From Maimonides to the Conversos

Visitors to Congregation Zohar Yisrael, where I serve as rabbi, sometimes notice my ambivalence toward an overemphasis on Kabbalah. Perhaps this reflects what I have observed among some descendants of Conversos who encounter Judaism and find themselves mesmerized by Kabbalah, sometimes at the expense of the far more demanding process of learning what it means to live a traditional Jewish life. Mysticism can be compelling; learning Hebrew, studying Torah, becoming familiar with halakhah, participating in communal prayer, and developing the rhythms of Jewish observance require patience, discipline, and time. Yet my ambivalence may also reflect another aspect of my own education—one that introduced me to a very different way of understanding the historical relationship between Kabbalah, Maimonidean rationalism, and the eventual crisis of Iberian Jewry.

According to Rabbi José Faur, the rise of the Converso phenomenon was connected, at least in part, to the weakening of Jewish religious and communal institutions in medieval Iberia. The rise of the anti-Maimonidean movement during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, together with changes in the nature of rabbinic leadership on the Iberian Peninsula, contributed, in Faur’s analysis, to a gradual transformation of Jewish communal and intellectual life.[1]

The conventional interpretation of the Maimonidean controversy often presents the anti-Maimonidean forces as defenders of authentic Jewish tradition against the assimilationist tendencies supposedly encouraged by rationalism and philosophy. Faur challenges this interpretation. He contends that precisely the opposite may have occurred: the anti-Maimonidean movement, far from representing an unambiguously more authentic expression of Judaism, reflected an assimilation of certain attitudes prevalent in the surrounding Christian culture.

Faur states:

“Unknowingly, the anti-Maimonideans promoted Christian ideology. It should be emphasized that they were not conscious of their mental assimilation. Their opposition fostered the illusion of total autonomy, barring an analysis of the basic elements affecting their own thinking process.”[2]

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Faur’s thesis concerns the relationship between religious zeal and coercion. He argues that one characteristic of anti-Maimonidean ideology was the displacement of halakhic restraint by religious zeal, including the willingness to employ coercive measures against competing Jewish viewpoints.[3] Medieval Christian society had increasingly employed persecution against groups considered heterodox. According to Faur, something analogous occurred within the Jewish community when anti-Maimonidean circles sought to suppress Jews who favored competing approaches to Jewish thought.

The consequences could be profound. As Faur observes:

“One need not be particularly bright to have realized that requesting the Dominicans to burn Maimonides’ works established an extremely dangerous precedent.”[4]

Whatever one thinks of Faur’s larger thesis, the episode raises a troubling historical question. Once Jewish factions appealed to Christian religious authorities to suppress the writings of other Jews, an instrument of coercion had been introduced into an internal Jewish controversy that Jews themselves could not control.

Faur connects this intellectual conflict with a broader transformation of Iberian Jewish society. The extraordinary creativity that had characterized earlier Iberian Jewish life weakened. Scientific, philosophical, humanistic, and diplomatic activity declined, while portions of the educated lay elite became increasingly alienated from rabbinic leadership. These weaknesses became particularly consequential when Iberian Jewry faced the anti-Jewish violence and mass conversions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The issue, therefore, was not simply philosophy versus Kabbalah. It concerned the changing nature of Jewish religious authority.

Earlier Andalusian Jewish civilization had developed within a society in which Jewish, Muslim, and Christian intellectuals participated, to varying degrees, in a common intellectual culture. Jewish thinkers engaged philosophy, medicine, science, linguistics, and other disciplines without necessarily regarding such engagement as a rejection of Torah. Maimonides became the greatest symbol of this tradition, though he was hardly its only representative.

For Faur, the emergence of a very different model of rabbinic authority represented a decisive break with this Andalusian inheritance.[5]

One of the most important figures associated with this transformation was Rabbi Moses ben Nahman—Nachmanides or Ramban. Nachmanides was one of the towering rabbinic authorities of medieval Judaism, and his influence on subsequent Jewish thought can hardly be overstated. Yet his approach differed significantly from that of Maimonides and the rationalistic traditions associated with Andalusian Judaism.

