Another great Jew of Spain was Moses Maimonides, born at Cordova in 1135. He came of a long line of Rabbis, who traced their descent from the royal house of David, and he might be described as a Talmudist by inheritance as well as by training. He had scarcely completed his thirteenth year when Cordova was taken by the fanatical sect of the Almohades, who offered to the Jews and Christians of the city the alternatives of Islam or death. The ancient Jewish community was broken up, and the family of Maimonides migrated to Almeria. But this town also, three years later, fell into the hands of the same fanatical Mohammedans, and the Jews and Christians were once more driven forth to seek freedom of worship elsewhere. Henceforward the family of Maimonides wandered hither and thither through Spain, unable to find a home. But this roaming life did not prevent the youth from attaining great proficiency in various branches of learning, sacred and profane. His father’s teaching was always ready at hand, and his own quick and clear intellect found it easy to acquire and to digest the lessons of experience. Aristotle, as has been said, was much studied, though little understood, by the Jews and Arabs of Spain. Maimonides’ intellect had much in common with the Greek philosopher’s scientific mind, while he possessed a sense of religion to which the Greek was a stranger. In the character of Maimonides the two temperaments, the Hebraic and the Hellenic, the reasoning and the emotional, met in a harmonious combination. Truth in thought as well as in action, was the object for which he strove, and the idle fictions of poetry were as severely condemned by him as by the mediaeval monks; but he was far from adopting the monastic definition of poetry as “the Devil’s wine.” His earnestness was free from fanaticism, and he could be severe without being savage. Unsparing in his scorn of what he considered false, he was most forbearing towards the victims of falsehood. Like many earnest men, Maimonides was born a missionary. Neither fatigue of body nor pain of mind deterred him from the diffusion of what he deemed to be the light, and to the propagation of rational Judaism he devoted his whole life ungrudgingly and unfalteringly. To this end he made himself master of all the knowledge accessible in his time. He studied ancient Paganism as well as contemporary Islam and Christianity; philosophy, medicine, logic, mathematics, and astronomy. Thus equipped, he entered the arena.
His people, after ten years’ wandering in Spain, had repaired to Fez, where persecution had driven many Jews to assume the mask of Mohammedanism—a form of compulsory hypocrisy, examples of which abounded in every country. A zealot wrote a pamphlet denouncing these apparent renegades as traitors to the cause of Israel. Maimonides, who was one of them, undertook to vindicate their conduct. But, while defending their prudence, he strove to combat their lukewarmness, and to confirm the wavering; endeavours which nearly cost him his life at the hands of the Mohammedans. In the dead of night he and his family embarked on board a vessel bound to Palestine. After a month’s perilous voyage the refugees landed at St. Jean d’Acre (Acco), whence they proceeded to Jerusalem, then in Christian hands, and finally reached Egypt. There Maimonides lost his father first, and then his brother, suffered severely in his health and fortune, and was obliged to eke out a modest livelihood by the practice of medicine. But in the midst of all afflictions and occupations he continued his first great work on the Talmud, which appeared in 1168 under the characteristic title, The Light. This work, though it failed to make its mark among the Jews of Egypt, gradually brought fame to the author abroad. In 1175 he was already revered as a great Rabbinical authority, and questions bearing on religion and law were submitted to him from all parts of Israel. At the same time he busied himself with the affairs of the Cairo community of which he was made Rabbi. In 1180 he completed his Religious Code, in which he wedded Judaism to philosophy. The object of the book was to introduce light and limit into the chaos of Biblical and Talmudical teaching. The Code attained wide popularity, and copies of it were diligently conned in every corner of the Jewish world from India in the East to Spain in the West. The learning as well as the character of Maimonides excited universal respect, and many were the titles bestowed upon the sage by his admiring co-religionists. Maimonides was proclaimed “the Enlightener of the eyes of Israel.” Opposition and calumny, the involuntary tributes which envy pays to success, came in due course; but Maimonides who had not been intoxicated by praise did not suffer himself to be intimidated by obloquy. His reputation as a physician was almost as great as his theological renown; a Mohammedan poet declares that “Galen’s art heals only the body, but Maimonides’ the body and soul”; Saladin, then Vizier of Egypt, engaged him as his physician, and Richard Coeur de Lion, who during his crusade in the Holy Land heard of Maimonides, invited him to be his physician in ordinary, an honour which the sage declined. Thanks to the high esteem in which he was held by the Mohammedan rulers of Egypt, Maimonides was, in about 1187, made supreme and hereditary head of all the Egyptian communities. While at the height of his power and popularity Maimonides found himself once more exposed to the danger which he had so narrowly escaped in Morocco. A traveller from that country recognised in the official chief of the Hebrew community of Egypt his pseudo-Mohammedan friend of Fez, and denounced him as an apostate. The penalty for apostacy prescribed by the Laws of Islam is death. Maimonides, however, succeeded in convincing the Vizier of the Moorish visitor’s mistake, and thus was enabled to return to the calm pursuit of his labours, communal, medical and philosophical. Soon afterwards Palestine was re-conquered by Saladin, and the Jews were allowed to settle in Jerusalem—a boon for which Maimonides is supposed to be responsible.
♦1190♦
In the midst of his manifold duties, and his feud with a rival Rabbi of Baghdad, Maimonides found time to produce another philosophical work, the Guide to the Perplexed, a work which forms the crown of his intellectual achievement, and which has been pronounced “perhaps the most remarkable metaphysical tour de force in the history of human thought.”[45] At any rate, it is a brave attempt at reconciliation between Aristotelian philosophy and Judaic religion, between Rationalism and Revelation, between Hellenic free-thought and Hebrew feeling. Therein is propounded the eternal problem of the origin and destiny of things, and solved in a manner that carried conviction at the time. The book has, indeed, been a guide to the perplexed for many generations, and, though it has not always commanded obedience among the Jews, it has served as a stimulus to enquiring minds and, through mediaeval scholasticism, has exercised an abiding influence over Christian theology. If metaphysical speculation be of any value to mankind, the world owes a great debt to the work of Maimonides. He died in 1204, at the age of seventy, full of years and honours, and his end was followed by a general outburst of grief. In Egypt both Jews and Mohammedans held a public mourning for three days, in Jerusalem a public fast was proclaimed, and similar funeral services and fasts were observed in many synagogues all over the world. The verdict of his contemporaries was, “From Moses the Prophet till Moses Maimonides there has never appeared his equal.” Posterity was not so unanimous in its appreciation. His tomb at Tiberias was adorned with the epitaph:
“Here lies a man, and yet no man.
If thou wert a man, Angels of heaven
Must have overshadowed thy mother.”
This inscription was in later times replaced by the following:
“Here lies Moses Maimonides, the excommunicated heretic.”[46]
The two epitaphs form an epitome of the sage’s posthumous career—characteristic, though hardly unique. Maimonides had to share the fate of all advocates of compromise ere he was accepted as the oracle of Jewish orthodoxy.[47]