By Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin
Sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, July 31 into August 1, someone crept into the Plaza de Tiberíades in the old Jewish quarter of Córdoba, Spain and sprayed a swastika across the base of the bronze statue of Maimonides, arguably the greatest thinker that Judaism has ever produced.
The paint went on the pedestal, not the face. But the target was the man himself, and the target was the face of Judaism itself.
“But, Israel…” some people will say.
To which I would say— whatever the Judeo-Spanish equivalent of bullsh-t would be. This had nothing to do with Israel. Maimonides died more than 700 years before the creation of the state. He only lived in the land of Israel briefly, before finally settling in Egypt.
When you deface a statue of Maimonides, it is about only one thing.
Judaism.
That is precisely what Córdoba’s city council knows. They called it an “attack on heritage” and “a message of hate of extreme gravity.” Acting mayor Cintia Bustos ordered the municipal cleaning company Sadeco to send its stone-graffiti specialists first thing Monday morning.
If that statue could speak, what would it say to us?
Not about the vandal. Maimonides, of all people, would have very little curiosity about one frightened man with a spray can. He would want to talk about the rest of us, about what to make of hatred itself, and about how not to let it move in and take up residence.
Moses ben Maimon was born in Córdoba around 1135, into a family of rabbinic judges, in a city then ruled by the relatively tolerant Almoravid dynasty. That world ended when he was a child. In 1148 the Almohads, a fundamentalist Berber movement whose founder is recorded as vowing to “cut [the Jews] off from being a nation,” conquered Córdoba and gave its non-Muslim population an ultimatum: convert or leave.
“Fun” fact: Maimonides had three names. RMBM, the acronym for his name, in Hebrew, pronounced in modern Israel as Rambam; Maimonides in Greek, the ultimate source of his philosophical system; and Musa ibn Maymun in Arabic, because Muslims also venerated him.
He would start with a diagnosis. Seven hundred years before anyone coined the word “antisemitism,” Maimonides had already worked out where this particular hatred comes from. In the Guide for the Perplexed, writing about human cruelty in general, he traced it to a single root: It comes from ignorance, which is the absence of wisdom. Whoever sprayed that swastika did not know Maimonides. He knew a symbol.
That diagnosis wasn’t abstract for him. It was personal history. Around 1172, the head of Yemen’s Jewish community wrote to Maimonides in despair. A ruler had decreed forced conversion. A self-declared messiah had emerged amid the panic. Maimonides’s reply, Iggeret Teiman (Epistle to Yemen), does not just console. It runs the ledger.
He reframes the crisis immediately: The nations that rise against Israel do it out of envy and impiety, unable to forgive a people bound to a covenant they did not invent and cannot break. Then he gets specific. Every campaign to wipe out the Jews and their Torah, he argues, has taken one of three shapes across history, and all three have already failed.
The first is the sword: outright killing, the method of Amalek and Sisera, and later Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Titus and Hadrian. The second is argument: the polemics of what he calls the most learned and educated of nations, the Syrians, Persians and Greeks, who tried to talk the Jews out of existing rather than kill them for it. The third came later, and combined the first two: a movement that claimed its own prophecy and its own revelation, hoping to absorb Judaism rather than merely attack it. He meant Judaism’s two “daughter” religions — Christianity and Islam.
His verdict on all three is the same. “Neither the one nor the other shall succeed,” he writes, reaching for Isaiah’s old promise that no weapon formed against Israel would prosper. He treats that promise less as comfort than as a prediction: Whatever the method — sword, argument or a rival faith — the campaign to erase the Jews is structurally doomed.
He grounds that confidence in the largest claim available to him. Israel’s disappearance from the world, he writes, is exactly as unthinkable as God ceasing to exist. He isn’t offering hope so much as stating a law of nature.
He would also tell us what to do while we wait them out, because he had already lived it. A decade before he wrote to Yemen, his own family had been given the Almohads’ ultimatum, and his answer, in Iggeret HaShmad, the Epistle on Forced Conversion, wasn’t defiance for its own sake. It was simpler than that: Go. A Jew must leave everything he has and travel day and night until he finds a place where he can live without compulsion. But for the Jews who could not run, who converted outwardly and prayed in secret, he had something the vandal in Córdoba will never earn from anyone: mercy. He refused to let the community shame them for surviving. Judge the persecutor. Not the persecuted.
If that statue could speak, that is what it would say. Sword, argument, rival faith or a can of spray paint on a pedestal: Maimonides observed every form of this campaign fail, one after another, for 3,000 years, and he did not expect this one to end differently. Hate is ignorance, not a verdict. It has failed before, and it will fail again. Maimonides knew that better than almost anyone who ever lived.
Eight hundred and fifty years later, so should we.
Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin is co-founder and co-director of Wisdom Without Walls, an online salon for Jewish ideas. His latest book is “Inviting God in: A Guide to Jewish Prayer.” (CCAR Press)
