History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  The Jews could never be sure when these moments would come. They prepared against them. They had renounced resistance by force in the second century, and did not resume it until the twentieth in Palestine. But there were other methods. One was for their ablest members to adopt professions which made them useful to the host communities but also kept them mobile. In Islam this was not usually difficult. Able Jews became doctors. Islamic rulers made daily use of their services; so did humble people if they could, consulting them even for minor complaints such as constipation and diarrhoea, as prescriptions which survive in the geniza show. In Egypt there was a Jewish doctor in every town and often in every village in areas of Jewish settlement. Jewish doctors were popular. They attended the big public hospitals and often had small private ones of their own. They could go anywhere, have access to anybody. So they were nearly always the leaders of the Jewish community. The first family of Egyptian nagids were all doctors. Medicine was the profession not only of Maimonides but of his son, probably his grandson, and his great-grandson. The al-Amman family were doctors for eight generations, and in one of them the father and all five sons were in the profession. So, occasionally, were daughters, at any rate as oculists. Judah Halevi was a doctor. So was Nahmanides. These medical families also traded in related products: drugs, opium, medical herbs, perfumes, scientific books. The trading networks thus developed enabled a medical family to switch from one country to another whenever persecution threatened. Jewish doctors were welcome everywhere except in phases of religious frenzy—when, of course, they were frequently accused of poisoning.56

  Keeping family corporations together was the best Jewish defence. The extended family was far more important than the nuclear family. The genizah sources show that primary loyalty went to fathers, sons, brothers, sisters, not spouses. Letters between brothers and sisters were much commoner than between husbands and wives. A woman’s proverb went: ‘A husband I can get, children I can bear, but a noble brother—where can I find him?’57 Wills show that when a man died without children, his estate went to his brother, or the closest member of the ‘House of the Father’, not the wife, who got only her own dowry. As one will put it, ‘the balance of the estate returns to my father’s house’.58

  To keep the family strong, marriage was in effect compulsory for men, and for women of child-bearing age; the genizah documents reveal no word for a spinster. It was a great economic and social strength of Judaism, as opposed to Islam, that it rejected polygamy. The Pentateuch did not actually prohibit it, but Proverbs 31:10-31 appeared to uphold monogamy and it was the rule from post-Exilic times; from the age of Rabbi Gershom (960-1028), bigamy and polygamy were punished by the severest type of excommunication in European Jewry.59 Bigamy led to excommunication in Egypt too, though in the case of compulsory levirate marriage, Maimonides sanctioned bigamy provided the wives were equally treated—‘one night with this one, one night with that’.60 A male became adult at thirteen, when he could make up a quorum for the services and put on phylacteries, and from the early thirteenth century this point was marked by the bar-mitzvah, meaning he had come under the yoke of the commandments.61 Then he was married as soon as convenient—Maimonides was most unusual in not marrying until he was past thirty.

  Marriage was a social and business transaction designed to keep society cohesive, so the contract or ketubbah was read out at the ceremony and it was drawn up, like a partnership agreement, to avoid disputes or make dissolution uncontentious. Here is a Karaite contract dated 26 January 1028:

  I, Hezekiah, the bridegroom, will provide her with clothing, roof and food, supply her with all her needs and wishes according to my ability and to the extent I can afford. I will conduct myself towards her with truth and sincerity, with love and affection, I will not grieve and oppress her and will let her have food, clothes and marital relations to the extent habitual among Jewish men…. Sarna the bride heard the words of Hezekiah and agreed to marry him and be his wife and companion in purity, holiness and fear of God, to listen to his words, to honour and hold him dear, to be his helper and to do in his house what a virtuous Jewish woman is expected to do, to conduct herself towards him with love and consideration, to be under his rule, and her desire will be toward him.62

  The Bible said ‘God…hateth putting away’ (i.e. divorce),63 but it was part of the strength of the extended, as opposed to nuclear, family system that divorce was easy provided the contract was properly drawn up. Genizah sources show it was commoner in Egypt than among European or American Jewish families until the second half of the twentieth century.64 In divorce the Mishnah favoured the man: ‘A wife is divorced irrespective of her will, but the husband is divorced only when he is willing.’65 Jewish women were of less account in Moslem Afro-Asia than in Christian Europe, but genizah records hint that they were often more powerful than their formal rights suggested. If they were beaten they could go to the courts, and sometimes a husband had to seek court protection from a dominant wife. Many letters make it clear that wives handled their husband’s business affairs when he was trading abroad. Women agents and brokers were common. One woman who figures in the records was in fact nicknamed ‘The Broker’, ran a business partnership, got herself expelled from a synagogue but figured on a public subscription-list, and died rich.66

  Women also played a role in the educational system, which was the real cement of the Jewish world. They had their own all-female classes—usually taught by blind scholars. Female Bible-teachers were common. A woman might also run a school, though this was rare. But the main educational effort was entrusted to men supported by the community. In fact the Jewish legal definition of a town as opposed to a village was that it had at least ten batlanim, ‘persons who do not work’, foregoing private profit to study on behalf of the community. At the end of the eleventh century there were twenty-nine in Fustat, fourteen in Cairo, including the rayyis or head of the Jews (under the Fatimids), the rabbenu (master), who was the chief scholar and religious authority, two judges, five yeshivah scholars, three ravs or masters, six cantors, one teacher and five beadles.67

  The community revolved around the school-synagogue complex. Cairo-Fustat was regarded as lax, even luxurious. Maimonides, who hated music, disapproved of the singing of piyyutim during services but the people loved them and he ruled that it would cause too much bitterness to have them stopped. His son Abraham deplored the use of huge cushions and reclining pillows in synagogue, but here again the popular will prevailed. But even in lax Fustat, there were three services daily and four on the Sabbath.68 Sabbath and dietary laws were kept in all their rigour. Jewish law was strict, and this caused a constant, though largely unrecorded, leakage into the host communities, but it was the discipline which also kept the Jews together and their heads high. Sabbath (root-verb shabath) meant to cease. All work was forbidden, Exodus specifically prohibiting kindling a fire and the Mishnah listing thirty-nine categories of labour used in making it. The Oral Law principle of erecting ‘fences round the law’, to prevent even accidental breaches, spread the area of prohibition still further. Thus, as you could not break a branch to kindle a fire, you could not ride a horse even if it did not belong to you (animals you owned had to be rested on the Sabbath), since you might have to break a branch to use as a whip. Since Jeremiah 17:21 forbade carrying burdens on the Sabbath, the Mishnah devoted two chapters to the quantitative minimums, and a vast amount of commentary discussed the difference between a private place in which some carrying was allowed, and a public one. Since Exodus 16:29 forbade a man to ‘go out of his place on the seventh day’, there was a huge volume of commentary on walks.69

  Paid public officials supervised these prohibitions. They played an even more important role in the dietary laws. As food was part of religion and eating a communion with God, the material had not only to come from a permitted species but a blessing pronounced during the killing, which had to be done in regulated form. Animals and fowl had to have their oesophagus and windpipe cut with a knife run three
times over finger and three over nail to ensure it was unblemished and sharp. After slaughter, the meat was examined for signs of disease, especially of the lungs, and then veins containing blood picked out, together with prohibited fat and sinews in the hindpart. The shohet or official ritual slaughterer was appointed by the rabbis, and a genizah letter shows they examined him under three heads, religiosity, good conduct and scholarship—a good example, as Goitein has observed, of the tendency of Jewish crafts to ascend into the academic realm.70 After he had done his work, which included the removal of all blood, a guard ensured it was untouched until ready for cooking, at which point it was soaked in water for thirty minutes and salted for an hour to ensure no blood was left. The guard also supervised milking and cheese-making, which was governed by purity rules. To be kosher, an egg had to be unmarked by blood, have one round, one oval end, and its yolk surrounded by white. As the Bible prohibited seething a kid in its mother’s milk, commentators interpreted this as forbidding eating meat and milk foods together, unless each is in a proportion to the other of more than sixty to one. That in turn led to the use of two sets of cooking and serving dishes.71

  Communal slaughtering thus helped to solidify the Jewish parish. Moreover, though a poor Jew might have to be strict in what he ate, he knew he would never want for food, since he could receive every Friday enough money (or equivalent) to cover fourteen meals for his family. From Temple times, the kuppah or collecting box was a pivot around which the Jewish welfare-community revolved, Maimonides stating: ‘We have never seen or heard of a Jewish community which does not have a kuppah.’72 There were three trustees, solid citizens, for each kuppah and, charity being mandatory in Jewish law, they had power to seize goods from non-contributors. There were carefully graded forms of welfare-provision, each with its own fund and administrators: clothes, schools for the poor, dowries for poor girls, Passover food and wine for the poor, orphans, the aged, the sick, burials of the poor, and prisoners and refugees. The notion of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ was one the Jews adopted before the birth of Christ and always practised even when the community as a whole was distressed. A solvent Jew had to give to the kuppah once he had resided in the community a month; to the soup-kitchen fund after three, the clothing fund after six and the burial fund after nine.73 But as helping the poor was one way of showing gratitude to God, a substitute for the old Temple sacrifices, a pious Jew gave more than the mandatory minimum, and long, elaborately written lists of contributors were hung up in the synagogue at Fustat—for God to see, as well as men. The Jews hated welfare dependence. They quoted the Bible: ‘You must help the poor man in proportion to his needs’, but added, ‘you are not obliged to make him rich.’74 The Bible, Mishnah, Talmud, the commentaries were full of injunctions to work, to achieve independence. The grace after meals pleaded: ‘We beseech you, O God of our fathers, that you cause us not to be in need of the gifts of flesh and blood…but make us only dependent on your hand, which is full, open, holy and ample, so that we may not be ashamed.’ The sages commanded: ‘Flay a carcass in the market-place if necessary, receive thy wages and do not say “I am a great man, and it is beneath my dignity to do such a thing.” ’75

  Yet the genizah documents, such as lists of recipients and donors, show that in practice welfare had to be distributed on a large scale. At the time Maimonides arrived in Fustat (c. 1150-60), of 3,300 Jews, 500 were breadwinners and there were 130 households on charity; in the period 1140-1237, there was an average of one relief recipient for every four donors.76 Poverty was often inescapable. In 1201-2, for instance, famine and plague cut Fustat’s population in half, leaving widows and children destitute. The genizah documents show that the jizya or poll-tax, the worst aspect of Moslem rule, was the real terror of the poor, enforced with great ferocity and relentlessness, relatives being held responsible for defaulters and travellers being forced to show tax-clearance certificates before leaving.

  Always, in the background, there was the menace of anti-Semitism. It is described in the genizah documents by the word sinuth, hatred. The worst actual persecution occurred under the fanatical or mad Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, early in the eleventh century, who turned first on the Christians, then on the Jews. Another zealot-ruler was Saladin’s nephew al-Malik, who called himself caliph of the Yemen (1196-1201); a letter of August 1198 from the Yemen relates how the Jews were summoned to the ruler’s audience-hall and forcibly converted: ‘Thus all apostacized. Some of the pious, who [then] defected from Islam, were beheaded.’ Parts of Islam were much worse than others for Jews. Morocco was fanatical. So was northern Syria. Anti-dhimmi regulations, such as sumptuary laws, were often strictly enforced to gouge a financial settlement out of the Jewish community. A genizah document of 1121 describes decrees in Baghdad forcing Jews to wear:

  two yellow badges, one on the headgear and one on the neck. Furthermore, each Jew must hang round his neck a piece of lead weighing [3 grammes] with the word dhimmi on it. He also has to wear a belt round his waist. The women have to wear one red and one black shoe and have a small bell on their necks or shoes…. The vizier appointed brutal Moslem men to supervise the Jewish males and brutal Moslem women to watch over the females and hurt them with curses and humiliations…. The Moslems were mocking the Jews and the mob and the youths were beating them up in all the streets of Baghdad.77

  During most of this period Egypt was a relatively safe place for Jews, though Alexandria retained its long tradition of anti-Semitism dating from Hellenistic times. The writer of one genizah letter, describing an anti-Semitic outbreak there when a Jewish elder was falsely accused of rape, added: ‘anti-Semitism is continually taking on new forms and everyone in the town has become a kind of police inspector over the Jews to express their sinuth’.78 But in Fustat and Cairo, the genizah papers show that Jews, Christians and Moslems lived mingled together and went into common business partnerships. Goitein concludes that the evidence does not support the view that in Egypt, at least, anti-Semitism was endemic or serious. But then Egypt under the Fatimids and Ayyubids was a refuge for persecuted Jews (and others) from all over the world.

  If the treatment of the Jews under Islam varied, from place to place and from time to time, it was always bad under Byzantine rule. In Latin Christendom, it was tolerable until the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095; thereafter the position of the Jews deteriorated almost everywhere. As in Islam, the powers-that-be always favoured Jews, other things being equal. They were the best of all urban colonists, had useful trading networks, possessed rare skills, accumulated wealth quickly and were easy to tax. They flourished under the Carolingians. The Emperor Louis the Pious, around 825, gave them a number of charters as inducements to settle. The letters of Agobard of Lyons show that they not only enjoyed imperial protection but were allowed to build synagogues. There was periodic trouble—persecutions in France in 1007, for instance; forced conversions in Mainz in 1012. But on the whole Jewish communities did well and spread, especially throughout the Rhine basin, and from the Lower Rhine to England after 1066. As late as 1084 the ruling Bishop of Speyer gave them a charter of privileges, including a defensive wall round their quarter, as an inducement to settle in his city; and in 1090, the Emperor Henry IV renewed this charter and gave them a new one in Worms.

  Yet there was a growing ambivalence in the official attitude to Jews. The secular lords tended to treat the Jews as personal property, to be farmed; not only their incomes but, in case of necessity, their capital too were there to be plundered. The ecclesiastical lords, as the rulers of cities, appreciated the economic value of the Jewish presence; as churchmen they abhorred it. Pope Gregory the Great (reigned 590-604) protected the Jews of Rome; but at the same time he created the ideology of a Christian anti-Judaism which was to lead directly to physical attacks on Jews. What he argued, in effect, was that the Jews were not blind to the claims of Christianity. They knew Jesus was the Messiah, was the son of God. But they had rejected Him, and continued t
o reject Him because their hearts were corrupt. And it had always been thus—the evidence against the Jews was all there in the Bible, which they had written themselves.79 Therein, of course, lay a terrible problem for the Jews. One of their greatest gifts was the critical faculty. They had always had it. It was the source of their rationality, one of the factors which brought them to monotheism in the first place, for their critical sense would not allow them to accept the follies of polytheism. But they were not only critical; they were, perhaps above all, self-critical. And they were, or at any rate had been in ancient times, superb historians. They saw the truth, sometimes the ugly truth, about themselves, and they told it in the Bible. Whereas other peoples produced their national epics to endorse and bolster their self-esteem, the Jews wanted to discover what had gone wrong with their history, as well as what had gone right. That is why the Bible is littered with passages in which the Jews are presented as a sinful people, often too wicked or obstinate to accept God’s law, though they know it. The Jews, in fact, produced the evidence for their own prosecution.

  Christian apologists did not, on the whole, believe that Jews should be punished for the crime of their ancestors in killing Christ. They made a different point. Jewish contemporaries of Jesus had witnessed his miracles, seen the prophecies fulfilled and had refused to acknowledge him because he was poor and humble. That was their sin. But every generation of Jews ever since had shown the same spirit of obstinacy, as in the Bible. They were constantly concealing the truth, tampering with it, or suppressing the evidence. St Jerome accused them of cutting out references to the Trinity in the prophets. There were clues in Ezra and Nehemiah which, said St Justin, they had taken out. The old rabbis who compiled the Talmud knew the truth and even put it in the record in hidden form—that was one reason Christian debaters tried to use it for their arguments. Even the Jewish historian, Josephus, had written the truth about Jesus (it was in fact an obvious interpolation when the manuscript chain was under Christian control), but the Jews set their faces against it. It was not ignorance. It was malice. Here is a comment from the twelfth-century historian Gerald of Wales: