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From time to time during the 1990s, the media became very excited about an African tribe, the Lemba, who claimed to be Jews. Their excitement was the result of research by a British historian, Tudor Parfitt. He had spent time living in Lemba communities and had published several books and articles about the so-called ‘Lost Tribes’ of Israel. He wrote specifically about the Lemba in his 1992 book, Journey to the Vanished City: The Search for a Lost Tribe of Israel.

Members of the Lemba community now live in small groups in South Africa and Zimbabwe. They trace their ancestry to a town named Sena, somewhere to the north, across the sea, a place whose exact location they no longer knew. Many of their traditions are reminiscent of Jewish practices, they ritually slaughter their meat, only eat animals that have hooves, , practise circumcision, never marry outside the tribe and, although shabbat does not feature among their customs, they regard the number seven as sacred. These practices alone do not necessarily indicate a Jewish background, but when considered alongside the history that they tell about themselves, a connection to the ancient Israelites sounds more convincing.

The Lemba regard themselves as blood relatives of the Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Israelite tribe often referred to as Falashas. Their tradition tells them that they are descendants of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba and that their ancestors lived under Solomon’s rule in the mysterious city of Sena. They left Sena due to some catastrophe, now forgotten, and crossed the sea to Africa. There they rebuilt Sena, on a site now known by archaeologists as the Great Zimbabwe, a monumental stone city that once was home to perhaps as many as 20,000 people.

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Joseph Bloch spent his life fighting antisemitism. Not just against antisemitic incidents or individuals. He also strove to find a political solution that would put an end to antisemitism once and for all. Astonishingly, it brought him into conflict with other Jews, both Zionists and with liberals, who had their own solutions and didn’t agree with his.

Joseph Samuel Bloch was born in 1850 in the Galician town of Dukla, now in the south of Poland. He studied to become a rabbi and was appointed to a congregation in Austria, in a suburb of Vienna. He first came to public attention in 1882 when he was sued for libel by August Rohling, a Christian professor of Hebrew archaeology at Charles University in Prague. Rohling, an avowed antisemite, had claimed, at a sham trial of 15 Jews accused of murdering a 14 year old girl, that he could prove from the Talmud that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals.

Bloch took up the cudgels against Rohling. He accused him of making up quotes from the Talmud. He declared that Rohling didn’t know how to read the Talmud, that he could not understand its complicated mix of Hebrew and Aramaic languages nor understand its arguments. He drove his point home by publicly challenging Rohling to translate a single, randomly selected page from the Talmud, offering him 3,000 florins as an incentive for doing so. Rather than accepting the challenge, exposing his ignorance and subjecting himself to public ridicule, Rohling sued Bloch for libel.

The preparations for the trial went on for two years. Bloch prepared a document containing 319 quotations from the Talmud that he translated into German, while his lawyer wrote a manual for the defence, showing how these quotations disproved Rohling. The media took an interest; one newspaper in Vienna published a special edition containing Bloch’s refutations of Rohling; 300,000 copies were sold in one day. Although antisemitism was rife in Austria at the time, the level of interest in the trial showed that Bloch had tremendous support. Two weeks before the trial was due to open, Rohling called it off. Bloch had won.

Bloch was now famous He saw an opportunity to use his victory to bring the fight against antisemitism into the political arena. He gave up his position as a rabbi and founded the Austrian Weekly, a newspaper that he hoped would strengthen Jewish self-respect and spread knowledge of Jews and Judaism, both amongst the Jewish community and in the outside world. A year later he was elected to the Reichsrat, the upper house of the Austrian parliament.

In 1884 he was instrumental in creating the Austria-Israelite Union, a national body to combat antisemitism and defend Jewish rights. The Union’s members promoted the idea that one could be both proudly Jewish and a full participant in Austrian society.

Unlike the Zionists, who argued that the only solution to antisemitism was an independent Jewish state, and the assimilationists who believed in Judaism as just another religion within modern society, the Union wanted the best of both worlds. They campaigned for a political solution that would allow Jews to be loyal and active Austrian citizens while remaining committed to their Jewish identity.

The tension between assimilation and Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, was a feature of late 19^th century Europe. These days, most diaspora communities have found a middle path, very similar to Bloch’s ideal; we are fully involved as citizens in the culture, events and politics of the lands in which we live and at the same time we identify and behave as Jews, according to our various interpretations of what that means. But in the 19^th century, a period when Jews in many lands were still fighting for civil rights, Bloch provoked the anger of both the Zionists and the assimilationists. The Zionists, saw him as a traitor, opposing the idea of independent Jewish nationhood. The assimilationists believed he was impeding their chances of being fully accepted by the Austrian people. The only options that most people could see to the problem of antisemitism were at the extremes, either full blooded Jewish nationalism or abandoning one’s identity altogether and becoming just like everyone else. A middle way did not seem possible.

Joseph Bloch was motivated by antisemitism but the campaigns he conducted were not just dedicated to the problems experienced by Jews. Austria at the time had a nationalist Catholic government that considered its own people superior to those of neighbouring, Protestant Germany. In response Germany was developing its own nationalist ideology. Bloch argued that in the multinational, multiethnic Austria-Hungarian Empire, the belief among one set of people that they were superior to another was a threat that endangered every minority, not just Jews. He insisted that to concentrate exclusively on the problems that Jews faced, as the Zionists and assimilationists did, was ultimately self-defeating.

This was not the time, he told his newspaper’s readers, to focus on any one specific ethnic or religious group. All minorities were in the same boat. He argued that if every nationality saw those from a different background as “an inferior being on account of his race, language and descent, as an individual who does not count . . . . with whom you carry on a life or death struggle, why should the Semites enjoy exceptional immunity?” He said that Jews, who lived in every country in the Austria-Hungarian empire, would always be at risk, along with all other minorities, unless nationalism as an ideology was defeated. As long as Germans, Austrians, Czechs or anyone else saw themselves as superior, they would never accept people who were not from their nationality as equals. He declared that, “It follows then as a logical conclusion as well as a command of political wisdom that we must take up a position outside of all national parties.”

The solution for Bloch was the creation of a multiethnic Austria, not dominated by any religion or nationality that regarded people from a different ethnicity or religion as less Austrian. This was necessary, not just for Jews, he believed, but for the very survival of Austria-Hungary, in a Europe that was increasingly fracturing into racial and nationalist groups.

For most of his political and editorial career, Joseph Bloch fought an uphill battle. Nationalism and factionalism continued to grow in Europe, while in the Jewish sphere, amid rising antisemitism and pogroms, Zionism or integration seemed to be the only choices. The world was not ready for Bloch’s ideas. It wasn’t until the outbreak of World War I that he felt optimistic; at last, it seemed to him, Austria would coalesce around a single unifying fact, everyone united in the battle against the enemy.

He was wrong. The defeat of Germany and Austria-Hungary led to the dismantling of the Empire and the rise of a nationalism in Germany on a scale never seen before. Rather than becoming a multiethnic land not dominated by any religion or nationality, Austria willingly succumbed to Nazism. Bloch lived just long enough to understand what was happening; he died in 1923, his dreams in tatters. It was only in the late 20^th century that his vision of tolerant multiethnic societies began to appear possible. Today, with the renewed surge of hard-right nationalism, who knows how long the possibility may last?

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Of all the Hebrew books and treatises written in medieval times, one of the most unusual must be the Chronicle of Ahima’atz. A history from the 11^th century, written in rhyming prose, it tells the story over the previous 200 years of the family of the chronicler, Ahima’atz ben Paltiel. As we would expect from a history from that period, the information it contains is far from reliable; these days historians rely on documents and evidence, in those days history was based on stories that people told, the memories of older generations and a considerable amount of authorial imagination. Nevertheless, the Chronicle of Ahima’atz is a valuable work, particularly for those stories it tells that do find support in other sources.

Ahima’atz ben Paltiel was born in Capua, in Southern Italy, in 1017. He came from a distinguished family of scholars, communal leaders and poets, descendants of a certain Rabbi Amitai, based in the city of Oria in Southern Italy. I discussed one episode from the Chronicle in my book on the history of Kabbalah, but this article is about the family member who Ahima’atz seems to be most proud of; a man known as Paltiel ben Shefatiah.

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In the Chronicle, Paltiel is depicted as an astrologer who was summoned by the Caliph, Al-Muizz (c.930-975). A member of the Fatimid dynasty, Al-Muizz had just conquered the family’s hometown of Oria and wanted Paltiel to interpret a dream he’d had. Paltiel told the Caliph that the dream meant he was destined to conquer three great territories, Sicily, North Africa and Egypt.

The Caliph was pleased with the prophecy and told Paltiel that if his words came true he would give him authority over the whole of his empire. A week later a message arrived from the princes of Sicily asking the Caliph to come and rule over them. Deeply impressed, Al-Muizz immediately appointed Paltiel as his vizier and counsellor “and did not depart from his advice, either to the left or the right.”

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Was Rosalind Franklin the victim of a male conspiracy, denied the accolades she deserved by a jealous patriarchy? Or did she fail to appreciate the results of her own work, thereby enabling two men, James Watson and Francis Crick, to take the honours for discovering the structure of DNA? It’s a question that has been discussed for over half a century and neither position is correct. But to even ask the question is to overlook and diminish everything else that Rosalind Franklin achieved, both as a scientist and as one of the first women to break into  the male-dominated world of science.

Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920, into a prosperous and  well-known Jewish family. The family was deeply immersed in communal and public affairs; her father, Ellis Franklin, a merchant banker, was vice-principal of the Working Men’s College and Treasurer of the Jewish Board of Guardians; her mother, Muriel, chaired committees dedicated to the welfare of those in need. They were politically involved too. One of her great-uncles, Herbert Samuel, had been the first British High Commissioner to Palestine, her great-aunt, Netta Montagu, was a leading suffragette and educational reformer who sat on the National Council of Women. Another great-uncle, Hugh, was more militant;  also a campaigner for the Suffragette movement, he was sent to prison several times, most notably for setting fire to a train and for trying to horsewhip Winston Churchill. The whole family, dozens of them, all lived within a few streets of each other in London’s fashionable Notting Hill and Bayswater where Rosalind’s great-grandfather had been a founder of the New West End Synagogue.

In 1938 Rosalind won a place at Newnham College in Cambridge to study Chemistry. She graduated in 1941 but did not receive a degree, Cambridge did not start to award bachelor degrees to women until 1948, the last university in Britain to do so. She was, however, awarded a graduate research scholarship, and studied for her PhD during World War Two by investigating the molecular structure of coal. Coal was an essential commodity during the war, used both as a fuel and in the charcoal filters of gas masks; her research was intended to increase its efficiency in both areas.

Franklin conducted her research through X-Ray crystallography, a relatively new technique allowing scientists to look in minute detail at how materials are formed. She became an expert in the use of the technique, published five scholarly papers and was awarded her PhD in in 1945. She was already attracting attention in the scientific community and in 1947 received an offer to work at the National Chemical Laboratory in Paris.

She lived a frugal life in France. Her family could easily afford to support her but she refused to accept money from them, choosing instead to live on the small salary she received from the laboratory. She spent four years in France, making many friends, going on cycling and walking holidays with them, calling Paris “far and away the best city in the world.” She published more papers and may easily have settled permanently into a French way of life but came under pressure from her family to return to England, where there were greater scientific opportunities. Kings College London offered her a position and she came home.

Her time at Kings College was not happy. She had been employed to use her skills in X-Ray diffraction, joining a pioneering team investigating the structure of DNA, the molecule that carries genetic information for nearly all living organisms. However, she found herself embroiled in conflict almost as soon as she joined. The head of department who engaged her neglected to tell his deputy, Maurice Wilkins, that he had taken her on. Wilkins, who was leading the DNA research was on holiday when she joined, on his return he assumed she had been employed as his assistant and treated her as such. That wasn’t the case, her position placed her on an equal footing with him and it created a tension between them that was never resolved.

There were personality issues too; Rosalind was lively, argumentative and ambitious, Wilkins was shy and retiring. It was hard enough for her to be one of not many Jews and even fewer women in the college; having to work with Wilkins made life at Kings unbearable.

Before Rosalind joined the team, Wilkins had discovered that DNA could exist in two different forms, signified as A and B. Rosalind subsequently showed that the A form could be converted to the B form simply by increasing the humidity in its atmosphere. She took a photograph of an X-ray image of the B form. Known as Photograph 51, it proved to be a crucial and controversial element in the scientific understanding of DNA.

Unknown to Franklin, Wilkins showed a copy of Photography 51 to two scientists in Cambridge, Francis Crick and James Watson. They too were seeking to discover the structure of DNA. And it is at this point that the historical record becomes cloudy. Pages and pages have been written about what happened but the fundamental issue is whether Rosalind Franklin’s Photograph 51 was instrumental in helping Watson and Crick to discover the structure of DNA, or whether it simply confirmed what they already knew.

This all happened in 1953 but the controversy didn’t really break out until 1968, when James Watson published a book, The Double Helix, in which he arrogantly dismissed Rosalind Franklin in misogynistic terms. Watson’s book caused an outcry. Particularly since he wrote: “Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King's realized they were in our hands.”

It was too much for her supporters. Watson, Crick and Wilkins had all received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for their work in the discovery of the structure of DNA and Rosalind’s supporters cried that she had been robbed of her award. They said it was because she was a woman, and because her Photograph 51 had been stolen. They claimed that it was she, not the three men, who was the true figure behind the discovery. Others refuted the claim, saying that Rosalind had failed to interpret the photograph properly: she’d had the opportunity to discover DNA’s structure but ad not been up to the task.

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Unfortunately, the argument was overdone on both sides. Rosalind Franklin had never made any claim to the discovery; indeed when Watson and Crick published their findings in the journal Nature, she published an article alongside it stating that her ideas were “not inconsistent with the model proposed by Watson and Crick.” And far from feeling she had been robbed by the men, she later became a friend of Crick and his wife, touring Spain with them in 1956 and recuperating at their Cambridge home when she was ill.

As to why she didn’t receive the Nobel Prize, it wasn’t because she was a woman. Nobel Prizes are only awarded to living people, and by 1962 Rosalind Franklin was no longer alive. She had tragically died of cancer in 1958, at the young age of 37.

The controversy over DNA and Photograph 51 is now the topic for which Rosalind Franklin is best remembered. It is a shame, because her work after Photograph 51 was just as important, if not more so. She left Kings after 2 years, unhappy because of her poor relationship with Wilkins and increasingly disillusioned by the college’s treatment of women - she was not even allowed to join her male colleagues for lunch in the dining room. She took up a position at Birkbeck College, a much more open-minded environment in those days. She led a team of researchers investigating the structure of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus, the first virus ever to have been discovered, used by scientists as prototype for further viral investigation. Her expertise in the study of viruses, including polio, laid the foundations for future research, helping scientists to develop anti-viral treatments and new vaccines, including that against Covid, so rapidly produced during the pandemic. Franklin described her work on organic cells as “probably the most fundamental of all questions concerning the mechanism of living processes.”

As befits a woman who succeeded in her struggle to establish herself in a male domain, Rosalind Franklin has now become an icon. The Rosalind Franklin Institute in England is a national medical research centre, the Rosalind Franklin Society showcases women who have made a substantial contribution to science, there is a laboratory named after her at Birkbeck College and a university bearing her name in Chicago. With her family’s suffragette background she was probably always aware of the struggle for women’s rights, but, rather than campaigning, she got on with showing what women could do.

Rosalind Franklin is buried in Willesden Jewish Cemetery in London. Her tombstone reads. “Scientist. Her research and discoveries remain of lasting benefit to mankind.”

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Last week’s antisemitic attack in Amsterdam was shocking for several reasons. Not just for the violence involved, nor because it was the first major antisemitic attack on European soil since the 1940s, nor indeed because of the degree of organisation and planning that went into it. The attack was shocking because it took place in Amsterdam, a city that played a defining and indispensable role in the Jewish struggle for civil rights; one that sees itself as the city of Anne Frank.  

Anne Frank is the name that comes to mind for most people when they think about the Jewish experience in Amsterdam. The diary she wrote while in hiding is one of the world’s best known books. The Anne Frank House, where, at the age of 13 she and seven others were hidden from the Nazis for over 2 years, until they were finally betrayed, is an essential destination for any visitor to Amsterdam, Jewish or not. The family who hid them, at great personal risk, were not Jewish. Yet they were only one family among many in Amsterdam who did incredible things to save Jews.

When I was a kid I was taught by a frail rabbi, a youngish, nervous man who looked far older than his years. Someone, now long forgotten, had helped him to flee Amsterdam and furnished him with a rickety old rowing boat. He rowed across the North Sea, with his mother, a distance of 200 miles, day and night, storm and calm, vulnerable to both the elements and hostile craft. He wasn’t religious but he vowed that if they arrived in England safely he would study Judaism and become a rabbi. The journey broke him, accounting for his frail, elderly looks, but they arrived safely, and he kept his vow. He wouldn’t have survived if he hadn’t had help in Amsterdam. And his story is just one among many.

The flourishing of Jewish life in Amsterdam began in the late 16^th century, after the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule. The revolt led to the creation of the Dutch Republic, a country very different from anywhere else in Europe, where the idea of religious tolerance, advocated by people like Réné Descartes and Hugo Grotius, first took root. Freedom of religion and tolerance of other people’s views was a defining quality of the Dutch Republic and still serves as a source of national pride in the Netherlands- despite the growing popularity of far-right politicians. It is the long Dutch tradition of tolerance that makes the antisemitic attacks in Amsterdam last week even more distressing.

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The ancient port of Tarshish must have been a rich and exotic place. According to the Bible’s Book of Kings, a fleet of ships would arrive from Tarshish every three years, bearing gold, silver, ivory, monkeys and peacocks (or maybe parrots) for King Solomon.

There is disagreement among Bible scholars about where Tarshish may have been. One opinion notes that King Solomon’s boats docked at Etzion Gever on the Red Sea, close to modern day Eilat. This suggests that Tarshish may have been to the south or east, maybe Africa, Arabia or even India.

The other opinion places Tarshish somewhere in the Mediterranean region. In another biblical book, that of Jonah, the fugitive prophet boarded a ship destined for Tarshish, from the Mediterranean port of Jaffa. There was no Suez canal in those days so if Tarshish had been in Arabia or India, the journey from Jaffa would have involved skirting the entire African coast, a very long and hazardous route. A long journey may have suited Jonah, who was trying to get as far away as he could, but it is unlikely that merchants shipping goods to Tarshish would have sent them from a Mediterranean port when they could have saved weeks of sailing by despatching them from the Red Sea.

Other passages in the Bible, and a couple of other ancient documents support the theory that Tarshish was a Mediterranean port. Some suggest it was Carthage on the north coast of Africa or, given the similarity of names, Tarsus in Turkey or Tartessos in Spain.

Jews in Sri Lanka disagree. They are certain that the city of Galle, on the island’s southern coast was the site of biblical Tarshish. They point out that the treasures Solomon imported from Tarshish were far more likely to be found in Sri Lanka than anywhere on the Mediterranean coast.

