g forth in Spain
the golden age of neo-Hebraic literature in the spheres of poetry,
metaphysical speculation, and every department of scientific research.
It is not an exaggerated estimate to say that the middle ages sustained
themselves with the fruit of this intellectual labor, which, moreover,
has come down as a legacy to our modern era. Two hundred years after
Mohammed, the same language, Arabic, was spoken by the Jews of Kairwan
and those of Bagdad. Thus equipped, they performed in a remarkable way
the task allotted them by their talents and their circumstances, to
which they had been devoting themselves with singular zeal for two
centuries. The Jews are missioned mediators between the Orient and the
Occident, and their activity as such, illustrated by their additions to
general culture and science, is of peculiar interest. In the period
under consideration, their linguistic accomplishments fitted them to
assist the Syrians in making Greek literature accessible to the Arabic
mind. In Arabic literature itself, they attained to a prominent place.
Modern research has not yet succeeded in shedding light upon the
development and spread of science among the Arabs under the tutelage of
Syrian Christians. But out of the obscurity of Greek-Arabic culture
beginnings gleam Jewish names, whose possessors were the teachers of
eager Arabic disciples. Barely fifty years after the hosts of the
Prophet had conquered the Holy Land, a Jew of Bassora translated from
Syriac into Arabic the pandects by the presbyter Aaron, a famous medical
work of the middle ages. In the annals of the next century, among the
early contributors to Arabic literature, we meet with the names of Jews
as translators of medical, mathematical, and astronomical works, and as
grammarians, astronomers, scientists, and physicians. A Jew translated
Ptolemy's "Almagest"; another assisted in the first translation of the
Indian fox fables (_Kalila we-Dimna_); the first furnishing the middle
ages with the basis of their astronomical science, the second supplying
European poets with literary material. Through the instrumentality of
Jews, Arabs became acquainted as early as the eighth century, some time
before the learning of the Greeks was brought within their reach, with
Indian medicine, astronomy, and poetry. Greek science itself they owed
to Jewish mediation. Not only among Jews, but also among Greeks,
Syrians, and Arabs, Jewish versatility gave currency to the belief t