the Jews concentrate their forces, and so enabled them to wage
successful war with nations mightier than themselves. Their heroism
under the Maccabees and under Bar-Kochba, in the middle ages and in
modern days, permits them to take rank among the most valiant in
history. A historian of literature, a non-Jew, enumerates three factors
constituting Jews important agents in the preservation and revival of
learning:[21] First, their ability as traders. The Phoenicians are
regarded as the oldest commercial nation, but the Jews contested the
palm with them. Zebulon and Asher in very early times were seafaring
tribes. Under Solomon, Israelitish vessels sailed as far as Ophir to
bring Afric's gold to Jerusalem. Before the destruction of the Holy
City, Jewish communities established themselves on the westernmost coast
of Europe. "The whole of the known world was covered with their
settlements, in constant communication with one another through
itinerant merchants, who effected an exchange of learning as well as of
wares; while the other nations grew more and more isolated, and shut
themselves off from even the sparse opportunities of mental culture then
available."
The second factor conducing to mental advancement was the schools which
have flourished in Israel since the days of the prophet Samuel; and the
third was the linguistic attainments of the Jews, which they owed to
natural ability in this direction. Scarcely had Greek allied itself with
Hebrew thought, when Jews in Alexandria wrote Greek comparable with
Plato's, and not more than two hundred years after the settlement of
Jews in Arabia we meet with a large number of Jewish poets among
Mohammed's disciples, while in the middle ages they taught and wrote
Arabic, Spanish, French, and German--versatility naturally favorable to
intellectual progress.
Jewish influence may be said to have begun to exercise itself upon
general culture when Judaism and Hellenism met for the first time. The
result of the meeting was the new product, Judaeo-Hellenic literature.
Greek civilization was attractive to Jews. The new ideas were
popularized for all strata of the people to imbibe. Shortly before the
old pagan world crumbled, Hellenism enjoyed a beautiful, unexpected
revival in Alexandria. There, strange to say, Judaism, in its home
antagonistic to Hellenism, had filled and allied itself with the Greek
spirit. Its literature gradually adopted Greek traditions, and the ripe
fruit of the union was the Jewish-Alexandrian religious philosophy, the
mediation between two sharply contradictory systems, for the first time
brought into close juxtaposition, and requiring some such new element to
harmonize them. When ancient civilization in Judaea and in Hellas fell
into decay, human endeavor was charged with the task of reconciling
these two great historical forces diametrically opposed to each other,
and the first attempt looking to this end was inspired by a Jewish
genius, Jesus of Nazareth.
The Jews of Alexandria were engaged in widespread trade and shipping,
and they counted among them artists, poets, civil officers, and
mechanics. They naturally acquired Greek customs, and along with them
Hellenic vices. The bacchanalia of Athens were enthusiastically imitated
in Jerusalem, and, as a matter of course, in Alexandria. This point
reached, Roman civilization asserted itself, and the people sought to
affiliate with their Roman victors, while the rabbis devoted themselves
to the Law, not, however, to the exclusion of scientific work. In the
ranks of physicians and astronomers we find Jewish masters and Jewish
disciples. Medicine has always been held in high esteem by Jews, and
Samuel could justly boast before his contemporaries that the intricate
courses of the stars were as well known to him as the streets of
Nehardea in Babylonia.[22]
The treasures of information on pedagogics, medicine, jurisprudence,
astronomy, geography, zoology, botany, and last, though not least, on
general history, buried in the Talmud, have hitherto not been valued at
their true worth. The rabbis of the Talmud stood in the front ranks of
culture. They compiled a calendar, in complete accord with the Metonic
cycle, which modern science must declare faultless. Their classification
of the bones of the human body varies but little from present results of
the science of anatomy, and the Talmud demonstrates that certain Mishna
ordinances are based upon geometrical propositions, which could have
been known to but few mathematicians of that time. Rabbi Gamaliel, said
to have made use of a telescope, was celebrated as a mathematician and
astronomer, and in 289 C. E., Rabbi Joshua is reported to have
calculated the orbit of Halley's comet.
The Roman conquest of Palestine effected a change in the condition of
the Jews. Never before had Judah undergone such torture and suffering as
under the sceptre of Rome. The misery became unendurable, and internal
disorders being added to foreign oppression, the luckless insurrection
broke out which gave the deathblow to Jewish nationality, and drove
Judah into exile. On his thorny martyr's path he took naught with him
but a book--his code, his law. Yet how prodigal his contributions to
mankind's fund of culture!
About five hundred years later Judah saw springing up on his own soil a
new religion which appropriated the best and the most beautiful of his
spiritual possessions. Swiftly rose the vast political and intellectual
structure of Mohammedan power, and as before with Greek, so Jewish
thought now allied itself with Arabic endeavor, bringing forth in Spain
the golden age of neo-Hebraic literature in the spheres of poetry,
metaphysical speculation, and every department of scientific research.
It is not an exaggerated estimate to say that the middle ages sustained
themselves with the fruit of this intellectual labor, which, moreover,
has come down as a legacy to our modern era. Two hundred years after
Mohammed, the same language, Arabic, was spoken by the Jews of Kairwan
and those of Bagdad. Thus equipped, they performed in a remarkable way
the task allotted them by their talents and their circumstances, to
which they had been devoting themselves with singular zeal for two
centuries. The Jews are missioned mediators between the Orient and the
Occident, and their activity as such, illustrated by their additions to
general culture and science, is of peculiar interest. In the period
under consideration, their linguistic accomplishments fitted them to
assist the Syrians in making Greek literature accessible to the Arabic
mind. In Arabic literature itself, they attained to a prominent place.
Modern research has not yet succeeded in shedding light upon the
development and spread of science among the Arabs under the tutelage of
Syrian Christians. But out of the obscurity of Greek-Arabic culture
beginnings gleam Jewish names, whose possessors were the teachers of
eager Arabic disciples. Barely fifty years after the hosts of the
Prophet had conquered the Holy Land, a Jew of Bassora translated from
Syriac into Arabic the pandects by the presbyter Aaron, a famous medical
work of the middle ages. In the annals of the next century, among the
early contributors to Arabic literature, we meet with the names of Jews
as translators of medical, mathematical, and astronomical works, and as
grammarians, astronomers, scientists, and physicians. A Jew translated
Ptolemy's "Almagest"; another assisted in the first translation of the
Indian fox fables (_Kalila we-Dimna_); the first furnishing the middle
ages with the basis of their astronomical science, the second supplying
European poets with literary material. Through the instrumentality of
Jews, Arabs became acquainted as early as the eighth century, some time
before the learning of the Greeks was brought within their reach, with
Indian medicine, astronomy, and poetry. Greek science itself they owed
to Jewish mediation. Not only among Jews, but also among Greeks,
Syrians, and Arabs, Jewish versatility gave currency to the belief that
"all wisdom is of the Jews," a view often repeated by Hellenists, by the
"Righteous Brethren" among the Arabs, and later by the Christian monks
of Europe.
The academies of the Jews have always been pervaded by a scientific
spirit. As they influenced others, so they permitted the science and
culture of their neighbors to act upon their life and work. There is no
doubt, for instance, that, despite the marked difference between the
subjects treated by Arabs and Jews, the peculiar qualities of the old
Arabic lyrics shaped neo-Hebraic poetry. Again, as the Hebrew acrostic
psalms demonstrably served as models to the older Syrian Church poets,
so, in turn, Syriac psalmody probably became the pattern synagogue
poetry followed. Thus Hebrew poetry completed a circuit, which, to be
sure, cannot accurately be followed up through its historical stages,
but which critical investigations and the comparative study of
literatures have established almost as a certainty.
In the ninth century a bold, venturesome traveller, Eldad ha-Dani,[23] a
sort of Jewish Ulysses, appeared among Jews, and at the same time
Judaism produced Sa'adia, its first great religious philosopher and
Bible translator. The Church Fathers had always looked up to the rabbis
as authorities; henceforth Jews were accepted by all scholars as the
teachers of Bible exegesis. Sa'adia was the first of the rabbis to
translate the Hebrew Scriptures into Arabic. Justly his work is said to
"recognize the current of thought dominant in his time, and to express
the newly-awakened desire for the reconciliation of religious practice,
as developed in the course of generations, with the source of religious
inspiration." Besides, he was the first to elaborate a system of
religious philosophy according to a rigid plan, and in a strictly
scientific spirit.[24] Knowing Greek speculations, he controverts them
as vigorously as the _Kalam_ of Islam philosophy. His teachings form a
system of practical ethics, luminous reflections, and sound maxims.
Among his contemporaries was Isaac Israeli, a physician at Kairwan,
whose works, in their Latin translation by the monk Constantine,
attained great reputation, and were later plagiarized by medical
writers. His treatise on fever was esteemed of high worth, a translation
of it being studied as a text-book for centuries, and his dietetic
writings remained authoritative for five hundred years. In general, the
medical science of the Arabs is under great obligations to him.
Reverence for Jewish medical ability was so exaggerated in those days
that Galen was identified with the Jewish sage Gamaliel. The error was
fostered in the _Sefer Asaf_, a curious medical fragment of uncertain
authorship and origin, by its rehearsal of an old Midrash, which traces
the origin of medicine to Shem, son of Noah, who received it from
angels, and transmitted it to the ancient Chaldeans, they in turn
passing it on to the Egyptians, Greeks, and Arabs.
Though the birth of medicine is not likely to have taken place among
Jews, it is indisputable that physicians of the Jewish race are largely
to be credited with the development of medical science at every period.
At the time we speak of, Jews in Egypt, northern Africa, Italy, Spain,
France, and Germany were physicians in ordinary to caliphs, emperors,
and popes, and everywhere they are represented among medical writers.
The position occupied in the Arabian world by Israeli, in the Occident
was occupied by Sabattai Donnolo, one of the Salerno school in its early
obscure days, the author of a work on _Materia medica_, possibly the
oldest original production on medicine in the Hebrew language.
The period of Jewish prosperity in Spain has been called a fairy vision
of history. The culture developed under its genial influences pervaded
the middle ages, and projected suggestions even into our modern era. One
of the most renowned _savants_ at the beginning of the period was the
statesman Chasdai ben Shaprut, whose translation of Dioscorides's "Plant
Lore" served as the botanical textbook of mediaeval Europe. The first
poet was Solomon ibn Gabirol, the author of "The Source of Life," a
systematic exposition of Neoplatonic philosophy, a book of most curious
fortunes. Through the Latin translation, made with the help of an
apostate Jew, and bearing the author's name in the mutilated form of
Avencebrol, later changed into Avicebron, scholasticism became saturated
with its philosophic ideas. The pious fathers of Christian philosophy,
Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, took pains to refute them, while
Duns Scotus and Giordano Bruno frequently consulted the work as an
authority. In the struggle between the Scotists and the Thomists it had
a prominent place as late as the fourteenth century, the contestants
taking it to be the work of some great Christian philosopher standing on
the threshold of the Occident and at the portals of philosophy. So it
happened that the author came down through the centuries, recognized by
none, forgotten by his own, until, in our time, behind the
Moorish-Christian mask of Avencebrol, Solomon Munk discovered the Jewish
thinker and poet Solomon ibn Gabirol.
The work _De Causis_, attributed to David, a forgotten Jewish
philosopher, must be classed with Gabirol's "Source of Life," on account
of its Neoplatonism and its paramount influence upon scholasticism. In
fact, only by means of a searching analysis of these two works can
insight be gained into the development and aberrations of the dogmatic
system of mediaeval philosophy.
Other sciences, too, especially mathematics, flourished among them. One
century after he wrote them, the works of Abraham ibn Ezra, renowned as
an astronomer and mathematician, were translated into Latin by Italians,
among whom his prestige was so great that, as may still be seen, he was
painted among the expounders of mathematical science in an Italian
church fresco representing the seven liberal arts. Under the name
Abraham Judaeus, later corrupted into Avenare, he is met with throughout
the middle ages. Abraham ben Chiya, another distinguished scientist,
known by the name Savasorda, compiled the first systematic outline of
astronomy, and in his geographical treatise, he explained the sphericity
of the earth, while the Latin translation of his geometry, based on
Arabic sources, proves him to have made considerable additions to the
stock of knowledge in this branch. Moses Maimuni's intellectual vigor,
and his influence upon the schoolmen through his medical, and more
particularly his religio-philosophical works, are too well known to need
more than passing mention.
