The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  The rhetorical shadow-boxing that characterises both Jewish and Christian accounts of these momentous days gives a misleading sense of symmetry between the debaters. But of course the sides were not remotely equal. The rabbis were fighting for the life of their people’s religion, and they were doing so in the intimidating presence of theologians, preachers, aristocrats, the king himself in Barcelona, an expectant throng eager to witness the humiliation and abasement of the wretched, purblind, arrogantly obstinate Jews, and even more satisfactorily, at the hands of one who was formerly of their benighted persuasion. Yet while the three rabbis in Paris could lean on each other for support, in Barcelona Nahmanides was quite alone, powerless, but heroically unbowed by his terrifying predicament, the bravest of the brave.

  Like Maimonides, Nahmanides was both physician and rabbi, and better known throughout Catalonia and southern France as pacifier rather than combatant. In 1232, he had attempted, not altogether successfully, to reconcile Maimonideans and anti-Maimonideans across a schism which he knew could only end in damaging Jews everywhere. He believed the Maimonideans were in the wrong for excommunicating Rabbi Solomon bar Abraham and his would-be book burners. But he felt those hostile to the doctor-philosopher were even more in the wrong for caricaturing Maimonides as playing fast and loose with the law, and even encouraging apostasy, when on many points he was more stringent than the Talmud itself. The Guide to the Perplexed, Nahmanides believed, was not meant as a seduction into pagan rationalism but, on the contrary, sought to bring back into the fold those who had already been intellectually persuaded by classical philosophy and needed to have its methods yoked to the essence of Judaic belief. Their perplexity had been caused by the exertions of their God-given reason, and they were now trapped in a false dichotomy between faith and intellect. All that Maimonides had done was to show them how the two could be brought together in the bosom of Judaism.

  Though his conciliation efforts had not been successful, Nahmanides was much loved in the juderias of Aragon and Catalonia, the high-walled alleys of great towns like Zaragoza, Huesca and his own Girona, set close to the bishop’s palace and cathedral for timely protection, and also in the gable-hung lanes of overgrown hill villages like Albarracin, Fraga and Montalban. Nahmanides was thought of as less world-savvy than Maimonides, but when it counted he showed that he knew very well how to conduct himself manfully amid the intimidating ranks of knights and friars lined up on the benches. Casting himself as the hero of his own drama, and showing the same kind of self-possessed eloquence characteristic of Maimonides at his most persuasive, Nahmanides knew that the sympathy of the king was essential if he was to have any chance of holding his own. And he undoubtedly felt that the eyes and ears of all the Jews of Spain, in Muslim as well as Christian lands, were on him. It was of paramount importance, then, to engage with rather than alienate Jaime, and he proceeded to do so with a disarmingly light touch, shamelessly playing to the royal gallery. It was Jewish stand-up, deadly serious in intent, playful in form, the most important there has ever been, and played to the most hostile house conceivable, and it took place in Barcelona on four hot days in late July 1240.

  Nahmanides had been given licence to speak as freely as he wished, always provided he did not blaspheme against Christianity. But he came dangerously close to it in a moment of mock-innocent satire when he offered a paraphrase of the New Testament narrative. ‘It seems a little odd,’ he drolly ventured, ‘that the Creator of Heaven and Earth should have repaired to the womb of a certain Jewish woman where he grew for nine months, was duly born as an infant, grew, was betrayed to his enemies and executed, restored to life and to his place . . . The mind of a Jew, or for that matter anyone else, simply cannot tolerate such assertions.’ Nahmanides would end up paying dearly for the chutzpah, but in the way of all great performers, there was no stopping him. Brazenly, Nahmanides again turned directly to the king who had, after all, sanctioned the freedom of his speech and told him that Jaime had ‘listened all your life to priests who have filled your brain . . . with these doctrines so that by now they are second nature and you accept them by pure force of habit. But if you were to encounter them for the first time as an adult you could not possibly believe them.’18

