Controversy and Collegiality: A Look at Provence

Gad Freudenthal and I disagree as to the relationship between Jewish anti-Christian polemics and philosophy in the cultural transfer of Andalusian rationalism to Provence. Freudenthal believes that the Jewish need to confront Christianity was one of the factors that led Provençal Jewry to adopt philosophical reasoning that theretofore had been foreign to them. I have argued that Iberian Jewish immigrants to Provence sought out Christian colleagues because of the latter’s interest in philosophy; in order to make sure the boundaries between the religions were maintained, these Jewish intellectuals were motivated to polemicize against Christianity. A central example of our disagreement is the case of Jacob ben Reuben, author of Wars of the Lord (1170), who describes his encounters with a Christian sage who tried to convert him. Freudenthal believes that Jacob learned philosophy in order to find answers to the Christian; but I contend that from Jacob’s description, it is obvious that he had first gone to the Christian’s house to learn philosophy before he was urged by his teacher to convert. Unlike Freudenthal who believes polemics led to philosophy, I argue that philosophy led to polemics.

Philosophy in Religious Polemics: The Case of Jacob ben Reuben (Provence, 1170)

Jacob ben Reuben’s Sefer Milḥamot ha-Shem (Wars of the Lord) of 1170 is the earliest Hebrew work of Christian-Jewish religious polemics that draws heavily on philosophy. Its geographical and intellectual contexts have been much debated, with significant implications for our understanding of the dynamics of Jewish intellectual life in Provence in the second half of the twelfth century, specifically the rapid acceptance there of rationalist philosophy and science and the associated rise of the Arabic-into-Hebrew translation movement. This paper offers new perspectives on the old questions. I lay to rest the claim that Jacob hailed from al-Andalus or sojourned in Huesca and submit that his place of “exile,” where he studied with a priest, should be identified as the locality Mourède, in Gascony (110 km west of Toulouse). I further demonstrate that Jacob had access to Hebrew sources only, as all Provençal Jewish intellectuals. Analyzing the genesis and development of the Wars of the Lord, I show that the discussions with his Christian mentor created in Jacob a need for the study of philosophy, needed to buttress his positions. I suggest that this pattern was recurrent, and that philosophically grounded religious polemics contributed to the Provençal interest in absorbing religious philosophy from the Andalusian immigrants who arrived in Provence in the 1150s. Jacob’s intellectual itinerary thus sheds light on the rapid acceptance of Greco-Arabic rationalist philosophy by Jews in Provence and on the resultant profound change of spiritual mentalité. The proposed account also identifies a causal relationship between the cultural change within Judaism and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance in gentile society and explains why they were contemporaneous. I lastly offer the hypothesis that Jacob ben Reuben, who composed his account of the exchanges with the priest after the event, may then have had contacts to the circle around Joseph Qimḥi in Narbonne. Last but not least, I insist that Jacob ben Reuben’s relatively slim Milḥamot ha-Shem is a rich multi-dimensional text that still calls for much research.