The Enemies of Judeo-Sufism Were the Enemies of the Rambam and his family...

Today it is no surprise that there are some backwards members of various segments of the Jewish community who will - acting on their own ignorance of Judaism - accuse Judeo-Sufis of `avodah zarah, or otherwise being part of some bizarre Shabbtaist or Frankist agenda. Their general accusations are nothing new, as these were the same caliber of attacks leveled against the son and grandsons of the Rambam.

David ben Joshua (ca. 1335-1415), last known of the Maimonideans was similarly fascinated by Sufism and integrated it in the same manner as his predecessor. His Judeo-Sufi work Al-Murshid ila-l-Tafarrud (The Guide to Detachment), embodies the most all-encompassing synthesis of Rabbinical belief with Sufism.

Despite Abraham Maimonides’ political and religious prestige, the pietist movement, like many revivalist trends in religious history, met with virulent opinion. The pietists were accused of introdcing “false ideas,” “unlawful changes,” and “gentile (sufi) customs,” and they were even denounced to the Muslim authorities.2

By this time persecution against the movement had grown. The very same brand of opponent – “who attempt to refute those with real understanding” – who leveled accusations and proposed banning Moses ben Maimon, had now continued in opposition to his family legacy; working in collusion with “Islaamic” authorities of Egypt to have the Maimonides Synagogue closed. This persecution eventually culminated in the exile of David ben Avraham (1222-1300) from Egypt, and the gradual disappearance of this Judeo-Sufi pietist movement from Judaism.2 In spite of this, however, the intellectual legacy of the Maimonides family, and certainly of Maimonides himself, remains unscathed and unimaginably influential in the current era.


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1. Josef W. Meri, Jere L. Bacharach, Medieval Islamic Civilization: L-Z. pp 547

2. Ibid. pp. 547

Judeo-Sufi Rabbis and Recommended Reading

Rabbi Ya`qov Yosef, disciple of the Besht, quotes Rabbeinu Bahya on Muhammad the Chassid

The full eBook that this selection is from can be purchased here: http://www.hashlamah.org/ebooks.php

In an anecdote about a pious person, a chasid, one of the early masters of the Chasidic movement, in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, Rabbi Ya`qov Yosef of Polonnoy writes in Hebrew of the chasid with the following saying:

It was told of a pious man (chasid) that he met some people returning from a great battle with an enemy. He said to them, ‘You are returning, praised be God, from a smaller battle, carrying your booty. Now prepare yourself for the greater battle.’ They asked, ‘What is that greater battle?’ and he answered, ‘The battle against the instinct and its armies.1

This “chasid” was none other than Muhammad himself, though it is highly unlikely that Rabbi Jacob of Polonnoy had any idea that he was in fact quoting a very famous hadith, popular amongst both Mutasawwuf and Islamic literates alike. There is no question, however, that Rabbeinu Bahya was aware of the identity of this chassid of whom he wrote.

In the same way, today readers of Hebrew and English-from-Hebrew translations of Bahya ibn Paqudah’s works might be just as surprised to know that this term for “battle” in this hadeeth was “jihad” and that this was the same Arabic term employed throughout Bahya’s works for both the external and great internal struggle (jihadu-l-akbar), the struggle against the self, or as Rabbi Ya`qov termed it, the “instinct” (“jahada-n-nafsa” in the original hadeeth). While there is absolutely no dispute that Bahya had much larger implications than mere “holy war” the Mutasawwufin would similarly claim that - as this source originates with Muhammad - that Muhammad neither meant by “jihad” physical struggle, but struggle against “the instinct and its armies.”

But if Muhammad was well acquainted with Jewish tradition, and if he saw himself as somehow implementing it, to an extent, amongst the Arabs, then the natural and problematic question is why would this not be clear amongst Islamic Orthodoxy today, or in the past. Todd Lawson, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto offers a poignant observation:

Undoubtedly, one of the reasons such material has been ignored in the context of this problem has to do with what we now know are unsuitable categories - especially in the case of Islam - of 'orthodoxy' and 'heterodxy' as methodological guides in religious studies. In the past, in many scholarly circles, it was felt that 'real (cf. orthodox) Islam', which was naturally the most populous Islam, is what we should be studying. Whatever the 'real Islam' might be, we now know that the majoritarian version of Islam, that is to say Sunni Islam, represents a consolidation of doctrines and positions that were worked out over time and in discussion, sometimes heated, sometimes not, with alternative views of what 'real Islam' was.2

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1. Diane Lobel, A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue, 2; ix
2. Todd Lawson, The Crucifxion and the Qur'an: A Study in the History of Muslim Thought, 6-7