  When Pablo Cristiani singled out the passage in Isaiah 53 prophesying a ‘suffering servant’ of God, a ‘man of sorrows’ whom the Lord would ‘bruise’, ‘stripe’ and ‘afflict’ for men’s sins, Nahmanides feigned mock surprise that anyone should think these passages referred to Jesus when everyone knew that the wounded figure was of course Israel itself, which God knows had suffered, but that was quite another matter from imagining a saviour figure sent to absolve mankind from collective sin. And while they were at it, might he point out, respectfully, that Judaism did not believe in collective guilt, much less a sin inherited from Adam ‘any more than we inherited the sin of Pharaoh’. There was, then, no universally fallen state from which such a messiah was required to save mankind. The Jewish Messiah – who by the way was ‘not fundamental to our religion’ – would be sent with an altogether more modest agenda, though to be sure of great significance for the Jews. All that he would redeem would be Jerusalem, enabling the Temple to be rebuilt. Such a messiah would never dream of claiming a portion of divinity, for that would violate what was a constitutive principle of Judaism, recited three times daily in the prayer of the shema, namely the indivisible unity and singularity of God. And then in a move of shameless rhetorical charm, Nahmanides again turned directly to Jaime explaining that the Jewish Messiah would be a king, but of the strictly mortal earthly kind, born like other kings from the union of a regular man and a woman, moreover attached to the womb by a placenta which could not have been the case of a messiah sired by some sort of spirit. The Messiah would then be a sovereign much like himself. ‘You are a king and he is a king’, which meant at this particular moment King Jaime was far more important to him than King Messiah.19 History does not record the breadth of King Jaime’s smile.

  But since, Nahmanides went on, for Christians it seemed that the recognition of Jesus as the messianic Christ was a big, if not indeed the whole, deal, then might he also point out that the reign of universal peace, said to be inaugurated with his sacrifice, did not seem to have materialised according to plan, neither at the time, immediately afterwards or in the twelve centuries of the Christian era that had followed. Quite the contrary, in fact: ‘from the days of Jesus till now the whole world is full of violence and plunder’. War continued relentlessly, he said, adding in one of his sly asides that he wondered what the assembled knights would in fact have to do if war was taken from them. Pablo Cristiani, stung by all this condescension and rabbinical derision (Nahmanides kept referring to him with heavy sarcasm as ‘our clever Jew’), retorted that it was typical of the Jews to measure everything in crudely physical, superficial terms or ‘carnally’ as Christians said; but Christ had descended into the underworld, hell had been harrowed; the righteous dead had been saved, had risen again and the triumph of the Church showed that Christ had indeed not come in vain. Really? responded Nahmanides. As far as he could see, Christendom had not been established, unchallenged ‘from sea to sea’ as the passage cited by Pablo had prophesied. Was not the sway of the Roman Church confined to what had been the old Roman Empire – or rather less? An inconclusive verdict then – at best!

  Game, set and match to the rabbi, at least if the account in his own Vikuah is to be believed, although much good it did him. The upshot was different in each of the trials. In France, the Talmud was confiscated, suppressed and burned. In 1247, however, the new Pope, Innocent IV, initially just as ardent a Talmud-baiter as Gregory IX, backtracked a little. Informed that without the Talmud the Jews could not properly grasp the Bible, and believing that such an understanding was the precondition of their conversion, Innocent ordered the Talmud returned to the Jews but censored to omit passages considered blasphemous or insulting to Christianity. The Barcelona show was always meant as a bloodless corrida, with
the victor winning moral credits and the laurels of suasion. But the Dominicans who had been its stage managers made sure that it did not end with the disputation itself. Nahmanides reports that on learning that the king himself would preach in the synagogue on the Sabbath, he decided to delay his return to Girona so that he might refute the royal sermon after it was delivered. Putting himself at still greater risk, he did just that.

