The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  It is packed full of stories, pictures, maps, images – even when all of those things are in the writing of Judeo-Arabic. It tells us, as the excited and possibly over-optimistic Goitein would insist, about what he called the ‘symbiosis’ of Jewish and Islamic cultures in Egypt and beyond. Symbiosis is a big word – it assumes true, organic and functional interdependence, which may be overstating it – but in comparison, especially, with medieval Christian societies, it is quite true that, in crucial defining ways, Jews and Muslims did indeed live with rather than just rub up against each other.

  In two respects in particular, the countless lives of the two cultures belonged to the same realm: where they lived and how they worked. Unlike their counterparts in the Christian world, the Jews of Islam were not legally confined to any district of a city. If they chose to congregate in a particular quarter it was (as it had been in Antioch and classical Alexandria) for proximity to the synagogue on which so much of their life was centred. In Fustat there were three distinctive communities – Babylonian, Palestinian and, radically different, the Karaites who rejected all post-biblical rabbinical authority. Just which of the rabbanite synagogues a Sicilian or a Syrian or a Yemeni Jew might attach himself or herself to was a matter of taste, or the connections of relatives, friends or business partners. Each of the synagogues, though, had their particular forms of Torah-reading, prayer and incantations.

  Those of the Babylonian or Iraqi Jews had behind them the authority of the heavyweight Talmud, completed in the ninth century, and the academies of Sura and Pumbedita were said (often, of course, by those who wouldn’t be seen dead there) to be grander, graver, and very much longer than the Palestinians’. The Babylonians had the cantors, but the Palestinians had choirs of boys, the most beautiful (so they said) scrolls of the law, and since they read the Torah over three years, their portions were shorter. The Karaites preserved many of the customs which they insisted had been copied by the Muslims rather than the other way round: the removal of shoes, prostration and the like.

  The Ben Ezra synagogue of the Geniza in Fustat was deep in the area known as ‘The Fortress of the Lamp’ and close to a number of churches (as it still is). The houses of worship of both dhimmi communities were not separated from the rest of Muslim Fustat. Since there was no Jewish call to prayer they were hardly bothered by the ban on building taller than any mosque – they had no need of a tower. As elsewhere and in other times and places, the synagogue functioned as far more than a prayer house: as a school (for girls, taught by the same women teachers who taught small children, as well as boys); a hostel for Jewish travellers from afar; and, most important, a court which sat twice a week, all its beauty and authority concentrated on the interior.

  Though it has been restored and partially rebuilt many times, especially after a major fire in the late nineteenth century, the Ben Ezra synagogue is said to have preserved the essential aspect of the great medieval synagogue it once was. The arched space has at its centre the bema reading table, which, originally movable, became fixed in finely fashioned and polished marble. At the far end was the Ark, the aron hakodesh. Congregants stood around the perimeter as they had in Sepphoris and Antioch or sat on the cushions and rugs which were provided by members of the community. Whether or not it was in response to Islamic custom, men and women in the world of the Geniza had come to be separated, the women provided with a wooden gallery and a carved screen through which they could follow the prayers, chants and readings – since many of them had Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic and the more learned some Aramaic. Bronze oil lamps lit the space, casting a glow on the textiles, stone and carved wood surfaces, throwing reflections on the crowns and pomegranate bell rimmonim decorating the finials of the Torah as it was carried around the synagogue.

