The Convert

  VII

  Cairo

  1

  Tunub, Alqam, Al Birijat, Jizayy, Al Khatatba, Abu Ghaleb, Al Qata, Al Qanatir Al Khayriyyah, the places in the delta where dirty white settlements rise today, names that come and go – which ones existed then?

  Again I must sweep the map clean of almost everything I find there now, leaving only a few scattered names and things. But she and I share the elements. Brief squalls, sudden rain, clouds and haze, mist, burning sun, deep-purple morning skies with circling eagles, sickly-smelling nights on the water, darting fish, clear voices on the bank. Docking, provisioning, haggling, pushing off again, sailing against the current, sometimes barely inching forward, mooring in sandy bends. Scraped skin, a dead goat drifting by, swollen like a balloon. The rowers’ rough hands, the strange singing at nightfall she does not begin to understand. The languid lowing of the water buffalo in the yellow mud of the banks. The herons and the frogs.

  After two days, the anointed dead child is brought up from the hold, as Hamoutal is held back by three men; she screams like a woman possessed. The little mummy is thrown overboard while two men pound a fierce drumbeat and a third wails on a wind instrument. The women let out shrill cries that drive her into a panic. The bundle slips away in the brown eddies. Just below the surface, she can see the supple curve of a crocodile’s back. For one terrifying moment, a vague red cloud rises in the brown water, then nothing more. Hamoutal gasps for air and pulls free. The boatmen urge each other on in a rhythmic chorus; the musicians go on drumming a little longer; then silence descends, and there’s only the lapping of the current against the low prow. Hamoutal, seizing the opportunity, tries to jump overboard; one man leaps forward and holds her in an iron grip. He smacks her and pushes her down onto a bench. Her cheek is bleeding: snot, dust, blood and tears. For the rest of the day she no longer resembles one of the living. She has a stunned, inward look and rocks with the swell of the water. That evening the sight of the men eating raw fish makes her gag. She is all alone now, except for the lecherous merchant, who tries three times a day to draw her in with words that mean nothing to her and a gap-toothed smile, which sometimes distracts but more often repulses her. She eats little, sleeps most of the day, wakes in the evening, and goes to the foredeck to sit and listen to the flowing water, slow and majestic.

  Beyond the last bend, a week and a half later, the buildings of Fustat lift from the horizon, shimmering in the sunlight from behind. The July heat is stifling; everything seems like a mirage. She feels almost untethered from the material world, drifting half conscious through her days, distant from everything and everyone. Silent and indifferent, she stares at the world floating past, a world she neither knows nor wants to know. The season is Shemu, when not a single drop of rain falls and everything turns dry and stony. The ship glides as far as the famous pontoon bridge that has connected Fustat to the island of Roda since the eighth century. From there, the small Nilometer building is visible. Beyond it, the great Mosque of Amr ibn al-As comes into sight, with its dreamlike minarets from the Umayyad period, an impressive skyline that bespeaks the power of the Fatimids over Egypt. On Roda, along this narrower stretch of the Nile, Muslim soldiers guard the entrance to the city; Hamoutal sees buildings, soldiers, swaying boats along the riverbanks, swarms of people.

  Fustat-Misr gleams and glitters in dust clouds and afternoon sun. Hamoutal disembarks from her Nile boat without any baggage; Embriachi helps her off. He’s been grumpy for the past few days, because she no longer responds to his advances. Before she can say a thing, he thrusts a primitive map of the city into her hands, with Al-Shamiyin Synagogue identified in big letters. He signs to her that she must go there and show her letter of recommendation from Obadiah. Then he nods, with a sour grin, and walks off, leaving her alone on the sandy quay.

