Season 1: Episode 21 - From Moshe to Moshe

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The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King said that the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. Ours is a story filled with both challenge and controversy, but ultimately it's also a story of hope and redemption. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. The epitaph on the Rambam's grave in Tiberia reads the following Mi Moshe l'moshe, ein lanu e l'moshe That is, from Moshe of the Torah to Moshe, meaning of Moshe ben Maimon, the Rambam there was none like Moshe Now the question that we have to address in this episode is how is it possible that someone who is compared to the incomparable to Moshe who brought down the Torah had his books burned in public only a few decades after his death, and perhaps even by his fellow Jews.

So, Rav Moshe de Maimon, Maimonides, also known, of course, by his acronym of the Rambam, was a great Talmudist, a philosopher, astronomer, and a famous physician. But when he was born, he was none of these. They're in Cordoba in 1135. And there were many steps that took him from Cordoba at his birth to his death in Cairo in 1204. So, I hope you recall, at the end of the last episode, we spoke about the invasion of the Iberian Peninsula by the Almoravids, that fierce and fundamentalist Berber tribe summoned by the Arabs of Al-Andalus to hold off the Christian armies advancing from the north. They were, indeed, successful in uniting the Muslim city-states of the south and in enforcing their fanaticism on the inhabitants.

and as you probably recall, this was bad news for the Jews. The oppression of religious minorities that followed the rise of the Al-Muravid Empire was of course one of the causes which led Rabbi Yehudah Levi to call for all of his fellow Jews to seek their salvation in the East. But unfortunately, as we spoke about, it was a call that he heeded, but very few others followed. But not to worry. After a decade or two, the religious passions of the Al-Muravids were tempered by the good life in Al-Andalus, as had been the Arabs before them, and that made life easier for the minorities. It also, however, weakened their will to resist the Reconquista. But it was not the Christian armies who took them down in the end, but rather a new power that actually emerged from amongst the Berber tribes themselves.

It was the Al-Mohad movement, founded by Ibn Tumart amongst the tribes of southern Morocco. they succeeded in overthrowing the al-Muravid dynasty in Morocco in 1147, and soon extended their rule over all the Maghrib, that's the term for the western North Africa, and al-Andalus in Iberia. And our story really begins in the year 1146, when the al-Murahid leader, Abed al-Mumin al-Gumi, the emir in fact, called together the heads of the Jewish community of what we consider today present-day Morocco. This is a community that had been there literally for a thousand years. And he said, Your ancestors have not accepted Muhammad as the true prophet on the grounds that your Messiah will appear 500 years after the advent of Muhammad.

The 500 years have now passed, and your Messiah has not come. Consequently, unless you accept Muhammad as your prophet, that now we shall regard you as heretics and outcasts, forbidden to dwell in our land. Should you decide to remain here, you have only one of two choices, embrace Islam or die. And by 1148, the Amohads actually extended the very same decree to all the Jews of Koldova, southern Iberia. Faced with such a choice, many actually chose martyrdom and died. Some fled north to the Christian kingdoms, basically completing the exodus that had begun almost a century before under the Almoravids that we spoke about with Rabbi Hudalevi, and a smaller number actually fled to North Africa. Amongst these new exiles were Rav Maimon and his family, who eventually settled in Fez, the actual capital of the Almohad kingdom.

now it seems that in 1148 a significant portion if not the majority of the Jews of Morocco and Cordoba chose to convert and whether it was the prospect that further exile was just simply too frightening or maybe they actually felt abandoned by God or maybe the reality of the extremist monotheism of the Amohads led them to see the declaration that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet as not contradictory to the service of the God of Israel? We'll never really know. But what we do know is that these forced converts were in a broken state. And they found some spark of encouragement in a letter of consolation written by the Rambam's father, Rebbe Mamun, who begged them in the midst of his own wandering exile not to despair, telling them that God had not forsaken them and that even if they practiced their Judaism in private while still professing to be Muslims in public, they were still Jews.

