The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  It was there in Constantinople that eventually the descendants of Daniel Ben Micah met again the children of Akkub Ben Micah. They did not know they were remote cousins. After so many years had passed, how could they? But so it was. Two of Akkub’s children, starving in Tarsus, had decided at last that life anywhere must be better than the grinding soul-destroying poverty of that sour city and left their father behind and like their kin, went travelling.

  These great grandsons of Akkub found themselves in Constantinople and because of them were as eager a scholar as Obadiah Ben Reuben and his son Simon Ben Chazan had been, it was inevitable they should meet. And that a daughter of Simon should wed a son of Akkub’s seed.

  So the web was woven and went on growing wider, tightening the bonds in very generation. As the years went by they all scattered far and wide about the lands between the three great rivers, Volga, Don and Dneiper, and settled in villages and small towns to raise even more children in the laws of lost Judah, teaching their sons the ancient language and the ancient ritual and their daughters the old rules of feminine submissiveness. Above all the ancient and yet ever new promises of future peace and happiness.

  In the thousand years that had passed since Susannah and Tamar had fled the horrors of Roman conquest forty generations of their children had spread about the world. And forty generations of the ninety thousand other fleeing Jews had also come and gone in the world, their numbers ebbing and flowing with the diseases and famines, heavy crops and good summers that so governed the lives of these struggling people. There were fortunate ones like the families of David Ben Lamech in Baghdad, and the Da Montana tribe if Cordoba in Spain who prospered, each generation adding something to the family’s wealth. They grew in thought and learning as well, as for riches gives the human heart and mind in room in which to grow.

  But there were others, like the myraid children of Micah, Jews of central and Western Europe who were too poor, too insignificant, too scorned by their gentile neighbours ever to have the dignity of a family name. The Jews who lived their lives out as their father’s sons – Reuben Ben Jethro, succeeded by Absalom Ben Reuben, succeeded by Jacob Ben Absalom, and who cared any more who his great grandfather had been? It was enough to be alive, to have food to eat and a wife to warm your belly on a bitter night. Of course thee poor Jews read their holy books and observed their holy laws, and when they could, found a few copper coins to give to the Rabbis, but there was no energy to spare to study literature or contemplate the art of the painter and the sculptor, the singer and the player of sweet music, as did their rich cousins in happier lands.

  Yet a few of them – in these far lands of France and Bohemia, Hungary and Bulgaria and the myriad duchies from the Rhine in the west to the Elbe in the east, which were one day to be collected together as Germany – a few of them leaned to live with their neighbours in such a way that they grew fat. Banned from the membership of the Guilds that would have admitted them to the mysteries of successful craft, because they could not, swear the necessary Christian oaths, they turned to money dealing. It was a natural way to be, with the Radhanites and messages from one place to another. A Jew could trust another Jew, and that helped. So, some of them became money lenders, the earliest of bankers, financing nobles in their petty skirmishes, lending money to would-be builders of cathedrals, bustling about the markets of the cities; needed, used, and in time inevitable hated and feared. For it is a part of the darker side of the spirit of man to loathe most that upon which he most depends.

  All of which added up to the horrors that were to be visited upon some of the children of Susannah and Tamar, and their fellow Jews. The fortunate ones in Spain and Baghdad were left in peace for a while, but their turn would come. First it was the children of Micah, the poor ones, who were to know the pain.

  Because of Pope Urban, the second of that name.

  5

  Samuel Ben Israel, a descendant of Micah, who lived a quiet humble like in a tiny Jewish village far from Blois, deep in the land of the Franks, had never hear of Pope Urban. How should he? He was an old man, who spent all this waking hours deep in study of the Torah and the Talmud. His five sons and three daughters and their husbands made sure he had enough to eat, difficult though it seemed on the meagre living they made as pedlars and small shopkeepers; so, for old Samuel, life was good. God had smiled on him. Yet when Urban the second son stood up amid the listening clergy and aristocracy that made up the Council of Clermont on a November afternoon in 1095, what he said was to mean much to Samuel and his children.

  It was, said Urban, unthinkable that the Holy Places of Jerusalem, where Jesus Christ had suffered his Passion and had died for the sins of the sons of man, should be in the hands of the Infidel. There must be, said Urban, a Crusade. Men must take up their crosses, and go to Jerusalem, to free that great and holy city from its yoke. It would bring suffering and pain, warned Urban, to those who answered his call, but also glory and a life of eternal bliss. Those who did follow would have all their sins forgiven.

  It was bit a spark of a speech, but a conflagration. Within a matter of weeks great swathes of Europe were seething with excitement as everyone – even the children – took up the cry to the Crusade.

  Who it was or when it was that the Christian peasants – and quite a few of the aristocrats too - pointed out that there were infidels nearer at hand to be killed for the Cross, no one ever really knew. Suffice it that someone did, saying that it was absurd to go to kill Christ’s enemies in foreign lands when there were some so handy, and so rich, with wealth that could be used to further the cause. The cry ‘Kill’ a Jew and save your soul!’ began to reverberate through the countryside and hills of Europe.

  The Jews did their best. They called a Day of Fasting three months after the speech at Clermont, a place which the Jews came to label Har Ophel, ‘The Hill of Darkness’, making a mournful pun on its French name ‘The Hill of Light’. Samuel Ben Israel did not fully understand why he had to fast and pray, but he did so with great enthusiasm, as he always did.

  Not that it did him or his fellows much good; in Metz in February of 1096 twenty-two Jews were killed by a, looting mob, precursors of the real Crusades, running amok among the peaceful Jewish community there. In May the synagogue at Spires was surrounded and attacked on the Sabbath. Two weeks later, in Worms, another attack was made, and this time some of the terrified Jews agreed to immediate baptism; but most didn’t. So the community was almost totally destroyed, even those had had taken refuge in the palace of the Bishop, a true and caring Christian who had tried to protect the Jews. Eight hundred did there.

  And in Mayence, just a week later. The same. In Cologne, three days afterwards, more deaths. On the first of June, it was the turn of Treves. Before July was out, the mobs had reached as far as Salonika.

  Poor old Samuel Ben Israel died lying in a pool of blood in the wreckage of his synagogue, his grey head almost severed from its scrawny neck, and so did three of his sons and twelve of his grandchildren. But there were survivors who limped away to hide in the more remote villages of the land in which they and their fathers and grandfathers before them had been born, to lick their wounds and ask their God, again, what they had they done to deserve such suffering. And slowly, pick up the pieces of life and begin again.

  Samuel’s youngest surviving grandchild, Issachar, moved to Treves, and there married and raised a family. By the time he was an old man, and the first Crusade was a sour memory, he had produced six children of his own, and they had given him twenty-two grandchildren. The line that had come from far off Micah seemed to have its breath, and put out new shoots. There were three little red headed blue eyed children in this generation, a girl called Deborah, and her cousins David and Isaac. They had heard the tales of the awful things that had happened fifty years before and been threatened with Crusaders when they were naughty, but it had never occurred to their young minds that they would ever suffer such experiences themselves. Until it all started again.

  T
he Second Crusade was a bloody as the first had been for the Jews in Europe. In Cologne and Magdeburg, Halle and Würtburg, itinerant mobs fell on the traders and grew beards and long ear locks of the devout and pious Jew, and even on the not so pious, the fashionably dressed who looked and spoke and behaved exactly as their Christian neighbours did. And also upon their women and their children. The mob, led by a particularly virulent monk called Radulph hooted and screamed and killed them all, scattering thick blood to run in gutters and stain the cobble-stones of the old cities a sickening brown.

  They came to Treves as well, of course, and Deborah’s mother, frantic with terror after her sons’ deaths, pushed her too-distinctive read headed surviving child into the arms of a visiting pedlar, one David of Odessa, a poor man who was hoping to mend his fortunes by travelling as far as possible from his home. He had not meant, God knew, to travel into the arms of marauding Jew-baiters, and have inadvertently done so, he had turned tail to flee as fast as he could.

  So, the women of Treves gave him her child to care for, as he took to his heels, he wanted to abandon her. A child of seven! How could he, a pedlar travelling the rough roads with his poor pack, cope with that? But the child looked so much like his niece, small Rachel faraway at home in Odessa, with her round blue eyes and rough curly hair the colour of freshly cooked carrots, that he had not the heart to abandon her. So he carried her, weeping, away from the killers roaming the streets of her birthplace.

  He fled before the hordes into northern France. Always just ahead of the massacres. Deborah took his hand and held it tightly, not understanding, but feeling his need for such contact, as well as her own. Neither of them knew of their relationship, that both had once, long long ago, shared a mother. Red headed Tamar somehow survived in them both. Just.

  It was at Blois that at last they stopped. Deborah had come back to the home of her great great grandfather, had she but known it. They had covered many weary miles, over many weary frightening months, but the sounds of killing seemed to have died down behind them and David of Odessa was tired. It was a tiredness born of disease, though he did not know that. His lungs were shredded by consumption, and in a few months he would cough his life’s blood up at the side of the road, and die alone leaving his pack to be seized by the next passer by. But first he left Deborah, now a taller and leggier creature than she had been when her mother had pushed her into the pedlar’s arms, in the care of a harassed but kindly enough widow who barely kept her large family in what she could earn as washerwoman to her fellow Jews. One more made little difference, and another pair of working hands could be useful.

  There Deborah stayed, sometimes remembering her parents in far away Treves and trying to remember David the pedlar who had been kind to her, but losing them in the haze of steam and soap that were her daily lot. And so she lived, in a daze of hard work and hunger until she had the good fortune to catch the eye of Mordecai Ben Yussef, a comfortably off silversmith, when she took his laundry to him. He had had a grandmother with red hair. And this child was like enough to her in looks to be interesting – and to wed a dowerless orphan, while it was not economic sense, made good personal sense to Mordecai, whose first wife had been one of a large and clannish family, whose demands had made his life less than peaceful.

  So, fourteen-year-old Deborah married forty-five-year old Mordecai and thought herself well off to do so. He made four children on her, much to his satisfaction, for his first wife had been not only a shrew but barren as well, and to Deborah, with no parents or brothers or sisters to call her own it was a comfort to have children, however painful it was to bear them.

  But there was still no peace for her. When her eldest on Micah was twelve (his father had chosen the name, telling Deborah it was one that had been in his family for many generations; as indeed it had been in hers and from the same source, though neither of them knew that) and the baby, Reuben, just five, a whisper began to hiss about the street of Blois. It came from no one knew where, but it was the women who thronged the market place who knew most of it, and they told each other, and told their men and their children, and soon it came to the ears of the Jews themselves, who laughed at first, incredulous that anyone could imagine such tale, let alone believe it.

  The Jews, whispered the women, kill Christian babies. They kill them for the sake of their sweet blood, which they take into their houses and using some strange and dreadful recipe, bake into their special Passover bread. Why, said the women of Blois, haven’t you seen that hateful bread? It is thin and flat and bears brown blisters on it. Blisters of Christian blood, burned brown in their evil ovens.

  The people of Blois were determined to believe the blood libel, airily dismissing the absence of any mysteriously dead body that might have been adduced as evidence, and set on the small community.

  It was a sunny day in May, in 1171, when Deborah was just a few days from her thirty-first birthday, when they did it. They built a pyre in the centre of town, and dragged the Jews to it, all the men they could find, and seventeen women, and tied them to the stakes and set light to the brushwood round them. Deborah’s last sight of Mordecai was his face upturned and his beard alight, his eyes closed as he cried aloud the ‘Shema Yisrael, adonai alehenu, adonai echael’ – ‘Here O Israel, the Lord if God, the Lord is one’. Had it not been for the children around her skirts, their eyes tight closed against the horrors and their small faces screwed up in terror, she would have hurled herself bodily upon the pyre with him, for old though he was, and despite the fact that she had never actually fallen in love with him, he was her husband and was deeply precious to her.

