Jewish History (2012) 26: 17–40 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012DOI: 10.1007/s10835-012-9155-5

The reckonings of Nahmanides and Arnold of Villanova:on the early contacts between Christian millenarianismand Jewish messianism

MAURICE KRIEGELÉcole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, FranceE-mail: maurice.kriegel@ehess.fr

Abstract Historians of the last generation have shown that millenarian circles played a criti-cal role in transforming attitudes towards Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe. Further-more, the Joachimist leanings that opened the way in early modern times for a rapprochementbetween Christians and Jews, they found, were already there in the Middle Ages. My aimhere is to consider the case of Arnold of Villanova, a lay supporter of the radical Franciscans.A major stimulus for Arnold’s eschatological ideas was his wrestling with messianic notionswidespread among Jews, especially kabbalists. However, at this early stage, messianic or mil-lenarian expectations were associated, among both Jews and Christians, with a confrontationalstance.

Historians of the last generation, and pre-eminently among them the lateRichard Popkin, have shown the critical role that millenarian circles playedin transforming attitudes towards Jews and Judaism in early modern Europe.As heirs to views first aired in the writings of the Abbot Joachim of Fiore,they envisioned a new, crowning age of history and combined this idea ofhistorical progress with a view of historical development based on the apos-tle Paul’s reflections on the “mystery of Israel” in the Epistle to the Romans(Chap. 11). They were thus led both to reject the centuries-old replacementtheology and to posit a future age when Jews would again enjoy some kindof spiritual pre-eminence. Indeed, they thought that the new age would openwith the conversion of the Jews to Christianity: the hope for their conversionwould foster feelings of admiration and fondness towards Jews. They wereopen to the idea that in the new age the Jews would return to their ancientland and felt sympathy for messianic Jewish longings, to which they saw theconversion to Christ as a bonus.

This idea rendered the millenarian Christian hope closer to Jewish mes-sianism and led millenarian Christians and Jews to discuss the nature of theirrespective aspirations. The millenarian discourse thus created a possibilityfor interaction between Jews and Christians: the meetings in Amsterdam be-tween Menasseh ben Israel and figures such as the Portuguese Jesuit AntonioVieira, or Wallon Petrus Serrarius, or his written exchanges with John Dury,are examples of this process. It was to some extent a two-way process. Jews

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would see the Christian millenarian interest as a positive sign that messianictimes were near. Menasseh claimed as much when he wrote to the Bohemianenthusiast Paul Felgenhauer that the numerous letters he received on the sub-ject from Christian millenarians fortified his own messianic expectations.1

As the late David Bankier claimed in a pioneering article on the FrenchJansenists and the Jews, the issue of Christian millenarianism should be res-cued from the search for forerunners of pro-Zionist trends. Rather, it shouldbe seen as an important factor in the re-evaluation of Judaism: even thesubjective motivation of hope for conversion was in the long run less im-portant than the transformation of attitudes that helped eventually to fosterintegration.2 Such was the role of millenarianism when this transformationin Christian attitudes to Jews began to take shape in the seventeenth century,and such was also its role from the moment when the battle for emancipationwas launched. Eighty years ago, Ben Zion Dinur noted that in one respect,Grégoire’s views were not typical of the Enlightenment, for they had beenaffected by millenarian expectations.3

Robert Lerner’s signal contribution has been to show that the Joachimistleanings that opened the way in early modern times for a rapprochementbetween Christians and Jews were already there in the Middle Ages. He re-vealed the seeds of this process in Joachim’s writings and then studied a num-ber of cases of millenarian figures influenced by Joachimism, mostly amongthe radical Franciscans, who would display increasingly accommodating atti-tudes towards Jews. The significance of these cases is more in their premises,their intellectual logic, and their promise, than in their actual influence. Mostof these figures were themselves targets of severe repression, from impris-onment to burning at the stake. Lerner did not overstate his general thesis;in fact, in the conclusion to his book he summed up the lesson of the differ-ent cases he studied most cautiously: Joachites had a “relatively more benignattitude toward the Jews than the late medieval Christian norm.”4

My aim here is to add to the discussion of the medieval stage of thisphenomenon by considering the highly illuminating case of Arnold of Vil-lanova, the celebrated physician who was also a lay supporter of the radi-cal Franciscans. Arnold’s views of the Jews were not irenic. However, oneaspect of Arnold’s thinking—his way of calculating the time when the An-tichrist will come—had a direct influence on a major figure of the Joachite-millenaristic current, John of Rupescissa, and we would do well to recall thegeneral scheme of the “last things” through which Rupescissa made sense ofArnold’s reckoning.

John of Rupescissa (or Jean de Roquetaillade) was born about 1310 inRodez, in southern France, and in 1335 he entered the Friars Minor. In 1344,he was arrested and imprisoned, most probably because he was close to thespiritual reform movement within the Franciscan order. About five years

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later, he was transferred to Avignon, then the seat of the Papacy, broughtto trial, and sentenced to imprisonment, which last until his death in 1366.In spite of these hardships, he produced a mass of writings, all of whichexpounded the same basic eschatological scenario. The Antichrist, identi-fied with an emperor embodying worldly, anti-spiritual interests, would soonappear and at approximately the same moment, a full-blown schism wouldoccur in the form of the opposition of an official carnal Church to a spiritualone. At the beginning of the impending crisis the institutional Church wouldbe persecuted by the emperor no less than the spiritual faction. Eventually,though, an alignment of the evil forces (the emperor, the pope, and their al-lies) would be confronted by a coalition of the “positive” ones (the “angelicpope,” with the French king taking up the role of good emperor, backed bythe French as “new Maccabees”). The victory of the side standing for spiri-tual rejuvenation would be secured by the supernatural intervention of Christ(in accordance with 2 Thess. 2:8: “the lawless one will be revealed, whomthe Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by thesplendor of his coming”). Thus a new epoch would be ushered in, bound tolast until a new assault by another Antichrist, the Last Judgment, and the endof the world.5 Rupescissa’s works were copied in many places, and their in-fluence can be documented in the two vectors that were typical of millenarianmovements in late medieval and early modern Europe in general. On the onehand, they were quoted and used by millenarians who sided with protest andrevolutionary defiance; on the other hand, they were adopted by those whoseeschatological scenario bestowed upon new monarchies, but especially uponcontenders for imperial domination, a role that would ultimately enhancetheir prestige.6

This scenario used and reshuffled materials that were staples among Joa-chites, especially of the more pro-French variety. (Rupescissa first choseKing Louis of Sicily, the grandson of Frederick III and great-grandson of Pe-ter III of Aragon and of Constance, granddaughter of Frederick II of Hohen-staufen, for the role of counter-hero, as Antichrist. This choice expressed thetraditional philo-Gallic/Angevin and anti-Hohenstaufen orientation of manyin his order.) One of Rupescissa’s most notable innovations, duly empha-sized by Lerner, is the idea that in the new era, the “Roman people” will beremoved from power and in its stead the Jews, converted to Christianity, willenjoy political supremacy.

Rupescissa was keen to know when the much anticipated crisis would be-gin; to this end, he borrowed his computation for the date of the appearanceof the Antichrist from Arnold of Villanova.7 At the beginning of the 1290s,Arnold composed two treatises that show his interest in final things.8 He hadalso begun to write a tractate On the Advent of Antichrist, which he completedin 1297; then, in 1300, he used the opportunity of a mission to Paris as an am-bassador for James II of Aragon to make the tract known and to test reactions

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to it—a move that got him into trouble. He was briefly arrested, and for yearsafterwards, he had to justify his positions. These had stirred up a major de-bate among contemporary Churchmen over eschatological computations heused in On the Advent and also in the treatise On the Mystery of the Cym-bals of the Church, written in 1301 and addressed to Pope Boniface VIII.9

The purpose of the latter treatise was to defend his use of such computationsin his particular method of reckoning. What is especially interesting is thatsome of the arguments he marshaled in the second tract leave no questionthat this method was largely a response to Jewish messianic calculations andviews.

Arnold discussed the chronological hints in the visions of Daniel. He wasof the opinion that no calculation could be made on the basis of the 2,300evenings and mornings mentioned in Daniel 8:14, a verse which deals, hesays, with the end of this world and of time (alluded to by the evening) andthe beginning of another world (morning), but is not useful, since it doesnot reveal any point of departure for counting the 2,300 days.10 Much morepromising is Daniel 12:11, “from the time the daily sacrifice shall be takenaway and the abomination that makes desolate be set up, there shall be a thou-sand two hundred and ninety days”! At both ends, clear indications were of-fered. The abomination that will be set up for the desolation of the faithful isthe Antichrist. The starting point, the cessation of sacrifices, is to be equatedwith the suppression of the sacrifice to which the angel Gabriel pointed in hisinterpretation of Jeremiah’s prophecy of the seventy weeks in Daniel 9:27.Sacrifices ceased when the Temple was destroyed by Titus—forty-two years,we are told, after the Passion,11 or, more precisely, three years and a half af-ter the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus. We learn from Daniel 9:27 that theJews had been offered a peace pact, by which they could stay in the remain-der of the Land of Promise. Yet since the Jews had violated the pact afterhalf a “week of years,” the Romans expelled them from the Promised Land,dispersed them throughout the whole world, and thereby put an end to theworship that according to the Law could be observed only on the land.12 Weshould understand that “days” stand for “years.” The date of the end is thenobtained by adding 1290 years to the date of the final suppression of worshipin Jerusalem. This should have led to the calculation of 1368 as the date of theend: 1290 + (33 + 42 + 3.5 = 78.5) = the year 1368; but Arnold, strangely,mentions 1376 and 1378.13 Rupescissa took over Arnold’s reckoning whenhe wrote his Liber secretorum eventuum in 1345, but later, being impatientto herald a closer date, he discarded the complication about Titus’ pact andaccepted the date of 1365/66.14

Arnold conceded that the Scriptures should not be examined out of vaincuriosity but maintained that it was his right to investigate them for reasonsof “charity.” He intended to warn believers that the end was near and, by this