  So although there was a Jewish presence concentrated in one area, Jews and Muslims lived among each other. The Geniza documents reveal that sometimes a Jew lived above a Muslim-owned shop or vice versa. A Jewish judge lived in the street of perfumers, many but not all of whom were Jewish; another prominent Jew lived in the street of the wax-makers. And precisely because Jews were not restricted in their occupations (the bearing of arms aside), very often they shared a workshop with Muslims or were business partners in short-term ventures and commercial voyages. Though there were some trades and industries in which Jews were conspicuous – textiles and dyeing above all, but also drugs and pharmaceuticals, and also in the closely related scent and perfume trade, shipping ambergris from the Hispanic Atlantic, frankincense from Arabia, musk from further east – there were so many other professions and businesses practised by Jews that because they were gathered in streets devoted to their speciality, and to the dar houses or bazaars, they must of necessity have worked and sold alongside Muslims and Christians in the same line of trade. The Jewish crafts and trades are so richly various that just to list them is to smell them and feel them: sugar-making; paper shipping; the making of leather bottles; copper, tin and the bronzeware that used both; the making of kohlsticks; owning and even crewing merchant ships; import and export of spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom; also fine carpentry; glass-making (a big Jewish speciality); gems, corals and crystals (the Jews dominated the gemstone bazaar); confectionery and preserves, almond-paste sweets, and rose marmalade, another big favourite of sellers and customers alike.

  There was nowhere Jews wouldn’t go for something precious to sell, some commodity that would find its market either in Fustat itself or shipped on west and north. If it took four months to get to Sumatra, a long and dangerous voyage, for the best camphor in the world, then off they went. There were three great geographical axes of long-distance trade. One went west to Sicily, Tunisia, Morocco and sometimes farther on to Muslim Spain, so that the Geniza business records are full of dynasties with relatives posted all along this route. A second, much more ancient trade, was north-east to Syria and Palestine and onwards to Iraq and Iran, connecting at the Caucasus with the silk road routes from the Far East. A third was the most adventurous of all: south-east, down the Red Sea to Aden and across the Indian Ocean to the Malabar and Coromandel coast, the source of many of the most valuable bulk spices. Along the way at the Horn of Africa, it might have been possible to trade for the Sudanese gold that everyone wanted a piece of. All sorts of commercial agents were posted en route and at the point of purchase. It was assumed that the most reliable would be drawn from members of the extended family – sons, but also cousins, uncles and nephews – an assumption regularly belied by the archive of intra-family disputes and feuds found in the Geniza. More dependable (though not immune from complaint) were family slaves, established at port offices and houses throughout the stations of a long-distance business, thought of as part of the dynastic business and personally valued as such, though not always enough to earn their freedom. Back in Fustat, the powerful figure of the wakil acted as official warehouse keeper of goods in transit and destined for the home markets; there was also a kind of clearing house and authorisation centre for payments. But the distances were so great, and sending hard money abroad through a third party (for it was forbidden to Jews) so hazardous, that networks of credit developed along the route, working on a basis of personal or familial trust and expressed – seemingly for the first time – in paper promissory notes and obligations, in effect the first cheques.

  Every kind and condition of working Jew appears at some point in the melee of the Geniza papers, which itself is a clue to something important about Jewish life in the Islamic world: even when it was in business, money was not the be-all and end-all. Not that either the little or the big fishes (and there were some very big ones indeed) were exactly indifferent to material fortune, but in the synagogue, in the yeshiva, in their feasts, fasts and ceremonies, listening to the Saturday-afternoon derash, paying respect to the muqaddam who would lead prayer and make decisions about marriages and divorces, waiting on the rav to give his response to a question, or petitioning the secular rayyis – the big-shots with connections to high-ups at co
urt – on behalf of distressed family or friends in some far-off place who might need money, intercession or liberation from cruel captivity, the Jewish world crystallised around its ancient sense of ethics. Its wealth, as ever, was moral and spiritual. And so we should not be surprised to discover that the status enjoyed by even the grandest of the grand came not from the size of their fortune so much as their reputation as a scholar, a wise and pious man or woman. Nor should we be amazed to find hard-pressed and preoccupied businessmen taking time off to compose poetry. Abraham ben Yiju, the India trader who settled on the Malabar coast for many years, was much given to trying his hand at poetry; some poems were flagrantly derivative of the great payetanim writers of liturgical verses, others closer to Arabic style. But then ben Yiju evidently had a romantic side, manumitting his Indian slave handmaid, Ashu, before her conversion into the Jewess Berakha (Blessing) and marrying her. In Aden, this did nothing to dispel the narrow-minded suspicions of censorious locals who refused to regard either Berakha or their son Abu as legitimate. ‘They stunned and hammered me,’ ben Yiju wrote in a verse vindication, ‘struck me . . . And plundered and tangled me . . . maligned me.’ But there were many less colourful than ben Yiju, for whom poetry and philosophical learning was not just a cultural adornment but a basic humane accomplishment without which wealth was merely a kind of gilded boorishness. So the men of trade, with their thousand-dinar fortunes, hunted for scholars as husbands for their daughters and steeped themselves in Talmud and midrash commentaries on the Bible texts. They craved respect in the Beit Hamidrash as much as in the marketplace and the funduq warehouse. They wanted their names inscribed in reverent memory.

  Distances meant absences. Long periods of separation often led to estrangements and disruptions of family life; uncertainties for the women whether their spouse was alive or not; agonising solitude, painful decisions about whether or not to accept the worst and seek the formal permission of the court to be free to remarry, and anxieties as to whether their absent husbands might themselves take a permitted second wife. Milah had moved away from Fustat to Alexandria, wanting to give her seven-year-old a schooling superior to local instruction. Once there, however, she was racked by fears that her husband would marry again and take the boy back from her.18 The nagging sorrow of separation went both ways, though. An advocate, married to the daughter of a judge in the Nile delta town of al-Mahalla, moved to Cairo to better his own career and into an abyss of miserable longing for the wife he had left behind, Umm Thana.19 The age of the lonely husband is not known but he certainly rode the adolescent roller coaster of torment between self-pity – ‘there is no one who loves me O Umm Thana except you’ – aggrieved petulance (he knows she is virtuous but so is he) and desperate threats of quasi-suicidal disappearance. Our unhappy hubby had obviously been drinking deep of Arabic and perhaps Hebrew poetry! – ‘Come then, or else I will forsake this country and vanish.’ But such vanishing acts had certainly been known. Less histrionic but deeply touching was the merchant for whom Friday night when, in the absence of his wife he had to light the Sabbath candles himself, was the worst ordeal, because in keeping with the strictures of the Mishnah, that was the night recommended for onah, the giving and taking of sexual bliss. So the act of celebrating the arrival of the holy day meant the solitary husband being eaten up with desire, and perhaps, guiltily and in violation of one of the strictest religious prohibitions, doing something about it. ‘When I light the candle and put it on whatever table God has provided, then I think about you. God only knows what comes over me.’

  Emotional blackmail could work both ways. The Geniza has letters from wives who responded to their husbands’ endless moaning about the aches and pains of body, brain and heart, by sighing, ‘listen if you think you’ve got troubles, try mine’.20 And, it need hardly be said that the Geniza has its share of grieving Jewish mothers complaining their sons don’t write. One peerless virtuoso of the maternal guilt trip, neglected by her bad boy right through the summer when she expected at least one letter (was that too much to ask, already?), complained, ‘You seem to be unaware that when I get a letter from you it is a substitute for seeing your face.’ Don’t worry, be cheerful, do your thing, whatever, I’m all right, this is just KILLING me. ‘You don’t realise my very life depends on getting news about you . . . Do not kill me before my time.’ So all right if you won’t send a letter at least, if it’s not too much bother, Mr Always Busy Big Shot, at least send your dirty laundry, a stained shirt or two, so a poor abandoned mother could summon up her boy’s body and have her ‘spirits restored’. What an artist.21

  The Geniza papers are full of every kind of strong woman, most of whom being illiterate and not generally encouraged to acquire writing skills, would have had letters written for them by scribes. But some of the brightest were certainly fully literate for there are elementary school teachers among the women of the Geniza, some instructing boys as well as girls, although one, the daughter of the principal of the Baghdad yeshivah, taught the boys from a window, screened, so that her instruction came from an invisible mouth. Others with less cultural pretensions worked outside the family home as embroiderers and weavers, but not as some sort of ornamental pastime; rather with the wholly practical aim of adding to household income. Others made a reputation as a ‘broker’ which, since it meant advertising and crying up the wares in the market and in the bazaars, presupposed they worked and walked in the world of men. By Jewish tradition women were required to dress modestly but covering headdresses (as with the orders for turbans) could be designed for colourful elegance with a nod to the demands of propriety.

  And every so often there bursts from the Geniza outsize personalities who belie all the commonplaces about family life in this world. One of the ‘brokers’ was evidently a fully-fledged businesswoman-banker, not just a marketing woman – since she became very wealthy, leaving a fortune of some 700 dinars. Her name was Karima though she was more widely known as Al Wuhsha the Broker, the daughter of a family of bankers, and Goitein says that she recurs more often in the papers of her time than anyone else.22 And no wonder, for she was as scandalous as she was successful and powerful. An early marriage of the usual kind proved brief and presumably unhappy since she took as lover one Hassun of Ascalon and became pregnant by him. Even during the pregnancy (during which she appeared, outrageously, at the Iraqi synagogue on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, clearly not much into penitential prayers) the always practical Wuhsha began to worry that the illegitimacy of the child would disqualify him or her from receiving a proper share of inheritance.23 She and Hassun had gone through some form of ceremony before an Islamic official, but on the advice of an acquaintance known as the ‘Diadem’ who was familiar with the requirements of Jewish law (not that Wuhsha was any slouch in that department herself ), she arranged to be discovered in bed with Hassun, thereby proving that it was after all a Jew who was the natural father of their boy Abu.

  Once he had served his purpose Wuhsha unburdened herself of Hassun who slunk off (or possibly ran for his life) back to Palestine. She never married again, though there was a daughter too. She cut a dangerous, glamorous figure in Fustat, notorious enough to be denied much fellowship of the synagogue. But she knew very well how to take revenge on the self-righteous for her ostracism. In her will (which specified that Hassun should be left ‘not a penny’ – what had he done?), Wuhsha bequeathed funds to the synagogue which had kept her at arm’s length – money for oil lamps so that young men could study deep into the night, and for the upkeep of the fabric – and generously enough that the elders could not, in all conscience, decline the gift. On her death, and surely well before it, the invincible donor had the satisfaction of knowing that the name of Al Wuhsha the Broker would be invoked in both inscription and spoken remembrance on all the great days of communal life.

  III. What Hebrew Could Say

  Sometime around the middle of the tenth century, a Jew at the western end of the known world took up his quill, dipped it in gall ink,
and wrote to another Jew, at the eastern end, who was, as it happens, also a king. The writer, Menahem ibn Saruq, was undertaking the task for his patron and master Hasdai ibn Shaprut, indispensable man to the caliph of Al-Andalus in the Iberian peninsula, Abdalrahman III. It was what he was paid to do, illiberally, he sometimes thought. Menahem was accustomed to addressing letters to the mighty, since Hasdai was often trusted by the caliph to negotiate with Christian powers: the emperor of the ‘Romans’ in Constantinople, or the Spanish king of Leon to the north. Direct contact between the Christians and Muslims was unthinkable, but the Jew Hasdai, who spoke every tongue imaginable and seemed to have kin or agents in every port and town of the world, and who was famous for cloaking his astuteness in disarming courtesy, could do the caliph’s diplomatic bidding where Muslim emissaries were barred. Hasdai would unravel the knot of difficulty. The Jew understood the political balm of gifts. His high taste and discernment would select the right balm for the king of the Franks or the Alans, and he would cast an eye on what was received in return before passing the gift on to his master. And then a prisoner would be released, or a tactical alliance could be arranged with the Byzantine empress, directed against their common adversary, the usurping Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. One way or another matters got settled, but it was always Menahem, the pen of his master’s thoughts, who summoned the words which opened the gates of understanding.