The Story of the Jews Finding the words 1000BCE-1462CE

Simon Schama

This is a gem! Schama has a wonderful gift for bringing long-lost peoples and cultures alive. The people are there in all their laments, lawsuits, loves and lurches of fortune. He's very good on Jewish mothers through the ages. He demonstrates Hebrew cultures in an incredible treasure house of nuance underscored by a deep feeling for poetry, cloth, and trades of every kind, a counterpoint of interactions with all sorts of neighbouring Gentile cultures and a love of the huge variety of ways in which it has been possible to be Jewish down the millennia.

We start with Elephantine Judaism is in chapter one. Interestingly Schama finds there already an interaction going on between the "purer" Temple-based Judaism of Jerusalem and the more pragmatic sort that adapts to local conditions and needs – they even have their own very splendid Temple in Elephantine with debates going on about what should be practised there, and the more because of the local Egyptian pagans who worshipped a ram-headed god in their temple while the Jews ritually slaughtered rams next door. It couldn't end well…

But the key thing is, these people live! Through their remains and documents, they speak to us today and their tongue is human. This is Schama's key mission. Through century after century in which Hellenisers, Romans, Crusaders, Arabs, the kings and prelates of Christendom, down to the fanatical idolaters of both Nazism and communism have demonised "The Jew," Schama aims to make this impossible by letting the Jews of history speak to us in our own human voices. "If you prick us, do we not bleed?"

In chapter 2 Schama relocates to Israel and strikes a powerful chord in his reflections on Judaism as a religion of the people (pages 32-33.) He sites this in the context of Nehemiah's account of the reading of the Law to the people in the newly re-walled Jerusalem. No king or high priest or Temple is present – those have all gone utterly through the disaster of conquest. The covenant being renewed is between God and His people, unmediated by any monarch or prelate but present in the words themselves as they are read out, words that demand the personal response of everyone in the crowd. In this the story echoes the narratives of the family histories of the patriarchs, the kingless days of the Exodus and the Judges, the dispute between Samuel and the people, the provisions of the Law itself that king would be subject to Law and not over it. It remains the case in the statelessness of Judaism and its putting family and synagogue at it heart rather than priest and nation.

In Chapter 3 Schama gives us a very interesting discussion between "minimalist" Israeli archaeology which wants nothing to do with any history emanating from the Bible because it rejects an older "maximalist" school which was largely interested in archaeology as a means of verifying the Bible. Schama does a great job of giving the minimalist approach full rein, to the flustered discomfort of an old-school Bible person like myself. Then he craftily chucks bits of archaeological evidence in that seriously undermine the minimalist case and makes them look like the ones who are trying to fit the evidence into pre-conceived notions (cheers from o-s B person.)

It's too much to go into all the ins and outs in what is only a review, but some of the bits that keep turning up so inconveniently have included:

·         The inscription by Hezekiah's miners who opened up the water channel that sustained Jerusalem through the Assyrian siege of approx 701 BCE. As a result Hezekiah and his court, which included Isaiah, become indisputably historical figures.

·         An exquisite little artefact with the Shema inscribed on it, predating King Josiah by centuries. The minimalist view is that the story of the unexpected finding during Josiah's reign of the Book of Deuteronomy, the book from which the Schema is quoted, was a post-exilic invention designed by the priests to explain the disaster of the destruction of Jerusalem through the failure of Judah to obey their God, but also to give hope that this same God would rebuild their society if they return wholeheartedly to Him. Finding that the Shema is much more ancient than either Ezra and post-exilic Jewry or than the stories of Josiah they looked back to does not help sustain the credibility of the minimalist story.

·         The finding of a hill fort round about where David was supposed to have fought Goliath. Apparently this fort dates back to about 1000 BCE, contains the bones of every kind of domesticated animal except pigs…

·         In this fort and elsewhere have been found models of a shrine with no idol, but a separate, empty Holy of holies, like the Temple Shrine of the invisible transcendent God.

·         They have even found at last an inscription to King David, who is treated as a myth by minimalists.

Schama rightly sticks to the archaeology in this archaeological debate. He does put in an extremely strong case for the historicity of Nehemiah, which is very obviously a first person memoir and has been shown to use the proper contemporary court style for all the Persian decrees and diplomatic correspondence it quotes. From Nehemiah we quickly find ourselves back with a pre-existent Jerusalem with named and recognisable walls, gates, Temple and quarters, and to earlier writers such as Jeremiah who then take us further back still.

But I would like to add a few thoughts of my own:

1.      What other discipline would reject so utterly a key and very ancient documentary source, corroborated in many instances by other records such as those of the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians for many significant events?

2.      How do we account for the picture of an evolving society in the Bible, from the nomadic society trying to set up its first institutions of the Torah through the very loose tribal confederacies of Joshua and Judges to the proto-kingdoms of Saul and David emerging into the complex but woefully underpowered city-states of later Israel and Judah? There is even an underlying evolution in the roles of women, from Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel who are more or less co-equal to men through powerful figures such as Miriam and Deborah to the virtual disappearance of women from any role of influence other than that of a Jezebel or an Athaliah in later Judaism. What purpose did all this serve in a narrative that according to the minimalists is mostly about Judah's rebirth through acknowledgement of past failures and a return to God? Could it be that it is there because it was the best acknowledgement available as to how things actually evolved?

3.      Why would Ezra's followers bother to include so much history about Joseph, Ephraim, the eight northern tribes and the North kingdom of Israel when the main point is the rebirth of Judah? OK, they can serve as a dire warning from the past – but why such very great detail? It looks more like love and regret than a propagandist rewriting of history.

4.      Come to that, why so much failure at all? Official histories never do this: and if the Jewish one does it for a particular reason, to justify the ways of God to men, would they really hammer it home to such a discouraging extent – "what's the point of even trying since we are all such incorrigible failures and always have been?" It is one of the great testimonies to the truth of the Old Testament that it is so unflinchingly honest about the shortcomings of even its greatest heroes.

5.      Key minimalist assertions do not hold water:

a.      "We can't find any monuments or buildings that acknowledge the mighty King David." But the Bible's account is of David as a shepherd king and a warrior leader in a loose association of fractious tribes, not a king of the kind found in later city states. He is never said to have built anything: he captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites and the only building project he is recorded as really wanting to carry out, the Temple, God told him not to.

b.      "We can't find archaeological evidence for the people of Israel travelling through the desert." How would you expect to? They were nomads, camping out and gathering food and water where they could. What remains could be left?

c.       "We can find lots of evidence of idolatry of every kind – the monolithically monotheistic Jewish state of the Bible never existed." Well it never did in the Bible either, or not at least until after the exile. Almost every book of the Bible contains multiple references to idolatry practised not only by the other people who lived amongst them – and the biblical record clearly shows that most of the time Israel and Judah were very cosmopolitan societies – but also, sometimes to a massive extent, by the Jews themselves.

Finally, I wonder what to make of the repeated doubling up structure of the Bible in this context. What I mean is that it's not the first creation that works out, but the second, Noahic creation. It's not the first children of Adam and Eve that succeed – Cain and Abel – but Seth the follower. Ishmael is not the chosen one but Isaac the second born is. Esau the firstborn is a waster so his younger brother gets the inheritance. It's not Leah the first wife who matters but Rachel the second. Moses' first attempt to stand up for the Israelites is a humiliating disaster which reduces him to a shepherd for forty years but his second attempt, led by God, brings Passover and forges a new nation. The first set of commandments are broken, the second are put in the Ark. The first attempt at invading Canaan does not have God's blessing and ends in chaos, the second under Joshua succeeds. The first priesthood of Eli breaks down but the second, of Samuel who doesn't seem even to be a Levite, flourishes. The first king Saul experiences moral, spiritual and political collapse, but the second, David, is "a man after God's own heart…" and so on.

It's so pervasive. Is it a moral lesson for a much later generation – "OK, this Temple and nation aren't a patch on the first one - but the second one has God's blessing, so just you wait and see what God will do?" That would please the minimalists of course. But the really fascinating thing is the way this theme is picked up (and fulfilled?) in the New Testament. It is this more than the archaeology leads me to look for a divine purpose being worked out in Scripture as a whole: not the first Adam who sinned, but the second Adam who restores: not the first Joshua who gives an earthly kingdom but the second Joshua (Jesus is just the Greek version of this name) who brings a heavenly one, not the first Temple built of stones but the second made without hands, not the brokenness of the old creation but a new creation, not my weakness but your strength, not just the life that ends in the grave but resurrection.

Bit of a digression there, hope you enjoyed it, but back to Schama. Jesus does figure in his narrative as a real historic person, one who lived in the times of the Herods and Pilate, who had a charismatic presence but, seen as a destabilising force in a time of political uncertainty, was disposed of by the authorities. All this is hardly surprising in view of the overwhelming evidence. Schama is agnostic about what happened next, as with Montefiore in his epic Jerusalem. He sees Jesus as a revolutionary rabbi not as Messiah or as the Resurrection and the Life. He sees Trinitarianism as a complication that does not commend itself to the simpler monotheisms of Jews and Muslims.