Unfortunately, not everyone saw the situation through the same lens. Because the very fact that many Jews had fled rather than bowed down to the decree cast a difficult light on those who chose to convert. And a response, a tshuva, was actually published by an anonymous authority taking a stance diametrically opposed to Maimon's letter of consolation. it declared that any Jew who publicly uttered the Muslim Declaration of Faith even if he secretly kept all of Jewish law could no longer be regarded as a Jew this harsh stance endangered the very spiritual survival of these first Anusim these first forced converts and it's important to remember that they're first because this prospect of forced conversion is going to play a very important role in the breakdown of Jewish Spain These people were wavering on the edge of despair, and this blow might have actually caused the entire community to wholeheartedly accept Islam, if it weren't for the fact that Maimon's own son picked up the battle.

The Igerita Shmad, the letter of forced conversion or Shmad, is really the idea of any systematic religious persecution, was the first public document written by the young Rav Moshe ben Maimon, at least seven years before he completes his first major work, his commentary on the Mishnahh in 1168, and well before he earned the famous name of the Rambam. But nevertheless, in many ways, the letter shows us that the Rambam's characteristic mode of thought was well in formation already at an early age. He opens by blasting this rabbi for reaching conclusions in an unscholarly manner. The Rambam says that in order to pass judgments, one has to make only assertions sustained by exhaustive research which produce empirical facts.

And he then goes to town doing just that. He analyzes the problem of forced conversion first from a historical, gives sort of a historical overview of the phenomenon, and then from a principled halachic perspective. Because in his mind, the overall issue at hand was Giddush Hashem, the sanctification of God's name, which is why the letter is also known as Ma'amar, Giddush Hashem. and the question he was treating was whether these Anusim, these forced converts, had done the opposite, Chilul Hashem, to desecrate the name of God. Now, he found in their favor. And the letter had a tremendous impact on these persecuted Jews. In fact, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that he single-handedly saved them from complete apostasy.

Because many actually abandoned their hidden life and returned to living openly as Jews, and others spurred on by the Rambam's statement in the letter that it was better to abandon all wealth and comfort and flee even into the wilderness in order to be free to keep the Torah, many of them decided to finally heed Rabbi Yehudah HaLevi's call and leave for the east. The letter was written, we think, between 1160 or 1161, and within a few years, the Rambam and his family followed his own advice and boarded ship for the land of Israel in 1165. now in the day and age of airplanes and easy travel it's kind of hard to imagine but the Mediterranean used to be an awe-inspiring trip and in fact the Rambam's journey was so difficult that he fixed the day of the worst storm they experienced as a day of penance and repentance for his whole life and he made the day of his arrival at the port of Akko a day of rejoicing for himself and all his coming generations As far as we know, the Maimon family spent approximately six months with the Jewish community of Akko, visiting many of the holy sites throughout the Galil, and certainly sharing much Torah.

But the Rambam was not satisfied with simply being in Eretz Israel. He had to see Jerusalem. Now that may seem obvious to you, but remember, the Crusaders, who we haven't discussed yet, don't be nervous, we're going to get back to Europe perhaps in the coming episode, the crusaders had conquered Jerusalem from the Muslims in the year 1096 wholesale slaughtered the Jewish community along with the Muslims and actually many Eastern Orthodox Christians and, most importantly for us, reinstated the century-old ban on Jews in the Holy City. Nevertheless, according to a letter cited by Rabbi Eleazar Ezkari in the Seber Haridim you can look it up in Mitzvah 83 if you're curious on the 4th of Cheshon, in the year 4926, that's the 19th of October 1165, in the secular calendar, Rambam headed south for his dangerous journey.

