PEOPLE OF THE WORD

Peter Lopatin


Simon Schama’s choice of “Story” in place of “History” in the title of this impressive new work is fitting, for the history he recounts is not history conceived of as a chronicle of important events, but rather as a compendium of thematically linked stories told throughout the ages by, and about, the lived experience of real people—and of a people. Schama tells these stories in terms of a number of characteristically

Jewish oscillations: between exclusivity and
inclusivity, differentiation and syncretism,
assimilation and rejection, fidelity to law and tradition and the Jewish proclivity for
scrutinizing and interrogating both. The
myriad ways in which Jews mediated and
resolved (or didn’t resolve) these oppositions over the better part of two millennia constitute the warp and weft, the theme and variation, of Schama’s narrative.
To tell a story is, necessarily, to adopt a
stance, an agenda that informs the story-
teller’s choices of what tales to tell and what
themes to educe, and Schama lays his agenda on the table at the outset:
What the Jews have lived through, and
somehow survived to tell the tale, has been
the most intense version known to human
history of adversities endured by other
peoples as well; of a culture perennially
resisting its annihilation, of remaking homes and habitats, writing the prose and the poetry of life, through a succession of
uprootings and assaults. It is what makes this story at once particular and universal, the shared inheritance of Jews and non-Jews alike, an account of our common humanity.
It turns out to be an agenda that serves
Schama well. Some of the stories he relates
are of well-known figures of Jewish history,
biblical and otherwise: Ezra and Nehemiah,
inveighing against the corruption of Jewish
society by “foreign” influences; the important (if ever problematical and dubious) Flavius Josephus, a Jew turned faithful Roman general and chronicler of Jerusalem’s destruction at the hands of his Roman masters; rabbi and philosopher Maimon ben Joseph (known to us today as Maimonides) striving to reconcile faith with reason. And the list goes on, including rabbis and scholars, to be sure, but also mapmakers, courageous wives and daughters, poets, and physicians.
The book’s subtitle is a bit misleading.
Although there are references to the very
earliest days of Jewish history, Schama’s story really begins with the fifth-century-b.c. Jewish community at Elephantine, in Upper Egypt, which provides the thematic backdrop for the stories that follow. As revealed in troves of papyri uncovered at the end of the 19th century, a Jewish garrison town flourished in Elephantine, populated by “tough guys, anxious mothers, slave-girl wives, kibitzers and quibblers, hagglers over property lines, drafters of prenups, scribes, temple officials, jailbait indignant that they were set up for a fall, big shots and small fry.” This was a community of Jews aware of its distinct identity, yet one which remained open to the wider non-Jewish world. Their
Jewishness was “worldly, cosmopolitan,
vernacular (Aramaic) not Hebrew, obsessed
with law and property, money-minded,
fashion-conscious [and] much concerned
with .  .  . the niceties of the social pecking
order and both the delights and burdens of
the Jewish ritual calendar.” These were Jews who mingled freely with their non-Jewish neighbors, sometimes to the point of taking non-Jewish wives, a practice repugnant to the priestly grandees of contemporaneous Jerusalem, where, at roughly the same time, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah were being composed, “with the express aim of purging Jewish society of ‘foreign’ elements: a winnowing out of foreign women, foreign cults, foreign habits.”
Elephantine and Jerusalem serve as the
thematic poles about which Schama’s “story
of the Jews” will turn, as he guides his reader deftly, if at times feverishly, over a great swath of Jewish history. The tension between the sacred demands of text and tradition—the never-ending “laying on of words” that is intrinsic both to the practice of Judaism and the lived experience that is Jewishness—and the pervasiveness of “alien” influences upon a people who saw themselves in some important sense as “distinct” is a recurrent theme in Jewish history. That theme runs like a river through Schama’s account as well,
perhaps nowhere more strikingly than in his chapter on “Classical Jews,” in which he
explores the tense yet fructifying interplay
between Hellenism and Judaism.
On the one hand, the Greeks abhorred the
obduracy of the stiff-necked Jews and “their
exasperating refusal to be like everyone else,” insisting—as against all (Greek) reason and spiritual sensibility—on restricting their diets (rather than indulging their appetites), violating the beauty of the human form through the practice of circumcision, and the exclusivity of their faceless God. Schama asks the key question: “What was it to be: the nude or the word? God as beauty or God as writing? Divinity invisible or an eyeful of perfect body?” The division seems stark and unbridgeable. Yet the lived reality of Hellenic Judaism tells us otherwise. From Libya to Alexandria to Judea and the Galilee, Jews and pagans lived among and influenced one
another:
For those multitudes, Hellenism and Judaism were not mutually incompatible at all. Their manner of living exemplified something like the opposite: unforced convergence; a spontaneous (if not untroubled) coexistence.
It is important to note that neither here, nor
in his compelling account of Jewish life in
Moorish Spain—nor anywhere else, for that
matter—does Schama spin a feel-good yarn of this or that golden age of Jewish life under the rule of non-Jews. He is keenly aware that the story of the Jews is, in part, a lachrymose tale of persecution and destruction. He notes that the earliest appearance of “Israel” on any historical artifact is a late-13th-century- b.c. Egyptian inscription that proclaims:
“Israel is laid waste, its seed is no more.” For all the cosmopolitanism of the Jews of
Elephantine, they were “stigmatized as
colonists, tools of the Persian occupiers .  .  .
their religion a desecrating intrusion.”
Schama knows those stories and tells them
vividly. But he also wishes to tell “a second
story .  .  . in which the line between the alien and the pure is much less hard and fast; in which being Jewish did not carry with it the requirement of shutting out neighboring cultures but, to some degree at least, living in their company.” The coexistence of these two stories is, in Schama’s telling, the real “Story”
of the Jews.
This book was conceived as a companion to
the eponymous BBC television documentary
series authored by Schama (now on PBS as
well), and, not surprisingly, Schama has
chosen a richly visual writing style that is
admirably evocative but occasionally
stumbles over itself. (Can it really be the case that “it takes no imagination at all to wander the streets of Elephantine, hear the gossip and smell the cooking pots”? Surely a little imagination would help!) And although, for the most part, Schama’s informal, conversational style works well, the overly generous sprinkling of Yiddishisms (Maimonides was a “king of the kvetch”) feels like a bit too much schmaltz in the kishka.
And it would have been helpful if the author had provided translations of some of the Hebrew words: nagid, nefesh, and sandek come to mind.
These are quibbles, however. The Story of the Jews is a deft, engaging, and humane work that, like all well-told tales, carries the reader along and leaves him better for the journey.