The age of the tannaim (135–c. 200)
The age of the tannaim (135–c. 200)
The role of the rabbis
After the defeat of Bar Kokhba and the ensuing collapse of active Jewish resistance to Roman rule (135–136), politically moderate and quietist rabbinic elements remained the only cohesivegroup in Jewish society. With Jerusalem off-limits to the Jews, rabbinic ideology and practice, which were not dependent on the Temple, priesthood, or political independence for their vitality, provided a viable program for autonomous community life and thus filled the vacuum created by the suppression of all other Jewish leadership. The Romans, confident that the will for insurrection had been shattered, soon relaxed the Hadrianic prohibitions of Jewish ordination, public assembly, and regulation of the calendar and permitted rabbis who had fled the country to return and reestablish an academy in the town of Usha in Galilee.
The strength of the rabbinate lay in its ability to represent simultaneously the interests of the Jews and the Romans, whose religious and political needs, respectively, now chanced to coincide. The rabbis were regarded favourably by the Romans as a politically submissive class, which, with its wide influence over the Jewish masses, could translate the Pax Romana (the peace imposed by Roman rule) into Jewish religious precepts. To the Jews, on the other hand, the rabbinic ideology gave the appearance of continuity to Jewish self-rule and freedom from alien interference. The rabbinic program fashioned by Johanan ben Zakkai and his circle replaced sacrifice and pilgrimage to the Temple with the study of Scripture, prayer, and works of piety, thus eliminating the need for a central sanctuary (in Jerusalem) and making Judaism a religion capable of practice anywhere. Judaism was now, for all intents and purposes, a Diaspora religion, even on its home soil. Any sense of real break with the past was mitigated by continued adherence to purity laws (dietary and bodily) and by assiduous study of Scripture, including the legal elements that historical developments had now made inoperable. The reward held out for scrupulous study and fulfillment was the promise of messianic deliverance—i.e., the divine restoration of all those institutions that had become central in Jewish notions of national independence, including the Davidic monarchy, Temple service, and the ingathering of Diaspora Jewry. Above all these rewards was the assurance of personal resurrection and participation in the national rebirth.
Apart from the right to teach Scripture publicly, the most pressing need felt by the surviving rabbis was for the reorganization of a body that would revive the functions of the former Sanhedrin and pass judgment on disputed questions of law and dogma. Accordingly, a high court was organized under the leadership of Simeon ben Gamaliel (reigned c. 135–c. 175), the son of the previous patriarch (the Roman term for the head of the Palestinian Jewish community) of the house of Hillel, in association with rabbis representing other schools and interests. In the ensuing struggle for power, Gamaliel managed to concentrate all communal authority in his office. The reign of Gamaliel’s son and successor, Judah the Prince, marked the climax of this period of rabbinic activity, otherwise known as the “age of the tannaim” (teachers). Armed with wealth, Roman backing, and dynastic legitimacy (which the patriarch now traced to the house of David), Judah sought to standardize Jewish practice through a corpus of legal norms that would reflect accepted views of the rabbinate on every aspect of life. The Mishna that soon emerged became the primary reference work in all rabbinic schools and constituted the core around which the Talmud was later compiled (see Talmud and Midrash). It thus remains the best single introduction to the complex of rabbinic values and practices as they evolved in Roman Palestine.
The making of the Mishna
Although the promulgation of an official corpus represented a break with rabbinic precedent, Judah’s Mishna did have antecedents. During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, rabbinic schools had compiled for their own use collections of Midrashim (singular Midrash, meaning “investigation” or “interpretation”), in which the results of their exegesis and application of Scripture to problematic situations were recorded in terse legal form. By 200 CE several such compilations were circulating in Jewish schools and were being utilized by judges. While adhering to the structural form of these earlier collections, Judah compiled a new one in which universally accepted views were recorded alongside those still in dispute, thereby largely reducing the margin for individual discretion in the interpretation of the law. Although his action aroused opposition and some rabbis continued to invoke their own collections, the authority of his office and the obvious advantages of a unified system of law soon outweighed centrifugal tendencies, and his Mishna attained quasi-canonical status, becoming known as “The Mishna” or “Our Mishna.” Yet, for all its clarity and comprehensiveness, its phraseology was often obscure or too terse to satisfy all needs, and a companion work known as the Tosefta(“Additions”), in which omitted traditions and explanatory notes were recorded, was compiled shortly thereafter. Neither compilation elucidated the processes by which decisions had been elicited, and various authorities therefore set about collecting the Midrashic discussions of their schools and recording them in the order of the verses of Scripture. During the 3rd and 4th centuries, Midrashim on the Pentateuch were compiled and introduced as school texts.
Fundamentally legal in character, this literature regulated every aspect of life; the six divisions of the Mishna—on agriculture, festivals, family life, civil law, sacrificial and dietary laws, and purity—encompass virtually every area of Jewish experience. Accordingly, the Mishna also recorded the principal Pharisaic and rabbinic definitions and goals of the religious life. One tract, Pirqe Avot (“Sayings of the Fathers”), treated the meaning and posture of a life according to the Torah, while other passages made reference to the mystical studies into which only the most advanced and religiously worthy were initiated—e.g., the activities of the Merkava, or divine “Chariot,” and the doctrines of creation. The rabbinic program of a life dedicated to study and fulfillment of the will of God was thus a graded structure in which the canons of morality and piety were attainable on various levels, from the popular and practical to the esoteric and metaphysical. Innumerable sermons and homilies preserved in the Midrashic collections, liturgical compositions for daily and festival services, and mystical tracts circulated among initiates all testify to the deep spirituality that informed Rabbinic Judaism.
