Chapter XVIII

THE CONQUESTS OF THE KALIPHS:
EFFECT, RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL, ON THE JEWS.

(600‒800.)

=1. Progress of Mahomedanism.=――There were great changes brought about in the position of the Jews from the spread of the new faith. The followers of Mahomed conquered east and west. First Syria was overrun, and the Christian subjects of the Byzantine Empire driven out of Jerusalem, and a mosque, sacred to Allah, was erected on the ruins of the Jewish Temple and of the Christian church. The power of Persia was broken and finally subdued by the Mahomedans,[8] and their victories over the Persians were rendered the easier by the help and sympathy which they found among the oppressed Persian Jews. Then from Asia the followers of the Prophet turned to Africa, and, establishing themselves in Egypt, looked threateningly across the straits at Spain. Within fifty years of the death of Mahomed the enormous empire of the kaliphs, as his successors were called, extended from the Caspian Sea to the Straits of Gibraltar, and was soon to bridge these, and to come to its greatest triumph in the Peninsula. It was just in these countries that Jews most congregated, and therefore the history of Islam has a special importance for the students of Jewish history.

=2. Gaonim.=――The first effect of the Mahomedan supremacy was felt in the neighbourhood where it arose, and chiefly amongst those scholars of Babylon who, within the memories of elderly men, had seen their schools closed and their רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא hanged. It was no part of the Mahomedan policy to make war on schools. Conquest once assured, the conquered might occupy themselves as they pleased. So long even as contrary beliefs did not take the active form of opposition to Islam, the holders of such beliefs were contemptuously and good-naturedly ignored. It was a pleasant experience for the Jews. Under the tolerant sway of the first kaliph, Omar, who had reason, in his quarrels with the Persians, to make friends with the Jews, the schools were reopened, an heir of the murdered רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא was reinstated, and the heads of the colleges took on themselves all their old duties and dignities with the new name of Gaonim.[9] Talmudic studies were again revived, and the _kallahs_ (high colleges) of Sora and Pumbaditha grew to be quite celebrated centres of learning. They were diligent students, these Gaonim, and a Gaon called Jehuda, who was blind, and who lived about the year 750, was one of the most active of them all in compiling the laws and decisions contained in the Talmud, and arranging them in systematic order. The Gaonim gradually became the great authorities on all religious and legal questions; and only political matters, and subjects which lay a little outside of the keenest interest, were left to the management of the רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא. His authority waned again. Some of those who wielded it were not very wise, and managed to come into collision with the Mahomedan rulers. Then from an hereditary dignity it became an elective one, and the succession provoked quarrels. At a certain stage in their history the Jews would seem to have prized scholars more than ‘princes.’ At any rate, the Gaonim came to the front, and the office of Head of the Captivity grew to be of less and less importance. Finally, under the combined influences of neglect from the Jews and of some jealousy from the Mahomedans, the office, after having existed for 700 years, expired altogether, as we shall see, in the tenth century.

=3. Spain in the hands of the Mahomedans.=――Eighty years after the death of the Prophet, the Koran and the sword, having made their triumphant way in Asia and in Africa, the Mahomedans proclaimed the one and sheathed the other in Europe. In 710 the flag with the crescent floated from the cathedrals and citadels of Spain, and Mahomedan kaliphs ruled in the place of Catholic kings. It made an enormous change in the condition of the Jews. Christian legislation had been hard on them for centuries. In public life it kept them from ‘use and name and fame,’ and in private life it prevented any sort of dignity or pleasantness. A Jew might neither be born nor be married, neither love nor work nor play, without penalties and restrictions. He might have the children he had begotten, or the servants he had bought, taken from him at any moment without excuse or possibility of redress. He could be forced into a church and made to listen unwillingly to bad sermons, and if he resisted he might be scourged. Would he be converted, or would he have his property taken from him? was a common form of question to the Jews. And when, about the date of Mahomed’s death, a Catholic king named Sisebut was reigning in Spain, even so much of choice, as was implied in this, was withdrawn. Not conversion or confiscation, but baptism or exile, was the alternative presented to his Jewish subjects by this royal fanatic Sisebut. It was a terrible state of things, for the difficulty to the Jews was to find any place where they should be better off. Dagobert was the contemporary king of France, and the laws he administered, and those that his predecessor Clotaire had had to administer, were precisely of the same sort. Heraclius, the ruler of the Byzantine Empire, had only lately renewed those edicts of Hadrian and Constantine which forbade Jews to approach Jerusalem; and with his recent experience of the part which Jews had taken in his struggle with Chosroes, Heraclius could not have been in a very friendly mood towards Jews generally. They could anticipate no welcome in any corner of Heraclius’s dominions. They might perhaps have tried Italy, where the Popes were powerful; for the Popes, as a rule, were not unjust to the Jews. And some did, and found in the comparative kindness of the heads of the Church good cause for believing that religion was not always a motive for persecution, though it too often served as an excuse for cruelty and plunder. And many had migrated to the East; and many, who were obliged to remain in Europe, had taken upon them, in hate and fear and trembling, the forced disguise of converts. Then came the conquests of the kaliphs, which brought about an altogether new state of things for the Jews. In Spain, we shall see that it made a brilliant silver lining to the clouds, a rift in that thick darkness which had descended upon the nation when Jerusalem fell.

=4. The Karaite Movement.=――Mahomed did not succeed in converting the Jews, but nevertheless the indirect influences of the faith he preached, helped perhaps a little by communal disputes, did produce a distinct sect among the Jews about the middle of the eighth century. There is so little that is really new, that many historians call Karaism only an old school of thought revived under new conditions and with a fresh name, and consider Judaism to be quite as accountable for it as Islam. We know that there were anciently three Jewish sects: the Essenes, who never struck root in Judaism at all; the Pharisees, the best of whom developed into the great earnest body of Rabbis; and the Sadducees, of whom Josephus said ‘they were able to persuade none but the rich,’ and who did, in truth, all but die out with the prosperous days into which they had fitted so easily. With Islam triumphant the prosperous days seemed dawning again, and once more the yoke of the Law began to be grumbled at. The oral law was now a written and settled code, and the obligations of codified tradition were more numerous than the injunctions of the Law. The murmurers said that they would observe the text, but not the commentary; they would read the Law, but they would skip the traditional interpretations. These grumblers grew numerous enough to be recognised: they were called Textualists, or Scripturalists; and yet more distinctively Karaites, from the Hebrew root קָרָא, to read.[10]

=5. Mahomedan Causes for Karaism.=――In their objection to tradition the Sadducees and the Karaites were alike, and so far it seems probable that the one sect was a survival of the other. But there were other influences at work, which may account for the appearance or the reappearance, as it may be, at this period of the later sect of separatists. The Arabs, by whom the impressionable Jews were surrounded, had enthusiastically accepted a most simple form of faith, a faith which had no priesthood and but one prophet. No sooner did tradition gather about Islam than a sect arose among the Mahomedans to throw it off. There had come quickly a Sunnah to the Koran, as there had grown slowly a Talmud to the Law. A party in Islam rejected the stricter traditions of the Sunnah, and a party among the Jews, about the same date, grew openly impatient of the Rabbinical ruling of the Talmud. Rebellion of any sort is catching, and there can be little doubt that each set of grumblers helped the other.

=6. The Leader of the Karaite Movement.=――The man who first gave expression to the Jewish discontent with tradition was a certain Anan, son of David, a native of Babylon. Anan had a personal grievance of his own, a position which gives a certain point and eloquence to any general sense of injury. He had wished to be made רֵישׁ נְּלוּתָא. But the election had come and gone, and he had been passed over; and, worst slight of all, a younger brother of his own had been appointed to the office. So Anan, disappointed of being patriarch of his people, and of leading them on the old and orthodox road, determined to become their spokesman and advocate in the new direction.

=7. What became of the Sect.=――Their tenets never made much way. They were, in fact, impossible. The Karaite said he would obey ‘the Law’――the strict and literal text, but would have nothing to do with tradition. Now let us see his difficulty. Take, as an instance, the command, ‘Ye shall kindle no fire in your habitations on the Sabbath’ (Exod. xxxv. 3). A ‘literal,’ consistent Karaite, living in a cold climate, would have to freeze for twenty-four hours regularly every seventh day, for he could not accept traditional observance, which lightens the yoke of the Law by limiting the meaning of the ‘ye’ to Jews, and permitting fire to be kindled in Jewish dwellings by the friendly hands of outsiders. Commentary――that is, explanation of some sort――is necessary to every law, and personal and off-hand interpretation is no more likely to be right than traditional ruling. It is somewhat conceited to think our own wisdom is all-sufficient, and that of our ancestors must be wrong; and it is just a little mean, perhaps, to be over-eager to throw off burdens which good men have deliberately borne. As our English poetess[11] wisely says,――

‘If we tried
To sink the past beneath our feet, be sure
The future would not stand.’

The Karaites never grew very numerous nor very powerful, though they were occasionally very troublesome. At the present day, stray remnants of the sect are discoverable in Jerusalem, and in parts of Turkey, Egypt, Galicia, and the Crimea.

=8. Good out of Evil.=――Sects never do prosper among Jews. The ideal of the nation, like the ideal of the religion, is Unity. The Karaites made but little impression in the way they wanted, which was a separate and a harmful way, but the means they employed brought about another and a very useful end. Rejecting all commentary, and relying entirely on the text of Scripture, they were forced to examine the text very closely. The Rabbis, to refute them, had to be equally particular about their interpretations. No arbitrary renderings could be given where both parties were inclined to be so positive. Each would examine, and re-examine, every phrase and word and letter for himself. This contest between Karaites and Talmudists brought about a very exact sort of scholarship; and accuracy is, we know, one of the conditions of truth. The Scriptures were exhaustively studied; the language was treated grammatically and scientifically; punctuation was added to the text, and the Pentateuch, after being divided into portions and paragraphs (פַרְשִׁיוֹת and סְדָרִים), was thus, as it were, put under the microscope. This work was mostly done by the Karaite scholars, and it was called the Massora[12] text. Thus the chief effect of the Karaite movement was to bring about a religious-literary revival. Historians who are fond of tracing back big events to a small original germ tell us that among the causes which led to the English Reformation (1525) may certainly be counted the spirit of earnest and profound inquiry into Scriptural renderings which Anan, son of David, aroused among the Jews. In this sense the Karaites are sometimes called the Protestants of Judaism.