by Simon Schama
This latest task, the letter of introduction, greeting and enquiry to Joseph, the Jewish king of the Khazars, demanded more than the customary formalities. Hasdai’s passions and yearnings, Menahem knew, were engaged in this matter, not just his formidable commercial and strategic intelligence. From one such gift-bearing embassy – Persian Khorazan – Hasdai had learned of a vast Jewish kingdom lying on the high grasslands of western Asia, watered by the lower Volga, bordered by the Caspian (then known as Jorjan) Sea to the east, the Black or ‘Constantine’ Sea to the west and the Caucasus mountains to the north. All of Crimea, and apparently the city of Kiev, lay in its power. The unexpected news, confirmed in 948 by a Khazar Jew who met with one of Hasdai’s own men in Constantinople, had excited and dumbfounded the caliph’s man, who prided himself on his knowledge of the geography of the dispersion. The sense that the entire earth was filled with the comings and goings of Jews, forever busy except on the days of Sabbath, fasts and feasts, turned the bitterness of exile into a consolation. But to hear of a Jewish state lying to the east of Slavs, Christians and Muslims was as though the body of the Jews had suddenly extended an arm unimaginably far into Asia. ‘We were amazed, we lifted up our head, our spirit revived and our hand strengthened.’
From the Khazar in Constantinople Hasdai learned that these distant Jews had originally been tented warriors, pagan devotees of the sky god Tungri and his shamans, dwelling for the most part in yurts. Their ‘emperor’, or khagan, was himself a sacred figure, but there were surprising limits to his power. On succeeding he would be asked by the lords how long he intended to rule and should he outstay his promise would be swiftly killed. Now and again he would face a challenge from his general, the bek, who himself aspired to regal authority. Over the past few generations, towns like the capital, Atil, had been planted in this high country of the kaghanate where brick palaces overlooked the herds and fields of a prospering people. It was almost as much of a miracle as the kingdoms of lost Jews that the traveller Eldad the Danite had sworn worshipped the one true Almighty God on the scorching uplands of Africa. Hasdai wanted to be sure that this latest information was no travellers’ tall tale, and questioned another embassy from Constantinople, recently come to Cordoba, who assured him that the Jewish kingdom of Al Kuzari was indeed real, that it lay fifteen days’ sea voyage from their own capital, that the present ruler was called Joseph and that hides, fish ‘and wares of every kind’ were sent from their land. Following this information, Hasdai lost no time in sending his own men to Constantinople with orders to make their way to the realm of the Khazars. But after six months attempting to organise the journey they were told imperiously to desist, that it would be too dangerous to attempt for ‘the sea was stormy’ and unnavigable in the present season. Hasdai suspected that the perils were all in the minds of the Christian empire, which though on friendly terms with the Khazars, might have been unsettled by the prospect of a connection between the Muslim caliphate of Al-Andalus and a Jewish warrior state to the east.
But Hasdai was haunted by the vision of that Jewish kingdom and now it was Menahem’s task to prise open with his words the gates that the Christians had shut. They would have to be Hebrew words, too, not the usual language of diplomatic exchanges, but how else could there be understanding between the Jews of Al-Andalus and Khazaria? And who better than Menahem ibn Saruq, since his life’s work was the first ever Hebrew dictionary? He had come to Cordoba as a young man from Tortosa, far to the north-west. There, in the great city of the Umayyad caliph, amid the garden pools and dovecots, Hasdai’s father, Isaac ibn Shaprut, had taken Menahem under his wing, in return for the composition of occasional poems and ceremonious inscriptions, including one celebrating Isaac’s donation to the grandest of Cordoba’s synagogues. When Isaac died, Menahem composed the proper eulogy and did the same to console Hasdai for the loss of his mother. All he had wanted to do at that point was go back to Tortosa and make whatever modest living was needed to allow him to pursue his real passion of Hebrew grammar.
