The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

There is no reliable documentary evidence, however, that Spinoza was anywhere near van den Enden in the years preceding his ban, much less that he was already a disciple of René Descartes’ mind–body dualism. The mentors of Spinoza’s disbelief at this period were all Jewish ex-conversos with strong ties to Spain and Portugal. Prado, who had inherited many of Uriel da Costa’s heresies, may well have become informal tutor to the more profound younger man. In August 1659, two (friendly) witnesses before the Madrid Inquisition – Friar Tomas Solana y Robles and Captain Miguel Perez de Maltranilla – testified to having met both Prado and Spinoza the previous year.42 They were described indivisibly as having the same opinions and having suffered the same fate of being expelled from the Jewish community for deciding that the Law of Moses was false. What was meant by ‘false’ seems very likely to have been the explosive argument Spinoza would later articulate in the Tractatus Theologicus-Politicus, that the Torah should be understood essentially as an act of political constitution rather than a revelation.43 Just as confrontational was the insistence, shared by Prado and Spinoza and inherited from Uriel da Costa, ‘that souls died in the body and that there was no God except philosophically’.

the alternative systems of monotheistic belief. Until Spinoza, there was nowhere else to go for a thinking Jew who wished nonetheless to uncouple himself from the literal prescriptions of religious literature or a literal reading of the Bible. Now Spinoza had created just such an oasis of understanding. ‘Secular Jew’, the casual term of choice for multitudes of Jews, is perhaps too much of an oxymoron for this as it seems closer to the atheism which Spinoza repeatedly and vehemently rejected. Spinoza did not regard the universe as a self-created piece of material machinery; on the contrary, the essence of its operational genius was identical with the uncaused God. But the difficulty of grasping this understanding as somewhere a Jew could go and still be a Jew, meant he would have no following until generations, centuries, later. Until, in fact, there were scientists like Albert Einstein, who regarded himself unequivocally as a Jew, who was never separate from Jewish history, and who also pitied the aridity of atheism, deaf, as he scornfully put it, ‘to the music of the spheres’; but when pressed on his belief in God in 1929, Einstein explained that ‘I believe in Spinoza’s god who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and doings of mankind’. For the vast majority of Jews in Spinoza’s world, however, this was not enough. The philosopher was asking them to abandon exactly what had kept them together over the millen...

Many of the theorists of the Jewish Americans argued they had migrated there from north-east Asia, in the land which since medieval times had been called ‘Arzereth’. Either they had crossed on a land bridge which had since been flooded (not altogether far from the prehistoric truth),

It was as though, deprived by the expulsion of 1492, the Spanish had robbed themselves of Jews intrinsic to the grand historical plan the Almighty had determined for their Christian empire. Discovering Original Israelites in the Americas brought the Jews back again into that providential planning, without the inconvenience of actually having to live with them.

‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One’, words which come instinctively to any Jew on beholding a marvel or a terror. Speaking through Francisco and with finger-counting on held-up hands they told Montezinos that they were the Children of Abraham, Isaac, Israel (Jacob) and Reuben. A strange formal recitation of utterances followed which to Montezinos had a cryptic-oracular tone as if from the mouth of one of the minor prophets. ‘We will bestow several places on them who have a mind to live with us.’ ‘Joseph dwells in the midst of the sea.’ ‘One day we shall all speak together saying Ba-ba-ba and we shall come forth as if issuing out of our mother earth.’ They then asked to be sent twelve men ‘bearded and skilful in writing’.

In Lisbon in 1631, when a silver box with the host in it went missing from a church, fingers pointed quite arbitrarily to ‘a young youth of our nation (hence a converso) whose name was Simao Pires Solis’ who, passing not far from there to visit a lady, was apprehended, imprisoned and terribly tortured. They cut off his hands and after they had dragged him along the streets burnt him, one year passed over and a thief at the foot of the gallows confessed how he himself had rifled and plundered the shrine of the host and not that poor innocent whom they had burnt. This young man’s brother was a Friar, a great Theologist and a preacher; he lives now a Jew in Amsterdam and calls himself Eliezer de Solis.

the mystical three-step: fast, trance, seclude.

Gershom Scholem argues that because Kabbalah had become the normative Judaism of its day, the Jewish world was ripe for a phenomenon like Shabbetai. But from Leone Modena on, through to the rabbi Jacob Sasportas in Hamburg, some of the most articulate voices were also the most vigilantly guarded, if not actually antagonistic to the wizardry of Kabbalah, which they believed flirted with heresy. Leone Modena’s appeal had been to a rational engagement with the Torah rather than the uncertainties of the trance. God was to be worshipped as the source of reasoning intelligence, as had been taught by Maimonides, and by Saadia before him in ninth-century Mesopotamia in his great work Beliefs and Opinions.8 His laws were the way to a concretely realised earthly life rather than an illumination of primordial cosmology. But Nathan was himself steeped in Maimonides and knew that in the Guide for the Perplexed, metaphysical meditation kept company with reasoning. In any case, there was no putting the Kabbalistic genie back into the bottle. After all, the Talmud was an empire of inference, and the authority of an oral law received at the same time as the written one had to be taken on trust. So why not make the assumption that the apparent meaning of the Bible was just a membrane covering a body of far deeper knowledge which could be apprehended through the intense, disciplined contemplation of the hierarchy of signs? Words, and the letters which made them, conveyed the lighter meaning ...

his anti-commandments were directed at the entire structure of rabbinic and Talmudic authority based on the perverse paradox, bittulah shel torah zehu kiyumah: ‘in the violation of the Torah lies its fulfilment’. His acts of juvenile daring in Smyrna – the out-loud pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton without being struck down for the blasphemy – now became a sign of his exalted status.

In eastern Europe, especially in Lithuania, an ancient midrash tradition that, come the messianic time, God would transport His people on clouds to Israel, found ready believers. Chuckling Christians and Jewish anti-Shabbeteans reported much cloud-gazing among the gullible Jews. A pregnant wife, worried that her condition would make the long journey to Jerusalem impossible, was comforted by her husband’s reassurance that cloud transport would ease her passage. At Arta in Greece another Jew broke his neck and died falling from his roof while attempting to jump over a cloud.

There had been two kinds of spectacle in the Amsterdam Sephardi synagogue within ten years: the herem laid on Baruch Spinoza, and the dancing on the 9th of Ab with rabbis Aboab and Sarphati clapping their hands. Each of those scenes led forward towards the future of Jews in the modern world. Those highways out of Amsterdam diverged about as widely as they could: one leading to the rejection of legalistic observance, the historicisation of Bible and Talmud, a synagogue car-park kind of Judaism, an ecumenical tiqqun of interfaith bonding; the other leading deep into the heart of the mystery, an eyes-shut, back-swaying, self-liquidating absorption, kavanah, devotion to the utmost, to the exclusion of anything but the chanted words, or the silently mouthed blessings or the ecstasies between the words. But in Amsterdam there was also a third way: the way of routine, a settling back into the rhythms of the week, the month, the year; the Sabbath; the counting of the Omer; the shaking of the palm frond on Sukkot; the children singing at Purim. Something which had eluded Jews since Christianity had begun, and had somehow been accomplished in the Dutch republic: a semblance of a normal life.

Year by year, the lit space on the street below shrank before the shadows. Closeness should have bred caution. Anyone in the top storeys getting up to no good and pretty soon the whole Judengasse knew about it. Closed shutters turned loose talk into certainty and an outbreak of Yiddish nodding when the women took the stew to the bakers’ ovens on Friday afternoon. Closeness bred scandal but also disease. The music of the Judengasse was coughing. Rooms on the inside now had little or no air. But still the births came with a faster tempo than the deaths. God must have wanted it thus. More mouths to feed in the Judengasse, then. The regulation allowing for the five hundred families also precluded their working in any of the occupations controlled by the guilds. So there were no artisans or even retail shops outside the ghetto. It was wholesale as usual, but a living could be made from cloth, grain, wax, and then, as everywhere, old clothes, moneylending, pawnbroking. There were also the butchers and slaughterers, the mohels, the matchmakers, the teachers at the beit midrash, and always on the corners like a rash that never went away the schnorrers, the beggars, pfuey. But even they were a notch above Beteljuden out in the country; armies of them, no better than gypsies, but more pitiful and more dangerous: houseless, lawless, filthy, stinking, lousy, covered in sores, rags falling off them, the blind stumbling with their sticks, the rest shuffling from place to place, a step a...

By 1700 no one imagined a confessional reunification. But intra-Christian war had barely ended before it was replaced by armed mercantilism. Its working premise was zero-sum-game macroeconomics; the last stage of competitive asset-counting before the gods of infinitely elastic growth came to rule the world. In the view that held sway for a century or so between 1650 and 1780, there was a fixed amount of treasure to be had in the world, and woe betide the realm that failed to use pre-emptive force if necessary to maximise or increase its share. Wealth might be aggregated in population, land, slaves, capital, gold, ships, merchandise, mines, manufactures. Predator dynasties – the Swedes, the Prussian Hohenzollerns, the Bourbons – eyed their competitors, ready to pounce on the weak, or the easily surprised. Barren queens heralded a war of dynastic succession, each of the big players putting up proxies. Action was power. To sit still was to die slowly. Thus was the baroque arms race launched and the bills were steep.

Maisel’s town hall, standing next to the Altneuschul, was one of those buildings and it was now given a fine gabled baroque clock tower, the first thing visiting tourists notice about Jewish Prague. Famously it bears two faces, one with Roman numerals, the hands sweeping in the usual direction, the other bearing Hebrew numbers, running anticlockwise, back to the future. Whatever else they had learned, the Jews of Prague knew it was a good idea to hedge your bets.

As Mendelssohn would succinctly put it, ‘you tie our hands and then accuse us of not using them’.

Moses stuck by his original namesake, unshakeably believing the laws had indeed been given on the mountain and he never supposed the Exodus was anything but historical fact. But he found nothing shocking or un-Jewish about Spinoza’s assertion that the lawgiving had to be understood in the context of its time and place and was intended for the governance of an uprooted unruly people. Unlike Spinoza, however, he believed that the historicity of that legislation did not make it redundant when circumstances changed. Mendelssohn also demoted the drama of revelation on Mount Sinai to secondary significance, for he agreed with the author of the Tractatus that it was absurd to suppose that the laws – or rather the social ethics which underlay their detail – could have been given for the benefit of one people alone. In this respect the origin of the lawgiving was to be distinguished from its destiny; one was particular, the other universal. Mendelssohn believed that Israel had been made the custodian, not the sole proprietor, of a system of ethics which was intended for the common practice of mankind. Revelations divided; reason reconciled. That was the heart of the matter.

In contrast to the usual tenor of Jewish preaching, and much of the synagogue liturgy, Mendelssohn’s Jewish God was not a hanging judge, ever on the lookout to punish backsliders, either singly or in entire cities and empires. Mendelssohn’s Jehovah wore an eighteenth-century smile. How could He not, since His earthly creation was intended for pleasure and happiness, and His corrections were more akin to that of a celestial gardener, periodically pruning and weeding, the better to ensure a new blossoming.

Discarding the principle that full citizenship for the Jews was conditional on their becoming Christians inaugurated modern western pluralism.

his ecumenical fashion Mendelssohn went out of his way to summarise the good that Jews had to say about the founder of Christianity. Once again he was deliberately making the best of it. In his coffee-house circle where Jews and Christians met as friends, doubtless the former had no trouble in praising the goodness of Jesus as moral teacher. Opinions on that subject might have been ruder had he listened in the Frankfurt ghetto or the backstreets of Brody. Jews, Mendelssohn insisted, accepted the ethical core of Jesus’ teachings and the inspiring innocence of his life and preaching. But by that very token, they denied the attributes which had been projected retrospectively on that innocent after his death. Jesus had never claimed co-equal divinity with God; never asked to be worshipped, nor during his entire lifetime showed the least sign of overthrowing the religion of his ancestors which, after all, he himself practised.

Judaism, said Mendelssohn, was not based on revelation but laws: precepts, ‘rules for life’. The epiphany on Sinai had given them a sacred aura, but they were above all a set of instructions for living, not a theology of salvation, neither did they carry with them any kind of dogma. None of the commandments in the Torah actually required a particular kind of statement of belief. For a brief period historically it was true that the Judaean state had allied itself to the Mosaic religion but that had ended with the destruction of the Temple and now those rules and moral guidance were the essence of what made a Jew Jewish. And there was nothing in them which made it impossible for such an observant Jew to be also a conscientious citizen of wherever he or she lived. The experience of life in a tolerant society like the Dutch republic proved as much.

Those particular laws were made for Jews alone, thus relieving them of the obligation to force them on anyone else. Hence Judaism was, in fact, the least coercive religion imaginable. But its practices rested on more general principles – to be discovered and mulled over in endless oral conversations with the text: a common core of ethics, available to all. Free men might subscribe to those ethics if they were so persuaded, but there was nothing dogmatic about Judaism. While Christianity demanded unconditional submission to a belief in Christ the Saviour, the salvific meaning of his sacrifice, as the only way to save mankind from original sin, the Torah at no point expressly asked anyone to believe in any theology. Ultimately, Mendelssohn argued, it was indifferent to revelation except as the backstory of the founding of a moral code. Judaism even entertained the expansive notion of a set of ethics known to have existed before the giving of the Mosaic laws. Those who abided by the ethical instructions supposedly given to Noah, the ‘Noahide laws’ comprising the essence of ethical conduct – the aversion to pagan idolatry, the belief in a single God, the horror of murder and so on – would not be turned away from the gates of heaven but would have a share of ‘the life to come’. For how, he asked rhetorically, could a loving God possibly deliver a set of laws dooming most of mankind to perdition?

Liberal pluralism was the only system that could be truly good for the Jews. But they would give back, for this new blessing cut both ways; it was the only system which would also be good for mankind. So if there was nothing in the laws of Judaism pulling its practitioners away from the fabric of civil society, why should Jews be required to abandon their precepts as the price of admission?

In a virtuoso coda, Mendelssohn made a brilliant polemical swerve back to his original conviction, the one that mattered most for Jews and thus for the world at large. What, he wondered, was so precious about ‘union’ anyway that it must always override the claims of diversity? Different beliefs, especially where they were grounded in mutually exclusive revelations, would never be capable of dissolving themselves into some fictitious or temporarily expedient comity. ‘If you care about true piety, let us not feign agreement when diversity is evidently the plan and purpose of providence.’50 Why not accept that, and restrict the role of the state to ensuring that irresolvable conflicts were not taken to the point of physical harm? The alternative to tolerating diversity was coercion for the sake of unity which was bound to be an admission of failure, the persuasiveness of a doctrine being the only sure way to make an enduring community of faith.

Mendelssohn’s arguments remain shockingly relevant to our contemporary world where, in so many places, intolerance is once more murderously in arms. They remain a guiding light because, unlike Voltaire’s strictures on the same subject, they were born from a love of religion, not a contempt for it, and thus take full measure of human psychological needs. ‘Let everyone be permitted to speak as he thinks, to invoke God after his own manner or that of his fathers and seek salvation where he thinks he may find it as long as he does not disturb the public peace and acts honestly according to the civil laws. Let no one be a searcher of hearts and judge of thought. Let no one assume a right the Omniscient has reserved to Himself alone.’

The pattern is familiar: the first generation retained its accent, its knowledge of Hebrew (sometimes even publishing learned commentaries in the ancestral tongue), keeping accounts and business correspondence in Yiddish or Ladino, and even sometimes keeping its beards. Their lives were coloured by the habits of the last family address: Hamburg, Altona, Amsterdam or Frankfurt. But in the next generation, beards, accents and any vestiges of distinguishing dress had all gone, the patriarchs and matriarchs accepting the assimilation, if not always happily.

