History of the Jews (33 page)

The Cairo genizah contains at least 1,200 complete business letters, which show that Egyptian Jews, including Maimonides’ younger brother David, travelled immense distances and handled a remarkable variety of products. Dyes were a Jewish trading speciality, but they also concentrated on textiles, medicaments, precious stones and metals, and perfumes. The immediate trading area was Upper and Lower Egypt, the Palestine coast and Damascus in Syria. One big Fustat trader, Moses ben Jacob, who dealt in dried fruit, paper, oil, herbs and coins, ranged this region so frequently he was known as ‘the Commuter’. But a note in the handwriting of Maimonides’ son
Abraham shows that Fustat traders went as far as Malaysia, and he also handled the case of a man who died in Sumatra. The scale too could be impressive: the great eleventh-century merchant Joseph ibn Awkal handled one shipment of 180 bales, and his network allowed him to act as official agent of the two big Babylonian academies, carrying their rulings throughout the Jewish world. Thus a small Jewish community in the Indies could keep in touch, even if a decision took a long time—Cairo to Sumatra was four months.
²⁸

David Maimonides was on such a long trip when he perished. A letter from him to his elder brother survives, recounting various misfortunes in Upper Egypt, from whence he was travelling direct to the Red Sea to take ship to India. After that: silence. Maimonides wrote:

 

The greatest misfortune that has befallen me during my entire life, worse than anything else, was the death of the saint (may his memory be blest), who drowned on the Indian Sea, carrying much money belonging to me, to him and to others, and leaving me with a little daughter and his widow. On the day I received that terrible news I fell ill and remained in bed about a year, suffering from a sore boil, fever and depression, and was almost given up. About eight years have since passed but I am still mourning and unable to accept consolation. And how should I console myself? He grew up at my knee, he was my brother, my student, he traded in the markets and earned and I could safely sit at home. He was well versed in the Talmud and the Bible, and knew [Hebrew] grammar well, and my joy in life was to look at him…. Whenever I see his handwriting or one of his letters my heart turns upside down and all my grief returns again. In short, ‘I shall go down to the nether world to my son in mourning.’
²⁹

 

This letter is very characteristic, in its warmth of heart and melancholy. We can dismiss Maimonides’ assertion that he spent a year in bed. He was prone to stress his ailments and physical weaknesses, but he was in fact a hyperactive man with a prodigious output of work. We do not know what this greatest of medieval Jews looked like: the portrait used for the first volume of his collected works published in 1744—though endlessly reproduced since—is pure invention. But his letters and books, and the material found in the genizah, tell us a good deal about him. He was part of the great twelfth-century pre-Renaissance which marked the first real emergence from the Dark Ages and which affected Jewry as well as the Arabic world and Christian Europe. He was cosmopolitan. He wrote in Arabic but he was familiar with other tongues and usually answered his correspondents in their own language. All his life he was an omnivorous reader. He claims in one letter to have read every known
treatise on astronomy, and in another that there is nothing in idolatry with which he is not familiar.
³⁰

Maimonides’ capacity to absorb masses of difficult material, sacred and secular, was developed very early in life. So was his determination to re-present it to the Jewish world in orderly and rational form. He was not yet sixteen when he finished his
Treatise on Logic
. Then, in 1158, followed his astronomical
Treatise on the Calendar
. When he was twenty-two he began his first major work, his
Commentary on the Mishna
, completing it at Fustat in 1168. This was the equivalent of the
summae
of the Christian schoolmen and included a vast amount of secular material, on animals, plants, flowers and natural history, as well as human psychology. Much of it was written when he and his family were trying to find a safe place to live: ‘I was driven from one end of the world to the other,’ he notes, ‘…God knows that I have explained some chapters whilst on my wanderings, and others on board ship.’
³¹
Thereafter he turned to the major task of codifying talmudic law, the
Mishneh Torah
, in fourteen volumes, which took him ten years and was finished in 1180. By this time the death of David had forced him to take up the practice of medicine. He was also an active judge, and in due course became head of the Egyptian Jewish community, though never with the official title of
nagid
. A great many people from all over the Jewish world consulted him by letter, and over 400 of his Hebrew
responsa
have been printed. But he found time in 1185 to begin his most famous and remarkable work, his three-book
Guide of the Perplexed
, explaining the fundamental theology and philosphy of Judaism, which he finished in about 1190.