And he says that when he arrived two days later I quote And I entered the place of the great and holy house and prayed there on the fifth day of the week the sixth day of the month of Mar Cheshvan. Now, though there is some scholarly debate, it seems clear to me from this that the Rambam ascended the Temple Mount and prayed there at the risk of his life. Awesome. but for unknown reasons the Maimon family did not stay in Israel but rather less than a year after their arrival they made their way back down to Egypt it's positively biblical right? and it's here that the Rambam made his official entrance into Torah scholarship with the completion of his commentary on the Mishnahh written in Arabic and completed in the year 1168 and it's also unfortunately here that tragedy struck after the death of Rav Maimon, the Rambam's father his brother David had supported the family by trading in precious stones and in the year 1169 David was lost at sea and with him not only his own fortune but large sums that he had been entrusted with by other traders the Rambam was crushed and he writes in one of his letters the greatest misfortune that has befallen me during my entire life worse than anything else was the death of my righteous brother, may his memory be blessed, who drowned in the Indian Sea, carrying much money belonging to me, to him, and to others, and left me with a little daughter and a widow.

On the day I received that terrible news, I fell ill and remained in bed for almost a year, suffering from a sore boil, fever, and depression, and was almost given up. About eight years have passed, but I am still mourning and unable to accept consolation. And how should I console myself? he grew up on my knees, he was my brother, he was my student. Despite the crushed nature of the Rambam in light of this terrible tragedy, he obviously picked himself up, brushed himself off, and moved forward in life. Now, Maimonides was famously opposed to earning a living through his learning, or through the teaching of Torah, or accepting charity if it was unnecessary. As he says in the Mishnahh Torah, Anyone who makes up his mind to study Torah and not work, but rather live on charity, profanes the name of God, disgraces the Torah, obscures the light of religion, causes harm to himself, and deprives himself of life in the future world.

Therefore, after his brother passed away, he decided to employ his other skill as a doctor. We know that the Rambam had mastered the classic Greek understanding of medicine from Galen through its Arabic translation, and had also absorbed the best practices of his day in his early life in Kortubah and his travels through North Africa. And if you look into Hilchot Deo, the laws of opinions or behaviors in his Mishnahh Torah, you can get a taste of his medical approach, which today we might call holistic. He believed that the body was the work of God, and therefore, if it was well treated in diet, rest, and exercise, it would basically take care of itself. I bless us all to get enough of that. due to his incredible skill the Rambam's fame as a physician grew and in 1171 he was appointed court physician first to the Grand Vizier Al-Qadi Al-Fadil and then to the Sultan Saladin who had actually taken over the Fatimid Empire based in Cairo and was soon to defeat the Crusaders for another decade and a half at the Battle of Hattin and furthermore according to the Arabic historian Al-Kitti the Rambam was actually offered a similar position by the king of the Franks in Ascalon meaning Richard I of England who was actually then in Israel as a crusader you just have to wonder how his history would have turned out if he'd said yes and spent the rest of his life in Great Britain but he didn't and meanwhile his association with royalty soon catapulted him to the head of communal affairs in that classic style of the Middle Ages when the Jew closest to the court, whatever court it may be inevitably became one of the most powerful men in his community.

So in the same year in which he became physician to the Grand Vizier, the Rambam was appointed Nagid, the head of the Egyptian Jewish community, at the tender age of 36. Now, as someone who struggles to work three jobs, parent five children, and be an actively engaged Jew, I deeply relate to the following description of the Rambam's life as royal physician, which he writes to one of his students who had asked if he could come visit and learn with him. He says, My duties to the Sultan are very heavy. As a rule, I leave for Cairo very early in the day, and even if nothing unusual happens, I do not return until the afternoon. In that I'm almost dying with hunger. I find the antechamber filled with people awaiting my return.

I dismount, wash my hands, go forth to my patients, and entreat them to bear with me while I partake of the only meal I eat in 24 hours. Patients go in and out until nightfall, sometimes even until two or more hours into the night. I converse and prescribe for them while lying down from sheer fatigue, and when night falls, I'm so exhausted I can barely speak. In consequence of this, no Jew can have any private interview with me, except on Shabbat. On that day, the whole congregation, or at least the majority of the members, come to me after the morning service, when I instruct them as to their proceedings during the whole week. We study together a little until noon when they leave. Some of them return and read with me after the afternoon service until evening prayers.

