by Simon Schama
III. A Different Place
But twilight was fast descending on the empire which Jewish poets identified as the fourth, ten-horned, iron-toothed, brass-nailed beast of Daniel’s delirious dream of apocalypse. It too would pass; indeed the ten horns would turn and attack the beast from which they had sprouted. There was only so much an embattled Roman emperor, even one with such mighty dreams of a united Christian Rome, could do, and Justinian’s decree converting synagogues into churches was never executed to any serious degree. Only one significant case is known – at Jerash, east of the Jordan – where a handsome, fourth-century synagogue was made over into a church in the early 530s. The Jewish building was evidently too scandalously flashy for the Christians who occupied it, for its mosaic of Noah’s flood (fragments of which have independently survived) was broken up and replaced with a more sober geometric design, though some of the animals – sheep, deer and bulls – still graze serenely amid the stone chips.
Justinian himself must have known that there would be no overnight mass conversion, for much of his programme was designed in a more Augustinian way to bring the Jews round rather than bludgeon them to Christ. They were now forbidden to read the Mishnah, a measure which, while extreme in its meanness, obtusely overlooked the fact that the work had begun as oral law and that the vast bulk of it had been internalised into Jewish social and legal practice. In another decree, Justinian declared Greek as the language for the reading of the Torah through its three-year cycle in synagogue, but in many places it already was. The version to be read was that of the Septuagint of Alexandria, translated by Jews from Second Temple Jerusalem.
If it imagined it could hurry Hebrew to extinction, the Christian Roman Empire was already too late. Far from becoming redundant, the Bible language was entering a new phase of intense vitality and muscular inventiveness. The twin Talmuds – ‘Yerushalmi’ (though Galilean) and ‘Bavli’, written in the Babylonian academies of Pumbedita, Nehardea and Sura – had added to the Mishnah a vast web of further commentary, the Gemara. With this, they had created an immense, surprisingly chatty body of Hebrew literature, which ranged free and far from the sacred mysteries of divinity down to legal briefs in the case of accidental ox-goring. The Talmud was big and baggy enough to be plumbed not just for legal guidance, daily rule-checking, enlightenment and discussion, but for inspiration and even for entertainment.
The Talmud was the religious empire of the academy sages, the amoraim. Another kind of Hebrew literature was also beginning at this time, meant not for the scholars and judges but for the voices of the synagogue. Synagogues in Babylonia were most commonly owned privately by the rabbis, often housed in their own homes (as is still the case with many of the rebbes), an extension of their Beit Hamidrash, the schools of study, and attended mostly by their students. But in Palestine, increasingly beleaguered as it was by an aggressive Church and hostile imperial decrees, the synagogues were still communal places, where those disdainfully called am ha’eretz (‘the people of the land’), of neither social nor spiritual aristocracy, could come together along with priests, Levites and local notables – those whose names were grandly embedded in the mosaic. The new poems, the piyyutim, written in a fierce, seething Hebrew, were for them a consolatory binding for the congregation in the face of adversity, a sung or chanted emotional release between the formal prayers – already prescribed to be the shema and the daily tefillin or amidah (the standing prayer) of eighteen blessings and invocations – and before and after the readings from the Torah. Some of the earliest were expressly written as high-pitched prefaces to dramatic moments of solemnity – the repeated blowing of the shofar during New Year, for example – and in different later versions the piyyutim still work that way. The most familiar and best-loved ones that even the occasionally observant Jew knows – Ashrei, Adon Olam, Yigdal, Ein Keiloheinu – were later medieval compositions. Although the dating is notoriously tricky, since the poems are mostly known from fragments preserved in the great storehouse (geniza) of Judaica in medieval Fustat, Old Cairo, the earliest have been dated on clear stylistic grounds to the sixth and seventh centuries.45
