at Avignon, who is now known primarily in the world of Latin scholasticism
(hence his fame as Gersonides), following up the problems raised by Averroës
as well as in astronomy. Against this tendency there was a nationalist reaction
represented by Hasdai Crescas and Joseph Albo, living in now-Christian Spain
in the late 1300s and early 1400s. Here too emerged the Jewish Kabbalah,
propagated especially by Abraham Abulafia (in the old Neo-Pythagorean cen-
ter, Saragossa) and Moses de Léon, as a kind of secret code for the Jewish faith
under the growing persecution in Christian Spain. The Jews, who centuries
before had welcomed Islamic rule as more favorable than Christian hostility,
left the lands of Islam again in the late 1100s as Muslim religious tolerance
disappeared. For better or worse, Islamic-Jewish intellectual interaction was a
thing of the past.^38
Averroës and Maimonides, in their respective communities, are among the
clearest examples of the owl of Minerva flying at dusk. For the Jews, the
Almohad invasion sent most intellectuals fleeing Muslim Spain for Christen-
dom; Maimonides fled east to the court of another caliph, but his followers
were all in Christian Europe. Could he have known that after his time there
would be no more Jewish philosophers in Islam? Did Ibn Rushd know that he
was the last of his breed, and that the cosmopolitan intellectual community
was disappearing in the east as well as in Spain? Could he have known that
14 years after his death the Muslim power in Andalusia would be crushed?
Geopolitical events are rooted in shifting resources and alliances, and no doubt
cast their shadows before them; by the mid-1100s, Spanish intellectuals must
have felt the ground slipping underneath. It is such shifts in the underpinnings
of intellectual communities that set the opportunity to rearrange the contents
of the intellectual field, which we know as these episodes of creativity.
Coda: Are Idea Imports a Substitute for Creativity?
Translating philosophical texts from a foreign culture inhibits creative philoso-
phy among the receivers. When the eminent figures in the philosophical com-
munity are the translators or expositors of alien philosophies, their imported
capital becomes a substitute for creating their own. This does not violate the
structural principles of the intellectual field but follows from them. Under the
law of small numbers, there is room for three to six positions to command
public attention; it does not matter whether these are filled up by new creations
or come from abroad. Presenting a foreign philosophy can preempt one of
these slots. Where there is little competition from others, the chief idea import-
ers become energy stars, pseudo-creators in their own right.
Consider the reputation of Cicero, in the generation when Greek philoso-
phy made its first impact on the Roman intellectual world. Not himself a446 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths