The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  That was not all the old man taught him. He showed him how to control complex transaction, and make them more and more complex, and therefore more profitable. And collecting his debts fast, as the old man had advised, meant that Simon always had money in his hand for new ventures. Inevitably, he prospered, and with the aid of distant Van Praag cousins; in an illiterate world being able to write down your messages in your own script and consign it to the hand of one you could trust (for your own brethren, by and large, treated you fairly) meant that you could take risks further afield. And risks brought money. Money begat money.

  For Simon Asher Damont and the Van Praags and for others like them, but for by no means all Jews. There were many, poor pedlars, living hand to mouth, trying to earn enough each day to stock their meager packs with a few trinkets and ribbons for the next day’s trading. If they failed, the next day was one when their wives and children went unfed. Life was like that, they told each other, and shrugged. How could it be otherwise for poor Jews? For them the riches and sleekness of the merchants were as remote and envy provoking as for the peasants of the countryside.

  Not that poor Jews remained poor always. Individuals would come pushing their way through the mass of struggling humanity and that filled the Jewish quarters of the cities of Europe and emerge blinking to the notice of the richer folk.

  That was how Isaac Van Praag’s grandmother had become his grandmother. A thin creature, with red hair and blue eyes, she had come to Hamburg from Lublin with her family, her father being a poor Jewish pedlar who could not make enough to feed his large brood in that busy Polish town.

  There in Hamburg old Van Praag had seen the girl with red hair and fallen in love with her and married her, in the teeth of much family opposition, but much to the delight of the girl’s mother. Clearly, leaving Lublin had been the right thing to do.

  Thus it was that yet again, one small and slender strand of the family that had been started by Micah, son of Tamar, made contact again with the children of Micah’s brother, Simeon. It was a tenuous link (just one red-headed girl producing a great-grandchild, Sarah, to wed a child of the family of the mountain, the children of Susannah) but a link none the less.

  Sarah Damont vanished into the maw of that haughty tribe of grandees, learning to speak soft Ladino, the part Castilian Spanish, part Arabic, part Hebrew the tongue of the Marranos had brought to the low countries with them, instead of the harsh Judish-Deutsch of her own family, the Van Praags. That Low German dialect, with its odd mixture of Slavic and Hebrew words as well as German was written in Hebrew characters and had found its birth in the middle Rhine, where Jews had once clustered together in large numbers. They had taken their language with them when they fled to the greater safety of Poland two or three hundred years earlier.

  Not that Sarah cared. All she knew was that her marriage into aristocratic circles had ennobled her, and made her a better and more valuable person, and she preened and strutted her way through Amsterdam, more Spanish than any of the Damonts had ever been, wearing the most costly clothes Simon could provide for her, and the richest jewels, and quite in ignoring her Van Praag relations when she could.

  It was not easy. Her Ashkenazi ways remained with her always, however hard she tried to be Sephardi and affected her husband Simon too. He lost some of the high gloss of the Marrano culture to her earthier ways. But she never admitted what she regarded as a taint in herself, and indeed, once her old father died, tried to cut herself off altogether. She would speak slightingly of ‘those Ashkenazis – so uncouth.’ ‘With such people about,’ she would say, ‘is it any wonder we Jews are sometimes looked upon askance by our neighbours? We really ought to try to keep them out of Amsterdam.’

  Simon said nothing, of course. It was less trouble to be as she was, and anyway it amused him to see the airs she gave herself. But sometimes he looked across at those abandoned relations and though wistfully of the energy and the connections she would have been useful so to him if he had been able to use them as much as he would have liked, and sighed. Never mind. He was doing well enough to the memory of his old grandfather. He was making his mark in Amsterdam. He had time enough. He was still the right side of fifty, and the Damonts had always been a long-lived family as long as no Inquisitors were around to truncate their lived. He had time.

  He became a revered figure in Amsterdam society. Simon Asher Damont indeed paid his grandfather’s debt of pain before he died. He, together with his cousins, brothers and brother-in-law had built a bank with tendrils that stretched across the whole trading world. His sons developed the bank even further, and his grandsons were exceedingly rich, for they had become part of the great Dutch mercantile explosion. That small and tidy lowland country had become one of the great Colonial powers, and that meant trade, trade and more trade.

  Out of Holland went muskets and gunpowder and hard working serious men with strong Protestant beliefs – for at last Luther had happened to the people of Europe – and excellent habits of prudence and thrift and acquisitiveness. The needed to be financed and it was the Damonts and their friends who financed them. Into those booming Dutch ports came sugar and spices, of course, the ever desirable trade goods of the ancient world, from the Dutch settlements in South America far across the heaving Atlantic, but also newer imports; rice and teak and above all diamonds from Borneo and Sumatra, Java and the Moluccas far away in the South China seas where the Dutch East Indies lay.

  And that was not all. Dutch India - Cochin and Negpattan and Colombo in Ceylon – sent pearls to Amsterdam, as well as familiar cinnamon, pepper and ginger. Every ship load brought profits for the careful Damonts and their cousins. And not only for them; in every one of the cities where the Dutchmen traded, there were representatives of the great Jewish banking houses. Passover was celebrated in sweating steamy Borneo in the same special garments and with the same gold and silver dishes brought long ago from Spain, and in the same soft Ladino words, lisping their story of the long ago Exodus to children who thought their parents were talking about Amsterdam when they spoke yearningly of Jerusalem and Zion.

  The progress and success of Dutch colonial effort had not gone unnoticed elsewhere. Across the cold English Channel the Commonwealth, which was busily trading too, was very aware of their success. Particularly Oliver Cromwell, its exceedingly shrewd and thoughtful leader. That the Dutch were successful was obvious. Why? What had they that England had not too?

  There were no Jews in cold Britain, at least not officially. Some had crept in quietly of course fleeing from Spain and later Portugal, and the local citizens had been content enough to close their eyes to their presence, for they were hard working people and brought their own prosperity with them. But they were all secret Jews and did not count. For Cromwell, a good Puritan who had taken himself back to first principles, which included the Old Testament, there was an appeal in the People of the Book, the source of his own true beliefs. Others, however, the theologians and the merchants did not agree. They did not want Jews.

  So Cromwell set about letting the Jews come in by the back door.

  Quietly they started to come; from Amsterdam and Antwerp to join the already resident Marranos who, cautiously, started to be a little less secretive about their Jewishness. In March 1656 they petitioned Cromwell for permission to ‘meet at our said private devotions in our Particular houses without feere of Molestation,’ and to set up a cemetery ‘in such place out of the cittye as wee shall think convenient.’

  And Cromwell agreed – though only informally. No risks were to be taken by that wily man. He was wily again when he was asked for asylum by a Marrano merchant who would have been thrown out of the country on the grounds he was a Spaniard, when the wars between Spain and England began, by granting it on the grounds that the man was not a Spaniard, but a Jew. Tacit acceptance that, and who would dare to throw out such a man who had suffered so at the hands of England’s enemy? He had to be given a home – and with him, his fellow Jews.

  And so they c
ame, in a trickle at first and then a small stream. One year later, they rented a house to use as a synagogue. A few months after that, they bought their patch of land for a cemetery. They imported a rabbi from Hamburg.

  Jacob Damont, a great-great-great-grandson of Simon Asher Damont, watched London’s new little Jewish community thrive, and waited. ‘I’ve always liked to have my bed warmed for me,’ he used to say to his children, long after when telling them the story- and then went to buy himself a house in Houndsditch, in the City of London. He was one of the founder members of the new synagogue that was built in Bevis Marks nearby, and a noted benefactor of the community.

  Before the end of the seventeenth century the name Damont was as respected in London as it had been in Amsterdam, and for the same reasons. They were hard working and honest men, though shrewd and with an excellent eye for trade. They still dealt in goldsmith’s work of the finest quality, and in diamonds, as had old Simão Da Montana, the founder of that clan. They lent money at reasonable rates to men concerned with world trade, and were not afraid to take a chance on merchants who showed as much energy and foresight as they did themselves. They looked after each other as well as their own. And they never lost contact with the other half of the family. In each generation, young Dutchmen left Amsterdam to come to London to work for a while with their uncles and cousins, and Englishmen with Oxford accents went to Amsterdam to discover the mysteries of the diamond Bourse and reforge the links with the old people. But they regarded themselves as solely and wholly English through and through, and not in the least as expatriate Dutchmen.

  The first English families had arrived.

  8

  In the many hundred of years that had passed since David Bar Issachar had brought his red headed Keziah to the nameless villages by the Tigris to found the great family that was to become the Princes of the Captivity, the basis of the might city of Baghdad, life had been comparatively peaceful for the Ben Lamech clan. Its tentacles had spread wide through the carefully planned marriages of its children, so that they were now related by both law and blood to virtually every Jewish family in the whole of that great city, and indeed over half of the Eastern world, for comfortable though life was in thee land between the two rivers adventure and profit always beckoned from somewhere else. There seemed to be in many of the Jews of Baghdad a well of restlessness from which they were always drawing. By the time Jacob Damont’s great-great-grandsons were settled in England as if they had been there for ever. David Ben Lamech, the Sarrif Bashi as well as Nasi of the City, had cousins in Madras and Calcutta, and ever far Shanghai, and every place of note in between.

  Peaceful years over all, if not always good ones. The family had gone on about its business contentedly enough, running their lives as they always had.

  The women stayed safely at home in their tiled fountain-tinkling courtyards in the cooler winter months, and at other times in special sections of their underground thick-walled serdabs, the great warehouses full of the family’s trade goods, where they hid from the cruel simooms, the hot dry suffocating sand winds that swept across the African and Asian deserts to broil the city to a purgatory of heat.

  They bore their children and reared them, parting with the boys to send them to school as soon as they were six, and losing their company altogether when they were thirteen and joined the men’s world, and teaching their girls how to be good daughters of Judah.

  They had their homes their private mikvahs, the ritual baths which they used to punctuate their menstrual lives and therefore their copulations, and servants to perform every function necessary for their comfort. So, they never needed to go out, and never did, except to go to synagogue, living in a purdah that no one man or woman ever questioned.

  Some of them became petulant and bored, and comforted themselves with the sticky Persian and Turkish sweetmeats flavoured with rose water and orange flowers and almond oil and grew monstrously fat as a result, but other kept their dark-eyed sharp-nosed beauty well into their dried up useless years when they were grandmothers. Not a very exciting life perhaps, but one they had always known, and who were they to expect otherwise?

  But the lives of their men were full of interest and drama, the drama of the souks and the trade routes, the caravanserais and the failures and success of their enterprises.

  Each small Lamech boy learned at school the language of his fathers, Hebrew. In recent years their Hebrew had taken on a hint of Spanish pronunciations as well as the purer tones brought from the Ancient land of Canaan and that they had always used. Marranos fleeing from the Spaniards had reached Baghdad just as they had reached every other part of the known worlds, and had brought with them their ways. The Jews of Baghdad were Sephardic in their practices now, and the children of the Lamech tribe learned its observances faithfully.

  But that was not all they learned. By the time they were ready, at thirteen, to stand up in the cool arched synagogue to read a portion of the Law while their fathers nodded at them over their prayer shawled shoulders and their mothers and sisters, hidden away in the latticed gallery above, wept tears of pride, they had learned other languages besides.

  Turkish of course, for Baghdad was part of the Ottoman Empire, but also Arabic and Spanish, and most important, the language of business – Persian. They could compute too, understanding the bewildering range of currencies that were common tender in the markets of Baghdad, and could swiftly convert from one to the other the different methods of weighing and measuring that were used there.

  Each day, after morning prayer, carried out in the proper manner with phylacteries, the leather boxes containing the words of God, strapped to forehead and arms, they would leave their comfortable homes, their robes wrapped close around them, to find out what was afoot in the tangle of narrow streets lined with souks and booths which was the trading heart of Baghdad.

  Who had arrived in the city, what was he selling and what was he buying? What, above all, was the state of the wool trade? For this was the most vital business in which the Lamechs dealt. They were interested in many things, and were happy to handle a few bales of vividly coloured silks when they came in from the mercers of Bushire, down the Gulf, or a pile of cotton goods from Calcutta or Madras and of course the spices that came by camel caravan from Java and Singapore; but it was wool that held the best place in their mercantile hearts. As soon as the sheep shearing time came among then Bedouins in Spring when lambing was over, Lamech agents were bustling about up-country, deep in the Mesopotamian uplands, bargaining and arguing and dealing, and always getting the best of wool for the best prices.

  But now times were not as they had been. The once beautiful city, with its needlelike minarets and great tiled palaces had dwindled sadly over the years of Ottoman domination. Before the Ottoman had come, there had been Persians to loot and destroy, and before them the Mongols. The once proud beauty that the Abassid Caliph All-Mansur had caused to be raised on the banks of the Tigris and collapsed upon itself to become little more than a stinking huddle of brick houses where poor artisans lived, and derelict waterworks and broken sewers gave dumb evidence of the sophisticated splendour that had been old Baghdad.

  Its physical decay was matched buy its political state. The capital of the Empire of which Baghdad was but a part was far away in Constantinople. The Sublime Porte there, the central office of the Turkish Government, was the source of all power – and all misery too. Its officials used the ruined city of Baghdad as a gutter, deposited there the political malcontents they did not want to keep in Constantinople, the failed civil servants who had be shuffled away into uselessness. Where better to send them than this sour deserts pashalik? It might offer good trading opportunities for its resident Jews, but it offered nothing to its Turkish officials and civil servants.

  Inevitably, there was discontent among them, struggles for power, and above all, greed for advancement. The more they could collect in taxes from the population of this hateful place, they argued, the sooner they would be forgiven and cou
ld return to civilized life on the Bosphorus. So, the officials of the Government became ever more rapacious, and the people who suffered most from their rapacity were inevitably the Jews, the richest of the city residents. Above all, their own tax collector, the Sarrif Bashi, David Ben Lamech.

  The called him Sheik Lamech, and for more than forty years he struggled to keep the peace between the Jewish community for which he felt himself responsible and the greedy stupid sly officials who sat on his back and dug their cruel claws into this heart – or so he would tell his fellow Jews.

  ‘They punish me, always they punish me,’ he would cry. ‘The pain I suffer for all of you!’ Sheik Lamech expected a great deal of respect and gratitude from his flock, and indeed he got it from many. But not from all. Inevitably, there were others, less rich, less careful than he in the wool trade, with fewer than the nine clever sons with whom Sheik Lamech had been blessed, to back them up and learn the business. These less fortunate men watched him under their skullcaps as he inspected the ritual baths, the rabbis at his side, or reprimanded a citizen for allowing the mezuzzah – the scroll of the Holy Law in its silver or gold casing which adorned the doorstep of every Jewish house – to fall into bad repair, or licensed the ritual slaughterers to do their holy work. They came to hate the successful Lamech family and plotted and talked and plotted again and eventually told the Government such tales of David Ben Lamech’s wickedness that it was inevitable that action would be taken.

  Sheik Lamech heard of what was happening, of course. After forty years as head of the Jews of Baghdad, he too had his spied and not so much as a goat died without his knowing of it. He plotted, too, sending special messages – and extra money – to Constantinople to appease the treasurer of the Sublime Porte, and held trouble off for a long time. But he was tired and old, and it could not be much longer before they succeeded, the men of the synagogue who wanted to see the haughty Lamechs toppled.