There is a lot of letting off steam in their fiercest verses, a poetic counter-attack on the oppressors from whom they had become bitterly estranged. They are, in fact, unsparing in their hatred. ‘Would that the ruler of Dumah [Edom, aka Rome] be humbled, brought low and lick the dirt like a worm,’ runs one from the hand of Yannai. ‘Let there be great slaughter in Edom’s lands, may fire glow from its fields.’ Eleazar ben Qillir, his pupil, was if anything even more given to bloodthirsty poetic retribution: ‘Bring down on Esau’s sons, the insolent villains, the loss of children and widowhood.’46 It may be that all this fire and brimstone extended to their own relations, since Yannai is said to have become so jealous of his pupil Qillir that he murdered him with a scorpion set in his shoe. But the earliest of all the poets – Yose ben Yose, writing in Palestine in the sixth century – used the Bible and its interpreters as a vehicle for both lament and messianic hope. His voice is that of the synagogue itself, personified as the bride from the Song of Songs, awaiting, with increasingly desperate sorrow, God in the form of a bridegroom. Unrighteousness has made Him flee and He is sought in vain in His old dwelling places the sea and the wilderness. A grain of hope endures: ‘Forever will He make me the seal on His heart as once under the apple tree He raised me up with a voice.’ Birdsong joins the lament as if the mourning voice of the dove. ‘The sparrow from Egypt has cried in the wilderness / The dove of Assyria sent forth her voice / Visit the sparrow, seek out the silent dove / Blow for them the trumpet.’47 Cue the shofar itself, and the hope, through repentance for sin and expectation of redemption, of a messianic moment round the corner when the bridegroom returns to the synagogue, Edom falls, and Jerusalem is restored. Just sampling the fragments of lines it becomes possible to feel the synagogue service as it is still observed today coming together (as was its counterpart in the churches): an orchestration of prayer, reading, sermon, all interspersed with devotional poetry and songs of praise.
Whether or not they were exported to the diaspora and Babylon, the early devotional poems were very much a product of a community under pressure; still gripped by acute Jerusalem-yearning; so near and yet so far. The Babylonian Talmud, written by those whom Yose ben Yose beautifully describes as ‘eating the bread of carefulness’, is at the opposite pole of emotional temperature from the exalted intensity of the piyyutim. And it is also as worldly in its way as another poetic genre, deriving from Qumran mysticism – the hekhalot literature, named after the celestial palaces through which a pure devotee ascends to behold the face and form of God Himself seated on His chariot throne – is other-worldly.
But then the Talmud is the product of a world – Persian Babylonia under the Sassanians – that was largely free of the acute fears and constant demonisation with which Jews in Christian lands were afflicted. No Jew was implicated in the death of the prophet Zoroaster; in fact his death was scarcely mentioned in the holy book, the Avesta. In the four centuries after the Persian conquest, life in the Mesopotamian cities on the Tigris and the Euphrates – Nehardea, Pumbedita, Sura and Mahoza, a suburb of the Sassanian capital Ctesiphon – was not entirely free of harassment. There were two periods of persecution in the middle of the fourth century, under kings Yazdegir II and Peroz, but in most ways that were missing from Byzantine Christendom, Jews and Judaism could flourish under Persian protection. While in the Byzantine world no Jew could testify against a Gentile or even appear as witness, in Persian Babylonia they had the same legal rights as everyone else, and as a result Jews used Persian courts as much as if not more than their own. ‘The [civil] law is valid law,’ one of the senior rabbis, Samuel, declared unequivocally. Their resh galuta, the exilarch, was a recognised authority with the status of a minor Persian nobleman, who lived in high style and enjoyed direct access to the Sassanian court. In an altogether different realm from the rabbis and sages of the Talmud academies, the exilarch
s gave themselves the airs of descendants of Yehoiakim, the last descendant of the royal line of David who went into exile after the destruction of the First Temple. Stories circulated of the mutually respectful familiarity between exilarchs and kings. At the beginning of the fifth century, the exilarch Huna ben Nathan was at an audience with King Yazdegir I when the belt of his robe, identical with the Zoroastrian kustig, slipped, whereupon the royal hand thoughtfully adjusted it.48
All this was because Judaism was not part of the Zoroastrian story, much less a deicidal part, so the Persians felt unthreatened even as many of the precepts of the two religions showed some affinity. They certainly shared purity obsessions concerning the dead, belief in the uncleanness of menstruation and the nocturnal emission of semen, and it seems likely that the peculiar Jewish requirement of burying nail clippings came directly from Persian-Zoroastrian practice. Certainly there were none of the assumptions that when the Jews sold amulets and charms (a thriving trade in Babylonia as elsewhere) they were trading in works of the Devil.
