But religion and learning were one and the same thing. As was the
case in Christianity, and for the same reasons, religion filled
the whole of life and engrossed all branches of knowledge. There
was no such thing as secular science; religion placed its stamp
on everything, and turned the currents of thought into its own
channels. One must not hope therefore to find, among the Jews of
Northern France, those literary species which blossomed and
flourished in Spain; philosophy did not exist among them, and
poetry was confined to a few dry liturgic poems. Their
intellectual activity was concentrated in the study of the Bible
and the Talmud; but in this domain they acquired all the greater
depth and penetration. Less varied as were the objects of their
pursuits, they excelled in what they undertook, and inferior
though they were in the fields of philosophy and poetry, they
were superior in Biblical exegesis, and still more so, possibly,
in Talmudic jurisprudence.
II
The history of the beginnings of rabbinical learning in France is
wrapped in obscurity. Tradition has it that Charlemagne caused
the scholar Kalonymos to come from Lucca to Mayence. With his
sons he is said to have opened a school there, which became the
centre [center sic] of Talmudic studies in Lorraine. Legends,
however slight their semblance to truth, are never purely
fictitious in character; they contain an element of truth, or, at
least, symbolize the truth; and this tradition, which cannot be
accepted in the shape in which it has been handed down, seeing
that Kalonymos lived in the tenth century, is nevertheless a
fairly exact representation of the continuity of the intellectual
movement.
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