most Jewish ideas fade away

thoughts from Maimonides on the death of Twitter

Twitter is dying, and all I can think about is a letter written almost a thousand years ago by one of Judaism’s greatest thinkers to a small town in the south of France.

The thinker I’m talking about is Maimonides, a philosopher and legal writer who died in 1204. Maimonides spent most of his life in Egypt, and he frequently wrote in Arabic, the primary language of the Middle East’s Jews. His commentary on the Mishnah is in Arabic (technically Judaeo-Arabic, which is Arabic written in Hebrew letters). So is the Guide for the Perplexed, one of the most important works of Jewish philosophy.

For all of Maimonides’ greatness, the intellectual power of his part of the Jewish world was waning, just as Christian Europe’s Jews, who didn’t speak Arabic, were coming into their own. Four years before he died, the Jews of the French town of Lunel wrote to Maimonides with a big request: can you please translate the Guide for the Perplexed into Hebrew so that we can read it?

Maimonides’ reply haunts me. He wrote back to them: I’d love to, but I’m out of time.

I am surrounded by time considerations, and even for commentaries that I have made…I have no time left to review them in depth or to revise them before they are published, so how much more so regarding translating from language to language.

By your lives, my companions, my friends, I do not even have time to compose something small, but in consideration of your honor I have pained myself and bothered to write this letter in my own hand...

Even Maimonides, who wrote his first treatise while still a teenager, had his limits. But this isn’t the part that haunts me. It’s that Maimonides goes on to say: my people are dying.

I must inform you that in this difficult time there remain no people to raise the banner of Moshe and to scrutinize the words of the Talmud except for you and the cities around you...

Most large communities are dead, the rest are moribund, and the remaining three or four places are ailing. In Palestine and the whole of Syria only a single city, Aleppo, has a few wise men who study the Torah, but they do not fully dedicate themselves to it. Only two or three grains can be found in the whole of Babylon and Persia. In all the cities of Yemen and in all the Arab cities, a few people study the Talmud, but they do so only in a mercenary way, looking for gain… The Jews who live in India do not know the scriptures, and their only religious mark is that they keep the Sabbath and circumcise their sons on the eighth day…

The entirety of Middle Eastern Jewish civilization, says Maimonides, is on the brink of collapse, and the Jews of Europe—the people whose request he is refusing!—are the last, best hope.

You, brothers, our redeemers, are our only hope for help. Be strong and be strengthened for the sake of our nation, and strive to be people of valor, for everything depends upon you…I have become old and gray—not from great years but from the nature of the body, which knows my illness. May the Creator support you and give you “renown and fame” (Zephaniah 3:20) upon the earth. Amen.

It’s incredibly sad, because Maimonides is basically admitting to making a bad bet. He wrote the Guide in Arabic to make it accessible, but it turns out he was making it accessible to a community in the process of dying. It wasn’t until he himself was dying that he fully realized his mistake.

For Maimonides, of course, things turned out okay; he was famous enough for his Arabic works to get translated into Hebrew. But plenty of other writers, people who devoted their intellectual lives to Judaeo-Arabic writing, were essentially lost as the center of Jewish gravity shifted to Europe. They’re still mostly forgotten today.

I carry Maimonides’ anxiety with me at all times. I worry that writing in English is a mistake. I worry that I am putting ideas into digital formats that will simply get lost. I’m a book publisher in part because there is something reassuring about the physicality of the ideas, the fact that their physical form is relatively stable and stored, decentralized, in tens of thousand of different locations around the world. But I also like Twitter, and its impending (possible) collapse has me worried about how we talk about big Jewish ideas, and how those ideas will be remembered, if at all.

It’s one of the deep ironies of contemporary Jewish culture that the people who care most about the Jewish future are the ones most likely to use online platforms that will inevitable evaporate, their archives possibly lost forever. It’s a problem because some of the best new ideas these days aren’t found in a magnum opus (who has the time or money?); they’re found as gems in short online paragraphs and sometimes in a single sentence or reply. There’s something incredible about the fluidity and openness of this, but it’s also frankly quite risky, because much of the discourse will simply be lost if it is not periodically crystallized into something more permanent.

You can see the effects already. Online Jewish discourse has gone through so many phases. There was the era of Usenet groups like soc.culture.jewish. There were the listservs and their long ponderous essay-replies. There were the blogs, serving as a dissent channel especially for Orthodox Jews. There was Facebook. There was Twitter. There will be something else. Nobody has written the history of any of this. Right now it’s all in living memory, and one day it just won’t be. The conversations are all good, but how they build on each other is unclear, and it’s unclear whether anyone will remember what was said and what was learned. People who have spent tens of thousands of hours of their lives in these spaces—their ideas may just vanish. Entire intellectual lives: poof.

Is there anything to do about this? Well, yes. The immediate solution is that we need better historians of the Jewish internet, and we need better, AI-assisted tools to help researchers comb through monumental amounts of data.

But that’s not enough. More broadly, Jewish thinkers who focus on writing need to buck the natural inclination to respond to the zeitgeist and create works that live in posterity instead. That means writing and publishing physical books, especially reference works and introductory works that are likely to remain useful to beginners and not just specialists. It means writing for children, and putting ideas into rituals and ritual objects. It means spending the extra time to polish ideas until they positively glow.

It also means that the ideas themselves need to be taken out of the stream of constant discourse and finalized. The internet is depressingly Talmudic; it goes on forever and there are no clear signals that a discussion has concluded. Just like the codifiers of Jewish law—including Maimonides—needed to go through the laborious process of extracting conclusions from a text that seems to defy them, we must sometimes intentionally extract ourselves from online discourse and ask ourselves: what here is worth remembering, and how do I ensure that it is remembered? What, at the end of the day, did we actually learn?

P.S. On mastodon, I’m @dzkalman@journa.host