The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  But not all marriages were so close. One or two of David Bar Issachar’s and Keziah’s great-great- grandsons brought the Persian wives into the family, somewhat to the disapproval of some of their sisters, but they were biddable girls and did not disturb the even tenor of the family’s ways. Still the old Jewish customs were observed – the Sabbaths and the festivals, the fasts and the celebrations – by children who had the liquid dark eyes and aquiline noses of their Persian ancestors as well as by the snub-nosed rusty-topped cousins who were Tamar’s memorial.

  As Islam spread and flourished in the cities of Mesopotamia, so did the Jewishness of the family of Baghdad. The Caliphs of the city built themselves the most beautiful palaces, set in many acres of wooded parkland with singing fountains and brooks and lakes teeming with are fish. They built peacock blue mosques and slender minarets and around them as Baghdad stretched itself along the right bank of great Tigris, streets of vaulted bazaars sprang up. Raw wool and cotton goods, spices and sugar, copper and precious stones came by camel and pack ass across the eternal deserts from China and the Indies, or arrived on the ancient goatskin rafts which twisted their way through the Tigris’s tangled channels to bring pearls and silver from the Persian Gulf.

  But among the minarets and great houses of the viziers were the synagogues of the Jews, rich yet elegant buildings which bore the most costly tiles, the handsomest cedarwood carvings in their dim cool interiors, and all that could ever be dreamed of in wrought gold and silver vessel and ornaments. The Jewish houses were mansions, built around paved courtyards where water tumbled from tiled fountains into marble basins, everywhere carpeted with the best products of Persia. The most exquisite porcelain from far China, the softest cushioned beds behind cool lattice of the windows, and were inhabited by the most splendidly dressed men and women.

  And none were more richly dressed nor more lavishly bestowed than the mighty family of David Ben Lamech. His great-great-grandfather had been nicknamed The Strong by a grateful vizier, who he had helped to quell an uprising of local peasants by means of bribery paid to their allies, a nomadic tribe which had come sweeping into the city hell bent on robbery. The nickname had stuck, but had been translated in the ancient tongue of Judah, so that the sons of the vizier’s friend became the ‘Son of the Strong’ Ben Lamech.

  There were by the year 1150 over forty thousand Jews living in the city of Baghdad. Some had come to trade from Babylon, Suera, Pumpeditha and Ava, drawn by stories of the great wealth of this jewels on the Tigris, and stayed to prosper. Others s had come from Persia, retracing their steps westward from their earlier migrations there, after the first Captivity that had taken their ancestors from Judah to Babylon. And many, of course, were the descendants of David Ben Issachar and Keziah.

  The Elder, David Ben Lamech, could trace his ancestry back through the oldest son of an oldest son directly to their Patriarch, David Ben Issachar. It was said by those who wished to curry favour that they could trace their line further still, to Kind David himself, who had ruled so long ago in lost Jerusalem, but the family themselves never made any such claims. They just smiled into their beards, and let their neighbours talk and fawn and said nothing.

  They did not need to. Whatever had been their ancient heritage, why they had now was enough for any family. Their senior member David (for the family liked to bestow this important name on someone in every generation) was the Nasi, the Prince of the Captivity who led all the forty thousand. When the caliph wanted money for one of his schemes, and had to turn to his Jewish citizens to get it, it was to David Ben Lamech he spoke first, labelling that great man Sarraf Bashi – Chief Banker. The other Jews did not like the caliph’s taxes; who would? But paying them to David Ben Lamech was somehow less painful than paying them directly to the viziers of the haughty Caliph; and anyway, it was more than taxes; it was insurance. While the Nasi rode decked in gold tissue to the Palace and was greeted as ‘Brother’ by their temporal ruler, they had a friend at court who could speak for them in any civil argument, and who could protest – successfully – when some junior official allowed his rapacity, to get the better of him. Life was good in Baghdad. Good and easy. The family of Ben Lamech had no reason to think it would ever be otherwise.

  Patterns were being repeated elsewhere, also. In Cordoba, it was very similar to Baghdad, even down to the regular appearance of red haired blue eyed children. Simeon Ben Jehohanan enriched the inheritance Susannah had left him, garnered from her prudence and hard work, and then distressed his sons by giving the bulk of his possessions to his beloved daughter Tamar before he died, so that their own inheritance was meagre. They learned to hate their sister, Tamar Ben Simeon, because she took all her wealth into marriage with a Jew from Granada, Gabriel Ben Asher, leaving them to make their own fortunes, while she and her children went to live on a hill above Cordoba.

  They too had children, many of them, who grew up and learned to copy customs of their neighbours in marrying exceedingly young. The great great great granddaughters of that Susannah who had lain on her back and stared at the sky beside the wharf in Gaza learned before they were twelve years old to lie on theirs and stare up at ornately decorated ceilings while experiencing the same invasion of their bodies. But they seemed to come to little harm from it, and dutifully bore their many children before going to their graces on the Spanish hillside near their homes in the growing city of Cordoba. The Jews of the city called the country where they had come to rest Sepharad, identifying it with the place named in the Book of Obadiah. They still remembered home though, and spoke yearningly of Jerusalem. One day, they promised each other, they would return. One day. Meanwhile they buried their dead on the hillside and kept to the old rules of the old religion, and went on managing their livings.

  The Arabs came in 711 and spread themselves around the peninsula like olive oil spilled on a marble slab, rolling into very corner of every life. It was said by some of the Spanish Christians that the Jews had plotted with the invading strangers. The Jews denied that. In response, their Christian neighbours pointed to the way the Muslims left the Jews of Cordoba and Cadiz and Toledo and everywhere else well enough alone, in spite of the fact that Mohammed, their great founder, had been on less than ideal terms with some other Jews. He had tried unsuccessfully to convert the Jewish tribe of Nadir in the city of Yathrib, the town he had renamed Al Medina, the City. Mohammed had been angry, very angry. Yet, somehow his anger seemed to have been dissipated in his followers, and the invaders of Christian Spain, a country they called Andalus, dismissed the Jews there as mere slaves, and let them be.

  So, the Islamic invasion pleased the Jews of Cordoba well enough; only thirty years before they had been sadly harassed by the King Erwig, who had taken upon himself to insist that all the Jews of Spain be baptised, or exiled. The King who followed him onto the throne reversed that rule but insisted the Jews sell their property to Christians at fixed and very low prices. Thus, the arrival of the Muslims came as some sort of relief. They had indeed been reduced almost to slavery by the previous masters – a change could be nothing but a benefit.

  Reduced to slavery – almost but not quite. The descendants of Tamar Bas Simeon had managed to hold on to much of her property in the form of gold and jewels, following a family tradition. It was said among them that because their first ancestors had always dealt in gold, they would too. Their memories were long, of the bad times all those years ago. No land-owning for them – they felt safer with their small delicate tools and their skill at spinning the precious metal into beautiful objects, for then if Romans or other marauders set about them again they could escape with most of their substance in their own hands.

  Inevitably, under Islamic rule, they prospered. The Muslins came into the Jewish workshops and looked at the delicate tracery of the neck pieces and bracelets and platters and cups that the people of the Mountain made, and bought them at handsome prices. The family of the Mountain – everyone knew them as the Da Montana tribe- thrived. And went on thriving
for many generations, rearing their dark haired children (many of whom bore a remarkable resemblance to the sharp eyed men from over the sea, but what could you do? These things happen in very family) and their red haired blue eyed ones, and marrying each other in succeeding generations, just as did their remote cousins, far way in Baghdad. They too were to go on prospering for many years, but not always. There, far ahead in the future, lay a cloud which would one day blot out the whole sky. But now, they had survived the Romans, the early Christian harassment and finally the Islamic invasion.

  That was God’s goodness enough for the present.

  4

  Strange things happened to Micah’s children in Byzantium, and not only to them; their distant kin in Tarsus, with whom they had long since lost any contact (indeed, none of the great-great-grandchildren of David Ben Micah even knew they had kin there) suffered upheavals too.

  The world was changing. Teutonic tribes bore down on Rome, and destroyed that eternal empire; Islam, passionate, united by Mohammed, destroyed first the Byzantine army and so overran Syria and Palestine and then defeated a vast Persian army. Great empires toppled.

  In the north, far on the other side of the Black Sea, a tribe of Mongolians had swept into Southern Russia in the year 700 CE and conquered it to found the Kingdom of the Khazars, which stretched from the Black Sea to the Caspian. The Khazars built a capital city. Ityl (later to be called Astrakhan), at the mouth of the Volga river, and flourished and grew rich; rich enough to have time for such matters as culture and religion. Travellers from distant Muslim and Christian countries came, and so did the Jews, and the king of the Khazars, Bulan, who saw himself as a man of high thoughtfulness, listened to all they had to say of their religions, and chose Judaism for himself, for was it not the mother of the other two? He and his nobles had themselves circumcised and read the Torah with eagerness and adopted the rituals of the Sabbath and the festivals with enthusiasm. So the kingdom that stretched deep into great Bulgaria, among the pagans of the North with their brutish ways and ugly guttural speech, became known as the Jewish Kingdom of the Khazars – a matter of some amazement to the Jews of distant Sepharad when news of its existence filtered through to them, struggling as they were to maintain themselves amid the complications of life surrounded by both Christians and Muslims.

  Once more, for a time, the scattered Jews dated to dream of a country their own again. Yet the descendants of Micah dreamed no such dreams. They were living as they had formally generations; Daniel’s children comfortable enough traders in rich Byzantium, and Akkub’s children poverty-stricken work horses in Tarsus. Until the world around them tilted, stirring the waters of their lives, and sent them off again on the ripples, wandering yet again.

  It was two of Daniel Ben Micah’s more energetic progeny who set off first, in the year 880 AD, from the teeming wharves and jetties of Byzantium, bearing such gold as they could extract from their father Jethro, an old man who deeply mistrusted this absurd project. They had visions, these two, Reuben and Amos Ben Jethro, of making their personal fortunes.

  It was not as easy as they had dreamed without means and connections in the rich city of Ityl. Amos, disgruntled, was prepared to return at once across the Black Sea to Byzantium even though the journey he had already made had been hellish. He was even prepared to face his father’s scorn. But to is own good fortune, he chose to take his evening meal on what he meant to be his last day in Ityl at a wharfside inn overlooking the broad Volga. Here he fell in with the servant of a Radhanite, one of the Jewish merchants who travelled, carrying others goods and letters and money and a certain amount of political intrigue when it suited them.

  The tales this man told impatient, twenty-three-year-old Amos fired him with new hope – stories of Radhanite life that seemed to him to match his private fantasies and promised their swift fulfilment. He persuaded his new friend to speak well of him to his master.

  This Amos became the number of his family who would wander furthest of all from Jerusalem. His Radhanite master, Menahem Ibn Labrat, had come from the Islamic city of Granada. The ebbing and flowing of the barbarian tribes throughout Western Europe, the wars and the invasions culminating in the defeat of the Syrian Empire by Islam, had closed the trade routes once used by the Christian Syrians. For a time it looked as though the people of the West, even the richest of the landed gentry and the highest of the Church dignitaries, would have to do without luxuries – the silk and spice, sugar and slave girls they hungered for. It was this need that provided opportunity for many ambitious Jews.

  Going overland in well protected caravans they set out from such cities as Burjan, in Great Bulgaria deep in the Khazar kingdom, and Cadiz, in Sepharad, and Damascus and Antioch and Baghdad, bearing furs and beaver skins from the remote Russians, swords and knives from Toledo in Spain, and honey, millet and dried grapes from the plains of Europe to China and India. And in time, they came back with cinnamon and musk and camphor, silk and above all, precious sugar.

