In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  Once the accusations were made, there were arrest warrants and people were brought in for questioning, and the cases went to grand jury and then to trial. The legal process was very deliberative and very bureaucratic, although, unusually, the court did not take a bond from the accusers to stand up for their accusation and confirm that they would be in court. The next people accused, Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good, were vulnerable; they were older and poor and had a reputation for arguing with neighbours.

  It was remarkably difficult for the accused to defend themselves, on account of the issue of spectral evidence. As the accusations increased, many defended themselves by simply proclaiming their innocence and, almost without exception, those who did were later hanged. This was linked to the idea that confession was good for the soul, and there was also a presumption of guilt.

  SUSAN CASTILLO-STREET: Tituba probably understood from the beginning that, if she confessed, she might be freed, as ultimately happened after a long period of imprisonment, so her confession was remarkably florid and evocative, and that instance touched off the outpouring of confessions that followed.

  Tituba, accused, had, in turn, accused other people, including Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. She talked about how they had demonic spirits, familiars in the shape of animals, about how they pinched and attacked the children and made her sign the devil’s book and had drawn her into their witches’ coven. But, Marion Gibson emphasised, she survived the trials, whereas Sarah Osborne died in prison and Sarah Good was hanged, so Tituba’s strategy was the right one for her.

  In all of the original documents, Tituba was described as an Indian woman. In the 1860s, with the civil war and the American politics of slavery, there was interest in people of African-American descent and, around that time, Tituba somehow began to be described differently.

  MARION GIBSON: It’s very likely that she was a Native American woman, and research done in the 1990s threw up a record in Barbados from the 1670s of a girl called Tatuba, who was being sold, who was part of an inventory of an estate owned by a man called Samuel Thompson in Bridgetown, Barbados. And this may be our Tituba. She’s listed among child slaves, so, by the time of the Salem trials, if this is our girl, she’s probably twenty-five to thirty years old.

  It made absolute sense for the accused to confess, Simon Middleton continued. Those who confessed were kept in jail in the expectation that they would implicate more people, rather than moved swiftly to execution, and there was a chance that time would allow them to weather out the storm of accusations, and then they could be treated differently. As the number of accusers widened, the case of Rebecca Nurse illustrated the value of confession even for those with impeccable reputations.

  SIMON MIDDLETON: Rebecca Nurse is a member of the church in good standing, a member of the elect, and it’s her trial and execution that really is a turning point in the trials, and her case is worthy of remembering because, of all of them, she’s the truly principled puritan. And when she’s told under questioning, ‘Just confess and we can sort something out,’ she says, ‘I cannot confess to something I do not believe I’ve done, I can’t tell a lie.’ So it is her adherence to principles that takes her ultimately to the noose.

  There was also the case of Elizabeth and John Proctor, who ran a tavern and owned a farm. He was genial but blunt, Susan Castillo-Street told us, and Elizabeth was his much younger third wife. She was accused by John Indian, another slave of Samuel Parris. It started when some girls at Ingersoll’s Tavern said that Elizabeth Proctor’s spectre was in the room. The wife of the tavern owner said they really shouldn’t say that sort of thing, and one of the girls said, ‘Oh, it was for sport.’ That then subsided, but people began to accuse Elizabeth Proctor of witchcraft, citing in support that she had allegedly offered someone some herbal medicine and, when it was refused, had made that person ill. John Proctor came to the hearing to protest his wife’s innocence, which left him open to accusation, too. He was imprisoned and denied all guilt to the end.

  SUSAN CASTILLO-STREET: He tried to write an appeal to some clerics in Boston, saying that this was a bit of a nonsense, that some of the accusations were simply specious, they were false – probably the very worst thing that he could have done. If he had confessed, they would have let him off. Elizabeth Proctor managed to avoid hanging because she was pregnant. When he was eventually hanged, he died very bravely, he forgave his accusers.

  One of the other aspects of the Parris household was that John Indian, a slave living there and perhaps the husband of Tituba, was also accused of practising magical medicine.

