Maimonidean controversies

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In Montpellier, around 1232, copies of the Guide of the Perplexed were carried into a public place and burned. The order had not come from within the Jewish community; the books were given over, by one account, to the Dominican friars then prosecuting heresy in Languedoc, and it was Christian hands that lit them. That a Jewish book of philosophy could be destroyed at the urging of Jews who held it dangerous, and by the same friars who within a few years would begin burning the Talmud itself, gives the measure of the quarrel that ran through medieval Judaism for the better part of a century. It was a quarrel over whether Greek wisdom belonged inside the study of revealed law — and it was fought, front to back, through the writings of one man.

The Maimonidean controversies were a series of disputes among medieval Jews, spread across the thirteenth century and into the early fourteenth, over the place of philosophy in Jewish life. They took their name and their heat from the work of Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), the jurist and physician born in Córdoba and dead in Fustat, whose attempt to reconcile the Torah with Aristotle became, for one party, the summit of Jewish thought, and for another a door opened to unbelief. The disputes are distinct from the position they contested — the rationalist theology itself, and its doctrine that God can be described only by negation. What is at issue here is the sequence of bans and counter-bans, the actors and the burnings: the fight over the books, not the contents of the books.

The two fronts

The quarrel had two main lines of attack, one about method and one about a single doctrine.

The methodological charge struck at the heart of Maimonides’ enterprise. In the Guide, written in Judeo-Arabic late in his life and dispatched chapter by chapter to a single qualified student, he had argued that scripture’s bodily images of God — the hand, the throne, the descending and the seeing — were not to be read literally. They were figures, accommodations to minds not yet able to think of God without a body, and the philosopher’s work was to read through the figure to the incorporeal truth it guarded. From this followed a hierarchy that his critics found intolerable: Maimonides ranked the knowledge of metaphysics — the apprehension of God reached by demonstration — above the performance of the commandments as the soul’s true and final work. To his opponents this inverted the order of the world. If the meaning of scripture is something other than what it plainly says, and if the highest service is contemplation rather than obedience, then allegory, pressed far enough, dissolves the very law it claims to explain. The fear was concrete and not abstract: preachers in Provence were reported to be reading Abraham and Sarah as form and matter, the twelve tribes as the twelve constellations, turning the narrative of the Torah into a coded treatise on physics. To subordinate the revealed text to a foreign wisdom was, on this view, to lose the text.

The doctrinal flashpoint was sharper because it could be stated as a yes or no: the bodily resurrection of the dead. Maimonides’ own writings spoke of the soul’s immortality and the intellect’s survival in terms that left readers uncertain whether he believed the body would rise at all. The accusation — that his system had quietly written resurrection out of Judaism — reached him in his own lifetime, and he answered it, around 1191, with a short Treatise on Resurrection insisting that he affirmed the doctrine and had never denied it, even as he reaffirmed that the deathless life of the soul, not the resurrected body, was the ultimate reward. The treatise did not close the question. To the suspicious it read less as a retraction than as a man defending, after the fact, a position his philosophy had already undermined. The charge that the philosophers had explained away the resurrection would echo through every later wave of the dispute.

The disputes in waves

The controversies recurred, in distinct generations, with long quiet intervals between them.

The first wave broke during Maimonides’ own life and just after it, over the Treatise on Resurrection and over his philosophical reading of the homiletic parts of the Talmud — the aggadah, the non-legal lore that he treated as parable rather than fact. The opposition in this phase centered on the rabbinic academies of the east and on the figure of Meir ben Todros ha-Levi Abulafia of Toledo, who circulated letters challenging the resurrection doctrine; the defense came largely from the scholars of southern France, where Maimonides’ code and his philosophy had found their most committed readers.

The second wave, in the 1230s, was the most violent. Around 1232 Solomon ben Abraham of Montpellier, with his disciples David ben Saul and Jonah Gerondi, persuaded rabbis in northern France to issue a ḥerem, a ban of excommunication, against the study of the Guide and of the Book of Knowledge — the philosophical opening section of Maimonides’ great legal code, the Mishneh Torah. The Maimonidean party in Provence, in Castile, and in Aragon answered with counter-bans of their own, excommunicating in turn those who had forbidden the books. It was in the course of this exchange that copies of the Guide were burned at Montpellier. The episode left a lasting wound. When the Dominicans, a few years later, began to burn the Talmud — the great Paris disputation and the condemnation that led to wagonloads of Hebrew manuscripts being put to the fire in 1242 — many drew the obvious and bitter lesson: a Jewish faction had taught the friars that Jewish books could be burned. Jonah Gerondi is said to have repented publicly of his part, undertaking to confess at Maimonides’ grave that he had spoken and sinned against the sage’s books. The precise role of the internal denunciation remains contested by historians, the Dominican initiative having its own momentum in the Languedoc of the inquisition; but the perception that the antiphilosophical party had loosed an outside fire it could not control shaped how the whole controversy was remembered.

The third and longest-remembered wave came at the turn of the fourteenth century, and it produced the dispute’s most precisely worded document. Its occasion was again the allegorizing preachers of the south. Abba Mari ben Moses of Lunel, alarmed at how far the philosophical reading of scripture had spread among the young, appealed for help to the towering legal authority of the age, Solomon ben Abraham ibn Adret of Barcelona — the Rashba, the leading talmudic jurist of his generation. An extended correspondence between the communities of southern France and the rabbinate of Barcelona followed; Abba Mari later gathered it into a book, the Minḥat Qenaot, the Offering of Jealousy. On the twenty-sixth of July, 1305, Ben Adret and the Barcelona court promulgated a ban: no member of the community under the age of twenty-five (some accounts, including the Jewish Encyclopedia, give thirty) was to study the works of the Greeks on natural science or on metaphysics, whether in the original tongue or in translation. The wording was exact in what it spared. Physics and metaphysics were singled out as the forbidden subjects; the study of medicine was explicitly exempted, and so were the sciences and philosophical writings of the Jews themselves — Maimonides’ own works among them were not proscribed. The ban was a compromise, narrower than the total prohibition some had pressed for. The philosophers’ party, led in the south by figures around the physician and translator families of Provence, answered with a counter-ban of their own, and the two excommunications stood against each other across the Pyrenees.

No verdict followed. In 1306 the king of France, Philip IV, expelled the Jews from the royal domains, and the communities of the Midi — Lunel, Montpellier, Béziers, the very towns where the dispute had been hottest — were scattered, their libraries seized, their combatants driven into exile. The argument was not settled; it was dispersed. The bans lapsed where there was no longer a community to enforce them.

The rival esotericism

Beneath the institutional bans lay a contest between two readings of what the secret heart of the Torah contained. Maimonides had made an audacious claim: that the two subjects the Mishnah had ringed with prohibition — the Account of the Beginning and the Account of the Chariot, the most restricted teachings in all of Judaism — were nothing other than the Greek sciences of physics and metaphysics under Hebrew names. The hidden inner stratum of the Torah, on his reading, was Aristotelian philosophy, lost to Israel in the long calamity of exile and now to be recovered.

In the same generation and the same regions — Provence and Catalonia — a different esotericism was crystallizing. The early Kabbalah of the Provençal and Geronese circles, the earliest stratum gathered around such teachers as Azriel of Gerona, claimed the very same restricted subjects for a wholly different content: not the impersonal cosmos of the philosophers but the dynamic inner life of the divine, the ten sefirot emanated within the Godhead, and a Torah whose every commandment bore on the hidden structure of God. Where Maimonides offered negation and demonstration, the Kabbalists offered symbol and a re-mythologized divinity; where he drained the old anthropomorphisms of literal force, they restored them as figures of a real inner divine life. Much later scholarship reads the rise of theosophical Kabbalah as in significant part a rival bid for the title of true sod, the genuine secret of the Torah, wrested back from the philosophers. The relationship was not uniformly hostile. Abraham Abulafia, whose ecstatic Kabbalah of the divine names took the Guide as a foundational text, read Maimonides as a fellow esotericist rather than an enemy. But the dominant line ran the other way, and the controversies were the public face of a deeper competition over who held the Torah’s inner meaning.

The dispute was never purely philosophy against mysticism, nor purely method against method. It carried, at every stage, questions of communal authority — who could ban whom, and whose word bound a distant community; the standing of the Talmud and the aggadah under philosophical reading; the fear of antinomianism, that allegory would erode the practice of the commandments; and the pressure of Christian polemic on a minority whose books were already vulnerable to seizure and the flame.

Sources and scholarship

The documentary core of the third wave survives in Abba Mari’s own compilation, the Minḥat Qenaot, which preserves the letters between Lunel and Barcelona and the text of the 1305 ban. The standard modern history of the earlier phases is Daniel Jeremy Silver’s Maimonidean Criticism and the Maimonidean Controversy, 1180–1240 (Leiden: Brill, 1965), which traces the resurrection dispute and the crisis of the 1230s. Joseph Sarachek’s older Faith and Reason: The Conflict over the Rationalism of Maimonides (1935) remains a useful narrative of the whole sequence. Bernard Septimus’s Hispano-Jewish Culture in Transition: The Career and Controversies of Ramah (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982) reconstructs the role of Meir Abulafia of Toledo in the first wave and the Andalusian-Spanish background against which the disputes unfolded.

For the rival-esotericism reading, Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) and Origins of the Kabbalah (Hebrew 1948; English Princeton, 1987) set out the case for early Kabbalah as a counter-movement to philosophical rationalism, a thesis refined and contested by Moshe Idel in Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), who recovered the positive Maimonidean lineage of Abulafia’s ecstatic stream. Moshe Halbertal’s Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and Its Philosophical Implications (Princeton, 2007) frames the whole quarrel as a clash between two incompatible theories of what a hidden teaching is.

The biographies of the principal actors are gathered in the standard reference literature. The 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, now in the public domain, carries full articles on Solomon ben Abraham Adret, the Rashba who issued the 1305 ban, and on Abba Mari of Lunel, whose appeal set the third wave in motion and who preserved its records. The philosophical positions at stake — the non-literal reading of scriptural anthropomorphism, the ranking of intellectual perfection above observance, and the resurrection question — are set out in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Maimonides. The same fault line ran, in the same decades, through Latin Christendom, where the recovery of Aristotle provoked the condemnations at Paris and the cautious scholastic synthesis — and where a figure like Roger Bacon pressed for the new learning against the suspicion of authority; the two debates were contemporaneous, and not unrelated, though the institutions that fought them were separate.

The fault line itself was singular and it did not blur: on one side the claim that the deepest service a human being can render is to understand the order of things by demonstration, and on the other the claim that it is to keep a law given from beyond reason. Maimonides had staked everything on their final agreement — that the God reached by proof and the God who commands at Sinai are one, and that to know the first is to obey the second most fully. His readers divided over whether he had shown this or merely asserted it, and the bans of 1232 and 1305 were the form that division took when a community tried to decide, by communal authority, how much of its own learning it could safely bear. The expulsion answered the bans before the bans could answer each other, and the two canons that emerged from the wreckage — the philosophical, whose book was the Guide, and the kabbalistic, whose books would be the Zohar and what came after — carried the unresolved fault forward as the permanent double inheritance of Jewish thought.

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