  They were not easy journeys. The roads were alive with robbers, and there were wild animals, and freaks of climate from dust storms to hailstones and thick clotting snowfalls to content with as well as disease and death. Yet Amos was happier than he would ever have thought possible. He never took a wife, but he left his imprint in every town through which he passed. Brown eyed black haired children with the face of long dead Micah tumbled and shouted and wept and laughed and grew up in back streets of Cologne and Troyes, Champagne and Aachen, never knowing their father was a Jew, or that their remote ancestors had once fled from burning Jerusalem.

  After many years of trading, Amos settled in the far city of Shanghai. There, when he was almost sixty years old, he had a son by a Chinese woman. Uncharacteristically, Amos took the child into his house and reared him lovingly. Later the boy, Kwan Sin – Sin meaning new, since he was a new sort of citizen – was taken to Kai Feng Fu, deep inside the Chinese mainland, and there he joined the small cluster of other Jews who had arrived here from Persia and Turkestan, long before.

  Kwan Sin was not the only Jew to have an oriental look; within a few dozen generations, even after they had built their synagogue in 1163 and became closer as a community, Jews of Kai Feng Fu married with the people of the town, absorbing them into their rituals and practices. They were to stay there for many years, worshipping in their synagogue. When the Chinese conducted memorials for their ancestors the Jews of Kai Feng Fu did so too, filling bowls with incense in memory of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Aaron and Joshua and Ezra. They used a ritual bath, as did their distant brethren of the West, and killed their animals for the table according to the laws of kashrus. But they ate their meals with chopsticks.

  When Amos dies at the age of eighty-three he left the world convinced that he had wrought well with his life; and indeed he had. Eventually his seed would peter out many centuries hence when the greatest war of all times engulfed the remnants of the people of Kai Fen fu. But Amos could not know that, and so he died contented.

  After he had bade his brother Amos farewell, so many years before, Reuben had set off northward, taking ship as a deckhand on one of the many boats that plied the Volga, leaving the Caspian Sea behind, and making his way to the very edges of the Khazar kingdom, and beyond across two more great rivers the Don and the Dneiper, before coming to rest eventually in a tiny village deep in the sheep rearing country north of Olbia.

  Here at last he settled. He married a woman of the Khazars, and when she had given him eleven children and died of the effort, married another who was almost as fruitful and gave him six more. He was not always as grateful to God as he might been for the richness of his family life, for it left him very poor in every other way; but they all loved him, and wept when they were old enough to be sent out to make their ways in the world.

  Some of his sons went to Olbia to make their livings, and did well enough; long after, when the town had been renamed Odessa, their children’s children became pillars of the Jewish community there, for the
y had brought from their life with their father Reuben a great affection for the practices of their religion, and kept every festival and fast most faithfully.

  Yet for Reuben in his old age, the favourite of all his children was Obadiah. He was a thin young man with very large dark eyes set deep in a pale face, and a passion for the study of the Torah that sometimes awed his father. Reuben could of course read and write – every Jew could do that, for how could he be called to be Bar Mitzvah unless he was literate? – but the years of dealing with fleeces and recalcitrant rams and the killing of lambs for the tables of his neighbours had rusted his ability to find his way among the ancient scrolls. So when Obadiah sat hunched over them in the synagogue the old man would watch him and smile proudly into his prayer shawl.

  Obadiah might never had married at all, had not Reuben become concerned for his future when he no longer had a father to feed and care for him. The old man entered into very complex and protracted negotiations with a family in Byzantium, using the services of on the Radhanites who passed through Olbia, and after the exchange of many fat sheep sent the bemused scholar there, amid many fatherly tears, to settle down as the husband of a rich man’s daughter.

  Obadiah managed to sire six sons of his own, and so spent the rest of his life happily in his books. One of his sons followed him, so started a tradition of scholarship among the descendants of Micah that was to last for many generations. Long after Byzantium, had lost its early glory and had become Constantinople, the family of Simon Ben Chazen, the ‘son of the singer of Israel, as Obadiah’s son was called, was respected for it’s scholarship, if despised for its poverty. It is a sad truth that learning and wealth made bad bedfellows.