Thanks! I'm also going to take up a suggestion of yours - I've decided that I'll do another arc after 1840, and that it will consist of four or five stories of Ulysses and Julia Grant's 1878 visit to Egypt, the Holy Land and Syria. They'll stay a few months longer and go more places than OTL, and there will be Geniza content.
What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.
- Thread starter jacob ningen
- Start date
THE STUDENT
JUNE 1840
JUNE 1840
Gideon Chelemer had grown up on stories of his great-grandfather’s arrival at Acre, nearly penniless after having been robbed in Beirut and lost in an unfamiliar city. Gideon himself was returning to Acre in far more fortunate circumstances; the view as he stood on the deck of the Jalib al-Sa’adat was of the city where he’d grown up, and the purse at his belt jingled with silver. A few pieces of the city mosaic had changed in three years – more ships in the harbor, more factories going up to the north, new works in the shore batteries – but it was still his city. And when you worked for old man Sassoon, and when you were one of the people he’d picked out to send to the university, you didn’t come and go in poverty.
The sailors tied up quickly, and it was still morning when Gideon made his way onto the harbor streets. At this time of day the markets were teeming, and the anonymity of the city fell around him as he passed through them. He’d expected to be out of place in his Dutch clothes, a frock coat and cravat and trousers, but he wasn’t; there were many foreigners this close to the harbor, and even the city men were more Arab or Turkish in their overcoats and hats but otherwise didn’t dress much differently. Had that, too, changed, or had the difference always been less than Gideon had imagined? He wasn’t sure; he was a man now, but he’d still been a boy when he left.
Past the markets and to the north were the narrow streets that led to the kollel katan, although ninety years and more after its founding, it was no longer so small. One of the houses on those streets belonged to Gideon’s family. And by the time he reached the door, his mother had already seen him and was waiting to draw him into an embrace.
“You’re home!” she said, stepping back into the foyer and holding him at arm’s length. “Three years a Utrechtenaar… why are you laughing?”
“That’s what the Dutch call men who favor other men.” Gideon didn’t, although in his time in Utrecht, he’d known several who had.
“Come inside then, and speak Dutch to me.” And it truly was a delight to hear his mother’s Dutch again, the language that he’d learned at her knee and that had caused such merriment to his classmates at Utrecht – not the Dutch of Amsterdam but Guiana Dutch, laced with Kongo and Akan and Javanese. Like many Jews of Acre, she had stories of the old country, but hers were of steaming tropics, jungles, and the wooden synagogue where the black and mixed-race Jews had worshiped until it had been shut down and they’d come here. Her name was Yaba Leah, Yaba because she’d been born on Thursday, and it had been Thursday when she’d arrived in the Holy Land, Thursday when she’d married, and Thursday when she’d given birth to Gideon.
“Tell me about Utrecht and Amsterdam,” she said. It was a question about what might have been, had her parents and their congregation gone to Holland instead. “What do the canals look like? How are the cities in winter? The clothes, the markets… the synagogues?”
“In Utrecht there are two,” said Gideon, answering her last question first. “There is a small one where the men sway and murmur and are led by no one, and where they hate Spinoza. There is a large one where the service is formal and where the rabbi prays for the people while an organ plays, and where they remember Spinoza but forget the Law. And in Amsterdam there are the great Portuguese synagogue, the great Ashkenazi synagogue and the great modern synagogue – that one is on the Prinsengracht and majestic as a cathedral, and they pray in Dutch sometimes.”
He trailed off there, unwilling for his mother’s sake to say the next words: “none of them felt right.” He wasn’t entirely sure why – after all, in their midnight services, the Jews of the kollel katan played instruments and spoke of the wonders of the world and prayed in any language that inspired them. But the organs, the rabbis preaching as pastors might, the architecture of the buildings – all of them seemed like imitations, like they were trying to be something they were not. And he said nothing at all about his visit to Frankfurt, when he’d met a group of maskilim who prayed no differently from Unitarians and who, in the style of their preceptor Friedländer, that such was necessary because emancipation had failed.
He gathered his thoughts to say something else, but was interrupted by the door opening and a familiar silhouette framed below the lintel: Shimon, his brother.
“Gideon! You’re home!” Shimon spoke Hebrew, not Dutch, and came into the room and embraced Gideon much as their mother had. “A scholar now? Well, after you see the old man, come help get Yitzhaki elected to the divan. It’s four days until the voting, and a university laureate speaking for him will count for a great deal.”
