THE JEWISH TRANSMITTORS
We have already seen that the Jews took a prominent part in bringing
a knowledge of philosophical research from Asia to Spain, and Ibn
Jabirul (Avencebrol) takes his place in the line of transmission by
which Spanish Islam was brought into contact with these studies. This
did not end the participation of the Jews in philosophical work, but
their subsequent writers do not form part of the regular series of
Aristotelian students influencing the Muslim world, but are rather
confined to Jewish circles. Yet they are of an importance wider than
merely sectarian interests, for it was by means of Jewish disciples of
Ibn Rushd that he was raised to a position of much greater importance
than he has ever enjoyed in the Muslim world. Amongst the Jews, indeed,
there arose a strong Averroist school, which later on was the chief
means of introducing Ibn Rushd’s theories to Latin scholasticism. As
we shall see later the transmission of philosophy from Arabic to Latin
surroundings falls into two stages: in the earlier the Arabic material
passes directly, and the works used are those which had attained a
leading importance in Islam, but in the later stage the Jews were the
intermediaries, and thus the choice of text-books and authorities was
largely influenced by an existing Jewish scholasticism.
Ibn Jabirul shows the Aristotelian philosophy introduced to Jewish
surroundings, just as Sa`id al-Fayyumi in Mesopotamia shows the
entrance of Mu`tazilite discussions amongst the Jews. In fact, all the
intellectual experiences of the Muslim community were repeated amongst
the Jews. In Islam the Mu`tazilites and the philosophers were followed
by the scholastics, who took their final form under al-Ghazali, and so
in Judaism also al-Ghazali has his parallel.
The founder of an orthodox Jewish scholasticism was the Spanish Jew,
_Jehuda hal-Levi_ (d. 540 A.H. = 1145 A.D.), who lived during the
Murabit rule and the coming of the Muwahhids. His teaching is known
by a work entitled _Sefer ha-Kuzari_, which consists of five essays,
supposed to be dialogues between the King of the Chazars and a Jewish
visitor to his court. These dialogues discuss various topics of a
philosophical and political character. The study of philosophy is
commended, but it is pointed out that good conduct is not attained
by philosophy, which is occupied with scientific investigations, and
many of these have no direct bearing upon the duties of practical
life; the best means of promoting right conduct is religion, which is
the established tradition of wisdom revealed to men of ancient times.
Even in speculative matters a surer guidance is often furnished by
religious tradition than by the speculations of philosophers. God
created all things from nothing; the attempt to explain the presence
of imperfection and evil in the world by the theory of the eternity of
matter, or by the operation of laws of nature is futile; those laws
themselves must refer back to God. The difficulty arising from the
mingling of evil with good in creation is admitted; the real solution
is unknown, but it must be maintained that creation was the work of God
in spite of the difficulties which this presents.
As to the nature and attributes of God, the distinction which Sa`id
al-Fayyumi tried to make between the essential and other attributes is
untenable. The attributes stated in the Old Testament may be applied
to God because they are revealed, which is exactly the same teaching
as that of al-Ash`ari and al-Ghazali. These attributes are either
referring to active qualities, or to relative, or to negative. Those
which are active and those which are relative are used metaphorically;
we do not know their real significance.
The fifth essay is more especially directed against the philosophers
as teaching doctrines subversive of revelation. In the first place
he disapproves the theory of emanations; the work of creation was
directly performed by God without any intermediary; if there were
emanations, why did they stop short at the lunar sphere? This refers to
the descriptions given by the Arabic writers who endeavour to explain
the successive emanations from the First Cause as reaching down to
different spheres. He opposes also the attempt of the Mutakallimin to
reconcile philosophy and theology as tending to undermine the truths of
revealed religion, so that he takes a more reactionary position than
al-Ghazali. This was inevitable, for Jewish thought had as yet been
much less influenced by philosophy than was the case with the Muslims.
He objects also to the description of the soul as intellect, more it
would appear because common usage confined “intellectual activity” too
much to philosophical speculation, and especially he protested against
the implication that only souls of philosophers were finally united
to the Agent Intellect. The soul of man is a spiritual substance and
imperishable; it does not win immortality by intellectual activity but
is necessarily immortal by its own nature. He admits, however, that
the passive soul in man is influenced by the Agent Intellect, which he
seems to regard as the wisdom of God personified. Generally, therefore,
Hal-Levi defined Jewish orthodoxy as against the teachings of the
philosophers: he recognises the force of philosophical speculation,
but is himself distinctly conservative. God was literally the creator,
and no philosophical definition of creation which tended to explain it
otherwise than according to traditional belief was permissible. But
Hal-Levi does not seem to have had any great influence outside Judaism,
and his work rather tends to show how far Jewish thought of the 6th
cent. of the Hijra was out of sympathy with current philosophical
speculation, though no longer ignorant of it.
