The Story of the Jews (Part 5)

The BBC Two continuity announcer introducing last night's final episode of Simon Schama's The Story of the Jews described it as "a very personal journey".

The four earlier episodes were always prefaced by the word "personal", but this was the first time the phrase "very personal" had been used. Why?

Well, perhaps because this was the episode the BBC most wanted to keep itself at arm's length from and the use of the words "very personal" made it very clear that 'THIS IS SIMON SCHAMA'S VIEW, NOT THE BBC'S!!'

Sadly, a personal take on the history of the modern state of Israel was always likely to be contentious. Pro-Palestinian activists had complained about the series even before it began, following Simon Schama's description of himself as a Zionist. Others would be watching intently to see if Simon was critical of current Israeli government policies. I suspect we all brought our own 'very personal' views to bear on this programme.

What we got was most definitely a very personal view: The view of a left-wing Zionist, passionately pro-Israel (calling the country "a miracle") but anxious and regretful about recent trends in the country - especially (inevitably) settlements and the security barrier - and deeply nostalgic for the idealistic socialism of Israel's kibbutzim.

"I've always thought that Israel is the consummation of some of the highest ethical values of Jewish traditional history, but creating a place of safety and defending it has sometimes challenged those same ethics and values". 

It was also 'very personal' though in its interweaving of Simon Schama's own life experiences with the history he was telling, from his birth in 1945 to his work experience on a kibbutz, etc.

The programme opened though by allowing us all to experience the sirens and silence of that day in Spring, each year, when Israel halts to mark the Holocaust - over one-and-a-half remarkable minutes of lump-in-the-throat TV.

As for the country itself,

"Today around half the Jews in the world live here in Israel. 6 million people. 6 million defeats for the Nazi programme of total extermination."

Simon Schama then told us about Szmul Zygielbojm, a Polish Jew who had escaped from the Warsaw ghetto who tried in vain to rouse the Allied Powers to come to the rescue of the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. Broadcasting on the BBC, he said, "It would be a crime and a disgrace to go on living, to belong to the human race, unless immediate action is taken to stop the greatest crime ever known to human history." Soon after, his wife and son were killed during the crushing of the Warsaw uprising. At the same time the Allied Powers were convening to discuss the plight of refugees. The words 'Jew' and 'Jewish' were banned from the proceedings, and the Allies decided to do nothing. Zygielbojm committed suicide in protest at their indifference soon after.

"The Holocaust put paid to the idea that when, facing annihilation, the Jews had any reason to expect much in the way of protection, succour or asylum from anyone. So it was not just what the Nazis did to the Jews. It was what everyone else failed to do that made the moral case for Israel."

After the war, "a desperate exodus from the blood-lands of central Europe, where two-thirds of Jews had been wiped out" made the perilous journey to the coast of British-mandate Palestine. 

"There was no returning to that continent of phantoms. Some who tried to go back to what had been their homes in Poland and Romania were harassed, assaulted, sometimes even killed."

A judicious telling of the history of the run-up to the re-birth of the State of Israel followed, moving from the arrival of the Holocaust survivors and back to the Chaim Weizmann and the Balfour declaration, through the bitter inter-communal conflicts in the interwar years and onto David Ben-Gurion, pausing to reflect on a 1919 letter from Prince Faisal (later King Faisal) of Iraq, leader of the Arab Revolt, to a leading American Zionist:

"Dear Mr Frankfurter, I want to take this opportunity of my first contact with American Zionists to tell you what I've often been able to say to Dr Weizmann in Arabia and Europe. We feel the Arabs and Jews are cousins in race and suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves. We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home."

"This is the document of what might have been," said Simon Schama, "and, you know, what might still be."

A 'very personal' narrative on two of the main strands in Israeli politics took shape as the programme proceeded.

On one side (the side Simon doesn't like) stand the "intransigent," security-minded nationalists, personified by the figure of Ze'ev Jabotinsky [whose ideas eventually, long after his death, flowed into Likud] - the side of the settler who Simon met [and clearly felt uncomfortable with] later in the programme, the side of those who support the security barrier.

On the other side (the side Simon likes) stand the the left-leaning, secular Zionists like David Ben-Gurion, the kibbutzim, and the liberal novelist he met [and clearly felt comfortable with] later in the programme.

To the accompaniment of poignant music, Simon Schama made his feelings clear:

"There has been a dramatic shift in Israel over the past decades. The secular, outward-looking Israel I remember from my days in [a kibbutz] has been eclipsed by one that insists - in the name of religion, nationalism or security - on separation and difference."

Jabotinsky's essay Iron Wall and Simon Schama's expressions of distaste for his ideas were accompanied by images of the present security barrier, and when Simon arrived at the security barrier itself, he merged his distaste for Jabotinsky with his distaste for the barrier. He did observe, however: 

"I want to say that nobody, including me, ultimately has the moral right to say 'That shouldn't have happened. The wall shouldn't have happened.' Before the wall happened hundreds of people were dying every year from terrorist attacks, after the wall happened, very, very few."

There's much more to say about about this episode, but I'll just mention a few more things and ask you to watch it for yourselves and discover all the rest.

Yes, we heard from an Arab refugee (Yacoub Odeh) from the time of independence,  but - unlike in nearly all other BBC programmes - he was powerfully balanced by the testimony of a Jewish refugee (Levana Zamir) from the Arab world.