In this manner I spend that day. I have here related to you only a part of what you would see if you were to come to visit me. Now, when you've completed for our brethren the translation you've commenced, I beg that you'll come to me, but not with the hope of deriving any advantage from your visit as regards your studies, for my time is, as I've shown you, excessively occupied. now, in spite of this excessive occupation and exhausting routine the Rambam's years in Cairo were actually his most productive literary phase, this is where he produced the twin pillars of his written thought, the Mishneh Torah and the guide for the perplex so the Mishneh Torah, his great legal work was written first, between the years approximately 1170-1180, in a Hebrew actually which bridges the Mishnahh and the modern, which in itself, by the way, is a small revolution, because Judeo-Arabic was still the language of choice for the Spanish scholars of his day.

The Mora, his Guide to the Perplex, would actually be written in Arabic. But the Mishnahh Torah is the beginning of a shift toward a return to a Hebrew scholarly culture even amongst the Spanish scholars. He begins the work, actually, with what becomes a separate book, Sefer of Mitzvah, the Book of the Commandments. It's a count of the 613 commandments. And there he makes it clear that his intention in writing this work is to set right a situation of halachic development, of legal development, which he sees as having gone astray. In his introduction, the Rambam speaks of the glaring errors made by the Go'onim, the great authorities of the generations before him, and says they lacked a fundamental understanding of what even constitutes a mitzvah of the Torah, having no idea as to what the actual 613 mitzvot are.

He further goes on to say that he sees the unwillingness of even the greatest scholars of his day to challenge accepted precedent to be a tragic circumstance. Now, it's important to understand this, that the belief in precedent as the guiding principle of law and even thought, which dominates today's community of Torah observance, was rejected out of hand by the Rambam, and by the way, by many other early medieval authorities as well. The Rambam believed that due to the suffering and trials of exile, there was no longer a definitive, reliable Mesorah, that the chain of tradition had been broken. But this did not leave him in despair, and not also lead him to the belief that all we can do now is sift through the shards of a broken world for the little bits of fragments of wisdom that are left to us?

On the contrary, the Rambam was confident that the sages had left behind in their writings sufficient information to allow the truth to be rediscovered, and he spent his entire life in search of these truths which they had conveyed in their works. And the Mishnahh Torah was the result. Though, in his introduction to the commentary on the Mishnahh, The Rambam had praised the Riff, that great mind of North African Torah, who brought at the end of his life his Torah to Spain, which we spoke about in the last episode. The Rambam had praised his work of the Halakhot, saying that it contains all the decisions and laws which we need in our day. Apparently, those are the words of a young scholar. Because in his introduction to the Mishneh Torah, he says, I call this work Mishneh Torah, meaning repetition of the Torah, because all a man has to do is first read the written law, the Torah, and then follow it up by reading this work, the Mishneh Torah, and he will know the entire oral law without the need to read any other work between them.

Now, in order to appreciate the power of the Mishneh Torah, it's actually best to appreciate its structure. The Gemara, the Talmud, written by the sages, is broken into loose associative units called masachot, tractates. I personally would call its structure a holistic narrative. It's a wandering story through the wholeness of reality. Now that means that if you want to know the laws of blessings, there is indeed a tractate called brachot, called blessings. But in order to get the full picture, you can't just go there. You have to go there, and from there, you will have to go to many other places. which means that you need a mastery of almost the entirety of the text. This is what I mean when I say it's holistic.

That when you read the first word of the Gemara which in Brachot is Mematai it actually a word of the Mishnahh but okay When you read that the Gemara assumes that you understand everything within the text as opposed to what the Rambam did Because the Rambam replaced this classic Jewish approach of organizing information through a meld of experiential law and storytelling with the Greek approach of a structure based on comprehensive categories, logical subcategories, and clarity of presentation. Just think of your favorite textbook from seventh grade, or science, or history, or whatever it was. It assumed, before you opened the covers, that you knew nothing. And when you read page one, it told you everything you needed to understand page two.

And when you got through page two, you could get to three, and so on, until you got to the end. It's a very powerful model of learning, which is a linear model, as opposed to the holistic model of the Gemara. So what did the Rambam do? he processed the entire Gemara in his mind, which is just simply incomprehensible, and he broke it into 14 books, thus the nickname of the work, which is Yad Chazakah, Yad Yudalit, having a numeric value of 14 in Hebrew. And now, all you need to know about blessings, or Shabbat, or ritual slaughter, or what have you, was easily located and learned in a clear format. And in doing this, The Rambam also broke with another important rabbinic norm. He didn't cite any minority opinions, or even his sources in the Gemara.

His belief in the superiority of his reasoning, and his desire to make his work as widely accessible as possible, actually led him to state his opinion on the halakha, on the law, as the last word. And this was actually one of the primary causes of the controversy, which surrounded even his legal works. Rav Avraham ben David known as the Raivid, Raivid III actually if you're curious wrote the definitive criticism of the Rambam's Mishneh Torah now the Raivid was one of the Chochmei Provence the wise men of Provence who actually deserve a word unto themselves and who we're going to return to actually at the end of our story so Provence as the golden age in Spain declined and Ashkenazi Jews of the Rhineland were being devastated by the Crusades, which we'll speak about, Provence was an island of political tranquility and a bastion of Torah learning.

When the famous Jewish traveler, Benjamin of Tudela, visited Provence in 1165, he noted that the Jews of this region, tucked geographically and religiously and really culturally, between Spain and Ashkenaz, were few in number, but great in Torah. A couple of names will suffice. Moshe Hadarshan, who's quoted often by Rashi, the Radak, Rabbi David Kimchi, who really is a pillar of our ability to learn the Tanakh, Rabbi Zerachia HaLevi, who wrote one of the classic works on the riff known as the Baal HaMor, Rabbi Yitzchak ben Abba Mari of Marseille, who wrote the Itter, which was the primary vehicle of transmission of all the response of the Geonim to the Rabbis of the later Middle Ages. He was, by the way, deeply opposed as well to the study of philosophy, which will be significant from the end of our story.

But the chief amongst the Chochmei Provence, the wise men of Provence, was the Raivid. Now, the Rambam's works were known almost immediately to the sages of Provence, despite their distance from Cairo. And in fact, he kept up a lively correspondence with them during his lifetime. And they largely looked to him as the greatest halachic mind of their time. It was to the Rambam that the rabbis of Marseille wrote when they were trying to determine whether astrology was a legitimate pursuit, or an act of idolatry. He, of course, responded against, in a letter which is highly worthwhile to read in its full. But its essence is really summed up in this quote, A man should never cast his reason behind him, for the eyes are set in the front, not in the back.

When the Raivad saw the Mishneh Torah, and he saw how the Rambam had abandoned the give and take of rabbinic reasoning, and even failed to cite his sources in order that others could reconstruct his own reasoning, he was horrified. A legal code that didn't state the sources and authorities from which its decisions were derived, and offered no proofs of the correctness of its positions, was, in the eyes of the Raived, entirely unreliable. And therefore, he proceeded to write a gloss on the entire work. And his criticism was so definitive that it's actually printed as part of the text in every standard edition of the Rambam. And this, of course, is the great irony of the criticism which the Rambam's legal works engendered in his lifetime.

Today, not only are the attacks of the Raivet incorporated into the text of the Mishneh Torah itself, every Gemara has been retrofitted. So even though the Rambam doesn't cite the Gemara, the Gemara cites the Rambam. You know, of Isidore Torsky, perhaps the greatest modern authorian, the Rambam, called the Mishnahh Torah a quantum leap in the development of rabbinic literature. He pointed to its decisive influence on the entire Jewish legal system. Because, no matter what the controversy, it had an unprecedented rapid spread throughout the entire Jewish world, Asia, Africa, Europe, to the point that by 1191, in its correspondence, the Rambam spoke of it being known in all corners of the earth. That means, within 10 years of its publication, it had gone to the entire Jewish world two and a half centuries before the invention of printing.

And so, through the Mishneh Torah and through his extensive correspondence the Rambam became one of the leading lights of world Jewry. But, if his bold halachic stance, his legal position made waves among some of the more conservative elements of the rabbinic world that was nothing compared to the storm which erupted around his great philosophical work, Morin Vuchim the guide for the perplexed. Now, the mora was written actually in Judeo-Arabic, not in Hebrew, and it was presented in the form of a three-part letter to a student, Rabbi Yosef ben Yudah of Coetha. Now, Rabbi Yosef was struggling, as were many of the shining youth of Spain. He was struggling to reconcile reason and revealed religion.

And he put his struggle to his teacher in the following poetic verse. Thy daughter Kima, and Kima apparently was the nickname for the Rambam's method of reconciling theology and philosophy, in particular the role of prophecy. So thy daughter Kima, whom I loved and married according to law and custom, in the presence of two witnesses, Abd Allah and Ibn Rushd, notice that the two witnesses are Muslim philosophers, and this is something we'll return to when we discuss the 14th century, turned her face from me to follow other men, there must be something wrong in her education he says, restore the wife to her husband for he is a prophet so the Rambam replied to this request from his student in the same style, declaring the innocence of his daughter meaning his method works and the guilt of the husband he advises his disciple to have faith in God and to be more modest and more careful in what he says lest he bring evil upon himself because the Rambam says in his introduction to the Mordor Nebuchadnezzar I have composed this work neither for the common people, nor for beginners, nor for those who occupy themselves only with the law as it is handed down, without concerning themselves with its principles.

The goal of this work is rather to promote the true understanding of the real spirit of the law, to guide those religious persons who, adhering to the Torah, have studied philosophy and are embarrassed by the contradictions between the teachings of philosophy and the literal sense of the Torah. together with Sefer Hamada which is the book of the science the opening section of the Rambam's halachic work, the Mishneh Torah the Mur Nevukhin is an attempt to reconcile the wisdom of the Torah with philosophy, in particular Aristotelian philosophy and in this sense, the Rambam took the exact opposite tack from Rabbi Yehuda Levi if you recall, the great poet had asserted that the only way in which the Torah could truly be understood was to live it from within He was not interested in philosophy.

But now, as opposed to the great poet, the mighty philosopher engaged in what we would call comparative religion. The second section of the Mor Nuhim is actually a comparison of Aristotelian thought, some of the Muslim thought of his day, and the thought of the Torah. And even though, ultimately, of course, the Torah comes out on top, I mean, he is the Rambam after all, the very idea that there was a standard of measure for the Torah's truth which lay outside the realm of religion, that it could be compared in a relevant fashion, was unacceptable to many traditionalists. And the age-old issue of Chokhmat Yavan, of Greek wisdom Athens versus Jerusalem, fully resurfaced. Revealed faith and intellectual philosophy needed to duke it out.

Now, we didn't say it at the time, but it's important to note that Rabbi Yehudah Levy had warned about this in his poem, Davara Bemor Over. Turn aside, he says, from mines and pitfalls. Let not Greek wisdom tempt you, for it bears flowers and not fruit. Listen to the confused words of her sages built on nothing. Why should I search for bypasses and complicated ones that leave the main road? On the other hand, the Rambam actually asserts that these theories, meaning philosophy, are not opposed to anything taught by our prophets or by our sages. Our nation is wise and perfect, as has been declared by the Most High through Moshe, who made us perfect. I quote, Surely this great nation is wise and understanding people.