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means, to inspire them to scorn earthly happiness while encouraging them tocare for heavenly bliss. To foster such a state of mind, he insisted, was pre-cisely the purpose of the Church. Likewise, he admitted that it is impossibleto have specific knowledge about the end through “human conjecture” (astro-nomical wisdom, philosophical speculation, or delusional magic), but infor-mation encoded in Scripture had certainly not been given in vain. Exegeticalefforts could well deceive, for Daniel himself was instructed to “shut up thewords, and to seal the book.” But the words need remain hidden only until theChurch sees fit to make them known. The watchman of the Church, moved byhumility, is enabled to understand the sense of Scripture.15 And one shouldbeware lest Christian watchmen assert that for Christians, the meaning ofDaniel’s words is impenetrable. This impenetrability would tip the scales tothe detriment of the Christian faith by vindicating the Jews, “mortal enemiesof the faith,” when they reject the Christian reading of Jeremiah’s prophecy,universally known the Seventy Weeks, in Daniel 9, and claim that it cannotbe deciphered.16 This contention would certainly be incorrect. The failureto understand the passage is characteristic only of those ungodly enough tothirst for the blood of Christians and to wish them eternal destruction.17 It isproper now that the Antichrist be announced; it was proper then that Christbe announced, and he was. The people knew that he would come, and thatis why, when the people saw that he was coming and the prophecies werefulfilled, the Sages invented not only one but two false Messiahs.18 The Jewshave foreknowledge of the time of the Antichrist (Arnold means the time ofthe coming of the Messiah). They even await it as they crave for an earthlytriumph, and they find support for their views in the last verses of Daniel12. Moreover, it is to be believed that God wants believers to know this timethrough the same prophecy. As the stork, Arnold learns from Jeremiah 8:7,knows “her appointed seasons,” the turtledove knows when it is time to returnby a divine intention.19

It has been recognized that Arnold used a computation widespread amongJews, and in fact substituted the reckoning of the Antichrist’s appearance forthat of the advent of the Jewish Messiah. Indeed, he was impelled to do soby a sense of competition.20 But Arnold’s efforts testify to much more thanthe borrowing of an exegetical device that posited the equivalence of “days”and “years” in “prophetic” parlance and, it seems, was in any case—even ifArnold made much of what he saw as his own discovery21—then being dis-cussed in circles sharing this kind of interest. The Joachitically inclined Fran-ciscan Peter of John Olivi speaks in his commentary on Revelation (writtenin 1297–1298 in Montpellier, the town where Arnold lived at the time) abouttwo conflicting views on the correct interpretation of Daniel 12:11. There arethose who think that the verses allude to 1290 years and allow one to deter-mine when the Antichrist is sure to come, but others insist on a literal reading

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and think that from the verses we learn that the tribulations of the days of theAntichrist will last three and a half years.22 The truth, however, as we maygather from Arnold’s strong words about the necessity of getting the better ofthe messianic views of the Jews is, and this is of course of much wider sig-nificance, that his eschatological ideas were stimulated by his confrontationwith messianic notions widespread among kabbalists.

Jews had not resorted to these verses in Daniel 12 during the first mil-lennium of the Christian era, since the number 1290, understood as referringto years and not days, would have been of no use to those making calcu-lations in the hope of finding a date conveniently close to their own times.Nahmanides could contend that the prohibition of calculating the date of theadvent of the Messiah, which would have led to the discovery of the date of1358, had to be explained by the concern, in past times, that the masses notbe disheartened by a date so far in the future.23 Saadya, it seems, was the firstto emphasize that the “days” of Daniel 12:11–12 were meant as “years.” Theperiod of 1290 years begins, according to him, at some point in the fourthcentury B.C.E. The “days of the Messiah” would then begin in his own tenthcentury.24

Rashi insisted that if past calculations had proven wrong, there was allthe more need to try again. He commented on the three chronological hintsoffered in the visions in the book of Daniel and viewed the figures of thelast chapter as the most significant. Borrowing Saadya’s insight that the daysmentioned point to years, he took as a starting point for his calculation thecessation of the “regular [sacrificial] offering,” which occurred, as he learnedfrom Yossipon, six years before the destruction of the Second Temple (68CE. According to traditional reckoning). He thus concluded that 1352 wasthe date of the coming of the Messiah, apparently undeterred by the con-siderable chronological distance between his own time and the date of theMessiah according to his calculations.25 Moreover, he posited the existenceof an intermediary period of close to half a century between pre-Messianicand Messianic times. Some aggadists had briefly discussed the interval offorty-five days that was presupposed by the two verses in Daniel 12:11–12(1335!1290 = 45). They saw it as corresponding to a series of events duringwhich Moses had appeared, gone into hiding, and reappeared. They had alsonoted a parallel between the trials of Moses, the “first redeemer,” and those ofthe “last redeemer,” the Messiah.26 Rashi seized upon this source and, sincehe interpreted the days of Daniel as years, logically deduced that the times ofthe Messiah would be divided into three phases. The Messiah would finallytriumph after forty-five years, in 1397.27

During the course of the twelfth century, both the theme of the years 1290and 1335 and the dates of 1358 and 1403 became increasingly popular. Theycould be combined or treated independently, since systems of calculation

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were devised to elicit these dates, though they were not based on Daniel orrooted in Scriptural proof texts. Joseph Bekhor Shor of Orléans, the discipleof Rashi’s grandson, Rabbenu Tam, made calculations that are very close tothose of Rashi.28 For Isaac ben Abraham (Ris.ba)—the master of one of Nah-manides’ masters, Nathan of Trinquetaille—1358 was to be the date of thecoming of the Messiah “son of Joseph,” while 1403 would see the comingof the Messiah “son of David.”29 To the Catalan Abraham Bar H. iyya, fourdates for the advent of the Messiah seemed conceivable, three of which werebased on the idea of a symbolic symmetry, including the equal duration of“negative” and “positive” historical periods. For the fourth date, Bar H. iyyacorrelated the date on the basis of Daniel with one established by “histor-ical astrology,” namely, a conjunction of planets that would occur in 1345.While this was not one of those great conjunctions that determine changes ofreligion or of political regime, it was, nonetheless, what astrologers called a“middle conjunction,” whose full import is recognizable if one connects itsdate to the number in Daniel. The conjunction of 1345 would bear fruit in1358.30

Abraham Ibn Ezra expressed his strong disagreement with all those whoused the concluding verses of the book of Daniel as springboards for mes-sianic reckonings and read in Daniel 12:11–12 a prophecy about separate butsymbolically related events. Daniel 12:11 points to the events of the Jewishwar against the Romans; the 1290 days represent the three years and a halfduring which worship was suspended until the Temple was destroyed and theJews went into exile; and Daniel 12:12 points to the Messianic future. A pe-riod of 1335 days, or roughly three and one half years, during which the Jewswill again be in dire straits, will come first, but the advent of the Redeemerwill immediately follow. We learn, Ibn Ezra says, from Daniel 11:36 that theinvasion of Egypt by the “king of the North” will be the inaugural event ofthis period of trial, and from Daniel 7:14 that with the advent of the Mes-siah, the “fourth kingdom”—the Islamic empire—will be totally destroyedin a matter of days, whereas in the demise previous “kingdoms” there willbe less damage. If the rulers are removed from power, their countries willnot be “physically” destroyed. However, Ibn Ezra insists that we are givenno information about when this will happen.31 In the thirteenth century, thekabbalists Ezra of Gerona and Nahmanides protested both against Ibn Ezra’sremoval of “Rome” (pagan and Christian) from its “function” as the “fourthkingdom” and his “agnosticism” in the matter of the Messianic date.32

These two kabbalists, as well as disciples of Nahmanides’ pupils, found away to square their general mystical views with messianic yearnings both tovindicate the date of 1358 and to outline the eschatological scenario. The toolthey adopted to reconcile a linear and a cyclical view of history—to transposethe formulation Marjorie Reeves frequently resorted to in her presentations of

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Joachimism—were patterns of sixes and sevens.33 The old parallel betweenthe week of creation and the “cosmic week” offered a starting point. Just asthere had been six days of “labor” and a seventh day of “rest,” history had tobe divided between six millennia and a seventh millennium. There were doc-trinal differences about the nature of the seventh, but it was generally agreedit had to be equated with the “world-to-come.” The different teachings aboutthe succession of the world-cycles of seven thousand years need not concernus here. The critical issues are that the character of the “events” during eachone of the days of Creation would determine the shape of the correspond-ing millennium,34 and that to the sixth day, pointing to the sixth millennium,was attributed messianic significance. Thus, on the fourth day, God had madethe two luminaries. According to Nahmanides, the fourth millennium (of theJewish calendar) was principally the time of the two Temples and of the twoDavidic and Hasmonean kingdoms.35 Likewise, Bah. ya ben Asher saw thisas a time of sovereignty, tranquility, and “great honor” for Israel, and equallyof a wisdom “broader than the sea”: the two luminaries “are” the two laws,written and oral. The fifth millennium, by contrast, witnessed the dominationof the “nations who do not know their Creator” and was for the Jews the timeof exile. This corresponded to the day that saw the creation of the great sea-monsters and of “every living creature that creeps,” as well as the creation offowl.36

When those kabbalists were writing, the sixth millennium (from 1240C.E.) was about to dawn or had already begun. Kabbalists had their ownrationale that allowed them to share the mood of excitement that becamewidespread in the Jewish world with the approach of the new millennium.37

This, they contended, would witness the arrival of the Son of Man prophesiedby Daniel, matching the creation of man during the sixth day. A messianicélan would be typical of such a rationale from the start.38 Still the Messiahwas to appear only after approximately a century. On the sixth day, the “liv-ing creature after its kind” was first “brought forth.” The creation of man “inour image, after our likeness” occurred precisely at sunrise, which may belearned from Ps. 104:22: “When the sun rises, they [the beasts of the forest]gather in and couch in their dens. Man goes out to his work, to his labor un-til evening.” Accordingly, the Messiah, “who knows his Creator,” will comeafter about “one tenth” of the millennium, “as is the proportion of the partof the day until sunrise to the whole day.”39 The date heralded by Daniel,1358, accords nicely with this scheme.40 During the Barcelona Disputation,Nahmanides countered Pablo Christiani’s claim that he would prove, on thestrength of texts drawn from the Jewish tradition, that the Messiah had al-ready come by asserting that not only had the Messiah not yet come, but thathe (Nahmanides), knew precisely the date when he would, namely, 1358.This was not a matter of “know[ing] how to answer to the heretic”; Nah-manides’ contention was fully consistent with his basic views.41

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History is certainly on the move with the opening of the sixth millennium.Accordingly, mankind will rise to a real knowledge of the Lord only with theMessianic times and the triumph of Judaism, which, Nahmanides declaresduring the Barcelona Disputation, is to be a hundred years from now.42 But itseems, he adds elsewhere in a note of positive expectation, that the change inthe nature of the animals created on the fifth day (sea creatures and birds) andon the sixth day (the “beast of the earth”) points to the upsurge of a new impe-rial nation, depicted as a matter of course as the last great beast in the dreamof Daniel (7:7), “dreadful and exceedingly strong,” but also, somewhat con-tradictorily, as one which will “come closer to truth than the earlier ones.”43

Is there a hint here of the hope that a new world-power like the Mongolswould appear, convert to a form of monotheism of its own invention, replay-ing the Khazar experience (though not through full conversion to Judaism),and thus pave the way for the Messiah, by playing a role comparable to whatMaimonides famously ascribed to Christianity and Islam? If indeed we candetect such a hint, Nahmanides’s response to the Mongol invasions was dif-ferent from that of his friend Meshullam Da Piera, who equated the Mongolswith the Ten Tribes and expressed, in a poem composed in 1260 on the eve ofthe Mongol defeat by the Mamluks at the battle of Ain Jalut, both his admi-ration for their ability to instill a sense of terror and his expectation of seeingthe Temple reconstructed shortly, hopefully before his death. Nonetheless,Nahmanides’ response was similar to some extent, since he, at least briefly,followed their conquests with trepidation.44

The kabbalists did not content themselves with surmising a date but alsoset down the sequence of events that would commence at that appointed time.This period, they contended on the strength of the difference between the twonumbers mentioned in Daniel—1290 and 1335—was to last forty-five years,from 1358 to 1403.45 Nahmanides gave the clearest account of the eventsthat would transpire in his Book of Redemption. He used a passage from theapocalyptic composition Book of Zerubbabel (as it was rewritten in PirqeiHeikhalot)46 to distinguish between a longer phase of forty years, duringwhich the Messiah son of Joseph would gather some of the exiled and wagewars until he was slain, and a much shorter one of five years, when the Mes-siah son of David would complete the Messianic task by winning the finalbattles and accomplish the full ingathering of the Jews.47 In the BarcelonaDisputation he expounded the same basic scenario, but omitted the two Mes-siahs, perhaps in order not to refer to the fate of a slain Messiah and therebyto risk being forced further to discuss texts lending themselves to a Christo-logical interpretation.48 He nevertheless was still contemplating the distinctroles ascribed to one or the other messianic figure, since he referred to theinitiative of his “first” Messiah, who would, in the beginning, rally some ofthe dispersed (nidah. im).49 Ezra of Gerona had previously made a distinc-tion between the roles of the two Messiahs. The Messiah son of Joseph, will

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summon the descendants of the Ten Tribes, who had been expelled fromtheir land but who had not been scattered, and the Messiah son of Davidwill gather the “scattered of Judah.”50 Ezra also mentioned a time of trial,when in the wilderness the ungodly in Israel will be “refined and cleansed”(Daniel 11:35). Nahmanides concurred.51 Both Ezra and Bah. ya ben Asherinsisted that the victory of the Messiah son of David52—or in any case theconcluding moment of the forty-five year period–would see the end of “warsand jealousies.”53 The “days of the Messiah” would fill the remainder ofthe sixth millennium, which would last 837 years; the number of years ofthis second period of “dancing” and sovereignty, Bah. ya determined, wouldbe equal to the number of years of the first, biblical, period of tranquilityand prosperity.54 Ezra mentioned that those who meritoriously cleaved to thecommandments in exile would be resurrected two hundred years after thebeginning of the sixth millennium.55 Nahmanides referred to a day of judg-ment and the final resurrection on the eve of the entrance into “the world tocome.”56

Nahmanides added two striking features to the opening moments of theMessianic crisis. They were based on the idea of a symmetry between theevents of Moses’ life and the career of the Messiah. First, just as the liber-ation from Egyptian bondage had begun with Moses’ confronting Pharaoh,the liberation from exile in 1358 would start with the Messiah son of Josephconfronting the Pope.57 In fact, this Messiah would surpass Moses in defi-ance. This was what the Sages had in mind in their interpretation of Isaiah52:13, “My servant will be exalted and lifted up and shall be very high”:This means exalted above Abraham, lifted up above Moses, and higher thanthe ministering angels.”58 Thus, Abraham preached the faith and was fear-less against Nimrod, but Moses outdid him, since he “stood in his lowlinessagainst Pharaoh. . . and showed him no favor in the great plagues with whichhe smote him.” And the ministering angels demonstrated their eagerness forredemption, as the verses from the Book of Daniel (10, 20–21) indicate. TheMessiah will nevertheless outshine all of them. He will “come and commandthe Pope and all the kings of the Gentiles in the name of God: ‘Let my peoplego’. . . . He will perform among them many great signs and wonders, and hewill not fear them at all.”59 Second, the destruction of “Rome” will occur inan early phase of the career of the Messiah as public leader: “first (la-zemanha-rishon) the Messiah will come, and he will cause the abomination thatworships what is not God to be desolate and pass from the world,” and onlyafterwards will he “gather the dispersed of Israel. . . and bring Israel to theirland.” The abomination to which he refers is “the people of Rome who de-stroyed the Temple.”60 Just as Moses grew in the household of Pharaoh until“he called him to account and drowned all his people in the sea,” so “theMessiah will remain in Rome until he brings about its ruin.”61

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From the same writings Nahmanides developed his all-encompassing ideaof a Messiah who would dwell in Rome and would later destroy the city fromwithin. He cites two biblical verses as prooftexts. The first, Isaiah 27:10,centers on the downfall of the “city of desolation”: “For the fortified city willbe solitary, a habitation abandoned and forsaken, like the wilderness; thereshall the calf graze, and there shall he lie down and consume the branchesthereof.” The image of the calf that fed in the very place he would later laywaste had appeared in a midrashic passage referring to the Messiah, who“is destined to take revenge on Edom [Rome] and lives with them in thecity [medinah], as the daughter of Pharaoh raised the one who is destinedto take revenge on her father.”62 Both the notion of the Messiah hidden inRome and the verse from Isaiah are mentioned in the two chapters at thebeginning and at the end of the part of Pirqei Heikhalot that supplement theBook of Zerubabel.63 Ezekiel’s prophecy on the fate of the arrogant kingof Tyre (28:18), “I shall bring forth fire out of your midst; it will consumeyou,” served as a second proof text.64 Both sources were quoted by Bah. yaben Asher in a passage on the future redemption, which, closely followingNahmanides, he conceives “in the image of the deliverance from Egypt.”65

Arnold of Villanova may have become aware of Nahmanides’ viewsthrough a number of channels. Ramon Martí had sown “the seed of theHebrew language,” Arnold tells us in the very first sentences of his Allo-cutio super significacione nominis Tetragrammaton, “in the garden of hisheart.”66 Still, further research is needed to ascertain the level of Arnold’skabbalistic knowledge. Possibly a comparison of “alphabet mysticism”—so influential on Joseph Gikatilla and Moses of Leon in the early phase oftheir intellectual-spiritual development67—with the two theological treatisesArnold composed in the early 1290s might shed light on the matter.68 But itseems indisputable that Arnold had assimilated kabbalistic notions and waysof thinking. He may have been acquainted with the messianic calculationsof the kabbalists who entertained views similar to those of Nahmanides butfound a way to reckon a date for the beginning of the messianic days closerto their own time than 1358.69

Arnold and his two nephews, Armengaud and Jean Blaise, had close con-tacts with Jewish scholars in Montpellier, and especially with Jacob benMakir, the grandson of Samuel Ibn Tibbon and leader of the rationalistparty.70 Arnold raised some eyebrows in the pontifical court when he re-sorted to an astrological talisman to treat the kidney ailment of Pope Boni-face VIII; the same talisman was used by Jewish physicians. This practice,which smacked of magic, provided the traditionalist party with a convenientpretext to begin its campaign against the supporters of “philosophy.” Arnoldand the Jewish physicians were tapping common sources, ultimately based onversions of (or additions to) the hermetic work, known in its Latin rendition

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as Picatrix, that was prepared at the court of King Alphonso X of Castile.71

While in Barcelona, following the expulsion of the Jews from France, Estoriha-Parh. i, a relative of Jacob ben Makir, translated a medical treatise by Ar-mengaud Blaise.72 In a later work, Estori mentioned the opinion based onDaniel 12:11–12 that sees 1358 as the year when Michael, the patron angelof Israel, will arise.73 Levi ben Abraham of Villefranche was an author com-mitted to more extreme philosophical positions and inserted an astronomicaltreatise in his work Livyat H. en. On astronomical grounds, he deduced, likeAbraham Bar Hiyya, that 1345 (or perhaps 1350) was the year of the arrivalof the Messiah. A number of authors in the late Middle Ages used both astro-nomical and scriptural proofs for their reckonings, as Bar Hiyya had himselfdone. It can thus be surmised that some members of the philosophical partywith whom Arnold of Villanova was acquainted put the verses of Daniel 12to good use.74 Arnold, it seems, got his information from the most diversequarters of the Jewish community.

