The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  None of this is to claim that Judaism, the religion of the word, had suddenly become a culture of icons. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jews were undoubtedly aware of the devotional spell cast by Christian images which were, after all, not only set above altars but carried through the streets of Christendom, and the veneration they received they regarded as further proof, if any were needed, of the idolatry of that religion. For the Jews, picturing was the handmaid of words, significantly confined, therefore, to books, although when the pages were covered with gold, and radiant colours of blue and scarlet, crimson and viridian, they ceased merely to be ‘books’ of instructional commandment or Talmudic interpretation. Without any sense of compromising the sovereignty of the sacred word, the Jews had decided to delight themselves with pictures. It would not be the last time.

  But this was possible only so long as words and images were seen as complementary; or rather that somehow the words and the letters that formed them had themselves a mysterious visionary power, akin (without blaspheming) to the Kabbalistic-mystic tradition, spelled out in the Sefer Yetzirot, the Book of Creation which maintained that God created the universe and the world through letters. Letters were primary forms. So perhaps we should not be surprised to discover that, aside from all the borrowings from Gothic art (and indeed architecture), the one form of picturing unique to Judaism were figures made from letters and words. ‘Micrography’ – the stupendous writing of miniature letters, sometimes so tiny that they are difficult to make out with the naked eye (at least middle-aged eyes like mine) and seem beyond any conceivable feat of fine motor control – is said to go back as far as the ninth century.30 A practical explanation would declare that, for a culture constantly loading the carts and running for its life, it made sense to compress what was already portable in the books of the Torah even further, so that the entirety of, say, the Book of Esther could be on one folio page, or for that matter a dish or a sheet of paper. It was also true that enriched texts of the Torah and Bible demanded pronunciation guides – the masorah – which needed to be inserted somewhere on the margins of the page, and some of the earliest micrographia do just this. But when, in the fourteenth century, Hebrew turned to picturing lions and dragons and gryphons and eagles and dogs and kings, evidently something else was afoot. Coiled within these writhing, helical, dancing forms, the ribbons of word-images, are the cellular materials of the Jewish tradition, perpetually morphing, adapting, self-renewing, and once set free in the world, they would always elude the grasp of those who aimed at their extinction.

  9

  Exile from Exile

  I. The Wide World Over

  It was when the abscess on the left arm of Charles the Wise stopped weeping and crusted over that the king of France knew his end was near. Many years before, a learned doctor had been summoned from Prague to drain the mysterious royal fistula and had pronounced that should it ever dry, he would have two weeks to settle his affairs before expiring. And so it came to pass. The sticky sore, periodically tended, had oozed reassuringly for many years beneath the plated rerebrace of his armour, as the king grimly battled to retake territories conquered by the English Plantagenets. But just as that life’s mission seemed to have been realised, the shades were unfairly closing in, quite possibly hastened by the periodic seasoning of arsenic spicing up the royal fare. The Wise are not without enemies.

  Before he succumbed on 30 September 1380, leaving the kingdom to his eleven-year-old son (who as Charles the Mad would lose everything his father had gained), the king had indeed done something wise. Around 1375 he had instructed his envoy to the court of Pere the Ceremonious, king of Aragon, to procure from the Jews of Palma de Mallorca (who had become famous for this kind of work) one of their mappae mundi, the ‘cloths of the world’. The great work known to posterity as the ‘Catalan Atlas’ is documented joining 917 other items in the royal library in November 1380, so it is possible that the mortally stricken king never set eyes on the six double sheets of vellum on which the whole known world was mapped – from the isles of the far west, the Canaries, named for the canes, or wild hounds, who barked through the volcanic hills, to the isles of the farthest east, the archipelago of seven thousand islands in the seas off Catayo that Messer Polo had claimed to have counted, or the waters of Trapobano where the natives devoured raw fish and drank seawater. Instead, the folding lengths of painted vellum – crowded with Catalan text, webbed with the lines of the winds, brilliant with gold and silver, vermilion and viridian, the personifications of the zodiac, things fabulous and things charted – would have been perused by the usual gang of shifty uncles ominously attending on the boy king, Charles VI, or perhaps by the lad himself.1