  MARION GIBSON: John was asked by a white female colonist, Mary Sibley, to bake a thing called a witch cake, which is something that you do by getting together cornmeal and the urine of the bewitched people, a lovely thing, and baking it and feeding it to a dog who will then take the witchcraft or the infection out of the household.

  Accusations started to spread across the wider Essex County. Simon Middleton noted that Andover, a nearby village, ultimately had more accusations than Salem. George Burroughs had been a minister in Salem earlier and had been preaching up on the northeastern coast, towards where the Wabanaki Indians were, and he became a key figure. These village communities were on the front line, facing the French and really terrifying Native American allies, so attacks become quite common and the threats of attack even more so. Burroughs came to be seen as the orchestrator of every incident.

  SIMON MIDDLETON: People testify to seeing hundreds of witches flying around with Burroughs as this black man in the lead. And what we see then developing is the trials start to happen and the whole thing snowballs because, once you’ve got jails with twenty-five or thirty people confessing to be witches, if you believe in witchcraft as a real force, then you have to proceed legally.

  The governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, returned from London in May and established a court of oyer and terminer to hear the cases, and the court proceeded with its work. Cotton Mather, the leading thinker in the state, was a really powerful force in the trials as he justified the acceptance of spectral evidence, whereas, in English legal tradition, that was one thing to count against the accused, but there needed to be other supporting evidence.

  SUSAN CASTILLO-STREET: Cotton Mather’s favourite word was ‘nevertheless’. In one statement, he says that one should proceed with extreme caution and be very careful not to incriminate innocents. ‘Nevertheless’, one should eliminate all witches. He liked to play it both ways. In 1702, when he was attempting to spin the witch trials according to his own perspectives, he describes the devil as rather like an Indian sagamore or as a French dragoon, which I think supports the hypothesis of the Indian frontier as a very, very crucial factor.

  There has been another theory for the state of the accusers’ minds, which relates to diet and suggested that these people were experiencing ergot poisoning.

  SUSAN CASTILLO-STREET: Ergot is a kind of fungus that can infect grain and, when it breaks down, one of the components is lysergic acid, or LSD, as we know it. They could have been having a really remarkably bad trip of some sort. The symptoms would be hallucinations and fits. This, however, has been convincingly debunked, because the girls, between the hearings, were hale and hearty, there were no symptoms at all.

  People in Salem were being hanged right up until the end of September 1692. By the close of the trials, according to Robert Calef, a Baptist writer and opponent of Mather, at least 300 people had been suspected in Essex County and about 150 were in jail. Then the colonists began to realise that something terrible had happened and that surely not all these people could be witches.

  MARION GIBSON: There is a story, also, that the wife of the governor William Phips was herself accused. That’s a story that comes out about a decade later, but it may well be that there is truth in it. And that would tend to turn people’s attention to the idea that some of those who were accused might indeed be innocent. It may be that the story starts to change its direction when the elite get in
volved and people important to them are accused.

  What Melvyn wanted to know was why, when other parts of the colony were quite well run, did the wiser heads not step in here? That, to Simon Middleton, was the key question. Why did men of power listen to teenagers and women when they normally never did?

  The colony was facing war, there had been a series of epidemics, and they had lost their charter in 1685 when James II established the dominion of New England.

  SIMON MIDDLETON: There is social anxiety at work here, and the fact that the devil is abroad in Massachusetts appeals to people in leadership positions as a possible explanation for why everything is going wrong, and it’s not their fault so much. The other thing is that, although it’s a very big deal for historians later, Salem actually wasn’t that big a deal for William Phips and the council at the time. If you read the provincial council minutes, they’re much more worried about the French and the Indian attacks from the north. They’re about as worried about Salem as they are about the problem of wolves taking livestock.

  The trials came to an end when the court of oyer and terminer was wound up, Marion Gibson continued, as part of the problems with the charter and the politics of governing the colony. There was a new court and it did continue to convict people and sentence them to death, but Governor Phips stepped in to pardon them. The elite tried to put an end to it, and succeeded in 1693. The trials came to be seen as the great example of a terrible American mistake, a moment when they got it badly wrong. These were late examples of trials for witchcraft, and these sorts of trial were petering out. By the 1730s, in England, there was a law to say that, if anyone claimed to be a witch, they could be tried not for being a witch, but on grounds they were fraudulent.

  In the studio afterwards, there was discussion of Robert Calef’s character assassination of Cotton Mather and his beliefs, which led to Mather having Calef’s book burnt in Princeton Yard. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible was praised, even if he did raise Abigail Williams’ age and lower John Proctor’s so that they could be romantically linked. Simon Middleton quoted the historian Keith Thomas, who said that witchcraft was about explaining things, dreadful things that were happening when other explanations no longer served. And Susan Castillo-Street picked up on a theme in Salem and in The Crucible – ‘what a toxic emotion fear could be’.

  MAIMONIDES

  One of the most visited sites in the city of Tiberias on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee is a simple marble tomb. This is the final resting place of the medieval philosopher, theologian and lawyer Moses Maimonides. You get some idea of his importance to the history of Jewish scholarship from the Hebrew inscription, which reads: ‘From Moses to Moses, there arose none like Moses.’ Today Maimonides is widely regarded as one of the greatest scholars of the Middle Ages. He spent much of his life in Egypt and was influenced by a rich mix of Jewish, Islamic and ancient Greek thinkers. His authoritative magnum opus on Jewish law remains central to the subject more than eight centuries on. And his book The Guide for the Perplexed is one of the masterpieces of medieval philosophy.

  With Melvyn to discuss the life and work of Maimonides were: John Haldane, professor of philosophy at the University of St Andrews and J. Newton Rayzor distinguished professor of philosophy at Baylor University, Texas; Sarah Stroumsa, Alice and Jack Ormut professor of Arabic studies and currently rector at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Peter Adamson, professor for late ancient Arabic philosophy, LMU Munich.

  Maimonides was born in Córdoba in Andalusia in Muslim Spain, around 1135, where his father was both a rabbinical leader and a doctor. John Haldane described Córdoba as a cultured, affluent city of merchants and learned people and a place that was relatively tolerant. When Maimonides was about nine years old, a more aggressive form of Islam became dominant in Morocco, Andalusia was invaded by the Almohads, and Córdoba was taken

  JOHN HALDANE: This Almohad movement doesn’t want to see either Jews or Christians living freely, and they have the slogan, ‘No synagogue, no church.’ And, at that point, he and his family are faced with a choice that actually others had in other circumstances: whether to flee, whether to suffer martyrdom or whether to convert. And his family flee.

  It would be fair to say, John Haldane added, that Jews had found it easier under Islam in this period than under Christianity. The history of Jewish philosophy in its first phase was conducted essentially in the Islamic lands, and later in Christian lands. Maimonides was writing in Judaeo-Arabic, which was Arabic but in Hebrew lettering and, as far as John Haldane recalled, only one of his works was written in Hebrew.

  JOHN HALDANE: He’s growing up in a very cultured environment. His father’s a doctor, he’s studying science, which, at that point, is astronomy, optics, logic, some medicine. Later, he’s going to study medicine more, he’s going to practise as a doctor. It’s said that the one thing he didn’t like was poetry.

  His family fled Córdoba, moving around the Iberian peninsula, travelling to Fez, to the Levant and then to Fustat, outside Cairo. What had happened to them in Spain with the Almohads was unusual, Peter Adamson said, and they would have found toleration in Egypt, if not stability. The Fatimid Caliphate, which was Shiite and had founded Cairo in the tenth century, was on its last legs. There were crusaders up in Palestine and, in the wider region, there was a Sunni force, the Ayyubids. In the 1160s, the Fatimid Caliphate was under pressure.