The age of the amoraim: the making of the Talmuds (3rd–6th century)
Palestine (c. 220–c. 400)
The promulgation of the Mishna initiated the period of the (lecturers or interpreters), teachers who made the Mishna the basic text of legal exegesis. The curriculum now centred on the elucidation of the text of the standard compilation, harmonization of its decisions with extra-Mishnaic traditions recorded in other collections, and the application of its principles to new situations. Amoraic studies have been preserved in two running commentaries on the Mishna, known as the Palestinian (or Jerusalem) Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud, reflecting the study and legislation of the academies of the two principal Jewish centres in the Roman and Persian empires. (Talmud is also the comprehensive term for the whole collections, Palestinian and Babylonian, containing Mishna, commentaries, and other matter.)
The schools were the primary agencies through which the rabbinic way of life and literature was communicated to the masses. The types of schools ranged from the primary school to the advanced “house of study” and more formal academy (yeshiva), the synagogue, and the Jewish court. Primary schools had long been available in the villages and cities of Palestine, and tannaitic law made education of male children a religious duty. Introduced at the age of five or six to Scripture, the student advanced at the age of 10 to Mishna and finally in midadolescence to Talmud, or the processes of legal reasoning. Regular reading of Scripture in the synagogue on Mondays, Thursdays, Sabbaths, and festivals, coupled with concurrenttranslations into the Aramaic vernacular and frequent sermons, provided for lifelong instruction in the literature and the various teachings elicited from it. The amoraic emphasis on the moral and spiritual aims of Scripture and its ritual is reflected in their Midrashic collections, which are predominantly homileticalrather than legal in character.
An amoraic sermon conceded that, of every 1,000 beginners in primary school, only one would be expected to continue as far as Talmud. In the 4th century, however, there were enough advanced students to warrant academies in Lydda, Caesarea, Sepphoris, and Tiberias (in Palestine), where leading scholars trained disciples for communal service as teachers and judges. In Caesarea—the principal port and seat of the Roman administration of Palestine, where pagans, Christians, and Samaritans maintained renowned cultural institutions—the Jews too established an academy that was singularly free of patriarchal control. The outstanding rabbinic scholar there, Abbahu (c. 279–320), wielded great influence with the Roman authorities. Because he combined learning with personal wealth and political power, he attracted some of the most gifted students of the day to the city. About 350 the studies and decisions of the authorities in Caesarea were compiled as a tract on the civil law of the Mishna. Half a century later, the academy of Tiberias issued a similar collection on other tracts of the Mishna, and this compilation, in conjunction with the Caesarean material, constituted the Palestinian Talmud.
Despite increasing tensions between some rabbinic circles and the patriarch, his office was the agency that provided a basic unity to the Jews of the Roman Empire. Officially recognized as a Roman prefect, the patriarch at the same time sent representatives to Jewish communities to inform them of the Jewish calendar and other decisions of general concern and to collect an annual tax of a half shekel, paid by male Jews for his treasury. As titular head of the Jewish community of Palestine and as a vestigial heir of the Davidic monarchy, the patriarch was a reminder of a glorious past and a symbol of hope for a brighter future. How enduring these hopes were may be seen from the efforts to gain permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Although reconstruction of the Temple was authorized by the emperor Julian (reigned 361–363), it came to naught because of a disastrous fire on the sacred site and the emperor’s subsequent death.
The adoption of Christianity as the religion of the empire had no direct effect on the religious freedom of the Jews. The ever-mounting hostility between the two religions, however, resulted in severe curtailment of Jewish disciplinary rights over their coreligionists, interference in the collection of patriarchal taxes, restriction of the right to build synagogues, and, finally, upon the death of the patriarch Gamaliel VI about 425, the abolition of the patriarchate and the diversion of the Jewish tax to the imperial treasury. Mediterranean Jewry was now fragmented into disjointed communities and synagogues. But the principles of the regulation of the Jewish calendar had been committed to writing in approximately 359 by the patriarch Hillel II, and this, coupled with the widespread presence of rabbis, ensured the continuity of Jewish adherence. Even the restrictions on synagogal worship and preaching imposed by the Eastern emperor Justinian I (reigned 527–565) apparently had no devastating effect. A new genre of liturgical poetry, combining ecstatic prayer with didactic motifs, developed in this period of political decline and won acceptance in synagogues in Asia Minor as well as beyond the Euphrates.
Babylonia (200–650)
In the increasingly unfriendly climate of Christendom, Jews were consoled by the knowledge that in nearby Babylonia (then under Persian rule) a vast population of Jews lived under a network of effective and autonomous Jewish institutions and officials. Steadily worsening conditions in Palestine drew many Jews to Persian domains, where economic opportunities and the Jewish communal structure enabled them to gain a better livelihood while living in accordance with their ancestral traditions. To regulate internal Jewish affairs and ensure the steady flow of taxes, the Parthian, or Arsacid, rulers (247 BCE–224 CE) had appointed in approximately 100 CE an exilarch, or “head of the [Jews in] exile”—who claimed more direct Davidic descent than the Palestinian patriarch—to rule over the Jews as a quasi-prince. About 220, two Babylonian disciples of Judah ha-Nasi, Abba Arika (known as Rav) and Samuel bar Abba, began to propagate the Mishna and related tannaitic literature as normative standards. As heads of the academies at Sura and Nehardea, respectively, Rav and Samuel cultivated a native Babylonian rabbinate, which increasingly provided the manpower for local Jewish courts and other communal services. While the usual tensions between temporal and religious arms frequently existed in Babylonia, the symbiosis of exilarchate and rabbinate endured until the middle of the 11th century.
Paradoxically, Babylonian rabbinism derived its theological and political strength from its fundamentally unoriginal character. As a transplant of Palestinian Judaism, it asserted its historical legitimacy to the Sāsānian dynasty (224–651), who protected Jewish practices against interference from fanatical Magian priests, and to native Jewish officials, who argued for the validity of indigenous Babylonian deviations from Palestinian norms. But ultimately the historical importance of this transplantation lay in Babylonia’s serving as the proving groundfor the adaptability of Palestinian Judaism to a Diaspora situation. Legal and theological adaptations generated by the new locale and the needs of the times inevitably produced changes in the religious tradition. The laws of agriculture, purity, and sacrifices all of necessity fell into disuse. The principles embodied in these laws, however, and the core of the legal and theological system—consisting of faith in the revelation and election of Israel, the requirement that the individual live by the canons of Jewish civil and family law, and the network of communal institutions modeled on those of Palestinian Judaism—remained intact, thereby ensuring a basic continuity and uniformity among rabbinically oriented communities everywhere. Because historical circumstances made Babylonia the mediator of this tradition to all Jewish communities in the High Middle Ages (9th–12th centuries), the Babylonian version of Jewish religion became synonymous with normative Judaism and the measure of Judaic authenticity everywhere.
“The law of the [Gentile] government is binding”—the principle formulated by Samuel (died 254), head of the academy at Nehardea—summarizes the essential novelty in rabbinic reorientation to life on foreign soil. Whereas Palestinian rabbis had complied with imperial decrees of taxation as legitimate de facto—and this was all that Samuel had in mind—Babylonian teachers now rationalized governmental authority in this respect as legitimate de jure, thus enjoining upon the Jews political quietism and submissiveness as part of their religious doctrine. In all other areas of civil law, the Jews were instructed by their rabbis to file suit in Jewish courts and thus to conduct their businesses as well as their family lives by rabbinic law.
While the rabbis could impose their discipline more effectively in matters of public law than in private religious practice, the density of the Jewish population in many areas of Parthia(northeastern Iran) and Babylonia facilitated the application of moral and disciplinary pressures. The most effective vehicle for the dissemination of their teachings was the academies, where judges and communal teachers were trained; among these institutions, those of Sura and Pumbedita remained preeminent. Frequent public lectures in the synagogues of the academies on Sabbaths and festivals were capped by public kalla (study-course) assemblies for alumni of the schools during the two months, Adar (February–March) and Elul (August–September), when the lull in agricultural work freed many to attend semiannual refresher instruction. These meetings were followed by regular popular lectures during the festival seasons that soon followed. Thus, while rabbis constituted a distinct class within the community, their efforts were oriented toward making as much of the community as possible members of a learned and religious elite. The harmonious relations that obtained with but few interruptions over the centuries between the Sāsānian rulers and their Jewish subjects gave the Jewish population the air of a quasi-state, which the Jewish leadership frequently extolled as superior to the Jewish community of Palestine.
The dissemination of the Palestinian Talmud probably stimulated the Babylonians to follow suit by collecting and arranging the records of study and decisions of their own academies and courts. The Babylonian Talmud, which apparently underwent several stages of redaction (c. 500–650) on the basis of the proto-Talmuds—the early collections of commentaries on the Mishna used in the academies—accordingly became the standard of reference for judicial precedent and theological doctrine for all of Babylonian Jewry and all those communities under its influence. Some scholars have postulated a group of anonymous editors of these earlier materials, calling them stammaim (“anonymous ones”). As had been the case with the Mishna, the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud was later designated by authorities as marking the end of a period in Jewish history. The scholars who added the finishing stylistic touches, known as savoraʾim (“explicators”), were classified as a transitional stage between the amoraim and the geonim.
The enduring vigour of Jewish faith during these centuries is graphically demonstrated by the missionary activity of Jews throughout the ancient Middle East, especially in the Arabian Peninsula. Proud Jewish tribes living in close proximity to each other in the vicinity of Yathrib (later Medina, Muhammad’s home city) engaged in agriculture and commerce and proclaimed the superiority of their monotheistic ethos and eschatology. In Yemen(southwestern Arabia) the last of the Ḥimyarite rulers (reigned from c. 2nd century CE), Dhu Nuwas, proclaimed himself a Jew and finally suffered defeat in approximately 525 as a consequence of Christian influence on the Abyssinian armies. Jewish missionaries, however, continued to compete with Christian missionaries and thus helped to lay the groundwork for the birth of an indigenous Arabic monotheism—Islam—that was to alter the course of world history.
The age of the geonim (c. 640–1038)
Triumph of the Babylonian rabbinate
The lightning conquests in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula by the armies of Islam (7th–8th century) created a political framework for the basically uniform (i.e., Babylonian) character of medieval Judaism. As a “people of the Book” (i.e., of the Bible), the Jews were permitted by the Muslims to live under the same autonomous structure that had developed under Arsacid and Sāsānian rule. The heads of the two principal academies were now formally recognized by the exilarch, and through him by the Muslim caliphs (the civil and religious heads of the Muslim state), as the official arbiters of all questions of religious law and as the religious heads of all Jewish communities that came under Muslim sway. Known as geonim (plural of gaon, “excellency”), they conducted high courts manned by scholars of graded ranks, and they received financial support from Jewish communities assigned to them by the exilarch. Religious questions and contributions were solicited from all Jewish communities, and these, along with formal gaonic replies (responsa), were regularly publicized at the semiannual kalla convocations. Under the strong leadership of Yehudai, gaon of Sura (presided 760–763), the Babylonian rabbinate made vigorous efforts to replace Palestinian usage wherever it was still in vogue—including the study of Palestinian amoraic legal literature—with Babylonian practice and texts, thus making the Babylonian Talmud the unrivalled standard of Jewish norms. The campaign’s success is indicated by the usage of the term Talmud, which, when unqualified, has ever since meant the Babylonian Talmud. Indeed, even in Palestine the Babylonian corpus displaced its older rival and caused the study of Palestinian Talmudic literature to be confined to circles of legal specialists.