Just as Ramon Martí (Raymond Martini) secured a wide knowledge oftalmudic literature and used it to voice militantly hostile views on Jews andJudaism, Arnold of Villanova combined his own exposure to Jewish doctrineswith an espousal of the extremist line on the place of Jews within Christiansociety. In the last year of his life, he wrote a tract for the benefit of Fred-erick III of Sicily, with whom he had become especially close, proposingradical steps. In order to make the Sicilian state more “truly Christian,” Jewsshould be restricted, he wrote, or better yet, eliminated, whether by expul-sion following the recent expulsions ordered by the kings of England andFrance, or by conversion. At the least, Frederick should enforce a segrega-tionist policy,75 advice that Frederick took up when he issued a law forbid-ding Christians to eat with Jews or to hire them for work in their houses.76

In 1312, the Jews of Palermo were required to leave the upper part of thetown.77

Arnold likewise recommended prohibiting Jews from treating Christianpatients. A tract he himself wrote, or which was written under his influence,expounds the view that Jews may hold menial jobs, but should be preventedfrom practicing medicine.78 Arnold had already informed Frederick of hisgreat displeasure when, in disregard of their spiritual well-being, monks andnuns sought the help of Jewish physicians.79 Frederick responded by pro-hibiting Jews from treating Christian patients by imposing a sentence of oneyear’s incarceration under the strictest conditions, commenting on the dan-gers that threatened Christians who turned “to Jews who hate them.”80 Jews,Arnold exclaimed in his On the Mystery, are thirsty for the blood of Chris-tians and are their capital enemies. Nearly a century later, in 1397, QueenMaria de Luna, who acted for a brief time as regent until the return fromSicily of her spouse Martin the Elder, again ordered Jews to cease treat-ing Christians without the assistance of a Christian doctor: “these perfidious

THE RECKONINGS OF NAHMANIDES AND ARNOLD 29

Jews, she explained, are thirsty for Christian blood, as enemies would be.”81

Arnold of Villanova thus advocated a stance that combined reducing Jews toa pariah-like status with an obsessive concern about physical contact. Thiswas identical to the avowed program of the more actively anti-Jewish groupsin society.

It would seem that at the time of Nahmanides and Arnold of Villanova,both Jews and Christians associated messianic or millenarian expectationswith a confrontational stance. However, as Lerner has argued, in these samegenerations there were millenarian Christians who cultivated other, more pos-itive, postures. These postures I intend to discuss in a forthcoming work.

Notes

1. For recent discussions, see Michael Zell, Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the ChristianImage in the Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Berkeley, 2002), 58–98; Yosef Kaplan,“Jews and Judaism in the Hartlib Circle,” Studia Rosenthaliana 38–39 (2005–2006): 186–215; Menasseh ben Israel, La Pierre Glorieuse de Nabuchodonosor, ou la fin de l’histoireau XVIIe siècle, eds. M. Hadas-Lebel and H. Méchoulan (Paris, 2007).

2. David Bankier, “Ra’ayon shivat Yisrael ba-Jansenism ha-S. arfati,” in Bein Yisrael la-Umot: Qoves. Ma‘amarim. Shai le-Shmuel Ettinger (Jerusalem, 1987), 71–86.

3. The article, originally written by Dinur in Hebrew on the occasion of the centennial ofGrégoire’s death in 1931, is now available in French translation with critical notes: BenZion Dinur, “En défense de l’abbé Grégoire,” Les Cahiers du judaïsme, 31 (2011): 97–105. For further discussion of a number of examples of millenarianism in the eighteenthcentury, see B. Mevorach’s article on “Ha-reqa‘ li-feniyat Lavater le-Mendelssohn,” Zion30 (1965): 158–170 and Christopher M. Clark, The Politics of Conversion: MissionaryProtestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728–1941 (Oxford, 1995), Chaps. 1–3.

4. Robert E. Lerner, The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval Millenarians and the Jews(Pennsylvania, 2002), 120.

5. On Rupescissa, see Leah DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy and the End of Time: John of Ru-pescissa in the Late Middle Ages (New York, 2009); Brett Edward Whalen, Dominion ofGod: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), 221–227; Robert E. Lerner, “Historical Introduction,” in Johannes de Rupescissa, Liber secre-torum eventuum, eds. Robert E. Lerner and Christine Morerod-Fattebert (Fribourg, 1994),13–85. The latter publication and the critical edition of the Liber ostensor quod adessefestinant tempora (eds. André Vauchez, Clémence Modestin, Christine Morerod Fattebert[Rome, 2005]) represent major contributions to the scholarship on John of Rupescissa.

6. This second direction in the influence of millenarianism has been extensively discussedby Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study inJoachimism (Oxford, 1969), part 3. Recent research has insisted that millenarianism func-tioned as a cultural resource that could be exploited in order to increase monarchicalpower. See, for example, Martin Aurell, “Le messianisme royal de la Couronne d’Aragon(14e–15e siècles),” Annales H,SS 52, no. 1 (1997): 119–155; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “DuTage au Gange au XVIe siècle: une conjoncture millénariste à l’échelle eurasiatique,”Annales H,SS 56, no. 1 (2001): 51–84, 52.

7. Lerner, “Historical Introduction,” 58, n. 92. Arnold of Villanova’s tract of 1301 On theMystery of the Cymbals of the Church (see below) includes both the computation and

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the “prophecy” beginning with the words Woe to the World (Vae Mundo), which an-nounces, inter alia, the wars led by a “bat” (a Christian king in Spain) that will devourthe “mosquitos of Spain” (i.e., the Muslims), will crush the head of the (Muslim) Beastand rise to universal monarchy, and the subsequent appearance of the Antichrist. Lernershows, that since Rupescissa uses the reckoning in his Liber secretorum and inserts in itan excerpt of the prophecy, there is no question, that he knew about Arnold of Villanova’scomputation from this specific tract. Yitzhak Baer referred to the prophecy Woe to theWorld in “Ha-reqa’ ha-his.tory shel Ra‘aya Mehemna,” Zion 5 (1940): 40–44 (reprinted inBaer, Meh. karim ve-Masot [Jerusalem, 1986], 2:345–349). The prophecy had been pub-lished by the Catalan scholar José Pou y Marti (Visionarios, beguinos y fraticelos cata-lanes (siglos XIII–XV) (Vich, 1930), 54; repr. Alicante, 1996), 171–172) and, earlier, byBaer’s mentor, Heinrich Finke, in his partial edition of On the Mystery of the Cymbalsof the Church in his book Aus den Tagen Bonifaz VIII (Münster, 1902). See also YitzhakBaer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain (Philadelphia, 1992), 1:277–279; JosepPerarnau i Espelt, “El text primitiu del De Mysterio cymbalorum Ecclesiae d’Arnau de Vi-lanova: En apendix, el su Tractatus de tempore adventus Anticristi,” Arxiu de textos cata-lans antics 7–8 (1988–1989): 5–169; Alain Milhou, “La chauve-souris, le nouveau Davidet le roi caché (trois images de l’empereur des derniers temps dans le monde ibérique:XIIIe–XVIIe s.),” Mélanges de la Casa de Velazquez, 18, no. 1–2 (1982): 61–78; andMatthias Kaup and Robert E. Lerner, “Gentile of Foligno interprets the Prophecy ‘Woe tothe World’, with an Edition and English Translation,” Traditio 56 (2001), 149–211.

8. For the most recent edition of these treatises see: Arnaldi de Villanova, Introductio inlibrum [Joachim] De semine scripturarum, Allocutio super significatione nominis Tetra-grammaton, ed. Josep Perarnau (Barcelona, 2004).

9. The precise dating of Arnold’s first two works and the sequence of events leading to hisarrest have been much debated. See Robert E. Lerner, “Ecstatic Dissent,” Speculum 67(1992): 33–57, 43, and Gian Luca Potestà, “L’anno dell’Anticristo: Il calcolo di Arnaldodi Villanova nella letteratura teologica e profetica del XIV secolo,” Rivista di storia delcristianesimo 4, no. 2 (2007): 431–433. Both treatises have been published in Perarnau,“El text primitiu.” On the debate around Arnold’s treatises, see Johannes Fried, Aufstiegaus dem Untergang: Apokalyptisches Denken und die Entstehung der modernen Natur-wissenschaft im Mittelalter (Munchen, 2001); Manfred Gerwing, Vom Ende der Zeit: derTraktat des Arnald von Villanova über die Ankunft des Antichrist in der akademischenAuseinandersetzung zu Beginn des 14. Jahrhunderts (Münster, 1996).

10. Perarnau, “El text primitiu,” 89–90.11. The notion that the destruction of the Temple occurred forty-two years after the Pas-

sion is already found in Origen: see Against Celsius, 4, 23, as quoted by Marcel Simon,Verus Israël (Paris, 1964), 90. Medieval texts hesitate between this chronology and aninterval of 40 years between the crucifixion and the fall of Jerusalem: see David Hook,“Some problems in Andres Bernaldez’s account of the Spanish Jews,” Michael 11 (1988–1989): 231–255, 237. An interval of 42 years lent itself better to an interpretation linked toDaniel. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was used by Pablo Christiani duringthe second disputation of Paris: see Shatzmiller, La deuxième controverse de Paris (Paris-Louvain, 1994), 48 (Hebrew text), 63 (French translation). See also Christiani’s reasoningin the Barcelona Disputation: Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, ed. H. .D. Chavel (Jerusalem,1963), 1:313, lines 1–2; for an English translation: Hyam Maccoby, Judaism on Trial:Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (London, 1996), 124.

12. See On the Advent of the Antichrist, in Perarnau “El text primitiu,” 91; On the Mystery ofthe Cymbals, in ibid., 149, lines 637ff. In his commentary on the Book of Daniel, Jerome

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mentions a number of interpretations of Daniel 9:24–27 and refers to the views of “theHebrews,” who apply the “covenant with many for one week” in 27a to Vespasian’s time,and the cessation of “sacrifice and oblation” in 27b to the destruction of Jerusalem byHadrian. Jerome intimates that “according to the history of Josephus, Vespasian and Ti-tus concluded peace with the Jews for three years and six months,” but ultimately rejectsthese views on chronological grounds. The basis for this exegesis could be Josephus’sdescription of how Titus, using Josephus as his mouthpiece, called John of Gischala tosurrender and promised to forgive him and the “rebels” for their “crimes.” In the continu-ation of this speech, Josephus declares us that he seeks to save the Jews from themselves,and that in fact they have been condemned by God: the “writings of the ancient prophetsand particularly that oracle on this miserable city,” meaning Daniel 9:26 (“And the cityand the sanctuary shall destroy the folk of a prince that is to come”), are now being ful-filled (see Josephus, The Jewish War, book 6, Chap. 2). The mention in one stroke of anoffer of “peace” and of the critical passage in Daniel 9 could have given rise to the notionof a peace sealed between Vespasian/Titus and the Jews. The Glossa ordinaria insertedJerome’s remarks: see Biblium Sacrorum cum Glossa ordinaria (Venice 1603), 4:1611.Yossippon puts the following words in Josephus’ mouth: “and now I conclude an eter-nal covenant. . . ve-ata hineni koret lakhem et ha-brit ha-zot lifnei Elohei ha-bayt ha-zehle-ad beini u-beinekhem.” Presumably on the strength of this passage, Rashi sees Daniel9:27a as referring to the alliance concluded between Titus and the leaders of the Jews forseven years. Abraham ibn Ezra, in his discussion of Daniel 9:24 and Nahmanides (see his‘Book of Redemption’ in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:282) mention an alliance for sevenyears. During the second Disputation of Paris, Abraham ben Samuel of Rouen says thatTitus ba ‘imahem be-brit lehanih. am shavu‘a eh. ad ve-hefer et brito ba-h. as. i ha-shavu’a,ke-di-khtiv be-sof ha-sefer be-h. as. i yamav yashbit zevah. u-minh. ah (see Shatzmiller, Ladeuxième controverse, 49 [Hebrew text], 65 [French translation]).

13. In On the Advent of Antichrist, Arnold gives “around” 1378 as the date: Perarnau, “El textprimitiu,” 149 lines, 671ff.; in On the Mystery of the Cymbals, he gives “around 1376”:Perarnau, “El text primitiu,” 91–92, lines 720–730. As he says on lines 727–730, it isnot certain whether the calculation should use the solar or lunar year. Gerwing has seena date in the 1370s as the logical conclusion of Arnold’s calculation, since Arnold, hethinks, only added the three and a half years corresponding to the extent of time fromthe conclusion of the pact for a “week of years” to the breaking of this pact after “halfa week of years,” but added the years of the full “week” of Daniel 9:27 a and the yearsof the “half-week” of 27b (Gerwing, Vom Ende der Zeit, 143). But Arnold’s computationcannot be based on such premises, since he does not see in the half week an additionalperiod of time after the week previously mentioned in the first part of the verse, but part ofthis week. See On the Advent of the Messiah, in Perarnau, “El text primitiu,” 91–92; Onthe Mystery of the Cymbals, in Perarnau, “El text primitiu,” 149, lines 639–655. Potestà(“L’anno dell’Anticristo,” 438–439) raises three possibilities to account for these dates inthe 1370s: they could be a copyist’s error; the original words may have been rewrittenin the wake of the Great Schism in 1378; and the formulation in On the Mystery, 149,lines 674–676, is perhaps to be understood as pointing to 1368 (and see the parallel for-mulation in the previous On the Advent, 92, lines 728–730), which seems very unlikely.Note that Henry of Harclay, attacking Arnold, imputed to him the year 1376: “Et patetquod isti Judei concordant de tempore cum magistro Arnaldo ponente Antichristum futu-rum post 76 annos ab anno Domino 1300” (Franz Pelster, “Die Quaestio Heinrichs vonHarclay über die zweite Ankunft Christi,” Archivio italiano per la storia della pietà [I,1951]: 62). A French monk who wrote a commentary on Woe to the world did likewise(see Finke, Aus den Tagen, 218, n. 1; quoted by Pou y Marti, Visionarios, 170, n. 60).

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14. Johannes de Rupescissa, Liber secretorum eventuum, 270–271, §16–17; Liber ostensor,117–119.

15. On the identity of the watchmen (speculatores) and the role of “charity” (caritas), seeJoseph Ziegler, Medicine and Religion c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova (Oxford,1998), 128–134.

16. On the Mystery, 97–98 lines 846–857. It is unclear why Arnold contends that the Jewsassert that the verses of the seventy “weeks of years” cannot be understood. The two textsadduced by Perarnau in his note are irrelevant here. During the Barcelona Disputation,Nahmanides does not say that Daniel 9:24–27 cannot be explained, but to the contrary of-fers to give his reading of it, insistimg that the passage does provide information on whenthe Messiah would come, as does, he says, Daniel 12:11–12: “And now I will explain toyou the whole passage from Daniel, in a clear interpretation, if you and your associateshere wish to learn, and have an understanding heart” (see Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man,1:313; for an English translation: Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, 125). During the debate inMajorca in 1286, the Jewish protagonists declare that if the Christian scholars have beendefeated by Nahmanides at Barcelona, there is no chance that a simple merchant like In-ghetto Contardo, their interlocutor, will do better; they then declare: “it is not proper forus to speak with you of such obscure matters, for you will not understand them.” SeeOra Limor, The Disputation of Maiorca, 1286 (Hebrew), 2 vols (Jerusalem, 1985), vol. 2,53–55, or: id. Die Disputationen zu Ceuta, 1179 und Mallorca, 1286: Zwei antijüdischeSchriften aus dem mittelalterlichen Genua (München, 1994) 229–232; English trans. inLimor, “Polemical Varieties: Religious Disputations in Thirteenth Century Spain,” IberiaJudaica 2 (2010): 55–79, 61–62. The passage from Daniel 9 was discussed later at Ma-jorca and the Jews gave their explanation of yikaret mashiah. (the “Anointed” to be “cutoff,” in the sense of “destroyed,” is the Temple): see Limor, The Disputation, 58–61;Die Disputationen, 236–241. Arnold’s contention is perhaps a reflection of the notion,as widespread among Jews as among Christians, that the chronological hints in Danielwill be understood only when the events foretold will actually happen. See, for example,the answer of Synagoga in the tenth-century text Altercatio Aecclesie contra Synagogam,in Bernard Blumenkranz, Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde occidental 430–1096 (Paris,1960), 247 n. 50, and Abraham ibn Ezra on Daniel 8:14 and 8:25–26.

17. On the Mystery, 98, lines 871–874.18. On the Mystery, 154–155, lines 891–895. This passage has in all probability been taken

from Raymond Martini’s Pugio Fidei. Martini posited two Jewish Messiahs in the firstand second centuries C.E., as he felt a need for symmetry and also as a reaction to theinconsistencies between the different rabbinical sources on Bar-Kokhba. In Pugio Fidei(Leipzig,1687), part II, Chap. 2, 264, he explains that after the demise of King Solomon apolitical and religious schism occurred among the Hebrews: the majority among them—ten tribes—refused to “have a portion in David and a inheritance in the son of Jesse,” andtwo calves of gold were placed in Bethel and Dan; for this sin, the kingdom of Israel waseventually destroyed. Likewise, most Jews rejected Jesus and invented two false Messiahs.

19. On the Mystery, 99, lines 885–891.20. Lerner, “Ecstatic Dissent,” 42, n. 38; and Potestà, “L’anno dell’Anticristo,” 440–442.21. See his own summary of his claims at the end of his tract On the Advent, 169; and his

text of 1305 (in Catalan), where he vindicates his positions: Arnau de Vilanova, Obrescatalanes, volum 1: Escrits religiosos, ed. Miquel Batllori (Barcelona 1947), 111.

22. David Burr, “Olivi’s Apocalyptic Timetable,” The Journal of Medieval and RenaissanceStudies 11 (1981): 237–260, 250–251. The divergence of opinion among Christians par-allels the difference in approach of Ibn Ezra and of Nahmanides (see below). Note that

THE RECKONINGS OF NAHMANIDES AND ARNOLD 33

Olivi, while presenting himself as not committed to a particular position, thought that the1260 days during which the woman “clothed with the sun” (Revelation 12:6) has to re-main in the wilderness, after being driven into it by the dragon, have to be understood asyears (Burr, “Olivi’s Apocalyptic Timetable,” 251).

23. Nahmanides, Sefer ha-Geulah, in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:290, line 11. Since thereal date is now so much nearer, Nahmanides adds, the prohibition may henceforth beignored. Both Nahmanides and Arnold of Villanova use the verse: “many shall run to andfro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Daniel 12:4) to claim that the search for the dateof the advent of redemption is legitimate, at least at a time that is near “the end of days”:see Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:290, lines 4–7; Arnold, On the Mystery, 104.

24. See the translation into Hebrew by Judah Ibn Tibbon of the eighth chapter of Saadya’s TheBook of Doctrines and Beliefs (Constantinople, 1562; repr. Leipzig, 1859; repr. New York,1947), 149–152. See also Abba H. Silver, A History of Messianic Speculation in Israel(New York, 1927), 50–51; Arthur Hyman, Eschatological Themes in Medieval JewishPhilosophy (Milwaukee, 2002), 52–53. Saadya points to Leviticus 25:29 to show that theterm “days” is to be understood as “years”: “And if a man sell a dwelling-house in a walledcity, then he may redeem it within a whole year after it is sold; for days [Hebrew yamim,here meaning: a full year] shall he have the right of redemption.” His use of the verseis repeated by Nahmanides: see, for the Disputation of Barcelona, Maccoby, Judaism onTrial, 126, and for the Book of Redemption, Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 291. Nahmanidesstates in both passages that the use of “days” for years is intended to fulfil the order of theangel to “shut up the words [and] seal the prophecy” (Daniel 12:4): Maccoby, Judaism onTrial, 128; Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 291, line 2.

25. Robert Chazan rightly stresses the ingenuity that Rashi displayed in his calculations:“Rashi’s Commentary on the Book of Daniel,” in Rashi et la culture juive en France duNord au Moyen Âge, eds. Gilbert Dahan, Gérard Nahon, and Elie Nicolas (Paris, 1997),111–120. There is no doubt that Gerson Cohen was wrong when he claimed that “Rashi’sdates were nothing more than an exegete’s elucidation of texts, which he interpreted withno greater emphasis than he had the rest of the vast corpus of Scripture and the Talmud”(Gerson D. Cohen, “Messianic postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim,” in his Studies inthe Variety of Rabbinic Cultures [Philadelphia, 1991], 271–297, 276). For recent perspec-tives on Rashi’s calculations, see Ephraim Kanarfogel, “H. ishuvei ha-qe.s shel h. akhmeiAshkenaz: me-Rashi u-venei doro ve-ad le-tequfat ba‘alei ha Tossafot,” in Rashi: demutove-yes. irato, eds. Abraham Grossman and Sarah Japhet (Jerusalem, 2009), 2:381–401,and David Berger, “Ha-mishih. iyut ha-Sfaradit ve-ha-mishih. iyut ha-Ashkenazit: beh. inatha-mah. loket ha-historyographit,” in Rishonim ve-ah. aronim: meh. karim be-toldot Yisraelmugashim le-Avraham Grossman, eds. Benjamin Z. Kedar et al. (Jerusalem 2010), 11–29.

26. See Ruth Rabba on 2:14. See Ephraim E. Urbach, H. azal: Emunot ve-de‘ot (Jerusalem,1976), 617–618. The import of this aggadic passage for the history of the notion of a“hidden Messiah” has been noted by Israël Lévi, “L’apocalypse de Zorobabel et le roide Perse Siroès,” Revue des études juives (1914): 129–160, 148, n. 8.; repr. in his LeRavissement du Messie à sa naissance et autres essais, ed. Evelyne Patlagean (Paris,1994), 192 n. 8; Yehuda Even-Shmuel referred to the passage as a witness to the parallelMoses-Messiah: Midrashei Geulah, 2nd edn. (Jerusalem, 1954), 17 n. 2. A variant of thissource is found in Yalkut Shimoni, no. 518, on Hosea 2:16, and H. . Chavel refers to it inhis notes on the text of the Barcelona Disputation (Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 314 n. 96).

27. See Rashi on Daniel 12:12.28. Kanarfogel, “H. ishuvei ha-qes. shel h. akhmei Ashkenaz,” 391–392.29. Kanarfogel, “H. ishuvei ha-qes. shel h. akhmei Ashkenaz,” 393–395.

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30. Silver, A History of Messianic Speculation, 69–74. The date of 1358 is also defendedthrough a scheme of the six millennia of history which will have run their course at thattime; two of the three other dates find confirmation in astrological calculations. On thehistorical astrology of Bar H. iyya, see Shlomo Sela, “Abraham Bar H. iyya’s AstrologicalWork and Thought,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 12 (2005): 128–158.

31. See Ibn Ezra on Daniel 7:14, 9:24, 11:30, 11:36, 12:11. On Ibn Ezra’s “benign” viewof the fate of the non-Muslim countries, see Gerson Cohen, “Esau as Symbol in EarlyMedieval Thought,” reprinted in his Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures, 271–297,260, and Israel Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians inLate Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 2006), 109–110, and n. 61.

32. See the parallel between Ezra’s development on Song of Songs, 5:6–7 in his commentaryon the Song of Songs (in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 2:500–501) and Nahmanides’ com-ments in his Sefer ha-Geulah (in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:283–287) as well as in hisexegesis of a number of verses, particularly Genesis 15, in his commentary on the Torah.In his Le commentaire d’Ezra de Gérone sur le Cantique des Cantiques (Paris, 1969), 427,Georges Vajda pointed out that the two authors addressed Ibn Ezra’s reasoning in the samefashion and shared a similar viewpoint. I attempt here to show that the two authors had incommon not only their strictures against Ibn Ezra, but also their positive views of how theMessianic crisis was to unfold. One becomes fully aware of the extent to which Ezra ofGerona and Nahmanides dealt with messianism along similar lines only if one reads crit-ical passages in Ezra’s commentary of Song of Songs, in the absence of a critical edition,in the French translation of Georges Vajda, which takes account of manuscripts, ratherthan the frequently reproduced but corrupt text of the eighteenth-century printed edition.

33. H. aviva Pedaya, Ha-Ramban. Hit‘alot: Zman Mah. zori ve-Text Qadosh (Tel Aviv, 2003);Moshe Halbertal, ‘Al Derekh ha-Emet: ha-Ramban ve-Yes. iratah shel Masoret (Jerusalem,2006), Chaps. 3 and 6.

34. In his sermon Torat ha-Shem Temimah (Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:168), Nahmanidesintimates that the account of creation in Genesis is enlightening be-‘atidot = on the future.Bah. ya ben Asher writes on Genesis 2:3: “know and understand that the seven days ofcreation make plain to us what happened in the past and point for us the future. . . ,” IsaacIbn Latif stresses likewise: “from the knowledge of first things (rishonot) we will payattention and will know the last things (ah. aronot). . . The first days were put as an example(dugma) of six thousand years” (Sarah O. Heller-Wilensky, “Meshih. iyut, eska. tologia ve-utopia ba-zerem ha-philisiphi-mi.sti shel ha-Kabbalah ba-meah ha-13,” in Meshih. iyut veEska. tologia, ed. Zvi Baras [Jerusalem, 1983], 229).

35. Nahmanides, Torat ha-Shem Temimah, 169. In his comment on Genesis 2:3, Nahmanidesconcentrates on the two Temples. See, generally, the three parallel texts by Nahmanideson the days/millenia: commentary on Gen. 2:3; Torat ha-Shem Temimah, in Kitvei Mosheben Nah. man, 1:168–170; Sha‘ar ha-Gemul, in ibid., 2:306, lines 22–27.

36. Ezra of Gerona, commenting on the “thousand pieces of silver” mentioned in Song ofSongs 8:11; Nahmanides, commentary on Gen. 2:3; Torat ha-Shem Temimah, 169; Bah. yaben Asher, commentary on Gen. 2:3. True, exile began, our authors thought, with the Ro-man conquest of Jerusalem in 3828 = 68 C.E., according to traditional Jewish chronology,172 years before the beginning of the fifth millennium (240 C.E.): but still this millenniumwas par excellence that of exile, and the inspired author of Song of Songs, when he re-ferred to it through the image of a “thousand pieces of silver,” did not have to deal withminutiae and mention those additional years (“lo hiqpid al mi‘ut she-hu yoter al-ha-elef”:Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 2:514, last line; Vajda, Le commentaire d’Ezra de Gérone,130). Conversely, the first Temple was built not during the fourth millennium, but at the

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end of the third (“2928”): on the third day, at twilight. But, Nahmanides insists, a day be-gins at the end of the preceding one: thus, Abraham, even if born at the end of the secondday, was essentially a man of the third. If, Bah. ya ponders, it is not written in the Biblicalaccount of the fifth day: “and it was so,” it is because nothing permanent was created ona day, or happened in a millennium, that was of a transient nature, as exile is provisionaland to be followed by redemption. The notion of a fifth millennium of enslavement, withredemption at its end, is found in Breshit Rabbati quoted by Yuval, Two Nations in YourWomb, 259, but is not set there within a general frame of the march of history.

37. See Israel Yuval, “Jewish Messianic Expectations towards 1240 and Christian Reactions,”in Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, eds. PeterSchäfer and Mark Cohen (Leiden, 1998), 105–121, and Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb,Chap. 6.

38. Ezra of Gerona asserts as much in two passages in his commentary on Song of Songs(8:12). Vajda, Le commentaire d’Ezra de Gérone, 131, lines 1–2: “Cependant, la rédemp-tion débutera, Dieu aidant, à la fin du cinquième millénaire à compter de la création dumonde.”

39. Nahmanides, commentary on Genesis 2:3; Torat ha-Shem Temimah, in Kitvei Moshe benNah. man, 1:169; Bah. ya ben Asher on Genesis 2:3.

40. As emphasized by Nahmanides in his commentary on Genesis 2:3, and, following him,Bah. ya ben Asher on the same verse: “the Messiah will come 118 years after the fifthmillennium [5118 = 1358] to fulfil Daniel 12:11.” Ezra of Gerona mentions in his com-mentary on Song of Songs 8:13, according to Vajda’s reading (Le commentaire d’Ezra deGérone, 132), the date of 1358 as being the beginning of the wandering of the Jews in the“Wilderness of the Peoples” and of their ingathering in their antique land, and refers toDaniel 12:11.

41. See Disputation of Barcelona, in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:313–314 (Hebrew), andMaccoby, Judaism on Trial, 125–127 (English). Robert Chazan has stressed the histori-cal significance of the heightened messianic expectations to which Nahmanides’ answerbears testimony, but has interpreted them mainly as a response to the Christian challenge:“The messianic calculations of Nahmanides,” in Rashi 1040–1990: Hommage à EphraïmUrbach, ed. Gabrielle Sed-Rajna (Paris, 1993), 631–637; Chazan, “Daniel 9:24–27: Exe-gesis and Polemics,” in Contra Judaeos: Ancient and Medieval Polemics between Chris-tians and Jews, eds. Ora Limor and Guy Stroumsa (Tübingen, 1996), 143–159, 152ff.; andChazan, Barcelona and Beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and Its Aftermath (Berkeley,1992). David Berger is of the opinion that Nahmanides’ Book of Redemption “presents amessianic date that is safely in the future” (see his review of Chazan’s book in AJS Review20 [1995]: 387). I hope to have shown that this date was in accordance with Nahmanides’systematic views and not selected in order to reconcile the wish to sustain hope and thepreference for a reckoning that would not have to bear the burden of a test in real life.In his Sefer ha-Geulah, Nahmanides relies on Daniel 12, but does not refer to the viewsexpressed in his commentary on Genesis and in other passages.

42. Nahmanides speaks, more precisely, of 95 years (those separating the year 1263 from1358).

43. For a different characterization of these lines, see Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, 290.44. See Nahmanides’ comment on a new ruling nation-kingdom (tith. adesh malkhut umah

shole. tet) at the end of his commentary on Gen. 2:3. For Da Piera’s poem, see H. aymSchirmann, Ha-Shirah ha-‘Ivrit be-Sefarad u-be-Provence, 3rd edn. (Tel-Aviv, 1972), 3:poem no. 350. For a precise dating, see Aharon Z. Aescoly, Ha-Tenu‘ot ha-Meshih. iyotbe-Yisrael (Jerusalem, 1956) 193; and Ezra Fleischer, “The ‘Gerona School’ of Hebrew

36 M. KRIEGEL

Poetry,” in Rabbi Moses Nahmanides (Ramban): Explorations in His Religious and Lit-erary Virtuosity, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 37. For a discussion oftexts testifying to the Jewish reactions to the Mongol conquests, particularly in the 1230sand 1240s, see Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb, 284–288.

