Solomon ibn Gabirol on Jews and Gentiles

In my previous article on the proto-Zionist ideology of the eleventh century jewish poet and philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol. (1) I pointed out that Gabirol's views on gentiles were not exactly positive and moreover verged on the point of advocating wholesale genocide against non-jews (especially those who were regarded as particularly wronging the jewish people like the Arabs).

The basis for this judgment was Gabirol's qualification on the use of mercilessness/ruthlessness in his philosophic work 'The Improvement of Moral Qualities', (2) which states:

'I do not find this quality among righteous or superior men. But it is (to be found) in him whose nature resembles that of a lion, for he is one who is never sated. These are the ones of whom it is said (Deut. 28:50), "A nation of fierce countenance." Upon my soul, this is a wholly detestable quality, whether (its measure be) great of small. It comes into being when the spirit of wrath prevails over a man. This quality is exercised for the purpose of wreaking vengeance upon enemies. There is no harm in making use of it in this manner, although the intelligent man ought not endeavour to be avenged upon his enemies. For this is not befitting. Thus saith the sage (Prov. 24:17), "Rejoice not when thy enemy falleth." To make use of it in order that one may do evil to his fellow-man, to kill him, or to lay hold of the possessions of one who has given no offence, is reprehensible.' (3)

In other words, as I argued, Gabirol is asserting that mercilessness/ruthless is a weapon that should only be used for 'wreaking vengeance upon enemies' after intelligent thought about the pros and cons of such a policy, which is probably taken from the concept of holy war in Judaism (i.e., both milkhemet mitzvah and milkhemet reshut). (4)

Gabirol then further qualified his comments in regards to in which situations such vengeance should be used in the same work with his commentary on wrathfulness (i.e., vengeance) where he tells us that:

'Wrath is a reprehensible quality, but when employed to correct or to reprove,or because of indignation at the performance of trangressions, it becomes laudable. Therefore the throughly wise and ethically trained man mus abandon both extremes and set about the right mean.' (5)

That simply put means that, according to Gabirol, wrathfulness/vengeance is to be used only when suitable transgressions have been made against the jews.

To put that another way; if an individual or group perform an action that is a suitable transgression then it can be said that they have transgressed and therefore are an ethical target for wrathfulness/vengeance, which could then after due consideration be subject to whatever brutal reprisal (up to and including genocide) the jewish people seeks to impose without any morality being violated (as they are the transgressors not the jews).

Gabirol also provides further evidence of this when he utilizes and approves of the statement that 'benefit occasions love even as injury begets hatred' in the same work. (6)

Therefore - according to Gabirol - if someone is perceived as injuring a jew, or the jewish nation, then it begets hatred from the jew/jewish nation and the individual or group concerned has also transgressed since they have irresponsibly caused injury and invited hatred. So thus are subject to the potentially genocidal response, which Gabirol ipso facto asserts is quite ethical.

Additional evidence that is this is indeed what Gabirol believed can be discerned from his poems. (7)

In 'Establish Peace' for instance Gabirol writes:

'To dust the Arab kingdoms sweep,

The ravenous beasts who tear and bite,

Who rend our scattered sons as sheep,

Whose motto is to seize by might.

Our heritage they have possessed,

Exiled, devoured us at their will,

Consumed and wasted and oppressed

And machinate against us still.'

Clearly when he asks Yahweh to 'sweep the Arab kingdoms to dust' he isn't being purely (or even substantively) metaphorical, but is rather referring to some form of widespread killing (either by Yahweh directly or by his earthly agents [i.e., the jews themselves]) in order to bring this about.

Suggestion of this can also been seen when Gabriol states that the Arabs have seized jewish land by might (i.e., invasion/violence) [which is also clearly their major transgression against the jews in Gabriol's eyes] so therefore would need to expunged by a similar method or stratagem by the jews and/or Yahweh.

That Gabirol also styles the Arabs as being 'ravenous beasts who tear and bite' suggests that in his eyes the Arabs are sub-human. Since he is comparing them to beasts (as in differentiating the jews [the people of god] from the 'beasts of the field' [the people who were not chosen by god]) and thus are not subject to any ethical objection in regards to their being killed to further the objectives of the jewish nation (as non-jews are barely even human).

