Luminous.  Beautiful.  Precious. Luxurious.  These adjectives are evoked by the term “Golden Age,” used by Jewish historians use to refer to Spain in the medieval era.   The period is remembered as a time when Jews were at ease with their non-Jewish neighbors, when they could breathe easily, express themselves freely, and walk proudly. 

This chapter in history has long provided a message of hope.  Jewish intellectuals in 19th-century Europe lamented their own frustrating attempts to be accepted into the non-Jewish world.  But, they looked to medieval Spain as a promise of what they might achieve if only their gentile neighbors embraced them.  More recently, in the wake 9/11, the Golden Age of Spain has provided an example of how warfare and hatred between religious communities might be replaced by tolerance and good-will.

Hillel Halkin has little patience for this narrative.  His book Yehuda Halevi (2010) is a biography of one of the most prominent Jewish cultural figures of Medieval Spain.  More broadly, the work provides a portrait of the period during which Halevi lived.  Not doubt it was a time when Jews produced literary and intellectual masterpieces.  It was also a time when cultural ideas and forms flowed freely between Spain’s Muslim, Christian and Jewish populations.  Yet, these conditions did not mean that Jews lived with a sense of security.   They were hardly “golden.”

Yehuda HaLevi provides a wonderful subject for a biography because of his tremendous creative output and his great diversity of talent.  He was a doctor, a community leader, a philosopher, a poet and a lively character.  During many of his years, he lived the high-life – surrounded by friends, drinking wine, entertained by music amidst luscious gardens, where cool fountains flowed and soft breezes carried the scent of almond blossoms.

But these experiences were set against a dark backdrop.  If Yehuda Halevi is a mascot of cultural and intellectual achievement, he is also an icon of the wandering Jew, moving from one place to the next, with the trials of persecution always on his trail.  

Born in northern Spain (around 1070) he moved to Granada as a young man to join the city’s lively Jewish intellectual scene.  Paradoxically, this city – a center of Jewish life – was living under the shadow of destruction.  An estimated three thousand Jews were killed in a popular uprising just a decade before Halevi’s arrival. 

If a sense of tranquility had returned to Granda, it was not long before it was shattered.  In 1090, just a few years after Halevi arrived, the zealous Almoravid’s invasion whipped up anti-Jewish sentiment once again.  Halevi fled, along with many of his fellows.  He travelled to Lucena, picked up again for Seville and then again for Toledo.  There he settled, but not for long.  In 1109, a war of royal succession brought with it terror and destruction to the city’s Jewish community.

At this point in the historical narrative, Halkin comments that the loss of Jewish life and property in Toledo was yet “another reminder of how precarious….the Jewish situation in the Iberian peninsula was” (70-71).  On the surface a spirit of convivencia (co-existence) reigned.  But this disposition was no more than a fragile veneer; a mood that could be shattered at any moment.

After leaving Toledo, Yehuda Halevi moved to Cordoba.  As he contemplated establishing himself in a new city yet again, it should come as no surprise that he simply gave up.  Tired, weary, lost and nearing old age, Halevi lost hope of ever having a good life Spain.

He announces that he will move to Jerusalem.  For Maria Menocol (who wrote Ornament of the World, 2002) Yehuda HaLevi’s declaration of leaving was akin to a defection.   It was a denouncement and abandonment of the very culture “that made his poetry possible.”  For Hillel Halkin, by contrast, Yehuda Halevi’s greatness lies in this very act of bravery.

In Halkin’s words, Halevi’s voyage to the Holy Land was one “of no return to a country where nothing awaited him but danger, loneliness, and hardship” ; a plan so unlikely, his contemporaries must have thought him mad.  “There would be no one to welcome or honor him,” Halkin tells us, “no Jewish community worthy of its name to take him in.”  Then he asks, “What was he thinking of?  What?” (p.128)  This question is of course rhetorical, for Halkin provides his own answer: 

For Halkin, Yehuda Halevi is a heroic figure because he had deep understanding of the Jewish condition.  So too, he had an honest and pragmatic view of how thin Spain’s culture of tolerance really was.  His leaving was an “expression of ultimate commitment” to a singular idea: that “All the best of grand Spain” was not worth even “one glimpse of Jerusalem’s dust.”

“Circumcise the foreskin of your heart.” What can this verse from the Torah possibly mean?  I won’t answer that here.  I’m interested, instead, in knowledge theory.  By that, I mean:  How should one go about figuring out what this Biblical verse means?

Let’s consider this issue through the eyes of a hypothetical, Reuven, who lived in 9th century Baghdad.  Reuven found himself perplexed by the notion that a heart has a foreskin, and wondering about how one might go about circumcising that foreskin.  What might he have done to find answers to his questions?  That depends, of course, on the sort of relationship he had with the text of the Torah. 

If Reuven traveled in Rabbinate circles, he would have turned to the religious authorities of his day for answers to his questions.  “Rabbi Yehoshua,” he might ask, “the Torah commands us to circumcise our hearts.  What does this mean?”  Rabbi Yehoshua would frame his answer in terms of the knowledge and understanding that he had received from his teachers, who in turn would have received this from the generations of teachers who came before them.  The central text around which this chain of tradition would have been transmitted was the Talmud.

If—by contrast--Reuven traveled in Karaite circles, finding answers would have taken a very different course.  For if he had turned to an erudite Karaite scholar with his questions, he probably would not have received an answer.  Instead, he would have been met by reprimand.  “Search ye well in the Torah, and do not rely on my opinion.”

Reuven--it seems--would have been on his own.  He would not have had the Talmud to turn to for answers, for Karaite authorities decried the authority of that text.  He also would have been bereft of contemporary figures of religious authority. Karaite creed valorized an unmediated relationship to the text.  Each individual was enjoined to read it on his own, and to reach his own understanding of its meaning and its practical implications.  In the words of ninth century Karaite Al-Kumisi “he who relies on any of the teachers of the dispersion and does not use his own understanding is like him that practices heathen worship.”

Al-Kumisi’s approach was re-articulated in the fifteenth century text, Aderet Eliyahu.  Outlining some of the basic principles of Karaite Judaism, author Elijah Bashyatchi wrote:

1.     The physical world was created.

2.     It was created by a Creator who did not create Himself, but is eternal.

3.     The Creator has no likeness and is unique in all respects.

4.     He sent the prophet Moses.

5.     He sent, along with Moses, His perfect Torah.

6.     It is the duty of the believer to understand the original language of the Torah.

The chain of transmission as outlined here is clear and succinct:  God gave the Torah to Moses.   The Torah, in turn, was given to each and every individual in its pure, unadulterated and perfect form.  The text is open and accessible to all.  It requires no mediator, and it is the duty of the believer to study it (in the original of course – not through any one else’s translation), to gain an understanding of it, and to figure out how it should be applied. 

Contrast this map of transmission to that which is written in the Rabbinic text, Mishna Avot:  Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it Joshua. Joshua transmitted it to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets transmitted it to the Men of the Great Assembly. They [the Men of the Great Assembly] said three things: Be deliberate in judgment, raise many students, and make a protective fence for the Torah.

According to this theory of knowledge, if an individual wishes to know what the Torah means, that individual must first recognize that he cannot sit alone with the text. To understand it, he must enter a study-house that is occupied by authorities; those who are versed in the teachings of the generations of scholars who preceded them.  These authorities’ readings must, in turn, be refracted through the authoritative knowledge of those who studied before them, and those before them.  In this scenario, the individual’s relationship with the text is anything but unmediated.

This difference between the Rabbinites and the Karaites that I’ve portrayed here is a caricature-like depiction.  How could Karaites not have any norms, authority figures, teachers, leaders, and texts through which the Torah is mediated? Likewise, how could the Rabbnites have no allowance for personal, spontaneous, malleable readings of the text?  Of course, neither scenario is possible in an unadulterated form.

Yet, the contrast provides a very compelling heuristic; a way of allowing us to think about religious knowledge theory.  What is the place of religious authority and tradition on on the one hand, and the place of personal autonomy and meaning on the other?  I struggle with these questions in my religious life every day.  

In the mid-twelfth century, Benjamin of Tudela embarked one of history’s most well-known Jewish journeys. We are fortunate that he had the foresight to record what he learned along the vast distances he traveled, and among the great numbers of communities he visited.  We are also lucky that those who lived in subsequent generations saw the value in Benjamin’s text.   It was copied, circulated, and re-copied so many times, that we today in the 21st century can still read his words.