Faur interprets this difference as much more than a disagreement over philosophy. He sees it as a transformation in the understanding of Torah, rabbinic authority, and religious knowledge itself.[6]

This transformation was accompanied by the growing importance of Kabbalah. Some scholars have even asked whether particular mystical ideas may have affected the religious atmosphere in which the later mass conversions occurred. One especially controversial example concerns reincarnation.

Reincarnation appears in early Kabbalistic literature, including the Bahir and the Zohar, although its precise meaning and importance developed over time. Shem Tov ben Shem Tov—who blamed philosophy for contributing to Jewish apostasy—gave reincarnation an important role in explaining divine reward and punishment in his Sefer Ha-Emunot.

Allan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler raise a provocative possibility. If punishment for sin, including apostasy, could ultimately be corrected through subsequent reincarnations, might such a belief have weakened the perceived eternal consequences of conversion? They write:

“Rather, the way G-d punished the sinner was by temporarily bringing his soul back again in a lower form of life. But if in this subsequent earthly life the sinner behaved, he could rise up the ladder of rebirth and come back as a person again in his next reincarnation. Thus, punishment for sin was not eternal, and punishment for the ultimate sin of apostasy was also not eternal. Such being the case, why should the Jews not convert en masse…”[7]

This argument is speculative, and reincarnation certainly cannot be identified as a simple cause of the mass conversions. Nevertheless, it illustrates the larger question: did fundamental changes in the intellectual and religious culture of Iberian Jewry affect the community’s ability to respond to the catastrophes that followed?

Norman Roth likewise emphasizes the collapse of the intellectual culture that had once distinguished Spanish Jewry:

“There is, therefore no question but that the fifteenth century saw a complete breakdown and virtual collapse of the high level of Jewish learning which had characterized Spanish Jewry from the earliest days. The vacuum was filled, to the extent that it was, not by Baer’s nemesis, philosophy, but by its opponent qabalah….all these factors paved the way for the final chapter, which saw the conversion of undoubtedly the majority of Jews of Spain before the Expulsion was decreed.”[8]

The important point is not whether Nachmanides or Kabbalah were somehow “responsible” for the Converso phenomenon. Such a conclusion would be historically simplistic. Rather, Faur and Roth invite us to reconsider the assumption that rationalism weakened Iberian Judaism while its opponents simply defended traditional Jewish continuity.

Faur’s analysis becomes particularly interesting when considered alongside the thought of Rabbi Judah ha-Levi.

For Judah ha-Levi, the commandments possessed defined boundaries. Jews served G-d not merely through religious enthusiasm or personal spiritual intuition but through the concrete requirements of the Torah. In Faur’s interpretation of the Kuzari, this approach stood in opposition to ijtihad—personal religious endeavor or judgment.[9]

The biblical episode of the Golden Calf illustrates the problem. Israel did not simply abandon the G-d of Israel for another deity. Rather, the people attempted to worship G-d according to their own religious initiative. Their intentions did not legitimize their actions. Similarly, the pagan king introduced at the beginning of the Kuzari is portrayed as sincerely devoted to religious observance. Yet the angel who appears to him informs him that although his intentions are pleasing, his actions are not.

The lesson is significant. Religious sincerity is not sufficient.

Judah ha-Levi’s goal was not to eliminate passion or devotion from Jewish worship. Rather, religious enthusiasm had to remain subordinate to the revealed categories of Torah. Sinai, not personal religious intuition, established the framework of Israel’s relationship with G-d.

According to Faur, Nachmanides represented a different conception of religious authority. His famous interpretation of Leviticus 19:2—“You shall be holy”—argues that a person might technically observe the commandments while nevertheless remaining a naval birshut ha-Torah, commonly understood as a “scoundrel within the permission of the Torah.” Holiness therefore requires something beyond a merely technical observance of explicit prohibitions and commandments.

For many readers, this represents one of Nachmanides’ most compelling religious insights. Faur, however, sees an important structural consequence in it. If the explicit categories of Torah do not exhaust the requirements of religious perfection, then some additional interpretive authority must determine what holiness demands.[10]

The difference between Maimonides and Nachmanides extended into their attitudes toward rational inquiry and supernatural claims. Faur draws particular attention to Nachmanides’ willingness to appeal to what he called the “science of necromancy” (hokhmat ha-negromansia) and to esoteric traditions as evidence against philosophical rationalism.[11]

Nachmanides writes:

“This would be known with spirits through the science of necromancy (hokhmat ha-negromansia), and it also could be known to the minds through the clues of the Tora, to those who understand their secrets. And I cannot explain [further], because we would have to shut up the mouth of those who pretend to be wise about nature, emulating the Greek [i.e. Aristotle], who rejected everything that he could not perceive with the senses.”[12]

This stands in sharp contrast to Maimonides, who famously dismissed sorcery, divination, and related practices as falsehood and superstition.

For Faur, therefore, the conflict between Maimonides and his opponents cannot adequately be described as a struggle between foreign rationalism and authentic Judaism. Both sides existed within larger cultural worlds. The question is not whether Jewish thinkers were influenced by surrounding cultures—they inevitably were—but which influences they absorbed, how they transformed them, and whether they recognized that process.

That observation brings us back to the Converso crisis.

No single intellectual development caused the mass conversions of Iberian Jews. The violence of 1391, Christian missionary pressure, social and economic incentives, political instability, ecclesiastical coercion, and the increasingly precarious position of Jewish communities must all be considered. Nor should a dispute beginning centuries earlier be transformed into a simple explanation for events that occurred much later.

Indeed, this chronological distance represents an important qualification of Faur’s thesis. The mass conversion crisis occurred roughly two centuries after the great controversies surrounding Maimonides. The connection, therefore, cannot reasonably be understood as simple cause and effect. Rather, Faur’s argument is most persuasive when understood as describing a long-term transformation of Iberian Jewish intellectual culture and religious leadership.[13]

Nevertheless, Faur raises an important question. By the time Iberian Jewry faced its greatest crisis, had changes in its intellectual institutions and religious leadership weakened some of the structures that had previously sustained one of the most creative Jewish civilizations in history?

If so, the Maimonidean controversy was more than a medieval dispute about philosophy.

It became part of the long transformation of Iberian Jewish society that preceded the rise of the Conversos and, ultimately, the destruction of openly professing Jewish life in Spain.

And perhaps that is what makes the controversy worth revisiting. The question is not simply whether Maimonides or Nachmanides was right. Both became indispensable voices within Judaism. The more difficult historical question is what happens to a religious community when disagreement over the boundaries of legitimate thought becomes a struggle over who has the authority to define authentic Judaism.

That question did not end in medieval Spain.

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Notes

[1] José Faur, In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 1–14; José Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons,” Review of Rabbinic Judaism 6, no. 1 (2003): 3–52.

[2] Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons,” 20.

[3] Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons.”

[4] Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons.”

[5] Faur, In the Shadow of History, 1–14. See also Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, vol. 1, trans. Louis Schoffman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1961), 96–110, for the interpretation of the Maimonidean controversy with which Faur is engaging.

[6] Faur, In the Shadow of History, 1–14; Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons.”

[7] Allan Harris Cutler and Helen Elmquist Cutler, The Jew as Ally of the Muslim: Medieval Roots of Anti-Semitism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 281.

[8] Norman Roth, Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 13.

[9] David H. Baneth, The Kuzari (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1977), III, 49, 129; Faur, In the Shadow of History, 10.

[10] Faur, In the Shadow of History, 10–14.

[11] Nachmanides, Commentary on Exodus 20:3, Pirush ha-Ramban, vol. 1, 393; Torat Hashem Temima, 146, 149, as discussed in Faur, In the Shadow of History, 223.

[12] Nachmanides, Keter ha-Torah, ed. R. Joseph Hasid (Jerusalem, 1970), vol. 3, 122b, cited in Faur, In the Shadow of History, 223. Because this edition has not been independently consulted for the present essay, the quotation is cited through Faur.

[13] See Faur, “Anti-Maimonidean Demons.” The chronological objection is important: the great wave of apostasy followed the Maimonidean controversy by approximately two centuries. Faur’s thesis is therefore better understood as an argument concerning a long-term transformation of Jewish intellectual and communal culture than as a claim of immediate causation.