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THE JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA

among

Jews to-day, although generally an ironical sense (compare Bernstein, in "Ha-Shahar," vi. 405). L. G. the Polish

employed

in

sonne various

Jews

Biblioqraphy settp,

BEAUCAIRE

(Provencal, Belcaire) City in the department of Gard, Prance. somewhat important Jewish community was founded here as early as the beginning of the twelfth century, whose members lived among the Christians and enjoyed the same rights and privileges as they did. In particular were they protected by the count of Tou:

A

Raymond

V. who admitted them to certain offices and entrusted them with an important part of the public administration. About 1195 they were persecuted, and many of them perished. la 1294 Philip the Pair ordered the seneschal to relegate them to the rampart which separated the city from the castle. This special quarter extended from the rock of Roquecourbe to the gate of Cancel it disappeared entirely in 1578, together with the ruins of the synagogue, at the general demolition which Pouquet de Tholon, seigneur of Ste. Jaille, undertook in order to isolate the fortress which he was louse,

,



besieging.

In 1295 all the Jews under the jurisdiction of the seneschal's court of Beaucaire were arrested, and the richest among them sent to the Chatelet at Paris. At the same time all their possessions were seized, and the prisoners were released only after having paid a considerable ransom and stated the amount of Nismes," i. 412; idem, " Preuves," p. 125). In distributing the assessment of 150,000 livres, which Charles IV. imposed upon all the Jews of Prance, the Jews in the district of the seneschal of Beaucaire were rated 20, 500 livres. On June 2, 1340, Philip VI. canceled all the debts payable to the Jews that had been contracted bj r the Christians ("Ordonnances," ii. 71). But in 1368 the Jews of the seneschal's court were again authorized to collect their debts (ib. iv.). No Jews returned to Beaucaire after the expulsion of 1394. number of scholars may be mentioned, who either lived at Beaucaire or were born there: The " prince " Kalonymus and his nephew Judah Isaac; the poet Judah b. Nathanael and his Scholars at five sons, who flourished at Beaucaire Beaucaire. about 1271, at the time when the poet Judah al-Harizi visited the city (Gross, "Gallia Judaica, " p. 120); the two brothers Don Todros and Jacob b. Judah, the latter being one of the friends of Abba Mari (Neubauer, "Rabbins Francais," p. 682); Sen Moses, who lived at Salon in the fourteenth century, and is to all appearances identical with Moses b. Solomon of Beaucaire, the translator of Averroes' great commentary on Aristheir credit (Menard, "Histoire de

A



totle's "

Metaphysics

"

(Gross,

ib.

p. 656)



Samuel

b.

of Marseilles, imprisoned about 1321 in the castle of Beaucaire, where he translated Averroes' commentary on Aristotle's "Ethics" (Gross, ib. pp. 121, 380) Tanhum b. Moses of Beaucaire, who trans-

Judah



lated at Urbanea, Italy, in 1406, Hippocrates' "Prognostica" (Gross, ib. p. 121); Bonjour or Bondia of

Beaucaire, commissioner in charge of resettling the Jews of Languedoc in 1315 (Saige, "Les Juifs de Languedoc," pp. 106, 330); and Bonet du Barry, who, in 1291, presented to the seneschal of Carcas-

(Saige,

G



Beautiful

letters

ib.

HMvire

en France,

Beard

concerning the privileges of the

p. 223).

Gross, Gallia Judaica, pp. 119 et sen.; Eysde Beaucaire, i. 4(11), 4ii2 ISrclarride, Les Juifs Gratz, Gesch. der Juden, vi. 401.

p. 235





S.

-

BEAUCROISSANT



K.

Community of

the canton Marcellin Isere,

of Rives, arrondissement of St. Prance, a locality inhabited by Jews in 1337. Bibliography Revue des Etudes Juives, tx. 241.

S.

BEAUGENCY. See France. BEAUGENCY, ELIEZER.

See Eliezer op

Beaugenct.

BEAUTIFUL, THE, IN JEWISH LITER-

ATURE

To the speculative theory of the beautiful the Jews can not be said to have contributed fruitful thoughts. In the economy of the humanities

this field fell to the inheritance of the Greeks.

This statement will stand, even though, as is now admitted, the origin of art in Greece points to Semitic influences. The impulses in this domain came to the Greeks neither from the Phenicians nor from the Egyptians, but from the Assyrians. The cycle of Cadmus myths may be dismissed as having no evidential relevancy on the problem (see Gruppe, " Die Griechischen Kulte und My then, " 1887). Still, whatever power the Assyrian civilization may have exercised to quicken and arouse the artistic genius of the Greeks, the Hebrews can scarcely be credited with

having cultivated the beautiful. The common distinction though resting on one of those sweeping generalizations for which modern thought is indebted, among others, to Ernest Renan between the office of the Aryan mind and that of the Semitic seems to be on the whole beyond dispute. Beauty is the preoccupation of the Greek soul; righteousThe philosophy of art, ness, that of the Hebrew. therefore, is naturally and nationally under the spell His theory of beauty as of Plato's speculation. "something abstract, divine, with an absolute and distinct reality quite apart from man," has sounded

—

—

the key-note of almost all the later disquisitions (see Eugene Veron, "^Esthetics," English transl., Lon-

don, 1879). For the Greeks Creation itself became under PlaThe tonic instruction a work of beauty, a cosmos. Creator took on the functions of an architect, molding the shapeless and often stubborn material in accordance with his preconceived and vitalizing ideas, Philo, the Jewish Platonist, does not hesitate to adopt the fundamental element of this Greek conAccording to him, the first day in the ception. Mosaic account of Creation relates to the intelligible cosmos and he proceeds to unfold his

The Greeks meaning by ous appeals and

illustrating to the

it

with copi-

methods of

archi-

tecture in which the ideal plan created and existing in the mind of the architect precedes and controls the execution of the real in stone or other material ("De Opificiis Mundi," §§ Similarly, the ideal tabernacle was revealed 4, 5). to Moses as the precreated pattern of the material

Beauty.

The Septuagint one ("De Vita Moysis," iii. 3). manifests its dependency upon similar Platonic concepts, when, in Gen. ii. 1, it renders the Hebrew