Evolution of Torah: Christian Spain
Establishing Torah Culture (Seaon 2, Episode 5)
All the legal cultures we discussed in this season come together in Christian Spain in the 14th Century. Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel (the Rosh) is one of the rabbis leading the integration of the legal culture of Muslim Spain, with the interpretative work of France and the rabbinic authority that was standard in Germany. This episode traces the Rosh’s immigration to Spain and highlights the period until the Spanish Inquisition. We end this season on the precipice of even broader geographic dispersion and as moveable type is about to revolutionize rabbinic and Jewish culture
Show Notes
Further Reading
Gampel, Benjamin R. Anti-Jewish Riots in the Crown of Aragon and the Royal Response, 1391–1392. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016.
Bios
- Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (Ramban, Nahmanides, 1194 – 1270) A precocious scholar, who showed his genius early, writing a compendium to the Rif when was 16. He left Spain in 1267 to move to Palestine. He is buried in Haifa.
- R. Solomon ben Avraham Aderet (Rashba, 1235 – 1310) A student of Nachmanides, he was a leading figure in Spanish Jewish life and a contemporary of the Rosh. He pronounced a ban against those who studied physics and metaphysics.
- Rabbi Asher ben Yehiel (the Rosh, Rabenu Asher c. 1250 – 1328) The most prominent student of the Maharam, who probably left Germany to avoid being blackmailed. He became the chief rabbi of Toledo after settling there. He was responsible for bringing the scholarship of France and Germany to Christian Spain.
Transcript
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Announcer Welcome to Season two of the Evolution of Torah, a podcast with JTS professor, Rabbi Mordecai Schwartz. In this season, Establishing Rabbinic Culture, Professor Schwartz traces the development of medieval Jewish legal literature through a journey to four key centers of learning across North Africa and Europe. This is episode six, our final episode…
Rabbi Mordecai Schwartz The Jews of Spain under Christianity adopted and expanded the Tosafot method, while still preserving aspects of their predecessors’ legal approach under Islam. How this strange unification of two very different learning cultures happened is the subject of this episode.
We cannot wholly ascribe this unification to one rabbi and his decision to escape Germany by emigrating to Spain with his family. Nonetheless the importance of that event cannot be overstated. After the imprisonment and death of his teacher, R. Meir of Rothenburg, R. Asher ben Yehiel, or the Rosh and his family escaped Ashkenaz and moved to Toledo. That decision to leave the place he knew and move to a place with a very different culture and language was a boon for him and for the entire Jewish people and its history to follow.
In Toledo, the Rosh met R. Solomon ben Avraham Aderet, the Rashba, the most prominent rabbinic jurist on the Iberian Peninsula of his time. The Rosh became the head of the community in Toledo.
It was in the year 1304 that the Rosh arrived with his family in Spain. He revived the study of the Talmud which had been neglected in Spain in favor of the direct study of Alfasi, of the Rif. He made use of the method of the Tosafot. The time of the Rosh’s immigration into Spain was a critical one for the Jews both in Germany and in Spain. In Germany the glorious age of the Tosafot had reached its end. They had critically investigated the Talmud, removed its contradictions, and harmonized its sources. German Jews were united. They looked with great reverence upon their religious leaders. They were greatly pious and committed to a moral underpinning for Torah. But the religious persecutions of the 13th century made life very complicated. Even though the community was wealthy and educated, there was the constant threat of violence, insecurity, and an ongoing anxiety about what the future would bring.
The position of the Jews in Spain was quite different at that time. The greater part of the Iberian Peninsula was under Christian rule and the Church made many attempts to curtail their rights, but the Jews played an important role in public and cultural life, and were seemingly protected by the monarchy. The kinds of persecutions such as were familiar to the Jews in Germany weren’t as widespread in Spain until near the end of the 14th century. So, while there was anxiety and insecurity in Christian Spain, there was far less ongoing violence, and the threat of the Crusades was far away.
What was lacking in Spain at this point was the religious unity and abiding rabbinic authority that was the standard in Germany.
When the Rosh arrived in Spain he found a community that was at odds with itself. Over the previous seventy years controversy over the study of natural science and philosophy, the conflict between faith and reason, had resulted in a divided community, groups of Jews who saw each other as intellectual and religious enemies.
When asked by the Rashba to sign a ban against those who studied science and philosophy he agreed, if for no other reason than out of respect for his great colleague. But his behavior afterwards towards those in both groups was conciliatory and he enjoyed general respect and great popularity amongst all the Jews of Spain, both the traditionalists and the philosophical and scientific progressives. Whatever his ideology, he became a unifying figure, working gradually to bring the whole community together.
The Rosh remains for us today a symbol of great importance. Whether exaggerated or not, whether true in every interpretive example or not, we look at the Rosh today as a unifier of the Ashkenazic and Sephardic tradition.
Another towering figure, who predates the Rosh, was Moshe ben Nachman, Nachmanides. Nachmanides had already adopted many of the approaches of the Tosafot part of his own methodology and quoted them readily in his commentaries.
In his rulings, however, Nachmanides remained faithful to his Spanish legal heritage, with a focus on the practical. When it came time to make decisions about law, he would often put aside the scholastic dialectical approach of the Tosafot. The methods of the French Tosafists were familiar to Ramban. He had trained under Provencal scholars who had studied in Northern France. Nachmanides trained the Rashba, who sat at the helm of Spanish Jewry after the death of Nachmanides for half a century.
There was a collegiality of spirit that existed between the Rashba and the Rosh, and the two were the greatest rabbis of their time.
Students came to study with the Rosh from far away, from places in Spain, Germany, France, Bohemia, and even from Russia. The Rosh taught students on the basis of the Tosafot, adding his own explanations. We have his students’ notes of these lectures in the form of a work called Tosafot Ha-Rosh, his own Tosafot. These are often more clear and more developed than the Tosafot that we have on the page of the Talmud, and since they’re parallel in their subject and structure it is often possible to gain a better understanding of the Tosafot on the page of the Talmud by looking at the Tosafot Ha-Rosh.
His students held him in great esteem. This can be seen from the testimony of one of his students Yitzhak Ben Joseph ibn Israel who wrote:
In the year 5065 (1305) the Lord inspired at the great teacher Rabenu Asher ben Yehiel, may his memory be for a blessing, to leave his native country of Germany to immigrate with his sons and his whole family into Toledo to enlighten our eyes and bring us out from darkness and backwardness to the light of wisdom and understanding.
During his public activity as rabbi, judge, and teacher of his contemporaries in Spain the Rosh was also engaged in the completion of a work which was to exercise a permanent influence over later generations. This work was his Halakhot, also called Pisqei Ha-rosh, in which he tries to reconcile the views of the French, German, and Spanish schools. He critically examined the views of the Tosafot, of his master Maharam of Rothenburg, and of other rabbis of the French and German schools as well as the Spanish scholars: the Rif, the Rambam, the Ramban, and R.Yonah in an attempt to reconcile their divergent opinions. Like the Rif, the Rosh aimed at dealing only with those laws that are applicable nowadays. He made Rif’s work a pattern for his own. It is even possible to read the Rosh’s Halakhot as a running commentary on Rif. The success of the Rosh’s Halakhot was immediate and palpable. Within his own lifetime it became the code that was used in Spain to determine matters of practical halakha.
To be sure, Rosh’s activities and literary output had a permanent effect on the state of Jewish legal affairs. His son, Rabenu Yakov ben Asher, later authored the work Arba‘ah Turim, which was heavily based on his father’s legal output. This work, in turn, served as the basis, at least structurally for Rabbi Joseph Caro’s universally accepted code of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch.
In the first part of the 14th century the Rosh had fled Germany coming to Spain seeking tolerance and freedom from fear. For the most part, in Spain, he and other Jews in that part of the century lived a decent life, if not free from anxiety, then with at least a low level of anxiety and fear. This did not remain the case towards the end of the century.
The most devastating attacks against the Jews of medieval Christian Europe took place not in Germany, not in France, not during the crusades, but during the riots that erupted, in 1391 and 1392, in the lands of Castile and Aragon. For ten horrific months, hundreds if not thousands of Jews were killed, numerous Jewish institutions were destroyed, and many Jews forcibly converted to Christianity. This event is not well remembered by Jews today, and we remember instead the Crusades and massacres in Germany, and the expulsion from Spain that was to later come in 1492. However, this is really the beginning of the end of the Jewish community in Spain proper, and the expulsion from Spain is really just the logical outgrowth of the events that occurred 100 years earlier in Aragon.
In his recent award-winning book on these riots in the crown of Aragon in 1391 and 1392, JTS professor Benjamin Gampel tries to explain why this happened, of all places, in Iberian society – in which Christians, Muslims and Jews lived together in relative harmony. He describes the powerlessness of King Juan and the other members of the royal family, their hesitant intervention during the crisis, their ambivalent attitude toward the conversion of the Jews, and their helplessness in response to the plundering of Jewish property.
Monarchic authority failed to protect the Jews during these violent months, because despite Royal promises of protection the Jews were just not a big enough priority. It was this realization, more than anything else, that no one was really there to protect them, that left the Jews in a state of anxiety and despair.
With the expulsion in 1492, a new period commenced not only in the life and history of Sephardic Jews, but also in their relationship to Ashkenazic Jews. Instead of one Sephardic Center many such centers–in North Africa, Italy, Turkey, and the land of Israel. This mixing and mobility, along with the invention of European movable type that allowed the new production of books and the information revolution of the 16th century is what characterizes the start of modern life.
In many ways the 16th century, following the expulsion from Spain represents a new dawning of Jewish life and rabbinic creativity. The phenomenon of the Shulhan Arukh as a universal code of Jewish law owes perhaps as much to the printing revolution of the 15th century as it does to Rabenu Asher and his son Yaakov.
But in the end you cannot have one without the other, and so this becomes the great tripod of Jewish modernity. The disruption caused by persecution and expulsion results in the unprecedented mobility that the Jews experienced during the 16th century. Second, the advent of printing and the availability of books gives access to a new broad-based intellectual ferment, a kind of information revolution that would not be repeated again until the birth of mass media in the form of film, television, and radio in the early 20th century, and then the internet and the later part of that century. Finally, it is the rabbinic creativity, and the advance of learning culture that imbue Jewish tradition with a dynamism and power that we feel to this day. But the events of early modernity and how the rabbinic learning culture changed are a subject for another season of the evolution of Torah.
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Announcer Thanks for listening to the Evolution of Torah with Professor Mordecai Schwartz. It was produced by Ellie Gettinger, JTS’s Director of Digital Learning, and recorded at JTS by the fantastic Christopher Hickey in New Media. Editing assistance by Sarah Brown. I’m Rabbi Julia Andelman, JTS’s Director of Community Engagement. If you have enjoyed this season, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. For those who want to dig a little deeper, visit jtsa.edu/podcasts where you will find sources, archival material and more in the Evolution of Torah Show Notes, along with links to all of JTS’s podcasts, exploring Jewish texts, history, culture, and experience.
