by Simon Schama
Halevi, the literary dramatist of revenge and vindication, sets up the king for the predictable surprise illumination. His story follows the legend of an angelic dream visitation to the king after which he summons representatives of Islam and Christianity to advocate the claims of their respective faiths. No champion of the Jews is called on for they were so universally despised it was unthinkable that their peculiar creed could possibly emerge superior from the debate. Yet while both the priest and the imam concede the ancient Judaic foundation on which their respective religions were based, they denounced that of each other as utter falsehoods. The rabbi has little to do other than appear for the king to be won over. For if it was true that the later monotheisms were mere amendments to the original – one, moreover, tainted by pseudo-paganism, the other suspect for its claims that God still spoke directly to a latter-day prophet – why not embrace the foundation-faith? Journeying to a cave where the scrolls of the Jews had been preserved, the king is formally converted, circumcised and returns to his capital full of projects to build synagogues and educate his people in the principles and practices of the new religion.
It is impossible to read the Kuzari without feeling that Halevi is writing as much for his own self-clarification as for the enlightenment of others. Some of the most impassioned sections make the case for the irreducible uniqueness of the ‘first language’ (as he thought), Hebrew, as the perfect vehicle for every kind of expression, both practical and spiritual. It is as if – writing in Arabic – he wanted to purge Hebrew of its long Arabisation. Similarly he wanted to liberate Judaism from Graeco-Arabic enquiries into the nature of God. The book, written in Arabic, had the subtitle of An Argument for the Faith of Israel and he means it to stand free from the hermeneutic principles informing Greek metaphysics. That kind of questioning, inherited from Plato and Aristotle and designed to yield knowledge of God, through study of His Creation, graduating progressively from the understanding of natural phenomena towards the revelation of the Prime Cause, was an exercise doomed to futility since the Jewish God was intrinsically and ultimately unknowable. Instead of embarking on this rationalist’s fools errand, Judaism counselled communion and was thus a state of longing, more like the inexpressible unassuageable cravings of lovers, rather than the reflexive, self-fulfilling enquiries of pure reason. Increasingly Halevi was making his own poetry express that yearning with an intensity that took him to the very edge of the boundary between life and death:
All my desire is here before you
whether or not I speak of it
I’d seek your favour for an instant then die –
if only you would grant my wish
I’d place my spirit in your hand
then sleep and in that sleep find sweetness.46
Surrender to that longing did not signify an indifference to social wisdom. On the contrary, the Torah abounded in such ethical necessities. Admonitions to love parents, abhor murder, adultery and the covetousness that is the overture to crime were all social and rational instructions. But significantly they followed the opening commandments which were non-rational affirmations and prime principles: ‘I am the Lord your God, have no other gods before me, take not my name in vain’, and so on. And much of Judaism was simply the resolution to embrace this singularity, observe the laws that flowed from it, maintain the customs (the tefillin phylacteries bound on hand and brow; the fringed tzitzit) as a way of living constantly and uninterruptedly with the presence of the sacred.
So while repudiating the self-sufficiency of reason, or even the need, argued in Philo a millennium before and by Moses Maimonides a century later, of opening religion to enquiry, Halevi’s Judaism is not mystical. Far from it, the doctor (however reluctant) is at pains to tell the Khazar king that the Jews were anciently expert in astronomy, had given the world calendrical divisions of time that have since been universally accepted, and the rest day of the week that also passed into common use. The Torah, he insists, might seem eccentric but, as the rabbis and sages of the Talmud endeavoured to explain, is in fact packed with material instruction, for example, on how to determine blemishes or impurities in animals that might render them unfit for both sacrifice and human consumption. Halevi’s attitude to unearthly sacred matters is, unsurprisingly, poetic: the essence of God shrouded from the view of reason, absent from the workaday world, embodied only in forms of godly names, but needing verbalisation and vocalisation in common, whether through prayer song or poetry.
