one must view the entire Torah as fundamental and not elevate some teachings above the rest. Others disagreed upon the teachings (Joseph Albo, in the fifteenth century, stressed three fundamental beliefs: God, revelation and retribution). But Maimonides’ statement, now the Yigdal of the daily service, is still sung in the synagogues.
Maimonides’ philosophy developed the Jewish dialogue with Aristotelianism. In his main work, the More Nevuchim (Guide for the Perplexed), he tried to show that faith is not opposed to reason; the chief doctrines of Judaism can be demonstrated in a rational manner, in harmony with philosophy. Beyond that, they offer insights which reason alone cannot obtain. In a later, less generous age, within a Jewish community under attack, this book was denounced to the Christian authorities (in Provence) as heretical, and was consigned to the flames. Even in his time, Maimonides evoked great hostility—the philosopher was distrusted because he was so great an authority upon the Talmud. Unsophisticated worshippers wanted to use anthropomorphic terms, denied to them by his teaching that no attributes can be ascribed to God except as a denial of imperfection. One may only say that ‘God is not weak, not ignorant’. The via negativa was difficult to walk. Maimonides’ world was an Aristotelian system of concentric spheres ending in the tenth sphere with the sechel ha-poel, the creative instinct which imposes form on life and also gives humans the faculty of prophecy. But all can develop their rational faculty through the discipline of Torah. It fosters soundness of mind and body with all its laws, helping man achieve the greatest good: the contemplation of God, given to all in the time of the Messiah.
Intoxicated with the intellectual love of God, reason here built firmly upon faith. Halevi, by contrast, had reared his edifice of faith with the tools of reason. Here, too, one must bring in the next generation of great Jewish teachers who disagreed with Maimonides, particularly Nachmanides (Moses ben Nachman ofGerona, 1194—1270) who denounced those who deny the existence of realities unperceived by the senses and who suppose that what their little minds cannot grasp must be untrue. Nachmanides was also a profound Talmudist, and a pioneer of Kabbalah, of Jewish mysticism. Godgiven laws need no reason. The Babylonian scholar Rab had taught that the precepts were given for no other purpose than to refine people. Nachmanides used this to show that worship of God and obedience to the Torah have the effect of inculcating virtue and good character, making humans more Godlike. It is the aim of the precepts ‘to eradicate every evil belief from our hearts, to make the truth known to us and to remind us of it at all times’.6 The creative interplay of faith and reason is evident in all these teachers, and the differing emphases engaged one another in a creative conflict within an open society. All too soon, that society changed.