The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  In other words, there was nothing about the crowded, beautiful mosaics of the third- to sixth-century Palestinian synagogues which is likely to have scandalised the rabbis, even in the town that, two centuries before, had made the Mishnah. But images and texts were directed at two different kinds of Jewish gathering. The Mishnah was tailor-made less for synagogue Jews than for the other institution also begun in these generations: the Beit Hamidrash, the ancestor of the yeshiva academies. There, indeed, the vulgar, rackety, profane heterodox world was to be excluded, the better to distil to their essence the words of the Torah and the words spoken and written about the words of the Torah that was the beginning of the endless web of interpretation, exegesis and commentary that would become the Talmud. On almost every page it is aware of how it was that righteous Jews should act in the outside world, yet often it seems a windowless enclosure, a place in which the minds were to be turned inwards, concentrating on the autonomous power of the sacred word alone.

  The fabric and images and inscriptions of the late-antiquity and early-medieval synagogues, read carefully and with a cautionary awareness of their particular moment and place in Jewish history, give us something other than that rabbinical view of places of hushed inward devotion. They flesh out the living reality of what it was like to be a Jew in one’s synagogue, and indeed a Jew in the world. They were institutions connected with, rather than cut off from, the character, hubbub and style of the town. Their daily vernaculars – Greek mostly, and often Aramaic – were incorporated into the mosaic inscriptions. The names of the Mishnah are the names of rabbis and sages. The names of the synagogue, written on floors and walls, are the names of ordinary Jews, often with their occupations given: merchants, dyers, doctors. The first are legendary, the second actual, staking their claim to the honour of remembrance (as they still do). ‘May they be remembered for good’ is the formula conventionally used. Sepphoris, for instance – where a number of prominent families seem to have been the dominant figures in the creation of their long, narrow synagogue – brings back to life the ghosts of ‘Yudan, son of Isaac the priest, and Paregri, his daughter. Amen Amen’ or ‘Tanhum, son of Yudan and Semqah, and Nehorai, the son of Tanhum’. When I think of Sepphoris I might think of Judah the Prince but I will certainly always remember Yudan and Paregri. With names like that who wouldn’t?

  So early synagogues were certainly not places where observance was conditional on shutting out the rest of the world and its visions. They had to be exposed to enough light for the reading of the Torah and their basilica-like forms were always pierced with clerestories, or open colonnades and wide doors. We know from the inscription of its ‘archisynagogos’ Theodotos of a synagogue built in Jerusalem while the Second Temple was still standing, and from similar Egyptian inscriptions, that synagogues began as community centres rather than houses of prayer, hostels that would receive pilgrims and travellers, feed them, provide them with water. When they mutated into places concentrating on prayer and Torah reading, not all of this social character disappeared – and so indeed they remain.

  Cultural history sometimes suffers from being written serially, a succession of isms, each entirely superseding the other, or leaving its predecessor as defensive and marginalised, on its way out. This emphatically did not happen to Judaism in the years between the destruction of the Temple and the establishment of Christianity as the state religion of fourth-century Rome. It was not a case of an original monotheism being almost wiped out, and then marginalised by the incoming all-conquering Gospel. This was a period when both Judaism and Christianity were being made and remade; and for some time – three centuries perhaps – and in spite of the fact that their respective stories seemed to demand it, they were not mutually exclusive, not to the point of requiring mutual annihilation.16 Both cults were certainly competing for the allegiance of monotheists. Crossovers were legion – both human and customary. Many ritual practices originating in the Torah were still observed by those who called Jesus Lord and those who didn’t. Sabbaths were kept and, despite Paul’s adamant insistence that the ‘new covenant’ embodied in the sacrifice of Christ had superseded the old ‘fleshly’ circumcision, plenty of those who thought of themselves as Jewish Christians continued it. That was precisely the issue that bitterly divided two born Jews – Peter and Paul – at Antioch where, to the horror of the latter, Peter would not share a table with the uncircumcised.

  During the second and third centuries, while both religions were still subject to pagan imperial authority, the two contending cults shared the same urban space without the obligation of mutual hatred. Sometimes, remarkably, they even competed with each other in their zeal for Jewish martyrs. In Antioch there was a Christian cult of the seven Maccabees (including old father Eleazar and his wife), some of whom were reputedly buried out at Daphne a few miles from the centre of the city where the Jews had the most famous of their synagogues. That Jews were forbidden to bury at a synagogue site did not in any way diminish the credibility of the legend or prevent it from eventually becoming a church. But the notion of the Maccabees as objects of intense Christian devotion speaks volumes about the entanglements of the two faiths and their stories in their formative years.17

  Nothing suggests this echo effect – the style of the pagan-classical past maintained into the monotheist present, and bouncing between the two religions – more dramatically than the way Roman Jews buried their dead.18 Jewish catacombs, the ‘Vigna Randanini’ on the Via Appia Antica to the south of the city, and others to the north at the Villa Torlonia, were originally discovered on farmland at the beginning of the seventeenth century and were naturally assumed to be Christian. That view did not change when they were more systematically uncovered in the middle of the nineteenth century, and it was on this basis that the landowners obtained permission from the papal authorities to proceed with excavation. Not far from the stepped entranceway leading down into the tunnels of the necropolis, an unmistakable seven-branched candlestick appeared painted red on the walls. Many more followed, often accompanied by inscriptions in Greek and occasionally Hebrew (‘Shalom’ reads one of them), putting the affiliation of the catacombs beyond question. What was being revealed was a purely Jewish underground cemetery, available to all classes of Roman Jewry from the most modest to the grand.

  Constructed at the same time or a little later than Christian catacombs, the Jewish versions assumed identical styles of cubicles, chambers and niches. At Vigna Randanini, though, there are some kokhim – burial spaces cut at ninety degrees to the underground gallery rather than parallel to it. So that in some respects at least, the Roman Jewish catacombs were also a translation of prototypical Jewish burial chambers before and after the destruction of the Second Temple, especially at the enormous necropolis at Beit Shearim just west of Galilee, begun in the second century. That, in turn, owed much to Hellenistic underground burial galleries, the hypogea. In Rome, most of the spaces are shallow cavities running parallel to the direction of the tunnels, including the numberless tiny shelves made for the bodies of infants and young children, interspersed with much larger subterranean cubicles for the wealthier and more eminent. Very occasionally there is a full-scale decorated sarcophagus; more often they are just spindly menorot and homely mottos and epigrams from a stock repertoire. The vast majority of Roman Jews in this period were modest or poor: ex-slaves and their descendants brought into captivity, but also artisans and shopkeepers. Not so poor, though, that they wouldn’t give their small children who had perished from one of the usual epidemics their own little wall niche, sometimes accompanied by heartbreaking painted or scratched farewells, and eulogies to the innocence of the departed child.

  Deeper into the warren of tunnels were places provided for the more substantial folk of the community. One inscription mourns a husband who was the community’s ‘grammaticus’– its all-important secretary – and it affects Roman flourish and poetic manner. The evidence of a particular style of wall painting makes it clear that the catacombs go back
to the fourth century ce, when there was a substantial Jewish community both at Rome and its seaport, Ostia, where there is also a synagogue (decorated with geometric mosaics), but which was also the period when Christianity was declared the state religion of the Roman Empire. So it may well have been that the better-known and more populous Christian catacombs were modelled on Jewish practice, not the other way round, since Jews had simply translated burial customs from Palestine to the diaspora.

  Even more surprising (unless one knew the borrowings at sites like Hammam-Lif and Sepphoris) is the pagan style of wall and ceiling decoration in the grandest of the family tombs – chapel-like chambers – in the deepest recesses of the catacombs. At Vigna Randanini they belie yet again the assumption of a Jewish aversion to decoration, especially in burial, since the graceful designs – wall-to-wall and up in the scooped-out vault – incorporate vegetation, flowers, animals and, in some cases, unmistakable images of the Muses, mythical figures like Pegasus, and deities who look very like Diana, Venus, Apollo and Mercury. One such chamber, the vault painted celestial blue as if to bring the light of eternal skies into the cells of darkness, is so delicately festooned with these images that archaeologists believe it might originally have been a pagan burial chamber. At some point it was taken over by the Jews, who evidently found its graceful decorations not only inoffensive but entirely to their funerary taste. The most exquisite of these decorated chambers (although not the largest) is almost a perfect cube, with date palms (that ancient Jewish symbol) at all four corners, the walls whitewashed and covered with such a delicate profusion of flowers, bounding gazelles and surging dolphins that it represents, unmistakably, a vision of the embowered Paradise, the gan eden or Garden of Eden, to which, in their imagination and poetic fancy, Jews consigned their beloved departed ones. Like so many of the assumptions governing what immemorial Jewish experience was supposed to have been (separation of the sexes in synagogues, for instance), the idea of burial practices of the utmost austerity is belied by the actual evidence of what Jews did in this early formative phase of their culture. Underground, taken from the light, every effort was made to decorate and ornament those resting places – with mere menorot and little inscriptions and valedictions for the modest and poor, an entire underground garden or grove for the well-to-do – the paradisial vision of heavenly salvation. This vision of the garden of the Jewish dead has survived even through the centuries in which the later rules of stony severity imposed themselves (though, as we shall see, with only intermittent and partial success). ‘Bye-bye, darling, sleep in the gan eden,’ was the last thing my mother said to my father when she saw his dead body in the Hampstead hospital and kissed his cold brow farewell. Observant herself, she would have been perfectly happy to have had Arthur Osea rest, in one of his striped deckchairs, in just such a leafy chamber of heaven.

  II. Breaking Apart

  Strictly speaking, the trouble between Jews and Christians was a family quarrel. That, of course, did not prevent it from going lethal, early; perhaps it guaranteed it. For it was one set of Jews, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, who first planted in the mind of Christians the truism that the unconverted among their people were inhuman monsters, God-killers. It is not just that Matthew’s version has the Jews avidly volunteer for their own perpetual guilt: ‘Let his blood be upon us and that of our children.’ Much, much worse, is the moment in the Gospel According to John, when Jesus himself makes clear that he will be killed by a people whose defining characteristic is that of diabolically possessed murderers.

  The passage occurs in the eighth chapter of John when, following Jesus’ defence of the woman taken in adultery, the confrontation with the indignant Pharisees takes an ominous turn. It may be the barest, deepest moment in the entire New Testament, the one from which all Judeo-Christian misfortunes, misunderstandings and mutual mischaracterisations would wretchedly unfold. ‘Who art thou?’ ask the Pharisees, the keepers (as they saw it) of Torah law. ‘Even the same that I said unto you from the beginning,’ Jesus gnomically responds, going on to speak of his Father. Sensing that at least some of his listeners will hear him out, Jesus encourages them, saying ‘ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free’. This is the sort of thing that a human messiah, the anointed Jerusalem-liberator, was supposed to say. But not everyone is impressed. Those who have heard it all before respond (a little illogically) that thanks all the same but we are already free for ‘we are Abraham’s seed’. ‘I know that ye are Abraham’s seed,’ Jesus responds, suddenly turning testy, ‘but ye seek to kill me because my word hath no place in you . . . if ye were Abraham’s children ye would do the works of Abraham.’ And then he repeats, ‘But now ye seek to kill me a man that has told ye the truth.’ On the defensive, the Jews interrupt, sensing the imminence of something ugly, protesting they were the children of ‘one Father, God’. No, says Jesus, the righteous anger hotly rising, were you that, you would love me since ‘I proceeded forth and came from God’. You, on the other hand, will not hear and cannot understand because your true allegiance is to another father altogether and it is he who stops your ears and blinds you to the light. What paternity would that be? ‘Ye are of your father the Devil and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth because there is no truth in him.’ Before long the antagonists are trading in mutually diabolical abuse. Appalled, the Jews, in their turn, accuse Jesus of being the real Devil, no better and maybe worse than a Samaritan, not least for promising perpetual immortality to those who would follow him.

  Four hundred years later, in 386 ce, another John, the presbyter, revered for his asceticism and his eloquence – hence the later honorific ‘Chrysostom’, the Golden-Tongued – stood in the pulpit of a church in the equally golden city of Antioch, lodged between the Syrian mountains and the sea, and warned his flock, lest they be curious, that the synagogues of the Jews, and especially Matrona out in the sylvan suburb of Daphne, were the resorts of demons, worse than brothels. ‘In their synagogues stands an invisible altar of deceit,’ John raged, conjuring up places of sinister diabolism, ‘in which they sacrifice not sheep and calves but the souls of men.’19 But it was the women of Antioch who were the most susceptible to the lure of the devils, for they were in the habit of going there for entertainment and inspiration. Since the midrash elaborations on the Torah, if not the actual readings themselves, were conducted in Greek, they could be understood by gullible Christians who had been drawn to the synagogues by the trumpet blare of the shofar on the New Year. ‘Rush not to those trumpets,’ John commanded, ‘you should stay at home to weep and groan for them [the Jews].’20 Then added: ‘Are you not afraid of dancing with demons?’21 And if they were too brazen in enjoying a day out with the Jews, he turned to their husbands (a great believer in the closeness of marriage was John the Golden-Tongued): ‘Are you not afraid that your wife will not come back afterwards?’ Flee their gatherings! Shun them as you would houses contaminated by plague! For ‘Judaising’, as this flirtation with the Jews was called, was indeed a terrible disease and could ensnare the naive in the trap set by the Devil.

  For was it not notorious that the Jews practised the black arts of sorcery? At Paphos had not St Paul confronted the wicked Jewish wizard Elymas, a veritable ‘child of the Devil’?22 ‘Insult the sorcerers!’ John demanded. ‘Drive them from your house!’23 From some of the first descriptions of them in Greek antiquity, Jews were thought to be masters of esoteric knowledge, adepts along that creatively blurred line of magic and medicine, and they were certainly sellers of amulets – some containing writings, some preservative stones (against infertility or abortions), some as rings and bracelets.24 With this potent wisdom to hand, the Jews made themselves available to recite blessings over fields and vineyards to ensure a healthy harvest, and from the fury of the preachers it was clear that many Christian cultivators thought such blessings could do no harm at all. From Chrysostom’s fury at the offences (and from the objections of other f
athers of the Church) we know there were a host of reasons why Christians were in the habit of going to the synagogue. They went there to hear Greek homiletic sermons of famous eloquence. They went there to have contracts signed because they evidently trusted the Jewish courts more than their own. They went there to swear oaths since (Chrysostom reported with incredulous scorn) they believed somehow oaths sworn in the synagogues were more solemn. If any one or all of such reasons gave Christians justification to make a visit, then the presbyter at least wanted to offer a Christian prophylactic: ‘Make the sign of the cross on your forehead and the evil power that dwells in the synagogue immediately takes flight. If you fail to sign your forehead, then the Devil will take hold of you naked and unarmed as you are and he will overwhelm you with ten thousand terrible wounds.’25

  The timing of Judeophobic attacks has always been the same. A city or a country or a state goes into crisis; trouble, strife, want and panic have already crossed the threshold; still more hideous things are knocking on the door. Quick, blame the Devil-people; stick it to the Jews. What ailed Antioch in 386–7 was the possibility of catastrophic Roman retribution for an act of insulting temerity on the person, or at least, the likeness of the emperor Theodosius and his new wife, Galla. The populous, luxurious, cosmopolitan city, third in the empire after Rome and Alexandria, was also the front-line command and control centre against the perennial threat from the Sassanian Persians (who a little more than a century later would bring about Antioch’s destruction). Its defence was expensive, especially for the geographically overstretched Byzantine Empire. A new tax in gold was to be levied on the sybaritic city, but it had been going through hard times: drought; food shortages, rising prices, disruptive outbreaks of the plague. Grumbling turned into riot, riot into iconoclasm.