“So soon?” In truth, Gideon had forgotten that there was an election this year, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about coming home right in the middle of one. He’d been eight the first time – just old enough to remember how the workers and shopkeepers of the city had demanded a council like the Galilee had; how the mutassalim had refused to appoint one; how the people had elected their one of their own, half of it made up of militia officers, and dared the mutassalim to oppose it. He remembered the shouting, the speeches, the confused fighting in the market square, and finally, the mutassalim agreeing for the emir to arbitrate. The rules had been set, not to everyone’s liking, and though the divan had only the power to advise and consent, it had learned that consent could come at a price.
All this had happened when Gideon was a child; he knew that the kollel katan controlled enough votes to elect two councilmen and sometimes three, but beyond that he’d understood little. Now he was an adult, and it seemed he’d have to understand more.
He’d thought simply to come home and see what the House of Sassoon had in store for him. He would know the answer to that soon, but it seemed he would have many more questions.
_______
The offices of Sassoon and Sons, Bankers and Traders – not entirely accurate, now that Sassoon ben Salih had gone to his fathers and his oldest son David ran the Bombay office – had been a Hospitaller barracks in the days of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and had been many other things since. The ground floor, to which a guard admitted Gideon after yet another exclamation of surprise, was as familiar to him as home; he’d worked among its storerooms and files, its books and ledgers, since the age of thirteen. But he hardly had time to reacquaint himself with it before Ahmed el-Fadlawi, who he’d hitherto known only as one of the lofty men whose rank was nigh unto the Name’s, greeted him and led him upstairs.
The second story was far less familiar. Gideon had rarely been invited to its meeting rooms, and the files here were for the great accounts – cities, provinces, emirates, even the Sultan and the Malik Misr – that a junior clerk would never touch. And he’d been to the third floor only once. Here were the maps and treasures and master plans; here were the offices of the Sassoon family, the Baghdadi Jews who’d been their chief retainers since they’d established themselves in the city, and those like el-Fadlawi who’d joined that inner circle. The old man had summoned him here three years ago to send him off to the university, and now el-Fadlawi ushered him into that office again.
The old man wasn’t truly old, not like his father had been when Gideon had first become a clerk – he was in his middle forties and his beard still came in black. But he had a presence that old men would envy, and unlike other men of Acre, he conceded nothing to the West, wearing a robe and turban and embroidered belt as he would have done were his family still the court treasurers of Baghdad. Joseph Sassoon, a name even a prince or a Rothschild would not take lightly.
“Sit,” said Joseph now, speaking the Arabic that had been his first language and was the one in which he was most comfortable. He poured a glass of wine from a bottle on his desk; Gideon recognized the mark of ben David, the greatest of the Galilee vineyards. “Drink. To a scholar come home.”
Gideon drank, and in this place, the wine hit as hard as a spirit. “I’ve heard good reports of you,” he heard Joseph saying. “You’ve learned Latin, you’ve read some law, you’ve studied mathematics and philosophy and the useful arts, no doubt you’ve learned to roister with the sons of Company men. But what have you learned?”
For a moment, Gideon sat frozen. He sensed there was a test in this question, but more than that, he didn’t know the answer; how could he distill three years of study into a single item? But then he realized that the question answered itself – he couldn’t condense his learning like that, and instead, he thought on those years and said the first thing he was inspired to say.
“I was taught” – careful, those words; they weren’t the same as I learned – “that the Torah can be understood as a work of history as well as a work of law, and that it can be questioned in the way of any other history. And that its contradictions, its omissions – the spaces between the words – can tell us much about the Name.”
“And who taught you that?”
“There’s a group of the Jewish professors that teach the rabbis of the Modern Synagogues. Carel Asser, when he isn’t sitting as a judge; some of the doctors of history and theology; Littwak, the mathematician. Only…”
“Only?” prompted Joseph.
Gideon was again silent. The Modern professors’ teachings had fascinated him – the kollel katan had long held that scientific inquiry was a path to inspiration, and applying that to the Torah itself, as others before them had only hinted, was as heady as ben David’s wine, but…
“The professors taught me this as a guide to the Name and the Law,” he said, “but there are those who see it as a release from those things.”
Joseph nodded. “Then the ultimate lesson is to learn, but to keep only what is good?”
“Maybe, sir. I don’t know.”
“We can speak of it further. Come to my home at Shavuot; there will be many of us there, and we will study together. But now, let’s talk of other things. Keep only what is good, we were saying – you are good, but should I keep you?”