This is Davarim 4.6. But when, says the Rambam, wicked barbarians have deprived us of our possessions, put an end to our science and literature and killed our wise men we have become ignorant According to the Rambam the supposed conflict between religion and philosophy originates in a superficial reading of the Torah, which itself was caused by our long-suffering exile, just as, as we saw, the exile caused the loss of the halachic tradition. And, just as a true legal scholar could return the law to its purity, so too, according to the Rambam, he could reconcile any seeming contradiction between the truths which God had revealed and the truths which the human mind has uncovered through philosophy.

Now, I have to admit, to delve into the depths of the Morin de Buchan is beyond my capacity, not to mention beyond the scope of our story. But, the struggle with philosophy is going to follow us all the way up to the expulsion from Spain. Therefore, it's worth it to take a moment and make clear exactly what the dangers were in the minds of the traditionalists. And the dangers of philosophy came in three categories. First of all, theological. The philosophers denied miracles, looked at prophecy as a purely natural phenomenon, and often rejected the traditional eschatology, the messianic vision. All of this really undermined the authority of the Torah. And it's noteworthy that hundreds of years after the Rambam, the great Gaon of Vilna, who please God will speak about when we get to, in his commentary on Eurodea 179.13, if you want to look it up, would claim that the Rambam's denial of certain healing practices, which were advocated by the Gemara, was a result not of his medical stance, but his being led astray by accursed philosophy.

So there's the theological challenge. The second challenge is textual. The claim was that the philosophers engaged in indiscriminate allegorization of the Torah. and thereby denied the historicity of various biblical cares and events. If you recall, way back when we spoke about Philo of Alexandria and that attempt to reconcile Greek philosophy with the revealed portions of the Torah, his primary tool was allegorization. That has not stopped. And here, the Rambam will actually be quoted down through the generations and particularly during the Jewish Enlightenment of the 19th century when he says in the mora, in the second section, in the 25th chapter, those passages in the Bible, which in their literal sense contain statements that can be refuted by proof, can and must be interpreted otherwise.

That's a big statement. Finally, in addition to the theological and the textual, there's really what I see to be the core issue, and that's practical. The philosophers were suspected of laxity and observance of the commandments. Now here, no one imagined that the Rambam himself was at fault. However, his opponents, particularly in Provence, took to calling the Morinavuchim, the guide for the perplex, the Nebuchat Hamorim, or perplexity of the rebellious. And they took to claiming that philosophy had become a convenient excuse for those who wanted to abandon the mitzvot. Remember, when we spoke in the last episode, about what the philosopher told the king of the Khazars, when he heard that voice from God telling him that his intentions were good, but that his actions were not desirable.

He said that God doesn't care about the specificity of your behavior. It was actually in Provence that the Morah, and a number of the letters of the Rambam, were first translated into Hebrew by Rabbi Shmuel Ibn Tibbon. The guide itself was translated in the year 1204, just before the Rambam's death. and Rab ibn Divan corresponded with the Rambam several times regarding difficult passages in the book but the true controversy over the Rambam's thought only erupted after his death in 1204 as part of the context we have to understand that the Jews of Provence came on hard times at the beginning of the 13th century it was actually true for the Jews of the rest of Europe as well but in particular in Provence the Albigensian Crusade was launched in 1209 This was a 20-year military campaign called as a crusade by Pope Innocent III in order to eliminate Catharism, which the Catholic Church judged to be a heretical offshoot of Christianity.