Maimonides took his medical career with great seriousness, and in the non-Jewish world it was his chief claim to fame. He wrote extensively on diet, drugs and treatment: ten of his medical works survive and there may be more. He also lectured on physiology and therapeutics, as well as Judaic religion and law. He doctored Saladin’s vizier, Al-Fadi al-Baisami, who paid him an annual salary, and later Saladin’s son, who became sultan in 1198. He was invited, but declined, to become court doctor to ‘the Frankish King’ (either Richard Lionheart of England or Amalric King of Jerusalem). The Arabic sources make it clear that he was regarded as one of the world’s leading doctors, with a particular skill in treating psychosomatic cases. An Arabic verse circulated: ‘Galen’s medicine is only for the body, but that of [Maimonides] is for both body and soul.’
³²

He led a life of heroic industry and public service, for he visited patients in the big public hospitals as well as receiving them at home. To his favourite pupil, Joseph ibn Aknin, he wrote:

 

I have acquired a high reputation among the great, such as the chief kadi, the emirs, the house of Al-Fadr and other city nobles, who do not pay much. The ordinary people find it too far to come and see me in Fustat, so I have to spend my days visiting the sick in Cairo and when I get home I am too tired to pursue my studies in the medical books—you know the amount of time a conscientious man needs in our art to check his sources, so that he can be sure all his statements can be supported by argument and proper authority.

 

To another correspondent, Samuel ibn Tibbon, he wrote in 1199:

 

I dwell in Fustat and the sultan in Cairo itself and the distance between the two places is a double Sabbath-day journey [i.e. 1.5 miles]. My duties to the sultan are heavy. I must visit him early every morning. If he feels ill, or any of his children or harem are sick, I do not leave Cairo but spend the greater part of the day in the palace. If some of the court officials are ill I am there the whole day…even if there is nothing, I do not get back to Fustat until afternoon. Then I am tired and hungry and find the courtyard of my house full of people, high and low, gentiles, theologians and judges, waiting for my return. I dismount, wash my hands and beg them to wait while I eat, my only meal of the twenty-four hours. Then I attend to the patients. They are queueing up until nightfall, sometimes till 2 a.m. I talk to them lying on my back because I am weak. When night falls I am sometimes too weary to speak. So no Israelites can have a private talk with me except on the Sabbath. Then they all come to me after the services, and I advise them what to do during the coming week. Afterwards, they study a little till noon, then depart. Some of them come back and study again until the evening prayers. This is my routine.
³³

 

The year after this was written, Maimonides found it impossible to continue visiting the sultan in person, instead issuing written instructions to his physicians. But he continued to hold his medical, judicial and theological court until his death in 1204, in his seventieth year.

Maimonides’ life was devoted wholeheartedly to the service of the Jewish community and, to a more limited extent, to the human community as a whole. This was in accord with the central social tenet of Judaism. Yet helping the Fustat community—or even the wider gentile community of Cairo—was not enough. Maimonides was conscious of possessing great intellectual powers; and, equally important, the energy and concentration needed to put those powers to huge productive use. The Jews had been created to leaven the dough of humanity, to enlighten the gentiles. They did not have state power, or military force, or wide territories. But they had brains. The intellect, and the reasoning process, were their weapons. The scholar thus had outstanding status in their society, and so peculiar responsibilities; the leading scholar had the most exacting duties it was possible to imagine
—he must take the lead in turning a savage and irrational world into a reasonable one, conforming to the divine and perfect intellect.

The Jewish rationalization process had begun by the introduction of monotheism and by linking it to ethics. This was primarily the work of Moses. It was typical of Maimonides that he not only gave Moses a unique role—he was the only prophet, he argued, who had communicated directly with God—but saw him as a great intellectual ordering force, creating law out of chaos. Clearly, it was the continuing function of the Jews to push forward the frontiers of reason, always adding more territory to God’s kingdom of the mind. Philo, who was a precursor of Maimonides in many ways, saw the object of Jewish scholarship in the same way. It was a protective shield for the Jews in the first place—for they were the ‘race of suppliants’ who interceded with God on behalf of humanity—and in the second it was the means whereby a terrifyingly irrational world could be civilized. Philo took a sombre view of the unreformed human condition. He had lived through an appalling pogrom in Alexandria, which he described in his historical works,
In Flaccum
and the fragmentary
Legatio in Gaium
. Lack of reason could turn men into monsters, worse than animals. Anti-Semitism was a kind of paradigm of human evil because it was not only irrational in itself but a rejection of God, the epitome of folly. But Jewish intellectuals, by their writings, could fight folly. That was why, in his
De Vita Mosis
, he tried to present Jewish rationality to a gentile readership and why, in his
Legum Allegoriarum
, he sought to rationalize, by the use of allegory, some of the more bizarre elements of the Pentateuch for Jewish readers.
³⁴

Maimonides stood half-way between Philo and the modern world. Like Philo, he had no illusions about humanity in its godless, irrational state. He had no direct knowledge of Christian persecution, but he had bitter, first-hand experience of Islamic savagery, and even in his tranquil haven of Fustat, his correspondents—in the Yemen, for instance—reminded him that atrocities were constantly being perpetrated against Jews; his letter to the Yemenis reflects his profound contempt for Islam as an answer to the world’s unreason.
³⁵
Unlike Philo, he did not have the benefit of the broad panoply of Greek rationalism available in the great Alexandrine library. But Aristotelianism was being spread again by Arab intermediaries—Avicenna (980-1035) and Maimonides’ older Spanish contemporary, Averroes (1126-98). Moreover, he was the beneficiary of a thousand years of Judaic commentary, much of which was another form of rationalism.

Then too, Maimonides was a rationalist by temperament. Like
Philo, his writings exude caution, moderation and distrust of enthusiasm. He was always anxious to avoid rows, and
odium theologicum
most of all: ‘Even when men insult me I do not mind, but answer politely with friendly words, or remain silent.’ He was a little vain but certainly not proud: ‘I do not maintain that I never make mistakes. On the contrary, when I discover one, or if I am convicted of error by others, I am ready to change anything in my writings, in my ways and even in my nature.’ In a famous letter of reply to the comments on his
Mishneh Torah
by the scholars of southern France, he admits errors, says he has already made some corrections and will insert others, and insists they are quite right to challenge his work: ‘Do not humble yourselves. You may not be my teachers but you are my equals and friends and all your questions were worth raising.’
³⁶
He was an elitist, of course. He said he would rather please one intelligent man than ten thousand fools. But he was also tolerant: he thought all pious men would be saved, whatever their faith. He was wonderfully urbane, irenic, calm, judicious. Above all, he was a scientist, looking for truth, confident it would prevail in the end.

Maimonides had a clear view of what the truthful and rational—and therefore divine—society would be like. It would not consist of physical or material satisfaction. Ultimate happiness lay in the immortal existence of the human intellect contemplating God.
³⁷
In the last chapter of the
Mishneh Torah
he describes messianic society: ‘His rule will be firmly established and then the wise will be free for the study of the Law and its wisdom and in those days there will be no hunger or war, no hatred or rivalry…and no toil on earth but for the knowledge of the Lord alone.’ The guarantor of perfect society is divine law. A good state, by definition, is one under the rule of law; the ideal state is under divine law.
³⁸

That, of course, had to await the coming of the Messiah, and Maimonides, being the cautious scientist, was the last man to raise eschatological visions. In the meantime, however, good societies could be produced by law. In his
Guide of the Perplexed
, he sets out his intensely rationalistic view of the Torah: ‘The law as a whole aims at two things—the welfare of the soul and the welfare of the body.’ The first consists in developing the human intellect, the second in improving men’s political relations with each other. The Law does this by setting down true opinions, which raise the intellect, and by producing norms to govern human behaviour. The two interact. The more stable and peaceful we make our society, the more time and energy men have for improving their minds, so that in turn they have the intellectual capacity to effect further social improvements. So it
goes on—a virtuous circle, instead of the vicious circle of societies which have no law.
³⁹
One is tempted to guess that Maimonides saw the age of the Messiah coming, not out of the blue, in a sudden clap of thunder, but as a result of progressing, unmiraculous improvements in human rationality.