"But there are other memories, and other catastrophes, dating to these same fateful years. Hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Muslim countries for centuries discovered suddenly their home was no longer their home."

The deeply-rooted Alexandrian Jewish community, with its Shamas, was the example Simon Schama used. After 1947 came "assaults, riots, murders, arrests, show trials, public hangings, expropriations, expulsions."

"The same story was repeated across the Muslim world, not just in Egypt, but in Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. At least 700,000 Jews left or were expelled, many reduced to destitution, taking with them only what they could carry. Some went to America, others - in the North African world - to France, Iraqis to Britain, but many came to Israel, most of them Zionists by necessity rather than chose. The exodus of Jews from Muslim lands almost doubled the population of Israel in just a few years - the first but not the last demographic tidal wave to engulf this tiny country.

"In the decades that followed millions more would come when they could, from places as far apart as India, East Africa, the Caucasus and Russia. This was a country for Jews, but it also became one of the most diverse in the whole world." 

This final episode was as strong as any of the other episodes in this wonderful series, but it was also the most thought-provoking, and the most challenging. Many will, perhaps, strongly disagree with parts of it. 

Part of the challenge stems from that 'very personal' standpoint of Simon Schama. It's a 'very personal' standpoint which, I suspect, tallies quite closely with that of many at the BBC - when it comes to the issues of Jewish settlements and the security barrier. To have had a 'personal view history' from someone who would come out in support of Jewish settlements and the security barrier is still hard to imagine from the BBC; indeed, it's close to being unthinkable (which surely isn't as it should be, is it?)

Still, the whole series was a powerful and sustained argument for the necessity of the State of Israel, a moral vindication of the country's existence, a robust justification of Zionism. And that's something you don't usually get from the BBC. 

So thank you Simon Schama.

The Story of the Jews (Part 4)

Chagall, Russian Wedding

Simon Schama's The Story of Jews is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, one of the best things the BBC has done in years.

A good deal of the credit for that goes to Simon Schama himself. As a story-telling historian, few can match him. 

This week's episode, Over the Rainbow, took us from Eastern Europe to the United States and back again - from the Pale of Settlement to The Wizard of Oz, and then (leaving a lump in this viewer's throat) to a village in Nazi-occupied Lithuania - homeland of Simon Schama's own family, on his mother's side. Just one Jewish survivor lives there now, surrounded by his own carvings evoking the lost world of Lithuania's Jews. 

The early stages of the programme vividly conveyed the extraordinary variety and vitality of Jewish life in the Russian Empire (at that time including Lithuania, of course) - despite the oppressive restrictions imposed upon the Jews who lived here and the extraordinarily vicious pogroms periodically flung against them. Simon Schama's enthusiasm for this vibrant and diverse culture was infectious, and he fairly threw himself into his descriptions of it.

It was out of this rich culture that much of the best of American 20th Century popular culture sprang, as large numbers of Jews fled the increasingly savage anti-Semitism of Europe's east for the chance of a better, freer life in the United States of America, and brought the many strains of their culture with them, transplanting and transforming them, giving us many of the crowning glories of Tin Pan Alley (Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, etc) and leading and shaping the creation of Hollywood.

The programme opened in the ruins of Zvonárska Synagogue in Košice, Slovakia [above], where the sense of desolation and absence was tempered somewhat by "the rainbows coming through the [stained] glass." "Out of the dust burst the colours", said Simon. And so did the memories, as he imagined the former congregation gathered there. In the spring of 1944, all 15,700 Jews in Košice were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz, but "this wasn't a place that sat passively waiting for its death sentence."

And it was that final thought which spurred the first part of the programme, as Simon Schama conjured up the "thriving, confident, noisy" Jewish life which existed right across Eastern Europe before the Holocaust - "a world that lives and breaths, and dances and sings". And the switch of focus to America was then viewed in this light:

"That this world somehow flourished despite all the pounding storms that would come its way is an escape act so epic that it counts as one of histories all-time redeeming miracles. Even when systematic annihilation overwhelmed the people the world that had nourished them survived. This is the story about how this unique culture of faith and ferment, of poetry and music, of the search for deliverance from brutality and oppression did not get pulverised by the hammer of history. It just changed its address." 

The story of the Jews living in the lands ruled by Tsarist Russia is, perhaps, less familiar to us in the West - or at least it is to me - so I was particularly struck by this part of the programme.

Eastern Europe used to be the home to over 5 million Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews, the largest population of Jews in the world. They came from France and Germany, fleeing persecution, around the 13th century, and settled in the huge, tolerant Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom. The Polish kings allowed the Jews to prosper, using them to collect their taxes. The carve-up of Poland at the end of the 18th Century saw most of the Jews falling under Russian rule. Russian merchants took against this new competition, and the Russian government expelled the Jews from all their main cities and restricted them to the Pale of Settlement.

We heard what life was life in the shtetls (little towns) of the Pale, and it was often harsh. Jews were forbidden from the cities, the professions and the universities and not allowed to own land, and Jewish boys as young as twelve were forcibly conscripted into the Russian army for up to 25 years.

Yet they formed real, solid communities, looking inward, out of necessity, towards the treasures of their own culture, they did a remarkable range of jobs and they certainly knew how to celebrate a wedding!

We heard of the emergence of Hasidic Judaism, with its ecstatic, joyous mysticism [an especially fascinating section of the programme], and of Odessa, the city where Jews, modern Jews, who found the shtetls too claustrophobic, could find a place. Among them Leon Pinsker, whose proto-Zionist pamphlet Auto-Emancipation urged the Jews towards independence and national consciousness, and mooted a Jewish homeland - possibly in the Holy Land.

That pamphlet was published in the year following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by the left-wing terrorist group The People's Will. One of the plotters was a Jewish girl, and within a month a tidal wave of pogroms (from the Russian word meaning 'destroy') began across the Pale of Settlement. These waves kept on coming, culminating in the massacres of 1903-1905 - massacres so extreme in their violence that many Jewish intellectuals despaired of ever obtaining equal rights in Tsarist Russia. They also noted that non-Jewish leftists didn't rush to their side. Some, including Pinsker, founded Hovevei Zion (The Lovers of Zion) in response - the first Jewish nationalist organisation.

It was at this point that things got a little confusing (for me) as Simon Schama's narrative would, I suspect, lead many viewers to assume to the organisations that comprised Hovevei Zion sprang up after 1905. Similarly, those viewers might also have assumed, from the way Simon described it, that Auto-Emancipation was published after the latest pogroms in Odessa (also around 1905). As far as I'm aware though (as I wrote earlier), Auto-Emancipation was published in 1882, just after the 1881 pogrom in Odessa, and Hovevei Zion societies first arose at that time too.

This was the period when many of the Jews of the Pale decided enough was enough, and began leaving for 'the Golden sanctuary', America.

They joined an earlier wave of Jewish emigration to the United States, dating from the 1850s, when Jews from Germany arrived in the country and began working their way up, building railroads and great businesses, becoming mayors of cities, achieving the dream. Their extraordinary success was illustrated by the magnificent Temple Emanu-El of uptown New York.

Most of the new wave of Jewish immigrants, though, ended up in the "mega-shtetl" of New York's Lower East Side. "Of the 2.5 million Jews landing in America between the 1880s and the 1920s, more than 60% of them began their new lives here, stuffed into a patch of land just one-and-a-half miles square. This lot were deeply different from the uptown Jews of Temple Emanu-El - proletarian, drenched in old world superstitions or radical politics and - worst of all - Yiddish! And, in the many ways, the New World was just a high-rise version of the old world they'd left behind."

It was this world to which Simon Schama devoted the next portion of the programme - especially the fusion of shtetl idealism and popular art - focusing on Yip Harburg, the left-wing lyricist behind that "anthem of the Great Depression", Buddy, can you spare a dime? (which may have helped Franklin D. Roosevelt defeat Herbert Hoover in 1933) - its tune based on a Jewish lullaby.

"What America had taught the Jews is the dream that they could be both Jewish and part of the wider culture in which they lived - a dream that was impossible in the old world of Russia - did actually have a chance of working out."

And it was to the dream-world of Hollywood - most of whose great studios were owned by the boys of self-made Jews - that Simon Schama took us next - and Yip Harburg too.

Harburg wrote the words for "the song that would come to define the Golden Age of Hollywood" - Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz ("this universal song of hope"). The song ended up in the film almost by accident, having failed to appear in the 'book' and striking the studio as unsuitable to be sung by the character of a young girl, but getting in because of Harburg and composer Harold Arlen's enthusiasm for it.

Then came the lump in the throat moment.

"I wish the story could end there," said Simon Schama, "with the collective success of America's Jews and the dream-world of Oz, but it didn't. Remember the date of that triumphant night at the Oscars [for Harburg and Arlen]. 1940."

It was to Plungė in Northern Lithuania we were taken, and to the fate of the three million Jews who had stayed behind. There was Jakovas Bunka, the last Jew in Plungė and his carvings of Jewish figures from before the Holocaust, and his memories. In 1941 the shtetl of Plungė was emptied of Jews in the most unspeakably brutal manner imaginable. Unspeakable? Well, Simon said, "As the grandchild of a Lithuanian Jewish family, I need to tell you what happened."

Which he did. Heartbreaking. You must watch it for yourselves - and for Simon Schama's closing words.

*******

Next week will be the final episode, contending with the Holocaust itself and the State of Israel.

I will be watching.

The Story of the Jews (Part Three)

Simon Schama can certainly tell a story; indeed, the third part of his The Story of the Jews seemed to flash by, such was the power of his story-telling.

And it was a big story he had to tell.

"This is the story of an immense leap of faith, made on a promise of equality and toleration. It would carry the Jews of Europe from the certainties of tradition, and from the ghettos enforced by ancient prejudice, and expose them to the opportunities and to the threats of freedom in world transformed by revolution, technology, mass culture and nationalism."

"The consequences would be world-changing, as hopes born on the pages of books died in the flames of hatred and destruction."

I shall retell it here.

This episode followed the story of the Jews of Western Europe from the dawning of the Enlightenment through to its twilight in the late 19th/early 20th Century, ending just as night fell in 1933.

It began in 1656 with the expulsion of the great philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the Jewish community of Amsterdam for his rejection of Jewish tradition - a tradition which the Jews had cherished for the sake of their very survival for over two millennia. 

Simon Schama didn't demur from the view that Spinoza was the first philosopher of the Enlightenment and that his heretical, rational, optimistic vision of an all-embracing God/universe uniting all people of all creeds in a single harmony - a vision of toleration - was the wellspring of the Enlightenment, challenging the cherished traditions of the Jews but promising them something tantalising instead:

"It was in the 18th Century that the world of gentile learning and the world of the Jews finally came face to face, finally came to engage with each other. The philosophers of the Enlightenment held that everyone, Jews included, guided by the light of reason, could sweep away the inherited prejudices of centuries. So they made the Jews a special bargain. 'Come out of your mental ghetto. Expose yourself to modern languages, to learning, to science, and then you will become useful members of society. When that happens we will embrace you fully and legally in civil rights and you'll become something new. You'll become a citizen who happens to practise the Jewish faith.' Well, it was a noble idea. For that matter, it still is. The question is, 'Would it work?'"

Spinoza's challenge was taken up, just a few generations later, by another Jewish philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn - a man from a poor, provincial background who walked to Berlin and, embodying the Jewish Enlightenment, transformed the relationship between Jews and gentiles forever. Whilst cleaving to Judaism, he embraced science, learned languages galore, became a great friend of the German Enlightenment leader Gotthold Lessing and translated the Hebrew Bible into High German - albeit writing his German in Hebrew letters. For Moses Mendelssohn, that German and Hebrew were kindred spirits. His translation was "the bridge over which generations of Jews would cross from the Jewish world to the German world, from the religious to the secular."

Now there were European thinkers who felt that true 'enlightenment' could only be achieved through conversion to Christianity, and who challenged Moses on this, but Moses Mendelssohn insisted he would always remain a Jew, and expected his enlightened fellow Jews to hold fast to Judaism. 

His own children and grandchildren, however, embraced Christianity. His son Abraham, a successful banker, baptised his own children, Felix and Fanny, as Christians - and it was to the composer Felix Mendelssohn that Simon Schama now turned. For Felix, German culture rather than Jewish culture took the driving seat (though Norman Lebrecht believes that he was "in denial" about his Jewishness), and his music went straight to the heart of German (and British) culture.

Music, indeed, was "the royal road for Jews into the heart of German culture" (and beyond), and it was to another Jewish composer - Giacomo Meyerbeer - that Simon turned next. Meyerbeer and his highly successful family did not abandon their Jewish faith as they moved to the centre of sophisticated culture and then, though Giacomo, into dazzling success - a dazzling success, however, that mainly took place in Paris.

That dazzling success brought the first harbinger of the approaching darkness - a not-so-veiled denunciation of Giacomo Meyerbeer [and Mendelssohn] by Richard Wagner. We heard extracts from his notorious 1850 anti-Semitic tract Judaism in Music. Wagner himself pioneered a new, unexpected turn in German culture towards nationalism - Christian, mythic, Teutonic, German nationalism.

Still, by the 1860s, all still seemed to be going well with the Enlightenment project. Urban Jews lived like anyone else and thrived in places like Berlin, outperforming gentile children in education and becoming captain of the new industries and key figures in the old professions. They were patriotic pioneers of the new Germany, so much so that Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismark was in attendance at the opening (in 1866) of the New Synagogue in Berlin, just before the unification of Germany. "It was a marriage that seemed to be made in heaven between modernising Jewish history and the power of the new Germany," said Simon Schama. "Not a cloud on the horizon. Not yet anyway."

In France, the story was the same. Leading Jewish families, such as the Rothschilds, "were embedded in the project to modernise France" - successful, sophisticated, patriotic.

The Enlightenment project seem to be working. 

Then the world turned. 

With defeat for France in the Franco-Prussian war, everything changed. "Defeated nations are dangerous nations, prone to paranoia," said Simon Schama. "And that's exactly what happened." French nationalism transmuted into something "narrower", more "strident", more "tribal". A global stock-market crash followed and the tide of anti-Semitism broke. "All the medieval cliches about blood-sucking moneylenders resurfaced", and focused on the figure of "the Jewish banker". ["Now, of course, there were in fact Quaker bankers, Presbyterian bankers, to say nothing of the Catholic bankers to His Holiness, the Pope," Simon noted.] The victims of the crash suspected there had to a controlling group of people "whose loyalty was to each other rather than the nations in which they happened to reside" - and who else could that be but the Jews? Anti-Semitic tracts like Édouard Drumont's La France Juive (Jewish France) stoked this feverish mood up even further. 

The most primitive anti-Semitism erupted though with the Dreyfus affair. 

Simon Schama set the scene: The Jewish officer, falsely accused of passing French secrets to the Germans, being publicly dishonoured before a huge, baying crowd, then protesting, "An innocent man is being degraded. An innocent man is being dishonoured. Vive la France! Vive l'armée!", as he stepped over his ripped-off buttons and epaulettes and his broken sword.

"He stepped over the debris of what was not just his own personal career but the debris of a noble dream, the possibility of being a patriotic citizen, Frenchman and a Jew."

Among the crowds watching Dreyfus's humiliation was Theodore Herzl, a young Viennese journalist -and Jew. That was the moment when "something snapped" with Herzl -  the moment when he realised that the assimilation route "was never going to work out" in Europe, the moment when pessimistic realism confronted the optimism of the Jewish Enlightenment - and found it wanting. 

The Enlightenment was meant "to sweep away all the old prejudices". It failed. In Herzl's own Vienna, anti-Semitism was now rampant. The mayor was an anti-Semitic demagogue. So what was to be done? 

"He was coming to the conclusion that anti-Semitism could not be cured or defeated. You just had to get out of the way of it. And the problem for the Jews was they were a nation without a home. So in 1895 he wrote his little book, a booklet really, called Der Judenstaat ('The Jewish State'). And this is what he said in it:

"We have sincerely tried everywhere to merge with the nations in which we live, seeking just to preserve the faith, the religion of our fathers, but this has not been allowed to us. It's been in vain that we've tried to enhance the fame of our countries in arts and sciences. It's in vain that we tried to increase its wealth by commerce and trade. We are still in the place where we've lived for centuries, decried as aliens, and often by people who were not even here when the sighs of our fathers have been heard for centuries."

"Now thus was born Zionism."

It was at this point that Simon Schama spoke straight to camera, looked each and every one of us in the eye, and said:

"Now Zionism has become a heavily-loaded term - for some people even a tragically loaded term - but not for me.

"I am a Zionist. I'm quite unapologetic about that. Because it comes down to this: Was Herzl, who had a sense of a catastrophic event just around the corner, telling the truth, or wasn't he, about whether it was possible still the live the Enlightenment dream, here in the German world?

"Of course he was.

"With that knowledge, with that sense of the Jews having never had the power of their own national home, how could you not be a Zionist?"

Indeed.

The programme's final Jewish composer, Arnold Schoenberg, living in Herzl's Vienna, wasn't yet prepared to give up the Enlightenment dream though, and confidently spearheaded the cultural revolution of modernism in early 20th Century music. Other cultural revolutions rocked the other arts, with many other Jews leading the way alongside non-Jews. 

Schoenberg had, like Felix Mendelssohn, converted to Christianity to "immunise himself" against the effects of anti-Semitism. 

It didn't work. When even his friend Kandinsky, the great abstract painter, made strongly anti-Semitic remarks, Schoenberg saw the truth. Even though Kandinsky said that Schoenberg himself was an "exception" from 'the Jewish question', Schoenberg said, "I do not want to be an exception...The events of the last year have forced on me a lesson, and it's one I'll never forget...I am no German. I am no European. Perhaps I'm not even a man, since Europeans seem to prefer even the worst of their race to me. I am a Jew." 

The Nazis forced him out. Heading to America, he paused in Paris. There Simon Schama prepared to bring his narrative to a close:

"This story of a great leap of faith began in a synagogue when a Jew was cast out by his own people. It ends in another synagogue, rather differently." 

On 24 July 1933, Schoenberg, who had become a Zionist, sought formal readmission to the community of Jews and Judaism. 1933?

"For more than a decade he'd been predicting that if Hitler and the Nazis ever came to power it would not just be the great experiment in cultural modernism that had begun perhaps since Spinoza and Moses Mendelssohn which would be a casualty but the entirety of Jews that would be engulfed in something utterly catastrophic. He knew that what had begun with words would end with terrifying violence. "

"That great dream of being Jewish and a cultural adventurer was about to disappear into the smoke of the crematoria."

Standing inside the Holocaust Museum, Simon Schama reflected:

"Was it all a delusion then, right from the start? I don't know. I like to think I would have been optimistic with Moses Mendelssohn and realistic with Theodore Herzl. I like to think that the humanity of the Enlightenment idea is not entirely cancelled out by the inhumanity of its incineration. To declare anything else is to declare victory for the murderers. I do know I grieve endlessly. Those here in Berlin, and all over Europe, who innocently imagined they could be Jews and citizens of their own countries and who, to the end, could not imagine the evil that would turn their books and their bodies into ash."

The Story of the Jews (Part Two)

Did you see the second episode of Simon Schama's The Story of the Jews, broadcast last night on BBC Two? 

If not, please allow me to tantalise your taste-buds about it (or not, as the case may be!)

It moved chronologically from Rome's destruction of the temple in 70 AD to the expulsion of the Jews from Christian Spain in 1492, when hundreds of thousands of people were "sent packing from a country where they'd lived for over a thousand years."

This latter event bookended the programme's narrative arc and, as with last week's programme, the episode opened by concentrating on a single object - this time a exquisite Hebrew bible, completed by a pair of Sephardic Jews, Moses Ibn Zabara & Joseph Ibn Hayyim, in 1476, full of lustrous illustrations and drawing on Muslim, Christian and pagan influences. Simon exulted in its beauty, but used it to dramatise the point that just sixteen years later "the Jewish world that had made it was brutally snuffed out by royal decree".

It represented the main theme of Episode Two of The Story of the Jews: "What this bible says to me is that even amidst torture and grief, even on the eve of destruction, Jews took to heart what's on this page - a verse from the Book of Deuteronomy: 'I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse; therefore, choose life.'"

The episode focused on at how the Jews survived under Christianity and Islam - "new religions that saw Judaism as an unwanted grandpa religion, too old, too obstinate in its ways to accept a new messiah or a new prophet". "It was the fate of the Jews to be exiles in the lands of the Cross and the Crescent, struggling to find a foothold on the narrowing ground between grudging toleration and murderous hostility."

Simon Schama's take on this was one which many of us will have found familiar from many other BBC documentaries - that the world of medieval Islam, as exemplified by Umayyad Al-Andalus in Spain, was a much more humane one than that of medieval Christianity. It was a world where Jews could "live in the light".

Simon said that 90% of all medieval Jews lived under Islam, only 10% under Christianity. Those who lived under Islam may have been classed as 'dhimmis - second-class citizens, living under the condescension of their Muslim betters and forbidden to do certain things, such as to carry weapons to defend themselves, or to ride horses - but still, as in medieval Cairo, huge numbers of jobs were open to them, and they lived in relative security. In tolerant Al-Andalus, painted in glowing colours by Simon Schama, Jewish culture flourished. There was none of the demonisation of the Jews, as expressed by the medieval Christians. Later Islamic sources, he said, emphasised that Judaism and Islam were originally closely bound together and could have become even closer. 

Yes, there were fleeting, unexplored hints of something darker under the benign cloak of Muslim rule - a passing mention of North African Islamic fundamentalism threatening the Jews of Al-Andalus with "intolerance" and an acknowledgement that the Jews of Arabia were massacred by the forces of Mohammed (though only after they had "turned bitterly and publicly critical" of the new religion) - but the overall message of the programme remained clear: It was much better to be a Jew under the Crescent than under the Cross. 

As for Christianity, well, for the story of the Jews it all began with St. Paul - his aggressive determination to kick off the "chains" of Judaism from the new universal religion, and his stressing of the "sinister note" found in the early gospels - that the Jews were "Christ-killers": "His blood be on us, and on our children". [Are there no anti-Jewish verses in the Koran? If there are, Simon certainly wasn't for mentioning them.] 

"Cruder, fiercer Church fathers followed" - above all the Syrian bishop, St John Chrysostom, who wanted a complete separation between Jews and Christians and began the long, dark tradition of accusing Jews of consorting with demons, inhuman monsters "who sacrificed their sons and daughters to devils...worse than wild beasts". His message soon became official policy in the new Christian Roman empire. Jews were excluded from public life, new synagogues were outlawed, gathering together in public was prohibited and the early Talmud was banned. While under Islam the Jews could "live in the light", Christian Rome began the process of pushing them "into the shadows".

After his exploration of how the Jews lived "in the light" under Islam, Simon shifted us to medieval England, where "the shadow of the Cross" again fell over the Jews. 

I was intrigued by Simon saying at this point that "The Jews had been first invited to England by William the Conqueror in 1066". I would have loved to know why William (a Christian king, after all) valued the Jews enough to invite them to England, but Simon didn't answer than question. Instead, he told us how some of the Ashkenazi Jews of England had thrived, up until the reign of Richard the Lionheart (1189-99) - especially Aaron of Lincoln, money-lender to the Church and the Crown, and the richest man in England. 

Unfortunately, that eventually made Aaron a target. Tragedy followed with the coming of Richard and his "holy war", as mobs began their own "murderous crusade" against the Jews of England, "the demon money-bags" to whom so many owed money. Carnage ensued. The authorities failed to protect the Jews from popular hatred - a hatred most shockingly exemplified by the blood-libel of Hugh of Lincoln, a Christian boy said to have been murdered in "a black re-enactment of the crucifixion" by the Jews of Lincoln. Henry III gave the fiction royal endorsement, and ordered the hanging and imprisoning of a large number of Jews. Hugh's shrine became a place of popular pilgrimage. It all culminated with the expulsion of the Jews from England by Edward I in 1290. "It took 700 years from the Jewish community to return to Lincoln", Simon said.

From there it was onto the climax of the episode - the events in Christian Spain which led up to the expulsion of the Jews there in 1492, something I won't spell out again here as it's an eternally-harrowing but fairly well-known story. That said, there were many details in Simon Schama's account that I didn't already know about, and which made it worth watching - especially his take on the Barcelona Disputation "show trial" of 1263 - and Simon told the story with some feeling: 

"So Jews did what Jews do. They packed. And you all know those pictures of long lines of pathetic, bedraggled figures, toting bags along dusty roads. That began here, in 1492, in Spain. And one of the most glorious, rich, sophisticated, poetically-beautiful cultures there had ever been in Europe came to an end." 

But, Simon said, the Spanish Christians couldn't take away from the Jews their language, their music, their poetry, their food, "and, above all, of course, inside their heads, inside their hearts, inside their little books, inside all the things designed for portability and endurance, their religion."

Where did they go? "Almost everywhere." Morocco, Italy, Egypt - and, "above all", to the Ottoman Empire "where the Turkish sultan actively encouraged the Sephardim to resettle."

The programme ended in commercial Venice, whose rulers found the Jews "priceless" for the edge they gave the city in trade (due to their family ties to the Islamic word) and who, therefore, offered the Jews "a welcome of sorts", isolating them, restricting their movements and activities, confining them at night to a locked ghetto - the world's first ghetto - but giving them a little space to breathe amidst all the poverty and condescension. Simon found hope in the beauty of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in the ghetto (La Scola Spagnola), where the Jews chose life, dug deep into their traditions, honoured their religion. There he ended the episode, clearly moved.

The Story of the Jews

The reviews for Simon Schama's new landmark BBC series, The Story of the Jews, have been favourable so far - and rightly so, in my opinion. 

Eschewing all talk of hand gestures, background music and suits, what follows will be an extended paraphrase of Part One - and what I think is the essential element of the The Story of the Jews, namely the story of the Jews. 

It may have nothing to do with the topic of BBC bias (though I'm sure some anti-Semites will think otherwise), but hopefully you will find it interesting, even if you've already watched the programme. (Plus writing it up means I can remind myself of what it said for years to come, without having to buy the book. Ain't I a cheapskate?) 

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The Story of the Jews began by posing the question, 'What, if anything, do all Jews have in common?' It's not skin colour, or language, or food, or music, or opinions, nor is it the way they pray (if they pray at all). No, it's a story, the story kept in their heads and hearts, "a story of suffering and resilience, endurance, creativity" - a story they've "told to survive" for over 3,000 years. "We are our story," said Simon Schama.

He began with Sigmund Freud who, having fled Nazi-occupied Vienna, settled in London and, in reaction to the anti-Semitic horrors beginning to unfold around him, and whilst dying from cancer, reflected on the story of the Jews, and on the very question Simon himself had just asked, and also on the question of why Jews have been persecuted so often. 

Freud's most treasured possession was an ancient Hanukkah lamp, a menorah, symbol of the temple light that kept burning. "The menorah is the most ancient and enduring symbol of Jewish identity, even for someone who called himself a 'godless Jew'", said Simon Schama. 

Freud applied his theories to the Jews, especially the story of Moses - the dominating father figure of psychoanalysis. Freud's "outrageous" theory was that the Jews had rebelled against Moses, and murdered him, but then adopted his laws out of guilt and remorse with "an obsessive devotion" that endured through millennia of suffering. A scandal ensued, but Simon said that the important point had been lost in the scandal: Freud's conviction that by preserving their religion, consciously or unconsciously, the Jews had given themselves the opportunity to endure not just as a faith but as a people when everything else had been lost. 

That was the meaning of Freud's travelling menorah and why he valued it. 

In that light, a Passover feast held by Simon for friends and family gave him the opportunity to express what Passover - the celebration of the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt - means to him. The Seder table, the Seder plates, the symbolic food, and the sacred text, the Haggadah, provide a chance to relive that "story of stories", by discussing it and applying it to the here and now - which is what we saw them doing. One reflection that stood out for me was one of Simon's guests saying, "The Jewish imagination is paranoia confirmed by history". 

The sacred landscape of Israel, which Moses never quite reached, prompted the thought that something remarkable happened there over 3,000 years ago, continued Simon. The first archaeologists to explore the area weren't Jewish though. They were Victorian evangelical Christians, determined to find the roots of their own faith through its roots in Judaism. Survey maps were drawn to try to pin down exactly where the events told of in the Bible actually occurred, but objectivity was swept away by romanticism amidst the awesome scenery of Sinai, and it was the Bible and its names which guided their work and their technology. Archaeologists since have been much more sober, said Simon, and no concrete historical evidence to prove the exodus has been discovered. 

The earliest extant solid Jewish artefacts come from the Iron Age and were found in Elah Valley, where Goliath is supposed to have been brought low by David, on the border between the ancient hill-dwelling Judeans and the coastal-dwelling Philistines. 

Simon talked to Yossi Garfinkel, the archaeologist who excavated the fortress there. He describes it as "a Biblical Pompeii". Carbon dating has placed the site at around 3,000 years old - the time traditionally associated with King David and, thus, a highly dramatic find. Yossi takes a less dismissive view of the Bible's relevance than many other archaeologists, because David and Goliath may never actually have fought but they nonetheless represent the conflict between the Philistines and the Judeans that was going on at that time. It's metaphors rather than literalism, the Bible as an echo of some sort of reality, said Simon. One find - a little altar and two model shrines ('arks') - was especially significant. Both shrines are empty, prefiguring the Holy of Holies in the High Temple, dwelling place on earth of "that extraordinary religious innovation - the faceless, formless god of Jewish monotheism."

That God was slow to emerge from the crowd of other gods in the region. It took centuries, Simon said, for the Jews to accept that their god was the only God. A god of many names. 

The early Jews used animal sacrifices, with smoke rising to heaven and nothing in between, but they also had the Hebrew bible, the Torah, the scrolls of The Law, the first five books of the Bible. These are still central to Judaism. The sacred book is still venerated, whether in Reform or Orthodox services. That reverence is common to all strains of Judaism. Simon Schama called it "the definition of worship through the sanctification of words" and finds it deeply beautiful. The words are read out loud and not directly touched. "And it is and was those words - read, remembered, perpetuated - that would ensure the survival of Jews and Judaism through the generations". 

The Bible began to be written down around 2,700 years ago. It contains so many great stories, Simon enthused, but these stories aren't museum pieces. They still mean something, here and now - such as to an Ethiopian Jew name Aviva Rahamim, who Simon talked to. She made her own gruelling exodus to Israel three decades ago, showing that relevance through her own experiences. She feels at one with her ancestors - those "who came up with Moses". 

That inspiring story, however, prompts Simon to say that many Bible stories are much more tragic. The Bible never "soft pedals" on the terrible fate of that "puny" little state crushed between imperial superpowers - Egypt, Assyria, Babylon - he said. 

The Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem - the first of the great disasters -, tearing down the great temple and exiling the Jewish elite. 

Still, the Jewish identity did not disappear - even in Babylon. Far from it. There, in exile, God's laws became tougher, fiercer, in response. When the Persians conquered Babylon and released the Jews, the exiles returned to a ruined Jerusalem with a Bible that "bound Jews ever more closely to its rules and commands". They began rebuilding, under Nehemiah, but the rebuilding of Jewish identity in those who had stayed behind was at least as urgent a priority. Torah, Law, was to be the heart of that identity. 

Ezra called the people together and told them to leave behind their non-Jewish and half-Jewish wives, husbands and children. "This is brutal - a hardline purge that elevates religious and ethnic purity at the expense of social reality", said Simon. 

That social reality, said Simon, was shown by exiles in Aswan, living at the same time as Ezra. He visited Elephantine in Upper Egypt, where many had lived in harmony with non-Jews since the Babylonian invasion. These Jews worshipped the Jewish god, but also his wife, the Queen of Heaven. They intermarried and their wives and husbands converted to Judaism. "They are ordinary, everyday Judeans", said Simon. "The documents [found in Elephantine] really are the first complete portrait we have of an entire community of Jews". They built a temple there too - breaking (or not knowing) the rule about the temple in Jerusalem being the only one where animal sacrifices were permitted. Unfortunately for the Elephantine Jews, the rams they sacrificed at that temple were sacred to the Egyptians who sacrificed at the temple next door. Guess what happened? The Egyptians got some Persian guards to destroy their temple. A petition to Jerusalem granted them the funds and the permission to rebuild, but on the strict condition that no animal sacrifices were to be carried out. "Hard Jerusalem rules had definitely won."

A new danger then emerged - the Greeks, led by Alexander the Great. With them came the threat of "annihilation through assimilation", thanks to the wave of Greek culture that followed. "The soft power of Hellenism" threatened to "submerge" Jewish identity "beneath its welcoming waters". A spectacular 2nd century palace for a rich Jewish family was used to show that seduction in action - some so much that they went through the "eye-watering" process of reverse circumcision (to look the part in Greek gymnasiums). Plus the Bible was translated into Greek. 

Jewish identity, however, could not be translated. No absolute fusion was possible. 

Loyalty to the "God of words" saved Judaism from being swallowed by Hellenism. Stubborn, orthodox resistance began and exploded when a Greek ruler [Antiochus IV Epiphanes] desecrated the temple and banned circumcision. The Maccabees (a family) led the rebellion and established an independent Israel run by priest-kings (the Hasmonean dynasty) which lasted for almost a century, until they were succeed by "the decidedly unpriestly Herod the Great", who owed his throne to the Romans, the new superpower on the block. Herod was a lavish builder, massively extending the High Temple, which became a "conveyor belt of continual sacrifice", presided over by (what some saw as) a "swaggering aristocracy", a clear expression (to many) "of what Judaism was about"...

...except that not everyone accepted that. 

Some pious Jews thought that the smoke of sacrifice was obscuring the word, the Law. They hurried away to safe places, reading their texts, awaiting the messiah. 

One such place was Qumran, birth place of the Dead Sea Scrolls, where pious mystics living "around the same time as the birth and death of a Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth" poured over the sacred texts, building a library of 850 separate manuscripts, including wisdom books and all sorts of "whacky", apocalyptic stuff alongside the Bible. Simon Schama visited a laboratory helping to preserve and investigate them.  

The big battle they envisioned because a "grim, bloody reality" soon after, in 66 AD. An immense anti-Roman rebellion began, requiring three Roman legions, under Vespasian and his son Titus, to crush it. [They became the Flavian emperors, along with Vespasian's other son, Domitian. As a wildly off-topic aside, I once fancied writing a Robert Graves-style play about mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Domitian.]

Only one written source remains, ' The Jewish War' by the Hellenistic Jew Josephus. Josephus was Vespasian's "in-house historian", someone who first took up arms against Rome, then surrendered and finally became an advisor to the soon-to-be Roman emperor, his "cheerleader and pet Jew". A turncoat to be despised? 

Simon is not so sure and attempted a rehabilitation.

Josephus was there outside Jerusalem as the zealots inside instigated a reign of terror to stop any talk of surrender, whilst the population (including his own mother) slowly and painfully starved to death. Josephus himself said his only concern was to spare his own people suffering, that he saw the Roman's as a punishment from God, and that the Jewish defenders had turned on each other like wild beasts. His point: "What was the point of going on?" The city walls finally fell, and a great disaster ensued, which Josephus (presumably aghast?) witnessed. The temple went up in smoke in flames, and the Romans pulled down what remained. 

The destruction of Jerusalem made the Flavians' fortune and Jewish loot and slaves paid for their Colosseum. Josephus was part of the "loot", and the Romans, who despised the Jews, made him despair of them. He wrote a book about Judaism - a defence of Judaism. Just like Sigmund Freud, he turned to Moses and stressed the Law. He "stands tall", said Simon Schama. "We have become the teachers of men in the greatest of things," says Josephus.

How are the Jews still here, after all those hammer blows? Words. Words beat swords, Simon says. The Roman Empire has come and gone but go into a synagogue any Saturday and you'll still hear those words. 

The dramatic final image was that of a postcard sent by Sigmund Freud in 1913. It was a picture of the Arch of Titus in Rome, that glorification of the conquest of Jerusalem. On it Freud wrote, "The Jew survives it".

I can't wait for Part Two.