Wisdom and Poverty
The difficult life and uncertain death of Abraham Ibn Ezra
Abraham Ibn Ezra lived a difficult life. Very little went right for him, though at least he managed to retain a sardonic sense of humour. “If I were a candle maker” he wrote, “the sun would never set. If I dealt in shrouds for the dead, nobody would die.”
Ibn Ezra rarely enjoyed good fortune, yet he was hardly a schlemiel; he was one of the most important Jewish thinkers of all time. Best known for his Bible commentaries, he was equally respected as a poet and philosopher, scientist, mystic, astrologer and grammarian. There was scarcely a field of medieval enquiry in which Abraham Ibn Ezra did not excel and on which he did not write profusely.
Ibn Ezra was born in Tudela in Spain, round about 1089. Very little is known about his early years, in fact almost his entire life until the age of 50 remains a mystery. When he was born, Tudela was a Muslim city and he would have grown up speaking Arabic, studying medieval Islamic philosophy and science. He would have learned Hebrew too and studied Jewish texts to an advanced level, but where he learned and with whom is a matter of conjecture. Nowhere in his writings does he give any indication of what his life in Tudela was like.
In 1115, the town was conquered by Christians and its tolerant Jewish-Muslim coexistence came to a jarring end. He started to travel through Spain and North Africa, sometimes with his friend Judah Halevi who had also been born in Tudela and would become the most famous Hebrew poet of his age. Each of them wrote poetry as they travelled, subsisting on whatever support they were able to receive from benefactors. If anyone at that time had asked Ibn Ezra what his profession was, he would probably have said he was a wandering poet.
In 1140, for reasons that he never publicly disclosed, he suddenly upped sticks and left Spain for Christian Europe, never to return. The culture shock must have been dramatic for him. He was 50 years old, quite an advanced age for the 12th century, and the rigours of travel could not have been comfortable. Nor could he have found it easy to acclimatise to the new world he entered. He did know a little about Christianity, he had travelled through both Christian and Muslim regions in Spain, but he had never lived in an environment where his native Arabic language was completely unknown; where the refinements of Islamic philosophy and science had never been taught and where Jews were treated with contempt and derision. Whatever his reasons for leaving Spain, they must have been pretty serious, compulsive enough to stop him from turning around and heading straight back.
In unfamiliar circumstances, Abraham Ibn Ezra made his way to Rome. He had no money and no means of support. But he had something that the fairly large and learned Jewish community of Rome did not have. He had a deep and profound understanding of language. He’d learned from Islamic poets in Spain who had turned the study of grammar into an art form and competed among themselves to produce poems that they considered to be of the highest linguistic beauty. Jewish poets, recognising that Hebrew and Arabic were very similar languages, copied them. By the time that Ibn Ezra left his homeland, the rules of Hebrew grammar had been fully decoded and Hebrew scholarship in Spain had reached a level of refinement unheard of among the Jews of Christian Europe. Ibn Ezra arrived in Rome armed with the tools to give the city’s Jews new insights into their traditional language, and new depths to plumb in understanding the biblical text.
For the next five or six years, Ibn Ezra supported himself by writing poetry and commentaries on books of the Bible for various patrons. It was no simple task. Patronage was not easy to come by and patrons, who after all were acting voluntarily, were not the most reliable of people when it came to parting with their money. Fortunately, Ibn Ezra retained his sardonic humour, summarising his experiences poetically:
When I come to the patron’s house in the morning they say he's ridden off.
When I come in the evening they say he's gone to bed.
He’s either climbing into his carriage or climbing into bed.
While he was in Rome, Ibn Ezra included Islamic astrological and philosophical ideas in his biblical commentaries and translated three Arabic grammar books into Hebrew. This unwittingly involved him in an ongoing process that first brought Islamic thought into Europe. The texts translated from Arabic by people like Ibn Ezra were acquired by monasteries, where Hebrew-reading monks transcribed them into Latin.
Ibn Ezra brought new ideas to the Jews of Rome but his efforts didn’t always go down well. To some people, his thought seemed heretical. Others resented his apparent intellectual superiority. After 5 years, it was clear he had outstayed his welcome. He resumed his travels, settling next in Lucca, a small town to the north east of Pisa. He was only there for less than two years but they turned out to be the most productive period of his life. Apart from three books on grammar, three on astrology and commentaries on several books of the bible he composed his most famous work, his Commentary on the Torah. The book is still in regular use today, frequently printed and included in all good Hebrew biblical compendia.
Ibn Ezra’s Commentary on the Torah is a concise and often terse composition in which he uses grammar to explain difficult words and digresses into mysticism, philosophy or astrology in his treatment of various topics. He is frequently outspoken, scathing of opinions with which he does not agree and not afraid to say so when he doesn’t understand something. His fallback position when his reasoning conflicts with accepted tradition, is to insist that one should rely on the traditional answer.
At various points in his commentary he alludes to the ‘Mystery of the Twelve’, an allusion to the last 12 sentences in the Torah, which describe Moses’s death. The traditional view is that Moses wrote the whole Torah and the mystery is whether or not he also wrote the verses describing his own death, or whether they were appended afterwards. Ibn Ezra doesn't express an opinion on their authorship, but he does identify other passages in the Torah which also seem to him to have been written at a later date.
Because of this, it is often said that Ibn Ezra was the first radical bible critic, the first person to deny the traditional view that the Torah was dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai. There is no real evidence that Ibn Ezra was quite that radical but the claim has a distinguished history. The Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, was among the first to make the claim, describing Ibn Ezra as ‘a man of independent mind and no slight learning’ and saying that he was the earliest source he had found to confirm his own view that Moses did not write the Torah. Generations of scholars have followed Spinoza since, in claiming Ibn Ezra as a support for their view that Moses did not write the Torah. Traditionalists maintain that such views misunderstand Ibn Ezra.
After Lucca, Ibn Ezra continued on his travels. He spent time in Mantua and Verona, where he wrote books on the astrolabe, one of the earliest scientific astronomical devices, then over the next three years travelled across France, settling temporarily in Béziers, Narbonne and Rouen. He was always on the lookout for new patrons, he doesn’t seem to have been able to hold on to them for long, and he often rewrote books for them that he had already written for someone else, because he had been too poor to make copies of his earlier works.
In 1158, Ibn Ezra travelled to England. He was still seeking patrons and still writing prolifically, though he was old, probably infirm and weary of travelling. He died, sometime between 1159 and 1161. Like so much else in his life, his death and the circumstances surrounding it are a mystery. One of his biographers believed he was murdered by ne’er-do-wells in a wood, somewhere near London, but the evidence for this is not particularly compelling,
The last word belongs to the 19th century English poet, Robert Browning. A friend of the Jewish poet, Emma Lazarus (more about her next week!), in his later years Browning seems to have taken an interest in Judaism. In 1864 he published a long, philosophical poem entitled Rabbi Ben Ezra. it is an interesting poem, about the acceptance of aging and of divine purpose, though it does not seem to relate particularly to Ibn Ezra’s outlook and nobody has come up with a convincing explanation of why Browning gave his poem Ibn Ezra’s name. Still, it serves well as a tribute to the ancient thinker, and it contains some encouraging ideas.
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"