Even in southern France and in Germany, whither the light of culture did
not spread so rapidly as in Spain, Jews participated in the development
of the sciences. Solomon ben Isaac, called Rashi, the great exegete, was
looked up to as an authority by others beside his brethren in faith.
Nicolas de Lyra, one of the most distinguished Christian Bible exegetes,
confesses that his simple explanations of Scriptural passages are
derived pre-eminently from Rashi's Bible commentary, and among
scientific men it is acknowledged that precisely in the matter of
exegesis this French monk exercised decisive influence upon Martin
Luther. So it happens that in places Luther's Bible translation reveals
Rashi seen through Nicolas de Lyra's spectacles.
In the quickened intellectual life of Provence Jews also took active
part. David Kimchi has come to be regarded as the teacher _par
excellence_ of Hebrew grammar and lexicography, and Judah ibn Tibbon,
one of the most notable of translators, in his testament addressed to
his son made a complete presentation of contemporary science, a
cyclopaedia of the Arabic and the Hebrew language and literature,
grammar, poetry, botany, zoology, natural history, and particularly
religious philosophy, the studies of the Bible and the Talmud.
The golden age of letters was followed by a less creative period, a
significant turning-point in the history of Judaism as of spiritual
progress in general. The contest between tradition and philosophy
affected every mind. Literature was widely cultivated; each of its
departments found devotees. The European languages were studied, and
connections established between the literatures of the nations. Hardly a
spiritual current runs through the middle ages without, in some way,
affecting Jewish culture. It is the irony of history that puts among the
forty proscribers of the Talmud assembled at Paris in the thirteenth
century the Dominican Albertus Magnus, who, in his successful efforts to
divert scholastic philosophy into new channels, depended entirely upon
the writings and translations of the very Jews he was helping to
persecute. Schoolmen were too little conversant with Greek to read
Aristotle in the original, and so had to content themselves with
accepting the Judaeo-Arabic construction put upon the Greek sage's
teachings.
Besides acting as intermediaries, Jews made original contributions to
scholastic philosophy. For instance, Maimonides, the first to reconcile
Aristotle's teachings with biblical theology, was the originator of the
method adopted by schoolmen in the case of Aristotelian principles at
variance with their dogmas. Frederick II., the liberal emperor, employed
Jewish scholars and translators at his court; among them Jacob ben
Abba-Mari ben Anatoli, to whom an annuity was paid for translating
Aristotelian works. Michael Scotus, the imperial astrologer, was his
intimate friend. His contemporaries were chiefly popular philosophers or
mystics, excepting only the prominent Provencal Jacob ben Machir, or
Profatius Judaeus, as he was called, a member of the Tibbon family of
translators. His observations on the inclination of the earth's axis
were used later by Copernicus as the basis of further investigations. He
was a famous teacher at the Montpellier academy, which reminds me to
mention that Jews were prominently identified with the founding and the
success of the medical schools at Montpellier and Salerno, they, indeed,
being almost the only physicians in all parts of the known world.
Salerno, in turn, suggests Italy, where at that period translations were
made from Latin into Hebrew. Hillel ben Samuel, for instance, the same
who carried on a lively philosophic correspondence with another
distinguished Jew, Maestro Isaac Gayo, the pope's physician, translated
some of Thomas Aquinas's writings, Bruno di Lungoburgo's book on
surgery, and various other works, from Latin into Hebrew.
These successors of the great intellects of the golden age of
neo-Hebraic literature, thoroughly conversant with Arabic literature,
busied themselves with rendering accessible to literary Europe the
treasury of Indian and Greek fables. Their translations and compilations
have peculiar value in the history of literary development. During the
middle ages, when the memory of ancient literature had perished, they
were the means of preserving the romances, fairy tales, and fables that
have descended, by way of Spain and Arabia, from classical antiquity
and the many-hued Oriental world to our modern literatures. Between the
eleventh and the thirteenth century, the foundations were laid for our
narrative literature, demonstrating the importance of delight in fable
lore, stories of travel, and all sorts of narratives, for to it we owe
the creation of new and the transformation of old, literary forms.