  But the children were even more precious, and in the screaming hysteria that surrounded the smoking pyre and the flames that burned pallidly in the afternoon sunlight she slipped away, her four children wrapped in such clothes as she could salvage for them, and took to the road.

  Refugees like them were not uncommon in those bad years. The roads of France and Germany were strewn with them; they were too commonplace to be interesting. It was that commonplaceness that was to keep Deborah alive. She made her way to Limoges first, feeding the children on roots and handfuls of grain garnered from the farms they passed, and later on fruit and nuts as the year turned golden. She managed to stay in Limoges for the winter, taking to her old trade of laundering, blessing the long dead foster mother who taught her how, and hoped for a while to stay there, even sending Micah to the cheder, the school were he could learn his Hebrew, for he was close to thirteen and ready to be called to the Torah.

  But times were hard there, too, as the contagion of Jew hating spread and the Jews of Limoges who once had employed the red haired washerwoman soon had to wash their own clothes, or go dirty, for they could afford even her few coins. She managed to last still spring, and then, thinner, and with her eyes seeming even larger in her face, she set off again.

  She reached the river Garonne, far inland from Bordeaux, making her way through the vineyards of the lush countryside, and grew a little stronger, for the rich farmers and vintners of these parts were more generous than their northerly neighbours. Indeed the children became quite plump, well filled with grain and eggs and milk. Micah and Reuben, when their hair was freshly washed in a brook and shone glossily black in the sun, would run about and laugh and play, while their mother and two sisters, Esther and Ruth, sat beside the road and rested, seeming much as other children were, whether Christian or Jew. It was Deborah and Ruth who caught the eye, for that little one, a vivid high spirited seven-year-old, had just her mother’s colouring. It alarmed Deborah sometimes because of its strangeness among the dark haired people of these parts, and she would make the child keep her head covered, as she covered her own, as they travelled on.

  Over the Pyrenees, and down at last into Navarre, where the heat of the sun beat cruelly on their heads and made their senses swim.

  The children begged to stay there. ‘Find us a house. Mamma, please find us a house,’ Micah said. ‘I want to go to school.’ For all h
is suffering and travels, Micah was still a child, and Deborah had to explain to him, painfully, that they must find a place where Jews were before he could do that. He sulked and shouted at her, but followed her when she set off again, though she feared he would rebel and run. And eventually they came to Toledo.

  Toledo. Beautiful, sunlit Toledo, with its thriving metal workers’ shops and tanners’ yards, its streets of tailors and bookbinders, candlemakers and silk dealers, and so many of them Jews; it was a paradise to the exhausted Deborah and her children, who had become unruly and insolent to their mother through the long months of rough living. A city paradise.

  She found a home for her family in a back room in the tailors’quarter, in the establishment of Laban Ibn Menahem, a widower with three children. He needed someone to keep house for him and she needed a roof, and though he was a taciturn embittered man, for he had loved his wife dearly and was ruined by her death, they managed well enough. He disciplined her errant sons, and saw to it that Micah was Bar Mitzvah, so deeply to Deborah’s relief that she agreed to marry Laban.

  It was a peaceful life, and she had a bed and a roof and so did the children. And there was Esther, quiet, sweet and biddable, to help her about the house, and to go looking for her naughty sister when she ran off to play boylike in the street, so Deborah was happy enough.

  Until Ruth, a glinting eyed creature with spirits which were one moment tearing away in the skies and the next sink in the deepest of despair, reached maturity and found that she could sing. Oh, that was a shock and a shame to Deborah, who wanted only that her girls would be good daughters of Israel, and wed good men and rear their children. To have such a child as Ruth, who would slip away, however carefully she was watched, to wander the squares of the Christian quarter of Toledo and sing her wild and lilting songs, songs she made up for herself, for the coins men threw at her - how could Deborah have reared such a one? What sin had she committed in the eyes of the Lord, Blessed be He, that she should suffer so?