  She feels small and lost. She hopes the Egyptian Muslims will leave a Jewish woman alone, or help her if they can, even if their help is casual and impersonal. Long ago in Narbonne, David’s father once told her that the Spanish Muslims left Jews in peace as long as they paid for the privilege. The dhimmis, as they called Jews, could even count on a degree of protection, since they were a source of income. She hopes the situation will not be too different here. But for the time being, Hamoutal, dirty and destitute, with northern features, has no claim to any help. Until she finds a place to stay and some form of protection, there is no telling what will become of her.

  There she stands, the erstwhile Christian Viking girl from Rouen, born four years after the Battle of Hastings. It is July 1097. Cairo rustles, churns and quivers in the broiling sun. In her home city, almost all the Jews have been murdered. The yeshiva she knew so well has been burned down and all of its library’s holdings are lost. She knows nothing about all that, nor about what her mother screamed as she watched the massacre, still embittered by her daughter’s disappearance: That’ll teach you, accursed Jews! Hamoutal is almost twenty-seven years old and has become nobody – a woman loose in a world not her own, roaming lost in a life story she scarcely understands, on her way to Yerushalayim, the city of three gods, where she hopes to be reunited with Yaakov and Justa. She turns her eyes to the sky, the hot, salty sky of Fustat; to the boatmen unloading their cargo on the riverbank; to the wild cats wandering among the discarded remains of fish, the dogs leaking pus from their eyes, pissing on wooden poles, or gnawing on smelly bones; to the little boys with perfect, gleaming calves, fast as the wind, carrying luggage for new arrivals in exchange for alms; veiled women coming out of dark doorways. Her blonde hair, once a wild mass of curls, lies drab and sweat-soaked on her head under her dark shawl; the skin of her cheeks is scaly and pale; her eyes are dulled by fatigue and deprivation. She watches in astonishment as Embriachi walks away, feeling the momentary urge to rush after him, fall to her knees, ask him to take her with him, take her under his protection, marry her, anything. Then he steps into a camel-drawn chaise, and she soon loses sight of him in the crowd. She wanders a while through the masses by the riverbank, unnoticed, inconspicuous, more a shadow than a person. She begs for a piece of bread and goat’s cheese, asks for a slice of watermelon somewhere, drinks water from a fountain where stray yellow dogs press their dirty noses into her skirts. She wanders through the dust of an ancient district of broken-down dark shacks, reaches a square, and sits down stiffly under the branches of an old acacia, which snake out gnarled and crooked from underneath a white ruin. She is muddled from days of bobbing down the river, her legs weak. She cannot sit up straight. The world spins; she falls on her side and stays down, dazed. Her hands clutch at the sandy grass. Swarms of gold-blue flies buzz all around her; a dog licks her cheek with its stinking tongue. She scarcely reacts. It is growing dark by the time she comes to her senses. No one gives her a second glance. She walks down a few streets and then, with a questioning look in her eyes, shows her map to a well-dressed man, who looks her up and down and points her in the right direction. By nine in the evening she has reached the old Mar Girgis church and is stumbling towards the synagogue. It is already dark. The narrow streets are deserted; they smell like dust and piss. The district comes to a sudden end at the city wall, next to which she finds the synagogue. By a large well behind the building, she lies down and falls asleep, with no notion of the viper that slithers into the folds of her clothes, of the yellow scorpion next to her hand, of the stray dog that sniffs at her, of the fact that the dog saves her life, grabbing the viper’s head in its jaws and tossing the writhing snake away; no idea of the dark path the scorpion follows between her hand and the little hollow among the stones of the Well of Moses. She has no idea whatsoever. She’s still breathing, that’s all.

  That is what the rabbi observes the next morning after opening the synagogue gate, when beside the well in the back courtyard, he finds, to his surprise, the haggard form of a sleeping woman.

  2

  I plunge into the metro, leaving the hectic traffic in Tahrir Square behind. At Mar Girgis station, I step off into the crowd
of women in niqabs and Nikes and men holding smartphones. I need a moment to get my bearings because, just like in Rouen, the entrance to the old city is a few metres below the modern world. The heat is starting to take its toll on me, this Saturday in February, when at last I descend the nondescript stairs to the medieval remains of Fustat, now known as Old Cairo. Fenced off like a ghetto, I can’t help thinking when I see the ornamented gate to the district. As I cross the white, dusty street I notice, against the blue, the blinding stone of the Coptic church dedicated to St George – Mar Girgis – shining in the morning sun. But it’s not the building Hamoutal saw – that one burned down a century after she passed this way. It’s cool here in the narrow streets. An elderly Jewish man offers me a brochure for twenty Egyptian pounds, but I turn it down. I’m constantly beckoned into shops to buy a piece of junk, drink a cup of tea, pay baksheesh, hear a rambling story, see a dusty booklet. All I have to say is ‘synagogue’ and every finger points ahead, to the end of this small, intimate labyrinth. I keep going, and an instant later I see it: Ben Ezra Synagogue, known in the days of Fustat as Al-Shamiyin. I take a deep breath and approach the entrance; someone says Shabbat shalom. It’s like coming home in a dream.

  This place is legendary. According to tradition, the well behind the building is where the pharaoh’s daughter found the newborn Moses in a basket, and he grew up here. Straight in front of the synagogue is the ancient church of Abu Serga, on the site to which Joseph and Mary are said to have fled during the mass infanticide ordered by Herod. As the story goes, they stayed there for three months. Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat was one of the world’s oldest; Abraham ben Ezra – not to be confused with the eleventh-century Abraham ibn Ezra –bought the land for 20,000 dinars in the year 882. The previous building on the site was an old Coptic church dedicated to St Michael. For that reason, the synagogue is similar in design to a small Coptic basilica.

  In 1169 Benjamin of Tudela found Ben Ezra’s Torah here and described it in his writings; the fourteenth-century Egyptian author Al-Maqrizi also mentioned this Torah, in his book Al-Muqaffa. By the time Hamoutal arrived here, that priceless manuscript had been kept in the synagogue for more than two centuries.

  I hesitate before entering the building, the destination of my private diaspora. After the yeshiva in Rouen, the crypt in Clermont and the ruins of medieval Monieux, this is the fourth place where I can touch Hamoutal’s life. The interior is expertly restored and nothing short of magnificent. It is not the medieval sanctuary that met the eyes of that exhausted, wandering woman, but it is this spot, this house of worship. The restoration, which took fifteen years, was a result of the Egypt–Israel peace treaty of 1979.

  From the right side, I look up at the women’s gallery on the left and gasp: up there at the end, I can see the opening of the genizah, the black hole into which hundreds of thousands of manuscripts were thrown so that Yahweh would take them back into the obscurity of the ages.

  The German scholar Simon von Geldern was probably the first Western traveller to see this storage space. That was in 1753. Von Geldern, also known as de Gueldre, was the great-uncle of Heinrich Heine, who describes him in his Memoirs as a kind of saint, an eccentric figure known as ‘the Oriental’. Von Geldern may not have realised what he had in front of him. The documents were not stacked or archived but jumbled in messy heaps in the dark, confined space. Many such genizot were later emptied out, the masses of discarded documents removed and ritually buried. The Cairo Genizah was never meant to survive for centuries and become one of the greatest troves of cultural heritage ever discovered.

  The scholar Solomon Schechter was the first to suspect what a world of knowledge it might hold. In 1888, he at last received permission to open the treasure chamber. What he found there was beyond his wildest dreams: fragments of Ben Sira’s Hebrew Ecclesiasticus from before AD 1, previously thought to be lost forever; works by Maimonides; poems and letters by Judah Halevi; fragments of Aquila’s Greek translation of the second-century Hebrew Bible; copies of Sadducee texts predating the destruction of the Temple; eyewitness accounts of the crusaders’ attack on Jerusalem; papers and letters from Khazar Jews; countless documents from merchants and Jewish military officers; records from the Islamic administration and agreements between the two communities; tax assessments and receipts; geographical and medical writings; payment records; fines; communications with and ordinances from the Muslim authorities; legal statements relating to marriages and divorces; contested claims to land and property; applications for loans; bills for maritime transport; letters appointing rabbis and administrators; documents in inheritance cases; love poems; and requests for clemency or for overdue salary payments – all tossed into the dark hole, century after century, because documents bearing the name of Yahweh may not be burned or otherwise destroyed; the Supreme Being Himself must reclaim them. Nowhere else are forgetting and remembering intertwined in such a paradoxical way as here in this oubliette with its unfailing memory. That is precisely why it has become the greatest treasury of Jewish heritage; its importance in Jewish culture outweighs that of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I can scarcely imagine Solomon Schechter’s amazement. He boxed up two hundred thousand documents – scraps and snippets of papyrus and parchment nibbled by rats and mice – and sent them to Cambridge. To this day, the university there holds most of this enormous shipment, known as the Cairo Genizah Collection. There’s a photo of Schechter sitting and reading in an office in Cambridge with one hand on his head, surrounded by the mountain of manuscripts. The process of exegesis was explosive, sensational, a ‘battlefield of books’ still growing today. The collection is studied in universities around the world. The great scholar Shelomo Dov Goitein has filled four thick volumes with his reconstruction of life in medieval Fustat. One of the myriad documents is about a proselyte from the north and her tragic fate. It’s number T-S 16.100; the letters refer to Schechter’s name and that of Charles Taylor, the man who funded the research and later continued the work. Document T-S 16.100 was translated and annotated in 1968 by the American scholar Norman Golb, who concluded that the proselyte in question had lived in a village in Provence. He gave a lecture on the topic for the University of Chicago’s Medieval Jewish Studies programme on 20 April 1968 and published his findings in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society in January 1969.

  The Hebrew letters that form the place name in the manuscript have been partly torn but are legible as – from right to left: mem, nun, yod, vav. In transcription: MNYW. Monieux.

  An impressively sturdy remnant of Fustat’s medieval walls rises from the ground just behind the synagogue, preserved more through neglect than out of any historical awareness. This fragment is a dusty monolith, a rough mass of uncompromising sandstone, a heap of hot rubble whose angular persistence says more about the indifference of history than any words I can find. Among the few scattered houses behind it, you can see the beginnings of the Arabic cemetery, a labyrinth dotted with piles of refuse where a woman in rags invites me into her home – a ruined mausoleum she has furnished with a few carpets and a small cooker, where she’s trying to bring up her children. She offers me coffee and invites me into the tomb, but I notice her eyeing my bag and hear someone shuffling behind the tall tombstone. I politely decline and amble back through the dusty alleys.

  I pass the church of Abu Serga. The building is being restored; large sheets of plastic, covered with dust, hang from the rickety scaffolding. Dozens of young men in slippers are standing on tall wooden ladders without any protection or dust masks, chipping away at the stone. Arabic music jangles from a small radio.

  I spend more than an hour rambling around the nearby Coptic cemetery. Names from many regions, lizards and pill bugs, lush bougainvillea flourishing in a small, dilapidated Greek temple. In Hamoutal’s time, this area must have been an international melting pot. The old man at the entrance to the historic district again offers me the brochure, which tells the history of the synagogue. Preoccupied, I ignore him once more as I
pass, but then go back, take the brochure, and forget to pay him. I walk up the stairs, then retrace my steps, hand the man – who is still shaking his head in sorrow – twenty Egyptian pounds, and rest my hand on his arm by way of apology. He points to his swollen, ailing foot. I tell him the reason for my visit. His eyes widen in disbelief; he staggers to his feet, clasps me in a tearful embrace, and slaps me on the back. Shabbat shalom, Shabbat shalom, he calls after me, an endless, fading incantation that echoes in my mind for days.