Yet, I must confess that I find myself disappointed each time I read the work.  So much information lacking, so many details absent:  How did Benjamin travel?  What languages did he use? What dangers did he encounter on the way?  And what about the people whom he met:  What did their homes look like?  How did they greet him and interact with him? 

Here is what Benjamin wrote about his experiences in Beziers, “There is a congregation of learned men.  At their head is R. Solomon Chalafta, R. Joseph, and R. Nethanel.  Then it is two days to… Montpellier.”  

That is all!  Like this portrait here, the information he offers throughout much of the travelogue are sparse.   So too, Benjamin’s tone is dry and impersonal.   Utterly absent are the sorts of details that abound in memoir-style travelogues of today.  There is no first-person perspective.  We learn nothing about the details of his life, or what sort of man he was.  Nor does he give any indication of why he traveled, how he funded his journey, or who he may have left behind.

Yet, I continue to read Benjamin’s travelogue.  I return to it, fascinated by the bits of information he did leave behind.  I am drawn to the work as a historian; interested in the few tid-bits of information that he does provide about Jewish life in the Middle Ages.  And I am also interested as a contemporary social theorist. His observations – scantly as they are - teach us about the organization of the Jewish world in days gone by.  And they continue to have resonance today.

Here are a few of the lessons we can take away from his travelogue:

1.  Viewing the Jewish world through a wide-angle lens. 

Jewish values, knowledge and identity are largely shaped in local synagogues, community-centers, schools and camps.  Yet--Benjamin reminds us—these institutions are embedded in a system of large far-reaching networks.  

Although he does not tell us why he traveled, some guess that Benjamin may have been scouting out places of safe refuge for those considering fleeing from instability in Christian Spain.  Others take note of his focus on Jewish communities on the Mediterranean coast who were engaged in commerce, and suggest that he may have been looking for far-reaching business connections.  Or perhaps he simply sought comfort in learning that Jews lived across much of the Mediterranean world, and that they were faring well.   Regardless, Benjamin’s expansive wide-angle view of the Jewish world is a compelling one, and it may be one of the reasons his book continued to be copies and circulated for centuries.

2. Dynamic Authority in the Jewish world

Baghdad is one of the few cities that receives extensive treatment in Benjamin’s travelogue.  As backdrop to his description of Jewish life in the city, he opens with a depiction of Muslim society.  Focusing in particular on the Caliph (Islam’s political and religious leader) and his lush palace and grounds, Benjamin provides a very interesting note on this leaders’ family members.  While they each had a luxurious dwelling space within the palace grounds, they were “all fettered in chains of irons” and guards were placed to keep watch, “over each of their houses” so that none would attempt to usurp the Caliph. (p.96-97)

While the Caliph was able to exert authority through the force of arms, Jews did not have this possibility.  How, then, were medieval Jewish leaders able to garner and rise to authority?  Without state power at their disposal, they had to resort to other means.  They relied on knowledge, charisma and wit.  They drew on pedigree and on relationships with the wealthy.  So too, alignment with authorities in the non-Jewish world provided leaders a source of power upon which to draw.  In short – without any real power, authority could never be fully agreed upon in the Jewish world.  It was (and still is) fluid, open to much change, and—as a consequence—it is dynamic, creative and adaptive.

3. Waxing and Waning Centers of the Jewish World

Why does Baghdad receive so much of Benjamin’s attention?  In part, because the community there of 40,000 is one of the largest that he visits.  So too, the city was rich in its institutional life.  Religious academies abounded, the influence of the Jewish leaders stretched across great distances, and students flocked to the city from afar.   It is no coincidence that Baghdad was located in one of the Muslim world’s important centers of art, finance, scholarship and politics.  

Even today, the Jewish communities that are most active and influential, are those that are situated in centers where cultural, political, and economic life thrives; in educational hubs; in tourist destinations.  So too, throughout history, the lives of Jewish communities have waxed and waned with the fortunes of non-Jewish worlds in which they are embedded.

In his book Zakhor, Yosef Yerushalmi draws a clear distinction between history and memory.  I am not convinced.

