Studies in Judaism 16

Studies in Judaism 16

Whoever his masters were, they must have been well satisfied with their

promising pupil, for he undertook, at the age of fifteen, to write

supplements to the Code of R. Isaac Alfasi. Nor was it at a much later

date that he began to compose his work, _The Wars of the Lord_, in which

he defends this great codifier against the strictures of R. Zerahiah, to

which we have referred above. I shall in the course of this essay have

further occasion to speak of this latter work; for the present we will

follow the career of its author.

 

Concerning the private life of Nachmanides very little has come down to

us. We only know that he had a family of sons and daughters. He was not

spared the greatest grief that can befall a father, for he lost a son; it

was on the day of the New Year.(68) On the other hand, it must have been a

great source of joy to him when he married his son Solomon to the daughter

of R. Jonah, whom he revered as a saint and a man of God. As a token of

the admiration in which he held his friend, the following incident may be

mentioned. It seems that it was the custom in Spain to name the first

child in a family after his paternal grandfather; but Nachmanides ceded

his right in behalf of his friend, and thus his daughter-in-law's first

son was named Jonah. Another son of Nachmanides whom we know of was

Nachman, to whom his father addressed his letters from Palestine, and who

also wrote Novellć to the Talmud, still extant in MS. But the later

posterity of Nachmanides is better known to fame. R. Levi ben Gershom was

one of his descendants; so was also R. Simeon Duran;(69) whilst R. Jacob

Sasportas, in the eighteenth century,(70) derived his pedigree from

Nachmanides in the eleventh generation.

 

As to his calling, he was occupied as Rabbi and teacher, first in Gerona

and afterwards in Barcelona. But this meant as much as if we should say of

a man that he is a philanthropist by profession, with the only difference

that the treasures of which Nachmanides disposed were more of a spiritual

kind. For his livelihood he probably depended upon his medical practice.

 

I need hardly say that the life of Nachmanides, "whose words were held in

Catalonia in almost as high authority as the scriptures," was not without

its great public events. At least we know of two.

 

The one was about the year 1232, on the occasion of the great struggle

about Maimonides' _Guide of the Perplexed_, and the first book of his

great Compendium of the Law. The Maimonists looked upon these works almost

as a new revelation, whilst the Anti-Maimonists condemned both as

heretical, or at least conducive to heresy.(71) It would be profitless to

reproduce the details of this sad affair. The motives may have been pure

and good, but the actions were decidedly bad. People denounced each other,

excommunicated each other, and did not (from either side) spare even the

dead from the most bitter calumnies. Nachmanides stood between two fires.

The French Rabbis, from whom most of the Anti-Maimonists were recruited,

he held in very high esteem and considered himself as their pupil. Some of

the leaders of this party were also his relatives. He, too, had, as we

shall see later on, a theory of his own about God and the world little in

agreement with that of Maimonides. It is worth noting that Nachmanides

objected to calling Maimonides "our teacher Moses" (Rabbenu Mosheh),(72)

thinking it improper to confer upon him the title by which the Rabbis

honoured the Master of the Prophets. The very fact, however, that he had

some theory of the Universe shows that he had a problem to solve, whilst

the real French Rabbis were hardly troubled by difficulties of a

metaphysical character. Indeed, Nachmanides pays them the rather doubtful

compliment that Maimonides' work was not intended for them, who were

barricaded by their faith and happy in their belief, wanting no protection

against the works of Aristotle and Galen, by whose philosophy others might

be led astray. In other words, their strength lay in an ignorance of Greek

philosophy, to which the cultivated Jews of Spain would not aspire.

Nachmanides was also a great admirer of Maimonides, whose virtues and

great merits in the service of Judaism he describes in his letter to the

French Rabbis. Thus, the only way left open to him was to play the part of

the conciliator. The course of this struggle is fully described in every

Jewish history. It is sufficient to say that, in spite of his great

authority, Nachmanides was not successful in his effort to moderate the

violence of either party, and that the controversy was at last settled

through the harsh interference of outsiders who well-nigh crushed

Maimonists and Anti-Maimonists alike.

 

The second public event in the life of Nachmanides was his Disputation,

held in Barcelona, at the Court and in the presence of King Jayme I., of

Aragon, in the year 1263. It was the usual story. A convert to

Christianity, named Pablo Christiani, who burned with zealous anxiety to

see his former co-religionists saved, after many vain attempts in this

direction, applied to the King of Aragon to order Nachmanides to take part

in a public disputation. Pablo maintained that he could prove the justice

of the Messianic claims of Jesus from the Talmud and other Rabbinic

writings. If he could only succeed in convincing the great Rabbi of Spain

of the truth of his argument, the bulk of the Jews was sure to follow. By

the way, it was the same Talmud which some twenty years previously was, at

the instance of another Jewish convert, burned in Paris, for containing

passages against Christianity. Nachmanides had to conform with the command

of the king, and, on the 21st of July, 1263, was begun the controversy,

which lasted for four or five days.

