Diary of a Chief Rabbi

learning to create a dialogue between civilisations

A journey to Hampstead took Elaine and me back seven hundred years in time. We had gone to see Hyam Maccoby's brilliant play, The Disputation. For those unfamiliar with it, this is a dramatisation of one of the great moments of the Middle Ages, the Christian-Jewish disputation held in Barcelona in 1263. For a few hours, mesmerised by the spell of theatre, we were drawn into the world of our ancestors in a dark and dangerous age.

It began with the First Crusade in 1096, in which Jewish communities throughout Northern France and the Rhineland were massacred. From then on, the mood of Christian Europe became intensely hostile toward the Jews. In 1144 in Norwich a terrible accusation - the Blood Libel - made its first appearance, and in subsequent centuries Jews found themselves charged with ritual murder, desecrating the host and poisoning wells. In 1290 they were expelled from England, and over the next two centuries this became the fate of communities throughout Western Europe.

In 1240 a new phenomenon appeared. Beginning in Paris, Jews found themselves summoned to public disputations with Christians, who saw this as a new way to bring about mass conversions. The Christian protagonists were convinced that they could prove, from the very texts held sacred by Jews, that the doctrines of Christianity were true. After all, surely it was the Hebrew prophets themselves who foretold the coming of the Messiah. And was this not what Christians believed had happened? How then could Jews persist in their disbelief if confronted by the evidence of the Hebrew Bible? It's hard to know whether the Christians genuinely believed that they could prove their case in free and open argument. They should have known that Jewish tradition had a completely different reading of these texts - indeed that Judaism had a quite different understanding of the messiah.

For Jews, the disputation put them in a no-win situation. If they got the worst of the debate they would come under intense pressure to convert. If they got the better, they risked provoking reprisals from their opponents. As Maccoby puts it, "When the lion invites the mouse to a Disputation, the mouse, however fond he may be of arguing, will do well to avoid the invitation. For the poor mouse does not know what to fear most, losing the argument or winning it."

By far the most memorable of these encounters took place in Barcelona. What made it exceptional were two things. The first was the person under whose aegis it took place, King James of Aragon. As Maccoby portrays him, James was no religious zealot. There is little doubt that, had he had a free hand in the matter, the disputation would not have taken place at all. He was, though, under considerable pressure from the Pope, and the politics of the time left him with little choice. That said, he allowed the Jewish spokesman considerable latitude to speak his mind, so that for perhaps the only time in the Middle Ages there was a genuine Jewish-Christian debate.

The other factor was the Jewish representative himself. This was none other than Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, Nachmanides, the greatest rabbi of the thirteenth century and an intellectual giant by any standards. Talmudist, commentator, physician, philosopher and mystic, Nachmanides was a figure of immense depth and dignity, in an altogether different league from his opponent, the ex-Jew Pablo Christiani.

Two records of the debate have survived, one written by Nachmanides, the other by his Dominican opponents, and they give quite different accounts of what transpired. But it seems that Nachmanides got the better of the argument, the King going so far as to present him with a reward of 300 gold coins. It was a short-lived triumph. Within two years, anti-Jewish pressure forced James to sentence Nachmanides to exile. Seventy years old at the time, he is reported to have said that he looked on his punishment as a blessing, since it gave him the opportunity to travel to Jerusalem. On reaching the Holy City, Nachmanides set about reconstructing the Jewish settlement there, establishing a yeshiva and synagogue whose ruins can be seen in the Old City today.

Out of the bare bones of the historical record, Hyam Maccoby has written a theatrical masterpiece of real passion and power. With great skill he portrays the Realpolitik of religious persecution, the pressures on King James to take harsh measures against a people from whom he drew many of his most trusted counsellors and whom he admired. But the core of the drama is the dilemma that faced Nachmanides. Should he, or should he not, speak his mind? Diplomatically it might have been better had he been a little less forceful, a little more conciliatory. But the pride of Jewish faith was at stake, as well as the message Nachmanides' words would send to future generations.

The Talmud tells us that there are times when we can be confronted with a situation to which the honest response is, "Woe if I speak; woe if I am silent." That was Nachmanides' fate. He spoke. Indeed he went further and published his account of the Disputation so that his co-religionists would not be misled by the Christian version. The result was that life became progressively more difficult for the Jews of Spain until their expulsion in 1492. Their "golden age" was at an end.

Reflecting on the play, I thought how things have changed. Today in the West, Jews and Christians meet as equals and friends. But it took seven centuries and the tragedy of the Holocaust to bring this about. Even now, there are parts of the world in which Christianity has not divested itself of its "teachings of contempt" against the Jews. And as recent events have shown, there is an immense task still to be done in the relationship between Judaism and Islam.

For me, The Disputation is a standing reminder of how dangerous it is to invest religion with political power. The prophets of ancient Israel had no power, yet their influence was vast and remains so to this day. No less important is the question the play raises about any religion that claims to be the exclusive truth for all mankind. Inevitably this leads to the denial that other faiths have independent dignity and integrity. The United Nations has declared 2001 to be a 'year of dialogue between civilisations'. That is an urgent imperative in a world still riven by religious-ethnic conflict. God has given us many faiths but only one world in which to learn to live together. Seven centuries after the Barcelona disputation that remains a still unfinished task.

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