Beyond Homo Sapiens: Doubt

By Mariú Suárez

The second volume of the trilogy Beyond Homo SapiensDoubt, explores and interprets the historical events from the discovery of America to the end of the 19th Century. Enlightenment began with the acceptance by a majority of the worlds population that the Earth rotates around the Sun. Symbolically, it meant that our minds became centered on the Light of wisdom instead of the darkness of ignorance.

Mari Suarez, the author, shows us how Homo sapiens managed to gain more tools with the marriage of science and crafts. However, his biological automatic reactions of self defense, immediate gratification and drive to reproduce have been left untouched, perpetuating and making even less human the world in which we live. Spiritual insight continued to be absent from our daily lives. Mari explains how two classic fiction characters of the time exemplified the inner struggle of mankind to leave behind blind faith. Don Quixote's Cervantes, and Hamlet's Shakespeare. Mari makes clear, Cervantes wrote about the world of blind faith and feudalism in decline, while Shakespeare explored with Hamlet the world of the bourgeoisie and doubt in ascendance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 2, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462816729

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Copyright © 2009 by Mariú Suárez.

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Contents

Book II

Doubt

BOOK I—BLIND FAITH SUMMARY

PREFACE

BOOK II

CHAPTER 13

TRANSITION TO DOUBT

CHAPTER 14

THE EARTH WAS ROUND

CHAPTER 15

RACE OF PREDATORS

CHAPTER 16

NATURE AS TEACHER

CHAPTER 17

SPIRITUAL WILL

CHAPTER 18

CHALLENGE

CHAPTER 19

THE DISPOSSESSORS OF THE LORD

CHAPTER 20

THE REBELS OF GEORGE

CHAPTER 21

THE RIGHTS OF MAN

CHAPTER 22

NORTH AND SOUTH

CHAPTER 23

SOUTH

CHAPTER 24

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

CHAPTER 25

PHILOSOPHY AND THE PROLETARIAT

CHAPTER 26

CRITIQUE

EPILOGUE

BOOK II

Thanks to my daughter Monica Sanchez without whose editorial advice this book would not have seen the light. To Emile Mann for his help with the English translation. To Research Advisory Inc. for the funds to publish the book.

Most of all, thanks to the generous humanists who, through the ages, have struggled to liberate our minds and hearts.

To all who aspire to see the best of humanity expressed in the world and who want to put an end to the dominion of inhumanity.

In memory of my father, Carlos F. Suarez; my mother Stella Baquero; and my nephew, Aron Alexander Weiss

Book II

Doubt

Breaking the Chains of Necessity

Doubt is the vestibule through which we must pass before we can enter the Temple of Wisdom.

—Charles C. Colton (1780-1832)

"We have probed the earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it... That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month to month basis, we would have been evicted long ago. "

—Rose Elizabeth Bird

BEYOND HOMO SAPIENS

BOOK I—BLIND FAITH SUMMARY

The brain evolved over millions of years, literally from the bottom-up. We share the brain stem, the most primitive part of the brain, not only with mammals but also with reptiles, which is why this lower part of the brain has been called the reptilian brain. This is the seat of the sensory nature. The next development in the brain was the limbic system, which we share with all mammals and which rests on top of the reptilian brain. This is the seat of the emotional nature. The latest development in the brain was the neocortex, which exists only in mammals and is largest in humans, and sits above the limbic system. This is the thinking brain. Art, science, and culture are the fruits of the neocortex.

What this means is that the sense brain (brain stem) gave birth to the feeling brain (limbic system) and the latter to the intellectual brain (neocortex). Since the thinking brain springs from two very primitive brains, it interprets the world around it through the sensory and emotional perceptions of its ancestral brains. Therefore, the neocortex does not govern the limbic system and brain stem. On the contrary, the sense and emotional brain have immense power over the neocortex’s interpretation of what is good and bad.

The first six chapters of book 1 explain the psychological implications of this biological fact: blind faith in how our sense and emotions interpret the world around us. Every person who awakens into doubt by acknowledging the error of these interpretations has to seek out a new way of understanding the world. After spiritual awakening, the personality can see the importance of the great mystical teachers and philosophers in the struggle to overcome the obstacles posed by biological evolution and the ignorance that springs from it.

Mystics, and later on philosophers, intuitively created technologies of meditation that were meant to repattern some of the automatic reactions of the two primitive brains in order to liberate the neocortex from the dictatorship of the brain stem and the limbic system. They always told us we need to think and behave in accordance with love, which in essence is Spirit. Since all creation is one, we have nothing to fear. Once we realize that, we can depose the warrior-hero archetype created by fear and can replace it with the loving spiritual hero archetype.

Continuous discipline in reforming our ancestral erroneous perceptions, which have become population-wide beliefs, and their subsequent reactions, permits the neocortex to experience glimpses of the spiritual levels. Over time, this will lead to the next level of the brain’s evolution: when the pineal gland crystallizes uniting us with the Light of Spirit. This achievement has been called illumination by the old mystics of all traditions.

Beginning in the seventh chapter of book 1, our ancient history was narrated separating in each consecutive civilization the truthful ideas from the false beliefs, showing that all spiritual traditions in the world, all culture, and all science emanate from the same spiritual center, and that all our taboos spring from our shared biological evolution and our ignorant interpretations of life.

Such a study of human civilization clearly shows how the Jewish people began and, always have backed, the progressive movements that have been pushing us toward enlightenment.

PREFACE

BOOK II

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.

—Eugene Debs

Universal Will is the Principle of Universal action, and its goal is change. Transformation demands the reformation of outdated forms of institutional and personal expression, and it requires planning and realization. Endless adaptations are the foundation of evolution. In relation to the collective and individual consciousness, judgments were made by Homo sapiens prior to truthful knowledge, which now are nothing but prejudice; to disintegrate those erroneous judgments is painful for individuals and societies. Unreasonable beliefs have to give way to reasonable science. However, the birth of truth does not have to be as painful as it has been historically because evolution has and must continue to take place. The conditioning of millions of years of biological evolution must be changed by reconditioning. False judgments have to be changed by truthful ones.

In order for the adaptations of evolution not to be painful, we have to be willing to change in a planned way. It will take time for us to make the institutional changes,which will promote the brotherhood of mankind, but start we must if we do not want to continue to cause undue destruction to ourselves and our environment.

War is the restless condition of the will to change by minds without a clue. It is not a predictable reorganization, but it is unpredictable chaos from which every time we come out not better than we were before.

During the Renaissance, evolution for the majority of people continued developing without consciousness. As Carl Jung said in his essay The Stages of Life, Every one of us gladly turns away from his problems; if possible, they must not be mentioned, or, better still, their existence is denied. We wish to make our lives simple, certain, and smooth, and for that reason problems are taboo. We want to have certainties and no doubts—results and no experiments—without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt and results only through experiment. The artful denial of a problem will not produce conviction; on the contrary, a wider and higher consciousness is required to give us the certainty and clarity we need.

The renaissance of philosophy was the renaissance of the mature of the ages, of those souls who had learned to struggle with problems giving us their illuminated faith, giving some Homo sapiens a start in the path from blind faith to doubt, a prerequisite for evolutionary change.

As in any individual psychoanalysis, my objective in the historical analysis is not to invoke guilt reduced to impotence but to identify forms of immature opinion, which compel us to behavior that has to be changed if we want to heal our society. It is logical that the different psychoanalytical models of personal psychoanalysis with their intent to identify erroneous complexes of personality can be applied to the collective consciousness. Conditioning has formed subconscious automatic habits, which extend from the individual Homo sapiens to the Homo sapiens society. At the same time, the individual desire for transformation would beeasier within a society, which also desires transformation and truth. Condemnation should not be imposed on individuals and societies, but only on individual and collective wrong opinions and their consequent atrocious actions, which deal us great pain.

The need for booty and the heroic warrior activity to get it are actions that we have to analyze to divest them from the sacred cover-up we have created, to absolve ourselves as we consecrate those actions into holy acts. Otherwise we will continue to apply the law of the fittest or the one that can kill most efficiently in the quest for booty, which has been our childhood’s most appreciated game as a species.

Although in the Renaissance we retook the humanist thread resurrecting philosophy through the minds of the mature of the species, the story of these five hundred years did not become the journey of the hero, but the immature for profit Homo sapiens hysterical melodrama. The darker races would suffer from it, and the white race would profit from it all the way to our present global economy all managing to remain blind and unconscious.

Our children are our link to the future the same way our parents are our link to the past; each generation have redeemed some ancestral ignorance, and as individuals, we have to take responsibility for our own mistaken patterns.

Just yesterday, I had a marvelous experience; and through it, I was able to see once more some of the wrong patterns in my daily activity, which I must become more disciplined to correct, as I come down from universals to personality patterns. As I think of you, my dear daughter Alexiara, I am facing like all parents do when they think of their children toward the future. You sent me the Mac computer, which you have used now for some years, to replace my IBM because it is a more recent model than mine and therefore faster. I knew it was going to arrive, but I never thought it was going to be such a revealing experience.

As I opened the box, it took me time to realize that the emotion I was feeling was not only because you had owned the computer, which makes it a jewel to me. You had installed all the programs I needed, and I knew that was one of the reasons why I had tears in my eyes. Also I was touched by your patience as you took me by the hand through the world of cybernetics since you wanted me to be aware of the new technology.

I received the computer in the original box, with everything packed to perfection and with all the contents organized in order. The cleanliness of the computer—the keyboard, the mouse, the modem—showed me immediately your particularities of character which make you so efficient and most of all, that make you an extraordinary daughter, family member, and friend. It brought into my mind the realization of the attention you give to each thing or person that comes in contact with you. What I saw was your ritual of love, hour to hour, day to day. I remembered that when I visited you in New York, I thought it was a miracle that living in a small studio apartment, everything was so organize that one does not feel in a studio. All things cohabitated in harmony, and there was a kind of joviality emanating from each thing which lived there. The closets were very full, but somehow they were not crowded; and as you open space for me in one, I felt like in a Walt Disney movie when all things became humanized and moved by themselves. I could not believe you found space for my things in a comfortable way. Your apartment has become a small place of heaven on earth.

You are efficient in your daily life and have time to do a lot in one day because you do not go through the hysterics of the majority of inhabitants in the planet, as we live the fast-paced ending of the twentieth century. Somehow you have achieved to give an ecological balance to your living space in which everything lives in harmony, rhythm, and melody.

Your life reflects the order of the spheres, since you can find anything with your eyes closed. This is the reflection within the lower scale of personality, of good memory patterns, and good will at work on earth. You say that it was from my lack of organization that you found the need for organization; you found a way to redeem in you something that could have become an ancestral problem for your personality, but instead you are teaching me to be more organized giving way for the future to correct the past.

I remember you, in your apartment sitting on the sofa, with your curly hair coming down to your shoulders, with your eyes fixed on what you are doing at the time, not paying attention to anything else. Each thing gets done fast because you concentrate on what you are doing. Calm is your characteristic, since you do not have the fastidious order of those people who do not want to move anything from their correspondent place. It is a form of life; it is the external projection of inner harmony. As I unpacked the computer, I saw all this; and I saw the light of this way of acting, instead of the lack of organization that my disorder conveys.

I hope anyway to be able to grow a little more like you, and I thank you for this lesson. You always had told me, It is not difficult, Mom, invest every day a little time, and you will see how, very soon, you will begin to function with harmony. You are right; I will begin to organize every day a little bit more, until the sum total of those bits become my harmonious life. However, life is also a permanent reorganization, and we can reorganize with consciousness and order, or without consciousness and with disorder. Some reorganization can look like real chaos although it is not. If you moved, you would have to take everything out, put it in boxes, and for a while, it would look like destruction although it would only be a temporal and predictable move and reorganization.