  The Majorcan atlases were made to be thrown over the cabin tables of ships’ captains, to graph from first-hand reports the precise details of safe and unsafe water, threatening reefs and banks, welcoming havens and treacherous straits.2 Though the great Catalan Atlas (still to be seen in the Bibliothèque nationale) was custom-designed and painted as a royal gift, it was nonetheless a practical as well as a visionary object, and the boy king, the guardian uncles and the royal librarian could have walked round it as if they might compass the earth. A year later, in 1381, the infante of Aragon, Joan, ordered from the ‘jueu [Jew] the master of mappae mundi and compasses’ another such map expressly for Charles VI, as a gift to seal what he hoped would be an alliance between Aragon and France.

  That Jew was Cresques Abraham, who with his son Jafuda had spent years making an atlas more spectacular and better informed than any that had gone before. Technically Cresques was not the map-maker so much as its illuminator, and was described as buxoler in Catalan (brujulero in Spanish): compass-maker and painter of the boxes in which cork-mounted magnetic needles bobbed and floated to mark the directions.3 The line between the job division is more shadowy than some recent scholars have allowed, and the commission of the infante leaves no doubt that Cresques and his son (who had been shown particular honour by King Pere as ‘royal familiars’) were deemed the true masters and authors of the overall work.

  When they plotted, drew and painted, Cresques and Jafuda stood on high with the angels. They caught the span of the orb – 180,000 stadia, or 24,000 miles, in circumference, just as Ptolemy had said – in their widened eye and nimble fingers: the corrugated seas rendered in azure, the crumpled shore, the bald or bristling wilderness, humpbacked hills and even the mires of Irlandia, tufts of grass poking through the bog. Thus they retraced the work of the Almighty without ever presuming, God forbid, on His infinite ingenuity.

  Who better to compass the earth than Jews who were its ceaseless wanderers and were to be found in every corner, save those from which they had been mercilessly expelled? There were Jews in Cathay protected by the khan, Jews in torrid Nubia, Jews in the Indian kingdom of Delli where the sovereign boasted seven hundred elephants, Jews on the Malabar coast and Jews in the Maghreb, where Cresques planted a six-pointed star of David in the neighbourhood of Fez, a thing never before seen on a map of the world. Jesus Christ – who in the Ebsdorf and Hereford maps of a century earlier still sat on high atop the earth – had disappeared altogether from the Catalan Atlas. The omission is so startling that the enthroned figure in the imaginary Far East, in the neighbourhood of Gog and Magog, is sometimes said to be Christ in Paradise, sometimes even less plausibly the Antichrist, but his crown and beard suggest it is more likely to be David – making the vegetation held rising from his hands the stem of his, and the Saviour’s, line a diplomatically Judeo-Christian conflation. At the site of the monastery on Mount Sinai, the devotional reference to St Catherine is inscribed but also its identification with the place where ‘Moses gave the Law’. Still more tellingly, the north-west arm of the Red Sea is cut through by a narrow white space, identified in an adjoining text as the road through which passed ‘the Children of Israel’ (not a phrase much used by the Gentiles).

  Cresques and Jafuda also made sure to cater to the grandeur of those for whom
the atlas was intended. Away from the compressed, minute topographical and nautical detail of the Mediterranean and European shores, the map is filled with the images of kings and queens installed in their respective realms. The most striking is the African ‘Mussa Melli’, the king of ‘Gynia’ (Guinea), in actual fact Mansa Musa who had ruled the kingdom of Mali, a swathe of West African territory from Senegal to Nigeria in the early fourteenth century, and who had sat at the centre of a gold trade so prodigious that it tempted the voyaging governments of Iberia down the coast to prospect its riches. Loosely robed in fine green muslin, bearded and barefooted, ‘Mussa Melli’ sits enthroned and crowned in gold, holding high a disc of the same precious substance as if he had caught the sun between finger and thumb. A little north and west a whey-faced Tuareg lord flails his dromedary before an oasis of dark tents. The ancient, perennial, equatorial face-off south of the Sahara between animists and Muslims, the pale and the black, slave-capturers and slave-traders, was known even then, especially to the Arabic-speaking Jews of Majorca, many of whom had come from the Maghreb and the Atlas.

  And since the mappa mundi was meant to be recent history as well as geography, Cresques and Jafuda painted the ship of Jaume Ferrer, who had set sail down the African coast in 1346 in a single-masted, square-rigged uxer galley, the kind usually used to transport horses, bound for the mouth of the fabled river the ‘Rio d’Oro’ that, once discovered, would lead Europeans into the heart of the realm of gold.4 On the Cresques map, the sail of Ferrer’s galley billows with a following south-westerly that would have brought him back home laden with riches and knowledge perhaps of the real rivers of Senegal or the Gambia. The king of Aragon, and recent conqueror of Majorca, was said to have crusading designs on the Canaries from which perhaps he could have launched the usual mission of preaching and profit on the Muslim-dominated mainland. But Ferrer was never heard from again. From the round stern of his little craft the Aragonese pennant is flying – a brag to the French, for this was the time when the kings of Aragon had taken to the seas to create a trans-Mediterranean state stretching from Valencia and Catalonia to the Balearics, Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily, a mini-empire so extensive that even the fish were said to sport the gold-and-scarlet bars of Aragon on their tails.

  Nothing is steady-state on the surface of Cresques and Jafuda’s world. The map itself needs turning about and around to read the texts depending from its features. The earth is alive with animation. Men are in motion, crossing frontiers, albeit at the pace of a camel’s padding tread or the tacking of a cog across the Persian Gulf. On their way to Chanbaleth, the capital of Kublai Khan’s Cataya – twenty-four miles in circumference, guarded by mighty walls – Marco Polo’s caravan moves over the Caucasian plateau into deep ‘Assia’, rimmed by mountains, somewhere along the Silk Road. Teams of camels are in the van, followed by a guard of foot soldiers, and then the travellers themselves, bearded Polo himself at their head, chatting and smiling to an unimpressed Tatar. One of the company is slumped imprudently dozing in the saddle, thus opening himself, as Cresques warned, to visitations from malign spirits of the night.

  The figures move this way and that, south-east to lower Danubian Burgaria and Oumania, north to Polonia, Rusia, and wild and rocky ‘Archania’ (the Orkneys) – places shrouded in darkness half the year, lit through the night the other half. The illuminating hand moves with the travellers up the Nile (shown rising in the western Sudan, as was supposed for centuries) into Nubian Ethiopia where Christians and ‘Sarracens’ (the map’s name for Muslims) endlessly war, then sails through the Persian Gulf where naked men dive for pearls, east into the land where diamonds were harvested by strewing raw meat on the hills and waiting for the wild birds that would cram flesh and gems in their beaks, obligingly dropping the stones when transferring crop from bill to gullet.

  Legends and facts, painstaking reports and compulsive fantasies, new discoveries and ancient traditions all crash into each other in the heavy traffic of these men in motion. And in this sense the Catalan Atlas is the cartographic projection of Talmudic aggadah: a colloquy of gossip, knowledge, received wisdom, fanciful folly, without dominating adjudication, the mutually interrupting voices replaced here by the swerving winds and the swivelling, twitchy compass.

  Which compass is, for the first time ever, set down on a mappa mundi: the rose of the winds, painted at the beckoning limit of the western ocean, thirty-two wind directions, projecting from the eight major ones, without any controlling magnetic pull, save that of curiosity and avidity, the two forces that would alter the world. Jerusalem is still set at the centre of the earth, the Holy Sepulchre prudently delineated by the Jewish draughtsmen for their Christian patrons as if it were not now irretrievably in the custody of the ‘Sarracens’, although here it is rendered on the scale of just another church. The recapture of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, the force of the crusading knightly mission, had not disappeared from the Christian imagination, especially not in Spain where nothing remained of Islam save the enclave of Granada. But where in other maps the Levant was signified by a cross, in the Catalan Atlas the eastern point develops a stylised pattern that some have seen, perhaps over-imaginatively, as approximating a menorah.

  The vision is omnidirectional, wheeling this way and that with the gusts of opportunity. Whether or not Cresques’ family ever travelled except in their mind’s eye and the graphic imagination with which they read the already imaginative account of Marco Polo, the atlas represents freedom from confinement, even at exactly the time when most Jews in Palma were having to reside in the district set aside for them – the Call, not an abbreviation of the Spanish word for street, calle, but a corruption of the Hebrew for community, kahal. More importantly the atlas is a document of its makers’ ethnographic curiosity, not restricted to Jews (as Polo’s career and story makes evident), but somehow strikingly unburdened by crusading obsessions with the unity of Christendom, the global mission of conversion that would bring on the Second Coming. The Jews were here, there and everywhere, and though many had arrived in Majorca in the thirteenth century along with its Christian conquerors, much of their value to their lords was precisely as intermediaries with the Muslim enemy. They spoke and read Arabic, brought Arab-based knowledge of astronomy, medicine and philosophy into the Christian world, and most important were able to trade with the powers and ports of the North African Maghreb and Egypt. Jews were not permitted to own vessels themselves, but the independent kings of Majorca and the Aragonese sovereigns after them ordered Christian shipowners to receive cargo originating in Muslim lands and shipped by the Jews. They were the only section of the population in Majorca who could travel freely, if not always safely, across the Mediterranean borders of language, religion and custom. The coastlines most densely marked with ports and nautical information bear the imprint of their comings and goings, through the contested Aegean or more daringly out into the Atlantic islands. West of the long curve of the Guinea shore, archipelagos lie beckoning (albeit not exactly pinpointed) – Madeira, the Canaries and isles given names meant to stick in the imagination as well as on the map: Caprara, the isle of goats; Brazil, the isle of fire; Corvo, the isle of crows.

  Majorca itself may not have been the land of milk and honey, but during much of the fourteenth century it was a home in exile for most of the thousand-odd families who had settled there from North Africa and other parts of Spain following the thirteenth-century Christian reconquest, not just in Palma de Mallorca but in Inca and Sineu in the centre of the island, Alcudia in the north-east and Soller in the north-west.5 In all these places, as they had elsewhere in Christian Europe, Jews often lived close by the citadels and churches, some on the scale of cathedrals that dominated the hilly topography of Majorcan towns. And this said something about the compatibility between those institutions and the possibilities of Jewish life. The Church and Crown authorities (for a while an independent monarchy; after 1343, a province of the Crown of Aragon) promised to keep the Jews safe while they also attempted to pe
rsuade them of the blindness of their religion, and pending their conversion were prepared to profit from the regular delivery of revenues. In the state of perpetual warfare along the Mediterranean, they would need sudden injections of funds every so often, and the Jews were there to supply it or else. Every so often, too (especially under the Majorcan kings), there would be unfortunate riots, confiscations of property and even synagogues. Then matters would settle back into an understood social reciprocity.

  Under the government of Pere IV of Aragon, the Jews of Majorca had reason to feel insulated from the storms of hatred and fanaticism that thundered about their heads elsewhere. The Crown expressly forbade the preaching friars from invading synagogues and forcing Jews to listen to missionary sermons. Humiliating distinctions of dress were largely ignored. Jews could not be arrested on Sabbaths or festivals, and when testifying in Christian courts were allowed to swear on the Ten Commandments. For the most part they were governed and judged by their own autonomous institutions. In Majorca, no one accused them of bringing on the Black Death. In Strasbourg, nine hundred had been massacred in a convulsion of paranoia; in Toledo there was a bloody riot in 1349.6 In Majorca, there was no talk of them poisoning the wells or setting infected lepers at large to destroy Christians. On the contrary, favoured Jews like Cresques Abraham, glorying in his elevated status as ‘royal familiar’, were given rights to draw water from the superior well in Palma, and even divert some of it to make a flowing conduit for a Jewish ritual bath.