Although, predictably in this kind of work, the Khazar king is often reduced to exclamations of excited wonder at the rabbinical illuminations set before him, there are striking moments when he impersonates that side of the poet who is constantly taking Yehudah to task for vacillation, contradiction and moral cowardice. The critical moment comes when Halevi describes exile from Zion as a kind of sleep; an awakening would happen when the Jews returned to the land where the covenant was made, the laws were received and the prophets opened to vision. Even though the shekhina, the divine presence, no longer dwells there, the rabbis and sages have said that ‘it is better to dwell in the Holy Land even in a town mostly inhabited by heathens than abroad in a town mostly populated by Israelites for he who dwells in the Holy Land is compared to him who has a God whereas he who dwells elsewhere is compared to him who has no God’. To be buried there is to be buried beneath an altar, he goes on.47 At which point the king retorts, ‘If this be so thou fallest short of the duty laid down in thy law by not endeavouring to reach that place and make it thy abode in this life and death although thou sayest, “Have mercy on Zion for it is the house of our life.”’
And this is indeed the self-accusation which increasingly agonised Halevi in Cordoba. The logical end of his withdrawal from Muslim and Christian culture was the personal journey back to Zion itself. The fact that Jerusalem was now in the hands of the Crusaders and that Jews had been massacred there somehow made this vocation more not less urgent. Intensifying belief was making Halevi listen to his inner voice which told him that when there were enough Jews standing on the Mount of Olives facing the Temple Mount, the shekhina would return to the ruined shrine from which she had fled; and when she was manifest, even the Messiah might reappear. In the Kuzari his rabbinical alter ego had told the king as a spur to conversion that good intentions were of no account without the deeds that followed. So now he regularly reproached himself, eaten up by a sense of being only half alive in the exile which he described as a kind of sleep. The Ark, he had written in the Kuzari, was a heart and now it was plain that his own lay east of the Sefarad of the Iberian peninsula:
My heart is in the East
And I am at the edge of the West
How can I possibly taste what I eat?
How could it please me?
I’d gladly leave behind me
all the pleasures of Spain
if only I might see
the dust and ruins of your Shrine.48
Not quite glad enough, though; not yet. Instead of embarking on an eastward-sailing vessel, Yehudah Halevi embarked on a procrastination extending many years, alternately flaying himself for his cowardly irresolution, and plunging into terror at what such a journey might hold. Those fears were understandable. Even had the Holy Land not been embroiled by holy war, the perils of such a journey were daunting for a man well into his fifties. The kind of square-rigged vessel which would take him from Seville to either Egypt or Palestine, a journey that could take two months, would be cramped, squalid and uncomfortable. There would be no respect for his grey beard. He would get no more than a wooden pallet to sleep on, as comfortless as a living coffin. Crammed into the tight space there would be nowhere for him to stretch his legs and he would be forced to squat on the swaying deck when he could no longer bear to stand. The nights would be alive with the scuttle of rats and foul with the stench of vomit as the ship bucketed about in squalls. Discomfort would give way to terror when the ship pitched so violently it seemed it must be wrecked. It happened all the time. And fro
m the ransoms he had had to raise for Jewish captives, Halevi was well aware that the eastern Mediterranean was the choice hunting ground for pirates.
In the spirit of trying to exorcise fright by summoning it, Halevi wrote one of his most intensely felt poems in advance of his eventual departure, upbraiding himself for his equivocation as the days of his life ran short: ‘try to appease your Creator with your dwindling hours . . . be like a lion to please him . . . your heart at sea will not fail’. Fighting words, but picturing himself out of sight of shore, caught in dirty weather, the poet is overcome by the panicky helplessness all around him: ‘decks and compartments rattle / stacked within the hull / men pull at the ropes / in pain, while others are ill . . . the cedar masts are like straw / ballast of iron and sand is tossed around like hay / everyone prays in their several ways / but you turn to the Lord’. All but lost, he prays and of course his prayers are answered. The mountainous waters fall back obediently into a perfect calm; the moon appears, most beautifully described as an Ethiopian, veiled in gold. The shining stars reflected in the mirroring sea turn into a myriad of water-borne Jews, exiles and fugitives, bobbing on the surface. And suddenly the imagining poet catches a marine epiphany. Sea and sky melt into one in the velvety darkness: ‘the two seas are bound together / between them lies a third, my heart, / pounding with waves of praise’.49
Eventually, sometime in the summer of 1140, Yehudah Halevi finally packs up and goes. Travelling with him is Yitzhak ibn Ezra, the husband of his only surviving child who leaves behind both his wife and son, Yehudah, named for his grandpa, and one Shlomo ibn Gabbai. The poet makes a great show of cutting loose from home, country, even the wife of many years who does not seem to have had any great hold on him. Only the thought of perhaps never seeing his grandson again snags his heart. But, he tells beckoning God, ‘these are trifles beside your love . . . soon I will enter your gates with thanksgiving . . . I’ll raise a tombstone in your land / There as a witness to myself ’.50 The voyage is every bit as hellish as he had imagined and generated another wind-whipped sea poem once safely in Alexandria in early September.
