Rabbi Ben Ezra

( Dram at is Personæ , 1864.) The character is historical. The Encyclopædia Britannica gives the name as Abenezra, or Ibn Ezra, the full name being Abraham Ben Meir Ben Ezra; he was also called Abenare or Even are. “He was one of the most eminent of the Jewish literati of the Middle Ages. He was born at Toledo about 1090, left Spain for Rome about 1140, resided afterwards at Mantua in 1145, at Rhodes in 1155 and 1166, in England in 1159, and died probably in 1168. He was distinguished as a philosopher, astronomer, physician, and poet; but especially as a grammarian and commentator. The works by which he is best known form a series of Commentaries on the books of the Old Testament, which have nearly all been printed in the great Rabbinic Bibles of Bomberg (1525-26), Buxtorf (1618-19), and Frankfurter (1724-27). Abenezra’s commentaries are acknowledged to be of very great value. He was the first who raised biblical exegesis to the rank of a science, interpreting the text according to its literal sense, and illustrating it from cognate languages. His style is elegant, but is so concise as to be sometimes obscure; and he occasionally indulges in epigram. In addition to the commentaries, he wrote several treatises on astronomy or astrology, and a number of grammatical works.” He appears to have po e ed extraordinary natural talents; to these he added “indefatigable ardour and industry in the pursuit of knowledge, and he enjoyed besides, in his youth, the advantage of the best teachers, among whom was the Karaite, Japhet Hallevi or Levita, to whom he is believed to have owed his taste for etymological and grammatical investigation, and his preference for the literal to the allegorical and cabalistic interpretation of Scripture. He was afterwards married to Levita’s daughter.” He did not consider his life a fortunate one as men look upon life. “I strive to grow rich,” he said; “but the stars are against me. If I sold shrouds, none would die. If candles were my wares the sun would not set till the day of my death.” The cause of his leaving Spain was an outbreak against the Jews. Hitherto, he said of himself, he had been “as a withered leaf; I roved far away from my native land, from Spain, and went to Rome with a troubled soul.” He seems to have written no books until after his exile, and then he actively engaged in literary work. The most complete catalogue of his works is contained in Furst’s Bibliotheca Judaica (Leipzig, 1849). “Maim on ides, his great contemporary, esteemed his writings so highly for learning, judgment, and elegance, that he recommended his son to make them for some time the exclusive object of his study. By Jewish scholars he is preferred, as a commentator, even to Raschi in point of judiciousne and good sense; and in the judgment of Richard Simon, confirmed by De Ro i, he is the most succe ful of all the rabbinical commentators in the grammatical and literal interpretation of the Scriptures” ( Imp. Dict. Biog. ). According to Rabbi Ben Ezra, man’s life is to be viewed as a whole. God’s plan in our creation has arranged for youth and age, and no view of life is consistent with it which ignores the work of either. Man is not a bird or a beast, to find joy solely in feasting; care and doubt are the life stimuli of his soul: the Divine spark within us is nearer to God than are the recipients of His inferior gifts. So our rebuffs, our stings to urge us on, our strivings, are the measure of our ultimate succe : aspiration, not achievement, divides us from the brute. The body is intended to subserve the highest aims of the soul: it will do so if we live and learn. The flesh is pleasant, and can help soul as that helps the body. Youth must seek its heritage in age; in the repose of age he is to take measures for his last adventure. This he can do with prospect of succe proportionate to his use of the past. Wait death without fear, as you awaited age. Sentence will not be pa ed on mere “work” done: our purposes, thoughts, fancies, all that the coarse methods of human estimates failed to appreciate, these will be put in the diamond scales of God and credited to us. God is the Potter; we are clay, receiving our shape and form and ornament by every turn of the wheel and faintest touch of the Master’s hand. The uses of a cup are not estimated by its foot or by its stem; but by the bowl which pre es the Master’s lips to slake the Divine thirst. We cannot see the meaning of the wheel and the touches of the potter’s hand and instrument; we know this, and this only,—our times are in His hand who has planned a perfect cup.—I am indebted to Mr. A. J. Campbell for the following notes, the result of his researches in endeavouring to trace the real Rabbi Ibn Ezra in the poem Rabbi Ben Ezra . His fellow-religionists say of the Rabbi that he was “a man of strongly marked individuality and independence of thought, keen in controversy, yet genial withal; and it is in words such as these that the final estimate of his own people is given. ‘He was the wonder of his contemporaries and of those who came after him... profoundly versed in every branch of knowledge, with unfailing judgment, a man of sharp tongue and keen wit’ (Dr. J. M. Jost, Geschichte des Judenthums , 2nd Abth., p. 419). And again: ‘This man po e ed an immense erudition; but his masterly spirit is far more to be wondered at than the ma of knowledge he acquired’ (Id., Geschichte des Israeli ten , 6 te Theil, p. 162).” Mr. Campbell thinks that the distinctive features of the Rabbi of the poem were drawn by Mr. Browning from the writings of the real Rabbi, and that the philosophy which he puts into the mouth of Rabbi Ben Ezra was actually that of Rabbi Ibn Ezra. “It was no worldly succe that gave peace to his age; but he had won a spiritual calm, no longer troubled by the doubts that at one time or another must come to all who think. ‘While this remarkable man was roving about from east to west and from north to south, his mind remained firm in the principles he had once for all accepted as true.... His advocacy of freedom of thought and research, his views concerning angels, concerning the immortality of the soul, are the same in the earlier commentaries... as with [those] which were written later; the same in his grammatical works as in his theological discourses’” (Dr. M. Fried lander, E ays on Ibn Ezra , Preface and p. 139). “Our times are in His hand,” says Browning’s Rabbi; so, too, Ibn Ezra, in a poem quoted by Dr. Michael Sachs ( Die Religiose Poesie der Juden in Spanien , p. 117)—“In deiner Hand liegt mein Geschichte.” Says Dr. Fried lander, “He had very little money, and very much wit, and was a born foe to all superficiality. So he had spent his youth in preparing himself for his future career by collecting and storing up materials, in cultivating the garden of his mind so that it might at a later period produce the choicest and most precious fruits” (Ibn Ezra’s Comment., Isaiah , Introduction by Dr. Fried lander). Mr. Campbell says that the keynote of Ibn Ezra’s teaching is that the e ential life of man is the life of the soul. “Man has the sole privilege of becoming superior to the beast and the fowl, according to the words ‘He teacheth him to raise himself above the cattle of the earth’” (Ibn Ezra, Comment., Job xxxv. 11). “He ascribes to man’s soul a triple nature, or three faculties roughly corresponding to the division of St. Paul of man into body, soul and spirit. The soul of man, he holds, can exist with or without the body, and did, in fact, pre-exist” (Fried lander, E ays on Ibn Ezra , pp. 27-8). This is Browning’s theory in verse 27. In Browning’s poem the Rabbi describes man’s life as the lone way of the soul (verse 8). Ibn Ezra, in his Commentary, Psalm xxii. 22, says, “The soul of man is called lonely because it is separated during its union with the body from the universal soul, into which it is again received when it departs from its earthly companion.” When Rabbi Ben Ezra, in Mr. Browning’s poem, speaks of the body at its best projecting the soul on its way (verse 8), he is uttering the thought of Ibn Ezra, who says, “It is well known that, as long as the bodily desires are strong, the soul is weak and powerle against them, because they are supported by the body and all its powers: hence those who only think of eating and drinking will never be wise. By the alliance of the intellect with the animal soul [sensibility, the higher quality of the body] the desires [the lower quality or appetite of the body] are subordinated, and the eyes of the soul are opened a little, so as to comprehend the knowledge of material bodies; but the soul is not yet prepared for pure knowledge, on account of the animal soul which seeks dominion and produces all kinds of pa ion; therefore, after the victory gained with the support of the animal soul over the desires, it is nece ary that the soul should devote itself to wisdom, and seek its support for the subjection of the pa ions, in order to remain under the sole control of knowledge” (Ibn Ezra, Comment., Eccl. vii. 3). Mr. Campbell has shown how much Mr. Browning has a imilated Ibn Ezra’s philosophy in many other points in the poem. (For an extended explanation of the poem see my Browning’s Me age to his Time , pp. 157-72.)