The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD by Schama Simon

Author:Schama, Simon [Schama, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-03-18T07:00:00+00:00

But who am I and what is my life that I should dare to write a letter to my Lord the King? I rely however on the integrity and uprightness of my object. How indeed can an idea be expressed in fair words by those who have wandered after the glory of the kingdom has departed, who have long suffered afflictions and calamities? . . . We are indeed the remnant of captive Israelites . . . dwelling peacefully in the land of our sojourning for our God has not forsaken us nor has his shadow departed from us.

With a few lines Menahem turned Hasdai into a noble of the exile, worthy to address himself to a king. An ancient tradition asserted that the first Jews in Spain had been taken there in the time of Titus the Conqueror on the request of his consuls who believed they had the makings of useful colonists. Nonetheless they had suffered through the Roman era and then, more bitterly, through the centuries of the barbarian Visigoths, who, as Christians, inflicted a persecution on the small Jewish population. Menahem attached this history to the Bible’s long chain of calamities laid across the backs of the Jews by God to punish their perennial transgressions. But when ‘God saw their misery and toil and that they were helpless, He led me [i.e. Hasdai] to present myself before the king and has graciously turned his heart to me not because of my own righteousness but for his mercy and the sake of his covenant. By this covenant the hands of the oppressors were relaxed . . . and through the mercy of our God the yoke was lightened.’ Then followed, in Menahem’s most lyrical vein, an extravagant, elated, encomium to Al-Andalus. If it was not true Zion flowing with milk and honey, of all possible places of exile, Sefarad ‘as it is called in the sacred tongue’ was surely the best, a treasure house of nature, a place of repose.

The land is rich, abounding in rivers, springs and aqueducts, a land of corn and oil and wine, of fruits and all manner of delicacies, pleasure gardens and orchards, fruitful trees of every kind including the leaves of the tree upon which the silkworm feeds of which we have great abundance. In the mountains and woods of our country cochineal is gathered in great quantity; there are also mountains covered by crocus and with veins of silver, gold, copper, iron, tin, lead, sulphur, porphyry, marble and crystal. Merchants congregate in it and traffickers from the ends of the earth from Egypt and neighbouring countries bringing spices, precious stones, magnificent wares for kings and princes and all the desirable things of Egypt. Our king has collected such large treasure of silver, gold and precious valuables such as no king had ever amassed.24

Notwithstanding all this abundance, and the mild benevolence of the caliph, should it be true that the ‘Israelitish exiles anywhere form one independent kingdom and are not subject to a foreign ruler .

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