It was in Spain that the Jews especially distinguished themselves as
physicians, reproducing and extending the investigations of the Arabic
authorities, who were pupils of the Nestorians and Jews in the first
place. The most distinguished of these Spanish Jews who became leaders
in medical science was _Ibn Zuhr_ (d. 595 A.H. = 1199 A.D.), commonly
known to the mediæval West as “Avenzoar.” He was a native of Seville
and member of a family of physicians. Jewish philosophy does not take
a leading place until the appearance of _Abu Imran Moses b. Maymun b.
`Abdullah_ (d. 601 A.H. = 1204 A.D.), a contemporary and follower of
Ibn Rushd and the one who did most to establish an Averroist school,
and so passed on his work and influence to Latin Christendom. He was
the son of a pupil of Hal-Levi, and, it is said, a pupil of one of Ibn
Bajja’s pupils. His family retired to Africa to avoid the persecution
of the Muwahhids and settled for a time in Fez, then removed to Egypt.
It was whilst he was at Cairo that Ibn Maymun, or Maimonides as he is
more commonly called by European writers, first heard of Ibn Rushd.
His chief work is known as _Dalalat al-Ha´irin_, “the Guide of the
Perplexed,” which, like all his other books, was produced in Arabic;
about the time of his death this work was translated into Hebrew by
Samuel b. Tibbon as _Moreh Nebukin_. The Arabic text, edited by Munk,
was published at Paris (3 vols.) in 1856-66, and in 1884 an English
translation by Friedländer was published in London. Next to this in
importance is the treatise _Maqalah fi-t-Tawhid_, a treatise on the
unity of God, of which a Hebrew translation was made in the 14th cent.
A.D. His other works were mainly medical, and include treatises “on
poisons and their antidotes,” “on hæmorrhoids,” “on asthma,” and a
commentary on Hippocrates.
Maimonides’ teaching reproduces the substance of that already
associated with al-Farabi and Ibn Sina put into a Jewish form. God
is the Intellect, the _ens intelligens_, and the _intelligibile_:
He is the necessary First Cause and the permanent source. He is
essentially and necessarily one, and attributes cannot be so used as
to imply plurality: only those attributes which describe activity
are admissible, not those which imply relations between God and the
creature. Like Ibn Rushd he disapproves of the Mutakallimin, whom he
regards as mere opportunists in their philosophy and without any staple
principles, besides which their method of compromise does not face
fairly the law of causality. The Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity
of matter cannot, however, be admitted; creation must have been from
nothing, as follows from the law of causality; that such was the case
cannot be proved, but every contrary supposition is untenable. All the
properties of matter, the laws of nature, etc., had their beginning at
creation. On the first day God created the beginnings (_reshit_), that
is to say the intelligences, from which proceeded the several spheres,
and introduced movement, so that on this day the whole universe and all
its contents came into existence. On the succeeding days these contents
were disposed in order and developed; then on the seventh day God
rested, which means that He ceased from active operation and laid the
universe under the control of natural laws, which guided it henceforth.
The teaching of Maimonides shows a somewhat modified form of the system
already developed by al-Farabi and Ibn Sina adapted to Jewish beliefs.
It had a rapid and wide success, spreading through the greater part
of the Jewish community in his own lifetime. But this success was not
without some opposition--the synagogues of Aragon, Catalonga, and of
Provence, where a very large number of Jews had sought refuge from the
Muwahhids; the synagogue at Narbonne, on the other hand, defended him.
It was not until the following century, and chiefly by the efforts of
David Kimchi, that Maimonides was at length generally accepted as the
leading doctor of the Jewish church.
Although Maimonides was known to the Latin scholastics, it was not his
work nor that of any other Jewish teacher which really made the Jews
important to mediæval western thought so much as the work they did in
popularising Ibn Rushd, whom they called “the soul and intelligence
of Aristotle.” Jewish MSS. of Aristotle are rarely found without Ibn
Rushd’s commentary, and his paraphrases very commonly bear the name of
Aristotle at their head. It was as the commentator that he held so high
a position in Jewish thought, and it was as the final and authoritative
commentator that he finally took his place in Latin scholasticism
introduced by Jewish teachers.
The Muwahhid persecution scattered many of the Spanish Jews to
Africa and to Provence and Languedoc. Those who took refuge in Africa,
like Maimonides, retained the use of the Arabic language, but Arabic
quickly became obsolete amongst those who had fled north. No doubt the
refugees in Provence found it necessary to use the Provencal dialect
for communication with their Christian neighbours, but that dialect
had never yet been used for scientific or philosophical purposes; in
Western Christendom Latin was invariably used for all educational
and scholarly purposes, but the refugee Jews did not feel disposed
to adopt a language which had no traditional associations for them
and was altogether a foreign tongue never as yet employed for Jewish
purposes. Under these circumstances the Jewish leaders deliberately
copied the actual condition prevailing amongst their Jewish neighbours
where the ancient Latin was in use as a learned language, whilst its
derived dialects were the speech in everyday use, and so they revived
the use of Hebrew as the medium of teaching and literature. Throughout
Hebrew had retained its place as a liturgical language; there had been
synagogue liturgies in Greek, but those belonged to a much earlier
period. The revival of Hebrew produced a neo-Hebrew which does not
preserve a line of historical continuity with the ancient Hebrew.
For some time Hebrew had been a dead language in the East, and it
had never spread as a living speech to the West. But this artificial
revival, which has more than one parallel in history, was not so
difficult a feat as it sounds at first. The vernacular speech of the
Spanish Jew was Arabic, and philologically Arabic is very nearly a
dialect if not of Arabic, yet at least of a proto-Arabic, which shows
many close parallels with Hebrew. Of course at that time the true
philological relations were not understood: influenced by theological
prepossessions the Jew rather tended to regard Arabic as a derivative
of Hebrew; yet the kinship was obvious, and in the early translations
made from Arabic to Hebrew it is not uncommon to find that most of the
words are translated in such a way that the same root-form is used
as in the original. Secondly, it was not only the case that Hebrew
“came easily” to those who knew Arabic, but there had been serious
philological studies by Jehudh Chayyug, David Kimchi, and others which
had emphasized this close kinship, and had indeed adapted all the rules
of Arabic grammar to the use of Hebrew; it was therefore possible to
compose and even to speak a tolerable Hebrew by the conscious rendering
of the Arabic vocabulary into Hebrew. It is not suggested that the
inaugurators of neo-Hebrew ignored the characteristics of the classical
speech; in fact they did not do so, but they were in a position to use
Hebrew as though a dialect differing from Arabic only in detail, and
in this attitude they were more strictly correct than they supposed.
Before long Arabic began to be entirely discarded, and Hebrew, whose
revival flattered Jewish susceptibilities, was taken up with vigour as
a language of the schools; how far it came into use in the home we do
not know.
This change necessitated the translation of the later theological
and philosophical writers from Arabic into Hebrew. Tradition puts the
beginning of this work of translation in the 12th century, but this is
not possibly true. It was not until well into the 13th century that
Hebrew translations begin to appear. The most famous translators were
of the family of Jehuda ben Tibbon, who cannot himself be accepted as a
translator. The first work was done by Samuel ben Tibbon, who compiled
a Hebrew “Opinions of the Philosophers,” which is a catena of passages
from Ibn Rushd and other Muslim _falasifah_. This production was in
general use as a popular manual until it was replaced by complete
translations of the actual texts, when, of course, such compilations
went out of use. The principal part of the work was done by Moses ben
Tibbon (circ. 1260 A.D.), who translated most of the commentaries of
Ibn Rushd, some portions of his medical works, and Maimonides’ “Guide
of the Perplexed.” About this time Frederick II. was strongly desirous
of introducing the Arabic writers to the knowledge of the West, a
matter to which we shall refer again when we come to consider the
translation of the Arabic philosophical works into Latin, and so we
find him protecting and pensioning Yaqub ben Abba Mari, a son-in-law
of Samuel ben Tibbon, at Naples, and this Yaqub employed in preparing
a Hebrew translation of Ibn Rushd’s commentaries on the Aristotelian
Organon.
The thirteenth century A.D. shows us a continuous series of Hebrew
scholars either preparing compilations and abridgments or actually
translating the full text of the leading Arabic philosophers, and
especially of Ibn Rushd. About 1247 Jehuda ben Salomo Cohen, of
Toledo, published his Hebrew “Search for Wisdom,” an encyclopædia of
Aristotelian doctrines mainly based upon the teachings of Ibn Rushd.