Yerushalmi tells us that Jewish history was not written from the time that the Bible was canonized until the emergence of the Wissenschaft school in the mid-19th century Germany. 

It is not that Jewish scholars were not interested in the past.  They were!  Indeed, the injunction “Zakhor” (Remember) has always been a Jewish preoccupation.  Yet, the rabbis did not write “history” in the ways that we—in our class, and in the American academy--think of history.  Yerushalmi tells us that they spoke and wrote of events in the past, but did not see it necessary to narrate those stories in chronological sequence.  Instead, they played with Time, “as though with an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will” (p.17).  (Remember Moses’ presence in Rabbi Akiva’s classroom).  And in cases when the rabbis did tell of the past in chronological sequence – the particularities of the events under discussion did not hold importance.   

Here is an essay a university student today might be asked to address: Describe the economic, political and cultural events that led to the vanquish of Jewish independence in 586 BCE (at the hands of the Babylonians) and in 70 CE (at the hands of the Romans).  How do they compare? 

For the rabbis, these socio-political details were of no interest.   The two events were both commemorated on the 9th day of Av, and it was the moral messages--which can be read as one and the same for both events--which were seen as most relevant. 

Rabbi Nahman (whose words were preserved in the seventh-century text Vayikra Rabba) took this same approach in his interpretation of Jacob’s dream.  The angles who appeared in the dream were the rulers of various kingdoms:  the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans.  Just as each rose up and came to rule over the Jews, each eventually came down.  Fear thou no, O Jacob my servant, God told the patriarch upon his awakening (p.22).  This message continued to resonate for Jews across the generations – Yerushalmi tells us.  The particular socio-political causes for rise and fall of each kingdom were of no interest to the rabbis.  Each historical epoch was collapsed into the previous.  Indeed all the eras bled into a single story, embedded within the Biblical narrative itself. 

Moving forward in time – from the Rabbinic period to the Middle Ages—Yerushalmi contends that Jews still did not write “history” the way we know it today. 

He points to several works which people have argued are “histories” but he discredits each one.  The works, for example, that provided a chronological survey of the transmission of rabbinic law are not really, “histories.”  Why?  Because they “did not come into being out of a desire to write or interpret the history of the Jewish people.” Rather, they were composed as a means to “refute those heretics from within and adversaries from without who denied the validity of the Oral Law.” (p.32) In other words, they are not really “histories” because they are polemical in nature, written with particular agendas in mind.

I think this is where Yerushalmi’s argument begins to get murky.  He is suggesting, that there is such as thing as “pure” “unadulterated” history, which is motivated only by the desire to reconstruct the past, nothing more. 

In contrast to history stands “memory.”    If history is un-invested, dispassionate, and purely intellectually motivated; memory is the opposite.  It is invested and emotional.  It is evoked through experience – through the foods eaten at the Passover seder, through the mournful chanting of Lamentations on the 9th of Av, through the act of sitting in huts on Sukkot.

I do not believe the divide between history and memory is as strong as Yerushalmi suggests.  Indeed, the Me’ah classroom defies this strict dichotomy.  We study in an intellectual fashion, reading works produced in the American academy.  Yet, we also learn and discuss together in the synagogue, and as a community.  We analyze, but we also sing.  In the space where we gather, there is room for both of these ways of engaging with the past.

At the end of his book, Yerushalmi mourns the erosion of Jewish group memory.  Prior to the modern era, Jews constituted a cohesive community, knit together through their shared faith and through “an entire complex of interlocking social and religious institutions.”  Bound together, they were able to transmit a common collective memory from one generation to the next.  

This transmission eroded in the modern era.   And now, who can step in to repair the breach?—he asks.  Not the historian.  She cannot heal the wounds that have been left in the wake of the rupture of community, faith and memory.  Jews today who are in search of a past “patently do not want the past” that the historian offers - Yerushalmi explains. 

So what is the solution?  Is there any way in which the study of the past amongst those who have “fallen” out from under Judaism’s collective sacred canopy can serve as a comfort or a salve?  Sadly, Yerushalmi tells us that he has no “catalogue of remedies.”  Perhaps he would have been pleased, though, to come upon a Me’ah classroom; a place in which we build community in the present through the common study of the past.