  PETER ADAMSON: The Fatimids invite the Ayyubids into Egypt to help them stave off an invasion from the crusaders, and this leads to good news and bad news for the Fatimids. The good news is that they managed to stave off the crusaders, and the bad news is that the Ayyubids decide that they don’t really want to leave.

  The invading general died shortly after the battle, and his nephew was Salah ad-Din, also known as Saladin, who became the vizier of this nominal Fatimid Caliphate and then sultan of Egypt.

  The Fatimid Caliphate had created a really impressive intellectual metropolis, with the Al-Azhar Mosque and the connected Al-Azhar University. There was a community of Jews living in Cairo at this time, numbered in the thousands rather than tens of thousands, and, in this group, Peter Adamson suggested, Maimonides would have been a big fish in a small pond. His command of the legal tradition and texts was probably greater than that of any other scholar who was there at the time.

  PETER ADAMSON: It’s possible that he was influenced by some of the ideas that come through the Shiite Fatimid tradition, this kind of Shi’ism called Ismailism. But, I think, equally important is that being in Cairo puts Maimonides in the centre of Mediterranean culture. He exchanged correspondence with people all over the Muslim world and beyond, so Baghdad, Yemen, also in southern France, all over Egypt, sometimes on legal issues but also on a wide range of other issues, including philosophy.

  We do not know exactly what happened to Maimonides and his family before they reached Cairo, Sarah Stroumsa said. We know they had taken the opportunity to flee from Córdoba and spent time in north Africa.

  SARAH STROUMSA: Our assumption must be that they outwardly behaved as Muslims, everyone, all the Jewish community including Maimonides’ family. And, when they managed to flee, I think we have to assume a traumatic experience in the background. The first few years in Egypt allowed Maimonides some years of peace and quiet to establish himself in the Jewish community and to write.

  Before long, though, his brother was lost at sea and, with him, the family’s treasure that he was looking after. Maimonides fell into a year of real depression. He now had debts to cover, he had his brother’s widow and small child to support and he had to find a way to support himself. This was when he moved into the court of Saladin to work as one of the court’s physicians. This may well be when he also moved from the precincts of the Jewish community and got into theological debates and conversations with Muslims.

  We know more of the life of Maimonides than we do of many of his contemporaries. The reason for that, Sarah Stroumsa said, is that we are lucky. We have someth
ing that is the closest we have to an archive. In synagogues, Jews do not discard documents on which they expect to have written the name of God, the tetragrammaton, the four letters YHWH or JHVH.

  SARAH STROUMSA: They collect all papers written in Hebrew and put them aside for decent burial. In Cairo, because of the climate and because of the continuity of the community, we have a treasure trove of documents called the Genizah, which was found in the synagogue in the nineteenth century and contains Maimonides’ correspondence, Maimonides’ deeds, his writings, everything about him. And this gives us a wonderful opportunity to see his life and to see his emotions.

  Maimonides became a rabbinical leader of Egyptian Jewry, John Haldane said, and had a reputation for brilliance, and he had practical wisdom. He addressed the question of whether it was ever right to adopt the modes of dress and other behaviours of Muslims in order to survive.

  JOHN HALDANE: There’s a debate about this, whether it’s a proper thing to do, and he says it is better that than martyrdom, though better still for the purity of the law to go into exile, to flee. But what is interesting is that he sees the purity of Jewish observance as residing in this world, the condition of the interior soul. What emerges is this purity of intellect.

  His first important work was his Commentary on the Mishnah, the written form of Jewish oral traditions. John Haldane explained that the Torah can be understood in a narrow sense as the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. There is also the broader sense, which is the entire Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the Old Testament) plus the Talmud, which is the oral tradition, codified, written down, plus commentary.

  JOHN HALDANE: In his role as a legal scholar, he works on the oral commentary, at one point producing an edition, as it were, of this, but then also producing commentary on this. This is a very rich source of both rabbinical teaching and guidance, but it also is going to lead into some of the philosophical ideas that will become the subject and treatment of The Guide, which is the work we’re going to come to.