Living in one of the most densely urbanised and sophisticated societies in the world, Aramaic-speaking Jews inhabited rich and poor strata and everything in between. They were river traders and porters, moneylenders and mule drivers, physicians and landowners. And because the Talmud writers wanted to speak to all kinds and conditions of Jews it sometimes offers a rich ethnography of their differences. The Mishnah had been content to include women’s cosmetics among things forbidden as ‘leaven’ during Passover.49 The Talmud sages won’t leave it at that and offer views about depilatories used by teenage girls. Clearly expert on the matter, Rav Yehudah says ‘poor girls apply lime [ouch], rich girls use fine flour and princesses [the first time the Jewish princess takes a bow in literature] six months with oil of myrrh’. In the way of their unstoppable free association this leads naturally to a discussion of ‘what is oil of myrrh?’ which the rabbis then argue heatedly about, all with competing inaccuracy since they seem to think the essential oil comes from unripe olives, whereas in fact it is extracted from the fruit of the thorny commiphora tree. Unless, that is, in Babylonia olive oil was being sold as a depilatory, in which case the rabbis needed to rule on cosmetic fraud. Mostly, though, they want the rich girls (a subsection of the princesses) to stop using flour on their skin during Passover. And while they were at it, they wanted to leave nothing in doubt about the ingredients not to be used for a dip at the Passover Seder: no Edomite (Roman) vinegar for sure, no ‘Median’ beer made with barley, which in turn (and for no discernible reason) led the rabbis to offer views not just on cosmetics but food that will stop or loosen the bowels. Unsurprisingly, it’s what the am ha’eretz – the common folk – eat that ‘increases faeces, bends the stature and robs a man of one five-hundredth of the light of his eyes’, and that would be black bread, uncooked vegetables and quickly brewed beer. To reverse all of these, you need bread with refined flour, vintage wine and fatty meat, preferably from a she-goat which has not yet had kids.50 Which puts the nutrition expertise of the sages in about the same class as their advice on depilatory cosmetics.
However questionable the advice given in almost every conceivable department of life, the Talmud is a work engaged with flesh-and-blood experience, not some sort of arid legal manual. It is also unmistakably not a product of cultural segregation, but comes from a world in which a Jewish life was open to the culture which surrounded it, without any sense that the result would somehow be a compromised version of Torah Judaism. In this sense the Talmud canvasses all the questions and perplexities, all the ‘how open, how closed off ?’ issues that have gone along with diaspora living ever since. Interestingly, precisely because Persian-Babylonian social customs converged so much with Jewish practices, especially on matters of purity, the issue of how far to adopt and adapt them for Jewish use divided the Talmudists, as well as the am ha’eretz. Persian law took an inclusive view of who was entitled to bear witness in court cases, which some of the rabbis followed and some did not. Living in the upscale, suburban world of Mahoza, Rabbi Nahman ben Yaakov, a relative of the exilarch, for example, deemed it perfectly acceptable that a man suspected of carrying on with a married woman could still be a witness. Likewise, Rava, a prolific Talmudist, saw no obstacle in allowing a Jew notorious for enjoying non-kosher food testify, while Rabbi Abaye, from the more narrowly Jewish world of the Pumbedita schools, would have none of it. The divide was beween the wealthy, laid-back elite of the Babylonian Jews even when they were rabbis, and those in the simpler, more enclosed worlds of the academies. Many rabbis in the former category were routinely polygamous in the Persian style, sanctioned the taking of ‘temporary wives’ when abroad, did so themselves and saw no reason why this should require them to be divorced from wife number one.51
Divergence of opinion among the Talmudists was not, of course, just a matter of social geography; those who took the narrow and those the broader ways of interpreting Torah and Mishnah did so through their own roads of apprehension. The remarkable thing about the Talmud is its elasticity: the way it swelled to accommodate the whole multivocal, mutually interrupting, sometimes cacophonous inter-generational conversation. It was the world’s first hypertext, in the way it made room for commentary upon commentary, source upon source on the same ‘page’ – mind-bogglingly, the different treatises, hands, even languages when they included Aramaic translations, would have crowded a space on the scroll, as codices (the early form of books) were not used by Jews until the ninth century. So the scroll form must have made the formal looseness of what the Talmud was even looser, its rolling bowling succession of free associations, its wonderful vagaries between law, story, vision, disputation. Its whole authority was bound up with orality, with its leaps from intuition to conversation, its sudden shafts of illumination that no one could bear to suppress, never mind their relevance to anything ostensibly the issue. Wherever you dip into the Talmud you don’t so much read it as hear it.
And you see it too. Two rabbis, important ones, Hiyya and Jonathan, walk through a cemetery. The fringes on Jonathan’s garment, the tzitzit, brush the ground. ‘Lift it up,’ says Hiyya, ‘so the dead don’t say, “Tomorrow they will join us but now they’re mocking us.”’ Jonathan replies (while lifting his fringes and walking, or have they stopped to do some finger-jabbing at each other?), ‘What do you mean, what can the dead know? Does not Ecclesiastes say “the dead know nothing”?’ Hiyya gets excited. ‘Please, if you had read properly you would know that by the “living” is meant the righteous who even after they are dead are called living, and the “dead” who know nothing are the wicked who “know nothing” whatever their physical state.’
The treatise on the Sabbath is punctuated by pure storytelling, especially of Hillel and Shammai. To promote the virtues of patience, a story is told of a man who laid a bet he could provoke to anger Hillel, legendary for his calm. On the eve of the Sabbath ‘Hillel was washing his hair’ (the Bavli Talmud loves these details) when the gambler beats on his door. Hillel hastily puts on a gown and asks what he wants. ‘I have a question. Why do Babylonians have round heads?’ Hillel doesn’t even shrug. Because their midwives aren’t up to scratch. Oh, right. An hour later he’s back. ‘Why do people from Palmyra have sore eyes?’ ‘My son, a good question, because they live in such a sandy place.’ This goes on. Not a trace of annoyance from the great man even when the obnoxious stranger warns ‘I have a lot of questions’. ‘Ask all you want.’ ‘Well, they say you are a prince. There can’t be many like you in Israel.’ ‘Why not, my son?’ ‘Because you’ve just lost me 400 zuz.’ Hillel goes in for the kill, with terminal sweetness. ‘Better you should lose 400 zuz than Hillel lose his temper.’52
Like the Mishnah around which it lays its heavily planted beds of interpretations, commentaries and folk-wise stories, the greater Talmud has, even when the text seems to turn on minutiae, ethical reflections of the deepest importance. When may a wife be rightfully divorced (agreement only on when she has been unfaithful for ‘I
detest divorce said the Lord God of Israel’)?53 When do matters of life and death override Sabbath observance (always, so you must heat that water if it’s needed)? Movingly, and tellingly (and surely inflected with the sorrows of Palestine in the Yerushalmi, or perhaps that fifth-century time when the Sassanians turned on the Jews), the sages ask themselves what to ask of Gentiles seeking to convert. ‘We say to him: why do you wish to convert? Are you not aware that nowadays Israelites are careworn, despised, stressed, harassed and persecuted? If he responds “I know and I feel unworthy [to share their troubles]”, we accept him at once.’ He is told of the commandments that are hard to keep and those that are easy; of the punishments for violation and the rewards for observance.54
But to be admitted to Talmudic Judaism, however easier life might have been (and not always) in the Babylonian diaspora, was to share not just in the memory of loss, but to feel it, see it and hear it as if it were still happening. What were the Levites singing, a chapter asks, as they stood on their platform on the 9th of Ab while the Babylonian armies finally smashed their way into the Temple? What was it like when Betar fell to Hadrian’s army and the ‘Temple Mount was ploughed over’? And they would share too in the world of messianic expectations that when certain things had come to pass – the fall of ‘Edom’, the return of the bridegroom God to His bride the Synagogue, Jerusalem, to which they all looked as they prayed, read the Torah, sang the piyyutim poems – the golden-gated Temple with the veiled Holy of Holies at its heart would be restored.