The history of the Jews: From the war with Rome to the present time

It would be impossible, within the limits of a work like this, to give even an outline of the great schools of Jewish learning, which date from an age anterior to the coming of Christ, and have been continued even to modern times. The mere enumeration of the names of their renowned Rabbins, each the author of some profound thesis or learned commentary, would fill a volume. During the gloomiest ages of Christendom, when the lamp of learning was all but extinct, even in the cloister, where alone it glimmered, the Jews had light in their dwellings, like their ancestors of old who sojourned in Goshen, while the world without was wrapped in Egyptian darkness. They are, as a rule, but little known to ordinary readers, one reason of which doubtless is, that they concern themselves mainly with subjects which very nearly affect their own people, and find exercise for their peculiar mode of thought, but which neither suit the fancy nor awaken the interest of other races. Their treatises on the Talmuds and the Cabbala, on cosmogony and judicial astrology, even their commentaries on the Pentateuch and the Hebrew Prophets, are read with profound attention by their own people; but their learning and ability is lost on other readers. Nevertheless, there are some great names among their literary celebrities, which are familiar to the ears of all students, and with which all ought to be acquainted who would know anything of their history. There are three in particular, belonging nearly to the era with which we are now dealing, which ought not to be passed over. These are Aben Ezra, Moses the son of Maimon, commonly known as Maimonides, and Benjamin of Tudela.

Aben Ezra was born about A.D. 1092 at Toledo, of a family already distinguished for learning and literary ability. He was an eminent commentator and Cabbalist, a writer on grammar, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy, celebrated also as a physician and a poet. His commentaries include nearly the whole of the Old Testament, the earlier prophets being the only ones on which he has not written. Being a man of substance, he was able to gratify his fancy for travelling, which was a rare taste in those days, but possessed by several others of his brethren also. The places at which his various writings were composed may serve to illustrate the extent of his wanderings. Thus one of his treatises is dated from Mantua, another from Rome, a third from London, and a fourth from some Greek city, and the like. He visited Africa also, as well as Palestine, and conferred with learned men of his own race at Tiberias, where the Patriarch of the West had once fixed his abode. He died on his return from this pilgrimage, in his seventy-fifth year, A.D. 1174. Posterity has bestowed on him the title of ‘Hachacham, or the Wise,’ and learned men of all races and ages have done justice to his genius and learning.[113]

Still more renowned for the extent and variety of his knowledge was Moses Maimonides. He was born March 30th, 1135, in Cordova. His father, Maimon, held the office of Judge of the Jews in his native city, which, indeed, for generations past had been almost hereditary in his family. Two different accounts are given us of his early youth; one says that he showed from the first symptoms of extraordinary ability, and his father began, almost from his cradle, to instruct him in the elements of science; the other, that he was treated by his family generally with contempt, because his mother had been a woman of inferior birth, and by his father with harshness, on account of his intellectual dulness. According to the latter statement, he was sent away from home to be under the charge of another teacher, but returned home so greatly improved in learning and manners that the opinion of his relatives respecting him was altogether changed. He studied astronomy and medicine under the famous Averroes. It was in this last-named science that he became especially excellent, both as a practitioner and a writer. From Averroes, also, he acquired the knowledge of the writings of Aristotle, which were unknown in Western Europe at this date.

Intrigues among the Jews of Cordova obliged Maimon to fly with his family from Spain, and take refuge in Morocco; but after a short residence in that country he removed to Egypt, and settled at Cairo. Maimon died soon afterwards, and his two sons maintained themselves for a while by trading in jewels; but a revolution having taken place in Egypt, by reason of the conquest of the country by the Turks, Maimonides attached himself to Abdebrahim, one of the Turkish generals, whom he served in the twofold capacity of counsellor and physician. Though we do not hear of his having previously practised medicine, it is probable that he did so, as his knowledge of it appears to have been always considerable. Through his connection with his Turkish employer he was not long afterwards brought to the notice of the famous Saladin, now Soldan of Egypt, who took him into his employ as his physician. He retained this post at the court not only of Saladin but of his successor, until his death in 1204. There was, however, a very unhappy episode in his life during this period, when he was accused of having attempted to poison the Sultan; and he was in consequence sent away in disgrace from the court. He is said to have spent the whole time of his exile in a cave, where he studied incessantly, filling many volumes with the fruits of his researches. He was afterwards recalled and replaced in his former office. During what is called the Third Crusade, we are told that he was invited to attend the English King, Richard Cœur de Lion, during his illness, but that he declined the office.

Maimonides had advanced far beyond his contemporaries in knowledge. Instructed in the philosophy of Aristotle, and a devout student of Plato, his mind broke loose from the fetters of Judaical Rabbinism, and sought to base religion on philosophy rather than on revelation. At one period of his life it is known that he did, under strong external pressure, make an outward profession of Mahometanism, or at least conformed to its ritual. Possibly his experience of its rigid stereotyped creed—on account of which Gibbon has bestowed such strange praise upon it—may have made him less tolerant of the fetters of Rabbinical tradition. It is certain that he introduced new lights and strange forms of thought into his teaching, which alarmed and irritated his brother Rabbins. His opinions were attacked by able and learned men; their supposed errors exposed and condemned. In France, more particularly, the feeling against them became so strong that his works were publicly burned as heretical. A fierce warfare was waged over his writings, which lasted many years, but ended at last in his entire restoration to the respect and admiration of his countrymen. A deputation was sent, in 1232, to his grave in Hebron, to ask pardon of his ashes. If strict justice were done in this life, of how many of its greatest men would not the same entreaty for forgiveness have to be asked! In Maimonides’ instance, at all events, the entreaty was sincere. He is now acknowledged by the Jews to have been the greatest man that has arisen among them since the days of the great Lawgiver who led them out of Egypt. Their common saying about him is, ‘From Moses to Moses there arose not a Moses!’ His writings consist of commentaries and expositions, partly of Scripture, partly of the Talmuds, treatises on logic, metaphysics, medicine, astrology, natural history, and other subjects, in such numbers that they would of themselves form an extensive library.

Here also should be mentioned some others of the chief writers of that golden age of Jewish literature—the three Kimchis, Moses, Joseph, and David, born in 1160, 1190, and 1192, all of them Jews of Spanish descent, but natives of Narbonne, and renowned for their ability and learning. David, the most distinguished of the three, was the author of a Hebrew grammar and dictionary of such excellence that he obtained the title of the ‘Prince of Grammarians.’ In the great struggle of those days between the supporters and opponents of science, he ranged himself on the side of the former, and travelled into Spain to endeavour to form a league of those who held his views; and, though we are told he did not prosper in his errand, we cannot doubt that his advocacy had its effect in the ultimate determination of the question.

Nor ought the celebrated Moses ben Nachman, generally known as Nachmanides, to be passed over, though he belongs to a generation later than the above. He is chiefly remarkable for the part he took in the public disputation held at Barcelona in 1263, by order of the King of Spain, between the Jews and the Christians. Pablo, said to be a converted Jew, was the disputant on the side of the Christians, and Nachmanides on that of his own people. It lasted four days, and the reader has already been informed that both sides claimed the victory. Nachmanides subsequently emigrated to Palestine, where he died.

But the writer of this period with whom we are most deeply concerned is not a divine or a philosopher, but a traveller, the well-known Benjamin of Tudela. He is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of the mediæval travellers—two centuries before Maundeville and Marco Polo. Like the first-named of those authors, he appears anxious to record everything he has seen or heard, of what were in his day the strange and unexplored regions of the East. He cannot match with Sir John Maundeville for monstrous and extravagant fictions; but a very large percentage of his statements must be accepted with doubt and caution. Especially is this the case where the credit of his own people is concerned.

He was born in Tudela, a city of Navarre, somewhere near the beginning of the twelfth century. He left Spain in 1260, and spent about fifteen years in visiting the various Jewish colonies in the East and West. He tells us that in Persia and the contiguous countries he found numerous communities of his countrymen, mostly living at their ease, and enjoying the free exercise of their religion. Thus, at Bassorah, a city situated on an island in the Tigris, he found a colony of four thousand Jews; at Almozal, a city built on the site of ancient Nineveh, out of the débris of its ruins, there were as many as seven thousand, ruled over by Zacchæus, a prince claiming descent from David. Journeying thence to Bagdad, he passed Rehoboth, where he found two thousand, and at Elnabar, the ancient Pumbeditha, celebrated of old as the centre of Rabbinical learning, but now fallen from its high estate and sunk to little better than a village, there were still a few doctors and students, and two thousand inhabitants.

Reaching Bagdad, at that time under the rule of Mostanged, a prince who protected and favoured the Jews, he found as many as twenty-eight synagogues, and ten courts, each presided over by one of the chief men of the nation. These ten were called the ‘ten idle men,’ and were subject to an official whom he styles, after the ancient title, ‘the Prince of the Captivity.’ He affirms that the authority of this dignitary extended over all the Jews under the dominion of the Caliph of Bagdad, from Syria eastward as far as India. He assures us that he was regarded in the light of a potentate to whom even the Mahometans were obliged to render reverence, rising up when he entered their presence, and bowing their heads as he passed; and he was escorted wherever he went by a hundred soldiers. It is difficult to reconcile these statements with what we are told of the entire suppression of the Princes of the Captivity nearly two centuries before.

Leaving Bagdad, he visited Resen, Hela, Cufa, and Thema, in each of which he found large and flourishing Jewish populations, and then passed on into Egypt. Here he found his countrymen still more numerous. He mentions a city which he visited, called Chouts, where there were as many as thirty thousand. But no city so called is known to geographers; and it is plain, from the errors with which this part of his narrative is filled, that he either picked up information at second-hand without inquiry, or was extremely hasty and superficial in his researches.

He next explored the Holy Land, which, if his account is to be trusted, had been at this time almost emptied of its Hebrew inhabitants, those who still dwelt there having been reduced to a condition of poverty and wretchedness. In Ascalon he found but one hundred and fifty Jews; in Tiberias, anciently the central point of Western Rabbinism, there were but fifty; in Jerusalem itself, scarcely two hundred. In Tyre and Shunem they were more numerous, five hundred in the one, and three hundred in the other. But, as a rule, the cities of Palestine could hardly have contained ten Jews out of every thousand inhabitants. The disappearance of the Hebrew residents was probably owing to the exterminating swords of the Crusaders.

Leaving Palestine, Benjamin travelled through Greece, Constantinople, Italy, and Germany, in all of which the Jewish population was greatly less than we should have anticipated—due, it is to be feared, in a great measure, to the cruel and devouring sword of persecution, which had been at work with fatal effect for several generations past.