Anti-rabbinic reactions
The firm—and occasionally oppressive—tactics of exilarchs and geonim generated anti-rabbinic reactions in the form of sectarian and messianic revolts, especially in outlying areas where enforcement was difficult. Inspired in part by ancient Palestinian sectarian doctrines and in part by Muslim usage, the sects were by and large quickly and forcefully suppressed. In the 8th century, according to the traditional Rabbinite account, Anan ben David, a disaffected member of the exilarchic family, founded a dissident group, the Ananites, later known as the Karaites (Scripturalists). The exact relationship between the followers of Anan and the later Karaites, however, remains unclear. The term itself first appeared in the 9th century, when various dissident groups coalesced and ultimately adopted Anan as their founder, though they rejected several of his teachings. The new group advocated a threefold program of rejection of rabbinic law as a human fabrication and therefore as an unwarranted, unauthoritative addition to Scripture; a return to Palestine to hasten the messianic redemption; and a reexamination of Scripture to retrieve authentic law and doctrine. Under the leadership of Daniel al-Qumisi (c.850?), a Karaite settlement prospered in the Holy Land, from which it spread as far as northwestern Africa and Christian Spain. A barrage of Karaite treatises presenting new views of scriptural exegesis stimulated renewed study of the Bible and the Hebrew language in Rabbinite circles as well. The most momentous consequence of these new studies was the invention of several systems of vocalization for the text of the Hebrew Bible in Babylonia and Tiberias in the 9th and 10th centuries. The annotation of the Masoretic (traditional, or authorized) text of the Bible with vocalic, musical, and grammatical accents in the Tiberian schools of the 10th-century scholars Ben Naftali and Ben Asher fixed the Masoretic textpermanently and, through it, the morphology of the Hebrew language for Karaites as well as Rabbinites.
In the face of sectarian challenges, the geonim intensified their efforts against any deviation from Rabbinite norms. They began to issue handbooks of Jewish law that set forth in concise and unequivocal terms the standards for correct practice. A number of these codes, notably the Halakhot gedolot (“Great Laws”), Siddur Rav Amram Gaon (“The Prayer Book of Rav Amram Gaon”; on liturgical practice), and Sheʾeltot (“Disquisitions”) by Aḥa of Shabḥa (c. 680–c. 752), attained authoritative status in local schools and further unified medieval Judaism.
The geonim, however, were powerless to halt several social developments in the 9th century that progressively undermined their hold even on Rabbinite communities. A renaissance of Greek philosophy and sciences in Arabic translation, coupled with the progressive urbanization of the upper classes of all religious and ethnic groups in the centres of political, commercial, and cultural activity, generated a new intelligentsia that cut across religious and ethnic lines. Widespread skepticism concerning basic doctrines of faith such as creation, revelation, and retribution was most poignantly represented by latitudinarianism (the tendency to be flexible and tolerant about deviations from orthodox beliefs and doctrines) and by antinomian gnostic groups that denied divine providence and omniscience (seeantinomianism). Ḥiwi al-Balkhī, a 9th-century skeptical Jewish pamphleteer, scandalized the faithful by openly attacking the morality of Scripture and by issuing for schools an expurgated edition of the Bible that omitted “offensive” material (e.g., alleged stories of God acting dishonestly). A mystifying Hebrew tract titled Sefer yetzira (“Book of Creation”) posited in terse and enigmatic epigrams a novel theory of creation that betrayed Neoplatonic influence. Karaites joined philosophically oriented intellectuals in heaping scorn on popular Rabbinite customs that smacked of superstition and, above all, on Talmudic homilies that referred to God in anthropomorphic terms.
Gaonic difficulties were compounded by the rise in North Africa and Spain of populous and wealthy Jewish communities that, thanks to the development of their own local schools and talent, ignored the Babylonian academies or favoured one over the other with religious queries and, in consequence, with financial contributions. To the delight of dissidents and the chagrin of the faithful, competition between the Babylonian academies turned to internecine hostility. Occasional revolts against exilarchic taxation and administration in outlying areas of Persia had to be quelled with armed force. The Palestinian Rabbinites had revived their own academies, and their presidents now not only appealed for support in other Diaspora lands but challenged the authority of the Babylonians to serve as final arbiters on matters of public import, such as the regulation of the calendar. By 900 the Rabbinite community of Babylonia was in a state of chaos and dissolution.
The gaonate of Saʿadia ben Joseph
In a bold effort to restore discipline and respect for the gaonate, the exilarch David ben Zakkai(916/917–940) bypassed the families from whom the geonim had traditionally been selected and in 928 appointed Saʿadia ben Joseph (882–942) to head the academy of Sura. Of Egyptian birth, Saʿadia had gained wide acclaim for his scholarly retorts to Karaites, heretics, and Palestinian Rabbinites. Politically, Saʿadia’s brief presidency was a fiasco and aggravated the chaos by a communal civil war. His gaonate, however, gave an official stamp to his many works, which responded to the ideological challenges to Rabbinism by restating traditional Judaism in intellectually cogent terms. Saʿadia thus became the pioneer of a Judeo-Arabic culture that would blossom fully in Andalusian Spain a century later. His translation of the Bible into Arabic and his Arabic commentaries on Scripture made the rabbinic understanding of the Bible accessible to masses of Jews. His poetic compositions for liturgical use provided the stimulus for the revival of Hebrew poetry. Above all, his rationalist commentary on the puzzling Sefer yetzira and his brilliant treatise on philosophical theology, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, synthesized the Torah (understood as the divine law in the Five Books of Moses together with the rabbinic understanding of this revelation) and “Greek wisdom” in accordance with the dominant Muslim philosophical school of kalām. His efforts made Judaism philosophically respectable and the study of philosophy a religiously acceptable pursuit.
Far from tightening the gaonic hold over the Jewish communities of the Arabic world, Saʿadia’s works actually provided the wherewithal for ever-greater intellectual and religious self-sufficiency. While economic, political, and military upheavals progressively weakened various institutions in the Middle East, concurrent prosperity and consolidation in the West stimulated the maturation of indigenous leadership in Egypt, Al-Qayrawān (Kairouan; in present-day Tunisia), and Muslim Spain. To be sure, able geonim such as Sherira and his son Hai (939–1038) exercised enormous influence over the Judeo-Arabic world through hundreds of legal responsa issued in the course of their successive terms (968–1038) at Pumbedita. Circumstances beyond anyone’s control, however, were gradually undermining the effectiveness of exilarchate and gaonate. But by 1038, the year of Hai’s death, the consequences of four centuries of gaonic activity had become indelible: the Babylonian Talmud had become the agent of basic Jewish uniformity; the synthesis of philosophy and tradition had become the hallmark of the Jewish intelligentsia; and the Hebrew classics of the past had become the texts of study in Jewish schools everywhere.
Medieval European Judaism (950–1750)
The two major branches
Despite the fundamental uniformity of medieval Jewish culture, distinctive Jewish subcultures were shaped by the cultural and political divisions within the Mediterranean basin, in which Arabic Muslim and Latin Christian civilizations coexisted as discrete and self-contained societies. Two major branches of rabbinic civilization developed in Europe: the Ashkenazic, or Franco-German, and the Sephardic, or Andalusian-Spanish. Distinguished most conspicuously by their varying pronunciation of Hebrew, the numerous differences between them in religious orientation and practice derived, in the first instance, from the geographical fountainheads of their culture—the Ashkenazim (plural of Ashkenazi) tracing their cultural filiation to Italy and Palestine and the Sephardim (plural of Sephardi) to Babylonia—and from the influences of their respective immediate milieus. While the Jews of Christian Europe wrote for internal use almost exclusively in Hebrew, those of Muslim areas regularly employed Arabic for prose works and Hebrew for poetic composition. Whereas the literature of Jews in Latin areas was overwhelmingly religious in content, that of the Jews of Spain was well endowed with secular poetry and scientific works inspired by the cultural tastes of the Arabic literati. Most significantly, the two forms of European Judaism differed in their approaches to the identical rabbinic base that they had inherited from the East and in their attitudes to Gentile culture and politics.
Sephardic developments
In Muslim Spain, Jews frequently served the government in official capacities and, therefore, not only took an active interest in political affairs but engaged in considerable social and intellectual intercourse with influential circles of the Muslim population. Since the support of letters and scholarship was part of state policy in Muslim Spain, and since Muslim savantstraced the source of Muslim power to the vitality of the Arabic language, scripture, and poetry, Jews looked at Arabic culture with undisguised admiration and unabashedly attempted to adapt themselves to its canons of scholarship and good taste. The cultured Jew accordingly demonstrated command of Arabic style and the ability to display the beauty of his own heritage through a philological mastery of the text of the Hebrew Bible and through the composition of Hebrew verse, now set to an Arabic metre. Since Arabic philosophers and scientists promulgated the compatibility of Greek philosophy with the revelation to Muhammad, rationalist study of the Jewish classics and defense of rabbinic faith in philosophical terms became dominant motifs in the Andalusian Jewish schools (in southern Spain).
The period of feverish literary creativity in classical Jewish disciplines as well as in the sciences in Spain has been called the golden age of Hebrew literature (c. 1000–1148). Jewish culture of this age was distinguished by the supreme literary merit of its Hebrew poetry, the new spirit of relatively free and rationalist examination of hallowed texts and doctrines, and the extension of Jewish cultural perspectives to totally new horizons—mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, and belles-lettres. Noteworthy too was the frequent overlapping of the Sephardic religious leadership with the new Jewish courtier class. The unprecedented heights that the latter attained—Ḥisdai ibn Shaprut (c. 915–975) as counsellorto the caliphs of Córdoba; the Ibn Nagrelas as viziers of Granada; the Ibn Ezras (Moses ibn Ezra, c. 1060–1139; and Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, c. 1092–1167), the Ibn Megashs, and the Ibn Albalias as high officials in Granada and Sevilla (Seville)—and the distinctions of these men and their protégés in Jewish and worldly letters restored the ancient integration of culture and practical life and expressed the identification of the Jewish elite with the biblical age of Jewish power and artistic creativity. The effort to recapture the vitality and beauty of biblical poetry stimulated comparative philological and fresh exegetical research that yielded new insights into the morphology of the Hebrew language and into the historical soil of biblical prophecy. Judah ibn Ḥayyuj and Abū al-Walīd Marwān ibn Janāḥ produced manuals on biblical grammar that applied the results of Arabic philology to their own tongue and provided the principles of Hebrew grammatical study down to modern times. The anticipations of modern higher biblical criticism by Judah ibn Balaʿam and Moses ibn Gikatilla (11th century) were popularized in Hebrew a few generations later by Abraham ibn Ezra. In the revival of Hebrew poetry, liturgical as well as secular, that translated the new preoccupation with language and beauty into art, Andalusian Jewry saw its greatest achievements. Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1022–c. 1058), Moses ibn Ezra, and Judah ha-Levi (c. 1075–1141) were the acknowledged supreme geniuses of a form of expression that became a passion with thousands the length and breadth of Spain. But the most enduring consequence of the new temper was the redefinition of religious faith in the light of Greco-Arabic philosophical theories. The exposition of faith in Neoplatonic terms by Solomon ibn Gabirol, the defense of Rabbinism using Aristotelian categories by Abraham ibn Daud (c. 1110–c. 1180), the attack on the religious inadequacy of philosophy by Judah ha-Levi, and the epoch-making Aristotelian philosophical theology by Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) fixed philosophical inquiry as an enduring subject on the agenda of rabbinic concerns. Beginning in the 13th century, a new class of philosophers sponsored the translation of Arabic literature into Hebrew and of Hebrew and Arabic literature into Latin; they brought Jews and their thought into the mainstream of Western philosophy and gained for them the position of middlemen of culture between East and West.
The salient trends of Sephardic Judaism did not imply relegation of the rabbinic class to a secondary role. Rather, they shaped a fresh approach to rabbinic texts that paralleled in many respects those adopted in biblical exegesis. Strict adherence to consistency, systematization, and philological exactitude yielded new codes that often diverged from gaonic judgments. A digest of Talmudic law by Isaac Alfasi (1013–1103) placed the Sephardic rabbinate on a self-reliant footing and epitomized its method of getting at the essentials of Talmudic law by sidestepping contingent discussions. In this area too, it was Moses Maimonides who brought the Sephardic principles of comprehensiveness, lucidity, and logical arrangement to their apex through his code of Jewish law, Mishne Torah. Written in Mishnaic Hebrew, the work remains the only comprehensive treatment of all of Jewish law, including those fields that are not applicable in the Diaspora (agriculture, purity, sacrifices, Temple procedure).
With Maimonides, however, the pure Sephardic tradition came to an end, for the Almohad(Amazigh [Berber] Muslim reformers) invasion of Spain in 1147–48 wiped out the Jewish communities of Andalusia and drove thousands to northern Spain and Provence (a province of southeastern France) or, as in the case of Maimonides’ family, to North Africa and Egypt. Sephardic Jewry suddenly encountered a discrete, mature, Jewish culture that for centuries had been developing independently and along quite different lines.
Ashkenazic developments
The Ashkenazic Jewry, into whose communities the Sephardim had been thrust by political events, regarded their own heritage and the Christian world in which they lived from a perspective shaped exclusively by rabbinic categories. They drew their school texts and the values that determined their judgments from the Talmud and the Midrash. Sensing no intellectual challenge in Christian faith, which they regarded with thinly concealed contempt, they constituted for the most part a merchant class that lived in urban centres under the protection of ecclesiastical and temporal rulers but also under their own complex of laws and institutions. Except for mercantile relations, Christian society was closed to them, thanks largely to age-old ecclesiastical prohibitions forbidding all social intercourse with Jews. With the Arab conquest of Spain and the rise of the Carolingians (the dynasty that ruled western Europe in the 8th and 9th centuries), the 12-decade interlude of suppression by the Visigoths(589–711) came to an end, and the Roman precedent of toleration and autonomy again became the rule. Merchants and rabbis moved from Italy to France and the Rhineland and infused new energies into the Jewish communities there. An indigenous religious leadership began to emerge at the very time that Andalusian Jewry was entering its golden age. The First Crusade (1096–99) unleashed a tide of hatred, periodic violence, and progressive restrictions on Jewish activities in the Rhineland, but the communities affected had attained sufficient resilience to reestablish their communal institutions shortly afterward and to continue the cultivation of their deeply ingrained traditions.
By 1150 Ashkenazic Jewry had established a culture of its own, with an indigenous literature that ranged from the popular homily to the esoteric tract on the nature of the divine glory. Study of the Bible and the Talmud was oriented toward a mystical pietism in which prayer and contemplation of the secrets embedded in the liturgy were to lead to religious experience. Significantly, the fathers of the Ashkenazic tradition were remembered as liturgical poets and initiates into divine mysteries, and the early codes of the Franco-German schools were heavily weighted with discussions of liturgical usage. After the Second Crusade (1147–49), the German Jewish mystics (also called Hasidim, or pietists) placed heavy emphasis on the merits of asceticism, martyrdom, and penitence, thus adapting to a Jewish idiom the features of saintliness then current in Christian Europe. For the masses of Jews, the cultural fare consisted principally of biblical tales and instruction as interpreted by rabbinic Midrash, the lives of scholars and saints, and liturgical poetry reaffirming the election of Israel and faith in messianic redemption. The chief vehicle of popular instruction consisted of anthologies from the rabbinic writings and commentaries on Scripture, of which the most popular was that of Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes (1040–1105), known as Rashi, the acronym formed from the initials of his name in Hebrew. For the more advanced student, Rashi composed a succinctcommentary on the Talmud that achieved an authority approaching that of the text itself.
As living sources of law and values, the Bible and the Talmud had an impact on public and private, as well as secular and religious, affairs. Taking their cue from Talmudic precedent and from Christian ecclesiastical procedures of their own times, the Ashkenazic rabbis occasionally gathered in regional synods to enact legislation on problems of a general nature for which there was no adequate precedent in the literature. Among the most enduring of these measures were the prohibition of bigamy and arbitrary divorce and severe economic penalties for abandonment of wives. Of far more immediate concern to the average Jew were the circumvention of Talmudic prohibitions against usury, relaxation of prohibitions regarding traffic with Gentiles in wines, and adoption of severe disciplinary measures, such as excommunication, against informers or those appealing, in cases involving Jews, to the Gentile authorities.