And furthermore, there was a perception that the philosophical contributions of the Jews were also part of the evil mix down there in Provence. Altogether, this led to the wholesale slaughter of Jews and Christians throughout southern France. It was so bad, in fact, when a soldier worried that this indiscriminate approach to killing might result in the death of Orthodox Catholics instead of just heretics, in the lead-up to the sack of Bézirs, Arnold Amalric, a Cisternian abbot that played actually a key role in the Crusade, told him to simply kill everyone, as God would sort it out later. That's right, kill them all, and let God sort them out. Now, the Abagansian Crusade has its own rich history, and it contributed to the birth of the Dominican monastic order and the Inquisition of the Middle Ages which will both play prominent roles in the unfolding of the final chapters of the Jewish story in Spain.

But for now, in the wake of this incredible social disruption and after the Rambam's living personality was no longer a factor in the struggle, the great controversy over philosophy in general and over his works in particular finally was unleashed. In the year 1232, Rav Shlomo ben Avran of Montpellier, one of the major cities in Provence, together with his soon-to-be-famous student, Rubenu Yonah Migurondi, issued a public protest against the liberal opinions and the laxity of practice which they saw around them in the major cities of Provence. Jews were scoffing at the commandments, they said, and ridiculing the words of the sages, and what was worse, they were hiding behind the words of the Rambam in order to do it.

Now, if Shlomo reached out to the rabbis of northern France, the Tosavists, who we'll discuss in coming episodes, you should understand that secular learning, and philosophy in particular, were completely foreign to the rabbis of the north. And therefore, they had no problem in declaring a ban on the works of the Rambam and the learning of all philosophy in general. Shlomo and his student, Rabbeinu Yonah, began to circulate this ban throughout Provence and in Spain. but they met so much resistance that a counter ban was issued against them by supporters of the Rambam. This is when things began to get nasty. Letters flew back and forth between the pro- and anti-Rambamist camps and things might have gotten even worse as they will again, actually, in the 14th century if this round was not suddenly cut off at a completely unexpected source.

The papal legate Cardinal Romanus was in Provence at the time. supervising the final solution to the Cathar problem. And according to a pro-Rambamist source, the Franciscan and Dominican friars, who had newly come into being, at least the Dominicans, were alerted to the religiously suspect nature of the Rambam's work by the anti-Rambam crew, and they brought the guide for the perplex before an ecclesiastical tribunal. Upon being read, the book was condemned as heresy, and according to tradition consigned to the flames, burned in public. The accusation was it was actually burned by Jews. It seems that it was burned by the Catholics at the instigation of the Jews. Now the shock of this Pyrrhic victory was actually so great that it extinguished the controversy for the meantime.

The anti-Mimonist crew was shut down. But we'll see that the struggle will re-emerge in coming generations. For now, the Rambam was survived by all of his works, and physically by one son, Avraham ben Harambam, himself an amazing scholar, who succeeds his father as both Nagid, head of the Jewish community of Egypt, and as court physician, and who would continue to defend his father against all critics. But I think the best defense of the Rambam has been time and the progress of Am Yisrael through history. Because today, we continue to drink from his waters and most of his opponents, if they haven't actually been incorporated into his works, are known only to scholars and historians. And maybe, with a final word, we can apply the Rambam's own words to himself.

Words which he sent to the community of Yemen, in order to bring them comfort as they suffered persecutions and trials of false messiahs. This is from Iger Teman, the letter to the Jews of Yemen. That is to say, the Rambam goes on, Although his offspring will be abased like dust that is trodden underfoot, they will ultimately averge, triumphant and victorious. As it implies, just as the dust settles finally upon the one who tramples it, and remains after him, so shall Israel outlive its persecutors. vote of support. I want to thank the folks at the Land of Israel Network for giving me a platform to reach such a broad audience. I want to thank the people at Pardes Institute, that's P-A-R-D-E-S dot org dot I-L for allowing me to touch the hearts and minds of so many different types of Jews.

I want to thank Suom Yaakov, Suom Yaakov.com, for being my home. If you want to reach out to me, you can find me at Rav Mike on Facebook or Rav Mike here on the Land of Israel Network. And finally, I want to just thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Poyer, and this is The Jewish Story.