Then Hasdai, himself deeply versed in Torah and Talmud, rose to unexpected eminence at the caliph’s court. There were two things expected of Jews in the Muslim world, two ways they might advance: medicine and money. Hasdai’s entrance was afforded by the first and his staying power guaranteed by the second. Vipers’ flesh had much to do with it, for that was the indispensable ingredient (it was said) of the theriacum, the miraculous cure-all common in antiquity but since lost to physicians. Theriacum was an antidote for both known and presumptively unknown poisons – a regular hazard of life at the caliph’s court – but it would perform all manner of wonders: make barren women fertile and impotent men virile; banish the falling sickness; give the hard of hearing the alertness of a deer in the forest; loosen the costive bowel and brighten the eye. And Hasdai ibn Shaprut, physician, who had studied the medicine of the Greeks and Romans – as well as being a man of commerce, literary refinement and pious learning – claimed to bring its secrets to the court of Abdalrahman III. Whether or not the drug performed as advertised, no one, not even jealous court physicians, ever accused Hasdai of pharmaceutical deceit. On the contrary, once brought to the caliph’s attention, his usefulness brought him further advancement. If there was odium to be risked from collecting taxes, let the Jews take the chance. Thus Hasdai was given the post of customs collector for the river trade on the Guadalquivir flowing through Cordoba, and in tandem the treasury of the caliph and the fortunes of the Jew prospered.
Menahem’s letter to King Joseph shows every sign of artful calculation. Hasdai needed to present himself as the eminence of the Jews of Cordoba, perhaps of Al-Andalus in its entirety, but without presuming to address the king as an equal. On the contrary, the panegyric had to be in the manner of a literary abasement without, however, any disagreeable fawning. And Menahem was pleased enough with his efforts to slip a little self-credit into the opening flourish by making an acrostic, spelling out, in the initial letters of each line, not merely the name of Hasdai ibn Shaprut but that of Menahem ibn Saruq as if they were of comparable station – a subtle impertinence he would live to regret. The first task of the letter, however, was to establish a Jewish comity, to place the Andalusian Jews in the long line of history.
I Hasdai, son of Isaac, may his memory be blessed, son of Ezra, may his memory be blessed, belonging to the exiled Jews of Jerusalem in Spain, a servant of my Lord the King, bow to the earth before him and prostrate myself towards the abode of Your Majesty. From a distant land I rejoice in your tranquillity and magnificence and stretch forth my hands to God in heaven that he may prolong your reign in Israel.
But who am I and what is my life that I should dare to write a letter to my Lord the King? I rely however on the integrity and uprightness of my object. How indeed can an idea be expressed in fair words by those who have wandered after the glory of the kingdom has departed, who have long suffered afflictions and calamities? . . . We are indeed the remnant of captive Israelites . . . dwelling peacefully in the land of our sojourning for our God has not forsaken us nor has his shadow departed from us.
With a few lines Menahem turned Hasdai into a noble of the exile, worthy to address himself to a king. An ancient tradition asserted that the first Jews in Spain had been taken there in the time of Titus the Conqueror on the request of his consuls who believed they had the makings of useful colonists. Nonetheless they had suffered through the Roman era and then, more bitterly, through the centuries of the barbarian Visigoths, who, as Christians, inflicted a persecution on the small Jewish population. Menahem attached this history to the Bible’s long chain of calamities laid across the backs of the Jews by God to punish their perennial transgressions. But when ‘God saw their misery and toil and that they were helpless, He led me [i.e. Hasdai] to present myself before the king and has graciously turned his heart to me not because of my own righteousness but for his mercy and the sake of his covenant. By this covenant the hands of the oppressors were relaxed . . . and through the mercy of our G
od the yoke was lightened.’ Then followed, in Menahem’s most lyrical vein, an extravagant, elated, encomium to Al-Andalus. If it was not true Zion flowing with milk and honey, of all possible places of exile, Sefarad ‘as it is called in the sacred tongue’ was surely the best, a treasure house of nature, a place of repose.
The land is rich, abounding in rivers, springs and aqueducts, a land of corn and oil and wine, of fruits and all manner of delicacies, pleasure gardens and orchards, fruitful trees of every kind including the leaves of the tree upon which the silkworm feeds of which we have great abundance. In the mountains and woods of our country cochineal is gathered in great quantity; there are also mountains covered by crocus and with veins of silver, gold, copper, iron, tin, lead, sulphur, porphyry, marble and crystal. Merchants congregate in it and traffickers from the ends of the earth from Egypt and neighbouring countries bringing spices, precious stones, magnificent wares for kings and princes and all the desirable things of Egypt. Our king has collected such large treasure of silver, gold and precious valuables such as no king had ever amassed.24
Notwithstanding all this abundance, and the mild benevolence of the caliph, should it be true that the ‘Israelitish exiles anywhere form one independent kingdom and are not subject to a foreign ruler . . . then despising all my own glory abandoning my high estate, leaving my family I would go over mountains, hills, through seas and lands till I should arrive at the place where my Lord the King resides that I might see not just his glory and magnificence but also the tranquillity of the Israelites. On beholding this my eyes would brighten my loins would exult my lips would pour forth praises to God.’
There was so much Hasdai wanted to know about this Jewish realm of the east. How extensive was the kingdom, how populous, how many cities and towns were within its borders, how was it governed? But there was another question he hoped King Joseph might be able to answer, a computation of the almanac of redemption. It had been almost a millennium since the Romans had destroyed the Temple. Perhaps the Almighty worked in round numbers? Might the day of the Messiah be at last drawing near? Was the correspondence of two Jewish eminences stretched across the world itself a sign? For all his understanding of heavenly arithmetic, Hasdai still felt himself in the dark. Perhaps King Joseph – who must surely have been appointed by God, a Solomon of the east – had some divination, some particular knowledge of the hastening of the day for ‘which we have been waiting so many years while we have gone from one captivity to the next, from one exile to another’?25
King Joseph, as it turns out, was in no position to contemplate the long-term calendar of Jewish history, for his own realm was about to join the chronicle of its disasters. Beset by the armies of Kievan Rus (Scandinavian and Slav), and periodically by the Byzantines, the Khazar Empire – Jewish for probably only a century – was already contracting. Within the next half-century it would be entirely overrun and the royal capital of Atil put to the sack.26 Khazars would commemorate the disaster of a thousand years before all too exactly. Most of the population would remain and submit to their conquerors and their religions, although some stubbornly Jewish Khazars became in their turn wanderers, two of them showing up in Toledo in the next century as students, their presence in Spain – a possible spur for the Kuzari, the poet Yehudah Halevi’s great philosophical dialogue-novel defending his own Judaism, written around 1140.
Yet hard-pressed though he was, it seems that King Joseph did have the time and desire to respond to Hasdai, in some form or other, over the thousands of miles that separated them. Two versions of a ‘reply’ exist, one published as long ago as 1577, a fuller version in the late nineteenth century.27 In both King Joseph himself relates angelic visions which prompted an ancestor, King Bulan, to be drawn towards the religion of one God. He was succeeded by a pious son, Ovadiah, who stages a debate between spokesmen for the Muslim, Christian and Jewish religions in which the other two monotheisms expressed their view that the faith of Israel was to be preferred over that of their immediate rival. Ovadiah (who seems to have artfully staged the event with prior knowledge of its outcome) could then publicly choose Judaism.