Gideon’s heart fell to the floor, but he gathered himself. “Do you think you might not, sir?”
“Very good, young man. Have courage; don’t leave the question unasked. And yes, I will keep you in my employment; the question is whether I will keep you here. Ordinarily, when I send a man to university, I put him on the second floor when he comes back – make him a senior clerk to someone like el-Fadlawi for a few years, let him find out if his future is in commerce or in banking. Maybe have him teach a little at the college I founded here, help build it into a university in its own right. You might prosper that way, and then go out to be a deputy factor somewhere. But there is another possibility, in your case.”
Gideon gripped the stem of his wine-glass. “Another possibility?”
“I could send you to Cairo right away as a junior factor – close enough that I can keep an eye on you, but far enough away so you can learn the job. And then, in four or five years more, you can go to Batavia.”
“I didn’t think you had an office there…” Gideon began, but then he understood – a Dutch-speaking factor, and one who had come to know many sons of East India Company men during his time in Utrecht, would be just the person to open that office.
The prospect was a daunting. In Batavia, Gideon would have to build a business from nothing, a thousand miles from the nearest other Sassoon depot – and he remembered his mother’s stories, and knew that the Company men might not look on him the same way in the Indies as they did in Holland. Even with five years in Cairo under his belt by then, the task wouldn’t be easy. But the notion was also an exciting one, and one that might make him very, very rich…
“I’m not asking you to decide now,” said Joseph. “Wait a few days. Reunite with your family. Reunite with the city. And after Shavuot – tell me then.”
Moments later, Gideon was on the street again, walking toward the seawall, his education resuming.
_______
Gideon got to know his city again in the next days, in the most intense way possible. He ate his mother’s cooking in the morning and saw his father off to work at the shipyard, and for the rest of the day, he and his brothers campaigned.
He didn’t have a vote in the election. That was reserved for those who owned city property, paid five lira in taxes a year, or were enrolled in a militia company – he would no doubt fall into the latter two categories if he stayed as a senior clerk rather than going to Cairo, but he didn’t yet. That didn’t mean, though, that he had nothing to do. He could hang banners, join the singing and feasting in the city parks, shout for the kollel’s candidates on the streets, and be ready to fight when their rallies were attacked.
And he did so all over the city – the candidates his family supported lived and drew most of their votes from near the kollel, but you never knew who might vote for them, and there were also alliances to maintain. There were factions among the Jews, Muslims and Christians; there were factions among the tradesmen and merchants and workers; there were factions among the radicals and liberals and reactionaries. The coalitions between these factions changed from election to election and issue to issue, and sometimes day to day.
And there was preaching.
The city elections, Gideon realized, had become almost religious acts. The Muslims at the rallies spoke of shura and ijma and being rightly guided; the Jews spoke of hesed and musar and tzedakah; the Christians spoke of mercy; and everyone spoke of justice. Candidates preached; their supporters preached. Sometimes even women preached.
Yaba Leah preached, and after, so did Gideon.
The candidates of the kollel katan, and their allies among the ulama, had gathered the day before the election at the green that lay just within the city walls. It had become tradition that the candidates themselves would not speak on this day, and that the public, voters and not, would have their say instead. Already forty or more had spoken, and Yaba Leah rose in her turn to talk of the open sewers and disease she’d known in Paramaribo as a child and call for Acre to improve its sanitation as Tzfat had done. And in the applause that followed, Shimon raised Gideon’s hand with his and said, “here is a mother’s son come back to us from the great university at Utrecht, and he will speak of the university that is to come in this city!”
There were more cheers, and Gideon hoped they would go on forever, because how could he speak of this of all topics? The kollel katan and its allies wanted to build Sassoon’s college into a true university, as he wished, but the bill they intended to lay before the divan would make it a public university. Gideon was loyal to his family, he was loyal to the kollel, he was loyal to the House of Sassoon; how could he take sides between them?
But he realized that maybe he didn’t have to.
“The sages say,” he began, “that it requires forty-eight qualities to learn Torah. And at the kollel katan, and in Holland, I’ve learned that in each of those forty-eight ways is a hundred thousand facets, and that there are so many of those we have yet to discover. New learning can sanctify the Name. Increasing the learning of the city sanctifies the Name. We must have this university.
“But we should not forget the last of the forty-eight qualities: to say a thing in the name of him who said it. ‘Thus you have learned: anyone who says a thing in the name of him who said it, brings deliverance to the world.’ We must never forget who first said that there should be a university in this city, and we must never forget who laid the cornerstone of its schools. Let the university bear the name of Sassoon forever – let everyone who speaks of it speak in Sassoon’s name.”
