However, during the earlier Middle Ages, the Jews, though exposed to popular hatred, were generally shielded from popular outrage by the princes, spiritual and temporal, who countenanced their usury, sharing the profits, and availed themselves, not without strict precautions, of their medical skill and administrative ability. We find them as land-owners, physicians and civil officials in Provence and Languedoc. At Montpellier, under the wing of the Count of Toulouse, there flourished a Jewish academy where medicine and Rabbinical literature were cultivated successfully—an institution which helped much to create and promote a medical profession throughout Southern Europe, while the great School of Salerno also owed much to Jewish talent. In a word, medical studies in the Middle Ages were deeply indebted to the Hebrew doctors. They were the first to discard the ancient belief in the demoniacal origin of disease and to substitute physic for exorcisms. Their adoption of rational methods in the treatment of patients helped to revolutionise the theory and practice of medicine, to emancipate the European mind from superstition, and to earn for them the cordial detestation of the monks and priests, whose relics and prayers were discredited and whose incomes decreased in proportion to the Jewish practitioners’ success. Thus the animosity of the lower clergy against the mediaeval Jew may, in part, be traced to professional rivalry.
In Spain the Jews had always been most numerous and prosperous. Under the Saracen conquerors, with few exceptions,—as, for instance, the persecution by Ibn Tumart,—they enjoyed a peace such as they had seldom experienced under Christian rule. The liberty usually accorded to them enabled the Spanish Jews to attain distinction in other fields of activity besides money-lending. They were farmers, land-owners and slave-dealers. The last kind of trade was particularly encouraged by the Caliphs of Andalusia who formed their bodyguards of picked Slavonian slaves. They also were physicians, financiers, civil administrators, and they vied with their Mohammedan masters in learning as well as in material splendour and love of display. The influence of Moorish culture on the spiritual and intellectual development of the Spanish Jews has been very ably outlined by a modern Jewish writer in the following words:—“The milder rule of the Moslem gave the Jew a needed pause in the struggle for existence, and the similarity of the Semitic genius in both prevented the perceptible tendency to narrowness, and brought the Jewish mind again into free contact with the world’s thought.... The first aim of the Caliphs, after the victory of Islam was assured, was to resuscitate Greek science and philosophy. Translators were employed to bring forth from their Syriac tombs Aristotle and Galen. And the Jews at once took part in this Semitic renaissance.”[42] The writer might have added that it was mainly through the instrumentality of the Jews that this Arabic resuscitation of Hellenic philosophy and science was transmitted from Islam to Christendom. Learned Jews, familiar with both languages, rendered the Arabic translations of Aristotle into Latin, thus bringing them within reach of the Schoolmen, who valued these versions highly, not only for their fidelity to the original but also for the explanatory comments which accompanied the text. In fact, the first acquaintance of mediaeval Europe with any of the Aristotelian writings, other than the Organon, was due to the Arabs and Jews of Spain.[43] Thus these two Semitic races, by a dispensation of fate the irony of which was not to become apparent until our own day, were the first to stimulate in Western students a thirst for Hellenic literature and to supply them with the means of gratifying it.
The first school founded by the Jews in Spain was that of Cordova (948), followed by those of Toledo, Barcelona and Granada. All these institutions were thronged with eager students and formed centres of light, the rays whereof shone all the brighter amid the gloom of the Dark Ages. Not only Talmudic, Biblical, and Cabbalistic lore were there cultivated, but secular philosophy was diligently studied; and Aristotle was revered as a disciple of Solomon! Poetry, music, mathematics, astronomy, metaphysics and medicine were also included in the curriculum, and the Spanish Jews, as the result of this encyclopaedic training, were men of the broadest and most varied culture; the same individual often combining in his own person the subtleties of the Rabbinical scholar with the elegant taste of a poet; the sagacity of a financier with the practical skill of a physician.
♦915–970♦
All these talents are found embodied in Abu-Yussuf Chasdai of Cordova, a European in every respect except religion and name. From his father Chasdai inherited great wealth and liberal views on its uses. He studied the science of medicine, but he shone especially as a patron and man of letters, and as a diplomatist. Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin were almost equally familiar to him. He rendered brilliant political services to Caliph Abdul-Rahman III. in his relations with the Christian sovereigns of Northern Spain and other European potentates, and he was rewarded by his master with a post which in reality, though not in name, represented the powers of a Minister of Foreign Affairs, of Trade, and of Finance, all in one—an elevation which enabled Chasdai “to take the oppressor’s yoke from his people,” and “to break the scourge that wounded it.” Fate decreed that envoys from the Byzantine persecutors of the Jews should come to Cordova to solicit the aid of the Western against the Eastern Caliphs, and they were received by the Jewish Minister.
Under the paternal, if at times despotic, rule of the Caliphs the Hebrew character cast away some of its sternness and austerity—a change which is pleasantly reflected in the literature of the period. The Hebrew Muse ceased to weep and wail over old misfortunes, and the lays of the Hispano-Jewish minstrels laugh with the sunshine or sigh with the lyric tenderness of their new country. These traits are brilliantly illustrated by the work of the Castilian poet Jehuda Halevi, born in 1086, and thus described by an enthusiastic co-religionist:
“Pure and true, without blemish,
Were both his song and his soul.
When the Creator had formed this soul,
Pleased with Himself at His work,