rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 331
simply through the force of rational argument. Their intentions were
good, they established the laws of thought, and they rejected the pleas-
ures of this world. They may, in any case, be granted superiority, since
they were not obliged to accept our opinions. We, however, are obliged
to accept whatever we see with our own eyes, or any well- founded trad-
ition, which is tantamount to seeing for oneself.’ Halevi’s assertion of
the glorious place of Israel in history may have been composed in
Arabic, but it was written in Hebrew characters and peppered with
Hebrew citations. It was never likely to be mistaken for the work of a
Christian as ibn Gabirol’s Fons Vitae had been.^24
Halevi’s attack on the philosophers recognized the fundamental role
that philosophy now played within the intellectual circles of Spanish
Jewry in his time, and especially the upper stratum of court Jews to
which he himself belonged. In these circles wealthy individuals of differ-
ent religious connections shared a cultured lifestyle of poetry, music and
literature and a common education in an Aristotelian philosophical cur-
riculum which had developed in the Islamic school curriculum in
Alexandria, Baghdad and Islamic Spain. The degree of tolerance to be
found in the convivencia, in which the three cultures of Islam, Chris-
tianity and Judaism flourished symbiotically, should not be exaggerated,
but what was remarkable about the religious life of this mixed society
was its intellectual openness, as much for the Jewish and Christian
minorities as for the Muslims who ruled over them.^25
The culmination within Judaism of the impact of this Islamic culture
on the Mediterranean world was the career and astonishing influence,
during and after the twelfth century, of Moses b. Maimon. Maimonides’
prolific output in the codification of halakhah, already noted in respect
of the Mishneh Torah (p. 315), was allied to a determination to reconcile
philosophy with the Jewish tradition. Both gave him exceptional influ-
ence among Jews from the western to the eastern ends of the
Mediterranean Sea and ignited a controversy, which was to rage for
centuries after his death, over the role of reason within Judaism. The
extent of his influence on later generations was summed up by a sen-
tence which began to circulate in rabbinic circles a century after his
death: ‘From Moses to Moses there was none like to Moses.’^26
The influence of Maimonides owes something to the travels imposed
upon him both by his personal circumstances and by the considerable
changes in the Islamic world in his lifetime. Cordoba had already been
the capital of al- Andalus, the Arabic name for Muslim Spain, for some
400 years when Maimonides was born there in 1138, and the great