The First Clash

Through the charisma of his personality and the trend of his thought and leadership Maimonides himself initiated this. An exile from Muslim Spain, he met in the Near East the hierarchical traditions of the exilarchate and the Geonim. Maimonides was willing and ready to respect the exilarch as scion of the royal house of David and as the proper authority, from the Halachik point of view, to appoint and ordain judges.

His mind and heart vehemently opposed the claims of the Geonim. He criticized sharply the way they: fixed for themselves monetary demands from individuals and communities and caused people to think, in utter foolishness, that it is obligatory and proper that they should help sages and scholars and people studying Torah... all this is wrong. There is not a single word, either in the Torah or in the sayings of the [Talmudic] sages, to lend credence to it... for as we look into the sayings of the Talmudic sages, we do not find that they ask people for money, nor did they collect money for the honorable and cherished academies (commentary to Avot 4:5).

This attempt to undermine the economic and social foundations of the leadership of the Babylonian Geonim went hand in hand with Maimonides' opposition to their program of studies and his contempt for their very office. The Gaon at Baghdad at this time was Samuel ben Ali, a strong and authoritarian personality. In an ironic "apology" for Samuel ben Ali's attacks on the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides explains to one of his pupils:

“Why, my son, should you take offense that a man whom people accustom from his youth to believe that there is none like him in his generation, when age, high office, aristocratic descent, the lack of people of discernment in this town, and his relationship with individuals, all have combined to produce this execrable consequence that each and every individual hangs expectantly on each word pronounced from the academy in anticipation of an honorific title from there...—why do you wonder that he has acquired such [evil] traits? How, my son, could you imagine that he should love truth enough to acknowledge his weakness?... This is a thing that a man like him will never do, as it was not done by better men who preceded him (letter to Joseph ben Judah).”

The First Stage in Europe

Maimonides' works reached Europe, chiefly in the southwest — Spain and Provence — entering a cultural and social climate very different from the one in which they had been created in Egypt. His authority in Mishneh Torah was impugned Halachikally by Abraham ben David of PosquiIres and Moses ha-Kohen, among others. The Christian Reconquest was proceeding apace in the Iberian peninsula. Mystical tendencies and visionary approaches began to find explicit and strong expression in the developing Kabbalah of Provence and Spain. Jews everywhere were suffering from the impact of the Crusades, with martyrdom (Kiddush ha-Shem) in their wake. Maimonides' grandiose attempt at a synthesis between the Jewish faith and Greek-Arabic Aristotelian philosophy was received with enthusiasm in some circles, mainly of the upper strata of Jewish society, and with horror and dismay in others, imbued with mysticism and dreading the effects of Greek thought on Jewish beliefs. The old and continuously smoldering issue of "Athens versus Jerusalem" conceived in the Talmud as the problem of Chochhma Yevanit (Bava Kama 82b–83a, Megillah 9a–b), now burst into flames. Essentially the problem is one of the possible synthesis or the absolute antithesis between monotheistic revealed faith and intellectually formulated philosophy. This problem is interwoven in the great monotheistic religions with the clash between rationalistic religious belief, inclining in the main toward synthesis, and mystic belief, which is largely opposed to it.

The problem was not new in Judaism. In Islamic countries in the tenth century it was in the main decided in favor of rationalism and synthesis. Maimonides was not the only one in the 12th century who expressly sought a synthesis between Greek philosophy and Judaism, a philosophic approach was attempted by Abraham ibn Daud, and he was preceded by Saadiah Gaon and Samuel ben Hophni who denied the historical veracity of the incident of Samuel and the Witch of Endor.

Yet in that same century changes were taking place. The influence of the Christian environment became more pervasive. Increasingly Christianity was involved in similar problems, as the conflict between Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux clearly shows. Social upheavals in Jewish society during the 12th and 13th centuries added communal tension to the spiritual strife. When Maimonides was still young, most of his work as yet unwritten, Judah Halevi warned: "Turn aside from mines and pitfalls. Let not Greek wisdom tempt you, for it bears flowers only and no fruit... Listen to the confused words of her sages built on the void... Why should I search for bypaths, and complicated ones at that, and leave the main road?" (from his poem beginning "Devarecha be-Mor Over Rekuhim").

This opposition hardened and developed with the passage of time. Against it stood the rationalistic attitude of the upper circles. Meir ben Todros ha-Levi Abulafia, in many respects a sincere admirer of Maimonides, was shocked at the implication that Maimonides did not affirm the resurrection of the body as a Halachik principle. In an angry letter sent to the scholars of Lunel he not only sought to prove by copious quotations the dogmatic truth of bodily resurrection, but also added passionately that if there is no such resurrection, "to what end did the bodies stand watch for their God, did they go in darkness for the sake of their God? If the bodies are not resurrected, where is their hope and where are they to look for it?" Abulafia also attacked Maimonides on other Halachik points. While some of his correspondents agreed with him, others tried to convince him that he had misunderstood the purport of Maimonides' teaching on resurrection, and this latter view was accepted wholeheartedly by the Nasi Sheshet ben Isaac of Saragossa, who in a very radical sense gave expression to Maimonides' rationalism and philosophic synthesis. Writing about 1200, he attacked sharply and derisively what he regarded as the simplicism and materialism of Abulafia's view.

To speak about bodily resurrection is "to bring down our saintly fathers from the highest level — the status of the angels who enjoy divine glory and live forever — to the status of man, through their returning to the impure body which cannot exist except through food and drink, and must end in dust and worms... but the life of wisdom is greater than foolishness, as light is greater than darkness. These notions seem to me like the words of one confused" (ibid., 418). The only correct conception of resurrection, he thought, is the one also accepted by the pagan philosophers. Resurrection means the eternal life of the soul of the sage-philosopher. "If the soul — while still in the body — was yearning for its Creator, subordinating its passion to its reason, [then] when it leaves the body, [it] will attain the highest status, for which it yearned while still in the body, and over it God will emanate of His spirit. This, in the view of the sages, is the resurrection of the dead and the reward of the just at the end of days". All pronouncements in the Bible and the Talmud about bodily resurrection are only for the simple men who constitute the majority of mankind and who understand only material rewards, and the same holds true for the Muslim paradise.