In Germany at that time, a Jewish minnesinger and strolling minstrel,
Suesskind von Trimberg, went up and down the land, from castle to castle,
with the poets' guild; while Santob di Carrion, a Jewish troubadour,
ventured to impart counsel and moral lessons to the Castilian king Don
Pedro before his assembled people. A century later, another Jew, Samson
Pnie, of Strasburg, lent his assistance to the two German poets at work
upon the continuation of _Parzival_. The historians of German literature
have not laid sufficient stress upon the share of the Jews, heavily
oppressed and persecuted though they were, in the creation of national
epics and romances of chivalry from the thirteenth to the fifteenth
century. German Jews, being more than is generally recognized diligent
readers of the poets, were well acquainted with the drift of mediaeval
poetry, and to this familiarity a new department of Jewish literature
owed its rise and development. It is said that a Hebrew version of the
Arthurian cycle was made as early as the thirteenth century, and at the
end of the period we run across epic poems on Bible characters, composed
in the _Nibelungen_ metre, in imitation of old German legend lore and
national poetry.
If German Jews found heart for literary interests, it may be assumed as
a matter of course that Spanish and Provencal Jews participated in the
advancement of their respective national literatures and in Troubadour
poetry. In these countries, too, the new taste for popular literature,
especially in the form of fables, was made to serve moral ends. A Jew,
Berachya ben Natronai, was the precursor of Marie de France, the famous
French fabulist, and La Fontaine and Lessing are indebted to him for
some of their material. As in the case of Aristotelian philosophy and of
Greek and Arabic medical science, Jews assumed the role of mediators in
the transmission of fables. Indian fables reached their Arabic guise
either directly or by way of Persian and Greek; thence they passed into
Hebrew and Latin translations, and through these last forms became the
property of the European languages. For instance, the Hebrew translation
of the old Sanskrit fox fables was the one of greatest service in
literary evolution. The translator of the fox fables is credited also
with the translation of the romance of "The Seven Wise Masters," under
the title _Mishle Sandabar_. These two works gave the impetus to a great
series in Occidental literature, and it seems altogether probable that
Europe's first acquaintance with them dates from their Hebrew
translation.
In Arabic poetry, too, many a Jew deservedly attained to celebrity.
Abraham ibn Sahl won such renown that the Arabs, notorious for
parsimony, gave ten gold pieces for one of his songs. Other poets have
come down to us by name, and Joseph Ezobi, whom Reuchlin calls _Judaeorum
poeta dulcissimus_, went so far as to extol Arabic beyond Hebrew poetry.
He was the first to pronounce the dictum famous in Buffon's repetition:
"The style is the man himself." Provence, the land of song, produced
Kalonymos ben Kalonymos (Maestro Calo), known to his brethren in faith
not only as a poet, but also as a scholar, whose Hebrew translations
from the Arabic are of most important works on philosophy, medicine, and
mathematics. As Anatoli had worked under Emperor Frederick II., so
Kalonymos was attached to Robert of Naples, patron of Jewish scholars.
At the same time with the Spanish and the German minstrel, there
flourished in Rome Immanuel ben Solomon, the friend of Dante, upon whose
death he wrote an Italian sonnet, and whose _Divina Commedia_ inspired a
part of his poetical works also describing a visit to paradise and hell.
With the assiduous cultivation of romantic poetry, which was gradually
usurping the place of moral romances and novels, grew the importance of
Oriental legends and traditions, so pregnant with literary suggestions.
This is attested by the use made of the Hebrew translation of Indian
fables mentioned before, and of the famous collection of tales, the
_Disciplina clericalis_ by the baptized Jew Petrus Alphonsus. The Jews
naturally introduced many of their own peculiar traditions, and thus can
be explained the presence of tales from the Talmud and the Midrash in
our modern fairy tale books.