Medieval Jewish Philosophy and Its Literary Forms

Aaron W. Hughes, James T. Robinson, Aaron Hughes, James Robinson

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253042545
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Medieval & Renaissance Philosophy

"This well-written, accessible [essay] collection demonstrates a maturation in Jewish studies and medieval philosophy" ( Choice ). Too often the study of philosophical texts is carried out in ways that do not pay significant attention to how the ideas contained within them are presented, articulated, and developed. This was not always the case. The contributors to this collected work consider Jewish philosophy in the medieval period, when new genres and forms of written expression were flourishing in the wake of renewed interest in ancient philosophy. Many medieval Jewish philosophers were highly accomplished poets, for example, and made conscious efforts to write in a poetic style. This volume turns attention to the connections that medieval Jewish thinkers made between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical to shed light on the creativity and diversity of medieval thought. As they broaden the scope of what counts as medieval Jewish philosophy, the essays collected here consider questions about how an argument is formed, how text is put into the service of philosophy, and the social and intellectual environment in which philosophical texts were produced.

1

ANIMAL FABLES AND MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

Kalman P. Bland, z’l

“WOLF AT GRAMMAR SCHOOL” IS A MEDIEVAL HEBREW tale, a fiction, a captivating sample of a storyteller’s art. Yet philosophy often prefers the medium of the theoretical or scientific treatise; allergic to “counterfactuals,” philosophy tends to distance itself from the telling of mere fictions.¹ This preference illuminates why “Wolf at Grammar School” and its kindred tales have been ignored by prospectors who have assayed the terrain of medieval Hebrew literature and discovered rich veins of philosophy in unexpected places, including law codes, poetry, and biblical commentaries.² This chapter argues that the neglect of Aesopian fables diminishes readers’ understanding of medieval Jewish philosophy.

The argument addresses three questions: (1) Taking “Wolf at Grammar School” as the point of departure, which features typify the genre of Aesopian fable? (2) What is it about the genre that elicits philosophy’s multiplex reactions? and (3) Using the terms right, center, and left in their political sense, where do Aesopian fables stand in relation to philosophy? My argument presupposes that in medieval Jewish culture Aesopian fables and philosophy converged: they were products of similar historical circumstances; their authors were uniformly accustomed to absorbing and interpreting biblical and rabbinic narratives; and both fabulists and philosophers earnestly probed or modeled life conduct. “Wolf at Grammar School” is therefore a congenial gateway leading to a more inclusive vista of currents and crosscurrents in medieval Jewish philosophy.

Typology of Aesopian Fables

“Wolf at Grammar School” belongs to Mishle Shu‘alim (Fox fables), a collection of stories written in northwestern Europe in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century by Berakhiah ha-Naqdan.³ The tale, composed in elegant rhyming prose and suffused with biblical idioms, reflects a society that prizes literacy. Readers encounter a teacher and a student during a beginner language lesson. The teacher, not unexpectedly, is human. The student, to the readers’ dismay and delight, is not. He is a wolf, a carnivore, a ferocious, feral predator. The lessons nevertheless proceed smoothly. The teacher pronounces “aleph” and asks the student to repeat it. The wolf, rather than blasting a lupine howl, articulates an “aleph.” After introducing the entire alphabet, the teacher demonstrates how the letters combine to form words. To encourage mastery, the teacher offers an incentive: the forging of “one family” or a single peoplehood (‘am eḥad) between the two of them, or perhaps between all humans and wolves. The teacher prompts the wolf to imitate the way he combines letters, “Aleph, beth.” The wolf replies, “Hinneh ha-seh” (behold, the sheep). The tale ends abruptly, without revealing whether the teacher was pleased or scandalized by the wolf’s statement; without explaining who initiated the lessons; without describing the time, place, and setting of the lessons; and without clarifying the wolf’s true identity.

In true rabbinic fashion, Berakhiah reveals part of the puzzle in the epimythium, or didactic commentary, he appends to the narrative. He explains that the wolf is a metaphor, a “figure” (mashal) representing wicked people whose appearances deceive but whose speech betrays the evil lurking within their hearts. Explicating the tale’s phrase, “one family” (‘am ’eḥad)—an allusion to Genesis 34:16, which describes the ruse perpetrated by Jacob’s sons on behalf of their violated sister Dinah against the wrongdoing of the uncircumcised, gentile inhabitants of Shechem—Berakhiah identifies the wolf with Esau, the typological brother who “despises Jacob.” Berakhiah was living in medieval England or northwest France, perhaps Rouen, when he composed the tale.⁴ By that time and in those places, Esau had become standard code in Jewish parlance for Rome and Christianity.⁵ Berakhiah’s identification of the wolf with Esau, the paradigmatic Other, the archetype of wickedness and physical violence, signals a barely disguised polemic against his contemporaries.

Perhaps Berakhiah meant to disparage the utopian thought that socioeconomic, ethnic, and religious differences conducive to hostility can be neutralized and replaced with a social order made peaceful by a common language, presumably Hebrew. Perhaps his targets were naive Jews who thought some good might come of teaching Hebrew to Christian scholars. Perhaps his narrative was meant to warn the Jewish community against the danger of Christians who dissimulate in order to proselytize, who only pretend affirmative friendliness with Jews and Jewish culture.

On the other hand, Berakhiah’s tale may have been a strictly intramural polemic, a parodic critique or caricature of his society’s idealistic faith in the civilizing power of education. Berakhiah was likely acquainted with any number of Jewish students who resisted bookish paideia, whose native temperaments rendered them incorrigibly more like alien Esau than non-threatening Jacob. Perhaps the didactic commentary, which is noticeably skewed in dilating on the wolf while scarcely mentioning the teacher, conveys esoteric, subtle assurance that there is no harm in studying extramural sciences or mastering a foreign language, including ecclesiastical Latin.

Regarding all of these interpretive possibilities, there is no certainty. Muddles and vagaries prevail. A fanciful figment of imagination, the tale is nevertheless wrapped in a thin veneer of philosophic dignity, a composite of respect for naturalism, ontological realism, and epistemological moderation. The tale strains credulity but stops short of bursting it. Perched precariously on the border between verisimilitude and falsification, the tale reasonably ascribes to the wolf desire, appetite, imagination, potential for being trained, and an oral-aural capacity for communication, but it avoids the outrageous suggestion that the wolf is capable of learning to read and write a human language.⁶ The tale also blurs the distinction between individuals and universals; it takes no precautions against stereotypical thinking. Its characters are dull abstractions: they lack personal names, and nothing differentiates them from other humans and wolves, from other teachers and students. As for the combination of tale and didactic commentary, its descriptions and judgments presuppose that the reader will recognize the distinction between virtue and vice, but its messages seem indistinct, irreverent, and indeterminate. The tale indulges in hyperbole, implying that carnivores are moral agents and necessarily wicked. If a wolf is faulted because it naturally thinks of sheep, what is a reader to think of the patriarch Isaac, who naturally asks his father Abraham in Genesis 22:7, “Here [hinneh] is the fire and the wood, but where is the sheep [ha-seh]?” “Wolf at Grammar School” exudes a distinctive aura, the consequence of skewed commentary and the byproduct of narrative fiction interacting with the complexity latent in all metaphors.⁷ The aura of dubious logic and uncertainty may typify the strain of Aesopian literature exemplified by “Wolf at Grammar School.”

A more complete sketch of that Aesopian strain can be drawn by juxtaposing Berakhiah’s tale with kindred stories from different times and circumstances in medieval Jewish history.⁸ Traveling eastward in space and backward in time, we encounter The Tales (or Alphabet) of Ben Sira, a late ninth- or early tenth-century Hebrew text composed in Arabophone, Islamicate, Geonic Babylonia, most likely Baghdad. It contains several fantastic narratives, including “Raven with Wobbly Gait” and “Fox without Heart.”⁹

In “Raven with Wobbly Gait,” the anonymous fabulist explains that one day, under unspecified circumstances, a raven admires the graceful walk of a dove. Attempts to emulate the dove are unsuccessful. All the other birds ridicule the ungainly raven, who consequently decides to revert to its natural walk. These attempts, too, are unsuccessful. The raven is hobbled, doubly incapacitated, unable either to imitate the dove or recover its former locomotion.

“Fox without Heart” is an episode in an elaborate tale about folklore’s paradigmatic trickster, “the most clever [piqeaḥ] of any creature.” The fox first outsmarts the angel of death, subsequently arouses the envy of the mythological Leviathan, and eventually outsmarts both the Leviathan and his minions, the fish. Lured by the fish into the ocean with false promises of replacing the Leviathan as king, the fox realizes his mortal danger when the fish inform him that they are carrying him to the Leviathan, who plans to eat his heart. The fox, feigning regret, persuades the gullible fish that one customarily leaves his heart at home when traveling. He proclaims his readiness to surrender his life and to guarantee their reward. Convinced by his compelling rhetoric, the fish return the fox to dry land in order to retrieve his heart from home. Safely on shore, the sophistic fox gloats, ridiculing the foolish (shotim) fish.

The patterns exhibited in the tales are dissimilar. “Wolf at Grammar School” features dialogue between a feral beast and a human being; “Fox without Heart” lacks human characters but features dialogue between animals, between the fox and the angel of death and between the fish and the mythological Leviathan; “Raven with Wobbly Gait” lacks both human characters and verbal dialogue. “Wolf at Grammar School,” couched in biblical Hebrew, is inseparable from its skewed and didactic commentary; the other two tales, composed in the idiom of Talmud and Midrash, speak ambiguously for themselves. Two of the three tales are etiological¹⁰ or cosmological: one explains how ravens acquired their awkward gait, the other accounts for why the seas lack a foxlike creature.

Complementing these differences are the “family resemblances” that demarcate the contours of Aesopian fable. The narratives conform to a pattern recognized by Walter Benjamin: they are meant to entertain, to be memorable, and to be practical or “useful”; their style is “chastely compact,” unconcerned with conveying information.¹¹ The fabulists are unburdened with the task of describing the times and places of the action; they neither detail the biographical background of their characters nor do they provide explicit theoretical explanation for their characters’ behavior. Another critic has noticed that a fable’s characters tend to “act on the basis of desire” and are “thwarted in that desire because another character . . . opposes and defeats it, also by desire. Desire is thus vanquished by desire.”¹² Other critics have remarked that, unlike fairy tales, fables “have no element of magic” and “no happy ending, except for the villains”;¹³ unlike fairy tales, fables do not allow for supernatural intervention or deus ex machina either to advance the aims of their characters or to save them from catastrophe.¹⁴ Aesopian fables simulate the writing of history; they describe the singularity of a past event. The import of their moral message is often questionable, ambiguous, or elusive.¹⁵ More allusive and provocative than dogmatic, the fables invite contemplation and stimulate thought rather than supply definitive answers. The fables tend to depict the implications of fixed identity, illustrating the futility of efforts to escape destiny. Typically, their preferred dramatis personae are nonhuman animals. Aesopian fables are therefore easily distinguished from the popular genre of exempla, in which the heroes to be emulated are not fictitious animals with questionable morality but actual or legendary human saints and scholars whose piety and righteousness are exemplary.¹⁶

Philosophy’s Polar Reaction: Discord and Compatibility

Aesopian fables blend more comfortably with other genres of medieval Jewish literature. Whimsically, innocently, ironically, subversively, or sarcastically, the fables ascribe to animals behaviors conventionally restricted to human beings. Among those behaviors are practices and virtues considered supreme in the medieval Jewish philosophic tradition: wisdom; rational deliberation; recognition of fixed laws in nature; and rhetorical prowess.

Similar to philosophy, Aesopian fables stimulate critical thought and favor the formation of abstract universals and generalizations. As Maimonides declares, “The Law does not pay attention to the isolated . . . [and] was not given to things that are rare.”¹⁷ Aesopian fables and philosophy are both preoccupied with the management of desire; both genres engage the pragmatic question of how best to conduct life.¹⁸ The parallels and analogies between philosophy and fables are noteworthy but not conclusive. The resemblances may be superficial or coincidental. Even if the resemblances indicate substantive o...