by Simon Schama
As you walked you trampled on a body or a skull and heard the screams of the mortally wounded.37
Naghrela was both the beneficiary of the endless wars of the Zirid Berber amirs, and the predictable victim of their relentlessness. The last campaigns, when he was in his middle age and saddle-sore, exhausted him and turned his mind to brooding on the futility of triumph when the ultimate victory was always Death’s. Some of the most touching reports from the field he sent to his son Yehosef, born in 1044 and still a youth when his father was a greybeard veteran. In the end, the Naghrela story – and by extension the story of the Jews in Zirid Granada – is all about a father and his son.
It is because of Yehosef that we know as much as we do of the father, for he was his anthologist, editor, the creator of the two diwan anthologies, whose Bible-invoking titles The Little Book of Proverbs and The Little Book of Ecclesiastes (meditations) were presumably Shmuel’s idea. So it is the son who supplies the poem testifying the strictness of the homework instructions of the father, even, or especially, while on campaign. From the battlefield itself he sends Yehosef a book of Arab poetry ‘copied by me while the sword was drawn’ to ensure his son has sufficient mastery to succeed him. ‘Even as the grave yawns about me I can’t stop educating you.’ (These Jewish fathers!) ‘Mark what I say, the cultured man is like a fruiting tree; even its leaves will heal the sick / while fools are like forest wood good only to be consumed by fire.’38 The most beautiful of all moments of father–son communion is set beside a garden pool. Yehosef – who evidently can wind his father round his finger – beckons him in: ‘It’s never been so full of flowers . . . and I’ve put in a lawn I can loll on / and have run a brimming channel around it / that rims it like the sky the earth.’ They stretch out under pomegranate and chestnut while a servant fills two crystal cups, sets them on a ‘raft of mottled reeds / And floated them to us across the water / As if they were two brides on palanquins / And we their grooms / we tossed them down / And stowed them with the empties on the deck, for their return to the barquetender / who in a jiffy filled them up / and with a “Down the hatch sirs!” / sent them back’.39
It is a scene of the sweetest intimacy and companionship; a last glimpse before trouble comes calling. Worn out, brooding darkly on his end, Shmuel ibn Naghrela died in 1056, leaving his twenty-one-year-old boy as successor. For all the years of close tutelage Yehosef seems not to have been ready to assume the mantle, although the only accounts we have of the misrule of Yehosef the wazir come from bitterly alienated Arab sources. Those chronicles paint a portrait of an arrogant, overbearing young man, presumptuous, corrupt and even sinister, making the amir his creature by having him drink himself into a stupor, perhaps lacing the wine with some mysterious Jewish potion designed to keep him tame and dependent. Suddenly all the proscriptions forbidding a proper Muslim ruler from putting Jews in positions of authority over Believers were invoked, ancient stereotypes refreshed by new venom. The hatred spilled over from Yehosef himself to all his co-religionists who were subjected to ferocious diatribes cataloguing all the ancient prejudices against the Jews. Ibn Hazm, Shmuel’s old literary sparring partner, was especially vicious. The Jews, he wrote, ‘are prone to lie . . . [and] whenever there is difficulty they want to wriggle out of it’. Their Torah is full of ignorance and immorality. ‘By God it is the way of the Jews. You will not find among them with rare exceptions anyone but a treacherous villain . . . Let any prince upon whom God has bestowed his bounty . . . get away from this dirty stinking crew beset with God’s anger and curse, wretchedness and misfortune, filth and dirt like no other people there has ever been. Let him [the Jew] know that the garments in which God has wrapped him are more contagious than elephantiasis.’40 Abu Ishaq al Ebiri was an even more violent castigator of the amir for ‘choosing an infidel as his katib . . . the earth trembles at this immorality’. How dare the Jews (now some thousands in their quarter on the hill) give themselves airs and graces when ‘they used to wander around in tatters . . . covered with contempt and humiliation they would rummage among the dungheaps for a bit of filthy rag to serve as a shroud for the burial of their dead . . . Pious Muslims are in awe of the vile infidel ape who has seized Granada’s revenues . . . dressing in exquisite garments while you are forced to wear the basest clothes . . . therefore make haste to kill him, slaughter and sacrifice him and offer him, fat ram that he is.’ The same had to be done to all his kind: ‘do not consider killing them as treachery / no it would be treachery to leave them scoffing’.41
The demonisation worked. In December 1066, ten years after becoming wazir, Yehosef was assassinated, and the Jewish area subjected to a mob attack in which the lives of most of Granada’s Jewish community were taken, some four thousand according to the not necessarily reliable Arab sources. We will never know for sure how high-handed and arbitrary Yehosef ibn Naghrela was, for the accounts of his misrule came from bitterly disaffected quarters. Rather than any particular misdeed, it may have been just the fact of a Jewish dynastic succession in the governance of Granada which fed suspicions of Naghrela’s plotting to turn it into a Jewish state.