A new religious trend began in Provence in the 13th century with the introduction into the Talmudic academies of a novel form of mystical study known as Kabbala (literally, “tradition”), which soon spread to northern Spain. Expressing gnostic doctrines in rabbinic guise, the devotees of Kabbala devised an esoteric vocabulary that reinterpreted the Bible and rabbinic law as allegories of the various modes in which God is manifested in a spiritual universe, access to which was reserved for initiates. The most renowned literary product of this new circle was the Zohar (“The Book of Splendour”), a vast mystical commentary on the Pentateuch by Moses de León (c. 1250–1305); with later additions it became the Bible of Jewish mystics everywhere. Although some of the theological notions of the Kabbalists deviated from basic postulates of Jewish monotheism, the insistence of the mystics on unflagging ritual orthodoxy and on a nominal acceptance of the biblical text as divine revelation helped them avert the suspicions aroused by Jewish Aristotelians and Averroists—followers of the 12th-century Arabic Aristotelian philosopher Averroës (1126–98)—and, in time, even won for them the status of a rabbinic elite. Indeed, in the early 13th century some of the mystics lent their support to a campaign that condemned the study of philosophy as generating skepticism, latitudinarianism, and disrespect for traditional literature.
Marginalization and expulsion
Developments within the two major Jewish communities of medieval Europe were complicated by their uncertain relationship with the Christian community surrounding them. By all accounts, Christians and Jews had been on relatively good terms until the 11th century. In the early Middle Ages there were frequent contacts between Christians and Jews, who intermarried and shared language and culture. In the Carolingian era some bishops even complained that the Jews were favoured too much by Carolingian rulers. The situation became more complicated after about the year 1000, as Christian society began a process of reorganization that contributed to the marginalization of the Jews and other groups. Although the Jews did not endure unrelenting persecution and even enjoyed a cultural renaissance in the 12th century that paralleled a Christian one, they faced an increasingly hostile community that created a new theological image of the Jews and undermined the place of the Jews in society.
In the opening decade of the 11th century, Jews in various parts of Europe faced violent attacks and forced conversions that led some, according to one account, to commit suicide rather than accept baptism. Attacks against the Jews and full-scale massacres of Jews would occur throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, most notably at Mainz in the Rhineland in 1096, in England in 1198–90, in Franconia in 1298, and in France in 1320. The image of the Jews among Christians worsened, and numerous anti-Semitic stereotypes appeared in the 12th century. The most notorious example of these was the blood libel, which alleged that the Jews killed Christian boys and used their blood to make unleavened bread.
Meanwhile, official legislation of the church confirmed the declining position of the Jews. Pope Innocent III issued a decretal declaring the Jews to be in perpetual servitude for the killing of Christ, and at the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 the Jews were ordered to wear distinctive clothing, forbidden to hold public office, and prohibited from appearing in public during the last three days of the Easter season. With the discovery and burning of the Talmud by Christians in the 13th century, the church’s view of the Jews worsened, because the church thus became aware that contemporary Jews were different from biblical Jews. The acceptance of the Talmud by the Jews was understood as heretical by the church, which had already launched a Crusade and the Inquisition against Christian heretics. The Jews’ failure to live up to the Christian understanding of them undermined the contemporary theological justification for their continued existence (i.e., until the end of time, as witness to the truth of Christian revelation).
Challenges also emerged in the economic and social order as economic opportunities were increasingly restricted. Although there were Jewish merchants, artisans, and viticulturists throughout much of the Middle Ages, by the 12th and 13th centuries the Jews were limited to the occupation of money lending, which brought some of them great wealth but also great animosity from borrowers. Moreover, the Jews were often an important source of capital for the monarchs of Europe. As an important source of revenue, the Jews provided a valuable service to the kings and thus received special protection in the law. This relationship, however, had an ominous side, as the Jews came to be defined in the law as the personal property of the king, to be exploited as he saw fit. Jews also lost their status as individuals and were secure only as long as they were of utility to their lords.
The declining economic usefulness of the Jews and the related deterioration of their social and religious status led to their expulsion from England in 1290 and from France in 1306. Jews were also expelled from the Holy Roman Empire and, most notoriously, from Spain in 1492. In Spain, anti-Jewish riots in the late 14th century had led to the conversion of large numbers of Jews, the so-called conversos. Spanish Christians, however, remained distrustful of the conversos, who were thought to maintain contact with uncoverted Jews and to practice the Jewish faith secretly. An inquisition established to deal with the conversos led to local expulsions in the 1480s. By 1492, however, the king and queen, Ferdinand II and Isabella I, and their inquisitors decided that the only real solution to the problem was the permanent separation of the conversos and the Jews. The Jews were compelled to choose between baptism and exile, and ultimately some 40,000 (estimates range as high as 800,000) departed Spain, never to return. They settled in Navarre (then outside the kingdom of Spain), North Africa, and Portugal. Many of those in Portugal, however, accepted Christianity as a result of an order of expulsion or conversion there in 1497.
Conflicts and new movements
The conflict between philosophers and anti-philosophers in Provence and northern Spain represented a clash between two mature Jewish subcultures of diverse geographic origins, the Sephardic and the Ashkenazic, each of which had in the course of centuries developed different esoteric doctrines to transcend the legalistic formalism and confining dogmas of normative Judaism. Both forms of speculation sought salvation for exceptional individuals through knowledge and thus provided an immediate substitute for messianic deliverance from exile and servitude. Each group charged the other with distortion of tradition, and each issued apologias and excommunications characteristic of medieval doctrinal controversy. While the rifts between them reached bitter proportions, the common threat posed by ecclesiastical attacks on the Talmud in public disputations and by the expulsion of the Jews from France in 1306 prevented open rupture or resolution of the conflict. Ever since that time, two strands of orthodoxy representing the two forms of medieval metaphysical speculation have lived side by side in an uneasy truce.
Most rabbinic circles of the 14th and 15th centuries displayed a progressive dogmatism and insistence on uniformity of practice. The great legal code of Jacob ben Asher of Toledo (c. 1269–c. 1340), Arbaʿa ṭurim (c. 1335; “Four Rows”), which sought to level differences in usage between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, signified the dominant trend of the rabbinate. The increasing hardening of ideological lines, however, did not eliminate independent thinking. Isaac Albalag(13th century) propounded an Averroist (rationalistic) interpretation of the Bible predicated on a theory of double truth (of reason and revelation), while Gersonides (Levi ben Gershom; 1288–1344), gave Jewish Aristotelianism a new and comprehensive formulation. In Muslim areas, the Maimonidean regimen of philosophical contemplation was extended by Maimonides’ son Abraham to a quest for pietist ecstasy that seemed to have much in common with Sufism(Islamic mysticism).
The anti-Jewish riots in Spain and their consequences stimulated the anti-intellectualism of the rabbinate. Hasdai Crescas (1340–1410), while conceding the philosophical untenability of traditional belief in free will (see also determinism), launched a scathing attack on Aristotelian approaches to religion, and his disciple Joseph Albo (c. 1380–c. 1444) issued a compendium on dogma that reaffirmed the traditional postulates of divine creation, revelation, and retribution as axioms of Judaism. But these reassertions of traditional faith could not overcome the ideological and social fragmentation that had split the Spanish communities, often leaving them in open conflict with each other. Widespread marranism (ostensible conversion to Christianity) polarized the community and left residues of bitterness toward those returning to the fold (see Marrano). The expulsions from Spain and Portugal drove the leadership into intensified pursuits of mystical escape from, and rationalization of, the endless calamities that befell their flocks. In Italy and the Ottoman Empire (Asia Minor, northeastern Africa, and southeastern Europe)—the two principal centres of refuge for the exiles of the Iberian Peninsula—legalistic Kabbalism, which insisted on strict observance of the law as a precondition of mystical practice and study, became the dominant form of rabbinic leadership. Despite the terrible circumstances, the rabbinate continued to produce works of encyclopaedic proportions and staggering erudition in every field of Jewish learning.
Inspired by the Jewish tradition that the coming of the messiah would be preceded by horrendous catastrophes, a group of rabbis established a community in Ẕefat (Safed), Palestine, where, in anticipation of the new dawn, every aspect of life was conducted on principles of saintliness and mystical contemplation. Under the leadership of Jacob Berab, the ancient practice of ordination (semikha) was reinstituted in 1538 to form the nucleus of a revived Sanhedrin that would administer ritual procedures requiring fully ordained authorities. Although the effort failed because of rabbinic opposition, it reflected the temper of the times and further fanned messianic hopes sparked shortly before by the campaigns of Solomon Molkho (c. 1500–32) and David Reubeni (died after 1532) in Italy; Molkho was burned at the stake by the Christian authorities, and Reubeni died in prison. In Ẕefat itself, Kabbalism soon entered a new phase under the inspiration of Isaac Luria (1534–72) and Ḥayyim Vital (1543–1620), who confided to their disciples that the calamities of Israel were but a mirror of the captivity into which many sparks of the Godhead itself had fallen. Liturgical innovations and a novel mystical theology were formulated to redeem the imprisoned elements of divinity and thus restore creation to the harmony intended for it.
That the Almighty himself was not quite omnipotent, at least with respect to the fate of his chosen people, was cautiously hinted in a Hebrew work of history (1550) by Solomon ibn Verga (1460–1554), who regarded the Jewish problem as a sociopolitical one to which theological answers were futile. Such guarded rationalism was entertained by a number of courageous thinkers in 16th-century Italy, where, despite the policy of ghettoization (the segregation of the Jewish community in a restricted quarter) begun by Venice in 1516 and soon extended to all major Italian cities, the spirit of the Renaissance and the passion for historical criticism had captivated many Jews. Catholic scholars and prelates occasionally employed rabbis to instruct them in the Hebrew language and in the secrets of the Kabbala, which some Christians believed actually verified the postulates of their own faith. Contacts with Christian scholars in turn introduced Jews such as Azariah dei Rossi (c. 1513–78), whose Meor ʿenayim(“Enlightenment of the Eyes”) inaugurated critical textual study of rabbinical texts, to new bodies of literature that had been lost to the Jewish community, such as the works of Philoand Josephus.
Such phenomena, however, were comparatively rare and isolated. The spread of dogmatic Kabbalism eventually led to the widespread acceptance of the views of the pseudo-messiah Shabbetai Tzevi (1626–76). Most of European and Ottoman Jewry was swept into near hysteriain the belief that the end was now finally at hand. When Shabbetai converted to Islam after being apprehended by the Ottoman government, all but his most faithful followers were despondent, though some tried to explain the apostasy of the pseudo-messiah as a form of voluntary crucifixion for the sake of the Jews. A witch hunt on the part of traditionalists to uncover the remaining cells of heresy unsettled Jewish communities everywhere.
The following century (to c. 1750) was the darkest in the history of Rabbinic Judaism. Scholarship declined and popular religion became mechanical to an extent that Jews had never before experienced. Polish Jews suffered terribly during the Deluge, a period of peasant revolts and war involving Poland, Russia, and Sweden that began in 1648. The Jews were slaughtered by rebels and professional soldiers during the war, which was fought mostly on Polish soil, and many survivors were sold as slaves in Turkey. The massacres and impoverishment of Polish Jewry after 1648 brought a pall over the growing eastern European centres of Jewish life. Antinomian eruptions of extreme Shabbetaians under the leadership of the self-proclaimed messiah and later Catholic convert Jacob Frank (1726–91) alarmed Gentile authorities almost as much as they did Jews. But the fossilization referred to above was only apparent. Beneath the surface many were restlessly searching for new avenues of faith, and the 18th century saw fresh responses that set the history of the Jews and of Judaism in new directions and marked the beginning of a new era.
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