 

I do not think that there is in the whole domain of literature less

profitable reading than that of the controversies between Jews and

Christians. These public disputations occasionally forced the Jews

themselves to review their position towards their own literature, and led

them to draw clearer distinctions between what they regarded as religion

and what as folklore. But beyond this, the polemics between Jews and

Christians were barren of good results. If you have read one you have read

enough for all time. The same casuistry and the same disregard of history

turn up again and again. Nervousness and humility are always on the side

of the Jews, who know that, whatever the result may be, the end will be

persecution; arrogance is always on the side of their antagonists, who are

supported by a band of Knights of the Holy Cross, prepared to prove the

soundness of their cause at the point of their daggers.

 

Besides, was there enough common ground between Judaism and thirteenth

century Christianity to have justified the hope of a mutual understanding?

The Old Testament was almost forgotten in the Church. The First Person in

the Trinity was leading a sort of shadowy existence in art, which could

only be the more repulsive to a Jew on that account. The largest part of

Church worship was monopolised by devotion to the Virgin Mother, prayers

to the saints, and kneeling before their relics. And a Jew may well be

pardoned if he did not entertain higher views of this form of worship than

Luther and Knox did at a later period. It will thus not be worth our while

to dwell much on the matter of this controversy, in which the essence of

the real dispute is scarcely touched. There are only two points in it

which are worth noticing. The first is that Nachmanides declared the

Agadoth(73) in the Talmud to be only a series of sermons (he uses this

very word), expressing the individual opinions of the preacher, and thus

possessing no authoritative weight. The convert Pablo is quite aghast at

this statement, and accuses Nachmanides of heterodoxy.

 

Secondly,--and here I take leave to complete the rather obscure passage in

the controversy by a parallel in his book, _The Date of Redemption_,(74)

quoted by Azariah de Rossi--that the question of the Messiah is not of that

dogmatic importance to the Jews that Christians imagine. For even if Jews

supposed their sins to be so great that they forfeited all the promises

made to them in the scriptures, or that, on some hidden ground, it would

please the Almighty never to restore their national independence, this

would in no way alter the obligations of Jews towards the Torah. Nor is

the coming of the Messiah desired by Jews as an end in itself. For it is

not the goal of their hopes that they shall be able again to eat of the

fruit of Palestine, or enjoy other pleasures there; not even the chance of

the restoration of sacrifices and the worship of the Temple is the

greatest of Jewish expectations (connected with the appearance of the

Messiah). What makes them long for his coming is the hope that they will

then witness, in the company of the prophets and priests, a greater spread

of purity and holiness than is now possible. In other words, the

possibility for them to live a holy life after the will of God will be

greater than now. But, on the other hand, considering that such a godly

life under a Christian government requires greater sacrifices than it

would under a Jewish king; and, considering again that the merits and

rewards of a good act increase with the obstacles that are in the way of

executing it--considering this, a Jew might even prefer to live under the

King of Aragon than under the Messiah, where he would perforce act in

accordance with the precepts of the Torah.

 

Now there is in this statement much that has only to be looked upon as a

compliment to the government of Spain. I am inclined to think that if the

alternative laid before Nachmanides had been a really practical one, he

would have decided in favour of the clement rule of the Messiah in

preference to that of the most cruel king on earth. But the fact that he

repeats this statement in another place, where there was no occasion to be

over polite to the Government, tends to show, as we have said, that the

belief in the Messiah was not the basis on which Nachmanides' religion was

built up.

 

The result of the controversy is contested by the different parties; the

Christian writers claim the victory for Pablo, whilst the Jewish documents

maintain that the issue was with Nachmanides. In any case, "_Der Jude wird

verbrannt_." For in the next year (1264) all the books of the Jews in

Aragon were confiscated and submitted to the censorship of a commission,

of which the well-known author of the _Pugio Fidei_, Raymund Martini, was,

perhaps, the most important member. The books were not burned this time,

but had to suffer a severe mutilation; the anti-Christian passages, or

such as were supposed to be so, were struck out or obliterated.

Nachmanides' account of the controversy, which he probably published from

a sense of duty towards those whom he represented, was declared to contain

blasphemies against the dominant religion. The pamphlet was condemned to

be burned publicly, whilst the author was, as it seems, punished with

expulsion from his country. It is not reported where Nachmanides found a

home during the next three years; probably he had to accept the

hospitality of his friends, either in Castile or in the south of France;

but we know that in the year 1267 he left Europe and emigrated to

Palestine.

 

Nachmanides was, at this juncture of his life, already a man of about

seventy. But it would seem as if the seven decades which he had spent in

the Spanish Peninsula were only meant as a preparation for the three years

which he was destined to live in the Holy Land, for it was during this

stage of his life that the greatest part of his _Commentary on the

Pentateuch_ was written. In this work, as is agreed on all sides, his finest thoughts and noblest sentiments were put down.