Such dehumanization of gentiles also finds voice in Gabirol's poem 'Ask of Me' where he states:

'Hath these creatures had passed,

Sated with Judah's spoil,

Than the wild ass we feared

Out of midnight appeared

To trample and dwell on our soil.'

Now one does not call fellow human beings as 'creatures', refer to them as if they were locusts ('Hath these creatures had passed, Sated with Judah's spoil' = a locust swarm that ravages all the land and crops in its path before moving on as soon as the resources it is living off are exhausted) and then suggest they are like 'wild asses' (i.e., unruly barbaric shaggy creatures only suitable for the rudest work/tasks unlike well-bred graceful horses who are capable of complicated learning and performing similarly complex tasks) who violate the integrity of the jewish nation and their land/property unless one sees them as sub-human as the comparison is clearly meant to dehumanize those it is made about.

In a similar vein Gabirol also styles non-jews as being uncouth barbarians in his poem 'Invocation' as he writes:

'Why should a slave rule,

The lineage of princes,

A hairy barbarian

Replace our young sovereign?'

We should notice how non-jews are styled as being barely human (hairy barbarians as well as natural slaves to boot), while non-jews are described in terms of lineage (i.e., not as a faith-based group, but rather a caste system based on ancestry) as being princes (i.e., rulers) who are ruled in turn by a young sovereign (i.e., the Messiah in the style of King David).

This juxtaposition is further explained in the poem 'Open the Gate' when we hear Gabirol cry:

'Open the gate, my love,

Arise and open the gate,

For my soul is dismayed

And sorely afraid

And Hagar's brood mocks my estate.

The heart of the hand-maid's sons

Is hateful and haughty grown,

And all because of the cry

Of Ishmael piercing the sky,

Ascending and reaching the Throne.'

In the above we can see that Gabirol identifies the children of Hagar (= Abraham's slave/hand-maid/concubine [i.e., the Arabs]) as being slaves who are 'hateful and haughty' against the jews and have stolen jewish land (Palestine).

This is portrayed by Gabirol as being an unnatural state of affairs as the lineage of princes (i.e., the jews) should sit upon the throne (of Palestine) not the lineage of slaves (i.e., the Arabs).

Further evidence for this interpretation of Gabirol's words is provided by the poem 'Establish Peace', which laments that:

'Beneath the feet of slaves we bend,

In pit and prison we are pressed,

The hunters at our necks impend,

We labour still and have no rest.'

This is qualified in the poem 'Ask of Me' thus:

'Ishmael's offspring command

Back to his Arab land,

As his mother of old

To her mistress was told

To return and submit to her hand.'

In other words princes (i.e., the jews) have become, and are treated as, slaves by the those who are actually created to be such (i.e. ,Arabs). This Gabirol believed was not the right order of things and when Yahweh once again shows favour to the jews then the Arabs (and non-jews more broadly) will once more assume their rightful place in the cosmos as the slaves of the jews and not the other way around.

This is hardly a complimentary thing for Gabirol to assert about non-jews (and Arabs specifically) and provides further proof of my point in regards to Gabirol's rampant ethno-nationalism and racial supremacist views in regards to jews and non-jews.

Now to return again to the poem 'Establish Peace'; we should note that the Arabs are believed by Gabirol to be eternally 'machinating against' the jews. Qualifying this Gabirol's poem 'The Redemption' suggests that non-jews in general seek 'to sever the life-faith' of the jews.

The meaning of this is that non-jews seek to convert/intermarry with jews and thus soil the 'lineage of priests'. Evidence of this is provided in Gabirol's poem 'Benediction', which describes the jews as 'a nation unique and pure'.

Now if we remind ourselves that Gabirol also overtly stated that the essence of the jewishness of the jewish people is their 'lineage of priests' and that Judaism operates on the basis of caste not confession of faith (hence the Kohanim [the priestly class defined purely by lineage in Judaism] who would redundant if the latter were true). Then it is not difficult to see that the idea that the jews are 'a nation unique and pure' has ominous racial, and even racial supremacist, overtones.

We are also told in the poem 'Establish Peace' that the Arabs (and non-jews in general) have already (allegedly) done the jewish nation much harm and dishonour (and thus have transgressed to use Gabirol's rubric), which provides further reason in his eyes for brutal jewish vengeance to be enacted as soon as Yahweh deigns to permit it.

Similar comments can be found in the poem 'My Soul Shall Declare' where we read:

'Bemock, O Almighty, the foes that bemock her,

Avenge with due vengeance her insults and shame,

In her stress be a rock of support against her foeman,

Nor yield up the child Thou to manhood didst frame.'

In the above text it is abundantly clear that Gabirol views all the 'foes of Israel' as being subject to vengeance (and the associated ethical holocaust that he implicitly proposes) in that they have insulted and shamed Israel and therefore have transgressed so are subject to said divinely-sanctioned vengeance and retribution from the jews.

This is described once again in the poem 'The Redemption' as being an inversion of the current state of affairs with the jews replacing their status as the whipped and despised slaves of the non-jews with the slaver's rod with which to mete out divine punishment to their former non-jewish masters.

To wit:

'His heritage shall to the exile be given,

And a strong hand the sick and the punished replace,

The abased and abandoned, by ever fang riven,

Shall their freshness renew by the patriarchs' grace

And the stranger be scorched like a tropical place.'

This vengeance which refers to the 'scorching' of the gentiles who have wronged the jews (which is not dissimilar from the use of the concept of Amalek in Judaism) (8) is further qualified by Gabirol in the poem 'The Day of Judgment', which relates thus:

'Set the Most High before thee, and know that every thought

And every hidden imagining are to Him not hidden.

Dread the day of His wrath, and the dreadful position

Wherein is help or refuge for no creature.

On the day He shall judge the peoples and destroy their beings

And wither all His adversaries as with the fiery blast of his nostrils

And decree the fate of all potentates, officers and rulers,

Nor pay regard to mighty princes,

And destroy tyrants and cut off the scornful,

The proud and presumptuous who rely on preciousness of their palanquin'

In other words Yahweh will 'scorch' all those who oppose the jews with the 'fiery blasts of his nostrils' with a particular emphasis put on exterminating (which is after all the necessary outcome of such rhetoric) all current and potential leaders among the gentiles.

If we relate this back to the poem 'Establish Peace' where Gabirol cried to Yahweh to 'sweep' the kingdoms of the non-jews (the Arabs are specifically mentioned, but as previously this is general not a specific statement) 'to dust'. Then it fits into the logic used by Gabriol in so far as when Yahweh allows the jews to turn the tables on their non-jewish oppressors then the last shall be first and the first shall be last (i.e., it is a global revolution with the jews turning the world on its head with them at on top and the non-jews at the bottom, which Gabriol believes is the natural order of things).

In other words: what Gabirol is advocating in his poems and philosophic work - in regards to jews and non-jews - is that jews (as being of the 'lineage of princes' and thus the natural rulers) should rule the globe, while the non-jews (as being of the 'lineage of slaves' and thus the natural servants) should cater to every whim and commandment of the former since they are their manifest inferiors.

If that isn't racial supremacism then I don't know what is.

References

(1) https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-zionism-of-solomon-ibn-gabirol

(2) Stephen Wise, 1902, 'The Ethics of Solomon ibn Gabirol', 1st Edition, Columbia University Press: New York

(3) Ibid., 2:4

(4) Cf. Louis Jacobs, 1995, 'The Jewish Religion: A Companion', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, pp. 583-584

(5) 'The Improvement of Moral Qualities', 4:1

(6) Ibid., 2:1

(7) The text of these I take from Israel Zangwill, 1944, 'Selected Religious Poems of Solomon ibn Gabirol', 1st Edition, Jewish Publication Society of America: Philadelphia

(8) Cf. Elliot Horowitz, 2007, 'Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence', 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton