MEDIEVAL HEBREW ( Sacred Book )

THE SACRED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE OF THE EAST

VOLUME IV

M E D I E V A L H E B R E W
THE MIDRASH
THE KABBALAH

In Translations by
DR. W. WYNN WESTCOTT, D.P.H., Magus of the Roskrucian Society;
S. L. MATHERS, M.A.; VERY REV. HERMAN ADLER, LL.D., President
of Jews' College; ADOLF NEUBAUER, Ph.D., Reader of Rabbinical
Literature, Oxford University; REV. SAMUEL RAPAPORT,
Rabbi of Cape Colony; DR. MICHAEL FRIEDLANDER, Ph.D.; and
other authorities on Hebraic and Kabbalistic lore.

With a Brief Bibliography by
ADOLPH S. OKO, Librarian of Hebrew Union College.
With an Historical Survey and Descriptions by
PROF. CHARLES F. HORNE, PH.D.

PARKE, AUSTIN, AND LIPSCOMB, INC.
NEW YORK LONDON

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MEDIEVAL HEBREW ( English Translated )
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" Wisdom is granted by God to him who already possesses
knowledge, not to the ignorant" MIDBASH TANHUMA.
"The Bible, or written law, contains unexplained passages
and hidden sentences, which can not be fully understood without
the help of the oral law." MIDEASH TANHUMA.


Introduction
HOW FROM RELIGION THE HEBREW THOUGHT BRED
JMYSTERY, PHILOSOPHY, AND POETRY
THE Hebrew writings after the fifth century of our present
era include no such transcendently important religious
works as the Bible and the Talmud. Yet the Hebraic
race had lost neither their wonderful genius for religious
thought, nor their strong instinct for formalism, for the
embodiment of religion in a mass of minute rules. Hebrew
tradition was still to give to the world two remarkable works
bearing upon religion. Neither of these is a single book;
each, like the Bible itself, is a collection of many works, brief
books carrying the complete thought of many generations.
One of these collections is commonly called the
"Midrash," and the other the " Kabbalah."
To appreciate these two earnest and strange and mystic
labors of medieval thinkers, we must realize that from the
time of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans (A.D. 70)
there was no longer a Hebrew nation living in its own land.

There was only a mournful race, wide-scattered over all the
world. At first the chief remaining center of Hebrew
thought and teaching was in Babylon, the foster-home from
which sprang the main bulk of the Talmud. But after the
fifth century A.D. the lands of Babylonia were plunged also
into destruction ; and more than ever the Jews became hapless
wanderers. They were welcomed, indeed, in some lands,
because their habits of peace and industrv and obedience
made them profitable servitors ; but more often they were met
with savage persecution. Hence to the medieval Jew the
usual conditions of life were strangely reversed. The people
among whom he dwelt were not his
"neighbors," but werestrangers and enemies ; while his true
"neighbors," those who would feel with him and help and value him, dwelt in all
the widest distances of the world.

Because of this scattered life of the medieval Jews, their
literary men were much more apt to write in the language of
the land wherein they dwelt than in the very ancient Hebrew,
which was known only to their very learned brethren, or in
the common Jewish speech, or Aramaic, which had long supplanted
the older Hebrew, even in Jerusalem itself. From
the time of Jerusalem's fall, when Josephus, that wise and
crafty Hebrew general, wrote his
" Wars of the Jews "
not in his native tongue but in Latin, so that the Roman conquerors
could read it, down to the day when the poet
Heine penned his passionate Jewish laments in German,
writers of Hebrew birth and spirit have enriched the literature
of every language in the world. Only when the
thinker had something to say directly to other Jews, something
personal or dealing with their religion, would he probably
write in Hebrew or Aramaic. Hence the later Hebraic
books are almost wholly religious, or, to employ the usual
word, " rabbinical."

THE MIDEASH
To this class belongs the medieval Midrash. The word
" Midrash " means " explanation," and so in a sense all
Hebraic religious works since the Bible are included in the
Midrash. But the name is generally limited to the commentaries,
which always remained mere human "explanations,"
and were never accepted, as was the Talmud, as being inspired,
and hence as forming part of the official and unalterable
religion. The medieval Midrash thus includes a
considerable bulk of writings, some of which may be as old
as the fifth century A.D., but the fullest and best of which
date from the ninth to the thirteenth century. They furnish
us, like the Talmud, with a further mass of homely or poetic
details about all the older Biblical characters, and of subtle
analysis of Bible doctrines. Some of the statements are
undoubtedly based on very ancient tradition. Many
Hebrews look upon the Midrash as the mere putting into
writing of facts always known to their race, and they hence
accept its teachings as equally valuable with those of the Talmud.

THE KABBALAH
With the Kabbalah we turn to another field, to what is
perhaps the latest, and certainly the most mysterious, product
of Hebrew religious thought. When the chief books of the
Kabbalah were presented to the European world in the fourteenth
century they created so profound an interest that their
appearance may well be noted as forming one of the most
important events of the Renaissance. They were said to
be as holy as the Bible, and as old, or even older ; and many
learned men accepted them at this valuation. A leading
Italian scholar, Pico di Mirandola, urged upon Pope Sixtus
(A.D. 1490) that the doctrines of the Kabbalah should be
accepted as part of the Christian doctrine. Indeed, many
Jews found in these so-called sacred Hebrew books such a
similarity to Christian teaching that they became converted
to the Christian faith.

Soon, however, eager scholars began to search the books of
the Kabbalah for what these could tell of magic, rather than
of religion. Doubts were cast upon the genuineness of their
proclaimed antiquity; and their teachings were relegated
to that borderland of fantasy and mystery which pervades
their highly spiritual religious ideal. To some critics of
to-day, the books of the Kabbalah are merely mechanical
riddles and mathematical word-games, to others they are
dark and brooding pits of evil ; to some they are petty frauds,
to others they are still the most ancient, deep, and holy books
of all the world. To every one of us they must have some
living interest as the subtlest and most mysterious product
of a subtle and mysterious age.

The Midrash reviews the past, the Kabbalah explores eternity.
The present volume, therefore, is given first to the
most noted books of the Midrash, with their harvest of added
details for the Bible story, and then to those of the Kabbalah,
with their searching of unknown deeps.
THE SPANISH HEBEEWS
Beyond these come the Hebrew writings held less sacred,
though only perhaps because they are less ancient, or at least
have never been invested with a claim or pretense to remote
antiquity. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries of our
era the gorgeous Arabic, or Moorish, civilization of Spain
was the center of the world's intellectual activity ; and as the
Moors were tolerant toward the Jews, we find among them
great Hebrew philosophers who wrote in Arabic. We find
also some who used the ancient Hebrew, or whose Arabic
works were by their admiring brethren translated promptly
into Hebrew. The more worldly or Arabian of these writers
we must look for in our Arab volume ; but we give here the
most noted works of the distinctly Hebraic style. First
among these in point of time comes the religious poetry.
There is a considerable bulk of medieval Hebraic verse of
this sort, much of it rising to a high level of poetic vision
and an even higher level of philosophical thought. We
begin here with the hymns of Avicebron, who was a noted
Arabic teacher arid philosopher of the eleventh century, but
had not forgotten his Jewish faith and people. Our book
then turns to Jehudah hal-Levi, commonly called Judah
Halevi, the most renowned of Hebrew religious poets. His
" Ode to Zion "
is usually accounted the high-water mark of
such poetry ; and his proudly boastful prose work,
" The Book Cusari," is equally typical of his day and of his people.

From the poets we turn to the prose philosophers. Chief
of these, from the Hebraic viewpoint, were Ibn Ezra of the
twelfth century and Maimonides of the thirteenth. Ibn
Ezra has been made known to English readers by Browning's
great poem, which takes him for its philosophic interpreter
of the worth of life. Maimonides, more accurately to be
called Moses ben Maimon, was so famed among his own people
for his work in codifying and expounding their faith, that
even to-day they speak of their religious teaching as extending
"from Moses to Moses." That is, the teaching began
with Moses of the Bible and receiving the Law upon Mount
Sinai, and it was finally fixed, closed, and established beyond
any further change, by Moses ben Maimon.

Having thus traced the whole outline of Jewish religious
development, our book closes with the most notable Hebrew
medieval work not touching on religion that is, so far as
anything Hebraic could reach outside of the tremendous allpervading
religious faith. This is the book of the travels of
Benjamin of Tudela, the most noted of Jewish travelers.
Doubtless other Jews in other ages have seen even more of
the world than he, but from no other have we preserved so
full and thoughtful a record of what he saw. Even Benjamin
of Tudela is more Jew than traveler. He notes chiefly how
many Jews he finds in each new place, how many
"neighbors,"
that is, for him, and how they stand with regard to
upholding the ancient faith. His work is thus well fitted to
form the closing picture of medieval Hebrew literature and life.


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 1917, Parke, Austin, and Lipscomb, Inc 

CONTENTS OF VOLUME IV
MEDIEVAL HEBREW

INTRODUCTION 
The Breadth and Persistency of Hebrew Learning
I. THE MIDRASH, or Preserved Tradition .... 7
The Tanhuma Midrash (about A.D. 500) ... 12
Bereshith Rabba 42
Exodus Rabba 69
Leviticus Rabba 90
Numbers Rabba . 105
Deuteronomy Rabba 121
Ashmedai, the King of Demons 133
II. THE KABBALAH, 
or Secret Tradition (from unknown date to A.D. 1305) 145
The Book of Creation, or Sepher Yetzirah . . 164
The Book of Concealed Mystery, or Sepher Dtzenioutha 181
The Greater Holy Assembly 236
III. RELIGIOUS POETRY 331
The Poems of Avicebron or Ibn Gabirol (died A.D. 1058) 334
The Poems of Judah Halevi (A.D. 1080-1150) . 337
Later Poets 352
IV. THE BOOK CUSARI, The Story of a Lost Race . 359
V. THE GREAT HEBREW PHILOSOPHERS .... 367
Commentaries of Rabbi Ben Ezra (A.D. 1092-1167) .371
Advice of Maimonides (1135-1204) .... 375
VI. THE TRAVELS OF BENJAMIN OF TUDELA (A.D. 1160-1173) 381
BIBLIOGRAPHY . 429
_______________

ILLUSTRATIONS IN VOLUME IV
The Tomb of Hiram    Frontispiece
The Mosque of Abraham 64
Kabbajistic Diagram of the Soul 160
An Ancient Synagogue in Palestine  384

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