There's a wonderful passage on page 150 (Bodley Head 2013 hardback edition) reflecting on the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in AD70:

Essentially, at this point Jewish time stops; the actuality of the Temple cult, its sacrifices and pilgrimages, become virtualised, the feasts themselves embalmed in a Judaism of loss… Judaism itself had floated free from the grave of history. It was to be a perpetual present, endlessly reanimated in memory… it was in effect… the moment when history is replaced by timeless memory.

Schama portrays a Judaism violently cut free from its embodiment in material things – a land, a city, a temple, an unending slaughterhouse of sacrificial blood – now taking off into the transcendent. Yet with that the phrase a Judaism of loss, a core of spirituality that is focussed upon what we once enjoyed but have no longer. "Next year in Jerusalem…"

Another brilliant passage is about the Mishnah (page 183 onwards.) He describes it as chatty, serious, argumentative, narrow and petty and comprehensive and sublime. Here is his strongest advocacy of it, from page 185:

There is something counter-intuitively powerful about the wiring established between quotidian habit and connection with the Almighty. From minutiae comes sanctification down to the last shoe and the locust which might be trodden underneath. The Mishnah resists the possibility separating the realms of the sacred and the humdrum: holiness pervades all; and the least action, the least creature, the least custom is to be considered in the light of the righteousness of divinity. Though dealing with small things, this is no small thing. It bestows a kind of radiance on the world itself, not through abstract nostrums but from the actual, concrete matter from which a day, a week, a life is made.

This is so brilliantly expressed that it makes you want to rush out and get a copy and read it straight away. And yet… I suspect that if I did so I might find the Mishnah slightly less brilliant than Schama makes it. I agree with the vision – to find every part of life radiant with the holy. But I would find the loss of all spontaneity in the Mishnah's search for that vision too great a sacrifice. Is divinity only about rules? Is there nothing left for freedom, for inspiration? Yes, cooking the dinner or catching the bus should be holy, lived expressions of our relationship with God. But can't we find that in joyous encounter with Him in all that we do rather than in endless prescriptions? I suspect I would find the Mishnah's vision unable to deliver this joy. There are always religious people, among Christians as well as Jews, who love rules and love imposing them on others if they get the chance.

I also feel Schama oversells some of what he has to say about Jewish imagery. I was delighted to find Judaism generally far less chary of pictures than it has latterly become, following Schama's lush descriptions of ancient synagogue interiors, full of image and colour. But some of his claims for Jewish illuminated manuscripts seem overstated. He lavishes praise on their imagination and virtuosity, but several of the illustrations in the book have a distinct air of the fourth form. You end up hoping that his other descriptions of subjects of which you personally know little are not over-egged.

But Schama certainly does make us wonder at the sheer extent and variety of Jewish civilisations down the ages in many different countries: in the Yemen, in Egypt, somewhere in the Caucasus, in Spain, in England, in various parts of Europe. Very clearly there are many ways of being Jewish! There are very affectionate portraits of Jewish women who at least among the Ashkenazi created a powerful civilisation of their own. His descriptions of Jewish sages like Maimonides and especially of the poet HaLevi are full of love for them and feeling for their achievements, like all the very best biography.

Finally the subject of Christians and Jews. Schama is excellent on just how Jewish Christianity was at the beginning. After all its Founder, its Scriptures and all its leaders were all Jewish. He portrays growing estrangement turning into rivalry and eventually enmity, a sickening story. With the rise of Islam he shows how Jews often did better under Muslim regimes than Christian ones.

It is absolutely horrible to read about the persecution of Jesus' own kin, our older brothers and sisters in faith, by people who claimed the name of Christ in justification. No Christian can read this without a deep sense of shame. At least some of the anti-Semitic mob violence at the time of the Crusades was it seems resisted by the church. Bishops and priests would protect Jews by sheltering them in cathedrals, churches and monasteries and would speak out to condemn the violence – or some of them would anyway.

But eventually lawless anti-Jewish rioting turned into official persecution by the Church through the instrument of the Inquisition. Torture, burnings and mutilation justified in the name of a loving God? Has the papacy ever issued a statement of repentance about this? Sorry is pretty weak after such horror but it is at least an improvement on keeping silence. Jesus ordered us to love our enemies, forgive them and pray for those who persecute us, so how can anyone have imagined that these persecutions could be done in His name. If the criterion of judgment is "as much as you did it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me," then there are a lot of popes and cardinals who have received very nasty surprises in the afterlife. I wish that Protestants had done better but then there are the appalling anti-Semitic rants of Martin Luther to bear in mind.

A complete eye-opener of a book then, both dazzling and horrifying. I can't wait to read the second volume.