As I am writing, I have in front of me one of your photographs, the one you took in Machu Picchu, Peru;

you are sitting at the peak of the Buena Picchu Mountain, the highest one in Machu Picchu, close to the sky and the clouds. On the photo you sent me, you wrote, Thank you for teaching me to soar. There you are, with your curly hair, and I cannot help but feel happy that beginning in the 1960s the dark races decided to begin accepting how we look and let our curly hair alone, rather than work at making it straight, which is a characteristic of the white race. You see? This is what happens when we speak in generalizations! As if the Indians from India, the Indian tribes, and the yellow race did not have straight hair. Pardon me.

CHAPTER 13

TRANSITION TO DOUBT

Religion is truth expressed in allegory and myth and thus made accessible and digestible to mankind at large: The profound meaning and lofty goal of life can be revealed to the people and kept before their eyes only in symbolical form, because the people are not capable of grasping it literally.

—Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms.

On Religion

We know accurately only when we know little; with knowledge doubt increases.

—Johann W von Goethe

Doubt entered the Jewish community before any other one in the world; Jewish scholars started to analyze rationalism and mysticism. Those thinkers, who loved reason, began to see revelation as a myth and demanded evidence of the miracles. The mystics understood that Spirit could only be perceived by the individual mind through the spontaneous symbolic images produced by the Higher Soul (or Higher Mind), which reach consciousness in vision or dreams. They knew that a person had to believe

they could have the spiritual experience to work toward its attainment with meditation. Rabbinic culture had developed two Talmud rationalistic currents, one known as Halacha with interpretations of law and another called Aggada, with philosophical and ethical dissertations. The third one, the Midrash, consists of symbolic stories and wise sayings. Jewish philosophers saw the need to equilibrate revelation and reason because revelation without reason degenerates into superstition.

Jewish discussion and doubt was no match to the blind faith of Christian believers, who were indeed very immature souls. Knowing how to read and write was judged by most Gentiles as witchcraft, and that put the Jewish communities in great peril.

The time passed during one thousand years had not helped mankind to become more conscious of its own light and shadow. Jeheshua (Jesus) had given us the means to assimilate the Light of Spirit helping us to recognize and tame the instincts of self-defense, immediate gratification, and reproduction toward which energy runs easily, although they are outdated molds. Acting them make us feel good; not acting on them makes us feel bad, and so it is difficult to see the evil we are doing. Only our Higher Consciousness can help us attain a higher moral and ethical level; however, since we projected the Higher Consciousness exclusively on Jeheshua as the only son of God, we were left in the darkness and worst yet, unconscious of both our great Spiritual Light and our millenary automatic sense experience shadow. Our dark side would split the atom without the Light side of Consciousness to oppose it since Spirit does not work for us but through us.

This is how, when the fundamentalist crusaders passed through European towns on May 27, 1096, as they went through the German city of Mayence on their way to Jerusalem, they decided to practice the killing of infidels they were planning to do in the East using the Jews as theirvictims. In the city, the Jews had asked for protection, and they were hidden in the archiepiscopal palace; the crusaders entered the palace and massacred them anyway, very happy to be great Christians since they were doing this in the name of Christ the pacifist. They did the same in Worms and Cologne, leaving in their wake the killing of one hundred thousand Jews. In 1144, the ritual accusations against the Jews began when Thomas de Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, started the rumor that a Christianized Jew by the name of Theobald had informed him that the Jewish books ordered them to shed Christian blood to be able to go back to their land. Every year somewhere in the world, they had to sacrifice a Christian in vengeance toward Christ for their suffering since it had been for his death that they had been taken out of their land. Europeans were too ignorant to know that they had been forced out of their land for having fought the Roman Empire all by themselves. The alleged Theobald also had said that the Spanish rabbis met every year in Narbonne and decided in which country and city the sacrifice would be performed. That year, Norwich was chosen. All these stories inspired by the bigotry of the crusades came in handy to kings and nobles because they owed money to the Jews who were the only ones who could lend it, and by killing them, they did away with their debts. In Blois, France, the Jews were accused of having killed a Christian child during Passover and having thrown his body into the Loire River; in consequence, from the forty Jews of the city, thirty were burned alive.

If the Nazarenes had continued to be a Jewish sect, through discussion, more and more Jews would have come to the realization that Jeheshua’s upgrade beyond Homo sapiens was the fulfillment of Jewish messianic scripture. However, as his great achievement was transformed without understanding into another religion, making Jeheshua into the exception not the first of many brothers and sisters, Christianity and Islam progressively resented Judaism, thesource of their belief system. Rabbinic society was already a society of discussion that societies of blind belief could only reject.

In England, the crowning of Richard the Lionhearted was an occasion for the attack on the Jews of London, and then it expanded all the way to York, where the nobles who owed a lot of money to the Jews were now free from having to pay their debts. An Augustine monk, William the Newburgh, wrote that avarice for booty was the real motive for the massacres at York. The leaders of the plan were some nobles who owed money to the infidels and either had to give their estates as payment or would lose their estates. Also some wanted to have money to back their crusade and knew that since they were leaving, they would not have to answer for the crime. The Jews hid in the tower of the castle and committed collective suicide, rather than let the mob kill them. After the booty was taken, their houses were put on fire, and the nobles went to the cathedral asking for the debtor’s papers and having obtained them, destroyed them, and that felt very good to them indeed.

In France, Philip August, wanting money to fight some of his nobles, put the Jews in jail in 1179, as punishment after an accusation of ritual murder of a Christian. He asked for ransom and let them go only when a good sum of money was paid to him in 1180. The following year, he annulled all the debts Christians had with Jews, and he took a comfortable 20 percent commission for himself. In 1182, he confiscated all their property and expelled them from France.

In 1215, Pope Innocence III introduced the yellow mark for Jews with the explanation that it wasn’t easy to distinguish them from Christians. In France and Italy, they were ordered to wear a circular mark; in Germany, they were obligated to wear a bigger one; and in Bavaria, this didn’t seem enough, so they were ordered to dress only in yellow and black and to go barefooted. In some cities, they were able to buy the right not to use the mark; in other cities the edict was ignored. In1290, they were kicked out of England because, according to church authorities, they wanted Christians to go back to the vomit of Judaism. Jews, as Stephen Birmingham tells us, were charged taxes for using bridges, paths, crossing feudal borders, for buying and selling merchandise, for having a baby, for getting married and for being buried, for having a house, for the number of rooms in it, which made Jews live together in small quarters. In times of peace, they were obligated to give hospitality in the Jewish quarter to the troops, and prostitution houses were put in the Jewish quarter to destroy Jewish family life.

Nicolas Donin, a Jew converted to Christianity, denounced the blasphemy of the Talmud to Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241) who ordered the bishops and kings of France, England, Spain, and Portugal to look into the accusation. Louis IX the Pius of France (1226-1270) was the only one to heed the papal request, and Talmud books were officially burned in 1242 and 1244. Any Christian who would protest the burnings would be sentenced to death. Papal bulls in favor and against the Jews succeeded each other. Pope Innocent IV (1247-1253) discredited the epidemic of accusations of ritual killings done by Jews, which claimed so many innocent lives. In the same century, the doctrine of transubstantiation was accepted. It was established that through consecration during the mass ritual, bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ. The Christians took it as an opportunity to expand the rumors that Jews were killing Jeheshua again and again by putting needles in the holy bread; they had seen how Jeheshua’s blood came down from it. With this story, they had found another great excuse to kill Jews.

Meanwhile, the Jews, not afflicted by the illness of ignorance, could not believe what was happening to them. As Max Dimont says, the Jews admire the man who, with intellect, slew the dragons of ignorance not the quarrelsome knight who, with sword, slew innocent people for booty.

Illiteracy, says Dimont, was regarded as something shameful... Pregnant mothers clustered around the yeshivas in the hope that their unborn would be imbued with the spirit of scholarship. Potions, reputed to contain magical powers, were given... to induce a reluctant youth to take up the study of Torah. Thus even superstition was put in the service of education. As Paul Johnson says, talking about the thinking of one of the greatest Jewish philosophers Maimonides, The Jews had been created to leaven the dough of humanity, to enlighten Gentiles. They did not have State power, or military force, or wide territories. But they had brains. Their intellect and their reasoning process, were their weapons... Clearly, it was the continuous function of the Jews to push forward the frontiers of reason, always adding more territory to God’s kingdom of the mind.

This is how the Jews produced Renaissance men within Islamic Spain, whose teachings spread all over Europe. Saadia Gaon (882-942), born in Egypt, was one of the first Renaissance men who tried to conciliate the polarities of reason and faith. He was laughed at by those who were rationalistic and scorned by those who were men of faith. Saadia had made studies of comparative religion, had written about Islam with great erudition, which seemed suspect to some rabbis. He compiled a Hebrew dictionary and translated the Old Testament to Arab. He also wrote The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs trying to unite the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism with the process of revelation. The work of Jewish scholars to unite faith and reason was going to influence scholastic philosophy. The concept of revelation and reason as partners to enlightenment is in fact part of Platonic, Neoplatonic philosophy, and Stoicism.

Yitzha Israeli (845-940), known in Europe as Israel Judeus, was the author of many books of medicine translated to Latin by the monk Constantine Africanus, who was probably a converse Jew. Sahal Albatri from Tabaristan was a rabbi, medical doctor, and mathematician. He was the firstto notice the rarefaction of light and translated the books of Tolomeus in astronomy, the most respected books on the subject until Copernicus. The Gaon was both chief justice and chief rabbi. With these cultural precedents, when the Gaonate passed to Spain, the Jews in Muslim Spain produced Renaissance men before the Renaissance entered Europe; and it was their commentaries, books, and translations that were the first ones read in Europe.

Chasdai ibn Shaprut (915-970) was the prototype of the Renaissance patron. Physician and investigator, he knew Hebrew, Arab, Castilian dialect, and Latin during a time when only the high clergy was instructed in it. He was the doctor of the caliphate of Cordoba, which had at that time five hundred thousand people, a city filled with artists and men of letters from all over the world with progressive academies for arts and sciences. Chasdai translated, along with the Byzantine monk Nicolas, the medical works of Dioscorides. Abdar-Rahman III had named him chief of taxation and international commerce. When the caliph died, his son Al-Kahan II also worked with him. During his government, more books were brought from all over the world to Cordoba, and he compiled a library with four hundred thousand volumes. Under the auspices of his administration, the astrolabe was perfected to advance maritime observation, and it was used until the invention of the sextant in the eighteenth century. Plane and solid geometry, botany, pharmacology, trigonometry were supplemented with contributions from India, from which we inherited the numbers, arithmetic, and algebra by way of the Arabs. They already had critics to the Tolemaic system about the sun rotating around earth, which contributed to the studies of Copernicus and Galileo. Abulcasis, an Arab surgeon, wrote a medical encyclopedia, which was translated to Hebrew and Latin influencing European medicine for centuries to come. Arab knowledge entered Europe through four doors: Spain, Sicily, the south of Italy, and Jerusalem.

The Spanish caliphate was always at war with the crusaders of the Spanish kingdoms of the north of Spain; they had to ask help from the Berbers of North Africa, who came to their aid splitting the caliphate in Emirates. In Seville, Cordoba, and Granada, the Jewish quarter was the best in the cities, their houses magnificent, and the Jews of all Europe had special pride in the life of the Jews beyond the Pyrenees.

The emir of Granada, who was pretty lazy, put the government in the hands of Rabbi Samuel Ibn-Nagdela (993-1063). He spoke Hebrew, Arab, Castilian dialect, and Berber. His translation of the Talmud was of great help for a long time to scholars and astronomers. The rabbi even had to lead the emir’s troops in battle against other emirs who wanted to get rid of the infidel, but those emirs also had Jewish Viziers. His son Joseph was the architect of the Alhambra of Seville.

Solomon ibn Gabirol (1020-1070) was a poet and a philosopher whose works were all written in Arab. When Christian scholars studied him later, they knew him as Avicebrol, his Latinized name. They didn’t know they were studying a Hebrew thinker whose poetry the Jews recited on the most important Jewish holy days. Judah Ha-Levi (1086-1140) was also a poet and religious thinker born in Toledo, who had lived alternately under Muslim and Christian governments. The Jews, he said, were verily elected in Sinai because their whole history has produced successive evidence of that election. The Jewish Torah, their laws, and their people were interconnected components of that redemptive process from which Islam and Christianity had begun to participate cleansing the world for redemption when all men and women with a pure heart, honest desires, and generous works would be redeemed without regard of their faith. However, he recognized the inhuman reality of his time, which has changed very little over the centuries.

The Spanish Jews studied the works of the Persian Arabian Avicena (980-1037), physician and philosopherwho wrote a Medical Cannon, and of Averroes (1126-1198), physician, philosopher, and astronomer and Arab jurist living in Cordoba. Their works were translated by Jews to Hebrew and Latin.

Moses, the son of Mimon, known to us as Maimonides (1135-1205) was a medical doctor, philosopher, and law codifier of whom Jews said that from Moses to Moses, there has been no one as Moses. He was the last of the great Spanish Renaissance figures. When he was thirteen years old, his family escaped Cordoba from the Almohades, liberal Muslim reformers who very soon became bigots against anyone who didn’t want to embrace Islam. Maimonides’s family decided to go and stay in Egypt where under Saladin (1174-1193), the Jews enjoyed a lot of freedom; he became a doctor of the court and the Jew’s rabbi. His Guide to the Perplexed, written in Arab, was designed to prove the compatibility between philosophy and faith. Maimonides exhorted the Jews faced with religious pressure to convert, to leave the country where they were, for a place where they could have more freedom. To the question of conversion versus death, he decided that a person should convert because life was sacred, and Jews always could go back to being Jews at a later date.

The Jewish quarter was for many years the only civilized place in the European cities. At the beginning, it was their personal preference to live among themselves, later, they ended up isolated trying to protect themselves from discrimination. During the sixteenth century, the Jews by law would be required to reside in their own quarters, which became known as the Jewish ghetto. Elementary school within the Jewish community continued to be free for the poor, the desire for education being part of the Jewish character. At five years of age, children began the study of scripture. At ten, they began to study the Mishna and the Talmud. At eighteen, their education emphasized understanding, independent thinking, andinvestigation. Once a more profound understanding had been achieved and mental power had become strong, they started philosophical study, which was divided in three groups: mathematics, natural science, and metaphysics. Mathematics comprehended arithmetic, geometry, optics, astronomy, and music. Natural sciences comprehended botany, medicine, and physics. Metaphysics was divided in three: (1) investigation on Being; (2) looking for proofs for the speculative sciences, natural sciences, and the principles of logic also to find, clarify, and elucidate the false points of view; (3) understanding of the entities, which were not the bodies but the force in the bodies.

Rabbis were chosen and paid by the community. The Jewish communities appeared in the cities where development was in gestation at the beginning of the crusades. In France, they were in Narbonne, Toulouse, Carcasona, Troyes, Bezier, Nimes, Arles, and Marseille. In Germany, they lived in Metz, Meins, Worms, Cologne, Magdeburg, and Merezburg. Until the eleventh century, the Jews of France and Germany constituted one cultural entity, French was spoken by German Jews, and only after the eleventh century there began to be developed the mix of Hebrew and German words, which constitute the Yiddish language. In Narbonne appeared the first disseminators of Jewish cultural awakening for the area; previously, the Jews of the Rhine submitted all their religious questions to the academies of Babylon. By the tenth century, Judah ben Meir founded the academy of Mainz, which became an important legislative college, which attracted some Italian Jewish scholars from Luca and Lombardy.

Jews worked in many arts and professions; they were medical doctors, cartographers, teachers, mathematicians, scribes, weavers, carpenters, locksmiths, shoemakers, goldsmiths, tailors, which made Jews necessary in the new cities. In 1084, the bishop of Speyer invited them to live in the city putting their quarters outside the city and defendingit with a wall to avoid the insolence of the other inhabitants against them. In exchange, they had to pay an annual tax, but they had jurisprudence over their community. There were Jews in the Arab lands of the south of Italy but also in the Christian north in Pavia, Verona, and Rome, which cities had a close relationship with the German cities because they were one empire. Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki, French, was born in Troyes (1004) and was considered the greatest Talmudist of his time; he created a school which educated Jews from all over the world. The biblical comments of Rashi had a great influence on Christian theologians, mostly Nicolas of Lyra who had a great influence on Martin Luther.

The Christians, however, continued to make all kinds of false accusations against the Jews. In 1020, on a Holy Friday, there was a hurricane in Rome. A fanatic reported to Benedict VIII that Jews had disrespected a statue of Christ in a synagogue, and this had been the cause of the catastrophe since God had sent his vengeance against the city. Jewish physicians had to live in terror if they were doctors to a court because if they could not cure a king, the rumors of having poisoned him were started, as happened with Hugo Capeto in 996 when the people decided that the Jewish doctor had poisoned him. The same rumor was heard when Zedekiah couldn’t cure Charles the Bold. Otto II was saved by Kalominus, a Jewish doctor, and the king expressed his appreciation by showing him affection and permitting him to invite Jews to Bohemia and Poland. In Prague, there were rich Jewish merchants. Jewish culture among the massive ignorance in Europe was not conducive to friendship, not even well accepted by the superstitious Christians who feared the Jews as black magicians because they read and they were afraid of their books. Supposedly, they corrupted the monks attracting them to magic and forcing them to sell their souls to the devil.

As they left to the crusades, feudal lords sold their rights to their land to get the money for the crusades, othernobles neglected their lands, and many poor that left to the orient never came back. At the time, towns were nothing but trading posts. They gained in population as people left the manors for the city engaging in city work. Gradually, as the towns got bigger, the bourgeoisie, or the people of the burghs (towns), began to need legal unity because it was very inconvenient to deal with different codes of law depending on the feudal estates. The bourgeoisie began to back the king by paying taxes to the court, making the crown’s bureaucracy strong to demand unified codes from the many fiefdoms. It was a marriage made in heaven for both parties since the king could also augment his power before the feudal lords. Commerce put more money in circulation, and by the year 1300, national taxation was on its way.

Progressively, towns, which already existed since the Roman Empire like Paris, London, and Winchester, gained in size and importance; and other towns were formed around the feudal castles, the monasteries and the churches becoming the markets of Europe. Their populations by that time varied between four thousand and forty thousand people. There wasn’t a vast banking system, and it was difficult for craftsmen and merchants to obtain credit to begin their operations and expand them. The church prohibited money lending with interest; hence, Christians did not lend money. Nevertheless, banking houses developed in Italy and Hapsburg, and the Jews were left with the task of lending money.

The disproportion between Islamic civilization and Latin Barbarism could be measured by looking at the cities. In Cordoba, the streets were paved and illuminated by lamps at night, and the Mosques had public schools to educate poor children while in Paris people walked in the dark with mud to their knees and no education. By the twelfth century, the nobles caught up with the kings and began to get closer to the bourgeoisie giving them some freedoms. Associations of independent craftsmen started. The master received studentswho learned from their master craftsman, and their salary was decided by the guild which also watched over quality control and production and decided the number of masters a craft could have. They also had a fund for masters who were going through economic problems. Commercial guilds followed, establishing regulations for the number of wholesale stores and creating methods for commercial transactions. Since the nobles owned the land where towns stood, the bourgeoisie began to pay the nobles with money instead of work; and in exchange for money, the nobles began to permit them some liberties in the political and economic management of the town. Some German towns formed the Hanseatic League, whose leading towns were Hamburg and Lubeck. The league was organized because of commercial reasons, but slowly they gained political power. Some towns seeing the need for education opened schools, which became the universities of Europe; seventy-five of them were created during the Middle Ages. The universities of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford became the more important ones. By 1200, the Cathedral of Notre Dame was constructed, and Gothic cathedrals expanded all over Europe with their Gothic arches and color glass russets. The sculptures of the Madonna and Child continued to adorn the frontal