A Vigilant Society

Jewish Thought and the State in Medieval Spain

Javier Roiz, Selma L. Margaretten

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438445649
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

A Vigilant Society presents a provocative hypothesis that argues that Western society as we know it emerged from the soil of Jewish intellectual advances in the thirteenth century, especially those formulated on the Iberian Peninsula. A paradigmatic shift began to occur, one that abandoned the pre–Gothic Sephardic wisdom found in, for example, the writings of Maimonides in favor of what author Javier Roiz calls the "vigilant society." This model embraces a conception of politics that includes a radical privatization of an individual's interior life and—especially as adopted and adapted in later centuries by Roman Catholic and Calvinist thinkers—is marked by a style of politics that accepts the dominance of power and control as given. Vigilant society laid the foundation for the Western understanding of politics and its institutions and remains pervasive in today's world.

1

Knowledge and Power

Modern man is the historical prolongation of medieval man who still survives within him. Our life is the second power of the superimposed medieval life.¹

—José Gaos

The need to live perpetually under the protection of a foreign entity has always been a characteristic of the Jewish people in the Diaspora. The life of its communities has always depended on the laws of those regimes and their territorial protection. As a consequence, the Jewish quarters have always had to rely on the law of the land and its authorities in order to survive. Lacking weapons, an army, and sovereignty, the tradition of Jewish public life intensely reveals the influences of their hosts.

However, their presence within empires and kingdoms of widely differing conditions had impregnated them with public substances that they frequently transferred to their sister communities.² We are dealing here with aljamas³ or calls (communities) or, in some cases, mere Jewish neighborhoods embedded in very different cultures. This, then, was how the task of political cross-pollination began that had far-reaching consequences for the construction of Europe.

It was not unusual for those rabbis who emigrated to other lands to bring with them their customs and to sometimes show their lack of understanding toward local practices, resulting in friction with Jews in their adopted countries. This is the reason Rabbi Simon ben Zemah Duran (1361–1444)⁴ gave for revoking a decision by another Spanish rabbi in Algeria: “The rabbi's inhibition is due to the fact that in Christian countries whence we hail no such custom exists, and consequently, it was difficult for the rabbi to regard as permissible a matter for which he had found no precedent.”⁵

It was in the midst of this Diaspora that the life of Moses Maimonides, or Rambam (1138–1204),⁶ an important thinker for southern Europe, transpired. As a prominent member of the Sephardic minority, he represents medieval thought at its highest point.⁷ Nevertheless, as a teacher, Rambam had many adversaries within Judaism who considered his ideas to be extremely rationalistic. Others felt that he was a danger to the integrity of the Jewish faith and a threat to the preservation of its people.

In spite of all this, Maimonides attempted to synthesize a rich tradition of thought, while at the same time he tried to make it comprehensible to those who were living in a very different time, one of major transformations.

He did this from the standpoint of a man who was assaulted on all sides to convert. Because of the situation of the Jewish community, always in the minority, ill-adapted to, and in the midst of two great empires, Moses had the task of sustaining his identity in the face of great demands and pressure for him to convert. In this respect, it was a world not very far from our own time.

His personal life is an example of the situation in which his own coreligionists found themselves in general: always on the brink of leaving, looking for safer lands, or fleeing from persecution, and always tempted to renounce their convictions for a more profitable faith. Maimonides represented a minority that was forced to live under difficult conditions, both civil and political, and under which the easiest choice would have been to convert. Sometimes it was simply the only outlet to use in order to save one's life.

Moreover, there is an additional aspect to his work. Judaism is also vulnerable to the plague of false messiahs who appear from time to time to put an end to the long wait of its people. They bring with them the hope of redemption for Israel's woes and the promise of independence. This would be the omnipotent attainment of what, in another context, the romantics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would call the final solution.

But the essence of Judaism lies precisely in the renunciation of omnipotence, in other words, of the magical solutions to life's hardships. Therefore, in order to keep the faith alive and preserve the Jewish people, it is necessary to avoid falling into the trap of those false messiahs. Centuries before the birth of Maimonides many of those so-called messiahs had caused problems for the communities and their rabbis. Some were hotheads, others demented, and others simply opportunists. But in every one of these cases, there was always a sizeable number of Jews who were tempted to believe that freedom had come at last, that finally a political and religious leader had appeared who would deliver them from so much humiliation and so many postponements.

When these false hopes were shown to be hoaxes, the consequence was discouragement. Many young people became disoriented when faced with three disparate attractions: the country in which they had grown up and that they saw as their home, those leaders who frequently seduced them into believing in miraculous solutions, and the strict interpreters of Judaic law who, in the face of such dangers for their identity, locked themselves up tighter in their ritual orthodoxy.

Maimonides arose out of the shadows as a key figure in science, an eminent scholar and rabbi, and a famous physician. The purpose of his work was to furnish his coreligionists with a guide to cope with so much confusion. His study of the texts of the Torah and the Talmud will serve him to give an account of a tradition of thought (halakhah)⁸ and its significance for the twelfth century. His education in al-Andalus (Córdoba and Lucena) and his knowledge, by way of his Andalusian teachers of the Greek and Judaic traditions, will prepare him for a new understanding of the city, public life, and religion. Such notables as Rabbi Isaac Alfasi, the first compiler of halakhah in Sepharad,⁹ Rabbi Joseph Levita ibn Míguez, principal of the Academy of Lucena; Joseph ibn Zadik; and his own father, Rabbi Maimon, a judge from Córdoba, influenced his early education, in addition to the lessons of Rabbi Solomon ibn Gabirol's Platonism, Rabbi Abraham ibn Daud's Aristotelianism, and the mathematics and astronomy of Rabbi Abraham bar Hiyya of Barcelona.¹⁰

The European Chessboard

Greek influence can easily be seen in the Sephardic tradition. Rambam probably received it by way of Mediterranean cultural and commercial centers. The Greek schools did not die out with the Cynics, Skeptics, or Epicureans, as young Western students were traditionally taught, but rather continued their activity until the fifth century CE. Their work spread from Athens to Alexandria, one of the most brilliant cities in this tradition,¹¹ as well as Constantinople, the capital of Greek-speaking Europe. Thus, a figure such as Themistius, the great fourth-century teacher of Greek philosophy, was, for Maimonides, well known and esteemed, something that was unthinkable in Latin-speaking Europe. The rupture of the tradition of the Greek schools which, in the West, was the consequence of the confrontation between the two Europes—Greek and Latin—had no effect on the North African Jewish tradition. Jewish science, by way of its active community in Alexandria, cultivated that knowledge and passed it along to future generations. It is enough to recall the extremely important figure of Philo of Alexandria (25BCE?–50CE) to understand the scope of this transmission. In like manner, the wealth of the Muslim culture and economy would take up all this knowledge and transmit it to medieval Andalusia.

Today the complete vision of those two Europes enables us to see what was hidden in the past, such as the Crusades against Byzantium or the importance of Venice as a hinge of luxury between both worlds. The commercial, fluvial, maritime, and overland routes were the fundamental arteries for the growth of European culture.

Jewish understanding of the reality of Europe enables us to understand that constant struggle between Greek and Latin Europe, in which the latter was ultimately more predatory and efficient in its expansion than the Orthodox model. This animosity between the two Europes explains why Greek culture had to find other, more circuitous ways of making inroads into the West. To a certain extent the rise of Christian scholasticism would attempt to reply to the “Greco-Arabic tidal wave”¹² that was perceived as a veritable menace. The great transfusion of Greek to Latin, already anticipated in the fourteenth century, occurred in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. European Greece was definitively left behind in the fifteenth century. It was time for the Renaissance to begin.

During the medieval period prior to the eleventh century, the culture inherited from the Greek schools found its way through the Mediterranean by slipping in between Christianity and Islam, the two empires of the period. The Jewish minority played an essential role in the preservation and development of European culture by serving as the transmitter of this knowledge. It performed an important function in the cross-pollination of the urban cultures of the West. Jerusalem was the symbol of this Mediterranean contribution, which, together with the Greek world, made up the foundations of our civilization. Later on, Leo Strauss would theorize about this in the twentieth century.

Curiously, Maimonides' biography moves inversely to this expansion. It goes from western Andalusia to the Middle East and the birthplace of Mediterranean civilization. Obviously it is an approximation to Jerusalem, the source of knowledge of his people. This movement is not unusual, especially within Sephardic culture. Nahmanides (1194–1270),¹³ himself, another great figure in thirteenth-century Jewish thought, would end up at the age of seventy-three as a refugee in Akko and Jerusalem after his exile from Catalonia in 1267.

It is important to analyze the essential differences between the public life as practiced by Jewish tradition and that of the Christian world, or so-called Christianity, in which Westerners do not usually include the Greek world. From a Western point of view, Orthodox culture is considered to be archaic and too hieratic.

We have seldom paid tribute to a world like Byzantium, obviously more learned and more developed commercially and culturally. We are indebted to it for introducing the fork, so we do not have to eat with our hands,¹⁴ the habit of daily bathing, and the code of Justinian (483–565),¹⁵ the great regulator of maritime life in the world that Byzantium contributed to the civilized world. From it would also come the tradition of noteworthy schools of philosophy that, in spite of the fact that they were no longer interesting to the West, would continue to be taught to generations of important thinkers and politicians. However, it is shocking that Western political engineering does not study the Byzantine Empire more thoroughly, if only as an example of efficiency and endurance.¹⁶

The rise of a tradition that extended from Alexandria, Aleppo, Tunis, Crete, Venice, Naples, Palermo, Siracusa, and Fez to Córdoba, speaks of an invaluable commercial, religious, and maritime world. This was how a great accumulation of philosophical, astronomical, mathematical, medical, botanical, and historical knowledge passed from Constantinople to Western Europe.¹⁷

Greek culture has come down to us in part from the Jewish circles that lived in these cities, Islamic or Christian, and continued to maintain its science and knowledge in spite of always being in danger of persecution or expulsion.

This was a minority that never had an independent political organization or an army of its own, and it always had to rely on the legal capacity and security provided by its countries of adoption. These human groups were also confronted with another danger—that of assimilation—a perennial fear of the people of Israel, established within monarchies that were very bellicose and often dogmatic. Forced to live as a minority in situations of harrowing civil clashes between Christians or headlong confrontations of mutual conquest between two religions of enormous transcendence, their mere survival was extremely difficult.

Education in Sephardic Culture

Maimonides was born in Córdoba in 1138 into a Jewish community that lived under a regime governed by changing versions of Islam, which gradually became more rigid. At the same time, his city was very close to the border with the Christian world, which was equally belligerent. This Christian society was more backward economically and endowed with fewer comforts, and religious orthodoxy was about to impose itself on its inhabitants.

After the Almohad persecution of 1148, he had to emigrate with his family to other cities in Hispaniae. Although it is known that many Jewish families went to Saragossa, there is no record of where his family ended up. They may have gone to Almería, a prosperous city at that time. Around 1159 the family crossed over to Fez, where they resided until 1165.¹⁸ From there, again because of religious persecution, Maimonides went to the Holy Land and finally to Egypt, where it is known that he settled down and worked for many years as a physician at the court of Saladin (Salah al-Din). He died in Fustat, a district of Cairo, in 1204.

Maimonides was always concerned that young people might become converted or assimilated for convenience, either because of ignorance or the need to become integrated in society. When Maimonides was thirteen he began a pilgrimage between the interstices of the two great powers, a situation that must have put him in a rather uncomfortable position. Those were influential years filled with unforgettable experiences.

The Sephardic or Hispanic world represented a substantial part of medieval Judaism. Specifically, the period between 900 and 1200 is considered to be the “Golden Age of Spanish Jewry.”¹⁹ It was this tradition that preserved elements relevant for political theory.

The first element is their view of education as an individual matter. In this sense, it does not seem probable that Maimonides intended for his works to merely regularize and systematize the knowledge of the Jewish religion. It is true that his Mishneh Torah made him an excellent codifier of halakhah,²⁰ that tradition of discourse and law that gives political and moral substance to the people of Israel and is the artifice of the recovery and protection of the identity of Judaism. His work, however, is not merely a compilation, but it is also a profound and learned review of its opportune meaning for the times in which he lived.

His knowledge of philosophy includes those Greek texts that he received from his teachers in Córdoba. But he also takes up the wisdom of Hebrew tradition regarding the public life of the kehillah or cahal, the aljama, or Jewish quarter.²¹

The world in which he was educated consisted, on the one hand, of Muslim scholars who had studied the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition and,...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Knowledge and Power
• Chapter 2: Moses Maimonides and the Politics of Dialectics
• Chapter 3: The Gothic World Comes to the South
• Chapter 4: Kabbalah and Political Power
• Chapter 5: The Zohar
• Chapter 6: Toward a Vigilant Society
• Chapter 7: Conclusions
• Notes
• References