45. Ezra mentions 1403 as the year of the completion of the messianic crisis, on the basis ofDaniel 12:12 in the translation given by Vajda, Le Commentaire d’Ezra de Gérone, 137, asagainst the corrupt reading in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:518 (Vajda’s remark, 431, thatthis date does not square with what we find in the previous pages and has probably beenintroduced by Ezra in order “not to lay aside any of the eschatological predictions” is puz-zling: to the contrary, the date clearly fits a neat comprehensible chronological scheme).Nahmanides uses Daniel 12:11–12 to mention 1358 as the beginning of a process spreadover 45 years in his account of the Barcelona Disputation (Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man,1:313–314; Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, 126–127), and in Sefer ha-Geulah (Kitvei Mosheben Nah. man, 1:291). Bah. ya ben Asher, likewise, mentions 1403 on the basis of Daniel12:11–12.

46. The lines in Sefer ha-Geulah (Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:291, lines 5–9) are based,by Nahmanides’ own admission, on Pirqei Heikhalot: see the text in Even-Shmuel,Midrashei Geulah, 368, Chap. 39, lines 1–9 (or lines 160–169 of the whole text). Thepassage in Pirqei Heikhalot is a rewriting of the source in the Book of Zerubbabel, whichtries to provide a more convincing chronological frame for the story. Compare PirqeiHeikhalot, Chap. 39 in Midrashei Geulah, 368, lines 1–4 with the Book of Zerubabbelin Midrashei Geulah, 78, lines 1–3 (or lines 67–69) and Pirqei Heikhalot, 368, lines 5–9with the Book of Zerubbabel, 81, lines 109–112. For these sentences in Sefer Zerubba-bel, see also the French version in Israël Lévi, Le Ravissement, 195, lines 3–7 and 197,lines 13–17, and the English version of Martha Himmelfarb in Rabbinic Fantasies: Imag-inative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature, eds. David Stern and Mark JayMirsky (Philadelphia, 1990), 74, lines 20–24 and 75, lines 23–27. In the Book of Zerubba-bel, the king of Persia wages war against the Messiah son of Joseph and slays him duringthe fifth year of the Messiah’s rule, Pirqei Heikhalot credits the Messiah son of Josephwith a forty-year “reign” before the Persian invasion and the war in Jerusalem. The redac-tor of Pirqei Heikhalot could take advantage of the mention in the Book of Zerubbabel ofthe forty years during which the Jews under the rule of the Messiah are offering sacrificesin the Temple (but, as noted by Lévi, Le Ravissement, 195, n. 3 and 4, it stands to reasonthat we should read here “four” and not “forty”). On Pirqei Heikhalot, see Joseph Dan,Toldot Torat ha-Sod ha-‘Ivrit ba-Et ha-‘Atiqah, (Jerusalem, 2009), 1:1005–1008.

47. Sefer ha-Geulah, Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:291, lines 5–9.48. See above n. 37.49. Sefer ha-Geulah, Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:291, line 6.50. Ezra, Commentary on the Song of Songs, in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 2:515, lines 6–21,

and Vajda, Le commentaire d’Ezra de Gérone, 131–132). In his commentary on Genesis2:3, Bah. ya ben Asher refers similarly to the forty-five years which indicate the time thatgoes from the beginning of the ingathering of the “dispersed of Israel” to the completionof the parallel ingathering of the “scattered of Judah.”

51. See Ezra, Commentary on the Song of Songs, in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 2:516,lines 3–4 and Vajda, Le Commentaire d’Ezra de Gérone, 132, lines 25–28 (this processof “refinement” will begin in 1358); Nahmanides, Sefer ha-Geulah, Kitvei Moshe benNah. man, 1:291, line 7 (the Messiah “will purify us”).

52. Ezra of Gerona appended to his description of the events that will fill the forty-five yearsfrom the appearance of the first Messianic figure to the final triumph of the second a

THE RECKONINGS OF NAHMANIDES AND ARNOLD 37

commentary on Zechariah 9–10, in which he provides a new depiction of those events;the two pictures, if I am not mistaken, do not harmonize well. In the first passage, weare told that the Messiah son of Joseph “will conquer countries and [defeat] kings, willcome to Jerusalem, will build it. . . and will die in battle” (on this last point Ezra refers toZachariah 12,11; see Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 2:515, lines 17–19). In the second piece,Ezra begins by emphasizing, on the basis of Zachariah 9:9–10 (“lowly, and riding uponan ass. . . and I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim”), that at the time of the Messiah sonof Ephraim, the land of Israel will be conquered “not by their arrow or their sword, notby horse and chariot, but by the will of the Creator, which will bring down and humbleall nations before them. . . and they will not need arms,” and goes on with a descriptionof four wars following each other at the time of the Messiah son of David: after theconquest of Egypt by the “King of the North,” there will be a war between him and the“King of the South,” that will end in the victory of the Northern power ( all this along thelines of Daniel 11). The triumph will be short-lived, since the North will be defeated bythe Ten Tribes. At this stage, here will be a war between “Ephraim” and “Judah” in oraround Jerusalem, followed by the “war of Gog and Magog” (Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man,2:516–517, line 2). Nahmanides alluded to the “wars of Gog,” waged, it seems, in anearlier phase, since it is in these wars that the first Messiah, son of Joseph, is slain (KitveiMoshe ben Nah. man, 1:291, line 6). Haviva Pedaya contrasts Nahmanides’ “activism”with what she sees as Ezra’s “passive attitude,” exemplified by his mention of the ThreeOaths and his contention that the Messiah son of David and the “scattered of Judah” willgo to the Land of Israel “with the authorization of the kings of the Gentiles and theirhelp.” See Haviva Pedaya, “Eres. shel ruah. ve-eres. mamash: R. Ezra, R. Azriel ve-ha-Ramban,” in Eres. Yisrael ba-Hagut ha-Yehudit be-Yemei ha-Beinayim, eds. M. Hallamishand A. Ravitzky (Jerusalem, 1991), 252, and Moshe Idel’s essay in the same volume, “AlEres.-Yisrael ba-mah. shavah ha-mys.tit shel yemei-ha-beinayim,” pp. 193–214, 204–207.

53. Ezra, in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 2:518, lines 2–3; Bah. ya ben Asher on Genesis 2:3in Midrash Rabbenu Bah. ya al al h. amishah h. umshei Torah (Israel, no date): “then allthe wars and all the jealousies will pass” (p. 11 of the Hebrew numeration, column 1,lines 37–38); “all the wars will pass and there will be an endless peace” (ibid., column 2,line 1). According to B.T. Brakhot 17a, it is in the “world to come” that there is “nojealousy, hate, or rivalry.”

54. Bah. ya on Genesis 3:2, page 1, column 1 line 43 to column 2 line 1. Bah. ya uses theexpression “days of dancing” and hints to the “dance in the two camps,” Song of Songs7:1.

55. Ezra on Song of Songs 8:12: “those who watch his fruit,” according to the reading inVajda, Le Commentaire d’Ezra de Gérone, 130.

56. Nahmanides, Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 2:306, lines 19 and 26–27. The systematizationof the chronological sequence: days of the Messiah/resurrection/world to come has beenemphasized by David Novak, The Theology of Nahmanides Systematically Presented (At-lanta, 1982) Chap. 8, and by Moshe Halbertal, By Way of Truth, 134 ff.

57. Nahmanides famously refers to this confrontation in two places in his account of theBarcelona Disputation: Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:306 and 312 (Hebrew); Maccoby,Judaism on Trial, 111 and 123 (English). As is well known, three authors followed Nah-manides’ lead and imagined a confrontation between the Messiah and the Pope: AbrahamAbulafia, Isaac ben Yedaiah, and Gersonides.

58. Yalkut Shimoni on Isaiah, 476.59. Nahmanides, Disputation of Barcelona, in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:312, lines 3–11

(Hebrew), and Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, 122, lines 24–35 and 123, lines 1–6 (English).

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See the parallel text in Nahmanides’s commentary on Isaiah 52–53 in Kitvei Moshe benNah. man, 1:322–323, note especially: Moses was a “shepherd, the lowliest of men (ro‘ehshefal anashim: see Daniel 4:14), did not fear him [Pharaoh] and brought forth his peopleout of the iron furnace, and the Messiah will do more than him, since he will stand againstall the kings of the whole world and will take revenge from the nations” (323, lines 1–2).For another perspective on the superiority of the Messiah mentioned by Nahmanides—hisunparalleled knowledge of the Name—see Moshe Idel, “Abulafia on the Jewish Messiahand Jesus,” Immanuel 11 (1980): 64–80, 72.

60. Nahmanides, Disputation of Barcelona, in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:313, last line-314, first line, and 314, lines 4–6 (Hebrew), and Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, 126–127(English).

61. Nahmanides, Disputation of Barcelona, in Kitvei Moshe ben Nah. man, 1:310, lines 1–5(Hebrew), and Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, 117 (English); and ibid., Kitvei Moshe benNah. man, 1:312, lines 10–11, and Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, 123: “[he] will stand againsttheir city Rome until he reduces it to ruins.”

62. Exodus Rabba on Exodus 2:10. The importance of this source has been noted by Even-Shmuel, Midrashei Geulah, 75.

63. Pirqei Heikhalot: the Messiah hidden in Rome until the end, in Even-Shmuel, MidrasheiGeulah, 357, lines 5–7. This is clearly the source that Nahmanides had in mind. On thispoint Saperstein’s observation (Decoding the Rabbis, 105) that “the aggadah to which hewas referring is not known” must be corrected; see the Isaiah verse (Midrashei Geulah,368, last line). We now know that this part of Sefer Heikhalot was not a late fabricationof Sabbateans, as Scholem once thought: see Gershom Scholem, Meh. karei Shabtaut, ed.Yehuda Liebes (Tel Aviv, 1991), 53, and Dan, Toldot Torat ha-Sod, 1:1006–1007. In theBook of Zerubabel as well as in Pirqei Heikhalot, the Isaiah verse is commented uponin the following way: “the calf is Nineveh, the city of blood, which is Rome the Great.”The text from Exodus Rabba is much more apposite and was certainly on the mind ofthe author. Nahmanides quotes the Isaiah verse in the Disputation in the place mentionedabove n. 57; at the same time he quotes the tradition that Rome will undergo a catastropheof such proportions that no one will want to buy it for even a penny (see the passage fromHeikhalot Rabbati, a work that constitutes the first part of Pirqei Heikhalot, in Yellinek,Beit ha-midrash, 3:87, or in Dan Toldot torat ha-sod, 40).