The people cheered again, and Gideon sank back into the anonymity of the crowd. He wouldn’t be anonymous to Sassoon, he knew; everything that happened in the city, the old man knew sooner or later. Had he squared the circle well enough? He would find out at Shavuot, no doubt.
_______
Joseph Sassoon’s home was close by the Baghdadi synagogue and his college and hospital, and for mild evenings like this one, it had a courtyard garden. Gideon was nervous coming in, not just because of the election but because of the exalted company he was entering, but the old man made him welcome. He took a seat at the courtyard’s edge where others were gathering, and if there was any reproach in Joseph’s gaze, he didn’t see it.
Before long, the study began. As Joseph Karo had done in Tzfat, the men gathered with Sassoon would read all night, from every book of the Tanakh and each of the mishnayot, and after they’d read from each, they would stop to discuss it, and sometimes to argue over it.
“Gideon!” Joseph called sometime after it had turned full night, when they’d read from the Pirkei Avot on the study of Torah. “There are forty-eight qualities of a student,” Joseph said – surely, thought Gideon, it was no coincidence that the old man had called him out on this passage. “Your teachers in Utrecht said that we may question the Torah itself – is that a forty-ninth quality, to stand outside it and make it prove itself?”
Again, Gideon wasn’t sure how to answer. Again, as he’d become used to in the lecture-halls and now in the streets, he simply spoke. “Spinoza, too, said that we may question the Torah if it is contrary to reason, but he also said that none of it is contrary.” He was conscious of the irony of quoting Spinoza to Baghdadi Jews steeped in tradition just days after he’d quoted the sages to a crowd that contained many radicals. “Maybe the idea that we can question the Torah is all we need – maybe that helps us look at new things with an open mind and let them reveal the Name to us.”
“An open mind?” Sassoon repeated. “Maybe it will reveal something soon.”
And the revelation came as the sun rose and the men walked to the mikvah to end their Shavuot studies, and Joseph spoke to Gideon again. “The House of Sassoon was built around a family,” he said. “I wouldn’t hire anyone who wasn’t loyal to his family. But I must also demand loyalty to me, and to my house. And sometimes, try as one might, one cannot have both. So what am I to do?”
Gideon waited to hear what Sassoon would say next, what his fate might be, but there was only silence, and he realized that he’d been asked a genuine question.
“There would be no conflict in my loyalties,” he said, “in Cairo.”
“Very good. You have decided, and I think you have decided rightly, so how can I decide anything different? You will go to Cairo – in a month, maybe? Cairo in Tammuz is the paradise of which the poets sing.”
Cairo in Tammuz. Gideon would endure it. And he would learn.
In Cairo, in Batavia, in Utrecht, in Acre, in Jerusalem – there would be new things to unveil the glory of the Name.
Notes to The Student:
1. Due to the events of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin and the post-Napoleonic reaction in Germany, the Netherlands have taken a more leading role in the early Reform movement (or as it is called here, “Modern”) than OTL. Several things have contributed to this: the prominence of Amsterdam’s Adath Jeshurun congregation in both Jewish and public life, a large number of German maskilim settling in Amsterdam and the university cities in the wake of the “Hep Hep” riots, and the relative freedom of the Dutch universities in conducting historical and religious inquiry. There is as yet no Modern seminary, but as mentioned in the story, several of the Jewish professors at Utrecht, Leiden and Groningen make up an informal training network for Modern rabbis.
2. The Black Jews of Paramaribo, as mentioned earlier in the thread, descended from slaves on the Jodensavanne who were converted to Judaism during the 17th and 18th centuries, and who had their own Darhe Jesarim congregation/brotherhood from the late 1750s. This congregation came under attack from the established (read “white”) Jews of Paramaribo in the 1790s and, by the 1810s IOTL, they had been reabsorbed as second-class members of the main synagogue. ITTL they took another option. As mentioned, there was some debate among them between going to Amsterdam and going to the Holy Land, but the latter won out because there was funding available for passage and because they didn’t entirely trust that they’d be treated differently in Amsterdam than they had been in Paramaribo. As of 1840 about half of them live in Acre and the other half in the Galilee.
