The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  And one year after his mother’s murder, Benedict the not quite guildsman was himself dead at the end of a hangman’s rope in London. A campaign of crushing terror and violence had been launched in 1278–9 in which the Jews of England, en masse, were accused of ‘coin-clipping’ (the shaving of silver and gold off coins to be melted into blocks, so adulterating the currency). It was doubtless a crime and along with the many Christians guilty of the offence there may have been Jews passing ‘light’ coin and doing some clipping.33 But the consequence was the incarceration of virtually all the Jews in the country, all brought to London and packed so tightly into prisons, that improvised jails had to be created, including Henry III’s elephant house at the Tower, vacant since the rapid death of his jumbos not long after they arrived. The quarters were reputed to be jumbo-sized at least, because there is a record of one forlorn and elderly Jewess pathetically petitioning to be incarcerated in the elephant house.

  Perhaps she was saved by the peculiar accommodation. For the city became sown with gallows, from which 269 Jews were hanged. This was London in the first years of Edward I; Jewish body after Jewish body, among them Licoricia’s Benedict, swinging over the streets; an abhorrent and unforgivable crime that has gone unremembered, unlamented, unacknowledged in English history ever since.

  The mass hangings broke the community. Their leading men and women, their protectors, champions and safeguards, had been destroyed at one fell (for once the word is not a cliché) swoop. Those who were left were poor, broken and terrified. There was no practical hope, really, of their fulfilling the social transformation purportedly desired by the king. And Edward’s ostensible eagerness for their social reformation had now robbed the Jews of any further utility. When he had expelled the Jews from Gascony Edward had discovered that the Flemish and the Genoese would come up with the needful when occasion called. All that remained for the Jews was a disposal job. So when it came in July 1290, Edward’s expulsion order, his coup de grâce – much to the delight of both his mother Eleanor of Provence, who had been a regular client and thus a Judeophobe, and his queen Eleanor of Castile who nurtured even more extreme malevolence – could not, then, have come as altogether a surprise. And there was a strictly pragmatic reason to capitalise on their removal. When he returned from campaigning in France in 1289, the Crown had so exhausted its coffers that only a punitive levy on all English subjects, nobles and the Church included, could fill the fiscal void. The sweetener for this otherwise unacceptably bitter pill was to be the expulsion of the Jews, or more specifically the outright cancellation of all bonds and debts owed to them. Needless to say, this was a popular solution. On 5 November it was decreed that ‘because of their crimes and the honour of the Crucified Jesus the king has banished the Jews as perfidious men’.34

  The expulsion edict would be a template for the even more traumatic expulsion (because of the far greater numbers involved) in Spain two centuries later. The Jews of England were given four months to depart, were entitled only to the principal of outstanding loans and not any interest, and were permitted to take with them only the possessions they could carry. Under those brutal constraints, houses were picked up by predatory buyers for ludicrously discounted prices as the Jewries of England emptied. Pathetic carts and footsore lines of Jews trudged their way to the ports, to Dover and Southampton with some departing from the docks on the Thames. A story was told of a ship’s captain recommending his passengers exercise their legs on the mudflats at Queenborough exposed by the high tide, and then, having pocketed the fares, set sail without them as the tide turned, leaving them to drown. What particularly roused the anger of royal officials was when they suspected that the exchequer may have been done out of any share of the spoils, no matter how trivial. A lively dispute broke out in 1291 in Norfolk over the sheriff ’s brother who had seized goods and chattels taken from Jews aboard a ship off Burnham with intent to pocket the proceeds, and whether proper taxes had been paid on the goods. Altogether incidental to the dispute was the fact that every Jew on the ship had been killed as well as robbed for they were, after all, as the sheriff said, ‘evil doers and disturbers of the king’s peace’.35 One of the more enduring images from this year of woe is of a gang of English Christians, clubs raised high in the air over the heads of Jews, beating them, gleefully, out of the kingdom.

  It was about this time that the legend of the Wandering Jew became popularised in the Christian mind. It was not some generalised vision of dispersed exiles but a particular story of a Jew, in some versions (such as that recorded by Matthew Paris, the gloater over Jewish misfortunes) the shoemaker Cartaphilus who had prodded Jesus on the way to the crucifixion reproaching him for being a slowcoach to death. Jesus replied that he would rest while his tormentor would find no repose at all. And thus the Jew was doomed forever to walk the face of the earth like Cain, in perpetual witness to his own sin and that of his people, denied the respite of death until the Second Coming. Perhaps watching the exhausted stragglers board their ships, Christian England took satisfaction that in its way, it had fulfilled another of the Saviour’s prophecies.

  8

  Trials

  I. Choosing Life

  Wasn’t it already hard enough to be a Jew without other Jews making it well-nigh impossible? That’s what crossed the mind of Moses Maimonides when he read the response given by a rabbi to some poor fellow who had asked whether, when forced at sword point to choose between death or conversion, he could be forgiven for taking the latter option? Just a bit, you know, going through the motions, saying the words, enough of them to save his life, but always of course staying Torah-true within? What else could he do? If he were killed his orphaned mites would be taken away as captives, made Muslim, lost forever to Judaism.

  Back came the adamant reply. In such circumstances, may they never befall you, God willing, but in such circumstances, the righteous Jew must choose death over transgression. Sanctify the Name as had the blessed martyrs in the time of the Maccabees, Rabbi Akiva in the time of the persecutor Hadrian (may his bones be ground to dust), the many holy men and women suffering slaughter when the Crusaders came to the Rhine. Perish by your own hand, stretch your throat to the blade and you enter Paradise where you would be made whole again, your blood staunched with heavenly balm. To imagine otherwise was idle delusion. Utter the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith, and God would turn His face from you, casting you forever into impenetrable darkness.

  No, no, no, choose life, Moses Maimonides thought. It wasn’t that he disrespected the sacrifice of the martyrs, but the simplicity of absolute ideals, across all religions, he found alien and disrespectful of the injunction to save life clearly enjoined in the Torah. What moved him most, as he made clear near the beginning of his great reworking of the Mishnah, the Mishneh Torah, was the passage in Leviticus 18:5 that required Jews (or Israelites as Maimonides liked to call them) to live by the commandments, not die by them.1 Intrinsic to the gift of the Law was free will; the possibility of choice. To those who insisted there were circumstances in which no choice was possible, he invoked Deuteronomy 30:15, the keystone to the arch of his philosophy which was built to support both faith and reason: ‘I have this day set before you a blessing and a curse; life and death; therefore choose life.’2 There was another way to ‘sanctify the Name’ and that was to live a decent life in accordance with the precious gift of the Law. ‘If a man has been scrupulous in his conduct, gentle in his conversation, pleasant towards his fellow creatures, affable when receiving them, not retorting even when affronted, courteous to all even those who treat him with disdain, conducting business with integrity . . . devoted to the Torah, wrapped in the tallit [prayer shawl] crowned with the tefillin [phylacteries] avoiding extremes and exaggerations, then such a man has sanctified God.’3

  Besides, what did these armchair Talmudists know of the agonies endured by the man who rashly asked if he might transgress to save his life? He and his father, Rabbi Maimon ben Joseph ‘the Sephardi’, did know. Opp
ression had followed them around like a snapping hound. It had come to graceful Cordoba where Moses had been born around 1035, and where his family had lived for many generations. Arabic came as naturally to him as Hebrew. The Berber rulers, the Almoravids, had begun as sword brandishers for the Prophet. But the streams of Al-Andalus had cooled their fury and everyone had settled down with everyone else and the Unbelievers had been left once more to say their prayers and read the Torah and attend on the rulers when they fell sick, for when was there ever a time when Jewish doctors were not sent for? As so often before, the rage of doctrine had yielded to worldly traffic. Yet this accommodation with life was precisely what so incensed the next cohort of Berbers, the Almohades, riding down from the slopes of the Atlas, spurred on by their leader Abd al-Mu’min who sliced his way through the compromisers in the name of a purer way to follow the Prophet. What was it, anyway, about the mountains of Morocco that bred such belligerence, such implacable certitude? For these followers of Abd al-Mu’min could not be bought off or argued with. All they knew was eye-rolling, prostration and cries of zeal. In their minds they had been called to cleanse a profane umma, for only the clean and the strong would be able to withstand the advance of the Christian Franks, whether in Spain or Palestine.

  The Almoravids yielded to the madder fury of the Almohades and the days of worldly accommodation in Al-Andalus passed for good. The Almohades ordered the closing of many synagogues, the razing of others. God help any Jew caught saying his prayers in public, even furtively beside some shady wall in a far-off village at the setting of the sun. Henceforth there would be no possibility of Muslims and Unbelievers scandalously occupying the same house (even as masters and servants) and risking polluting intercourse, for the kafr would now be so costumed as to make such confusions impossible. The Jews would be required to wear a long black shapeless garment reaching to the ground so that they trailed their hems in the grime of humiliation. The jaliya tax would be taken from them in such a way as to remind them of their subjection, with slaps and grimaces and yelled abuse as they forked over their gold, to remind them, clink clink, that they were apes, donkeys, pigs, dogs. Oh, and their women, their wives and mothers were all whores, that too.

  The olives of Andalusia tasted bitter now. Rabbi Maimon ben Joseph prepared the family to depart from Sefarad, from all they had known. The carts trundled over the arched Roman bridge on the River Guadalquivir and into a daunting life. Everything was unknown except that wherever they landed there would be Jews fasting on the Day of Atonement, rejoicing on the Day of the Giving of the Law, chanting the Torah, binding their arms every morning with the tefillin. Mysteriously, though, Rabbi Maimon took the family south, crossing the Mediterranean to Morocco, and settling them not, as one might suppose, as far away from the Almohades as he could possibly get, but in the lofty stronghold of their doctrine: Fez. It was as if he imagined, in a rabbinical kind of way, that by bracing himself for the worst, anything short of an ordeal might seem disproportionately blessed. And though Fez was a famous centre of Islamic law and doctrine it was much more than that too: an enormous city, perhaps 200,000 souls within its walls, a great hub of trade, business routes radiating out like spokes to the desert caravans, the coast and the hills. And where there was trade there were Jews, plenty of them, shutting their ears to the din of the new aggravation, going about the tasks of the perennial calendar, bending their heads over the Talmud. Ancient synagogues opened from low, studded doors. Candles glimmered from arched windows that overlooked lanes where the hooves of mules trampled yesterday’s dung. In the great souk, people sneezed and spat yellow and red dust inhaled from heaps of spices, while crooked men emerged from doorways to tug at their sleeve. It could have been worse.

  And it could have been better. So when Moses, himself now a scholar and commentator of Torah and Talmud, learned of the responsum to the hard-pressed Jew trapped between death and conversion he became angry. In those days, he reflected much later, he had often been quick to fly off the handle. The truth is that he never really mellowed. Intensity and urgency followed the beat of his pulse. How could he not take offence at such inhuman severity, such easy freedom from the merest shadow of doubt? Was this any better than the persecutors with whom they were obliged to live every day? His father had already written a little consolatory tract, insisting that, faced with disaster and persecution, it was better to cling to the Torah in whatever way one could contrive than to let go of what he called, poetically, a rope suspended from heaven, and so plummet into the pit of self-destruction.4 Secret prayer would commend the pure at heart to God. Moses’ Letter on Forced Conversion (Iggeret hashemad) was written with a mind to the many who, under coercion, had already converted to Islam while trying to maintain their Judaism in secret. The respondent rabbi’s instruction had been widely circulated so that Moses felt it incumbent on him, young as he was, to offer a kinder way so that the anusim, the coerced, might know there would be a path back to the open profession of Judaism when safety permitted. The Letter was written in Judeo-Arabic but translated into Hebrew, and its reassurance could as easily have been applied to the Ashkenazim of northern Europe who had been faced with the same brutal alternatives at the hands of crusading Christians. Unless the demanded transgression was murder, idolatry or coerced sexual congress, the young Maimonides wrote, saving of life was the highest obligation. How else could Jews be saved for God who wished Jews to live the Torah? To take one’s own life rather than transgress under duress made one the author of one’s own killing, the profaner, rather than the sanctifier of the Name. Outward utterance was of no consequence for it was not the seat of true belief. God saw into the innermost soul of conviction. Hence it was indeed permissible to assume the forms of Gentile religion while remaining true to the Torah wherever and howsoever was possible, without fearing that an act of idolatry had been committed.5 Most dramatically, the young teacher assured the anxious party that those who kept true faith in secret would be as assured as any other Jew of salvation in the afterlife.

  Could Maimonides have been talking to, and convincing, himself? Scholarly biographers have suggested that he may actually have followed his own advice and submitted, for a while, to a temporising conversion to Islam.6 For two years, from 1163, the second Almohad caliph Abu Ya’qub Yusuf had borne down harder and harder on Unbelievers and it may finally have been too much even for the family of Rabbi Maimon. But there was a way to escape both death and conversion, namely flight, and Maimonides pressed it on his correspondents and then again to the distressed ‘master of sciences and learning’ who wrote to him in a similar plight from Yemen in 1172. Never mind the attachments of home or family, he said, offering cold comfort, take yourself to wherever it might be possible to follow the Torah in freedom; best of all, to the Land of Israel, the land of their fathers.

  There was a touch of disingenuousness, or convenient forgetfulness in this instruction. Maimonides had been there himself along with his father and brother David in 1165, but had not, in the end, stayed. This was despite the solemn injunction in his Mishneh Torah that it is better to live in Palestine amid heathens than in a city outside Israel amid many Jews, and that dwelling there was itself a way to atone for sins and wipe the slate clean (an assumption shared by the Crusaders). The relentless mutual hammering between Christians and Muslims was an opportunity for the Jews only in that at this particular moment both of the warring armies hated each other more than either did the Jews. Neither side excluded the Jews from the whole land of Palestine, though it was not easy to live there. A scattering, concentrated mostly in Galilee, visited the tombs of the forefathers, peddled, prayed and stooped over the Talmud. The Crusader kingdom had reinstated the old ban keeping them from Jerusalem except on matters of business and days of prayer and fasting, when the Christians looked with grim satisfaction on the Jews going through their grieving beside the ruined western wall of the Temple precincts. This was why they kept the Jews around, they reminded themselves, as perennial witnesses to their own blind
error.

  By the time Maimonides and his family made the journey, there was already a set of diaspora expectations built into the pilgrimage (just as there are now), not least from the ecstatically intense poems of longing, the great storms of the soul, stirred up in Yehudah Halevi’s verses, well known around the Sephardic world. Maimonides duly got his tempest about a week into the voyage, and recorded both his terror that the ship might be dashed to pieces by a towering wave, his trembling prayers, and his relief that God had seen fit, eventually, to abate the storm. He would, he vowed, fast and offer prayers of thanksgiving every year on the day of their deliverance. (Maimonides was in the habit, as many Jews of this period probably were, of inventing a personal calendar of piety and rejoicing connected to the great events of their life.)

  The voyage from one of the north African ports, probably Ceuta, was by the standards of the time not unduly long – perhaps a little over a month – but it was no Mediterranean cruise either, and as anyone knows who has run into dirty weather, sea-time has a nasty way of prolonging itself into what seems an eternity of misery. Moses, his father and brother were squashed together with another four hundred souls in the hold, along with animals and sundry clobber like the heavy saddles they would need on arrival and certainly did not want to have to buy from the leather-goods pirates of the souk in Acre. For obvious reasons the Jews would have brought most of their own food (buying water from the crew) which meant below decks there would have been non-stop cooking along with equally non-stop puking. On other bodily inconveniences it is best not to dwell. But the real problem with such journeys was less the physical discomfort than with the fact that such pilgrims were trapped in unrealistic expectations about what they would find on arrival. No one imagined it to be the antechamber to Paradise, but as Maimonides wrote, walking even four cubits on its soil would assure the pilgrim of the afterlife. Yehudah Halevi had disappeared before he could communicate any hint of disenchantment; what remained were his enraptured paeans of yearning and joy. Maimonides might, as he recommended to others, kiss the rocks and ground on the threshold of the land. Yet he also kissed it goodbye after little more than a year.