Chapter XXVII: Some Fixed Stars

=1. Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021‒1070).=――This poet and philosopher, who was born at Malaga in 1021, is a very good example of what tolerant Mahomedan Spain produced among her Jews. The truest lives, it has been said, are those which have been cut rose-diamond fashion, that is to say, many-sided, and each side answering to some useful aspect of the life around them. This many-sidedness is perhaps a distinctive feature of Jewish genius, and due as much to circumstances as to nature. Solomon ibn Gabirol is an instance in point. He was poet, patriot, astronomer, and philosopher in one, and equally distinguished all round. Of his own life-history we unfortunately know almost as little as we do of Shakespeare’s, for biographies and autobiographies were not so much in fashion in those days as in these. But sonnets and poems with Gabirol, as with the great Englishman, take often a personal turn, and from these we learn that the Spanish poet was early left an orphan, and that he found a friend and protector in a certain Jekuthiel ibn-Hassan, the chief minister of the reigning kaliph. There are verses in existence which tell us of the friendship, and verses, too, of a sadder sort, which tell us of that friendship’s ending. Jekuthiel died when the boy he loved, and who loved him back again as only boys and poets can, was but eighteen, and the sorrow that came thus early into Gabirol’s life shadowed it henceforth. He seems always to have been of a somewhat sombre temperament, and it is possible that the loss of his parents when he was a child, and then the loss of this good friend just as he was entering manhood, may have made him more inclined than even he was naturally, to take sad views of things. He wrote a really wonderful elegy for so young a poet, on the death of Jekuthiel, and for the rest of his life he seems to have turned to work as a cure for heart-break. The most valuable of his writings is called ‘The Fountain of Life,’ and its philosophy was so wise and so original that the book grew more celebrated than the author. It was translated about 1150, from the Arabic language in which it was written, into Latin, and under its name of _Fons Vitæ_ it was greatly prized by learned schoolmen of the period, and in time it became a puzzle to identify the writer. ‘Avicebron’ was received as the name of the author, but who Avicebron might be was only conclusively solved in these days, when the French _savant_ Munk proved, to the satisfaction of all who knew most about the facts, that the unknown and celebrated ‘Avicebron’ of general fame, and the known and loved Gabirol of Jewish fame, were identical. To Jewish literature his chief contributions were numerous _Piyutim_, to be found in the various rituals, and the כֶּתֶר מַלְכוּת, or Kingly Crown, which forms part of the New Year service in the Prayer-books of the Spanish and Portuguese and the British Jews. This is a most beautiful religious poem, beginning ‘Heavenly and earthly creatures bear witness that they decay, and that Thou alone dost endure.’ The German astronomer and philosopher, Humboldt, said of this composition of Gabirol’s that it was a worthy and noble echo of ancient Hebrew poetry. It has a certain scientific as well as a theological value, for the first part of the prayerful poem gives a scholar’s rendering of the truth that ‘the heavens declare the glory of God,’ by presenting to the reader a faithful picture of what was the astronomical knowledge of the period in which the author lived. The כֶּתֶר מַלְכוּת has been translated into almost every European language. Another work of this many-sided man was the composition of a Hebrew grammar in verse, and a more interesting one was a small collection of wise and witty saws and sayings. This little book was called a ‘Choice of Pearls,’ and here are a few sample jewels:――

‘Questioning is halfway to wisdom.’

‘Courtesy is halfway to cleverness.’

‘Thrift is halfway to wealth.’

‘He who soweth hatred soweth regret.’

‘Man’s friend is his reason, and ignorance is his enemy.’

‘Who is wise? He who seeketh wisdom.’

‘A body without wisdom is like a house without foundation.’

‘Kings rule the land, wisdom rules kings.’

‘Forbearance is the best counsellor, courtesy the best companion.’

‘What is a test of good manners? Being able to bear patiently with bad ones.’

The string on which these pearls, and such as these, were strung, was a neat system of headings, such as ‘Friendship,’ ‘Patience,’ ‘Wisdom,’ and so on, under each of which headings the maxims were arranged. Gabirol did not live to be an old man; he died at Valencia before he was quite fifty years old, but, as Ben Jonson says,――

‘It is not growing like a tree
In bulk, doth make man better be,
Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere.’

It is not the number of our years, but the things done in them, that will be counted to us in eternity. Ibn Gabirol lived his life to the full, although it was twenty years short of the allotted sum.

