History of the Jews (36 page)

To keep the family strong, marriage was in effect compulsory for men, and for women of child-bearing age; the genizah documents reveal no word for a spinster. It was a great economic and social strength of Judaism, as opposed to Islam, that it rejected polygamy. The Pentateuch did not actually prohibit it, but Proverbs 31:10-31 appeared to uphold monogamy and it was the rule from post-Exilic times; from the age of Rabbi Gershom (960-1028), bigamy and polygamy were punished by the severest type of excommunication in European Jewry.
⁵⁹
Bigamy led to excommunication in Egypt too, though in the case of compulsory levirate marriage, Maimonides sanctioned bigamy provided the wives were equally treated—‘one
night with this one, one night with that’.
⁶⁰
A male became adult at thirteen, when he could make up a quorum for the services and put on phylacteries, and from the early thirteenth century this point was marked by the bar-mitzvah, meaning he had come under the yoke of the commandments.
⁶¹
Then he was married as soon as convenient—Maimonides was most unusual in not marrying until he was past thirty.

Marriage was a social and business transaction designed to keep society cohesive, so the contract or
ketubbah
was read out at the ceremony and it was drawn up, like a partnership agreement, to avoid disputes or make dissolution uncontentious. Here is a Karaite contract dated 26 January 1028:

 

I, Hezekiah, the bridegroom, will provide her with clothing, roof and food, supply her with all her needs and wishes according to my ability and to the extent I can afford. I will conduct myself towards her with truth and sincerity, with love and affection, I will not grieve and oppress her and will let her have food, clothes and marital relations to the extent habitual among Jewish men…. Sarna the bride heard the words of Hezekiah and agreed to marry him and be his wife and companion in purity, holiness and fear of God, to listen to his words, to honour and hold him dear, to be his helper and to do in his house what a virtuous Jewish woman is expected to do, to conduct herself towards him with love and consideration, to be under his rule, and her desire will be toward him.
⁶²

 

The Bible said ‘God…hateth putting away’ (i.e. divorce),
⁶³
but it was part of the strength of the extended, as opposed to nuclear, family system that divorce was easy provided the contract was properly drawn up. Genizah sources show it was commoner in Egypt than among European or American Jewish families until the second half of the twentieth century.
⁶⁴
In divorce the Mishnah favoured the man: ‘A wife is divorced irrespective of her will, but the husband is divorced only when he is willing.’
⁶⁵
Jewish women were of less account in Moslem Afro-Asia than in Christian Europe, but genizah records hint that they were often more powerful than their formal rights suggested. If they were beaten they could go to the courts, and sometimes a husband had to seek court protection from a dominant wife. Many letters make it clear that wives handled their husband’s business affairs when he was trading abroad. Women agents and brokers were common. One woman who figures in the records was in fact nicknamed ‘The Broker’, ran a business partnership, got herself expelled from a synagogue but figured on a public subscription-list, and died rich.
⁶⁶

Women also played a role in the educational system, which was the real cement of the Jewish world. They had their own all-female classes
—usually taught by blind scholars. Female Bible-teachers were common. A woman might also run a school, though this was rare. But the main educational effort was entrusted to men supported by the community. In fact the Jewish legal definition of a town as opposed to a village was that it had at least ten
batlanim
, ‘persons who do not work’, foregoing private profit to study on behalf of the community. At the end of the eleventh century there were twenty-nine in Fustat, fourteen in Cairo, including the
rayyis
or head of the Jews (under the Fatimids), the
rabbenu
(master), who was the chief scholar and religious authority, two judges, five
yeshivah
scholars, three
ravs
or masters, six cantors, one teacher and five beadles.
⁶⁷

The community revolved around the school-synagogue complex. Cairo-Fustat was regarded as lax, even luxurious. Maimonides, who hated music, disapproved of the singing of
piyyutim
during services but the people loved them and he ruled that it would cause too much bitterness to have them stopped. His son Abraham deplored the use of huge cushions and reclining pillows in synagogue, but here again the popular will prevailed. But even in lax Fustat, there were three services daily and four on the Sabbath.
⁶⁸
Sabbath and dietary laws were kept in all their rigour. Jewish law was strict, and this caused a constant, though largely unrecorded, leakage into the host communities, but it was the discipline which also kept the Jews together and their heads high. Sabbath (root-verb
shabath
) meant to cease. All work was forbidden, Exodus specifically prohibiting kindling a fire and the Mishnah listing thirty-nine categories of labour used in making it. The Oral Law principle of erecting ‘fences round the law’, to prevent even accidental breaches, spread the area of prohibition still further. Thus, as you could not break a branch to kindle a fire, you could not ride a horse even if it did not belong to you (animals you owned had to be rested on the Sabbath), since you might have to break a branch to use as a whip. Since Jeremiah 17:21 forbade carrying burdens on the Sabbath, the Mishnah devoted two chapters to the quantitative minimums, and a vast amount of commentary discussed the difference between a private place in which some carrying was allowed, and a public one. Since Exodus 16:29 forbade a man to ‘go out of his place on the seventh day’, there was a huge volume of commentary on walks.
⁶⁹

Paid public officials supervised these prohibitions. They played an even more important role in the dietary laws. As food was part of religion and eating a communion with God, the material had not only to come from a permitted species but a blessing pronounced during the killing, which had to be done in regulated form. Animals and fowl had
to have their oesophagus and windpipe cut with a knife run three times over finger and three over nail to ensure it was unblemished and sharp. After slaughter, the meat was examined for signs of disease, especially of the lungs, and then veins containing blood picked out, together with prohibited fat and sinews in the hindpart. The
shohet
or official ritual slaughterer was appointed by the rabbis, and a genizah letter shows they examined him under three heads, religiosity, good conduct and scholarship—a good example, as Goitein has observed, of the tendency of Jewish crafts to ascend into the academic realm.
⁷⁰
After he had done his work, which included the removal of all blood, a guard ensured it was untouched until ready for cooking, at which point it was soaked in water for thirty minutes and salted for an hour to ensure no blood was left. The guard also supervised milking and cheese-making, which was governed by purity rules. To be kosher, an egg had to be unmarked by blood, have one round, one oval end, and its yolk surrounded by white. As the Bible prohibited seething a kid in its mother’s milk, commentators interpreted this as forbidding eating meat and milk foods together, unless each is in a proportion to the other of more than sixty to one. That in turn led to the use of two sets of cooking and serving dishes.
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Communal slaughtering thus helped to solidify the Jewish parish. Moreover, though a poor Jew might have to be strict in what he ate, he knew he would never want for food, since he could receive every Friday enough money (or equivalent) to cover fourteen meals for his family. From Temple times, the
kuppah
or collecting box was a pivot around which the Jewish welfare-community revolved, Maimonides stating: ‘We have never seen or heard of a Jewish community which does not have a
kuppah
.’
⁷²
There were three trustees, solid citizens, for each
kuppah
and, charity being mandatory in Jewish law, they had power to seize goods from non-contributors. There were carefully graded forms of welfare-provision, each with its own fund and administrators: clothes, schools for the poor, dowries for poor girls, Passover food and wine for the poor, orphans, the aged, the sick, burials of the poor, and prisoners and refugees. The notion of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ was one the Jews adopted before the birth of Christ and always practised even when the community as a whole was distressed. A solvent Jew had to give to the
kuppah
once he had resided in the community a month; to the soup-kitchen fund after three, the clothing fund after six and the burial fund after nine.
⁷³
But as helping the poor was one way of showing gratitude to God, a substitute for the old Temple sacrifices, a pious Jew gave more than the mandatory minimum, and long,
elaborately written lists of contributors were hung up in the synagogue at Fustat—for God to see, as well as men. The Jews hated welfare dependence. They quoted the Bible: ‘You must help the poor man in proportion to his needs’, but added, ‘you are not obliged to make him rich.’
⁷⁴
The Bible, Mishnah, Talmud, the commentaries were full of injunctions to work, to achieve independence. The grace after meals pleaded: ‘We beseech you, O God of our fathers, that you cause us not to be in need of the gifts of flesh and blood…but make us only dependent on your hand, which is full, open, holy and ample, so that we may not be ashamed.’ The sages commanded: ‘Flay a carcass in the market-place if necessary, receive thy wages and do not say “I am a great man, and it is beneath my dignity to do such a thing.” ’
⁷⁵

Yet the genizah documents, such as lists of recipients and donors, show that in practice welfare had to be distributed on a large scale. At the time Maimonides arrived in Fustat (
c
. 1150-60), of 3,300 Jews, 500 were breadwinners and there were 130 households on charity; in the period 1140-1237, there was an average of one relief recipient for every four donors.
⁷⁶
Poverty was often inescapable. In 1201-2, for instance, famine and plague cut Fustat’s population in half, leaving widows and children destitute. The genizah documents show that the
jizya
or poll-tax, the worst aspect of Moslem rule, was the real terror of the poor, enforced with great ferocity and relentlessness, relatives being held responsible for defaulters and travellers being forced to show tax-clearance certificates before leaving.

Always, in the background, there was the menace of anti-Semitism. It is described in the genizah documents by the word
sinuth
, hatred. The worst actual persecution occurred under the fanatical or mad Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, early in the eleventh century, who turned first on the Christians, then on the Jews. Another zealot-ruler was Saladin’s nephew al-Malik, who called himself caliph of the Yemen (1196-1201); a letter of August 1198 from the Yemen relates how the Jews were summoned to the ruler’s audience-hall and forcibly converted: ‘Thus all apostacized. Some of the pious, who [then] defected from Islam, were beheaded.’ Parts of Islam were much worse than others for Jews. Morocco was fanatical. So was northern Syria. Anti-
dhimmi
regulations, such as sumptuary laws, were often strictly enforced to gouge a financial settlement out of the Jewish community. A genizah document of 1121 describes decrees in Baghdad forcing Jews to wear:

 

two yellow badges, one on the headgear and one on the neck. Furthermore, each Jew must hang round his neck a piece of lead weighing [3 grammes] with the word
dhimmi
on it. He also has to wear a belt round his waist. The women have to wear one red and one black shoe and have a small bell on their necks
or shoes…. The vizier appointed brutal Moslem men to supervise the Jewish males and brutal Moslem women to watch over the females and hurt them with curses and humiliations…. The Moslems were mocking the Jews and the mob and the youths were beating them up in all the streets of Baghdad.
⁷⁷

 

During most of this period Egypt was a relatively safe place for Jews, though Alexandria retained its long tradition of anti-Semitism dating from Hellenistic times. The writer of one genizah letter, describing an anti-Semitic outbreak there when a Jewish elder was falsely accused of rape, added: ‘anti-Semitism is continually taking on new forms and everyone in the town has become a kind of police inspector over the Jews to express their
sinuth
’.
⁷⁸
But in Fustat and Cairo, the genizah papers show that Jews, Christians and Moslems lived mingled together and went into common business partnerships. Goitein concludes that the evidence does not support the view that in Egypt, at least, anti-Semitism was endemic or serious. But then Egypt under the Fatimids and Ayyubids was a refuge for persecuted Jews (and others) from all over the world.

If the treatment of the Jews under Islam varied, from place to place and from time to time, it was always bad under Byzantine rule. In Latin Christendom, it was tolerable until the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095; thereafter the position of the Jews deteriorated almost everywhere. As in Islam, the powers-that-be always favoured Jews, other things being equal. They were the best of all urban colonists, had useful trading networks, possessed rare skills, accumulated wealth quickly and were easy to tax. They flourished under the Carolingians. The Emperor Louis the Pious, around 825, gave them a number of charters as inducements to settle. The letters of Agobard of Lyons show that they not only enjoyed imperial protection but were allowed to build synagogues. There was periodic trouble—persecutions in France in 1007, for instance; forced conversions in Mainz in 1012. But on the whole Jewish communities did well and spread, especially throughout the Rhine basin, and from the Lower Rhine to England after 1066. As late as 1084 the ruling Bishop of Speyer gave them a charter of privileges, including a defensive wall round their quarter, as an inducement to settle in his city; and in 1090, the Emperor Henry
IV
renewed this charter and gave them a new one in Worms.