The Story of the Jews by Simon Schama

Author:Simon Schama
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

Naghrela was both the beneficiary of the endless wars of the Zirid Berber amirs, and the predictable victim of their relentlessness. The last campaigns, when he was in his middle age and saddle-sore, exhausted him and turned his mind to brooding on the futility of triumph when the ultimate victory was always Death’s. Some of the most touching reports from the field he sent to his son Yehosef, born in 1044 and still a youth when his father was a greybeard veteran. In the end, the Naghrela story – and by extension the story of the Jews in Zirid Granada – is all about a father and his son.

It is because of Yehosef that we know as much as we do of the father, for he was his anthologist, editor, the creator of the two diwan anthologies, whose Bible-invoking titles The Little Book of Proverbs and The Little Book of Ecclesiastes (meditations) were presumably Shmuel’s idea. So it is the son who supplies the poem testifying the strictness of the homework instructions of the father, even, or especially, while on campaign. From the battlefield itself he sends Yehosef a book of Arab poetry ‘copied by me while the sword was drawn’ to ensure his son has sufficient mastery to succeed him. ‘Even as the grave yawns about me I can’t stop educating you.’ (These Jewish fathers!) ‘Mark what I say, the cultured man is like a fruiting tree; even its leaves will heal the sick / while fools are like forest wood good only to be consumed by fire.’38 The most beautiful of all moments of father–son communion is set beside a garden pool. Yehosef – who evidently can wind his father round his finger – beckons him in: ‘It’s never been so full of flowers . . . and I’ve put in a lawn I can loll on / and have run a brimming channel around it / that rims it like the sky the earth.’ They stretch out under pomegranate and chestnut while a servant fills two crystal cups, sets them on a ‘raft of mottled reeds / And floated them to us across the water / As if they were two brides on palanquins / And we their grooms / we tossed them down / And stowed them with the empties on the deck, for their return to the barquetender / who in a jiffy filled them up / and with a “Down the hatch sirs!” / sent them back’.39

It is a scene of the sweetest intimacy and companionship; a last glimpse before trouble comes calling. Worn out, brooding darkly on his end, Shmuel ibn Naghrela died in 1056, leaving his twenty-one-year-old boy as successor. For all the years of close tutelage Yehosef seems not to have been ready to assume the mantle, although the only accounts we have of the misrule of Yehosef the wazir come from bitterly alienated Arab sources. Those chronicles paint a portrait of an arrogant, overbearing young man, presumptuous, corrupt and even

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