And there another obstacle to the fulfilment of his vows presented itself: celebrity. Letters preserved in the Cairo Geniza have revealed Halevi as the object of a near cult following among the well-to-do, the pious and the culturally ambitious of both Alexandria and Cairo. Letters pass between them expressing their excitement at his impending arrival, their concern at its delay, intense competition among the poet-hunters as to who would offer him hospitality, pangs of deadly jealousy when the Great Man was said to have graced one home but, inexplicably, not theirs! This seems to have taken Halevi by surprise and, to begin with, once he had got his land legs back, yet more conflicted feelings. Had he not come as a pilgrim, stripped of possessions and worldly vanities, wanting only to get himself to Palestine as quickly as possible and there ‘kiss the dust, as sweet in the mouth as honey’, of its sacred ruins? But oh dear, after all the battering at sea, another journey, whether overland on the caravan route or by sea again to Acre, suddenly seemed a bit daunting for his old bones. For that matter Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, and then the Day of Atonement and then the Feast of Tabernacles, Sukkot and then the Rejoicing of the Law (how could he not rejoice?) were imminent, one after the other, and by then, the bad weather would have set in that would make a second sea voyage an appalling prospect. And people in Alexandria were so very kind, falling over each other to be hospitable, especially Aharon al-Ammani, the pillar of the community, who had opened his doors, well, insisted really on his resting a while in his mansion so beautiful, with its bustan of tended trees and plashy fountains . . .
So for over two months, Yehudah stayed, along with the son-in-law and the friend, grateful for al-Ammani’s lavish provision of comforts, the fine food, the peace of the courtyard, disturbed only by fans hammering down the doors to tug at the hem of his garment. Winter was closing in on the sea routes but if he wanted it as badly as he said he did, Halevi could still go to Fustat, where a competing group of admirers, including his old friend Halfon ibn Natanael, were crying out for the pleasure of his company, and organise a place in a caravan destined for the Holy Land. Sometime before Hanukkah he made the trip up the Nile, lodging with the nagid, the head of the Cairo community, Shmuel ibn Hananiah, who attempted, not too strenuously, to fend off the pursuing hordes of hospitality-hounds. At some point during the winter it seems that Halevi attempted the overland journey, as arduous in its way as the sea voyage, saddled on a jolting, swaying camel for hours on end, the route much further south than the normal trains. Whether because of the discomfort, sickness or anxiety, he abandoned the caravan and returned to Fustat, amid, for the first time, much clucking of tongues, shaking of heads and ‘I told you so’s by those who had said all along it was too much for a greybeard in his mid-sixties. What was so wrong with Egypt after all?
Not much, the poet-prophet of redemption and Zionist return would concede, when every so often he escaped to the great river. Was he not allowed to enjoy it? Had not Joseph prospered? Had Egypt been in the plans of the Lord? And as he ceased to berate himself, and the margins of the river suddenly broke into green, the old Yehudah, much given to drinking in the pleasures of life, produced a last burst of springtime celebration:
Has time taken off its clothes of trembling
and donned its finest gown and jewels
is the earth now wearing robes of linen
richly woven, threaded with gold . . .51
But it’s not just nature the old boy is gazing at:
girls wander beside the river
their hands weighed down by bracelets of brass
their walk confined by anklets.
And he is a boy in Granada again who can’t take his eyes off the beauties:
the heart forgetting its age, is tempted
and finds itself thinking of Egypt’s Eden
its young there by the river gardens
along its banks across its fields
where the wheat has turned reddish gold.
He is writing once more an Arabic-style qasida, in which it is allowed, expected, to begin with desire as long as one ends in piety, which Halevi has no trouble with. That breeze is coming from the west, bidding him sail again, back from Alexandria this time, to reach his last destination.
The poem, filled with two kinds of longing, was so immediately popular that Halevi could not help writing another to his Alexandria host al-Ammani even more shockingly sensual, featuring those girls with all the hardware on their wrists and ankles, ‘burdened by silver bells of apples and pomegranates’, their hair as ‘black as the gloom of goodbyes’ or so fair that ‘One look at the sun from them and it would get sunburned . . . luscious, lithe or lanky I could fall for them all and their perilous red mouths’.52 In the second half of the poem Halevi properly reverts to piety, picturing himself as a barefoot pilgrim in Zion, flooding its ground with his tears, but the lip-smacking ogling of the earlier lines, coming as they did from the dilatory old boy, were disturbing enough for an acquaintance who had organised the abortive overland caravan to carp at its frivolousness to al-Ammani, who in his turn doesn’t seem to have minded it a bit.
It was, in any case, a final outburst of worldly delight. Passover in Egypt came and went and Yehudah Halevi at last faced the east in his prayers with more than just a formal gesture. The solitary journey he had said he would make was now upon him, for his son-in-law Yitzhak told him that he was staying in Cairo and Shlomo ibn Gabbai was not coming either. On 7 May, alone, unquiet in his mind and heart, the poet boarded a ship that had come from Kairouan in Tunisia and was bound for Acre. For another week, the prevailing winds were from the east. Then they shifted. The sails billowed; the vessel moved out of the harbour and Yehudah Halevi was seen no more.
For centuries Jews wanted to know what had become of him.53 The traveller from Halevi’s home town, Benjamin of Tudela, claimed to have seen his tomb close to Tiberias right on the shore of th
e Sea of Galilee. But no subsequent witnesses verified it, and given Halevi’s fame and the tenacity of Jewish pilgrimages, it seems unlikely that such a site would have been neglected. In any case, Jewish longing for Jerusalem projected on to Yehudah Halevi, who longed for it more eloquently and desperately than any other Hebrew poet before or since, a story that could match the intensity of that craving. In the sixteenth century the Italian Jew Gedaliah ibn Yahya claimed in a Hebrew collection published in Venice in 1586 that Halevi had indeed got to the gates of Jerusalem where he had been trampled to death beneath the hooves of an Arab rider’s horse.
Was it even conceivable that he had got that far?54 Assuming he had survived the relatively short voyage from Alexandria to Acre, sometime in late May or early June 1141, it might have been possible for Halevi to have gone to Jerusalem near the fast day of the 9th of Ab, falling on 18 July that year, when the ban on Jews was relaxed to allow them to mourn the destruction of both Solomon’s and the Second Temple. The old practice of walking round the city perimeter and praying at the gates was frowned on by the Crusaders, but Halevi might still have been able to climb the Mount of Olives and look towards the Temple Mount where the Dome of the Rock had been turned into a church. It would have been like him, having got that far, to want to approach a gate, perhaps even prostrate himself in the dirt which he had said over and over again would be scented like myrrh and taste as sweet as honey.
7
The Women of Ashkenaz
I. Sacrificial Lambs
Such beautiful names, such terrible ends. Doulcea, the sweet one, eshet chayil, the woman of worth, price above rubies to her husband the Pietist rabbi Eleazar bar Yehudah, known as the Perfumer, cut to pieces on the streets of Worms in 1196, trying to summon help while her daughters Hannah and Bellette lay dying inside the house; Licoricia, tough as nails, twice-widowed, moneybags loaded, who survived three spells in the Tower of London, only to be murdered in her Winchester house along with her Christian maidservant in 1277; Zipporah of Worms, the bird caught in a suicide trap, in the spring of 1096, Crusader bands shouting for the blood of the Christ-killers, imploring her husband to kill her first so she might be spared the sight of her son slaughtered by his father’s knife; Sarit of Cologne, the comely bride, sliced up the middle, groin to throat, by her father-in-law Judah the Levite, her nuptials turned into a blood wedding; the women on the bridge, two from Cologne, two from Trier, watching their sisters dragged mercilessly to the baptismal font, resolving on a defiant counter-baptism, jumping to a drowning death in the dark waters of the Mosel; the nameless convert who had married Rabbi David Todros of Narbonne, pursued by her outraged family, finding sheltering obscurity in Monieux until a crusading gang killed Rabbi David, seized two of their children for captive conversions, leaving the widowed proselyte destitute with her infant boy.1