=2. ‘Rashi’ (1040‒1105).=――Something more of a scholar, and something less of a poet, was Rabbi Solomon Isaaci, a French contemporary of Ibn Gabirol, who was born at Troyes in the year 1040. Though accusations against the Jews of France had grown frequent, and their position ever more and more insecure since the death of Charles the Bald in 877, yet their schools, particularly in the south and south-east of the country, were still flourishing and uninterfered with at the date of the little Solomon’s birth. His father and his uncle were both learned men, and the child was a student almost from his cradle. He was born, in fact, into a community of scholars, and something of the simplicity, and something too of the poverty which belongs to the scholarly life clung to him all his days. His means were small, but his wants were few, and he seemed always extremely content with his portion of ‘plain living and high thinking.’ He married at eighteen, which is, perhaps, some explanation both of the poverty and of the content. But happiness did not quench his thirst for knowledge. So eager was he to learn all he could possibly be taught, that, like Akiba before him, he did not hesitate to leave his wife and children in the pursuit of study. He went to the then celebrated theological colleges of Mainz and Worms, and worked there to such good purpose that his fellow-students dubbed him פַּרְשַׁנְדָּתָא, which is a Chaldaic equivalent for ‘Explainer of the Law.’ He is said to have made פְּשַׁט of the Talmud, which means to have arrived at a clear and simple rendering of the text――a great feat if we are to accept it literally. He made also a commentary on the Bible, which gives evidence of wide research and clear thought, but his Talmud commentary is considered, by competent judges, to be the more valuable of the two. With all his learning, Rabbi Solomon Isaaci would seem to have been one of those delightfully genial people who naturally earn nicknames among their companions, or, at least, get long-sounding titles affectionately shortened. In the very little we know of the inner lives of these long dead heroes, it is often necessary to add inferences to facts, and it is very suggestive that many of the greatest of these scholars used what Dean Swift calls the ‘little language’ among each other. The famous Maimonides was familiar Rambam in his own circle. Ibn Ezra was known as Raba, and something of the modest, happy nature of the wise Rabbi Solomon Isaaci seems to be revealed to us when we hear that this learned scholar and distinguished commentator on Bible and Talmud is seldom called by his grand full names, but only by the initials ר ש י, (רַבִּי שְׁלֹמֹה יִעְחָקִי) and it is as ‘Rashi’ he is famous.

=3. Abraham Ibn Ezra[36] (1092‒1167).=――Ibn Ezra, who was born at Toledo in 1092, was a star that shone in many different ways. He was a man of vigorous intellect, and as active in body as in mind. For those quiet days he was a famous traveller, and we find him enjoying a visit to London when he was in his sixty-seventh year (1159). He was just sixteen years old when the fanatic outburst against the Jews in his native town was put down by King Alfonso of Castile,[37] and possibly it was the sense of impending troubles in Spain which first set him thinking of seeking his fortunes abroad. His ‘fortunes’ he never seems to have found, but failures in that direction did not trouble him much. He would laugh at his own disappointments, and say, ‘If I were to take to shroud-making, I do believe men would leave off dying, or if I adopted candle-making as a trade, I am certain the sun would take to shining by night as well as by day till I gave it up.’ Ibn Ezra’s travels were rather the result of a restless and inquiring spirit than of a settled and sustained object. He would learn for a while, and then teach for a while, and do both equally thoroughly, and to the delight of either masters or pupils. And then he would travel again, and prove the most charming and entertaining of companions to any one whom he might chance to meet. He stayed once for a long time in Italy, and his influence amongst scholars there caused quite a revival to take place in grammatical and analytical study. He was an excellent critic, and his philosophic and scientific commentaries on the Pentateuch, and on some other parts of the Bible, are very valuable. Astronomy, also, was a favourite pursuit of his, and he was a first-rate mathematician. Ibn Ezra must have been, as the phrase goes, a very able man. Yet all qualities have their corresponding defects, and the charm of many-sidedness, when undirected by any high aim, has a tendency to run into indistinctness of outline. Ibn Ezra, it must be confessed, was all his life just a little of a rolling stone, and mere restlessness appears to have had a good deal to do with his frequent change of place and pursuit. His intellect seems to have been more active than his emotions, and it looks almost as if he had more mind than heart. And so the light this star gave forth, though brilliant, was of a somewhat wavery and uncertain sort.

