Ulysses Essay 14 (26:24)

Chapter 2 (Nestor) No. 1

 “Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides”

It is 10 am at a boys’ school in the village of Dailey, a mile south of the Martello tower. At the end of a perfunctory history lesson (mainly concerning the exploits of Pyrrhus and his costly “victory” at Tarentum), Stephen is reminded by his pupils that Thursday is a half day and that hockey practice has been called. He accordingly dismisses the class, but stays behind to assist Cyril Sargent, one of the less bright student in solving some algebra problems. Stephen is a willing and considerate teacher, but as he peruses the “quaint caps of squares and cubes” in Sargent’s ink stained exercise book, his mind wanders to the now gone Moors whose pioneering work in mathematics gave the world “algebra” (from the Arab “jabara” meaning “to restore what is missing” or “to equate”). Thinking of the Moors, Stephen recalls the great eleventh century Spanish Islamic philosopher-physician, Averroes (Ibn Rushd) who lived and worked in Cordoba (1126-1198) and his eminent Jewish co-townsman and contemporary Maimonides (1135-1204) who attributed much of own his philosophical thinking on Aristotle to Ibn Rushd, the rediscoverer of Aristotle’s works after their millennium-long disappearance from Western European discourse.

And so my mind too wanders to Maimonides. I know him best as the “Rambam” (the Hebrew acronym for his full name - Rabbi Moshe (Moses) ben Maimon. As an aside, if you say “Rambam” (unqualified) to Israelis, their first association is to Rambam Hospital in Haifa, where I did part of my internal medicine residency. The Rambam himself (like Ibn Rushd) was a master physician who treated Saladin, the Muslim conqueror of the Crusaders (and, some say, also Saladin’s opposite number, Richard the Lion Hearted, although this assertion is almost certainly apocryphal), and who bequeathed us a physician’s oath (analogous to the Hippocratic oath) that Israeli medical students take on completing their studies. The Rambam, who used to see patients of every religion and social class at home in the evenings, wrote medical texts containing much practical advice  for living a healthy life, but it was his non-medical writing that established his dominancy among the post-Talmudic rabbinical echelon. These writings ranged from the philosophical “Moreh Nevuchim” (“The Guide to the Perplexed”) written in Arabic, the lingua franca of Moorish Spain, where in discussing Jewish belief and theology, Maimonides attempts to reconcile Aristotelian and rabbinical thought, to the massive fourteen-volume “Mishneh Torah” (“Repetition of the Torah”) the first organized and detailed codification of Jewish law and practice, written in clear and concise Hebrew. It is not surprising that subsequent Jewish generations termed the Rambam “Ha’nesher Ha’gadol” (“the Great Eagle”) because, as the popular saying went, “from Moses to Moses none arose like Moses” – an adage that Bloom recalls in the “Ithaca” episode, although Joyce typically makes Bloom erroneously include a third Moses  - the Enlightenment rabbi and philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn - in this litany of great Jews. In this Ithaca interlude, Joyce suggests that Maimonides’ “Guide to the Perplexed” (Joyce also gives it its Hebrew title “Moreh Nevuchim”) originated from the Rambam’s awareness that Aristotle had a rabbinical teacher, an idea which is often touted but actually lacks any factual basis.

The Rambam also answered questions of Jewish law from all parts of the Diaspora that reached him in letters delivered by far-ranging Jewish merchants. One of these “responsae” is particularly well-known. Asked by Jews living in Yemen if conversion to Islam on pain of death could in any way be countenanced in Jewish law, the Rambam replied affirmatively. He explained that while a Jew under coercion to commit any one of three cardinal sins (murder, incest and idolatry) should sacrifice his life rather than perform any of these extreme transgressions, in the matter of idolatry an exception could be made for Islam, since the Moslem Hadith, in common with Judaism, forbids even making “graven images”, let alone worshipping them, and hence Islam could not considered to be an idol-based religion. Thus, according to the Rambam, in contrast to coercive conversion to Christianity, conversion to Islam on pain of death is permissible in Jewish law. Three centuries later, in 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, celebrating the fall of Moorish Granada and thus the completion of the Christian “Reconquista” of Spain, moved to fund Columbus’s voyage of discovery, and simultaneously issued an edict expelling the Jews from Spain (two hundred years after the 1290 expulsion of Jews from England). The expulsion from Spain climaxed two decades of persecution of Spanish Jews by Torquemada’s Inquisition which had tortured and martyred Jews who refused to acknowledge the divinity of Jesus Christ. These Jews went to the stake with the words from the Torah “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One” (Deuteronomy 6:4) on their lips.

A little over a century later, the Moriscos, the descendants of the Moors who had converted under coercion to Christianity during the early 16^th century, were also expelled from Spain by Royal Decree. Most of the Moriscos settled in the Moslem Maghreb. But where did the exiled Spanish Jews go at the end of the fifteenth century? Mainly they made their way to the Islamic Ottoman Empire ruled by Sultan Bayezid II who quickly appreciated the economic benefits that would derive from the influx of the sophisticated and relatively prosperous Spanish Jewish exiles into Turkey and the Balkans, an act which would be emulated by Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England, some 150 years later, when in 1655 he too allowed the Jews to return to England after their expulsion from that country in 1290.