A little later Shem-Tov b. Yusuf b. Falaquera also reproduced the
doctrines of Ibn Rushd in his essays, and later again in the 13th
century Gerson b. Salomo compiled “The Door of Heaven,” which shows the
same influence.
About 1257 Solomon b. Yusuf b. Aiyub, a refugee who had come from
Granada to Bèziers, translated the text of Ibn Rushd’s commentary
on the _de coelo_ and _de mundo_, and in the latter part of this
century complete translations begin to take the place of abridgments
and collections of extracts. About 1284 Zerachia ben Isaac from
Barcelona translated Ibn Rushd’s commentaries on the _Physics_, the
_Metaphysics_, and the treatises _de coelo_ and _de mundo_. Rènan has
drawn attention to the fact that the same works are translated again
and again, sometimes by translators who were very nearly contemporary
and lived in the same neighbourhood. Evidently these translations did
not quickly enter into wide circulation, and it does not seem that the
task of the translator was held in any great esteem; it was regarded
as a purely mechanical work, and not credited with any literary
possibilities.
Early in the 14th century Kalonymos b. Kalonymos b. Meir translated
Ibn Rushd’s commentaries on the _Topica_, _Sophistica_, and _Analytica
Posteriora_ (completed 1314); then his commentaries on the _Physica_,
_Metaphysics_, _de coelo_ and _de mundo_, _de generatione_ and _de
corruptione_, and the _Meteora_ (completed 1317), and followed these by
a translation of the _Destruction of the Destruction_. An independent
Hebrew translation of this latter work was made about the same time
by Kalonymos b. David b. Todros. About 1321 Rabbi Samuel ben Jehuda
ben Meshullam at Marseilles prepared Hebrew versions of Ibn Rushd’s
commentaries on the Nicomachæan Ethics and his paraphrase of the
Republic of Plato, which was regarded by the Arabic writers as part of
the Aristotelian canon. It is rather interesting to note that somewhere
about the same time Juda ben Moses ben Daniel of Rome prepared a
Hebrew translation of _de substantia orbis_ from the Latin translation
which was itself derived from the Arabic. To a great extent the Hebrew
and Latin translations were being made contemporaneously but quite
independently; it was not until well into the 14th century that they
begin to influence one another. It was during this later stage that so
many of the Arabic philosophical works were translated into Latin via
Hebrew, and this gave a marked preponderance to Ibn Rushd, the result
of the Jewish vogue of his writings; the earlier translations into
Latin from the Arabic rather tend to lay weight on Ibn Sina.
In the course of the 14th century A.D. the Hebrew commentators on Ibn
Rushd begin. Chief amongst these was Lavi ben Gerson, of Bagnols, who
wrote a commentary on Ibn Rushd’s _Ittisal_ on the doctrine of the
union of the soul with the Agent Intelligence, and on Ibn Rushd’s
treatise “on the substance of the world.” Levi’s teaching reproduces
the Arabic Aristotelianism much more freely and frankly than was
ventured by Maimonides; he admits the eternity of the world, the primal
matter he describes as substance without form, and creation meant only
the impress of form on this formless substance.
Contemporary with Levi was Moses of Narbonne, who, between 1340 and
1350, produced commentaries on the same works of Ibn Rushd as had
already been treated by Levi, as well as other of the treatises on
physical science.
The fourteenth century was the golden age of Jewish scholasticism and
the following century sees it in its decay. Ibn Rushd was still studied
and commentaries were still compiled. About 1455 Joseph ben Shem-Tob of
Segovia produced a commentary on Aristotle’s _Ethics_ which he intended
to supplement Ibn Rushd, who had not written a commentary on this
portion of Aristotle. Elias del Medigo, who taught at Padua towards the
end of the 15th century, is regarded by Rènan as the last great Jewish
Averroist. He wrote a commentary on the _de substantia orbis_ in 1485,
and also published annotations on Averroes.
The 16th century shows the final decay of Jewish Averroism. In 1560 an
abridgment of the logic of Averroes was published at Riva di Trento,
and this has remained a standard work amongst Jews, but outside logic
Averroes was beginning to fall into disrepute. Rabbi Moses Almosnino
(circ. 1538) uses al-Ghazali’s work against the philosophers to oppose
Ibn Rushd, and evidences occur of an interest in Plato by those who
despised Aristotle as a relic of the dark ages. The later Jewish
philosophers such as Spinoza are not in touch with the mediæval
tradition, whose continuity is severed towards the end of the 16th
century; later work shows the influence of post-renascence non-Jewish
thought.