=4. A Great Traveller.=――Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela was a Spanish merchant, who, between the years 1165 and 1173, visited the Jewish communities then existing in Europe, in Asia, and in Africa, and has left the most valuable record extant of the general condition of the Jews at that period throughout the three continents. It is quite likely that commercial pursuits shared with the pursuit of knowledge the motive of Rabbi Benjamin’s wanderings. For, in the modern sense, he certainly did not ‘make a book’ of his travels. The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela is the plainest and most unvarnished record of experiences, and, on the face of it, the work of a man who had no great literary ability. There is a lack both of detail and of polish in these rather rough notes of twelfth-century travel, and some critics have gone so far as to account for this meagreness by suggesting that Rabbi Benjamin might, in strict truth, have dated some of his despatches from Tudela. But more charitable and better informed commentators do not accuse our traveller of this bad faith, but explain his baldness of description and his occasional omissions by the much more likely suggestion that parts of the diary may have been altogether lost. The text which we now possess is considered by competent judges to be an abridgment of the original, and if this be the case, it would account for many otherwise unaccountable omissions. For instance, there is very little space indeed given to the Jews of Germany, who were numerous enough in the twelfth century to have afforded plenty of material to a traveller bent on recording his impressions. There would seem to be no cause for any wilful omission of this sort on the part of Benjamin, but the accidental loss of the German descriptions would easily explain it. With all its drawbacks, the book is extremely valuable. It gives us a glimpse of Jews, ‘toiling, rejoicing, sorrowing,’ in the midst of alien peoples, and it enables us to see how they looked to the eyes of a very keen-sighted and very plain-speaking traveller, who spent eight years in visiting all the chief cities of the world in the second half of the twelfth century. Rabbi Benjamin wrote his journals in Rabbinic Hebrew. They have been translated into Latin, French, Dutch, and English, but, strange to say, never into German. Possibly the Germans considered a book of travels, which did not say much about them and their country, to be too trivial for the trouble of translation.[38]

=5. Jehudah Halevi (1085‒1140).=――When the cry of _Hep! Hep!_ was ringing in all its first fierce frenzy over Europe, there were just one or two quiet corners in the Continent where the sound was forbidden. Peter of Arragon and Alfonso VI. of Castile were the Caleb and Joshua of their age, who stood steadfast, refusing to join in a ‘false report,’ and follow a multitude to do evil. Within the century that had just closed, France, Italy, Germany, Bohemia, and Greece had each been, at different times, the scene of terrible persecutions of the Jews. In Spain alone, under the mild sway of the Ommeyade kaliphs, Jews found peaceable homes. By the beginning of the twelfth century the Catholic kings were fast winning back Spain from the Moors, but the tolerant policy of the Mahomedans was yet, for a while, maintained. Space and liberty were still accorded to Jewish subjects, and it was on the safe soil of Old Castile, whilst Alfonso VI. reigned, that the poet, Jehudah Halevi, of whom a sober historian[39] gravely writes that the words ‘created in the image of God,’ when applied to him, read like the most simple and literal of descriptions, passed his childhood. As Jehudah grew up he became the very centre and chief of the group of tuneful and unworldly sages who, whilst the world was hurrying after vain shadows, and forgetting all about such beautiful realities as learning and humanity, remind us, by their calm and studious and religious lives, that such things did exist even in the dark ages. The quiet, uneventful histories of such men have been almost covered up from sight in the din and dust raised by recurring crowds of ‘chivalrous’ crusaders. Even in the age in which they lived, these gentle old scholars were not very visible, nor very prominent figures. They seem to stand a little apart, writing their poetry and philosophy, studying among the wise, teaching among the ignorant, and rarely eager for fame, and never for reward. Like the scholars of an older period, these, whom we find behind the scenes of the Middle Ages, used ‘the Law’ neither as a spade to dig with, nor as a crown to shine with. A modest livelihood was contentedly dug out of some handicraft or profession, and as to shining, they never thought about it at all.

Jehudah Halevi, physician and poet, was the highest type of this old-fashioned class of authors, and in his lifetime was far wider known as a doctor than as a poet. Even his doctoring was done on old-fashioned lines. As he stands in his laboratory he writes:

‘This draught that I myself combine,
What is it? Only Thou dost know
If well or ill, if swift or slow,
Its parts shall work upon my pain.
Ay, of these things, alone is Thine
The knowledge. All my faith I place
Not in my craft, but in Thy grace.’

His ‘faith’ was perfect; it never failed him.

‘When I remove from Thee, O God,
I die whilst I live; but when I cleave to Thee
I live in death,’

is another saying of his, and so beautiful a one that it has found a worthy setting in the יוֹם כִּפּוּר service. But, intensely religious as was Halevi, and perhaps because he was so religious, he was of an extremely happy nature, and he seems to have had, in addition to his other doctoring gifts, the ‘cheerful heart which doeth good like a medicine.’ This cheerfulness is very apparent in all his compositions, and a great many of his poems seem actually to be bubbling over with joyousness. Though, like most of the Jewish authors of his age, Halevi was an Arabian scholar, and thoroughly well read in Greek literature, he wrote mostly in Hebrew, and, as it seems, by preference as well as from principle, used his genius on Jewish subjects. He drank at the classic well, he recognised to the full its charm and its use, but he was too thoroughly Jewish for it ever to be to him as ‘the fount of living waters.’ He warned his people, indeed, against the fascinating influences of ‘Grecian wisdom.’ ‘It bears not fruit, but only blossom,’ he says in his charming poetic fashion. There could be to Halevi but one ‘tree of life.’ His chief prose work is founded on the somewhat doubtful history of that Bulan, the Jewish king who is said to have reigned over the Khozars in the eighth century. The legend――it is hardly history――tells that Bulan, startled into religious self-questionings by a vision of the night, summoned, next day, Jewish, Christian, and Mahomedan divines to talk to him of their faiths, in order that, open-eyed, he might choose from among them the most satisfying. The arguments of the Jewish doctors, it is said, proved the most convincing to Bulan, and the legend concludes with his conversion to Judaism, and the founding in his person of a Jewish dynasty which lasted some two hundred years.[40] This was a tale after Halevi’s own heart. He saw it all as it might have been, and made it not only into a stirring story, but into an interesting discourse concerning Judaism; and, that it might have the more readers, he wrote it in Arabic. Halevi’s love for his race and his religion was enthusiastic. ‘Israel among the nations,’ he says, ‘is as the heart among the limbs.’ But he was practical as well as poetic, and loyal as well as loving. He never neglected a patient for the sake of a poem, nor was he the less a faithful citizen of Spain because Jerusalem was to him, as he expresses it, ‘the city of the world.’ He had always a great desire to visit the lost land of his fathers. ‘Oh! had I eagles’ wings, I’d fly to thee,’ he writes in his beautiful poem on Jerusalem. But as he had not eagles’ wings, but only the plodding feet of a steadfast and God-fearing man, he set himself to do the work that lay straight before him, and made of his unsatisfied longings no excuse for sloth, but a spur to endeavour. It is said by some writers that he did at last go to Jerusalem, and died there; and others assert that he was murdered by Arabs on the road thither; and yet others, that he never had even the happiness to start on the long-desired journey. In truth, of the actual facts of Halevi’s life we know, as absolute certainty, but few, and we have to build up his character, and guess at his circumstances, from his writings. These are fortunately plentiful, and there is no difficulty at arriving at some settled conclusions. From the love poems, which are 800 in number, we gather some knowledge of a happy home, and of a wife of ‘rarest worth and sweet exceedingly.’ Then there are quantities of letters to prove to us that Halevi was as faithful in friendship as in love. One of these epistles, written to a companion while absent on his travels, after regretting the loss of his society, adds, prettily and poetically enough, ‘Within our hearts thou ne’er art out of sight.’ Another, which is addressed to Moses Ibn Ezra, begins, ‘How can I rest whilst we are absent one from another? Were it not for the glad hope of thy return, the day which tore thee from me would tear me from all the world.’ An elegy, which Halevi wrote in 1138 on the occasion of Moses Ibn Ezra’s death, is one of his best known and best liked compositions. Moses Ibn Ezra was a relative of the witty, wandering Abraham Ibn Ezra, and one of that brotherhood of poetic philosophers. But the most characteristic of Halevi’s writings are his religious poems, and these show us our poet in the truest aspect of his short but many-sided life. ‘For Thy songs, O Lord, my heart is a harp,’ he says in one place; and here is a specimen of the melody of his heart-strings:

‘Lord! where art Thou to be found?
Hidden and high is Thy home.
And where shall we find Thee not?
Thy glory fills the world.
Thou art found in my heart,
And at the uttermost ends of the earth.
A refuge for the near,
For the far, a trust.

‘The universe cannot contain Thee;
How then a temple’s shrine?
Though Thou art raised above men
On Thy high and lofty throne,
Yet art Thou near unto them
In their spirit and in their flesh.
Who can say he has not seen Thee?
When, lo! the heavens and their host
Make, silently, Thy presence manifest.

‘I sought to draw near to Thee.
With my whole heart I sought Thee,
And when I went out to meet Thee,
To meet me, Thou wast ready.
In the wonders of Thy might
And in Thy holiness I have beheld Thee.
Who is there that should not fear Thee?
The yoke of Thy kingdom is the yoke of all.
Who is there that should not call upon Thee?
Thou givest unto all their food.’