rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 341
dispute. Thus Yitzhak Arama, a Spanish rabbi of the second half of the
fifteenth century, adopted from Christian sermons the practice of pre-
senting philosophical ideas in weekly addresses in the synagogue in light
of the Torah reading for that Sabbath. He used appropriate rabbinic
texts and a skilful use of allegory to popularize philosophical ideas for
a wide audience. So, for instance, ‘In the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth’ was to be explained by stating that ‘in the very
beginning God brought the heavens and the earth out of absolute non-
existence. The word “Heavens” points to the two elements, the spiritual
world (intelligences) which had to be created first and also the matter of
the spheres that was closest to God in the order of creation.’
But Arama’s own confidence in human reason was limited, since he
knew from the biblical text that the tree of knowledge as described in
the Garden of Eden was a tree of knowledge of evil as well as good, and
that human reason, which could do so much good if tempered with
faith, would veer towards evil if allowed to overflow the boundaries of
faith. The ‘true science’ for Arama was not philosophy but kabbalah.
He was one of the first commentators on the Torah to use as a classical
source the Zohar, the most influential text produced by the mystics of
medieval Judaism who had led so much of the opposition to the ration-
alism of philosophy.^40
The Zohar and Kabbalah
Where in the minutiae of living according to the halakhah, the rational-
ization of philosophy and the scholastic arguments of the talmudists
were medieval Jews to find a sense of the transcendence of the divine?
The ethereal architecture of the Cordoba Mezquita in Islamic Spain and
the great cathedrals of northern Europe which instilled religious awe
in their Muslim and Christian contemporaries had no architectural
counterpart in the religious lives of Jews, both because medieval Jewish
communities were small and had no need for synagogues on a grand
scale and, in many cases, because of restrictions placed by Christian
authorities on the height of Jewish buildings, which were not to exceed
that of neighbouring churches. Those Jews with wealth to expend on
religious architecture lavished it on the interior decorations. The syna-
gogue of Worms, founded in 1034 for a merchant community which
flourished under royal protection and was home to a series of rabbinic
scholars expert in halakhah, remained a plain rectangle even after its