The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

Sometimes, the Talmud rabbis, the exilarch and his court, and the multitudes of the am ha’eretz thought the darkest of times conceals light. So it was with the Byzantine emperor Heraclius at the beginning of the seventh century, who went the whole way in missionary fanaticism, decreeing that there was nothing for it but for the Jews to be converted, forcibly if necessary, as only through Christ could they attain salvation, and so long as they were blind they were also dangerous – the creatures of the Devil. While he was at it Heraclius also banned weekday services and, seeking to rip out the heart of Judaism, forbade the recitation of the shema at any time. (Cantors were said to circumvent this by inserting it at arbitrary moments during the service.) Only one community in the Byzantine-Roman diaspora is known to have suffered mass forced conversion: that of Borium in the Maghreb.55

  For before the Heraclian vision could be executed, a moment heavy with messianic possibility suddenly happened. Early in the seventh century the Sassanian king Khosrau II decided to appeal to the Jewish population of his realm to support a military campaign against the Byzantines led by his general Shabahraz. The son of the then exilarch, Nehemiah, is said to have mobilised an army of 20,000 Jewish auxiliaries to fight with the Persians. The march cut through the Byzantine defences. Antioch, the glory and the heart of Christendom, was taken, after which Jewish auxiliaries led by one Benjamin of Tiberias, drawing recruits from the heartland of Galilean Jewry – Sepphoris, Nazareth, Tiberias itself – rallied to the Persian army. Into Judaea they swept and after a three-week siege, Jews took back their city, for the first time since the Hadrianic ban, establishing an autonomous city state within the Persian Empire.

  Martyrologies describe traumatic destruction inflicted on churches and Christians. Archaeology has found very little of the former, but skeletal remains have been discovered on at least one Jerusalem site, by the Mamilla pool, now an upscale shopping mall and residential development. Whether or not Jews took revenge on their oppressors, the moment turned out to be less than messianic. Almost before work of clearing and rebuilding could begin, the Persians, finding themselves embattled elsewhere, decided to leave Jerusalem and the Jews to their fate. In 628, just fourteen years after they had been defeated, the troops of Heraclius returned and exacted a terrible retribution. The Christians must have imagined that, once again, the disappointment of the Jews was the result of their deluded recognition that there would be no Messiah other than the returning Jesus. The Jews ought to end their delusions, accept that the dominion of Christ would prevail in Jerusalem forever.

  It may have been the Christians who suffered the greater delusion. Only ten years lapsed between their recovery of the city and the Muslim conquest of it by the second caliph, Umar, in 638. According to later Jewish and Muslim sources, Jews accompanying Umar’s army led the caliph to the site of the Temple Mount from which Muhammad was said to have ascended to the heavens, consulting on his way with Jewish prophets. Dismayed by the mounds of rubbish with which Christians had deliberately polluted the Temple site, Umar reportedly ordered a clean-up with, naturally, the Jews volunteering for the work. In response, seventy families from Galilee were permitted to live in Jerusalem and even build a synagogue close to the Temple site. Thus was born a culture of coexistence between Jews and Muslims.

  That, at any rate, was the story.56

  6

  Among the Believers

  I. Muhammad and the Cohens of Arabia

  Crated cheetahs, lions and the odd rhinoceros lay in the holds of ships moored in the harbour of Yotabe along with chests filled with myrrh and spikenard.1 To the west was the southern tip of Sinai, to the east the northern coast of Arabia. The shark-shaped island (now known as Tiran) lay plumb in the middle of the narrows, impeding passage for vessels wanting to sail north from the Red Sea or south from the Gulf of Aila (now Aqaba). All of this made Yotabe the perfect place to extract customs and tolls, and the historian Procopius of Caesarea tells us that the Jews who lived there had been doing just that for generations. Except for a small number of Christians, Yotabe was a Jewish island, with a population thought to have settled there after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem; but since the Jews went island-hopping well before the first century CE, their commercially strategic presence on Yotabe might have begun much earlier. Upfront money talked, especially to overstretched empires, so the Yotabe Jews had a good thing going, furnishing the ready in exchange for the right to collect, and profiting from anything over and above their prepaid disbursement. The arrangement suited whichever treasuries were the beneficiaries, enough for the Byzantine Empire to grant Yotabe the status of an autonomous micro-state: an eighty-square-kilometre miniature commercial republic of Jews.

  Until, that is, the middle of the sixth century, when the overweening emperor Justinian, with his deluded obsession of making the Christian Roman Empire whole again, chose to end the liberty of the island. The misfortune was predictable. Justinian was not prepared to cede strategic command of the straits to any party not fully committed to the long-running wars against the Persians. And Jews on the frontier were notorious for hedging their bets. But, even after they had been reduced to subject status, the Jews of Yotabe stayed put, collected their fees and surveyed the cargoes of African wild animals bound for the last (and officially illegal) games, the venatores, organised by the languid aristocracies of Rome and Byzantium, bored with watching mere bear and boar torn to pieces in their private circuses. Along with the big cats and elephants, the riches of Arabia came under the eyes of the Yotabe customs post, and all were lucrative: musk; frankincense used by Christians, Jews and pagans alike for incense; perfumed oils and gummy resins; gemstones and the coral taken then, as now, from the Red Sea reefs, and worn as protective amulets, suspended from silver or gold chains. Ever since the earliest Greek reports had described them as communing with the stars, Jews had been thought to have access to potent, esoteric mysteries – secret concoctions and formulae extracted from plants, minerals and animals, and these too found a taxable market. From further off came Asian silks going north and west, exchanged for Egyptian linen travelling south and east.

  The force of Yotabe’s extractive grip on shipping depended on the bottleneck of the Red Sea being corked up at the other, southern end, where another populous community of Arabian Jews were settled in the port of Aden, commanding the exit out to the Indian Ocean, as well as incoming traffic from the Horn of Africa. Between Yotabe and Aden, moreover, lay a long chain of Jewish settlements and towns strung along the camel routes of the Via Odorifera, up from Yemen along the oasis-scattered periphery of the desert into the Hijaz, the north-western flank of the Arabian peninsula, and into towns like Hegra, Ula and Tabuq.2

  This, then, was the social geography of somewhere most people cannot imagine ever having existed: Arabia Judaica, the home of Judaised Arabs and Arabic Jews – a phenomenon that now seems to us oxymoronic, but in the two centuries before the arrival of Islam was the most natural thing in the world, flourishing both economically and culturally. From the Nabateans of the Negev and the hills of Moab they had acquired skills in catching and conserving precious, sudden downpours and channelling underground currents so that date palms might flourish. Their ties in one direction with the Jews of Palestine and in the other with the communities of Mesopotamia gave them a pre-established network of trade. From inscriptions we even know about their connections between the towns of Arabia itself. One such tomb inscription at Hegra from the middle of the fourth century declares it to have been built by ‘Adnon, son of Hmy, son of Shmwl [Samuel] Prince of Hegra for his wife Monah, daughter of Amrw . . . son of Shmwl Prince of Tayma’.3 Jewish clans and tribes whose names are known to us from early-Muslim histories owned date-palm groves and forts and were busy in the trans-Arabian camel caravans (indeed many of them followed the herds as Jewish Bedouin), and, before the appearance of Muhammad in 610, dominated fortified market towns like Tayma, where they were powerful enough to impose Judaism on the city and on any pagans or Christians who had a mind to settle th
ere. In Khaybar, an oasis town of towers and fortified walls where there was enough water streaming from surrounding hills (stored in catchment tanks) to irrigate date palms and vines, landowning Jews specialised in making and warehousing weapons, armour, catapults and whole siege engines as well as dealing in the silks and textiles brought from the southern kingdom of Himyar. Some of the estates of Khaybar, especially in the garden oasis of Fadak, were owned by the clan of Banu Nadir who had been among the founders of Yathrib a hundred kilometres further south, the town which grew into the most populous and powerful of all the cities of the Hijaz. There, in the place where Muhammad created his community of Believers, the Jews, at least 60 per cent of the population, were landowners, market overlords, goldmiths and silversmiths speaking and writing yahudiyya, the Jewish dialect of Arabic. But there were also kahinan, as Muslim sources call them – cohanim, the priests, some said by the Talmud to be descendants of thousands who had fled into Arabia when the Temple was destroyed, others sent as Jewish missionaries (for contrary to conventional wisdom there were many) from Tiberias and other towns of Byzantine-Roman Palestine. They were, in effect, the Cohens of Arabia. There was also a Levite community and some of the words at the heart of their faith – nabi for prophet; sadaaqa for righteous obligation, charity and justice; rahman for mercy – would pass intact into Islam. There were Arabian Jewish sailors, sculptors, scribes and poets, merchants, peasant cultivators and pastoral nomads living in tents: a complete culture.

  It seems natural to us to imagine the antiquity of a Christian Arab population because that community survives to this day as a coherent culture. But we have to add to that scene of the fourth to sixth centuries a Jewish Arab population – both ancient and newly converted – energetically contesting with the rival monotheism for the allegiance of pagans. According to the church historian Philostorgius, when the emperor Constantius II sent missionaries to Arabia in 356, they found themselves frustrated by heavy and successful competition from Jewish proselytisers, those whom Muslim sources called the rabban’iyun.

  By the late fourth century, just as life for Jews in Christendom was beginning to turn starkly harsher, Judaism made its most spectacular conquest in Arabia, when the Kingdom of Himyar (corresponding, territorially, to present-day Yemen, and the dominant power on the Arabian peninsula for 250 years) converted. For a long time, it was assumed that the Himyar conversion was confined to a narrow circle around the king – the last of the Tubban line, Tiban As’ad Abu Karib – and perhaps the warrior aristocracy. There is still a lively debate around the extensiveness of Himyar Judaism, but the evidence of both inscriptions and, more significantly, excavations at the mountain capital of Zafar uncovering what seems likely to be an ancient mikvah purification bath, suggests to many recent scholars (though not all) that the dramatic conversion was more profound, widespread and enduring.4 It may have been that Himyarites were devotees of the ‘sun and moon’ as well as practising eighth-day circumcision, but then the cult of the sun, as we have seen from synagogue mosaics of the period, was also uncontroversial in Jewish practice. Indeed, according to the chronicler ibn Abbas, one of the major sources of suspicion that Ka’b al Ahbar, the companion of the caliph Umar at the conquest of Jerusalem, was a false Muslim was because he claimed that at the day of judgement the sun and the moon would be taken to judgement ‘like castrated bulls’, a view said to be typically Jewish!5 Since the Himyarite elite sent their remains to be interred in the great necropolis of Beit Shearim there is no question about the direction of their religious allegiance or the closeness of their connection with Jewish Palestine. Later Muslim sources even write of rabbis coming from Tiberias to instruct the Himyarite court. Whether or not that report is true, it is evident that in the centuries before the appearance of Muhammad in 610, the Jews were far from a tenuous, alien presence amid the ethnically Arab world of the Hijaz and Himyar.

  The conversion of Himyar was only possible because it would never have occurred to the converts that the belief they were adopting was in any way foreign. Jews were so anciently and deeply planted in Arab lands that they had become an organic part of its world. In recent excavations at Zafar, built inside a range of volcanic craters, an intaglio carnelian signet ring was found, dating to the second or third centuries, inlaid with the symbolic image of the Torah shrine, stylised in exactly the same way as it appears on the mosaic floors of early synagogues, and with the name Yishaq bar Hanina engraved in mirror-image Hebrew.6 Jews like Yishaq and his descendants spoke Arabic as well as Aramaic, and some like the warlord Samw’ayal ibn Adiya of Tayma wrote Arabic poetry of enough bragging eloquence to merit a diwan anthology of his verses collected by Muslim redactors of warrior literature. They carried Arabic names, dressed indistinguishably from Arabs, were organised in semi-tribal extended family clans like Arabs, and – not just in Himyar, but throughout the entire region from the Indian Ocean to the Negev and the Sinai – many of them were ethnic Arabs.7

  There had been so many conversions over the centuries since the Hasmoneans forcibly imposed Judaism on the desert-dwelling, ethnically Arab Itureans and Idumeans, that it is impossible to differentiate Arabian Jews who had originated as emigrants from pre- or post-Temple destruction Palestine, and the multitudes of erstwhile pagan Arabs who had chosen Judaism rather than Christianity as their monotheistic faith. Recent studies on the DNA of modern Yemeni Jews by the geneticist Batsheva Bonne-Tamir have confirmed their ancestral origin in south-western Arabian and Bedouin conversions.8 This pre-Islamic merging of Arab and Jewish identities was reinforced when the last and most militantly proselytising Jewish king Dhu Nuwas, Lord of the Curls (also known as Yusef As’ar), was defeated by the Christian Aksumite king of Ethiopia, Kaleb, in an all-out battle in 525. Prior to that, it looked as though the Lord of the Curls would take his aggressive Judaism deep into the Arabian peninsula. Evidently driven by wanting to exact retribution on Christians for the persecution of Jews in the Byzantine Empire, as well as the burning of synagogues in the predominantly Christian city of Najran, Dhu Nuwas took prisoner and executed Christian merchants travelling through Himyar to Ethiopia. Word of the killings lit the fires of revolt in Najran which Dhu Nuwas repressed with terrible ferocity, a massacre that immediately became the stuff of martyrologies spread by surviving local monks and priests. Byzantine power – and access east and south – was now suddenly threatened by a nightmare belligerent combination of Persian and Jewish power. Committed to hold the frontier against the Sassanians, Emperor Justin I appealed to the newly baptised Christian African Aksumite kingdom to intervene. At the head of a huge army (perhaps as many as 60,000) the Aksumite King Kaleb invaded Himyar in 525 and defeated Dhu Nuwas, ending the history of the Jewish Arabian kingdom and the life of its most colourful monarch. The story of Dhu Nuwas riding his horse over a cliff into the sea is merely legend, but the last and most aggressively Jewish king of Himyar certainly did not survive the fate of his vanquished army, and nor did the dream of a Jewish pan-Arabian federated state.

  But the shattering of Jewish Himyar in 525 only sent its Judaically loyal population north into the Hijaz where they augmented an already strongly Jewish–Arab population in the towns and oases. (Some of them certainly remained under the Aksumite Christian lordship but retained their Judaism, for the great antiquity of Yemeni Jews was unbroken from the Middle Ages to their mass emigration after the Second World War.)9 It meant that Judaic monotheism had deeply penetrated Arabia for almost a century before Muhammad declared his revelation in 610 in one of the towns – Makka, or Mecca – in which those Himyarite emigrants had settled. It was precisely because Arabian monotheism (as distinct from the confusing three-in-one version preached by Christianity) had such a strongly Judaic colouring – was in effect Arab Judaism – that Muhammad, who had lived among Jews all his life, could assume at the very least a sympathetic hearing among them, even that they might be the most receptive of the population to his prophecy, not least the part about Islam being the true Abrahamic faith.

 
; It is not hard to see the grounds for Muhammad’s optimism when, in 622, after his failure to win over Mecca, he made the hijra journey north to Yathrib/Medina where, as it would turn out, Islam would triumphantly prevail and create its first governing institutions. It may be that the Jewish clans in Yathrib – and there were many of them – were no longer politically and socially dominant in the city, but there is equally no doubt that they were still there in both economic and cultural force. Islam, then, was born in a Jewish urban crucible. Muhammad’s belief that the Jews would be his most natural allies is explained by an affinity between the two one-God religions. But the connection is even stronger than that. Himyarite-Arabic Judaism may have been, in a deep sense, the direct parent of Islam, for it makes no sense historically to classify Muhammad’s core doctrines as anything but essentially Judaic – evident in the indivisibility of the one unseen omnipotent God (referred to in Himyarite and Arabian Judaism, after all, as ‘rahman, the all-merciful and compassionate who art in heaven and earth’); the coming of the Last Days (a central belief of the Qumran community); the hatred of idolatry; the righteous commandment of charity (sadaaqa in Arabic, tzedaka in Hebrew); the strict prohibition not only against pork but also against consuming meat with its living blood still in the flesh; the insistence on ritual washing and purification, especially before prayer. It is no surprise, therefore, that until his stinging repudiation by the Jewish clans of Yathrib, Muhammad commanded the Believers to pray in the direction of Jerusalem, not least because he thought of himself firmly in the succession of the biblical prophets. Other of his strictures – multiple daily prayers (also required by Zoroastrianism); ritual purifications; a fast on the tenth day of Tishri (the Jewish Day of Atonement), only later replaced by Ramadan, as well as weekly fasts on Mondays and Thursdays; the obligation of circumcision – were all standard Jewish practice.