The Book of Delight, and other papers

by Israel Abrahams

My hope God knoweth well,
My life He made full sweet;
Whene'er His servant fell,
God raised him to his feet.
Within the garment of His grace,
My faults He did enfold,
Hiding my sin, His kindly face
My God did ne'er withhold.
Requiting with fresh good,
My black ingratitude.

There remain the great merchant travellers to be told about. They sailed over all the world, and brought to Europe the wares, the products, the luxuries of the East. They had their own peculiar dangers. Shipwreck was the fate of others besides themselves, but they were peculiarly liable to capture and sale as slaves. Foremost among their more normal hardships I should place the bridge laws of the Middle Ages. The bridges were sometimes practically maintained by the Jewish tolls. In England, before 1290, a Jew paid a toll of a halfpenny on foot and a full penny on horseback—large sums in those days. A "dead Jew" paid eightpence. Burial was for a long time lawful only in London, and the total toll paid for bringing a dead Jew to London over the various bridges must have been considerable. In the Kurpfalz, for instance, the Jewish traveller had to pay the usual "white penny" for every mile, but also a heavy general fee for the whole journey. If he was found without his ticket of leave, he was at once arrested. But it was when he came to a bridge that the exactions grew insufferable. The regulations were somewhat tricky, for the Jew was specially taxed only on Sundays and the Festivals of the Church. But every other day was some Saint's Festival, and while, in Mannheim, even on those days the Christian traveller paid one kreuzer if he crossed the bridge on foot, and two if on horseback, the Jew was charged four kreuzer if on foot, twelve if on a horse, and for every beast of burden he, unlike the Christian wayfarer, paid a further toll of eight kreuzer. The Jewish quarter often lay near the river, and Jews had great occasion for crossing the bridges, even for local needs. In Venice, the Jewish quarter was naturally intersected by bridges; in Rome there was the pons Judeorum, which, no doubt, the Jews had to maintain in repair. It must be remembered that many local Jewish communities paid a regular bridge tax which was not exacted from Christians, and when all this is considered, it will be seen that the Jewish merchant needed to work hard and go far afield, if he was to get any profit from his enterprises.

Nevertheless, these Jews owned horses and caravans, and sailed their own ships long before the time when great merchants, like the English Jew Antonio Fernandes Carvajal, traded in their own vessels between London and the Canaries. We hear of Palestinian Jews in the third century and of Italian Jews in the fifth century with ships of their own. Jewish sailors abounded on the Mediterranean, which tended to become a Jewish lake. The trade routes of the Jews were chiefly two. "By one route," says Beazley, "they sailed from the ports of France and Italy to the Isthmus of Suez, and thence down the Red Sea to India and Farther Asia. By another course, they transported the goods of the West to the Syrian coast; up the Orontes to Antioch; down the Euphrates to Bassora; and so along the Persian Gulf to Oman and the Southern Ocean." Further, there were two chief overland routes. On the one side merchants left Spain, traversed the straits of Gibraltar, went by caravan from Tangier along the northern fringe of the desert, to Egypt, Syria, and Persia. This was the southern route. Then there was the northern route, through Germany, across the country of the Slavs to the Lower Volga; thence, descending the river, they sailed across the Caspian. Then the traveller proceeded along the Oxus valley to Balkh, and, turning north-east, traversed the country of the Tagazgaz Turks, and found himself at last on the frontier of China. When one realizes the extent of such a journey, it is not surprising to hear that the greatest authorities are agreed that in the Middle Ages, before the rise of the Italian trading republics, the Jews were the chief middlemen between Europe and Asia. Their vast commercial undertakings were productive of much good. Not only did the Jews bring to Europe new articles of food and luxury, but they served the various States as envoys and as intelligencers. The great Anglo-Jewish merchant Carvajal provided Cromwell with valuable information, as other Jewish merchants had done to other rulers of whom they were loyal servants. In the fifteenth century Henry of Portugal applied to Jews for intelligence respecting the interior of Africa, and a little later John, king of the same land, derived accurate information respecting India from two Jewish travellers that had spent many years at Ormuz and Calcutta. But it is unnecessary to add more facts of this type. The Jewish merchant traveller was no mere tradesman. He observed the country, especially did he note the numbers and occupations of the Jews, their synagogues, their schools, their vices, and their virtues.

In truth, the Jewish traveller, as he got farther from home, was more at home than many of his contemporaries of other faiths when they were at home. He kept alive that sense of the oneness of Judaism which could be most strongly and completely achieved because there was no political bias to separate it into hostile camps.

But the interest between the traveller and his home was maintained by another bond. A striking feature of Jewish wayfaring life was the writing of letters home. The "Book of the Pious," composed about 1200, says: "He that departs from the city where his father and mother live, and travels to a place of danger, and his father and mother are anxious on account of him; it is the bounden duty of the son to hire a messenger as soon as he can and despatch a letter to his father and mother, telling them when he departs from the place of danger, that their anxiety may be allayed." Twice a year all Jews wrote family letters, at the New Year and the Passover, and they sent special greetings on birthdays. But the traveller was the chief letter-writer. "O my father," wrote the famous Obadiah of Bertinoro, in 1488, "my departure from thee has caused thee sorrow and suffering, and I am inconsolable that I was forced to leave at the time when age was creeping on thee. When I think of thy grey hairs, which I no longer see, my eyes flow over with tears. But if the happiness of serving thee in person is denied to me, yet I can at least serve thee as thou desirest, by writing to thee of my journey, by pouring my soul out to thee, by a full narrative of what I have seen and of the state and manners of the Jews in all the places where I have dwelt." After a long and valuable narrative, he concludes in this loving strain: "I have taken me a house in Jerusalem near the synagogue, and my window overlooks it. In the court where my house is, there live five women, and only one other man besides myself. He is blind, and his wife attends to my needs. God be thanked, I have escaped the sickness which affects nearly all travellers here. And I entreat you, weep not at my absence, but rejoice in my joy, that I am in the Holy City. I take God to witness that here the thought of all my sufferings vanishes, and but one image is before my eyes, thy dear face, O my father. Let me feel that I can picture that face to me, not clouded with tears, but lit with joy. You have other children around you; make them your joy, and let my letters, which I will ever and anon renew, bring solace to your age, as your letters bring solace to me."

Much more numerous than the epistles of sons to fathers are the letters of fathers to their families. When these come from Palestine, there is the same mingling of pious joy and human sorrow—joy to be in the Holy Land, sorrow to be separated from home. Another source of grief was the desolation of Palestine.

One such letter-writer tells sadly how he walked through the market at Zion, thought of the past, and only kept back his tears lest the Arab onlookers should see and ridicule his sorrow. Yet another medieval letter-writer, Nachmanides, reaches the summit of sentiment in these lines, which I take from Dr. Schechter's translation: "I was exiled by force from home, I left my sons and daughters; and with the dear and sweet ones whom I brought up on my knees, I left my soul behind me. My heart and my eyes will dwell with them forever. But O! the joy of a day in thy courts, O Jerusalem! visiting the ruins of the Temple and crying over the desolate Sanctuary; where I am permitted to caress thy stones, to fondle thy dust, and to weep over thy ruins. I wept bitterly, but found joy in my tears."

And with this thought in our mind we will take leave of our subject. It is the traveller who can best discern, amid the ruins wrought by man, the hope of a Divine rebuilding. Over the heavy hills of strife, he sees the coming dawn of peace. The world must still pass through much tribulation before the new Jerusalem shall arise, to enfold in its loving embrace all countries and all men. But the traveller, more than any other, hastens the good time. He overbridges seas, he draws nations nearer; he shows men that there are many ways of living and of loving. He teaches them to be tolerant; he humanizes them by presenting their brothers to them. The traveller it is who prepares a way in the wilderness, who makes straight in the desert a highway for the Lord.

THE FOX'S HEART

Pliny says that by eating the palpitating heart of a mole one acquires the faculty of divining future events. In "Westward Ho!" the Spanish prisoners beseech their English foe, Mr. Oxenham, not to leave them in the hands of the Cimaroons, for the latter invariably ate the hearts of all that fell into their hands, after roasting them alive. "Do you know," asks Mr. Alston in the "Witch's Head," "what those Basutu devils would have done if they had caught us? They would have skinned us, and made our hearts into mouti [medicine] and eaten them, to give them the courage of the white man." Ibn Verga, the author of a sixteenth century account of Jewish martyrs, records the following strange story: "I have heard that some people in Spain once brought the accusation that they had found, in the house of a Jew, a lad slain, and his breast rent near the heart. They asserted that the Jews had extracted his heart to employ it at their festival. Don Solomon, the Levite, who was a learned man and a Cabbalist, placed the Holy Name under the lad's tongue. The lad then awoke and told who had slain him, and who had removed his heart, with the object of accusing the poor Jews. I have not," adds the author of the Shebet Jehudah, "seen this story in writing, but I have heard it related."