Unlike the monks, no Jew had ever taken a vow of silence. The sacred obligation was voice. Being alive, being human, meant hearing from your fellows. Shema Yisroel! Hear O Israel! Read the Torah out loud. It had been that way since the days of Ezra the prophet. Vocalise; make a joyful noise unto the Lord. Talk till you drop. Ignore the futile shaaaah, the pointless shush. It’s only the Christians who bow their heads and shut their mouths in their houses of prayer. Us, we chant, we gabble, we cantillate, we shout. The prophets themselves get into arguments with the Almighty and even if we’re no prophets God needs to hear from us on a regular basis too.

At Ribeauville in the Upper Rhine wine country, Jessel Lehman kept a secret Yiddish diary relating some of the elaborate humiliations visited on Jews who had imagined that they would enjoy security under the revolution.

in February 1799, Thomas Corbet, an Irish officer serving in the French army – one of those who escaped the debacle of the revolt of the United Irishmen and the failed French invasion of 1795 – had much the same idea. Writing to Paul Barras, Bonaparte’s patron in the governing Directory, Corbet proposed that the directors should summon some ‘Jews of the highest consequence’ and propose the mass mobilisation of men and money in the cause of liberating their ancestral land, thus attaching more than a million Jews throughout the world to the cause of the Grande Nation of liberty. The Irish at the western end, the Jews at the eastern, what could possibly go wrong?

On usury, the laws of Israel made a distinction between what was required (no interest) for charitable loans and commerce which was freer, not a distinction between loans made to Jews and those made to non-Jews. So the old canard that Jews only charged interest to the Gentiles was entirely without foundation.

This is what it had all come to: the epic of emancipation reduced to a tatterdemalion starveling, desperate for a little rachmones from Jews whose habitual lives were untouched by the lofty rhetoric of philosophers. What was left of Gabriel Schrameck, tailor, soldier of the empire, citizen-Jew, fully vested in his rights, had, in a way even he did not fully comprehend, somehow come home to a pot of piping-hot cholent, the Sabbath stew he had wolfed down as a child, the morsel of pity which in his distress of body and soul, he could not keep down.

the Jews of Satanow walked to their Great Synagogue on the hill where the Torah Ark was elaborately embellished with the best that Jewish rococo could provide. Painted gryphons stretched their leathery wings against an azure ground, the intense blue still visible even in the days of deepest ruin. Above the gryphons, surmounting the tablet of the Decalogue, a complicated, elegant decoration of swag and scroll rises to a pair of lions, holding between them the Keter Torah, the only crown that mattered to these Jews. All this splendour might have fallen before the People’s Bulldozers in the 1970s, had not a Christian neighbour, Boris Slobodnyuk, begun a long, indomitable, one-man campaign to stop them in their tracks.

But the spinning hares are more likely to be found in the churches of medieval France and western England where they were called ‘tinners rabbits’ by the Cornish miners. The hares have even been found on Buddhist temple walls along the Silk Road, and their motion resembles nothing so much as the limbs of Shiva circling in his wheel of fire. So the hares bounded into Satanow from somewhere else, perhaps somewhere a long way away. The town was, after all, a crossroads of trade and ideas, sitting as it did between the forested country of the Dniester, the rise of the Carpathian Mountains, the dark-earth, fertile plain of Red Ruthenia and the basin of the Dnieper to the east.

Satanow, like countless comparable towns in Jewish eastern Europe, scarcely resembled the one-cow mudhole conjured by Anatevka, the Fiddler’s shtetl. But then Tevye the milkman and Anatevka with its ‘small mud huts’, ‘low and rickety’, their ‘roofs half buried in the ground’, a pathetic swarm of destitute Jews dwelling in dirt-poor streets, ‘packed together like herring in a barrel’, shut off from the Gentile world, except when visited by pogroms, was the picturesque fiction of Sholem Aleichem, composed at the end of the nineteenth century.4 Both he and the other great Yiddish bard of the imaginary shtetl, Mendele Moykher Sforim, wrote at a physical and temporal distance (usually urban) from historical reality and at a moment when Jewish towns in the Russian Pale of Settlement were becoming vulnerable to depopulation, a narrowing of economic opportunity and repeated physical attack. Dilapidated ruin as the most obvious characteristic of the shtetl was projected back onto Jewish towns by writers who saw themselves as liberated from its stifling narrowness. They sat before the rattling tramcars of Odessa or Delancey Street in New York smoking their Russian cigarettes, while the bleating of faraway goats and the penitential laments of Yom Kippur filled their heads. Before they knew it they had made an Anatevka as fantastic as anything Marc Chagall of big-city Vitebsk would conjure from his dreams. The reality of the eighteenth- and early-ninteenth-century shtetl was different...

The Jews married young (sixteen for a girl was common, betrothal as early as eleven or twelve), so that by the custom of kest they moved in with the in-laws for many years.

For the Jews, even if it was just to brew stomach-scouring scummy ale and mead or distil rotgut brandy, the tavern was the un-synagogue, but no less central to the life of the community for that. And they were places where Jews and Christians were constantly in each other’s company.

Decentralised power was benign for the Jews. In the Dutch republic it enabled them to take advantage of opportunities offered by particular cities and provinces. A bidding war – like the one waged between Rotterdam and Amsterdam – could only help them. Poland–Lithuania was a kingdom in name only. Its real rulers were the twenty-odd dynasties of landowning magnates.

Jacob Joseph’s Toledot Yakob Yosef appearing in 1780 which set out the essence of the new temper as he claimed the Besht had wished it. Provided it was engaged in kavanah – utter devotion – prayer was ultimately more important than study. The mind is all very well but

the soul is the essence; let it be open to God. For remember that God inhabits the whole universe; the merest nook and cranny are brimful of His presence. And since that is the case avoid melancholy and the mortifications of the flesh which bring it on. Do not fast more than the Torah requires. The Shekhina, even in exile, walks in joy not sorrow. Our bodies are not, as some seem to think, prisons for the soul, to be beaten and wasted until its walls are so thin the spirit may break out. That was not it at all, thought the Besht. God gave us bodies for the delight of life. Acceptance, not rejection, of our fleshly selves was the way to blessing.

But there is no doubt that, as Talmudic studies became ever more legalistic and nit-picking, an approach to works that claimed to unlock deeper significance behind the ostensible meaning of words exercised an extraordinary spell. For those stuck in the textual drudgery, or scholastic hair-splitting, it opened the reader to a new way of living. Just looking at Kabbalistic texts – embroidered as they were with cosmic diagrams, anagrams, vortices, webs, musical patterns, the unthreading of words into their constituent letters and sounds and their reworking into magical illuminations – was a heady experience, a kind of literary alchemy which, even if it did not ultimately remake the world as bottomless treasure chest, was a thrilling experiment. But it was entirely possible to be steeped in Kabbalah while not rejecting Talmudic studies. The Kabbalah was first and foremost a cosmology on the ways in which the dynamics of Creation continued to influence earthly experience; the Talmud was about everything else. And yet in the second half of the eighteenth century, the priority given to one or the other represented a definite choice of what kind of Jew one was.

Besht had not preached. After his death there were no sermons to publish; just stories of his deeds, going from one place to the next, from one troubled soul to the next.

Most non-Jews, for whom one set of sidelocks is much like another, assume Hasidism to be synonymous with observant Judaism, or ‘ultra-Orthodox’ as it has become anachronistically known. But this is not and has never been the case. Hasidic cosmology owes almost everything to the Kabbalists of Safed – the redemption of the divine sparks of the creation from their entrapment in the base matter of the qelippot husks in particular – and this gives the Hasidim of Brooklyn something in common with Madonna Ciccone. But for the Ashkenazim of eastern Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and especially for the young who flocked to its banner in their multitudes, the ‘new’ Hasidism had specific, practical implications for how they lived their Judaism. Most essentially it instructed them to set prayer above study. Not that Hasidim were or are against study – in the improvised cloisters by the Western Wall in Jerusalem it’s possible to see both activities happening at the same time. But for the early generations of Hasidim it was the total absorption of kavanah coupled with the mystical self-dissolution that worried Solomon Maimon, which would enable the apprehension of godly presence throughout the world. When that heightened sensibility was most active, especially during night prayers, the Hasid would experience a trance-like form of exultant joy, a transport

collective engagement – the bliss of the crowd – was at the core of Hasidism and continues to be. It signified a Judaism which rejected the austerity of the solitary penitent, alone with his achingly deprived gut.

