Reflection on Belonging: The Story of the Jews 1492-1900 by Simon Schama

             While I couldn’t write a full reflection of the first book of the two Schama has released (about the years up to 1492) I actually have my notes on this one. Schama continues to skillfully use anecdotes about real people to link stories, though I think they came a little too heavy and too often in this book. My main complaint, however, is that he focuses way too much on western Europe, spending only 70 pages on Polish Jews and not much more on Jews in the Arab world. This is a book about Sephardi Jews above all else and some Ashkenazi Jews who lived in Berlin and Vienna. Russia and Poland are afterthoughts. For example, Schama mentions when discussing the Netherlands that many Jews arrived there seeking tolerance when in 1648 pogroms in Russia and Poland killed 90% of Jews there. I want more on that! How can you just mention it and then go into zero detail on something like that? Anyway, it was a good book and a well-told story, so I’m not too critical.

In the Ottoman world, the Jews had the advantage of choosing the winning side at the fall of Constantinople. Jews became integrated, despite the lack of many basic right, into the court of the sultan. Sultans often kept Jewish doctors above all others. Two Jews (both named Abraham Castro- one from Syria the other from Egypt) were critical funders of the construction of the Dome of the Rock. The Castros funded Suleyman when he built the “Old City” as it exists today, specifically the limestone walls, the seven gates, the thirty towers, two great mosques, the tiles for the Dome of the Rock, and the preservation of the Western Wall. It seems like Jews could do well in court and at higher levels but that normal people were discriminated against a lot, a pretty common theme in Judaism I think.

My favorite story in the book is a chapter about the Chinese Kaifeng Jews. It starts with the arrival of (Mateo?) Ricci, a missionary, in Kaifeng, a region of western China. He meets a man named Ai Tian, who Ricci thought was a lost Christian. Ricci showed Ai Tian paintings of the virgin and Child and others of the Baptist and the Apostles, but Ai Tian thought they were Rebecca and Jacob, and that the 12 disciples of Jesus were the 12 tribes of Israel. While Christian doctrine insisted that Jews were condemned to worldwide persecution, the Jews in China were not persecuted, living and worshipping freely, well-integrated into Chinese society. They followed all major Jewish customs, except those imposed by Christians such as being segregated from non-Jews, being forced to wear identification that they were Jewish, and being stigmatized as greedy and vindictive. They followed patrilineal descent, as did the Hebrews of old, meaning that they converted its of local women and after a few generations they looked Chinese. Though there were never many, it’s incredible to think of a Jewish community in China and how completely different it must have been.

The book also tries to answer the question of why Jews became traders in so many societies. It just made sense when you look at it logically- first of all, most Jews knew Hebrew. Second, there was an exodus, placing Jews all over the known world. Those two things create a completely unique phenomenon, with one group of people who speak the same language dispersed from India to England. That meant that they were logically the people who provided global links since, if you wanted spices from India, the best person to talk to was a Jew, who could go to India and find the Jews there, be welcomed, communicate, trade, and return with lots of cinnamon, pepper, and cumin. That gave Jews disposable income, which, since it was either illegal to lend money or only possible (among Christians) to do so at very high rates, made Jews likely to go into loaning money. It was not that great a business to be in. There were no protections for lenders, so kings and whoever may have owed money often refused to pay, sometimes killing or exiling the Jew that loaned him money.

Starting in the 17^th and 18^th centuries there was a sort of double-encounter between Jews and gentiles in the wake of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Jews started exploring knowledge outside of the Torah in the hard sciences and in philosophy. Gentiles started to question whether the treatment of the Jews was fair in light of the new moral value of individualism and humanism. It was helped along by high rates of Jewish literacy and the interest that Christians had in the Jewish people, being that Jesus was a Jew. A new group of thinkers, Hebraicists sought to learn Hebrew and the Torah, familiarize themselves with Judaism, and integrate with Jews to better convert them. Many Jews went about acquiring “worldly” knowledge to speak to the Europeans in their own moral language and show them that the Jews weren’t so different. The result was a heightened communication among the peoples and while few were converted, many found that the people on the other end of the religious divide were not so different from them. New Jewish thinkers like Mendelssohn and Spinoza revolutionized Jewish culture by introducing Jewish secularism, integrating Jews into Europe. Jews and Christians became friends in unprecedented numbers.

There’s a really cool story about a Jewish boxer in England named Dan Mendoza that would make an amazing movie. At 16-years-old he was discovered while fighting on the street by Richard Humphreys “The Gentleman Boxer,” who was the most famous boxers in England at the time. He helped train Mendoza and Mendoza quickly became one of the best on the circuit. He never hid his Jewishness and it was part of the draw to see him fight. However, one day Humphreys invited Mendoza to train in the house of a friend, which turned out to be a brothel. Surprised and indignant, Mendoza walked out, giving offense to Humphreys. Running into each other at a bar some time later, Humphreys challenged Mendoza to fight it out on the spot, and Mendoza declined. In the meantime, Mendoza beat “Butcher” Martin of Bath in 26 minutes when it had taken Humphreys well over an hour to do the same. Humphreys was embarrassed and his supporters and those of Mendoza would regularly fight in the streets. One day, Humphreys’ men kidnapped Mendoza while he was walking with his pregnant wife (who begged him to stop boxing) and locked him in a room that he escaped from. Now it was on. In an incredibly close and controversial battle, Humphreys edged out a tight victory. Injured, Mendoza went into training and Humphreys showed up one day wanting more. Mendoza, in black mourning a recently deceased child, thanked Humphreys for gracing the gym with his presence, at which point Humphreys jumped onto a table and mocked him. In a rematch held in 1789, Mendoza knocked Humphreys down after almost an hour of fighting. In a third match, Mendoza also won. It’s a story better told in the book with lots more detail but I was on the edge of my seat reading about the Mendoza-Humphreys rivalry.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Ulysses S. Grant tried to ban all Jewish people from Tennessee when he was a general in that theater during the Civil War. It never went into effect because he soon lost the area, but he accused them of being smugglers.
• Apparently there used to be a custom called helitzah, in which if a man died, his brother was required to marry his widow unless she threw a shoe at him. Apparently that cleared him of the responsibility.