  Yet the king was really just a warm-up act for Raymond Penaforte, the great codifier of canon law under Pope Gregory and the Master of the Preaching Dominicans. A zealot for Jewish and Muslim conversion, it had been Penaforte who had encouraged the king to allow Nahmanides to speak his mind freely but then had been disconcerted that he had taken advantage of the liberty so skilfully. The Sabbath sermon in the Barcelona synagogue and its captive congregation would be a return bout with himself arguing more expertly than Pablo Cristiani. When challenged by the rabbi on the self-contradictory nature of a Trinity that was at the same time One, Penaforte made the tactical mistake of comparing the Trinity to wine possessed of taste, smell and colour and yet remaining just wine. Nahmanides retorted that on the contrary, those characteristics were three entirely separate ‘accidentally’ linked properties, each one of which was capable of being removed under certain conditions to alter fundamentally the nature of the liquid. Evidently one of them had been thinking of (and possibly sampling) wine to more profit. Petulantly, Pablo Cristiani – who had been sulking, and perhaps seeing an opportunity for belated vindication in the eyes of the king – then got up and asserted that nonetheless the Trinity was a truth but one so mysterious that even princes and angels could not properly fathom it. ‘I stood up,’ wrote Nahmanides, a little pleased with himself, ‘and said “Well, it is obvious that a person cannot believe what he does not know and therefore the angels must not believe in the Trinity.” And Fray Paul’s [i.e. Pablo’s] companions made him keep silent.’20

  Neither Paris nor Barcelona had the effect the Christian impresarios had hoped for. There was no mass conversion. In fact, the exercise had shown Jews could mobilise in the court of their adversaries and were far from toothless in their own defence. This was just as well, since from the mid-thirteenth century on, and by papal order, Jews were forced, physically if need be, to listen to Christian sermons in front of the Ark containing the Torah scrolls, and they would not always have such articulate and irrepressible defenders as Nahmanides. The friars selected not only the Sabbath when they knew the Jewish congregation would be most plentiful, but the holiest days of the year – the Day of Atonement, Passover, Tabernacles – to storm in through the synagogue doors whenever they saw fit and subject the Jews to a violent harangue on the iniquity of their blindness. The violation of their sanctuary space must have been deeply traumatic. The profound sense of desecration at having to endure a pelting rainstorm of abuse and, as they saw it, falsehood, was dispiriting if not terrifying. But the thunder of the friars was meant to be leavened with the promise of salvation for those who saw the gospel light. Encouragement was needed as well as intimidation, for conversions were of the utmost importance to the friars who were working to an ever-accelerating timetable of the impending Last Days. (The Jews, too, believed that their year 5000 would bring their own Messiah.) For the Christian zealots, with Jerusalem still in Saracen hands and little immediate possibility of its reconquest, it was in the synagogue now that crusading victories could be won. And they were not deluded. There is no doubt that as their relentless campaigns turned more intense, conversion rates climbed, especially in Spain.

  Nahmanides and the authors of the Hebrew narratives of the Paris trial did not need to be told about the threat. The more friars trained to read Hebrew and become familiar with the Talmud, and the more converts available to guide them to choice texts for their polemics, the greater the danger. Thus, David–Goliath stories like the Vikuah, pitting lone Jews armed only with the slingshots of their keen minds against the giants of the Church, were designed to put heart into Jewish readers. The worst that Christians could throw at them, including their own apostates, would be vanquished with God’s help. All of Nahmanides’ ironic asides, his vivid descriptions of the scene, were meant for entertainment as well as vindication, not least the little coda in which he and King Jaime part on a note of mutual respect. The day after the sermons in the synagogue the king, who has already expressed his admiration for Nahmanides’ powers of argument, now receives him again, gives him 300 dinars and bids him return to Girona to dwell ‘in life and peace. And I took my leave of him with great love.’