64. The verse is quoted in the source mentioned above, n. 63, in Exodus Rabba, on how Moseswas brought up at the court of Pharaoh.

65. See Bah. ya ben Asher, Kad ha-Qemah. , 66 b (the text is found in Benzion Dinur, Israelba-Golah vol. 2. (Jerusalem 1971), pt. 5, 347–348. Bah. ya speaks of the “last redeemer,who will come out from the metropolis of Rome and will destroy it.”

66. Arnaldi di Villanova, Introductio, 139. These first sentences are only found in a Greektranslation of the Latin treatise (the tract in Greek has itself been re-translated in a modernLatin version): Robin Vose, Dominicans, Muslims, and Jews in the Medieval Crown ofAragon (Cambridge, 2009), 114, n. 92 (for the modern editions of the Greek text and theLatin rendering of it, see Introductio, 74–75).

67. Asi Farber, “Li-mqorot torato ha-qabalit ha-mukdemet shel R. Moshe de-Leon,” Jeru-salem Studies in Jewish Thought 3, nos. 1–2 (1983–1984): 67–96; Elliot R. Wolfson,“Beyond the Spoken Word: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Medieval JewishMysticism,” in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion,eds. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni (New Haven, 2000), 188.

68. The Spanish scholar Joaquín Carreras y Artau claimed that when Arnold wrote these twotreatises, he transposed into a Christian frame basic notions of the “prophetic Kabbalah”

THE RECKONINGS OF NAHMANIDES AND ARNOLD 39

of Abraham Abulafia and referred especially to one of Abulafia’s works, Or ha-Sekhel.Scholem rejected this hypothesis in his essay published in German in 1954 and latertranslated into English: “The beginnings of the Christian Kabbalah,” in The ChristianKabbalah, ed. Joseph Dan (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 17–51, nn. 29–36. For Yitzh. akBaer, Arnold’s approach did not derive from a direct engagement with Kabbalistic orother Hebrew sources, but from Martí’s Pugio Fidei. Yet Baer added that the problem“requires further investigation” (A History, 418 n. 82, 434 n. 8). In the last pages (53–56)of his otherwise valuable essay “Scrutamini Scripturas: Joachimist Themes and Figuraein the Early Religious Writings of Arnold of Villanova,” Journal of the Warburg andCourtauld Institutes 37 (1974), 33–56, Harold Lee dismissed the notion of a connection,other than purely marginal, between the patterns of thought at work in those treatisesand Kabbalah; his negative assessment is based on no real acquaintance with Kabbalisticwritings and uses arguments that are patently erroneous. An analysis on a more solidbasis is still a desideratum. Moshe Idel long ago observed that Arnold “wrote a treatise onthe letters of the Tetragrammaton which may be considered the closest theological workto Kabbalah written by a Christian scholar up to this time”: “Ramon Lull and EcstaticKabbalah: A Preliminary Observation,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes51 (1988): 170–174, 174.

69. Suffice it here to point briefly to some examples. Joseph of Hamadan calculated the dateof the coming of the Messiah at the time “of the shining of the sun in the sixth day,”which means, in Nahmanides’s description, the moment of the day, or the millennium,that begins after its first tenth has passed (Nahmanides justified on the basis of this view,as we have seen, the date of 1358) and gave explicitly the date of 1358 in his Sefer Tashaq(see Joseph de Hamadan, Fragment d’un commentaire sur la Genèse, ed. Charles Mopsik[Paris, 1998], 12); but he also held that sacrifices had ceased sixty years before the Templewas destroyed, and this observation enabled him to find that 1304 was the right date; seeAlexander Altmann, “Le-she‘elat ba‘aloto shel Sefer Te‘amei ha-Mis. vot,” Qiryat Sefer40, nos. 2–3 (1964–1965): pp. 256–276, 405–412, 262–264. A well-known Zoharic textexpresses notions closely linked to those which have been discussed here: the redemptionbegins with the sixth millennium (starting in 1240), and the world will enter a phaseof millenial Sabbath with the seventh. For the precise calculation of redemption, sixtyadditional years after 1240 are to be taken into account, see Zohar I:116b–117b (the letterhe in the Tetragrammaton, we read in the passage, had been separated from the lettervav when the Assembly of Israel [Knesset Israel] is in exile, and the Assembly of Israel“lies in the dust the entire day of he. What is that? Fifth millennium”: this represents atransposition in Kabbalistic parlance of the idea that the period of exile fills, but doesnot go past, the fifth millennium); for an English translation, see The Zohar, trans. anded. Daniel Matt (Stanford, 2004), 2:178–179; Zohar, I:139b Midrash ha-Ne‘elam, whichspeaks of only forty additional years. Joseph Angelet used a numerological device as abase for a calculation according to which the Messianic birthpangs would start 88 yearsafter the outset of the sixth millennium, i.e. in 1328, and would extend from that yearuntil 1358: see Livnat ha-Sapir, quoted in Dinur, Israel ba-Golah vol. 2, pt. 3:372. On thesignificance of the year 1328 for Angelet, see Yehudah Liebes, “Keis.ad nith. aber sefer ha-Zohar,” in Sefer ha-Zohar ve-Doro, ed. J. Dan (Jerusalem 1989), 65, n. 293. Millenarianimpatience led Arnaldo to revise his computations, but his original reckoning remainedthe most influential; see Potestà, “L’anno dell’Anticristo,” 454.

70. Joseph Shatzmiller, “In Search of the ‘Book of Figures’: Medicine and Astrology in Mont-pellier at the Turn of the Fourteenth Century,” AJS Review 78 (1982–1983): 383–407,385–391; Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, and Medieval Society (Berkeley, 1994), 136–137.

40 M. KRIEGEL

The work on the quadrant that Jacob ben Makir wrote in 1288 was translated two yearslater from Hebrew to Latin by Armengaud Blaise, with the help of the author: Jacob benMakir translated orally into vernacular, and Blaise wrote the Latin rendition (according tothe pattern more especially known from twelfth- and thirteenth-century Spain for transla-tions from Arabic or Hebrew to Latin): Shatzmiller, “In Search of the ‘Book of Figures’,”387; Lynn Thorndike, “Date of the Translation by Ermengaud Blasius of the Work on theQuadrant by Profatius Judaeus,” Isis 26 (1937): 306–309. For the translation by Armen-gaud Blaise of some of Maimonides’ medical treatises, see Görge K. Hasselhoff, “TheReception of Maimonides in the Latin World: the Evidence of the Latin Translations inthe Thirteenth to Fifteenth Century,” Materia Giudaica 6 (2001): 258–280, 274–275, andMcVaugh and Ferre (see n. 73 below). Jean Blaise had commercial dealings with Jews inMarseilles.

71. Shatzmiller, “In Search of the ‘Book of Figures’,” 383–407; Jean-Patrice Boudet, “Lapapauté d’Avignon et l’astrologie,” in Fin du monde et signes des temps. Visionnaireset prophètes en France méridionale (fin XIIIe–début XVe siècle) (Toulouse, 1992), 261;Boudet, Entre science et nigromance: Astrologie, divination et magie dans l’Occidentmédiéval (XIIe–XVe siècle) (Paris, 2006), 397.

72. Shatzmiller, “In Search of the ‘Book of Figures’,” 387–388; Michael McVaugh and LolaFerre, “The ‘Tabula Antidotarii’ of Armengaud Blaise and its Hebrew Translation,” Trans-actions of the American Philosophical Society 90, pt. 6 (2000): 1–14.

73. See Dinur, Israel ba-Golah, vol. 2, pt. 3:372–373.74. On Levi ben Abraham’s calculations, see Ernst Renan, Les Rabbins français du com-

mencement du XIVe siècle (Paris, 1877), 635; Silver, A History of Messianic Speculation,99–100; Bernard R. Goldstein and David Pingree, “Levi ben Gerson’s Prognostication forthe Conjunction of 1345,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 80, pt. 6(1990): 1–60, 3. For Bar H. iya, see above n. 30.

75. See Arnau de Vilanova, Obres catalanes, 234–235. Arnold turned with the same recom-mendation to James II of Aragon, the older brother of Fredrick III. The text had alreadybeen published by M. Menendez y Pelayo in his Historia de los Heteredoxos Españoles(1880–1882), and Baer pointed to this source in his classic book A History of the Jews inChristian Spain, 2:8, 460.

76. Clifford Backman, The Decline and Fall of Medieval Sicily. Politics, Religion and Econ-omy in the Time of Frederick III, 1296–1337 (Cambridge, 1995), 207, n. 47.

77. Henri Bresc, Arabes de langue, juifs de religion : L’évolution du judaïsme sicilien dansl’environnement latin, XIIe–XVe siècles (Paris, 2001), 92.

78. Ziegler, Medicine and Religion, 258, n. 157.79. Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, 95 (the passage had already been published by Menendez

y Pelayo in his Arnaldo de Vilanova, medico catalan del siglo XIII: ensayo historico[Madrid, 1879], 96, and then in his Historia, vol. 1: 722); Ziegler, Medicine and Religion,74, 255. Francesco Santi has claimed that Arnaldo only demanded the enforcement ofcanons adopted by councils of the Catalan Church in the thirteenth century: “La visionde la fin des temps chez Arnaud de Villeneuve: Contenu théologique et expérience mys-tique,” in Fin du monde, 119–120, 126 n. 56. The council of Tarragona of 1243 had pro-hibited the Christians from resorting to Jewish physicians (Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine,91), but this prohibition renders no less meaningful Arnold’s insistence on the applicationof such a ban.

80. Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, 92–93, 189–190.81. Arnold, On the Mystery; Baer, Die Juden im christlichen Spanien, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1929),

1:733–734 (quoted in Shatzmiller, Jews, Medicine, 87–88).

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