rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 337
‘have filled their bellies with the food ... of the Greeks’, so that if it
were not for the writings of Maimonides ‘they would have lapsed almost
entirely’.^34
Such mediation was in vain in light of the passions on both sides and
the clarity of the arguments both for and against the deployment of
philosophy for better understanding the Torah. As each side banned the
other, with a welter of letters, sermons and polemical commentaries
circulating widely and rabbis travelling from one camp to the other to
gain supporters, the battle came to the attention of the Christian auth-
orities. In 1232 the Dominicans in Provence intervened by burning books
of Maimonides as heretical. The shock to all involved in the controversy
was immense. It was said that Jonah b. Avraham Gerondi, a leading
partisan in Provence and Spain among the opponents of Maimonides,
repented so deeply his involvement in the struggle that he planned a
pilgrimage to Maimonides’ tomb in Tiberias in Palestine, where Mai-
monides’ body had been carried after his death.
These differences between rationalist and non- rationalist Jews within
rabbinic Judaism paled beside events in Paris, where a certain Nicholas
Donin, a Jew who had been excommunicated by his teacher, R. Yehiel
b. Joseph, for his heretical views in repudiating the oral Torah in a fash-
ion similar to Karaites, apostatized to Christianity, joined the Franciscans
and attacked the Talmud as an obscene text full of blasphemies against
Jesus, Mary and Christianity. In the ensuing disputation, held in Paris in
1240 with papal support, the Talmud was condemned, and twenty- four
wagonloads of talmudic works were burned in 1242. Both sides of the
Maimonidean controversy would have agreed with the desperate argu-
ments presented by R. Yehiel to Queen Blanche against the desecration
of what was, for philosophers and mystics as much as halakhists, the
basis of their faith:
The Talmud is very ancient and no one has complained about it before.
Your learned Jerome knew all Jewish knowledge, including the Talmud,
and he would have said something if there had been anything wrong with
it. Why should we have to stand for our life against this sinner, who denied
the authority of the Talmud and refused to believe in anything except the
Torah of Moses without interpretation? But you all know that everything
requires interpretation. It was for that reason that we excommunicated
him, and from that time he has plotted against us. But we will die rather
than give up the Talmud, which is the apple of our eye. Even if you should
decide to burn the Talmud in France, it will continue to be studied in the