In a message dated 97-07-18 22:18:23 EDT, you write:

> For this I have no better explanation to offer than
>  that Dante apparently neither shared the Jew hatred of many of his
Christian
>  contemporaries, nor had special reasons in Inf. 4 to extend his approval
of,
>  or admiration for, Muslim philosophers like Averroes and Avicenna to
Jewish
>  philosophers like Maimonides. 

Otfried,

Thanks for explaining the 3 ages, which is very helpful.  I'm assuming this
isn't discussed very often in the literature as you're not offering
citations.  I agree that Dante never demonizes Jews, and I thought it quite
unusual for the period, and wish more were written about this.

I think of the pagans in Limbo as illustrious rather than innocent,
especially as one of them is Julius Caesar.  As Averroes, Avicenna and
Maimonides are the three major non-Western commentators on Aristotle,  we
seem to have two choices on what happened to Maimonides.  Perhaps, as I think
you're saying, Maimonides' Jewishness kept him from making the grade in
Limbo, in which case he may be somewhere in hell. 

But where? there is no circle in Dante's hell for commentators on Aristotle,
just as there is none for unbaptised Jews of the third age (the age when
baptism was necessary for salvation).  Also, it's a bit more tricky than
that. Maimonides is supposed to have had a big influence on Thomas Aquinas,
who I understand to have had an influence on Dante. So why would Dante park
Maimonides in hell?  I suppose it could have been done solely because
Maimonides was Jewish.  But, as you bring out, Dante seems to be free of
Jew-hatred, so it would be a bit odd.

The other possibility turns on Christ carrying up from Limbo "many others"
besides the 21 OT persons named directly and indirectly. Certainly Trajan and
Ripheus and Hezakiah must have been among the many others, because they turn
up in Paradiso, saved but not baptised.  So Maimonides might as easily be in
heaven as in hell (if he was one of the "many others" who were carried off to
blessedness).  

The situation with Caiphas and the pharisees is also very strange.  Here was
the perfect place for Dante to argue that the Jews or their leaders were
responsible for killing Christ, if Dante wanted to introduce that argument.
 Instead, he places them with the hypocrites,  and I believe it's in the
Gospel of Matthew that Caiphas is called a hypocrite.  Also, Dante refers to
one of the Popes--I think it was Boniface VIII--as one of the new Pharisees
(or about the equivalent of Caiphas).  

This is a very different picture from placing Caiphas with, say, Judas as a
betrayer of Christ.  As you say, Dante very definitely doesn't have the
Jew-hatred which was so typical of the period.  But then we have to ask why
he picks Saint Bernard of Clairveaux,   who's remembered for his
anti-Semitism as well as his mysticism, as the highest saint of the highest
heaven.  I'm wondering if we're supposed to consider the possibility that
Bernard might be incorrect.  Though he says Baptism is necessary for
salvation (in your third age), this doesn't seem to be true in the rest of
Commedia--as in the case of Trajan and Ripheus.

I'm sure Dante believed Baptism was necessary for salvation, at least in the
sense that he had his children  baptized.  But I'm wondering if he didn't
also add that pious proviso that maybe ought to be a part of anyone's
"theology."  That human understanding is limited, we may not see the full
picture, or (as Dante says) even the blessed in heaven do not fully
understand the mind of God.  Thus, even an emperor like Trajan, who was not
only unbaptized but exceedingly cruel, could be saved if this is God's will,
and we as human beings should not expect to be able to understand why.  We
should just accept that it's beyond our ability to understand the mind of
God, who sometimes makes exceptions to what we think are his rules. 

The point you bring out about Dante lacking the Jew-hatred that was so
pronounced in his day is really so strange that I would want to know why.
 Certainly medieval talk about baptism versus lack of baptism leads back at
some point to the question of what will become of the Jews (who are not
baptised).  I'm wondering if Dante could be saying that we should leave
judgment to God (who will decide what to do about the Jews).  This question
comes up largely through the message that Dante's just kings send back to
earth--that mortals should refrain from judging.  It's a very loaded idea set
against the events of Dante's day.  The Christians who were abusing Jews may
very well have thought they were carrying out God's will.  Those Popes who
tried to stop  abuse of the Jews maybe had a greater sensitivity to the point
that judgment ought to be left to God. And maybe Dante was still more
sensitive on that issue. If so, this non-judgmental attitude might come out
as what you call his lack of Jew-hatred. 

I'm not sure it's necessarily an incidental issue as far as the overall
literary organization of Commedia is concerned.  There were no living pagans
in Dante's day, in the sense that there were no longer living worshippers of
the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome.  Why make such a to-do
about whether a bunch of dead pagans had been saved, while having not one
word to say about the salvation of the Jews, the largest non-Christian
minority in Europe at the time?  It doesn't make sense to have that kind of a
gap, and my question is whether he really <has> left a gap. 

Take all that vision metaphor in Inferno 4, for example.  Christians have
true (spiritual?) vision.  Virgil and the pagans live in the "blind" world of
Limbo, where they cannot "see" (comprehend?) God.  By your reasoning,
Maimonides couldn't even make it into Limbo, so he's presumably even more
blind than the pagans.  But that can't be, because there's no such thing as
being more blind than the blind.  If you can't see, you can't see. There is
no further extremity of non-seeing.

Assuming that the Jews are supposed to fit into this vision metaphor
somewhere, I'd nominate them as the half-blind, and I'm wondering if this is
where Dante mean to place them.  They saw more than the pagans -- they saw,
for example, that there is one God. But they didn't see as much as the
Christians --that, for example, this one God is a Trinity. Maybe the most
obvious place where you get the Christian-Jewish-pagan division is in the eye
and eyebrow of the eagle of justice, where Dante has 2 Jewish or Hebrew kings
(David and Hezekiah), two pagans (Trajan and Ripheus) and two Christian
kings.  

One place this 3-part division could have come from is Saint Augustine's
 City of God, where Augustine goes on and on about why Christians are better
than pagans and where the Jews fit into the picture.  Thomas Merton says he
doesn't think Augustine wrote those chapters--he thinks they were written by
Orosius.  I don't know whether Dante would have thought they were written by
Augustine or Orosius.  Whoever wrote them, there's a lot of what Otfried
calls Jew-hatred.  And that tends to disappear when the motifs get recycled
in Commedia.  

As I explained to Otfried off-list,  my first question concerned what T. S.
Eliot is doing with imagery he borrows from Commedia.  This led to the
question of whether Eliot's controversial Jewish imagery is a take-off on
Dante's Jewish (Hebrew) imagery in Commedia.  Finally, I found Dante's
imagery quite puzzling.  I've been looking for commentary on Dante's Jews
(Hebrews) and not finding much so maybe there isn't any.   I'm thinking that
maybe Eliot had a different reading of Commedia that focused more on Dante's
lack of Jew-hatred.  Assuming that this is the case, I don't really care if
he had a right or wrong reading.  As he wasn't a Dante scholar, I'm not
expecting a lot. I'm actually more interested in whether there's a possible
reading of Commedia that would shed light on what Eliot is doing with the
Jewish imagery in his own poems.

In any case, I'm hoping somebody can suggest some readings on Dante and the
Jews (Hebrews).  Or tell me for certain that this area isn't covered.  As a
non-Italianist, I keep looking for the material, not finding it, and
wondering whether I just don't know where to look. 

Thanks to Otfried for his clarification on the three ages, and for starting
this list, and for his perfectly wonderful Dante page on ORB.

pat sloane






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