Jewish Approaches to Hinduism: a history of ideas from Judah HaLevi to Jacob Sapir (12th through 19th centuries)
This book explores past expressions of the Jewish interest in Hinduism in order to learn what Hinduism has meant to Jews living mainly in the 12th through the 19th centuries. India and Hinduism, though never at the center of Jewish thought, claim a place in its history, in the picture Jews held of the wider world, of other religions and other human beings. Each chapter focuses on a specific author or text and examines the literary context as well as the cultural context, within and outside Jewish society, that provided images and ideas about India and its religions. Overall the volume constructs a history of ideas that changed over time with different writers in different settings. It will be especially relevant to scholars interested in Jewish thought, comparative religion, interreligious dialogue, and intellectual history.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part I: India’s idolaters, magicians, scientists, philosophers, and ascetics, 12–14th centuries
1: Judah Ha-Levi: “Idols, Talismans, and Ruses”
Medieval Muslim images of India
Medieval Jewish merchants who traded in India: evidence from their letters
Judah Ha-Levi and his two Indias
Ha-Levi’s picture of Indian beliefs: the Barahima
The Barahima in tenth-century Jewish books
Ha-Levi’s Indians as Sabians
Themes derived from Muslim Geographical Accounts
The Book of Nabatean Agriculture
Maimonides: Indians and Astral Magic
Ha-Levi’s History of Religions
Ha-Levi’s Vocabulary of “Religion” and whether Indians possess “din”
Two differences between Judaism and the pagan religions
Why two Indias? Why four?
2: Abraham Ibn Ezra and the Aristotelian astrologers
The ethnology of India: civil morality, customs, and diet
Customs of the descendants of Ham
Indian beliefs
God, cosmos, and astrology: Ibn Ezra’s universe
The image of Indians in Ibn Ezra’s scientific writings
The question of astral magic
The Astrological Study of “Religions”
Ancient misbeliefs
Ibn Ezra’s idea of Indian culture and religion: reprise
How Ibn Ezra would compare his Judaism with Indian beliefs: a speculation
3: The kingdoms of South Asia and the hierarchy of religions in Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels
Benjamin’s Book of Travels
The South Asian kingdoms and their Arabic parallels: Qulam
The South Asian kingdoms and their Arabic parallels: Ibrig
The hierarchy of religions
Benjamin’s view of South Asian religions
4: Translations and Transformations: Glorious wisdom: Jacob ben El`azar and India’s Panchatantra
The India of Ben El`azar’s Kelilah and Dimnah
Ben El`azar’s theology of Indian ethics
Muslim and Jewish transformations of the Panchatantra
The problem of fate
Ben El`azar’s encounter with the Panchatantra
5: Translations and Transformations: Immanuel Bonfils, the Brahmans, and Alexander the Great
Indian philosophers in the writings of Philo of Alexandria and Josephus Flavius
Indian ascetics in “The Book of Josephus”
The Alexander Romance in Christian Europe
The translation by Immanuel Bonfils: similarities with his Latin source
General differences from the Latin source
Bonfils’ Hebrew revision of Dindimus’ letter
Translation as comparison
Part II: The Indian history of a biblical verse: partial revelation, 17th and 20th centuries
6: Genesis 25:6, Menasseh ben Israel, and the east
Current Orthodox interpretations of Genesis 25:6
Genesis 25:6 in context and in Talmudic and medieval commentary
The Zohar: evil magic and dangerous ideas
Isaac Abravanel and the origin of the sciences
Genesis 25:6 in Menasseh ben Israel’s Nishmat Ḥayyim (1652)
The role of Genesis 25:6 in Menasseh’s defense of the immortality of the soul
Menasseh and Christian interpretations of Genesis 25:6
Matityahu Glazerson (Jerusalem, 1990): seeds of truth borrowed from Judaism
Part III: New Paths to India, 19th century
7: Samson Bloch: Indian philosophy and priestly system
Bloch’s intellectual journey
Bloch’s picture of Indian religion (dat)
Bloch’s sources and his originality
8: David d’Beth Hillel: the hidden meanings of temple Hinduism
The Travelogue
Interactions with Hindus and Hindu sites
Hillel’s ideas about temple Hinduism
9: Jacob Sapir: temple Hinduism as Torah-study
Study house and travel
Tradition and modernism
Sapir’s picture of India’s temple Hinduism
Sapir’s concept of Hindu origins
Priestly power and British power
Did Sapir copy Bloch?
Echoes of British ideology
Conclusion
Behind the Jewish Interest in Hinduism
Ideas about Hinduism: images and judgments
Patterns in the comparison of religions
CHAPTER ABSTRACTS
Introduction: India and Hinduism, though never at the center of Jewish thought, claim a place in its history, in the picture Jews held of the wider world, of other religions and other human beings. Some Jewish writers saw their Judaism threatened by Hinduism, some felt revulsion, and others were attracted to what they imagined as India’s moral teachings, science, civility, or mystical ideas. This book poses five related questions: What is the author’s image of Indian religion? What are the sources of that image? And what ideas and judgments did the author form about Indian religion? How did the authors compare their Judaism with their image of Hinduism, and what were their underlying methods of comparing religions? The book approaches these questions as intellectual history, trying to understand written ideas in their historical context. It looks at the cultural context, within and outside Jewish society, that provided images and ideas about India and its religions, and it examines the literary context, that is, an author’s writings which provide background to what he or she says about India. Whenever possible, the book applies a close literary reading of the specific words an author wrote about Indian religion. Two terms used in this book, “Hinduism” and “religion,” have problematic meanings and will be used with care.
Chapter 1 Judah Ha-Levi: “Idols, Talismans, and Ruses” Judah Ha-Levi’s book Kuzari (c. 1140) depicts India in two ways. For the purpose of theological allegory, it imagines India as an ideal kingdom inhabited by a good king and just citizens, but because Ha-Levi thought India’s actual beliefs challenged his most important argument for the truth of traditional Judaism, he portrayed Indians in a second way, attacking them as quarrelsome magicians, astrologers, and idolaters who reject revelation. This image is based on features that appear in Arabic-language travel reports, geographies, and heresiographies, and combines common notions about astral worship associated with Sabians, the rejection of prophecy associated with Barahima, and Indian magic and ideological division recounted in travel reports. Chapter 1 then examines the concept of Sabians found in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed to clarify the astral magic and astrology central to Ha-Levi’s image. His extensive discussions in Kuzari of the history of early religions further illuminates his view of Indian religion as well as his method of comparing religions on the basis of their efficacy in bringing people into contact with God. For Ha-Levi this requires revelation of commandments that train people in a pious life of closeness with God, and revelation of the personal aspect of God that awakens selfless love. This revelation, in the form of Torah, created a fundamental difference between Judaism and the pagan religions.
Chapter 2 Abraham Ibn Ezra and the Aristotelian astrologers Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164) referred to India fourteen times in his commentaries on the Bible, and many more times in his science books. These references are brief, unsystematic, and fragmented, appearing in the form of ethnology, philosophy, and science. His biblical commentaries attribute to Indians civic virtue, customs surviving from the ancient past, and an Aristotelian monotheism that assumes the eternity and ongoing creation of the world, God’s ignorance of particulars, and the impossibility of prophecy. Ibn Ezra’s scientific writings treat Indian scientists as foremost authorities in mathematics, astronomy, and astrology who, like other scientists of the world, believe in astrological forces governing human life. Ibn Ezra never directly compared his own beliefs with those of Indian philosophers, but this chapter speculates that if he had, he would have respected Indian thinkers as moral citizens who knew God as a distant Cause and helped people avoid astrological dangers. But lacking the Torah, Indians lacked guidelines that helped the masses avoid harmful astrological forces and trained them to cleave to God, while enabling intellectuals to ascend into God’s higher presence and gain eternal life.
Chapter 3 The kingdoms of South Asia and the hierarchy of religions in Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels Benjamin of Tudela’s Book of Travels (Sefer Masa`ot) presents itself as a record of the people and places encountered by a traveler named Benjamin who returned from his journey in 1173. Scholars have doubted, as “imaginative” and inexplicable, the book’s descriptions of two kingdoms in southern Asia, with their worship of sun and fire, rituals of self-immolation, mummification, and priests employing magic to deceive people. But a comparison with accounts of India in Muslim-authored travel reports and geographies of the time shows that nearly all the elements of Benjamin’s descriptions are reflected in the Arabic accounts. One way to discern how Book of Travels evaluated the south Asian kingdoms is through the perspective of dat, the book’s term for a combination of beliefs, rituals, and social laws, exhibited most fully in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian societies but incompletely in certain other societies. This perspective shows the south Asian kingdoms, like societies of dat, possessing doctrine and social laws and training their citizens in rules of worship and moral behavior. But Benjamin calls their worship “folly.” Unlike Islam and Judaism, the people of south Asia possess no revelation or sages to study it. Thus Book of Travels views the south Asian religions as dat but in a defective form.
Chapter 4: Translations and Transformations:
Glorious wisdom: Jacob ben El`azar and India’s Panchatantra More than any previous Jewish author, Jacob ben El`azar (13th c., Toledo) praised Indian thought. He translated Kalila wa-Dimna, an Arabic translation of an Indian book which we know as the Panchatantra, and introduced it with his interpretation of its theology. He imagined Indians as rational monotheists who, having yearned for prophecy but received none, were compelled to rely on human reason, through which they had discovered a just God and a natural law of morality that placed limits on human desires and upheld a life of contentment. They had then written a book of clever animal fables to teach these principles. Ben El`azar thought this book functioned for Indians in a way parallel to the revealed Torah for Jews, and could teach morality in a new form to Jewish readers. This chapter compares the Panchatantra with the Arabic Kalila wa-Dimna and Ben El`azar’s Hebrew Kalilah ve-Dimnah to learn how the translations transformed the original text, ending with Ben Elazar’s emphasis on interpersonal morality and a biblical theology – quite different from the Panchatantra’s original political philosophy with its specific cultural elements. The chapter argues, however, that one concept in the Panchatantra, that of Fate, retained in translation enough of its original form to move Ben El`azar to alter his concept of God.
Chapter 5: Translations and Transformations:
Immanuel Bonfils, the Brahmans, and Alexander the Great A Greek tradition of Jewish images of Indian thought began with two authors of the first century CE: Philo of Alexandria, who imagined Indian philosophers as courageous Stoics who end their lives through self-immolation, and Josephus Flavius, who depicted them as other-worldly Platonists longing for immortal bliss after death. This second image entered the popular Hebrew book, Yosippon (10th c., Italy), to which was later added a story of Indian ascetics debating with Alexander the Great. This story derived from a fictionalized retelling of the life of Alexander which, in Latin translations, circulated widely in Christian Europe as “The Alexander Romance.” In the 14th century Immanuel Bonfils of Provence rewrote the entire Alexander Romance in Hebrew, including lengthy letters from a Brahman king setting forth Brahman beliefs. A detailed comparison with Bonfils’ Latin source illuminates the ways he revised the letters, and these revisions suggest how he compared Jewish values with the Cynic and Christian values of the Brahmans of the Romance. Whatever Bonfils considered similar in Brahman and Jewish values, he expressed in biblical and Talmudic phrases or turned into Jewish institutions such as study houses and rabbis, or “Judaized” in other ways. But he left other Brahman characteristics unchanged such as living in the wild and radical voluntary poverty.
Chapter 6 Genesis 25:6, Menasseh ben Israel, and the East Some Orthodox Jews today interpret Genesis 25:6 as a statement that Hinduism and Buddhism originated from gifts of wisdom that Abraham sent east to India in the ancient past. Since the verse in its original context had no such meaning, this chapter examines the Jewish history of its interpretations to learn how it became a vehicle for thinking about Hinduism. An influential Talmudic interpretation, several medieval commentaries, and the Zohar viewed Abraham’s gifts as impure or evil magic, but with no connection to India, and one passage in the Zohar imagined them as truths that had become distorted and dangerous. Chapter 6 then focuses on Menasseh ben Israel’s Nishmat Ḥayyim (1652, Amsterdam), the first Jewish text to connect the biblical verse with Indian beliefs. Menasseh interpreted Abraham’s gifts as the Brahmin doctrine of rebirth and the technique of invoking demons to reveal the future, beliefs which supported Menasseh’s central argument for the immortality of the soul, an urgent topic for Jews and Christians in 17th-c. Europe. Current Christian interpretations also connected the verse with India’s Brahmins, which probably originated from the speculations of Guillaume Postel. Menasseh revised these interpretations, turning the content of Abraham’s gifts into the doctrine of transmigration. In 1990 Matityahu Glazerson used the verse in his book From Hinduism back to Judaism to support his claim that all Hindu philosophy derives from truths found fully only in Judaism.
Chapter 7 Samson Bloch: Indian philosophy and priestly system Shevilei `Olam (Paths of the World, 1822–1856) was the first Jewish geography book to cover Asia and Africa extensively. Its author, Samson (Shimshon) Bloch (1785–1840), was a major figure among 19th-century Galician exponents of Haskalah, the so-called Jewish Enlightenment. The book’s introduction depicts secular knowledge about other countries as liberating pathways out of the stultifying narrowness of rabbinic study. Bloch’s chapter on India presents its natural history followed by a lengthy discussion of its society and culture, especially religion (using the Hebrew word dat). Bloch points to essential similarities between Indian and Jewish beliefs: an ineffable God requiring morality, a Golden Rule ethic, and the institution of priesthood, but he decries India’s multiple gods, doctrine of rebirth, veneration of oxen, Brahman priests oppressing credulous followers, and their trust in irrational magic. The aim was to show his readers commonalities among the peoples of the world and to teach them lessons in correct thinking and morality. Comparison with Johann Friedrich Kleuker’s orientalist Das brahmanische Religionssystem suggests this book as Bloch’s main source and reveals what was original in Bloch’s ideas about India.
Chapter 8 David d’Beth Hillel: the hidden meanings of temple Hinduism David d’Beth Hillel (d. 1846) arrived in India in 1828 having studied nothing about India from the work of European scholars, and with only his rabbinic education from Vilna and his facility with languages to guide him. The Hinduism that Hillel encountered, and only on the surface, was the devotional temple Hinduism widely practiced by a majority of Hindus. David visited six temples during his arduous eight-month journey from Bombay to Madras and reported on these visits at great length in his travelogue The Travels of Rabbi David d’Beth Hillel (1832). He argued with people at the temples, “mocking” their beliefs and imposing his own interpretations of the names of their gods or rituals, usually employing linguistic analysis based on Hebrew. David saw all Hindu worship as biblical forms of idolatry and speculated that idolatrous Jews had brought it from the Near East long ago. These Jews were also responsible for Jewish elements in Hindu worship, such as a celebration like Purim. David ultimately judged Hindu worship as error and abomination.
Chapter 9 Jacob Sapir: temple Hinduism as Torah-study Jacob Sapir (Saphir) (1822-1886) articulated in his travelogue, ‘Even Sapir (1866, 1874), a particular interpretation of Hindu practices which was both modern and biblical at the same time, in some ways reflecting current British ideas about Indian religion and in other ways as uninformed as it was original. The book’s introduction gives value to studying holy books at home as well as to the knowledge gathered through travel and empirical observation. Sapir saw travel as a means of gaining insights into obscure passages in Jewish holy books. In India, where he arrived in 1859, this meant using observations of Hindu rituals, such as a chariot festival and ox-veneration, to clarify descriptions of idolatry in Scripture and rabbinic writings. He believed this was possible because contemporary Hindu rituals and cultural forms had survived from an ancient idolatrous worldwide civilization. Sapir wrote four long descriptions of Hindu worship that sound objective but reveal, through his vocabulary, his disapproval and revulsion. Sapir blamed the misery of Indian people on the oppressive asceticism enforced by their priests. His solution was for Hindus to study European literature, customs, and knowledge, and to convert to Christianity. Sapir’s view of Hinduism as idolatry, abomination, falsehood, and priestly oppression echoes the views of British Evangelical missionaries of the time, as well as British liberal ideas on social reform.
Conclusion The history of Jewish ideas about Hinduism, though composed of a series of discrete ideas influenced by each author’s distinct interests and goals, his sources of information, conceptual worlds, and social and intellectual challenges, nevertheless exhibits some common patterns. Jewish authors took an interest in Hinduism out of a need to defend or affirm Judaism in some way, or the goal of educating Jewish readers about the world, or (Jacob ben El`azar only) admiration for Indian values. All the authors saw India as an ancient land devoid of the guidance of revelation, or (in accord with Gen. 25:6) following a lower form of it. But they pictured Indian beliefs in two basic ways, as either idolatry and magic, or as monotheistic philosophy associated with moral behavior. Jews could be objective or even admiring when they saw Hinduism as philosophy and morality, but they disparaged Hinduism as image-worship. This might suggest an essential “Jewish approach to Hinduism,” but serious problems undermine such a conclusion. Finally, Jewish authors compared religions on the basis of a theological definition of Judaism’s essence, or a philosophical or institutional essence; the concept of dat or the related opposing concept of idolatry (`avodah zarah); or using a language of Jewish institutions, including the sub-category of holiness.