The Talmud (13 page)

he acquired many holy texts, and copies of the Mishnah and Talmud … and he would support anyone who wanted to make religious scholarship his craft. He had scribes who would write copies of the Mishnah and Talmud, which he would give to students who could not afford to buy them … and he provided olive oil to the synagogues in Jerusalem. … he died at a good old age.
28

Shmuel wrote a legal compendium of law, only a fraction of which has survived. He clearly had an extensive library, because his work incorporates a wide range of sources, including both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, much of the early literature from the time of the Mishnah and many of the responsa of the geonim. Although his work has not gone down in history as pivotal, its importance lies in the fact that he summarized current thinking and provided an accurate summary of laws as they then stood. Shmuel’s legal scholarship was an advance on the earlier legal compilations which had simply based their decisions on the discussions in the Talmud. It was a first step in the trend towards the collation and formalization of the law which would eventually become the hallmark of the Spanish school.
29

About thirty years after Shmuel’s death an old man arrived in Lucena, a town half-way between Cordoba and Malaga where Shmuel had his spice shop. His name was Isaac Al-Fasi – his surname indicating that he hailed from Fez, in Morocco. Alfasi had fled Morocco, according to Ibn Daud, because of unknown slanders against him.
30
He lived in Spain for fifteen years, until the age of ninety, but he had already acquired his reputation before leaving Morocco.

Alfasi, who as a young man had studied in Kairouan under both Hananel and Nissim, shared their affinity for clarifying the law and explaining the Talmud text to students who found it hard to follow. His work was effectively a summary of the Talmud; he copied verbatim those parts of it which he felt were already clear enough, he explained bits which he felt needed to be explained, he wove together material from different parts of the Talmud which were better understood in one place and he simply omitted anything he did not feel was relevant. His omissions were not restricted to material which had no bearing on the law; he also left out any content which related to now-defunct practices, such as Temple sacrifices.

Alfasi’s work is printed in all good editions of the Talmud. It forms part of the curriculum for all serious Talmudic study today. He was hailed by later generations as one of the most important of all Talmudic codifiers and his is one of the four ‘monolithic codes of Jewish Law produced during the Middle Ages …[which] were all produced in a Sephardic or Spanish milieu’.
31

But for all its importance Alfasi’s code was not the greatest of the four. That distinction goes to the compendium written by Moses ben Maimon, better known by his patronym Maimonides, or his Hebrew acrostic Rambam.

Notes

1
Avot 3.15.

2
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Penguin, London, 2008.

3
Fishman, 2011,
Introduction;
Ta Shma, 1999
.

4
Shabbat 61a.

5
Al-Idrisi: Nuzhat al-Mushtaq, in The Conservation and Preservation of Islamic Manuscripts: Proceedings of the Third Conference of al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation: 18–19 November 1995.

6
Hirschberg, 1974.

7
The earliest evidence of Jewish settlement in Spain is the third-century tombstone of a young girl named Salomonula, found at the ancient seaport of Abdera.

8
Abun-Nasr, 1987.

9
Abun-Nasr, 1987.

10
Pilgrimage: From the Ganges to Graceland: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1
, Linda Kay Davidson, David Martin Gitlitz, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, 2002.

11
II Kings 17.

12
Neubauer, 1889. Many groups around the world claim descent from one of the ten lost tribes. A modern solution to the Eldad problem (if his stories were indeed true) would be that the lost tribes left the Holy Land long before the Mishnah was compiled. Unlike the Sadducees and Karaites who rejected the Oral Law, the ten tribes just didn’t know of it.

13
Gil, 2004.

14
The Ancient Sijill of Qayrawan, Adam Gacek, MELA Notes, No. 46 (Winter, 1989).

15
The Living and the Dead in Islam: Studies in Arabic Epitaphs
, Volume 3; Werner Diem, Marco Schöller; Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 2004.

16
The best-known version of this legend is in the anti-Karaite work Sefer HaKabbalah or
Book of Tradition
by Abraham ibn Daud who lived in twelfth-century Spain (Neubauer, 1888)
. He may have circulated the legend to demonstrate that, with the arrival of Moses ben Hanoch in Spain, the community’s independence from Babylon was complete.

17
Moshe Gil argues in favour of the legend (Gil, 2004)
. He suggests that even if the legend was embellished in its earliest known source, Abraham Ibn Daud’s
Book of Tradition
, it has a historical core. He holds that the episode is likely to have taken place in the reign of Abd-al-Rahman III, the Umayyad ruler of Spain around the year 960
ce
.

18
Fishman, 2011
.

19
Solomon Shechter published a letter found in the Cairo Genizah which Hushiel wrote to Shemarya, possibly the son of Elhanan, another of the ‘four captives’.
The Jewish Quarterly Review
, 11(4) (July, 1899), pp. 643–50.

20
Ibn Daud, Sefer HaKabbalah (Neubauer, 1888).

21
The two men had very different styles. Hananel’s approach was to give his reader an overview of the topic being discussed. Although the Talmud switches languages freely from Hebrew to Aramaic, and back again, Hananel wrote only in Hebrew. He provided the etymological roots of difficult words, referring to Greek, Arabic and Persian as necessary and was not afraid to quote the Jerusalem Talmud, which had been far better received in Kairouan than it ever was in Baghdad, giving rise to Pirkoi ben Baboi’s concerns. Indeed, his use of the Jerusalem Talmud is
so extensive that Hananel has often been cited as the person who began the process of bringing that work back into the mainstream, after it had been sidelined by the spread of the Babylonian version.

Hananel’s commentary needs to be read alongside the Talmud text. Nissim’s in contrast can be followed without even having a copy of the original (Ta Shma, 1999, Chapter 4); (Steinsaltz, 2009). Whereas Hananel only dwells on those parts of the Talmudic discussion which he feels are relevant, Nissim’s style is to paraphrase the whole debate, referring the reader back to the sources which underlie the Talmudic discussion and providing a simplified summary of the topic.

22
Dunlop, 1954; Golb & Pritsak, 1982; Brook, 2006. For more controversial views of the consequences of the Khazar conversion see Koestler, 1976; Sand, 2009. The conversion itself is the subject HaKuzari, of a highly stylized polemic written by the Spanish philosopher, poet and physician Yehuda HaLevi in the early twelfth century.

23
Brook, 2006.

24
Golb & Pritsak, 1982.

25
The Alexander legend is very ancient and widespread. The Qu’ran (Surat al-Kahf 83–98) contains an account of Dhul Qarnayn (= ‘two horns’; Alexander is depicted with two horns on some coins) who also confined the people of Gog and Magog between two mountains, and shut them in with iron gates overlaid with copper. A Jewish source,
Vayikra Rabbah
27.1, dating from the fourth or fifth century recounts how Alexander visited a King Katzia ‘behind the mountains of darkness’.

26
Brook, 2006.

27
Neubauer, 1888.

28
Neubauer, 1888, p. 72–3.

29
Shmuel Hanaggid’s
Hilcheta Gavrata
was published with an extensive introduction by Mordechai Margaliot as Hilchot Hanaggid (Margaliot, 1962).

Standard printed editions of the Talmud contain a short work called Shmuel HaNaggid’s Introduction to the Talmud. Although this concise work is distinguished by its clarity of language and the simplicity with which it gets its message across it has been mistakenly attributed to him. Shraga Abramson (Abramson, 1987) demonstrated that it is in fact an abridged translation of a work by the Babylonian
Gaon
Shmuel ben Hofni.

The translator begins by listing twenty one literary features of the Talmud text. These include the Mishnah text, explanations of the Mishnah, questions, solutions and refutations. The upshot is that the reader is able to navigate through what is generally assumed to be a very dense text with considerable ease. He then turns to the rules by which decisions are made in the Talmud so that when the reader encounters two authorities disagreeing on a point it is possible to determine which view is the accepted one.

30
Neubauer, 1888.

31
Karnafogel, 2006.

8

The age of the giants

Abba Saul said: When pursuing a deer, I entered the thigh-bone of a corpse, and pursued it for three parasangs but reached neither the deer nor the end of the bone.
1

Maimonides

Maimonides is a giant on the Talmudic stage. His influence in the fields of Jewish thought, philosophy and law is second to none. His philosophical treatise
Guide for the Perplexed
was the first significant attempt to systematically explain the rationale behind the Jewish faith to those who, as the name implies, found it difficult to hold onto religious belief in the face of coeval, speculative thinking. Even though there is little place in modern thought for his Aristotelian approach and twelfth-century world view, the
Guide
remains pre-eminent amongst all Jewish philosophical writings. His impact on the Talmudic world was no less important.

Maimonides was born in Cordoba in 1135. When he was thirteen the city, which had been the site of power struggles for over a century, fell once again, this time to the puritanical Almohads whose attitude towards
dhimmis
, non-Muslim minorities, was far from tolerant. Faced with the option of converting to Islam or leaving the city, the boy’s father, Maimon, a respected judge in the Jewish courts, chose the latter.

