Yacob was dedicated to a life of learning and teaching. He sought to instill free thinking in his pupils and championed the use of reason and the importance of critically examining that which our predecessors simply tell us, which he argued were often lies told to obtain wealth and honors. 

 

Unfortunately for Yacob and many others, when the Ethiopian monarch, King Susenyos, converted to Catholicism in the 1620s, persecution of freethinkers followed. 

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Yacob reasoned and declared that no religion was more right than any other —and this pissed people off! 

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For him, all these ways of believing and practicing religion were good “if we ourselves are good.” For him,  religion should be subordinated to ethics. So he “was disliked by all” dogmatic thinkers who preferred and pushed their own religion. He held on to what he reasoned was true and angered many people because of it.

 

And they went after him. In a big way. They ratted him out to the king. 

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Yacob found himself fearing for his life — and then fleeing for his life. He wrote that he fled at night, taking with him only some gold and the Psalms of David.

 

He fled and lived off what farmers would give him until one day he found “a beautiful cave at the foot of a deep valley” where he told himself “I shall live here unnoticed.” And he did, or two years, until King Susenyos died.

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During this time, he lived as a hermit, only visiting the nearby market to get food. He really lived the life of true self-reliance (of the kind that Henry David Thoreau championed but actually didn’t because his sister and mother cooked and cleaned for him). 

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He had it incredibly tough.

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But he not only successfully escaped the threat to his life, he did so while holding on to his beliefs. Even more, during this time, he totally thrived! Of the experience, he wrote, “Alone in my cave, I felt I was living in heaven”

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It is during his time in exile, Yacob developed his own reason-based philosophy that emphasizes the supremacy of reason of ALL humans. He argues that Reason teaches that all people are intelligent and capable of contributing equally because of their capacity to reason. And that it is false that one category of people — whether organized by perceived racial or gender difference — is meant for life and mercy and another for death and judgment. In his words, “our reason teaches us that this sort of discrimination cannot exist in the sight of God.”

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In doing so, Yacob argues for a more equal and enlightened world than his (later) European counterparts ever did.

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We’ve already seen how Locke and Thoreau fall far short of what they preached. But they are not alone. The Scottish philosopher David Hume explicitly wrote incredibly racist things, such as “There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor any individual eminent either in action or speculation.”

 

Even Immanuel Kant who preached the equality of all rational beings, claimed incredibly racist and sexist things, including that women do not “possess certain high insights.” 

 

In all these ways, these Europeans betray the fact that by “rational beings” and “humans” they really mean “ white men — usually wealthy ones too.” By contrast, when Yacob talks of all rational beings being equal, we see that he really means it. 

 

Like many European enlightenment thinkers, Yacob embraced a Rational Theism, believing that a single intelligent God as Creator is what best explains the world’s order. However, he was far more tolerant and also far more sophisticated in his philosophical dealing with religion.

 

Much of his writing rationally criticizes many organized religions. He notes that all different religions hold that their truth is God’s truth, but he argues that “all of them lie when they claim to attribute to the word of God the word of men.” 

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Yacob goes on to criticize the laws of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, arguing that in them he finds “many things which disagree with the truth and the justice of our creator that our intelligence reveals to us.”

 

He denounces Christians who persecute others (like himself) for setting aside the love of and mercy to our fellow humans and instead turning towards hatred and violence.

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He also criticizes Moses and Christianity, arguing that in their teachings these religions “defile the wisdom of the creator” in falsely claiming that menstruation is impure. He notes that intelligent observation and reason teach us that “the life of a woman requires this flow of blood in order to generate children” and that holding, on religious grounds, that this perfectly natural blood flow is wrong, is what’s actually wrong.

 

Wrongly holding on to the law of Moses “impedes marriage and the entire life of a woman and it spoils the law of mutual help, prevents the bringing up of children and destroys love.”.

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He concludes, with good reason, that “this law of Moses cannot spring from him who created woman.”

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In criticizing these religions in this way, Yacob’s philosophy embodies a commitment to equality between men and women. More than that, his philosophy incorporates not just the perspective of learned men, but the perspective of women, of child-rearing and development, of affection, and of embodiment in his philosophy.