There was, after all, one of Yehosef’s pet projects which might have confirmed those suspicions. On the Sabika hill stood the ruins of a small ninth-century fortress known from its brick as Al-Hamra, the red one. In his passion to ground the Zirid dynasty in Granada’s antiquity, Shmuel had excavated what was left of its foundations, planning to create a new palace that would rise from the ruins. Since the Jewish quarter was nearby it would do no harm to them to be associated with this act of architectural piety and power. The plans evidently passed to Yehosef who may have begun to expand them to include a full palace and gardens. Thus it was that the Alhambra began as a Judeo-Muslim project, but it could have been this very fact, the creation of a fortified residence from which the Jew and his like could run the kingdom as their fief, which provoked the murderous backlash. After the bloodshed and the plunder, Jews would return to Granada, but plans for the Alhambra were put into abeyance. Two successive waves of conquerors from Morocco, the Almoravids who took the city in 1070 and the even more militantly puritanical Almohades in the following century, meant that it would be two centuries before the Naghrela vision for a palace on the hill would be realised under the Nasrid dynasty, and achieve in Andalusia the most perfect expression of Muslim architectural poetics the world has ever seen.
V. Blown Over the Deep: The Wandering of Yehudah Halevi
The secluded courtyard garden, was the place where the Jews of Al-Andalus best fitted the Muslim world. Like the poetry their writers had mastered, it had form and measure within which nature’s profusion blossomed. Pomegranate trees overhung the paths and pools, shedding oily leaves. Jasmine climbed the brick walls, and as the sun dimmed over Granada and Cordoba, its intense, complicated perfume would suddenly catch the senses unawares. The strings of an oud would begin their chords while the heel of a hand beat a rhythm on a dull drum. Guests would arrange themselves on cushions, receive the first goblets of wine from the ‘gazelles’ and when the songs and the wine had diffused woozy pleasure through the company, recitations might begin on the usual matters: the cruelty of beauty, the torment of desire, the fullness of lips, the suppleness of limbs, the velvety night, the feckless vanity of the beloved, the consoling cup. The Hebrew was sonorous, the Arabic interpellations witty. The poets rose to the challenge to best their friends and rivals and shrugged off defeats. The poetical Jews seemed as pleasurably intertwined with this world as the snaking forms of the sash poems, the muwashshah, that epitomised it.
This is what the adolescent Yehudah Halevi, son of Levites, must have expected when he made the long journey south to Granada from his home town of Tudela in Christian Navarre, as the first black hairs popped forth on his chin, an event demanding, and getting, a verse or two. It had been twenty years since the Granada massacre. The terror had abated and Jews who had fled returned to the Sabika hill. They prayed, they traded, they still collected taxes but
were nervously diplomatic about the manner in which they went about that business. They avoided extravagance. They even continued to write poetry. The most accomplished among them, Moshe ibn Ezra, was from an old Granada courtier family which had somehow survived the throat-slittings of 1066 and had returned to quiet, careful, prospering work. Twenty years older than Halevi, ibn Ezra’s attention had been caught by the boy’s poems, presumptuous self-introductions, persistently sent from the north. They were good enough, for an invitation had been sent to the precocious teenager who, on arrival, sometime around 1088–9, turned out to be by turns playful and devout. He had the old refrains down pat, but what made Halevi different was his eye–hand coordination. He saw things differently and then he found the words for them. A ‘gazelle’ would wash her clothes in the pool of her rejected lover’s tears, and then would lay them out to dry in the heat of her own splendour. Halevi was sunstruck, heat-happy. Auburn hair fell over a damp ‘crystal’ brow (fire and ice always a good combo) and then at night’s end would dissolve into the perfectly exhilarating sunrise, the afterburn of desire: ‘reddening the clouds with flames’.
Halevi was welcomed into the garden of ibn Ezra’s poetry and into his house. He may even have briefly served as the older man’s secretary, the standard apprenticeship for such protégés. But he barely had time to smell the jasmine before the walled peace was broken forever and Jewish Granada finished. At the end of the eleventh century what had happened to the Umayyads at the beginning repeated itself. Berber warriors from Morocco, called in to reinforce the Muslim states against Christian advances, succeeded all too well, turning on their patrons and taking the whole of Andalusia including Granada as their own power. As with previous moments of Islamic renewal, the warriors were ascetic, militant, hostile to laxness and luxury, and all of that – needless to say – was Bad for the Jews. Under the new puritanism, it was unthinkable that Unbelievers should hold high office. Moshe’s brothers left Granada for good as their property and possessions were taken. The poet stayed on a few years longer before leaving Sabika hill and embarking on a bitter life of journeying across frontiers, lost Andalusia always on his mind. Later on, when he was middle-aged, Halevi would write Moshe lines recalling the time when ‘no one harnessed or rode / the wagons of wandering road . . . our days were unbroken and whole / Time bore us separately but love which bore us [as] twins / raised us in her spice garden / suckled us with guzzled wine’.42
Having imagined a serene life with a benevolent mentor in Granada, Halevi became very familiar with those ‘wagons of wandering’. The map of his travels is hard to trace with any exactness, but it seems as though after leaving Granada he moved west to Lucena, the Andalusian city that was predominantly Jewish and where Halevi knew the head of the yeshiva school. But its Judaism made it a prime target for the Almoravid conquerors who exacted brutally punitive taxes as the price of avoiding forced conversion to Islam. Halevi moved on to Seville, surviving by being, in effect, a jobbing poet, writing for weddings, funerals and any grand occasions in the increasingly constrained life of the Andalusian Jews. The poems from these years – which still startle by their freshness and conversational immediacy – most often arise from this unsettled state: partings, separations, absences, longings. Bound ‘ruthlessly’ in captivity by a ‘doe’ and then forced to take leave, the pining lover turns ‘to an apple for succour / whose fragrance recalls your breath like myrrh / its shape your breast / and its colour the flush that races through your cheeks when you blush’.43 Another poem, probably from the same period, onomatopoeically echoes in Hebrew the sound of a groaning sigh, each line ending in ‘ach’ while the deserted lover complains conversationally she doesn’t call, she doesn’t write . . . ‘why darling have you barred all news / from one who aches for you within the cage of his own ribs / you must know a lover’s thoughts / care only for the sound of your hellos? / At least if parting was the fate reserved for us / you might have lingered till my gaze had left your face.’44
Eventually, sometime in the first decade of the twelfth century, Halevi decided he had had enough of the Almoravids and moved across the religious and military frontier to Toledo in Christian Castile. It was not as though he was entering terra incognita. His childhood had been spent in Tudela, further north in Christian Navarre. The Castilian king Alfonso VI had shown himself hospitable to Jews precisely because of their helpful knowledge of the language and culture of their Muslim enemies, but his hospitality went beyond strategic convenience. There was a large and thriving Jewish community in Toledo which now included Halevi’s old mentor Moshe ibn Ezra, as well as the famous Yosef ibn Ferruziel, a powerful grandee in the town and the king’s own doctor. It may have been the demand for Jewish physicians that prompted Halevi to become one himself as a way of supplementing his income. But although Halevi stayed there for twenty years, married, had three children, it seems never to have been a place where he felt secure or especially happy. The doctoring was drudgery; Moshe ibn Ezra had moved away under the shadow of a scandal involving a niece; his friend Shlomo ibn Ferruziel, Yosef ’s nephew, was murdered on a highway, prompting an outpouring of grief and rage at the Christians. Two of Halevi’s three children died, a misery which drew from the bereaved father one of his most heart-breakingly beautiful poems, written in three voices – of himself, his wife and the dead child: ‘Were I to cry / whole rivers for her / Still she would lie / In a wormy pit / Deep-sepulchred / Earth-bonneted / My child there is no clemency / for death has come between you and me.’45 Death would not leave him alone in Toledo. In 1109, following the demise of the benevolent Alfonso VI and awaiting the succession of his son-in-law the king of Aragon, yet another violent onslaught took place against the Jews.
Where did a place of safety lie in Spain? Nowhere, for Castile was making the life of Jews difficult, and the Almoravids who had relaxed their harshness somewhat were, for that very reason, about to be succeeded by yet another warrior tribe, migrating from the place where endless waves of puritanical cleansing were stirred up between the Atlas mountains and the sea: Almohades. They would make life for the Jews near to unbearable, subjecting them to waves of violence, the destruction of synagogues and communities, forced conversions at the edge of a sword. For the moment, though, the Almoravids were hanging on, enough at any rate for Halevi to load his wagon sometime in the late 1120s and for the second time in his life migrate south, back towards the swallows of Andalusia. The place he himself roosted for a while was the city where a century and a half before, the new Hebrew poetry had begun: Hasdai’s Cordoba.
All this perilous shuttling between rival sets of persecutors had changed Halevi. He was now middle-aged and, perhaps understandably, given to raining curses on the persecutors of the Jews, Christian and Muslim alike. A dawning, bitter conviction that the Jews could expect no refuge, no succour, no understanding from anyone except their God and their religion, was drawing him away from the possibility of a genuine coexistence with either Muslims or Christians and towards an intense communion with his Judaism. His knowledge, from correspondents in Cairo, of the killing of Jerusalem Jews by the notorious Crusaders and the burning of their synagogue, only deepened his despair and resolution.
But the lingering ghosts of Jewish Cordoba prompted Halevi to think again both about his poetry and his Judaism. Yehudah Halevi, in whose hands Hebrew poetry, following Arabic models, had achieved an extraordinary consummation of vitality and grace, now began to summon up that old, bloody war of duelling poets so brutally adjudicated by Hasdai ibn Shaprut over a century earlier. Like all skilled versifiers Halevi had followed Dunash ben Labrat’s emulation of Arab forms, and perfected them. But now he thought about the apparent loser, Menahem ibn Saruq, literally beaten for his presumption that the Hebrew of the Bible and the liturgical piyyutim should find its own way forward. Perhaps Menahem and his followers had been right. Perhaps it should be possible to write an intensely spiritual Hebrew that kept faith with everything Judaism held sacred. If love poetry that also sang of love
of God in tones of deepest, physical yearning was to be written, why not do it in the language of the Song of Songs, not Arab wine poetry? And so Halevi’s poetry began to change, to take on weight, gravity and ancient passion. It was as if Menahem ibn Saruq, bare patches on his scalp where the hair had been torn from the roots by Hasdai’s thugs, was standing over Halevi’s shoulder, finally satisfied with belated vindication.
There was another memory of that time which fed even more momentously into Halevi’s preoccupations: the letter written by Menahem on Hasdai’s behalf to the king of the Khazars. In Toledo, driven by a bitter realisation that sharing language, living space, even elements of belief, with Muslims and Christians ultimately counted for nothing when they chose to turn violently on the Jews, Halevi had begun to write a work of unapologetic reaffirmation of the singularity of Judaism and of the unique history that flowed from it. The memory-mirage of a distant kingdom in which Jews and Judaism might actually have held their own (and who knew, perhaps still did?) fed his increasing indignation at their contemporary defencelessness. Deprived of the power of arms, Halevi would see to it that they asserted the power of their language and religion. The Kuzari took the form of a dialogue between a learned rabbi and the unnamed king of the Khazars who became persuaded to convert himself and his empire to Judaism. But it was in Cordoba, where the memory of the actual historical moment of this episode, nearly two centuries earlier, was still alive, that Halevi completed his paradoxically philosophical attack on the presumptions of metaphysical philosophy. And tellingly, he wrote a book which among other things was a repudiation of the dependence of Hebrew on Arabic in Arabic, the language in which Greek philosophy had been transmitted and of course the language of those who expressed their habitual contempt for the inferior Jews.