The next we hear of Maimonides is as a young man of twenty five in the city of Fez. Fez was also an Almohad city but the attitude of its ruler towards
dhimmis
seems to have softened somewhat as he edged towards old age. It was during the period between leaving Cordoba and arriving in Fez that the young
Maimonides began work on his first magnum opus, an Arabic commentary on the Mishnah, bearing the name
Sirāj.
We don’t know where he was when he wrote the commentary. He must have travelled extensively, perhaps even living a peripatetic life, since at the end of his commentary he apologizes for any inaccuracies which may have come about due to his mind being ‘troubled by exile and wandering’, and due to his journeying by road and by boat.
2

In the commentary Maimonides explains the legal principles behind the topics in the Mishnah and offers a summary of the law. Occasionally his explanation of a section of the Mishnah
3
differs from the interpretation placed upon it by the Talmud.
4

Maimonides’
Commentary on the Mishnah
is probably best known for his formulation of what have become known as the Thirteen Principles of Faith; the nearest thing that classical Judaism has to an ‘official’ dogma, and the subject of considerable controversy and scholarly discussion.
5

The sojourn in Fez was brief; within five years the leading Jewish scholar in the city, under whom Maimonides studied, was martyred by the Almohads, having refused to convert to Islam. Maimonides and his family didn’t hang around. They spent a short amount of time in the Holy Land then travelled on to Egypt, settling first in Alexandria and then in Fostat, now part of old Cairo.

Maimonides’s brother David supported the family through his trade in gemstones. When he drowned in the ocean on a business trip, they were left penniless. In those days rabbinic scholars tended not to take a salary for their work and Maimonides was now obliged to seek out a livelihood for himself. He trained as a physician and, although it took some time, he was eventually appointed as doctor to the sultan’s court. In a letter he tells a friend not to visit him as he is too fatigued from the heavy duties that his royal appointment placed upon him, the demands made upon his time by his general medical practice and the responsibility he carried as senior scholar and head of the community.
6

His fatigue, however, did not prevent him from writing. Maimonides’s major contribution to the Talmud is his legal code,
Mishneh Torah
7
which he completed at the age of forty five in Cairo. Unlike his commentary on the Mishnah, the
Mishneh Torah
was detailed and prescriptive. Of his three main works
Mishneh Torah
is the only one written in Hebrew, indicating no doubt that Maimonides intended it for a far wider Jewish audience than just those in the Arabic speaking world.

The work is a code in the strictest possible sense. Systematically divided into fourteen books, Maimonides makes no attempt to reproduce the discussions or arguments contained in the Talmud. Nor does he cite his sources. He simply states his understanding of the law which emerges from those discussions. Unlike other legal codes he includes laws relating to defunct Temple practices; an indication that he considered the work applicable for all time, even when the Temple would be rebuilt.

Monumental as it is, the
Mishneh
Torah
was not universally acclaimed. Some of Maimonides’s critics believed he intended its study to replace that of the
Talmud.
8
The work came under severe censure from a contemporary, Abraham ben David of Posquières, who argued that Maimonides had reduced the flexible openness of Talmudic law to a series of prescriptive statements with no room for
manoeuvre.
9
He took issue with Maimonides on many of the legal statements in the work but reserved particularly fierce criticism for his assertion that anyone who believed God had a body was a heretic.

How can he call such a person a heretic when so many who are greater and better than him thought this way because of what they read in the Bible and even more so in homilies which confuse the mind?
10

Rabad’s objection was not to promote the view that God had a body, but rather because, as Daniel Silver puts it, Judaism had ‘never read the simple minded or the literalist out of the fold’.
11

Most editions of the
Mishneh Torah
contain Abraham ben David’s criticisms, as well as other commentaries which seek to explain the reasons behind Maimonides’s rulings.

Although generally acclaimed as the greatest Jewish thinker for two millennia, controversy was never far from Maimonides. Apart from the attacks by Abraham ben David, his philosophical and theological views came under repeated attacks leading, as we shall see, to public condemnation and even burnings of his works in the later centuries.

The Rhineland

Kairouan may have been in ruins but due to its husbandry the Talmud was now known across a vast area. It was taught from Fez, on the western extreme of the Maghreb through Cairo to Baghdad in the east. In Europe it reached Spain, Provence, France and Italy, extending northwards through Germany, to the Rhineland cities of Mainz, Speyer and Worms. It was here the Talmud had its first serious encounter with an unfamiliar culture – and it was here, over the course of the next few centuries, that it was scrutinized as never before, both by its friends and by its enemies.

Throughout its history the Talmud had developed in an Islamic environment. Islam and Judaism were not so dissimilar in their world view. They shared the same cultural norms, particularly around family, trade and social organization. They had a linguistic affinity; Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic are all part of the same family. Islam’s acceptance of Moses as a prophet, coupled with the institution known as
dhimmi
, through which minorities were protected, had allowed the Talmud to develop freely alongside, and even in partnership with the Islamic legal tradition.

Christian lands were relatively unfamiliar territory for the Babylonian Talmud. With the exception of southern Italy, from where the Four Captives are supposed to have set sail, those few Christian centres which had encountered the Talmud were largely confined to the eastern Mediterranean and only knew the Palestinian work.

A few small Jewish communities had dwelt along the River Rhine in Germany since the earliest dispersions. They hadn’t always had an easy life. A Church Council edict in Paris in 846
ce
ordered all Jewish children to be removed from their homes and placed in monasteries.
12

Much later, in 992
ce
, Sehok ben Esther a Jewish convert to Christianity, tried to destroy the Jews of Le Mans. He went to the local lord to tell him that the Jews were piercing his image with a goad in order to kill him. He suggested he search the local synagogue. The lord did as he was bid and found a wax effigy which Sehok had planted there, with its feet amputated and piercings on its body. Sehok urged the lord to take his revenge and a wave of violence broke out against the Jews. We don’t have the full story since the one manuscript which contains the account breaks off before the end, but based on similar events we can imagine that the outcome may have included wholesale slaughter, forced conversion and expulsions from the city.
13

Fifteen years later the king of France ordered all Jews to convert or die; those who could flee did, a group of women drowned themselves and the elderly were slaughtered.
14

But it was by no means all doom and gloom. Compared with events soon to come, the tenth century in northern Europe was a period of relative calm. The Jews comprised a tiny fraction of the overall population, most Christians had never met one and as Jonathan Elukin points out, there must have been a general tolerance of Jews by ordinary people, because no early medieval government would have been able to maintain control if there had been constant strife.
15
In 1074 Henry IV even exempted the Jews of Worms from paying the poll tax in recognition of their loyalty.
16

It was against this uncertain background that the legend of the Jewish Pope emerged. Undoubtedly fictional, it is just one of a number of popular medieval tales set in tenth-century Mainz. It offers a revealing insight into the insecurities and aspirations of people in a city which was becoming a major centre for the Talmud.

The legend, which circulated in various forms during the Middle Ages, tells the unlikely story of Elchanan, son of the poet Shimon of Mainz. Elchanan and Shimon were real characters, some of Shimon’s poetry has survived and in one he refers to his son Elchanan.

One version of the story is that Elchanan was kidnapped as a child, placed in a monastery, told that his parents were dead and raised as a Christian. The
boy prospered and rose rapidly through the ranks of the Catholic Church, eventually being appointed Pope. Known as Andreas, the Pope grew increasingly insecure about his origins until he eventually demanded that his aides tell him the true story of his birth. The whole story came out, the Pope was reunited with his father and returned to Mainz to live as a loyal Jew.
17

The story is the result of a powerful imagination, but no less powerful than the intellectual currents then flowing in Mainz. A shared atmosphere of intellectual curiosity prevailed in both the Talmudic communities and monasteries, as did comparable methods of education and study.
18
It had been sparked by the ninth-century Carolingian Renaissance, which saw art, culture and religion flourish across Europe. And although the Carolingian era had long subsided by the time interest in the Talmud surfaced along the River Rhine, its legacy lingered on. Talya Fishman notes that the Cathedral schools that produced the Holy Roman Empire’s diplomats were situated in the very cities where Talmud study was strongest.
19

The ban on polygamy

The Talmud had probably first been introduced into the Rhineland by local merchants and traders, who would regularly travel great distances to obtain the goods and raw materials they needed. Whenever possible they would lodge in foreign lands with their co-religionists, with whom they shared a common language. Friendships would form amongst the regular travellers, just as they do today, and they would exchange news and ideas.

In this way the merchants heard about the new phenomenon of religious scholarship that had spread from Baghdad and Kairouan, of how the Talmud was institutionalizing their traditional religious practice. They heard about the legal authorities who were basing their decisions upon its debates; as part of the ongoing process of formalizing Jewish law. One can imagine there was a certain amount of disquiet and even cynicism about the new breed of rabbis
and scholars who seemed to be imposing new restrictions and changing the old ways.

The merchants didn’t just bring home news and information. They carried documents and manuscripts. Some of the letters written by the Babylonian
gaon
, Hai, reached Mainz, as did books from Kairouan.
20
But the travellers were few in number, the geographical and political divide between North Africa and the Rhineland was huge and the flow of information and manuscripts was intermittent. Almost as soon as the Talmud was established as an object of study in the Rhineland its rabbis ploughed their own course, responding to local events and reaching their own decisions independently of anything happening in the Islamic world.

The pioneer of Talmud study in the Rhineland was Gershom ben Yehuda, known as the Light of the Exile. He was one of those figures who are so influential that history credits them with all sorts of things that were actually carried out by others. The earliest European commentary on the Talmud is attributed to him, even though it was probably written by several of his students, or even by some of theirs.

Gershom was the first European scholar to try to reconcile the Talmud’s world view to the reality of living in a Christian society. He’d lived through good times and bad; intellectual and cultural dialogue when conditions were favourable and harsh realities when they weren’t. In 1012 the entire community of Mainz, including Gershom, were expelled from the city by the Emperor Henry II. At the same time one of his sons was forcibly converted to Christianity; he died before he could be reconciled with his family.