168 CHAPTER SIX
refutation to the response written by Maimonides, and which he had al-
ready described as “a superfl uous repetition.”^54 Indeed, Joseph’s epistle
responds, directly and passionately, to the only previously written com-
ponent of the triad, the Gaon’s treatise, whereas Maimonides’ treatise
represents the third and last stage of this literary debate.
Joseph was not the offi cial target of Maimonides’ treatise, and Maimo-
nides does not mention him in it. As the following pages will attempt to
show, however, Maimonides’ treatise bears witness to his familiarity
with Joseph’s Silencing Epistle. It also indicates that in some ways, Jo-
seph Ibn Shimon was a primary addressee of Maimonides’ treatise, just
as he was the primary addressee of the Guide of the Perplexed.^55
As shown by both the text of Maimonides’ Treatise on Resurrection and
his correspondence with his student Joseph, Maimonides attempted to
keep a restrained public tone as long as the debate remained confi ned to
a more or less private discussion, reserving his more outspoken pro-
nouncements to his private correspondence. It is only when the debate
received a literary form and became highly visible that he felt obliged to
respond and to defend himself in public.
As is often the case in theological debates, the origin of the dispute
may have had little to do with theology. Baghdad had for centuries held
the hegemony among Jewish communities around the Mediterranean. In
the twelfth century, however, the city had lost much of its primacy, both
as a Muslim metropolis and as an effective Jewish center. Ibn Jubayr, a
Spanish Muslim traveler passing through Baghdad in 1185, was not
much impressed by it. Compared to the thriving Cairo, which he had
visited less than a year earlier, he found Baghdad to be a city that, intel-
lectually and eco nomically, lived on its past glory. At the same time, Ibn
Jubayr remarked, the people of Baghdad still considered their city to be
the center of the world: “You scarce can fi nd among them any who do
not affect humility, but who yet are vain and proud. Each conceives, in
belief and thought, that the whole world is but trivial in comparison with
his land, and over the face of the world they fi nd no noble place of living
save their own.”^56 The deterioration of the status of the city as a spiritual
and cultural center was still more perceptible regarding the Jewish com-
munity of Baghdad. Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish traveler who visited
the city only a few years earlier (around 1171), found 40,000 Jews in
(^54) On the genre of Joseph’s Epistle, see further below.
(^55) On the close similarity of the Treatise on Resurrection to the Guide, see Lerner, “Mai-
monides’ Treatise on Resurrection,” 141; and see further below.
(^56) SeeTravels of Ibn Jubayr, ed. W. Wright, rev. M. J. De Goeje (Leyden and London,
1907), 217– 18; En glish translation in R.J C. Broadhurst, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr (Lon-
don, 1952), 226 ff.