As fantastical as all this seems, at least some of the history was not fable but the truth. In 837 and 838, coins (discovered in a number of hoards from Crimea to Viking Scandinavia) were overstruck bearing the legend ‘Moses is the Messenger of God’ on one side and ‘Land of the Khazars’ on the other. Thus Moses displaced Muhammad in the familiar affirmation and evidently some sort of conversion took place in the first half of the ninth century. More information on how and when is supplied by tantalising fragments of five letters evidently not from the hand of the Khazar king himself but almost certainly dictated by him, and discovered by Solomon Schechter in the vast pile of the Cairo Geniza. Those letters make it apparent that there was indeed written contact between Jewish Khazaria and Cordoba. Written in Hebrew (this itself is something of a miracle) the author identifies himself as a Khazar Jew, but instead of a sudden epiphanous conversion, tells a more drawn-out history of a ‘return’ to Judaism. It was when the Byzantines defeated the Persians in the middle of the seventh century, and the emperor Heraclius’ policy of forced conversion was at hand, that Greek-speaking Jews in some numbers fled from places in the Balkans and Bosporan Crimea, especially the town of Pantikapeum where they prospered for centuries, over the Caucasus to the safety of the still pagan Khazaria.28 There they received a hospitable welcome and remained for many generations, intermarrying and, in the words of one of the fragments, ‘became one people’, most of them, as is the way, losing the letter of strict observance which became little more than the practice of circumcision and keeping the Sabbath. But precisely because over time they had become fully Khazar, one of the Jews became a bek of their armies and after a particularly spectacular victory, was elevated to the kingship. The bek who became known by the Hebrew word for king, melekh, is likely to have been the Bulan in the ‘reply’, and although estranged from the religion was encouraged by his wife Serakh, also of Jewish descent but more faithful, to stage the famous debate which might indeed have been a historical event. Torah scrolls were produced from a Qumran-like cave library that rose from the plains of Tiyul and became the means of full instruction. Bulan took the theophoric name of King Sabriel, circumcised himself and his nobles, imported ‘sages’ from Baghdad and Persia, built synagogues and a grand sanctuary and kept fasts and feasts. Hanukkah and Passover especially were held in such importance that the bek would come from the plains to Atil for their celebration. The Geniza fragments make it clear that the Judaising reforms extended through the whole population (which in any case had a kernel of Jews from the Armenian flight), and that some six kings followed Bulan/Sabriel in the same path called by Hebrew names – Obadiah, Hezekiah, Menashe, Benjamin, Aaron and eventually Joseph. But the century of official Jewish Khazaria may not have been long enough to have rooted itself sufficiently to withstand the invasions from the Rus. When that happened, just two decades after the opening between Cordoba and Atil, it is impossible to say what proportion of the Khazar Jews left and how many stayed under the new religions.
If Jewish Khazars were on the threshold of disaster at exactly the moment when they made themselves known to the Jews of Al-Andalus, so was the man whose Hebrew had made the connection. It was not long after the Khazar correspondence that Hasdai imported from Baghdad a new and younger light of Hebrew writing, Dunash ben Labrat, and, as it turned out, there was no room for both Menahem and Dunash in Hasdai’s circle. They were oil and water, and, more ominously for Menahem, Dunash represented a wholly new way of Hebrew writing. His first name suggests a Berber origin and he had been born in Fez, but Dunash had come of age as a writer in Babylonian Sura where he studied with the great sage Saadia the Gaon. The teacher was himself the embodiment of finding a way to strengthen the teaching of both Torah and Talmud yet turn it confidently towards the philosophical and literary culture in which he lived. This was, momentously, the rediscovery of Greek philosophy transmitted
through Syriac Arab sources. No one could remotely accuse the deeply pious and learned Saadia of flirting with alien wisdoms (although they would accuse Dunash of exactly that), but Saadia’s great work, Beliefs and Opinions, was the first attempt since Philo of Alexandria almost a millennium earlier to justify the core principles of Judaism through rational enquiry, indeed to make the reasoning method the sign of God’s particular blessing. Significantly, although Saadia was himself an unimpeachable master of the Talmud and even the definer of its canon, his book returns instead to the Torah and the Bible, possibly as a direct response to the new sect of the Karaites who, from around the ninth century, rejected post-biblical rabbinical commentaries and laws entirely. Even more significantly, in the Graeco-Arabic manner, it follows the long treatise on biblical meanings with a guide on how to lead a truly Jewish contemporary life. Chapters – and for the first time this is a Hebrew book, not a scroll – on sexual desire, the urge to wealth, right dealing with neighbours and the like depart entirely from the digressive, elaborate bed of Talmudic discussion and just give clear directions, invariably pointing to restraint while acknowledging the sensual and instinctive force of those cravings.