3. So now we know where Sassoon ben Salih ended up – he chose Acre as the place where he would be least regulated (Nablus would also have been a possibility, but the House of Rothschild had a head start there). As IOTL, the Sassoons are both a trading and banking family; Joseph Sassoon in Acre and David in Bombay are joint heads of the enterprise, but in practice Acre as banking center is first among equals. The House of Sassoon is becoming the “native” banking family as opposed to the Rothschilds and Warburgs of Europe and the India-based Kedouries; they’re international enough to avoid the court Jew trap, but like traditional court Jews (and very much in character for their patriarch), they have adopted the role of local patron.
4. The riot that resulted in Acre having an elected city council took place in 1828 and grew out of protest against corruption in the local government. The emir allowed it for much the same reason as the nagidah – the council would take the mutassalim down a peg while coming primarily from a middle class and upper working class that was loyal to the emirate. Acre isn’t representative, though, or at least not yet. The emir isn’t nearly as keen on popular government on a national or provincial scale – the Va’ad ha-Aretz remains the only council above the city level, and is still chosen by a mix of consensus and appointment – and the cities with elected councils in 1840 are mainly the new ones like Haifa and Ashdod where traditional authority structures are weak. Tzfat and Tiberias may be special cases – we’ll see something of them later in the 1840 cycle.
5. The 48 qualities of the Torah student referred to in Gideon’s speech come from Pirkei Avot 6:6. His Spinoza reference is paraphrased from the preface to the Theologico-Political Treatise. Obviously, many of Spinoza’s views on the Torah as expressed later in the treatise aren’t nearly as sanguine, but the kollel katan sees him as a guide, not a prophet.
1. Due to the events of the Napoleonic Sanhedrin and the post-Napoleonic reaction in Germany, the Netherlands have taken a more leading role in the early Reform movement (or as it is called here, “Modern”) than OTL. Several things have contributed to this: the prominence of Amsterdam’s Adath Jeshurun congregation in both Jewish and public life, a large number of German maskilim settling in Amsterdam and the university cities in the wake of the “Hep Hep” riots, and the relative freedom of the Dutch universities in conducting historical and religious inquiry. There is as yet no Modern seminary, but as mentioned in the story, several of the Jewish professors at Utrecht, Leiden and Groningen make up an informal training network for Modern rabbis.
2. The Black Jews of Paramaribo, as mentioned earlier in the thread, descended from slaves on the Jodensavanne who were converted to Judaism during the 17th and 18th centuries, and who had their own Darhe Jesarim congregation/brotherhood from the late 1750s. This congregation came under attack from the established (read “white”) Jews of Paramaribo in the 1790s and, by the 1810s IOTL, they had been reabsorbed as second-class members of the main synagogue. ITTL they took another option. As mentioned, there was some debate among them between going to Amsterdam and going to the Holy Land, but the latter won out because there was funding available for passage and because they didn’t entirely trust that they’d be treated differently in Amsterdam than they had been in Paramaribo. As of 1840 about half of them live in Acre and the other half in the Galilee.
3. So now we know where Sassoon ben Salih ended up – he chose Acre as the place where he would be least regulated (Nablus would also have been a possibility, but the House of Rothschild had a head start there). As IOTL, the Sassoons are both a trading and banking family; Joseph Sassoon in Acre and David in Bombay are joint heads of the enterprise, but in practice Acre as banking center is first among equals. The House of Sassoon is becoming the “native” banking family as opposed to the Rothschilds and Warburgs of Europe and the India-based Kedouries; they’re international enough to avoid the court Jew trap, but like traditional court Jews (and very much in character for their patriarch), they have adopted the role of local patron.
4. The riot that resulted in Acre having an elected city council took place in 1828 and grew out of protest against corruption in the local government. The emir allowed it for much the same reason as the nagidah – the council would take the mutassalim down a peg while coming primarily from a middle class and upper working class that was loyal to the emirate. Acre isn’t representative, though, or at least not yet. The emir isn’t nearly as keen on popular government on a national or provincial scale – the Va’ad ha-Aretz remains the only council above the city level, and is still chosen by a mix of consensus and appointment – and the cities with elected councils in 1840 are mainly the new ones like Haifa and Ashdod where traditional authority structures are weak. Tzfat and Tiberias may be special cases – we’ll see something of them later in the 1840 cycle.
5. The 48 qualities of the Torah student referred to in Gideon’s speech come from Pirkei Avot 6:6. His Spinoza reference is paraphrased from the preface to the Theologico-Political Treatise. Obviously, many of Spinoza’s views on the Torah as expressed later in the treatise aren’t nearly as sanguine, but the kollel katan sees him as a guide, not a prophet.
Last edited: