The letter to Yemen
The letter to Yemen ( Hebrew אגרת תימן iggeret teman ) is a letter from the Jewish doctor and philosopher Maimonides to the Jewish community in Yemen . The letter was most likely written in Cairo ( Fustat ) in 1172 . The letter has two prominent intentions: to strengthen the Jewish community against the threats of the Mahdids and to impregnate against the emergence of Messiah candidates and the hope for them. On the one hand, it provides information about the abilities of Moses Maimonides to know and to link arguments from different traditions or hermeneutics of the religions of the Mediterranean region and the Middle East. On the other hand, he gives insights into the cultural contact and economic traffic between Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula. Much of the descriptions in this letter could later be confirmed by finds from the Cairo Geniza .
History and circumstances
At the time of Maimonides' activity in Cairo, the situation of the Jews in Yemen was uncertain and unstable. This was mainly due to the political situation in the country. Various Islamic dynasties subjugated the country within a few decades. At the time the letter was written, Yemen was under the power of the Mahdids , who theologically can be assigned to the Twelve Shia or the Ismailis . To this day, those Muslims expect the return of the Mahdi , a figure whose conception is similar to that of the Judeo-Christian Messiah. So probably, spurred on by missions and forced conversions, the expectation spread within the Jewish community that a Messiah would appear in Yemen and free them from their sufferings. It is likely that there have been many reports of pseudo-messiahs in areas where Jews were under high religious pressure or threatened their community. As Sylvia Powels-Niami points out, however, the economic situation of the people in Yemen was far less precarious than the reader of Iggeret Teman might assume. Many Jews had good economic contacts on the trade routes between the Occident (e.g. Spain), the Orient with Cairo as an economic hub, controlled by the Fatimids and later Ayyubids and the Far East, i.e. Yemen and India. They can even be described as the social upper class of Yemen. This is exemplified by Maimonides' brother, who worked as a trader and seafarer and for some time contributed significantly to the wealth of the Maimon family in Cairo. Nonetheless, the integrity of the Jewish community in Yemen was threatened. Conversions and persecutions were not uncommon. Jews were second-class citizens in the lordly Islamic Yemen , and the still young rule of the Ayyubids in the entire area influenced the situation of the Jews, who were able to live even more freely under the Fatimids.
The call for help from Rabbi Jakob Ben Nathanel al-Fayyumi finally prompted Maimonides to write the letter . Maimonides, for his part, had experience and personal motivation to stand up for the fate of the Jews: he himself had been subjected to an obligation to convert in Spain and Morocco, which he had previously dealt with in writing. As a concrete opponent of the Jewish community was the leader of the Mahdids, ʿAbd an-Nabī, who allegedly stylized himself as a Messiah / Mahdi.
The letter
Content and form
The letter roughly follows a common thread: Maimonides formulates the content of the letter in a targeted manner in the direction of his intentions. In doing so, he works on many facts and allegations or arguments, all of which he exposes as false and inadequate. He then contrasts the previous discussion with a solution (his argument / assertion). This approach was taken up by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologiae , where he applied it in the Quaestiones , which became a stylistic device of scholasticism .
The letter to Yemen has a predominantly edifying, strongly tendentious character. Maimonides presents himself as a scholar who preaches the doctrine of cohesion and superiority to a distant diaspora community . The letter is framed in polite greeting phrases. At the beginning and the end, the content resembles a personal letter addressed to Jakob Ben Nathanel al-Fayyumi and his community. In between, there is primarily a confrontation with the enemies of the Jewish community in Yemen, the Mahdids. With extensive factual knowledge of the author, these are accused of incompetence, disbelief and weakness. At the same time, Maimonides developed a kind of apologetic theology for the recipients of the letter, not only expressing courage and praise, but also reinterpreting certain contents of the Torah appropriately for the intention of the letter. The core message of the letter is that every announcement of the coming of a Messiah from a strange mouth must be regarded as false. Instead, Maimonides himself announces the coming of the Messiah in prophetic language ( Koranic we-language ). With a new method of calculation, he says coming to 4970 / 1210 requires a point in the future at that time 38 years date.
Language and arguments
A special linguistic feature is that the letter is written in both Hebrew and Arabic. In both cases, however, the Hebrew alphabet is used. The reason for this is that the letter should be personal in its address, but public in its content. In the 12th century, the Jews in Yemen spoke Arabic, which is why Maimonides reached the largest possible readership with his Arabic version of the letter. In addition to many established theological terms, both from Islamic and Jewish theology, which are always retained in the original language, Maimonides uses many puns, and thus even ambiguities, to caricature the Islamic conquerors of Yemen. The Koran and its language serve Maimonides as a source of arguments against the opponents of the Jewish community: he tries to refute the Islamic arguments with their own terms. This culminates in the formulation of a creed that parodies the Shahada : "There is no god but God and Moses is his messenger." In this context, Muhammad is replaced as the messenger, who is usually mentioned in the Shahada, by Moses. Theologically, this creed is not necessarily wrong: the Koran also tells of Moses and calls him a prophet. Christianity and Islam are dismissed as misguided and fundamentally to be rejected heresy. The use of Islamic-theological arguments also served as an aid to the Jewish recipients, since in this way they could argue better against the Mahdids.
The bāṭin argument
A fundamental argument against the teaching of the Mahdids is the reference to the hidden meaning of the religious scriptures. Maimonides uses the expression bāṭin (Arabic باطن - occult, mystical, hidden), which was established in Islamic theology. With this, Maimonides shows posterity how well the Jewish scholar was also familiar with Islamic theology ( ʿIlm al-kalām ). The argument implies that the religious text reveals a secret message that cannot be inferred through pure study. The indispensable belief in Moses as the chief prophet is the prerequisite for recognizing the secret message (bāṭin). Furthermore, this secret meaning is not present in every text. Only the Torah contains this hidden meaning, the Muslims have no knowledge of it and the Koran does not contain it either, according to Maimonides. Everything that the Koran contains is therefore mere imitation (cf. taqlīd ). This is countered by the expertise with which Maimonides used the arguments and language of Islamic theology.
The Messiah Argument
The central moment of the letter is the proclamation of the coming of a Messiah for the Jews in Yemen. When preaching the passage can be seen, because he did not, as usual in the letter from the Tanakh citing but even as a prophet, the time dated the dawn of the messianic era. Maimonides identifies himself as authorized and able to tell the time. Because his grandfather allegedly passed on a calculation method to him through his father, which was the correct one before all other calculation methods. He does not explain why. In this passage Maimonides clearly contradicts himself. Because generally in the letter, but also in his other works , such as B. the 11th and 12th section of the Mishne Torah on the establishment of kings (Hilchot Melachim), the doctor from Cordoba takes the view that the point in time cannot be fathomed by humans and can probably never be calculated. The point in time, according to Christian calendar 1210, can be calculated as follows:
- "The prophet Balaam says in Num 23,23 EU :" At the right time [Hebrew ka'et] Jacob and Israel will be told what miracles God will do. " Balaam said these words in the 38th year after the Israelites left Egypt. This took place in the year 2448 after the creation of the world. "In the 38th year" means exactly: 37 years after the exodus from Egypt. So if you add 37 years to the year 2448, you get the year 2485. Now, according to the Jewish tradition, there are two redemptions: the first was the exodus from Egypt , the second will be the coming of the Messiah. Since Balaam speaks of the right time ('et), the prophetic words, Maimonides said, "must contain a coded reference to the point in time of the restoration of prophethood. This will be the case after a period of time equivalent to that of the 6 days of creation until the time of Balaam has passed. " Balaam's saying in the year 2485 must therefore be understood in such a way that after another 2485 years the second redemption will come. 2485 plus another 2485 years result in the year 4970 after the creation of the world. This year "the restoration of prophethood" is to take place. Maimonides says clearly what this means: "There is no doubt that the restoration of prophethood is one of the signs heralding the beginning of the messianic era." To put it mildly, the reader understands that the Messiah will come in 4970, that is, according to Christian calculations, in 1210. That was not a prediction of a distant one. Future, but rather an expectation in the near future. Maimonides was 37 years old when he wrote the Yemen letter, he expected the coming of the Messiah in 38 years, that is possibly during his own lifetime. "
effect
The tradition of the Yemeni Jews is largely silent about the effect of the letter. It is reported that the Mahdid rule came to an end just a few months later. There is no record of a Messiah or a person with messianic qualities. Whether the decline of the Mahdid dynasty in Yemen was a consequence of the letter cannot be said with certainty. The letter was largely intelligible to the rulers of Yemen. Especially since he was currently using a large amount of vocabulary and typical terms that the Shiites of the time could easily understand and classify. Nevertheless, it can also be assumed that the Mahdids in power were simply defeated by the political and military might of the invading Ayyubids.
Regardless of the factual history of the impact, Moses Maimonides is particularly revered among the Yemeni Jews to this day.
literature
Maimonides, Moses: The Letter to Yemen. Texts on the Messiah. Edited, translated and commented by Silvia Powels-Niami. Berlin, 2002. Parerga Verlag.