  All this seems too good to be true, and it was. Any improbable rush of affection arising between the rabbi and the king certainly did not survive Dominican antipathy. Instead of being permitted to retire to Girona and live unmolested, the Dominicans brought capital charges against the rabbi for his account of the proceedings, especially perhaps the passages where he pokes fun at the virgin birth. The king managed to have them heard before an independent tribunal where Nahmanides insisted he had added nothing to what had been said unobjectionably at the disputation. Nonetheless the Vikuah was duly burned and its author sentenced to two years’ banishment, to gratify the Dominicans, especially Penaforte, who was clearly a sore loser. Before much time had passed that sentence was converted into perpetual exile. Nahmanides moved across the border to Provence, but then, in his seventies, made the arduous journey to Palestine where he encountered the two Jews who he said were the only men of his religion then living in Jerusalem. He moved to Acre where he presided over a circle of pupils, dying in 1270 and buried, like Maimonides, in a place unknown but perennially guessed at. A modest but authentically medieval synagogue in the Jewish quarter bears his name, or rather the posthumous nickname of ‘The Ramban’, an acronym of his rabbinic title and Hebrew name (Maimonides, confusingly, being ‘The Rambam’). Every day there is the bustle of Orthodox Jews in the Ramban shul, rushing and shushing, exclaiming and bobbing, perhaps as Nahmanides would have enjoyed, but then again, since he was famous for his studious self-mastery, possibly not.

  III. Picturing Jews

  The joust of minds was the stage on which the battle of faiths was played out before princes, prelates and preachers. It was driven by the firm belief of Christian theologians that they ought to win the battle against Jewish ‘obstinacy’ and ‘blindness’ through persuasion not force, and through books cherished by the Jews themselves. Surely, then, they would see that fidelity to the Bible required the abandonment of the Talmud, not a dogged adherence to it.

  But much of what happened between Jews and Christians in the late Middle Ages was not this elevated. The adversarial drama played out more often in the pit of the senses. Its natural theatre was the body not the mind, and its medium was that of images not words. Its power was visceral not philosophical, and the erudite scrutiny of texts yielded to a theatre of cruelty, suffering and horror. One set of torments thrown into bright relief, those said to be regularly inflicted by the Jews on Christians in ritual repetition of what they had done to Christ, was imaginary. The other set of torments, those done to Jews by Christians, was all too real and involved mass murder.

  Blood was everywhere in both the fantasies and the realities. Every Good Friday, it was widely believed in the Christian world, blood streamed from the anuses of Jewish men in helpless atonement for the bloodshed of the crucifixion. Had not Matthew said of Christ and the Jews, while Pilate was washing his hands, ‘his blood be upon us and our children’?21 The first Jew to experience something like this penitential haemorrhage had been Judas Iscariot, whose intestines bloodily erupted from his body cavity when, in remorse for his betrayal, he hanged himself on a fig tree (figs, it was noted, were emblems of fistula, among other things). Since his soul could not ascend, the route through which it exited Judas’ body was via the lower orifice. The guts of Judas became a popular theme for passion plays, especially in Jew-free late-medieval England where the sausage-stuffers of York supplied a long chain of chipolatas spilling from the exp
loded body of the false disciple at the crucial moment in the Play of the Saucemakers.22

  A medieval tradition developed, evident in the writing of Thomas de Cantimpré, for example, attributing to Jews a particular propensity for bloody haemorrhoids which, when the ritual calendar came round to Easter, would copiously rupture. (The fact that the doctor Maimonides was known to have written an entire treatise on haemorrhoids could only have confirmed these suspicions.) A few centuries later this fantasy would mutate into the even odder commonplace that Jewish men menstruated like clockwork. But in the late Middle Ages, the bloody flux said to beset them was enough to enrich the grotesque image of Jewish unwholesomeness. At least one story, related by the thirteenth-century chronicler Caesarius of Heisterbach, featured a Christian clerk who fell lustily for a Jewish girl (as often happened in the medieval imagination), and turned on the fact that the only opportunity for their consummation came in the week leading to Good Friday when, she claimed, her father would be too busy swabbing his arse to pay close attention to her movements. The Latin obscenity verpus, used by Roman satirists like Juvenal for the circumcised penis, came to be applied to the bent back middle finger used in an attempt to plug the anal flow, and subsequently as a synonym for a Jew himself. The middle finger jabbed high in insult, still very much in use in the United States and Latin Europe, might have originated with this particularly malodorous fantasy.