The Story of the Jews Read online

  Dedication

  For Chaya and Avraham Osea in loving memory

  Epigraph

  All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

  Ecclesiastes 1:7

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Foreword

  Part One: papyrus, potsherd, parchment

  1. In Egypt

  2. The Words

  3. Delving, Divining . . .

  4. Classical Jews?

  Part Two: mosaic, parchment, paper

  5. The Menorah and the Cross

  6. Among the Believers

  7. The Women of Ashkenaz

  8. Trials

  9. Exile from Exile

  Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Photographic Insert

  About the Author

  Also by Simon Schama

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  List of Illustrations

  The streets of Elephantine, courtesy of Oxford Film and Television Ltd

  Khirbet Qeiyafa © Tim Kirby

  Silver benediction amulet, courtesy of Israel Museum, Jerusalem/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Stone shrine from Khirbet Qeiyafa © Jim Hollander/epa/Corbis

  Siloam inscription © Tim Kirby

  Asherah statuettes © akg-images/Erich Lessing

  Members of the Sinai survey, courtesy of Palestine Exploration Fund, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Plain of Er Rahah from the cleft on Ras Sufsafeh, courtesy of Palestine Exploration Fund, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Limestone ossuary with architectural decoration, courtesy of Israel Museum, Jerusalem/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Ossuary belonging to high priest Caiaphas © Tim Kirby

  Iraq al-Amir © akg-images/Gerard Degeorge

  Ceramic candelabrum courtesy of Israel Museum, Jerusalem/Gift of Morris and Helen Nozatte through the Morris Nozatte Family Foundation/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Hasmonean pruta, courtesy of Israel Museum, Jerusalem/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Iraq al-Amir lion and cub © Tim Kirby

  ‘Tomb of Zechariah’ © akg-images/Gerard Degeorge

  Arch of Titus © Tim Kirby

  Fallen masonry from the Jerusalem Temple © Tim Kirby

  Wall paintings from Dura-Europos synagogue, courtesy of National Museum of Damascus, Syria/Photos © Zev Radovan/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Sepphoris mosaics depicting the months of Tevet and Nisan, courtesy of Private Collection/Photos © Zev Radovan/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Sepphoris mosaic depicting a menorah © akg-images/Bible Land Pictures

  Painting of palm grove from Vigna Randanini © Araldo De Luca

  Mosaic of a dolphin, courtesy of Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, USA/Museum Collection Fund/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Child’s exercise book, T-S K5.13, reproduced permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

  Abu Zikri Kohen cheque, T-S Arabic 30.184, reproduced permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

  Jew of Bourges stained glass window © Sonia Halliday Photographs Cartoon of Aaron © The National Archives

  Chronica Roffense, courtesy of British Library, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Mishneh Torah of Maimonides, courtesy of Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest/The Bridgeman Art Library Birds’ Head Haggadah, courtesy of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem/The Bridgeman Art Library

  Title page from Moreh Neruchim by Maimonides, courtesy of The Art Archive/Bodleian Library Oxford

  Dedicational inscription in El Transito Synagogue © akg-images/Bible Land Pictures

  Mudejar stucco decoration in the El Transito Synagogue © akgimages/Bible Land Pictures

  Santa Maria la Blanca Synagogue © akg-images/Album/Oronoz

  Carpet page from the Kennicott Bible, courtesy of The Art Archive/Bodleian Library Oxford

  Barcelona Haggadah, courtesy of The Art Archive/British Library

  The Cervera Bible, courtesy of Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, Portugal/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library

  ‘We were slaves in Egypt’ illustration © The British Library Board (Add. 26957 f.39v)

  ‘This is the Bread of Affliction’ illustration © The British Library Board (Add. 26957 f.39)

  Jonah and the ‘Great Fish’ illustration, Kennicott Bible, courtesy of The Art Archive/Bodleian Library Oxford

  Menorah illustration, Kennicott Bible, courtesy of The Art Archive/Bodleian Library Oxford

  The colophon page of the Kennicott Bible, courtesy of The Art Archive/Bodleian Library Oxford

  Hebrew micrography © The British Library Board (Add. 15282 f.45v)

  Catalan Atlas, courtesy of The Art Archive/Bibliothèque Nationale Paris

  Maps

  The Bible Lands 10th century BCE to 70 CE

  Synagogues in late antiquity

  Jewish towns in Arabia

  The Jewish world revealed by the Cairo Geniza

  Jews in Christian Iberia, c.1390

  Massacres and expulsions in medieval Christendom

  Foreword

  I can’t say I wasn’t warned. ‘My sonne’, the wintry-wise preacher of Ecclesiastes admonishes, ‘of making many bookes there is no end and much studie is a wearinesse of the flesh’. Anyone venturing into Jewish history has to be dauntingly aware of the immense mountain ranges of multi-volume scholarship towering behind him. Nonetheless, forty years ago, I agreed to complete a history of the Jews left unfinished at the death of one of those scholars, Cecil Roth, whose entire life had been devoted to that subject. At the time, I was at work on a book on the Rothschilds and Palestine. Together with a friend and colleague at Cambridge University, Nicholas de Lange, a scholar of Jewish philosophy in late antiquity and Amos Oz’s translator, I had been educating myself at the students’ expense in post-biblical history through an informal seminar held in my rooms at Christ’s College. For a couple of hours after supper, the sages, false messiahs, poets and rabble-rousers came into our little company as we cracked walnuts and jokes, and drank wine and the brimming cup of Jewish words.

  But Nicholas and I had brought the gatherings together for a serious reason. Outside of rabbinics there seemed to us no other place for history or literature students to meet and discuss Jewish culture, and that itself was a sign of how separate the subject had become from the academic mainstream. By the time the invitation to complete the Roth volume came along, there were other pressing reasons to want to make a connection between the history of the Jews and everyone else. It was 1973. The Yom Kippur Arab–Israeli War had just taken place. Despite another Israeli military success, the mood was as sober as it had been euphoric seven years earlier, after the Six Day War. This last conflict had been a close-run thing, especially during the bold Egyptian advance over the Suez Canal and into Sinai. The sands were shifting; something which had seemed secure no longer was. The years which followed saw Jewish history at both ends of its multi-millennia chronology become fiercely self-critical of triumphalism. Biblical archaeology took a radically sceptical turn. Painful truths began to air about what exactly had happened between Jews and Palestinians in 1948. The realities of prolonged occupation, and eventually of facing the first intifada, sank in. It became impossible to talk to non-Jews about Jewish history without the subject being swamped by the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Over everything else, understandably, the crematoria smoke still hung its tragic pa
ll. The unparalleled magnitude of that catastrophe seemed to demand silence before its enormity, both from Jews and Gentiles.

  But, whatever the cost of breaking it, silence is not a historian’s option. I believed that by writing a post-medieval history for a general readership, one that gave full weight to shared experience, not all of which was invariably a story of persecution and massacre, I could act as an interlocutor, persuading readers (and makers of history syllabuses) that no history, wherever and whenever its principal focus of study, was complete without the Jewish story, and that there was a lot more to it than pogroms and rabbinics, a chronicle peopled by ancient victims and modern conquerors.

  This was the instinct I’d grown up with. My father was obsessed in equal measure with Jewish and British history, and assumed the fit between them. He would take the tiller at the back of a little boat on the Thames, puttering along between Datchet and Old Windsor, with some strawberries, scones and a pot of jam in a basket, and talk of Disraeli one minute as though he had known him personally (‘Baptised? What difference did that make?’) and the next of the seventeenth- century false messiah Shabbetai Zevi through whom my dad (and the ancestral Schamas) had obviously seen. (‘What a momser! [bastard]’) Or who’d got their Jews right? Walter Scott or George Eliot, the caricaturing Dickens of Oliver Twist or the sentimental Dickens of Our Mutual Friend? We would moor under the willows to wrestle with the pain of Shylock. It was from my parents, too, that I inherited the sense that the Old Testament was the first written history of all, that for all the poetic excesses of miracles, it was the scroll of enslavements and liberations, of royal hubris and filial rebellions, of sieges and annihilations, of lawgiving and lawbreaking: the template on which every other subsequent history would be laid. If my dad had written it, his history would have been called ‘From Moses to Magna Carta’. But he didn’t.

  And neither did I, not in 1973. I tried, following on from Cecil Roth’s narrative, but for whatever reasons the graft wouldn’t take. And then I went on forty years of wandering, not exactly in the wilderness but to parts remote from my Jewish background, to Holland and South Carolina, Skara Brae and Jacobin Paris. But through all that time, the lines of the story I might have told stayed dimly present in my thoughts and memories, like relatives tugging gently but insistently at my sleeve at family weddings or funerals (which sometimes they did). Never underestimate the power of a Jewish auntie much less the silent, patient reproach of a mother.

  So in 2009, when Adam Kemp of the BBC arranged a meeting to talk about an idea for a new television documentary series ‘which you’ll either love or hate’, I knew, somehow, before it was out of his mouth just what was in the offing. There was, I admit, a fleeting Jonah moment. A voice inside me said, ‘Flee to Joppa, book berth on first ship leaving for Tarshish.’ But then what good had it done him? So I took hold of the project abandoned all those decades before, with every kind of gratitude and trepidation. This time, the story would have the persuasive power of television behind it, and through the two media – writing and filming – organically interconnected but not identical, I hoped to build exactly that bridge between Jewish and non-Jewish audiences which somehow seemed to elude me forty years earlier.

  For all the immeasurable challenges (three millennia of history in five hours of television and two books), this has been, and still is, a great labour of love. However unequal to the task of telling this story, it’s one I rejoice to be narrating, not least because the source materials, visual as well as textual, have been so transformed over the past few decades. Archaeological finds, especially inscriptions from the biblical period, have given a fresh impression of how that text, which would become the heritage of a large part of the world, came into being. Mosaics have been uncovered from one end of the Jewish world to the other that radically alter not just our sense of what a synagogue and Jewish worship was, but how much of that religion was shared in its forms with paganism and early Christianity. Without forcing the narrative into feel-good pieties, and without downplaying the many sorrows that have spotted the story with tears, the history that unfolds is one of the heroism of everyday life as much as that of the grand tragedies. This book and the television films are full of such little revelations that add up to a culture, the prosaic along with the poetic: a doodle on a child’s Hebrew exercise page from medieval Cairo; battling cats and mice on a sumptuously illustrated Bible from Spain; the touchingly meagre dowry of an Egyptian slave girl from the fifth century BCE married to a local Jewish temple official; the aggravation of an NCO sweating it out on a hilltop fort while the Babylonians are closing in; the plangent lines of the priestly benediction engraved in archaic Hebrew on a tiny silver amulet from the reign of King Josiah.

  This is the small stuff of common experience. But the Jewish story has been anything but commonplace. What the Jews have lived through, and somehow survived to tell the tale, has been the most intense version known to human history of adversities endured by other peoples as well; of a culture perennially resisting its annihilation, of remaking homes and habitats, writing the prose and the poetry of life, through a succession of uprootings and assaults. It is what makes this story at once particular and universal, the shared inheritance of Jews and non-Jews alike, an account of our common humanity. In all its splendour and wretchedness, repeated tribulation and infinite creativity, the tale set out in the pages which follow remains, in so many ways, one of the world’s great wonders.

  Part One

  papyrus, potsherd, parchment

  1

  In Egypt

  In the beginning – not the imagined beginning of patriarchs and prophets, and certainly not the beginning of the whole universe, just the documented beginning of ordinary Jews – in that beginning, a father and mother were worrying about their son.

  This son, a soldier boy, was called Shelomam, an Aramaic version of my Hebrew name, Shelomo. His father’s name was Osea, which was the middle name of my own aba.1 The time was two and a half millennia ago, in 475 BCE, the tenth year of the reign of Xerxes, the Achaemenid king of Persia who, though much bloodied in Greece, was still ruler in Egypt, where Shelomam and Osea lived. Xerxes had another decade on the throne before being murdered by his most trusted officer, Artabanus the Hyrcanian, who did the deed in cahoots with a helpful eunuch. Jesus of Nazareth would not be born for half a millennium. If the several writers of the Hebrew Bible are to be believed, it had been around eight hundred years since Moses had led the enslaved Israelites from Egypt into the desert mountains where, in possession of the laws given directly by Yahweh – indeed written with His very finger – they turned, despite recurring flings with idolatry and a yen for many other gods, into something resembling Jews.

  The exodus from the flood valley of the Nile, the end of foreign enslavement, was presented by the Bible writers as the condition of becoming fully Israelite. They imagined the journey as an ascent, both topographical and moral. It was on the stony high places, way stations to heaven, that YHWH – as Yahweh is written – had revealed Himself (or at least His back), making Moses’ face hot and shiny with reflected radiance. From the beginning (whether in the biblical or archaeological version), Jews were made in hill country. In Hebrew, emigrating to Israel is still aliyah, a going up. Jerusalem was unimaginable on the low fluvial plain. Rivers were murky with temptation; the sea was even worse, brimming with scaly monsters. Those who dwelled by its shores or shipped around upon its waves (like the Phoenicians or the Greeks) were to be detested as shifty, idolatrous and unclean. To go back to Egypt then, in the eyes of those for whom the exodus was the proper start of everything Jewish, was a fall, a descent to brazen idolatry. The prophets Ezekiel and Jeremiah – the latter even when he had gone to Egypt himself – had warned against this relapse, this un-Jewing. Those who fully succumbed, Jeremiah warned, would become ‘an execration and an astonishment, a curse and a reproach’.

  Heedless, the Israelites not for the first or last time disobeyed, trotting back to Egypt in droves. Why
not, when the northern kingdom of Israel had been smashed by the Assyrians in 721 BCE, and a century later the kingdom of Judah was likewise pulverised by the Babylonians? All these misfortunes could, and were, interpreted by the writers of the Bible narratives as YHWH’s chastisement of back-sliding. But those on the receiving end could be forgiven for thinking: much good He has done us. Some 30,000 rams and ewes sacrificed for Passover in the Temple by King Josiah; a mass rending of raiment in contrite penitence for flirting with false gods; no help at all in fending off whichever hellish conquerors came out of Mesopotamia with their ringlets and their panthers and their numberless ranks of archers and javelin-men.

  So the Israelites went down from their lion-coloured Judaean hills to the flood country of Egypt, to Tahpanhes on the delta, and Memphis halfway south, and especially to Pathros, the south country. When the Persians arrived in 525 BCE, they treated the Israelites not as slaves but often as slave owners, and above all as tough professional soldiers who could be depended on, as much as Arameans, Caspians or Carian Greeks from the western Anatolian littoral, to suppress Egyptian uprisings against Persia. They would also police the turbulent southern frontier where Nubian Africa began.

  Shelomam, Osea’s boy, was one of these young men, a mercenary – it was a living – who had been posted south all the way to the garrison of the Hayla hayahudaya, the Judaean Troop, on the island of Elephantine, just downstream from the first cataract of the Nile. Perhaps he had been assigned to caravan convoy, guarding the tribute of elephant tusks, ebony and Ethiopian boys that had been the pharaoh’s due from Nubia and was now sent to the Persian governor in his place.

  The father, Osea, was writing from Migdol, probably located on the eastern branch of the Nile delta, where Shelomam had previously been stationed. His letter, sent five hundred river miles south to await the soldier boy’s arrival on Elephantine, was written in Aramaic, the daily tongue of the region and the entire empire, on the pressed-reed writing surface of papyrus. Patched together though this particular piece was, papyrus degrades very slowly. If kept from light, the ink remains dark and sharp. The square-form script, the same elegant style in which Hebrew would be written from the time of the Second Temple to our own, is still crisply legible. In Jewish memory it is as though Osea had written just yesterday. A worried father is a worried father. He can’t help letting the boy know how he feels, right away, at the top of the letter: ‘Well-being and strength I send you but from the day you went on your way, my heart, it’s not so good.’ And then, the inevitable clincher, the three words Shelomam must have known were coming, even without Osea having to write them, the phrase all Jewish boys hear at some point; the phrase from which history unfolds: ‘Likewise your mother.’