distinctive folk literature of Hasidism, a populist canon, and in this form they still flourish, in Hebrew and Yiddish, in America, Israel and Europe. That they often resemble the narrative, aggadic passages of the Mishnah and the Talmud, rather than the abstract metaphysical speculations of hard-core Kabbalah, is not a coincidence. Whether by luck, instinct or calculation, Hasidic literature made itself earthy as well as heavenly; comforting rather than bullyingly didactic. It winked an eye rather than wagged a finger. And even when it turned to a more teacherly manner, the most artful of the zaddiks made sure their message could be easily connected to everyday experience, and could have explanatory force in bewildering times. Nahman of Braclav, for instance, asserted that every soul was constituted from good and evil substances (thus explaining, in a way reminiscent of the very earliest Jewish dualism, the appearance of terrible things in the world).

The Pale of Settlement, the huge swathe of territory he assigned for the Jews, stretching from Kiev province all the way to the Baltic, ought not to be understood as some sort of holding pen or vast territorial ghetto into which the Ashkenazim were herded. It simply coincided with the lands in which the Ukrainian–Polish–Lithuanian Jews had, in any case, been long settled. It is true that, in deference to the alarm

shown by Russian merchants (such as they were) in Moscow and St Petersburg at the prospect of Jewish competition, they were prevented from residing in those major cities.

The wearing of skullcaps in public was criminalised, as were other items defined as habitually Jewish. But Hasidic Jews responded by adopting the costume of the Polish-Russian merchant; the black fox-fur shtreimel hat worn over the yarmulka, the long belted black coat and white stockings that merchants wore in St Petersburg. This is what they still wear in Jerusalem and elsewhere, imagined as distinctively Jewish dress, which frozen over the generations it has duly become. Long sidelocks and beards were also outlawed but no one thought to employ a scissors police, so that regulation was more or less ignored.

He was looking somewhere else, where perhaps you could be a good German rabbi without having to listen to endless screaming and carrying on that you were leading Jews to the Church, that your name should be blotted out with the heathen; somewhere without all the brickbats and the meshugaas; and that place was called New York.

the rioters shouting ‘Hep hep!’ as they went about their dirty business beneath the impassive gaze of spectators. Students explained that the slogan stood for a cry thought to have been shouted during the Judaeophobic slaughters of the first Crusade: ‘Hierosolyma est perdita’ – Jerusalem is lost – which could be taken either as perdition to the Jews or as the determination to retake the holy city. In the Christian revivalist fervour of Romantic Germany, the slogan had a sinister medieval echo.

The romance of the Jewess, both alluringly exotic and somehow intensely American, was strong enough that one cultural celebrity, an actress renowned for qualities other than her social ethics, went so far as to invent a Jewish identity for herself. Adah Isaacs Menken took this new-found allegiance seriously enough to claim Jewish birth, learn Hebrew, and write poems and essays about Jewish culture and history in journals.25

echoing the Enlightenment view of a Judaeo-Christian rapprochement in which each party would water down their respective exclusiveness to establish a kind of Jesus-the-Jew common ground. Church and synagogue would thus be of the same family and so would Simon and his sons. But this was an optimistic delusion. It echoed, somewhat, the friendships established through the indispensability of Hebrew to rabbis and Christian theologians alike. But the latter seldom if ever abandoned their ultimate goal of conversion, and this would be true of nineteenth-century philo-Semites as well. And Christian culture at this time was romantically militant not enlightened and ecumenical.