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Sri Lanka may qualify as the world’s most benign location for Jewish settlement. The island, once known as Ceylon, has never had a large Jewish population but Sri Lanka’s Jews do not seem to have experienced anything like the persecution or discrimination so frequent elsewhere in the world. Indeed, Jewish life on the island was so easy that, according to legend, Adam and Eve chose to live there after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and Noah’s Ark finally came to rest there, on the mountains of Serendib (the old Persian name for Sri Lanka, from which we get the word serendipity).

The earliest record of Jewish settlement on Sri Lanka comes from the travelogue of a Persian geographer, Abu Sa'id al-Hasan. Writing at the beginning of the 10^th century he says he found a large number of Jews on the island, but says nothing more about them. 200 years later another Arab traveller added a little more detail, reporting that four of the 16 members of the King of Serendib’s governing council were Jews.

If you look on the internet, as I did, you will find references to the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela who is said to have come across a community of 3,000 Jews when he visited Sri Lanka in the 1170s. But he may not have been referring to Sri Lanka. His geography sounds right but he called the island he visited Ibrig or Candig, and even the author of the 1907 translation of Benjamin’s travel diary questions whether he was writing about Ceylon. Nevertheless, even without Benjamin it is apparent that Jews have lived on Sri Lanka for a very long time.

When Portugal colonised Ceylon in 1505 they brought Jewish soldiers with them. These soldiers had been forcibly converted to Catholicism in Portugal but still lived under severe discrimination and jumped at the opportunity to get away from their homeland. The soldiers were, of course, all men; few, if any, Jewish women from Portugal travelled with them. It didn’t take for the soldiers to settle down with local women.  Their descendants are now members of the small Sri Lankan ethnic group known as Portuguese Burghers. Their Jewish ancestry only survives in some of their surnames.

The Dutch came to Sri Lanka next, entering into a treaty with the local King, agreeing to evict the Portuguese in return for a trade monopoly with the island. More Jews arrived and although intermarriage again depleted their numbers, this time several families retained their Jewish identity. The records of the Dutch East India Company contain the names of various Goldsteins and Singers who arrived together in 1787. So did Frans Phillip Frentz who was appointed as magistrate in the Kalpitya peninsula in the north west of the country.

The most frequently mentioned Dutch Jew to take up residence in Sri Lanka had in fact converted to Catholicism before his arrival. His name was Leopold van Dort, he took up the position of Professor of Hebrew at the Christian Theological Seminary in Colombo, where he translated the Qur’an into Hebrew. He made his translation from a Dutch version of the Qur’an, which had been based on a French rendering of the original Arabic (so it probably wasn’t too accurate). He lost his job, and vanished from the island records, when the Dutch governor general removed Hebrew from the Seminary’s curriculum. It has been suggested that van Dort went back to Amsterdam.

When Napoleon occupied the Netherlands, the British moved to keep him out of Dutch Ceylon. They seized the island and remained in occupation until 1948. It was under British rule, in 1841, that three wealthy brothers from the de Worms family came to Ceylon. They purchased several estates in the hill country and planted them with coffee. When recurring outbreaks of coffee blight destroyed their crops they imported tea seedlings from China and turned their estates over to tea. They established the flourishing tea industry that is now Sri Lanka’s largest agricultural export. The de Worms brothers returned to England in 1865 but their estate remains in business today, still known as the Rothschild Tea Plantation, named after their maternal grandfather.

It was under British rule that the Jewish presence in Sri Lanka grew from a small number of  individuals scattered across the country to something resembling a community. A synagogue was built in Colombo for soldiers in the British army and several British Jews took up positions in the colonial administration. The person whose name is cited most frequently is Virginia Woolf’s husband Leonard. He worked for the civil service, became an assistant government agent and wrote a novel, The Village in the Jungle, based on his time in the country. Two other British Jews, Sir Sidney Abrahams and Sir Alan Rose served as the island’s Chief Justices with Alan Rose acting as Governor-General for a  while.

Jews started to leave Sri Lanka in 1948, the year in which the island was granted independence, the State of Israel was founded and war broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Sri Lanka has a large Muslim population and its new independent government came down firmly on the Arab side, leaving many Jews feeling endangered.

But they came back. Sri Lanka is now one of the most popular destination for Israeli tourists. The synagogue in Colombo was demolished in 1966, and a hotel built on the site, but the Chabad outreach organisation have moved in to cater for religious, and not so religious, Jews. There are now apparently four Chabad centres across the island, probably commanding a larger institutional Jewish presence than at any time in the past.

Three weeks ago, on October 24^th 2024, in the surfing resort of Arugam Bay, Jews were reminded that there is no guarantee of safety, even in Sri Lanka. The Israeli government, the US Embassy and the German Foreign ministry all issued warnings of a terrorist threat. The local police said that one of the targets was the Chabad centre. Fortunately the attack was thwarted, three people were arrested and the police have now set up a hotline dedicated to assisting Israeli tourists. In contrast, the neighbouring Maldives islands have announced that they are banning Israelis from entering their country.

I wrote this article after I received a message from Ruan Ranasinghe, telling me about the Jewish history of his land. His grandmother, Anne Ranasinghe, was one Sri Lanka’s most important poets, a winner of countless awards, whose work is discussed in the Oxford Companion to Contemporary Poetry.

Born as Anneliese Katz in Germany in 1925, she escaped to England as a teenager on the Kindertransport, the remarkable rescue programme for German Jewish children.  She met her future husband, Dr. Don Abraham Ranasinghe while she was studying in London to become a midwife. They married and moved to Sri Lanka; he became a professor at Colombo University Medical School and she took a degree in journalism after raising four children. She became a citizen of Sri Lanka in 1956 and published her first collection of poems, And the Sun That Sucks The Earth to Dry in 1971. She also wrote short stories and essays. She died in 2016, having never seen her parents again. They were murdered by the Nazis. Her tribute to her mother, Holocaust 1944 is available online.

The Slovakian town of Bratislava sits on the River Danube, close to the border with Austria. Formerly known as Pressburg, and once part of Hungary, the town had been a centre of Jewish life for hundreds of years, the home of a dynasty of rabbis descended from the scholarly but strictly conservative Moses Sofer. By the 1920s, however, Bratislava’s significance to Jews was less to do with its rabbis and more to do with the escape route it offered for those fleeing to the west.

Large numbers of Jews left Eastern Europe in the wake of World War I, a regional upheaval which saw the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the consequences of the revolution in Russia. Many of those leaving were trying to dodge forcible conscription into the Polish army, a lengthy and brutal period of service from which not all returned.  Others were leaving to escape the hostile nationalism of the newly independent Polish state, with its antisemitic discrimination and pogroms to which the authorities turned a blind eye. Some were simply seeking a more prosperous life in the West. Others still were driven by the new Zionism with its goal of establishing a homeland for the Jews in their ancestral land. Whatever their motivation for leaving the East, Bratislava was where they could find a network of activists providing them with practical assistance for the onward journey.

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The flow of Jewish refugees into Bratislava continued into the 1930s. Now however, they were coming from Germany not Poland, determined not to live under Nazi rule. Sensing desperate times ahead, Gisi Fleischmann, one of the Bratislava activists, led the efforts to help the refugees. She established contact with charities and support networks across Europe and travelled to Paris and London seeking funding and assistance. With colleagues, she saved dozens of refugees who had been expelled from Austria and were now living on a derelict barge in the middle of the Danube, having been refused entry into any other country. She was in London in 1939 when Slovakia became a Nazi-allied republic. Her friends tried to persuade her to stay in England; she refused and returned home.

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Was Christopher Columbus Jewish? According to a Spanish TV channel last week, he undoubtedly was. A documentary reported that Jose Lorente, a forensic expert at the University of Granada, had analysed DNA from Columbus’s remains, and from those of his son and cousin. His findings, the programme claimed, conclusively showed that Columbus was of Jewish heritage.

The theory that Columbus was Jewish is not new. It is generally thought Columbus was born in Genoa in Italy, where his family name was Colon (Columbus is its Latinised form). However, around 1912, a Spanish scholar, Don Garcia de la Riega, claimed to have discovered documents relating to a 15^th century, Jewish family called Colon in the town of Pontevedra in Spain. After much digging around and speculation, Garcia de la Riega declared that the documents he had found were those of Columbus’s family. This proved, he said, that Columbus had been born, not in Genoa, but in Pontevedra, and that like many Jews at the time, his family had been pressurised to convert to Christianity. Columbus, de la Riega insisted, was of Jewish ancestry.

De la Riega’s theory was pooh-poohed almost as soon as he announced it. His research was denounced as flawed and the documents he claimed to have found may well have been forged. But the theory that Columbus was Jewish didn’t go away. In the 1930’s, a Jewish American, Maurice David, came up with the bizarre and incomprehensible suggestion that Columbus’s very strange signature, written in the form of a triangle, was “an abbreviation of the ‘last confession’ of the Jews and also a substitute for the Kaddish.”

Maurice David’s theory was also given short shrift but the Jewish Columbus theory persisted. In 1940 Salvador de Madariaga, in his biography of Columbus, tried to show that his personality traits were typically Jewish. He explained that the reason why the mariner spoke poor Italian and good Spanish was that his Jewish parents had travelled from Spain to Genoa but continued to speak their native language in their new home. Columbus, according to de Madariaga, was indisputably Jewish.

Columbus seems to have encouraged speculation about his origins. He may even have had messianic pretensions. In one letter he wrote “I am not the first Admiral of my family . . .  David, that most prudent king, was first a shepherd and afterwards chosen king of Jerusalem, and I am a servant of that same Lord who raised him to such a dignity.” In his ship’s log he mentions the Hebrew Bible frequently and calculates the number of years since the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Nevertheless, it is a bold step from these and other similar assertions to the conclusion that Columbus was Jewish.

Books about the Jewish Columbus are still being written. Mike Evans’s 2014 book, Christopher Columbus, Secret Jew, argues that the mariner set off on his expedition across the Atlantic to find somewhere that would be a refuge for Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and their impending expulsion from Spain. Even the noted mid-20^th century Jewish historian Cecil Roth was swayed by the theory that Columbus was Jewish. Writing in the Encyclopaedia Judaica he cites some of the claims made by previous researchers but admits that it is impossible to reach any conclusions from their evidence. However, the reason why the theory can’t be proved, Roth insists, is only because of Columbus’ ‘own mendacity’, the mysterious way that he spoke about his origins and his cryptic suggestion that he had a connection to King David. It sounds very much as if Roth would like to believe that Columbus was Jewish, and that he blames the man himself for not being more assertive about his origins.

Columbus may or may not have been Jewish but there is no doubt that Jews played an important part in his voyage to America. The Santangel family had been obliged to convert from Judaism to Christianity in 1415 but like most converts still secretly retained some Jewish traditions. Luis Santangel, the royal court’s finance minister, told the Spanish king that Columbus was hoping for his support for a voyage to discover a westward route to India. When the king proved to be less than enthusiastic about Columbus’s idea, Santangel introduced him instead to Queen Isabella. It took three meetings until she was convinced of the importance of Columbus’ voyage and she only agreed to sanction it if Santangel paid a substantial proportion of the expedition’s costs himself. He agreed. Had it not been for Luis Santangel, Columbus’s world-changing voyage may never have taken place.

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When Columbus finally reached, not India, but the islands of the Caribbean, the first letter he sent home was addressed to Santangel. He had the letter translated into Latin, printed and circulated across Europe. Columbus may or may not have been a Jew but it was the Jewish Santangel who made sure that the world was first informed about the existence of lands, still assumed to be India, on the far side of the Atlantic.

Columbus was given permission to sail on the same day that the Spanish monarchs announced that the Jews were to be expelled from the country. It was no coincidence. Luis Santangel’s contribution did not cover the full costs of the expedition. The balance was paid by the Queen, out of the money confiscated from Spain’s Jews as they fled. Columbus himself confirmed this, writing that “after the Spanish monarchs had expelled all the Jews from all their kingdoms and lands they commissioned me to undertake the voyage to India with a properly equipped fleet.”

Columbus set sail on August 2, 1492, the same day as the deadline given to the Jews for their departure. Several of his crew were Jews, or former Jews, using the voyage as an opportunity to make a new life for themselves in whichever lands the voyage ended up.

After his successful return from his initial voyage, Columbus set sail across the Atlantic again. This time the royal family fully funded the voyage, by once again plundering the property and goods of the Jews who had now left the country. They raised four times the amount they had needed for the first voyage. Columbus set sail for America again, this time in style, all his needs paid for by Spain’s absent Jews. 

Luis Santangel did not travel with Columbus; he had no need to do so. Like all converted Jews, the Spanish Inquisition kept a suspicious eye on him, just waiting to pounce should he show any hint of a lapse back towards Judaism. He had been forced to do penance on a previous occasion for doing something that suggested he was not fully committed to his Christian faith. But now that his protégé Christopher Columbus had furnished Spain with vast territories in the New World, the King placed Santangel under his personal protection. He and his family became free from the persecutions of the Inquisition.

So, was Columbus Jewish, or not? The latest evidence seems to side conclusively with those who maintain that he was. After all, you can’t argue with DNA. Or can you? The DNA that Jose Lorente analysed came from Columbus’s tomb in Seville Cathedral. However, there is some doubt as to whether the tomb really contains Columbus’s remains. The explorer died in Spain in 1502, in the Spanish town of Valladolid. He had wanted to be buried on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola and in 1524 his remains were shipped there. In 1795 they were taken back across the Atlantic, to Havana, and then in 1899 they were eventually buried in Seville. After such toing and froing, there is considerable uncertainty about whether the bones in the tomb are indeed those of Christopher Columbus.

Forensic experts have also thrown a mantle of doubt over Jose Lorente’s conclusions. Typically, scientific researchers ensure that their work is peer-reviewed; scholarly journals are unlikely to publish the results of research unless they have been scrutinised independently and confirmed. Jose Lorente did not arrange for his research to be peer-reviewed. He said that he would, but he hasn’t done so yet. Criticisms have also been made of his methodology. DNA notwithstanding, it seems that the question of Columbus’s Jewish ancestry remains as open as it ever has been.

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Recently a twist has been added to the Columbus ancestry saga. The topic caught the popular imagination at the 500^th anniversary commemorations of Columbus’s voyage in 1992. Several articles at the time pointed out that Columbus’s arrival in America heralded the mass slaughter, over several centuries, of the native population and the separate horror of slavery. In the circumstances, the writers of these articles asked, did Jews really want to claim Columbus as one of their own?

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Three times Prime Minister of France, Leon Blum was an unusual and unlikely politician. An article in The Atlantic, written in 1937, declared that:

Leon Blum is an idealist and a logician, a poet and a critic, a diplomat and a revolutionary, a politician and a gentleman. He is a Frenchman and a Jew. Complex, subtle, eclectic, he presents a problem which baffles his admirers as much as it irritates his enemies. It is difficult to place him in any category of men. He is an intellectual, but he is also a man of action. He is exceedingly sensitive, and so sincere that some of his speeches sound like public confessions; yet he is not a blind fanatic. He is thoroughly faithful to the doctrine which he defends, but remains critical of himself as of others. He is a discreet messiah.

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As a young man Blum had no intention of entering politics. Born in 1872, he studied philosophy and law, practising as a government lawyer for the Council of State, the highest court in France, and working simultaneously as a drama critic for several Parisian newspapers. Prominent on the Paris intellectual scene he was seen around town, in the theatres and ballrooms, as a slight, delicate, Bohemian figure, often clutching a volume of poetry or engaged in literary conversation. His biographer, Pierre Birnbaum, describes him as a ‘languid, effeminate dandy preoccupied with the elegance of his attire, his hat, his monocle and his gloves as well as with the grace of his movements and pose.’ He stirred up controversy with an essay he published arguing that people should enjoy free love before marriage, that a life of adventure should precede one of stability.

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In 1707, Doctor Tuvya Cohen travelled from Constantinople to Venice to arrange the printing and publication of his medical text book, Ma’aseh Tuvya (The Work of Tuvya). An instant success, Tuvya’s book was reprinted four times in the 18^th century, and repeatedly over the next 300 years. It was in fact much more than just a medical book. Written in five parts, it began with chapters on theology, cosmology, astronomy, false messiahs and the existence of multiple worlds, before settling into a sustained discussion of medicine.

Tuvya came from a medical family. His grandfather, a physician in Jerusalem, had moved to Poland around the beginning of the 17th century where his son Moishe, Tuvya’s father, followed in his medical footsteps. When the Khmelnitsky uprising broke out in 1648, in which thousands of Jews were massacred, Tuvya’s father fled westward, settling in the French city of Metz, where Tuvya was born in 1652.

As a young man Tuvya spent a few years at a yeshiva, or rabbinical seminary, in Cracow. He must have shown exceptional promise because in 1678 the Duke of Prussia insisted that Tuvya and his friend, Gabriel Felix of Brody, were to be admitted to study medicine at the University of Frankfurt, an institution which up to now had not admitted Jews. The Duke even provided Tuvya with a stipend.

Tuvya’s experience at the Frankfurt University was not pleasant. He and Gabriel were subjected to unrelenting anti-Jewish hostility from the students and teaching staff. Despite the Duke’s orders, the faculty refused to award them medical degrees and the two young men soon left Frankfurt, travelling south to resume their studies in Padua.

The medical school at Padua University had a long history of educating Jewish students. Although the Catholic Church generally excluded Jews and Protestants from higher education, the Venetian Republic, in which Padua was sited, prided itself on its independence from Rome. When it came to secular matters, Rome could not tell the Venetians what to do and Padua University was known for its tolerance and open mindedness. A century earlier the astronomer Galileo, who was soon to be charged with heresy by the Pope, had spent 18 uncontroversial years as the university’s professor of mathematics.

Tuvya and Gabriel flourished in Padua. The rabbi and physician, Solomon Conegliano took them under his wing, tutoring them in both medicine and Jewish studies. Years later, when Tuvya was ready to publish his book, Ma’aseh Tuvya, it was Conegliano who introduced him to a printer and wrote an enthusiastic preface to the book, praising Tuvya fulsomely and ensuring that it caught the eye of scholarly readers just as soon as it appeared.

Tuvya graduated in 1683, with doctorates in both philosophy and medicine. He worked as a doctor for a short while in Poland, until he received a call from the royal household in Turkey. For the next twenty years or so he served as personal physician to one sultan after another, flour altogether, relocating with them as their courts travelled between Adrianople and Constantinople.

Unfortunately, no full account of Tuvya Cohen’s life was ever written. The little information that is known about him comes from his book, and, other than the portrait of himself that the printer inserted, the details that he tells about his life are sketchy at best. He finished writing the book around 1701 but it wasn’t until 1707 that he travelled to Venice to have it printed.

Ma’aseh Tuvya was written at a time when modern science was beginning to emerge, leaving Tuvya torn between his loyalty to the traditional religious understanding of the workings of nature and the new ideas that were circulating. In his section on astronomy he graphically illustrated Copernicus’s theory that the earth revolved around the sun by drawing a series of concentric circles, each labelled with the name of a planet and with the sun at the centre. Even though Copernicus’s theory was now 200 years old, Tuvya’s diagram was the first time it had been set out and explained in a Hebrew book.

But illustrating Copernicus’s theory was one thing. Acknowledging that Copernicus was right was something else altogether. Tuvyah was a traditionally educated Jew who subscribed to the Talmud’s understanding of the earth as the centre of the universe. he concealed his appreciation of Copernicus’s theory by lashing out, writing a chapter refuting him and calling the astronomer the firstborn of Satan. Tuvyah was interested enough in Copernicus’s theory to illustrate how it worked, but he refused to acknowledge that he might have been persuaded by it.

Yet Tuvyah realised that the new science was superseding the old beliefs. He was offended by accusations he heard that Jews were ignorant, that they clung stubbornly to the old ways and were not prepared to acknowledge the changing times. He said that he wrote his book in response to the taunts he had heard when studying in Frankfurt, from those “who vex us, raising their voices without restraint, speaking haughtily with arrogance and scorn, telling us . . . that our knowledge and ancient intelligence have been lost.”  A response to those who accused the Jews of ignorance, Ma’aseh Tuvyah was intended to show the world that Jewish thinkers were just as up to date with modern scientific thought as everybody else.

That, at least, is how he presented the book but it was more complicated than that. The book may have succeeded in showing the world that the Jews were up to date in their thinking if he had written in Latin, German or French.  But he didn’t. Tuvyah spoke several languages, he was by no means ignorant of European tongues. Yet he chose to write Ma’aseh Tuvyah in Hebrew. And, as David Ruderman, whose work is one of the sources for this article, has pointed out, this can only mean one thing. He wasn’t really writing for those who criticised Jewish ignorance. Rather, he was writing for the minority of people who read Hebrew. He was writing for Jews.

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What Tuvya really meant, according to Ruderman was that his book “containing the latest and most serious scholarship in the medical sciences, would serve to demonstrate to Jews themselves that they had not fallen so far behind, that at least some educated Jews like the author could . . .  produce a tome equal to and even surpassing any among the languages of European civilisation.” In other words, Tuvyah was trying to reassure educated Jews that the charges of ignorance laid against them were false, that there was no contradiction between the way in which they understood the world and modern science.

Ma’aseh Tuvyah was not an easy book to understand. It could only be appreciated by those who were prepared to take the time and effort to study it seriously. But that too demonstrated that Jewish readers were no more ignorant than anyone else. Medicine and science required serious intellectual engagement.

Most of Ma’aseh Tuvyah is dedicated to the study of medicine. For centuries medical theory had been based on the ancient views of the Greek physician Galen, that illness was caused by imbalances of humours, or fluids, in the body. But for the last 200 years Galen’s theories had gradually been displaced by those of the Swiss philosopher Paracelsus, who argued that diseases came from outside the body, from contact with contaminating agents and chemicals. Tuvyah was enthusiastic about these theories, writing of the “new medicine which dwells in the bosoms of the physicians of our time.” One of his main reasons for writing Ma’aseh Tuvyah was to bring this new medicine attention of those Jewish doctors who were still unaware of it. But his respect for Paracelsus did not extend as far as mentioning his name in the book; the man was rabidly anti-Jewish and particularly dismissive of Jewish doctors. Tuvyah had no intention of affording him any honour.

Nevertheless, there was a limit to the amount of time Tuvyah was prepared to spend treating Turkish royalty. The success of Ma’aseh Tuvyah elevated him to a new level of fame, one from which he could leave the Sultans behind. In 1715 he retired and moved to Jerusalem, where he lived until his death in 1729.

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How many Jewish languages do you think there are? Hebrew and Yiddish obviously, and Ladino, though not everyone has heard of it. But they are far from all. There are, according to scholars in the field, over 30 different Jewish languages and while most are in danger of disappearing, new ones appear from time to time.

Of course, much depends on what one means by a language. Academics have a different view from most of us. Speakers of Jewish English, for example, might not consider that the way they speak is any different from the language spoken by their non-Jewish friends and neighbours. But according to the Jewish Languages Project “The difference between general English and Jewish English can be as small as the addition of just a few Hebrew or Yiddish words (e.g., Hannukah, matzah ball, shlep), or it can be as large as multiple influences from Yiddish in syntax, lexicon, phonology, discourse, and prosody.” And if Jewish English is a language then, just like English itself, it can presumably be subdivided into American Jewish English, British Jewish English and so on. The word shanda for example, is used in American Jewish English but I have never heard it used in Britain.

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Leaving aside the technical question of whether peppering one’s speech with Yiddish or Hebrew words creates a different language, there are a dozen or more ancient Jewish tongues still spoken around the world. There is even a language that doesn’t use words. Generations of intermarriage in a small, isolated Jewish community in the Algerian Sahara led to many people being born with a hereditary deafness. The large proportion of those in the community who could not hear meant that everyone knew several people who were deaf. So they all knew how to use sign  language. A unique system of signing evolved, enabling them to communicate in the local Jewish vernacular. There are no Jews left in Algeria today, but Algerian Jewish Sign Language is still used in a few, small circles in Israel today.

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Imagine you had a time machine and could travel back to the 7^th or 8^th century. That you landed in one of the Jewish communities around Baghdad or in Southern Italy, for example, and asked someone there to tell you a little of their communal history.

The chances are that they would tell you stories from the Bible or Talmud, stories rooted in their religious background. They would know very little secular history, hardly anything of the empires that had risen and fallen, of the wars that had been fought or political alliances that had been made since biblical times, or elsewhere in the world. Centuries after the Greeks were able to read the histories of Herodotus or the Romans to study Tacitus, the Jewish world had still not had an historian of its own. Except, of course, for Josephus, the 1^st century Jewish historian. But they had never heard of him. He became a Roman citizen and wrote in Greek, a language the great majority of Jews were unable to read.

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The situation changed at the end of the 9^th century, or early in the  10^th when a secular history book suddenly appeared. Written in Hebrew, it looked at first sight to be a translation of Josephus’s history of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, The Jewish War. The author of this new book was said to be a certain Joseph ben Gorion, an otherwise unknown character whose name may have been a pseudonym, a clumsy attempt to identify him with Josephus (who was Joseph ben Matityahu). Joseph ben Gurion’s publication became known as the Book of Yosippon, a Greek form of the name Joseph.

As the only Hebrew book dealing with post-biblical Jewish history from the 6^th century BCE to the 1^st CE,  Yosippon plugged a yawning gap in the market. It became an instant success. Initially it was thought to be a translation of Josephus’s Jewish War, but it was nothing of the sort. Unknown to its 10^th century readers, who were ignorant of such things, Yosippon contained passages based on Virgil’s Aeneid, Livy’s History of Rome, Orosius’s History Against the Pagans, the Vulgate and various other Latin texts. It did contain a translation of parts of Josephus’s book Jewish Antiquities too. But the sections that could possibly have come from his Jewish War were actually taken from On the Destruction of the City of Jerusalem, a Latin paraphrase, based on Jewish War but given an anti-Jewish, pro-Roman slant instead.

Of course, in the 10^th century, and for quite some time after, nobody realised just how well-read and erudite the author of Yosippon was. They just assumed that his book was the true and unvarnished history of the Jews, a particularly credible assumption since the book was written in a very clear and elegant Hebrew, making it easy to read, digest and understand.

Despite its various Latin and Greek sources, Yosippon (sometimes pronounced Josippon) is undoubtedly a Jewish book. It contains some very imaginative polemics, all designed to exaggerate Jewish heroics, to dispel any suggestion that, in comparison to other nations, Jews were weak and pusillanimous. It makes a hero out of the rather obscure biblical character Zepho, a grandson of Esau. There is no mention of this in the Bible but according to Yosippon, Zepho was taken prisoner by his cousin Joseph, Jacob’s son who was ruler of Egypt. However Zepho escaped from prison and fled to Carthage where he met Aeneas, hero of Virgil’s Aeneid. He became head of Aeneas’s army and travelled with him to Italy where, in true Herculean style, he killed a monster, half-human and half-goat, that was devouring all the Italian cattle. He had his name changed to Janus-Saturnus, and his status from a person to a god. He founded a city and ruled as King of Italy for 55 years, finally being buried in Genoa. After his death the city he founded was governed by his grandson, Latinus, whose great achievement was to invent the Latin language. Romulus built a wall around the city that Zepho founded and Latinus governed,  to protect it from invasion by the Hebrew King David. The city became known as Rome.

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Zepho therefore, in Yosippon’s reworking of the Aeneid, replaced Aeneas as the founder of Rome, making the Romans descendants of Zepho’s great-grandfather, the biblical Isaac. In itself that is no surprise, The legend that the Romans are descended from Isaac through Esau crops up many times in Jewish folklore. But Yosippon is the first source to attribute the founding of Rome to Isaac’s great-grandson Zepho, and to transfer the mythical beginnings of Rome from Virgil’s Latin Aeneid to the Hebrew Bible.

Among his many historical accounts, Yosippon rewrote the story of the siege at Masada. According to Josephus, a band of Jewish rebels had fled from the Roman invaders, taking refuge in the mountain top fortress at Masada. The Romans besieged the fortress and, when it looked as if all was lost, the rebels committed suicide rather than fall into en emy hands.Yosippon’s author didn’t like this. It didn’t paint Jews in a very favourable light. In his version of the story, the rebels, far from dying by their own hand like sheep to the slaughter (the phrase comes from Yosippon) staged a fierce and valiant counter attack. They were defeated, overwhelmed by superior numbers and weaponry. But they died in glory. They were the nation who founded the city of Rome. They could hardly be seen to be terrified of its army.

Yosippon was written somewhere in Southern Italy, home to a number of Jewish communities in those days. One of the questions about its authorship is how the author managed to get hold of the Latin sources he relied upon. The only places that collections of Latin manuscripts were likely to be found were monastery libraries, places where Jews were rarely admitted. Steven Bowman, one of the leading authorities on Yosippon, suggests the author may have been granted access to a library as an itinerant scholar, or that a Jewish doctor might have taken the opportunity to spend time there, while visiting a patient in the monastery. Alternatively he suggests that the yeshivot, the rabbinic colleges, in Apulia could have ordered copies of the manuscripts for their own libraries. The late David Flusser, who published a critical edition of Yosippon in 1978, suggested that the author may have used the library belonging to the Duke of Naples, though again, in those days it would not have been easy for a Jew to gain access. So far, nobody has come up with a satisfactory answer to the question of how he was able to consult his sources.

Yosippon was the first of several Jewish books to appear in Southern Italy in the 10^th and 11^th centuries. Full of mythical and legendary material, they all purported to be historical in their own way, though none of them really were. And none enjoyed anything like the same degree of success as Yosippon. It was translated into Arabic, Slavonic and Russian in the 10^th or 11^th century and into Ethiopic during the 13^th. It was translated into Yiddish in 1546 and an English version was published in 1558 by Peter Morvyn, under the title A Compendious and Moste Marveylous History of the Latter Times of the Jewes’ Commune Weale.  The Coptic church treats Yosippon as a canonical text.

Nobody doubted Yosippon’s veracity. Even when educated Jews began reading Josephus in its original Greek or in Latin translations, if they came across something that was contradicted by Yosippon, they deferred to the Hebrew work. Christian authors copied extracts and passages from it over the following centuries. It was one of the earliest, perhaps the first Jewish book to be printed, in Mantua in the late 1470s, some years before the Talmud.

The first serious challenge to Yosippon’s accuracy came during the 16^th century, from the Italian, Jewish scholar Azariah di Rossi, in his book The Light of the Eyes. Di Rossi was a deeply learned and highly controversial character, the first person to subject the entire corpus of Jewish writings to sustained analysis and historical criticism. These days he would not be out of place in any university, but in 16^th century Italy he was condemned relentlessly by less insightful thinkers. He questioned the historicity of Yossipon and challenged the claim that it was a translation of Josephus. But he didn’t condemn the book, he recognised its value, despite some of its claims.

Yosippon’s status as the pre-eminent work of Jewish history ended long ago. But it has remained influential. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who modernised the Hebrew language, drew on Yosippon’s superb linguistic style to help hm compose his thesaurus. It is said that Israel’s first prime minister, David ben Gurion, born David Grün, took his new name in homage to the purported author of Yosippon. And when trying to encourage the desperate inmates of the Vilna ghetto to fight back against the Nazis, the resistance leader Abba Kovner quoted from Yosippon, “We will not be led like sheep to the slaughter!”

Yosippon is still read today. There are some, on the fringes of the Jewish Orthodox world who continue to maintain that it is the authentic voice of history, the correct Hebrew recension of Josephus’s Jewish War. The Greek version and translations made from it are, they assert, corruptions of the original. They reason in this way for religious reasons, and they will argue, as strongly as we will, that their view of the world is correct. 1,000 years of avid Yosippon readers may agree with them.

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Until the 20^th century, Jewish communities in Europe were fairly autonomous; they had their own governing councils and by and large they resolved their own disputes. Typically, the only contact they had with the ruling authorities was when taxes were collected, or at times of persecution, war or civil disturbance. If for any reason they needed to make representations to the rulers of the lands where they lived, they generally did so through specially appointed advocates or intercessors; a Jewish official  known in Yiddish as a shtadlan.

When a local community appointed a shtadlan, they looked for someone who was articulate, intelligent and learned, who understood the culture of the Christian world and was able to make compelling arguments to support the cause he was advocating. He needed good diplomatic and leadership skills and he needed to be respected by his own community; he could only advocate on their behalf if people were prepared to abide by his decisions. Advocates like this didn’t come cheap, the shtadlan was often the highest paid official in the community, earning far more, for example, than the rabbis, who were often paid a pittance, or not at all, for their services.  

The most famous of all the shtadlanim was Josel (also known as Yossel or Joseph) of Rosheim. He recorded his activities in a chronicle, of which only fragments have survived. His biographers have reconstructed much more of his life story from official reports and documents that mention his name. He lived a life full of drama, risk and danger. One day someone will make a film or TV series about him.

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A few weeks ago I published an article on Jewish doctors and asked whether you would like to read more pieces on the subject. The response was overwhelmingly positive, so I am writing about doctors again this week.

I am not able to write much about the doctor I would most like to discuss. She was not the first Jewish woman doctor in history, but she was among the most highly regarded, counting royalty among her patients. Her name was Floreta Ça-Noga. She lived in Santa Coloma de Queralt, about 100 km west of Barcelona and on 20^th January 1374 she was granted a licence by King Peter IV of Aragon to practise medicine throughout his territories. The licence describes her as “fit and sufficient in the art of medicine” and praises her diligence and lengthy experience as a medical practitioner.

Floreta must have been a practitioner of some distinction. Court records show that she looked after Queen Eleanor of Sicily, the wife of King Peter IV of Aragon and, after her death, Queen Sibilla de Fortià. The records also show that she was paid more than was customary.

Unfortunately, nothing else is known about Floreta, nor indeed about any of the women doctors who lived during the Middle Ages. Only a few names remain, like Bellayne, the widow of Samuel Gallipapa, and her daughter-in-law Na Pla, who were both licensed in Zaragosa, in 1380 and 1387 respectively.

Interaction between Jews and Christians was severely restricted in the medieval world and Jewish religious laws about impropriety limited contact between men and women. Doctors bent the rules and few minded; Jewish women doctors treated men as well as women, Christians as well as Jews.

This did cause some concern when Hava, a Jewish woman, was called to treat a Christian man who had been wounded in the genitals. A court asked her what she had done. She told them that she had taken her son with her, that she merely gave instructions and that the boy had carried out the treatment. 

Like Jewish men, medieval Jewish women had no opportunity to study medicine at a university. Nevertheless, they were trained; the fact that they were licensed meant that they were not just run-of-the-mill healers, who used folk remedies, incantations and a good deal of wishful thinking. To be trained and licensed as a doctor gave them official sanction for their work, and the ability to charge more for their services. And to obtain a licence they not only had to provide evidence of their skills, they had to be aware of the early medical theories of the Greek physician Galen and the later Arab doctors who had built upon his ideas.

The only way women could train to become doctors in those days was by living and studying with other physicians. In most cases they would have trained with a man; history has preserved the name of just one woman doctor who is known to have trained others. Her name was Sara de Sancto Aegidi, of Marseille. She entered into an agreement in 1326 with her pupil, Salvetus de Burgonoro. She would teach him ‘the art of medicine and physic’ for a period of seven months, he would board with her during that time and she would provide his food and clothing. He, in turn, would hand over to her, all the fees that he earned while training.

Salvetus’s name suggests that he was a Christian. His close relationship with his Jewish teacher is just another example of how little is really understood about interactions between Jews and Christians on a personal level, in an age when Jewish communities were frequently under attack or being uprooted.

One of the few studies of early Jewish women doctors was carried out by the Baltimore ophthalmologist, Dr Harry Friedenwald. His 2-volume work, Jews and Medicine was first published in 1944. Among the many doctors he describes is the woman who treated the 13^th century German rabbi, Judah ben Asher. The son of Asher ben Yehiel, one of the foremost Talmudists of the medieval period, Judah was never able to reach the same scholarly heights as his father because he was partially blind. His ability to read and study at all was, he explained, due to the Jewish eye doctor who treated him (unfortunately he did not think it important to record her name):

When I was three months old I suffered with my eyes and did not get better.... a woman endeavoured to cure me but she increased my blindness so that I was confined to the house for one year because I could not see . . . until a Jewish woman skilled in the healing of the eyes came. She treated me for two months but then she died. Had she lived another month, I might have regained my eyesight fully. Were it not for the two months she treated me, I might never have seen any more.

Germany, and Frankfurt in particular, was especially well-endowed with Jewish women physicians. The first recorded name to have survived, was of a woman named Selekeid who was practising in 1393. But again, their names are all that is remembered about the Frankfurt doctors. There is no information anywhere about their lives or their medical activities. Apart from their dealings with the tax authorities. The Frankfurt treasury was good at keeping tax records.

There must have been some sort of tax exemption for doctors in Frankfurt, but it evidently wasn’t consistent. In 1439, women doctors were ordered to pay the same tax as all other Jews, suggesting they were not doing so before. If they didn’t pay they were ordered to leave the city. But there were exceptions. One doctor, who was treating the toll-master of the bridge was excused from paying any tax at all, and in 1457 a woman doctor who had been ordered to leave the city because she hadn’t paid her taxes, was offered a discount if she would only consent to stay. The city agreed to tax her at the same lower rate that rabbis and cantors paid. Some years later, when an outbreak of plague highlighted the shortage of doctors in Frankfurt, a Jewish woman who visiting Frankfurt was excused from paying the ‘strangers’ tax’. They needed her to help deal with the disease.

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For many women, their skills at medicine cancelled out the disadvantages they suffered under as Jews. Sarah of Würzburg was given a licence by the local archbishop to practise medicine throughout his lands. She had to pay ten florins a year for the privilege but in return the archbishop guaranteed that she may practise her profession without interference: “And should anyone intend to prosecute her or actually do so, against such one we shall take action to the best of our ability so that he be stopped, unconditionally.”

Sarah must have been a particularly successful doctor because the local prince, Friedrich von Riedern, issued a decree granting her the usufruct, or right to benefit, from all his possessions, throughout the Duchy of Franconia.

It goes without saying that women Jewish doctors, just like their male colleagues, were often the target of abuse. When the Jews of Trent were massacred in a blood libel, after the death of a young child, the Catholic priest Bernadino of Siena accused Brunetta, a female Jewish physician, of supplying needles to draw off his blood. A 14th century Swiss poet complained about Christians ‘who are so foolish, that. . . they call in a Jew or a Jewess who practices medicine . . . even though there is a Christian physician in their midst.’

It is a shame that so little information has survived about Jewish women who practised as doctors in the Middle Ages. It would be instructive and enjoyable to know more. Although a few rose to prominence, like Floreta, Sarah of Würzburg and Manuela of Rome who was the Pope’s personal physician, the great majority carried out their work quietly and invisibly, as was so often the lot of medieval women.

Even when Jews began writing medical textbooks in the 15^th century there were no women among them. But the text books themselves, and their authors, are another story. I hope to write more about them shortly.

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In last week’s article I referred briefly to Henry Ford’s antisemitism. Some readers have asked to know more so I thought I would follow up on him this week.

In many ways Henry Ford was a remarkable man. He revolutionised car production and paid his employees well, setting new standards for manufacturing industries. But his heirs knew that all the good he had done was obliterated by a fierce, unyielding antisemitism that resulted in him being the only American honoured by Hitler. His descendants have put tremendous energy in trying to make up for his behaviour. But they cannot change the man he was.  

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Ford set up his car manufacturing company in 1903. Ten years later he revolutionised the production line, reducing the time it took to produce a car from 12.5 hours to just over an hour and a half. By 1925 he was producing 10,000 vehicles a day. It allowed him to slash the price of his cars and give ordinary working people the chance of owning their own vehicle.  

However, his new production line made his workers’ jobs monotonous. He found it hard to retain staff. Realising that it was cheaper to pay them more to keep them than to train replacements, he doubled their wages, to $5 a day. Suddenly a job at Ford’s was one every factory worker wanted.

The pay rise came at a price though. In order to qualify, workers had to allow Ford’s inspectors into their homes. If the inspectors found that their houses were dirty, or if their wives worked or the workers drank or gambled, they were denied the pay rise. Immigrant workers were obliged to attend classes to Americanise themselves and black employees were only allowed to perform the most menial and dangerous tasks. Henry Ford had strong, unconscionable views on social structures and hierarchies.

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The authors of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion may have thought they were original. They may have imagined they were the first to fake and distribute a document purporting to show that Jews were bent on world domination. On the other hand, perhaps they knew that a similar forgery had been produced before. Perhaps they were hoping their lies proved as successful as the 16^th century Spanish fake, Carta de los Judíos de Constantinopla, the Letter from the Jews of Constantinople.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an antisemitic fabrication first published in Russia at the beginning of the 20^th century. It was soon shown to be fictional; the so-called Elders of Zion do not exist and their ‘protocols’, 24 chapters alleging to be the minutes of the Elders’ meetings, were the product of the writer’s imagination. Nevertheless, the forgery was distributed widely. A newspaper owned by Henry Ford, the inventor of the Ford motor car, published articles based on the Protocols. The Nazis adopted it, citing it to justify genocide. The forgery is still quoted by antisemites, to bolster their pretence that Jews are planning to control the world economy and media. It is regularly cited in Arab countries, as anti-Israel propaganda.

Unlike the Protocols, it took a long time for the Carta de los Judíos de Constantinopla to be exposed as a forgery. The document was written in the mid-16^th century and it wasn’t until 1887 that the French scholar, Isidore Loeb, showed to be a fake. Few, if any, racists, antisemites or islamophobes today have heard of it but their hatred is still fuelled, in part, by the nonsense contained in the Carta.

The background to the Carta de los Judíos de Constantinopla was the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. To avoid expulsion, many Jews converted to Catholicism and became known as New Christians. Some of them used their Christian status as a mask, continuing to perform Jewish rituals secretly in their homes, risking their lives in doing so, hoping the Inquisition would not find out. Others adapted to their new religion with alacrity, dispensing altogether with their connection to Judaism and becoming sincere Christians. Several entered the Christian clergy, some even rising to high rank. Like the acclaimed Talmudic scholar, Rabbi Shlomo Halevi, who was baptised, changed his name to Pablo de Santa Maria and ended up as Bishop of Burgos.

There was a lot of resentment among Old Christians, those who had been born into the Christian faith, about the sudden arrival of New Christians into Spanish society. It seemed to them that, all of a sudden, people who one day had been vilified as Jews and were treated as second class citizens, were now sharing the same rights and privileges as those who had been Christians all their lives. As the New Christians began to prosper in Spain, a backlash broke out against them.

The first that most people knew about the Carta was when a book of stories and curiosities, called La Silvia Curiosa, was printed in Zaragosa. Among its curiosities were two letters. One had allegedly been sent, just before their expulsion, by the Jews of Spain to their co-religionists in Constantinople. They were asking for advice on how to deal with their dilemma; should they allow themselves to be expelled, or should they convert? The other letter was a supposed reply from Constantinople, advising them to convert, but to do so with the intention of fatally undermining Spanish society:

Concerning what you write about the fact that they are seizing your goods, well, turn you children into merchants so that, bit by bit, they may seize their goods. In connection with what you have said about their murdering you, well turn your sons into doctors and apothecaries, so that they may murder them. As regards what you say about their destroying your synagogues, turn your sons into clergymen and theologians, so that they may destroy their churches. . . . in this way you will get your revenge.

The book containing the fake letters was printed in 1580. However, the forgery was made some time earlier. The scholar, Francois Soyer, on whose research this article is based, suggests that they were written around 1550, when the controversy stirred up by the Old Christians against the new converts was reaching a crescendo. One of the accusations they hurled at the New Christians was that they were planning to take over Spain. The forged letters were cited as proof.

Those who resented the privileges enjoyed by the New Christians were particularly outraged when converts from Judaism were given senior positions in the church, often in preference to Old Christians. The letters were alluded to several times in propaganda written against the New Christians. One bishop claimed to have heard a rumour that the New Christians had sought the advice of ‘foreign synagogues’, who had told them to infiltrate the clergy, the legal and medical professions, to inflict as much harm on Spain as they could.

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The controversy over the place of New Christians in Spanish society was eventually settled by the introduction of new laws, known as limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood. These days we would call them racial laws. Under these regulations, anyone applying for positions in the church, government or professions had to demonstrate that their blood was ‘pure’, in other words that they were descended from unadulterated Christian stock and that they had no trace of Jewish heritage. The laws were draconian and their impact far-reaching. Whenever it was claimed that someone did not have pure Christian blood, a stigma automatically attached to their entire family; if one member of the family had Jewish heritage than clearly the entire family did.

The introduction of the blood purity laws soon divided Spanish society along racial lines. Jews who had converted to Christianity, believing that they would be able to live normal lives in Spain, discovered that because their blood was not ‘pure’, they were still treated as second class citizens, denied the opportunity to advance their careers. The same applied to Muslims of course.

As time passed, the fake letters became a central component of Spanish propaganda against the New Christians. They were quoted in all antisemitic publications produced in the country during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. They even turned up in books that were not intended as antisemitic propaganda, including a 17^th century treatise about the role and work of public officials and an 18^th century text discussing how doctors should behave. Even when the forged letters finally disappeared from view, the idea of purity of blood continued to circulate in Spanish society.

Limpieza de sangre has had a significant impact in the evolution of modern racism. Blood purity underpins all racist discourse, even today. The anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws instituted in Germany in 1935 were based on the invented premise that a pure German bloodline existed, one that was untainted by any ‘foreign’ element. Today, racists and far right politicians regularly abuse and condemn those who are not ‘one of us.’ There is of course no scientific basis for limpieza de sangre, but that hasn’t stopped the idea from percolating down through racist channels for nearly 500 years.

The history of the Carta de los Judíos de Constantinopla and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion reminds us that racism can only justify itself through lies and forgeries. Antisemitic calumnies have been around for a very long time. And yet they disappear, The Spanish forgeries have long been forgotten. The same will happen to the Protocols one day. Sooner or later, maybe racism will vanish as well.

This article is based on Francois Soyer’s paper The Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory in Sixteenth-Century Spain and Portugal and the Origins of the Carta de los Judíos de Constantinopla: New Evidence, Sefarad, vol. 74:2, pp. 369-388

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In the year 40 CE, the Roman emperor Gaius was petitioned by a Jewish delegation from Alexandria.  Among the delegation, probably the leader, was the philosopher, writer and Bible commentator Philo, a man who deserves more attention than history has given him.

The Emperor Gaius, better known by his derogatory nickname Caligula, meaning ‘little boots’, had recently been appointed to office. The delegation was visiting him to discuss the dismal situation of the Jews of Alexandria, who were suffering from a sustained campaign of attacks and persecution. (I wrote about it a few months ago):

The Roman governor of Alexandria, a man named Flaccus, was encouraging the Greek citizens of the city to riot, attacking Jews in the streets and setting fire to their homes and synagogues. In the synagogues that they were unable to burn, they erected statues of Roman gods and of Caligula.

Philo’s delegation set off for Rome to ask Caligula to rule on the trumped-up charges that had led to the riots, to convince him to find in the Jews’ favour and bring the attacks to an end. An opposing delegation of Alexandrian Greeks also set off, hoping to persuade the Emperor to support them; to allow them to deprive the Jews of their civil rights.

Philo was relatively confident that his delegation would succeed. The Alexandrian Jews had lived peaceably in the city since its foundation in 331 BCE and had maintained a good relationship with Caligula’s predecessors, Tiberius and Augustus, when Alexandria came under Roman rule in 30 BCE.

Philo, in his account of the delegation’s meeting with Caligula, explained that they had every reason to believe that he too would be as benevolent as his forerunners. After all, he had inherited a prosperous and peaceful empire, one that was happy and joyful (so Philo says), delighted at their Emperor’s recent recovery from a severe and debilitating illness. Furthermore, even before the delegation had set off for Rome, Caligula had recalled the villainous Flaccus from Alexandria and had ordered his execution. Although the anti-Jewish feeling in the city had not abated when they left, the delegation set off for Rome with high hopes. They were confident that the Emperor would rule in their favour. What could possibly go wrong?

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A story is told about King Francis I of France, who was suffering from an interminable illness. His doctors could do nothing for him and in despair he sent a message to King Charles V in Spain, asking him to send him a Jewish doctor. The Spanish king was perplexed, he couldn’t understand why Francis might want a Jewish doctor rather than a Christian. He couldn’t help anyway, because this was in the early 1500s and a few years earlier all the Jews had been expelled from Spain. So Charles sent Francis the best Christian doctor he could find.

When the doctor arrived in France he and the king started to talk about religion. It didn’t take  long for Francis to realise that the man was not a Jew. He was furious. He told him to go back to his country “for I have Christian physicians enough in my own court and house. I took you to be a Jew, who in my opinion are those who have a natural ability for cures.” Francis then sent to Constantinople for a Jewish doctor, who cured him with a few doses of donkey’s milk.

The story may not be completely true but it does show that, even in an age where Jews were generally reviled and persecuted, Jewish doctors were respected as being able to cure illnesses that nobody else could. The reason has much to do with the extremely long tradition of Jewish medicine, a tradition that was already well established by the 10^th century and quite possibly long before. Even the Talmud, completed around the year 500, contains remedies for certain illnesses, and although they tend to be of the ‘eye of newt and toe of frog’ variety, it is clear that the Talmudic authors knew of a few surgical operations, like amputations and a primitive form of caesarean section. 

The earliest Jewish medical treatise, The Book of Healing was written by someone whose life story is unknown, he is called simply Asaf HaRofeh, or Asaf the Healer. Dated somewhere between the 7^th and 10^th centuries and written in Hebrew, it is a sort of medical encyclopaedia, covering every aspect of ancient medicine, other than surgery. As we would expect from a book so ancient there is a lot of mythical content; the author begins by explaining that Noah was taught medicine by the angel Raphael (the name means God heals), and that the Jews then passed medical knowledge on to the Indians, Babylonians and Egyptians. Although he tries to show that medical knowledge in his time was based on Talmudic medicine, the content of The Book of Healing is almost exclusively based on ancient Greek teachings; it even contains a version of the Hippocratic Oath that doctors still take today when they qualify.

The Book of Healing is a historical curiosity, but it doesn’t explain why there have been so many Jewish doctors throughout history. The person who really began the story of Jews in medicine was Shabbetai Donnolo who, fortunately, tells us quite a bit about himself. Born in 913 in the Apulian town of Oria, on the heel of southern Italy he was taken captive at the age of 12 after an invasion by the Fatimid caliphate. Eventually ransomed by his family he learnt Latin and Greek and studied astronomy, astrology and medicine, seeking out non-Jewish teachers who could help him expand his knowledge of those topics not typically taught in a Jewish environment. Around the year 970 he wrote The Book of Remedies, a treatise on pharmaceutics that was designed, he said, to instruct Jewish physicians in the art of dispensing medicine according to the wisdom of Byzantium and Israel. Written in Hebrew, it was one of the earliest books not to be written in a monastery and the first medical treatise to be written in Southern Italy. Showing signs of Arabic, Latin and Byzantine influences, the book may well be responsible for the legend that Donnolo, together with a Catholic, a Greek Orthodox Christian and a Muslim was one of the four founders of a medical school in Salerno.

In ancient times healing was regarded as a miraculous process and doctors were assumed to have mystical and spiritual powers. Donnolo was as much a mystic as he was a medical man, including among his works a commentary on an early mystical treatise, the complicated and obscure Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation.

It was the belief that the ability to heal reflected one’s spiritual and religious qualities which explains why so many Jewish doctors, all the way through medieval and early modern times, were also rabbis. At that time rabbis did not earn salaries and therefore anyone learned in religious matters needed a profession. Since Jews were excluded from most professions apart from medicine, it made sense for those who were ordained as rabbis to become doctors. And whatever anyone thought of Jews, nobody was in any doubt that they were heirs to an ancient tradition of wisdom. So a medical doctor who was also a rabbi was regarded as someone possessed of valuable and unusual healing powers. This explains why Francis I of France was so insistent on being treated by a Jewish doctor.

From around the mid-8^th century, Muslim scholars started translating Greek works into Arabic, among them the works of Hippocrates and Galen, the most important of all medical writers in ancient Greece. Jews living in Islamic lands, who spoke both Hebrew and Arabic, were not slow to take advantage of the new texts now circulating, improving their knowledge and kicking off the next phase in the Jewish relationship with medicine. The names of three Jewish physicians from this period have survived: Masarjuwayh, his son Isa, and Furat ben Shahnatha. They are all quite obscure characters, all that has survived is their names. Unlike their contemporary, Isaac Israeli, who was born around 855 in Egypt and died in Kairouan in North Africa, well into his 80s.

Isaac Israeli wrote several medical treatises, among them the Book of Urine, On Simple Remedies and Foodstuffs, a book on the philosophy of medicine, The Book of the Elements and On Theriac, about an old Greek pharmaceutical preparation, used as an antidote to just about everything. His most important work was the Book of Fevers. It was the first ever written on the subject and became very popular among Jewish and Arabic physicians, was widely read and frequently quoted. In 1087 it was translated into Latin by Constantine the African (who didn’t bother to attribute it to Israeli), becoming perhaps the first example of Jewish scientific scholarship to be studied in Christian Europe. The Book of Fevers was later translated back into Hebrew, both from the Latin version and from the Arabic original. It was quoted as late as 1621, in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

It was not easy for Jews to study to become doctors. Medical schools were few and far between in those days and even where they existed Jews would have been excluded (Padua was probably the first university to admit Jews and that wasn’t for several centuries). In order to become a doctor a student would train with a master, usually another physician. Jews and Muslims studied and taught together. Isaac Israeli trained the North African physician Ibn al-Jazzar, he too would go on to carve out a successful career for himself as a doctor and medical authority.

It is impossible to say how many Jewish doctors there were in Islamic lands by the 12^th century. Donnolo and Isaac Israeli were just the first of several Jewish medical writers and, given that the number of practising doctors is likely to have greatly exceeded that of technical authors, we should assume that by the time the most famous of all medieval Jewish doctors came along, the great Maimonides, he was already one of many.

Maimonides, who like so many others was both a rabbi and a doctor, is far more famous as a philosopher and for his expertise in Jewish law than he was for his medical abilities. He only trained as a doctor because his brother, a merchant who supported him, was drowned in a shipwreck.  But as a doctor, Maimonides was no slouch. Born in Cordoba in Spain, he was forced by persecution to flee, first to Morocco and eventually to Egypt where he was appointed as a physician to the royal court,  eventually ending up as the sultan, Saladin’s, personal doctor. Also the head of the Jewish community in Cairo, he complained that the combination of his communal duties and medical practice left him permanently exhausted, with no time at all for himself. It didn’t stop him writing though. Apart from his works of law, philosophy and the many epistles he sent as a rabbi, he wrote 10 medical works. He summarised the works of Galen and Hippocrates to help young doctors to study, explained the origins and cures of various illnesses and  composed a book of 1500 short pieces of medical instruction and advice, based on Greek and Persian writers. Maimonides’s reputation and influence ensured that medicine was now accepted as a profession of particular interest to Jews.

The greatest days of Jewish doctors however were still to come. It is a subject we may return to in future weeks. If you would like to read more about the history of Jewish doctors, please indicate this in the short poll below. Likewise, please tell me if you wouldn’t!

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The destruction, in the year 70 CE, of the Temple in Jerusalem, was a turning point in world history. It brought the old, sacrifice-based Hebrew faith to an end, enabled Christianity to emerge as a global religion and created a new form of Judaism, based on the supremacy of reason and ideas.

It impacted global politics too. As a result of the Temple’s fall, the anniversary of which falls this week, the Roman commander, Vespasian, was hailed as the new Emperor of Rome. His triumph brought a civil war in the Roman Empire to an end and ushered in a ‘golden age’, laying the foundations for millennia of Western history. It is impossible to imagine what the world would look like today, had the Jerusalem Temple not been destroyed.

The fall of the Temple came after four years of war. The fighting had begun with a series of uprisings against Roman occupation by the people of Judea (the Roman name for Israel). The uprisings needn’t have happened: Roman occupation had its good points as well as its bad, and by and large Rome ruled over a peaceful and submissive empire. That the Judeans found it necessary to rise in revolt was particularly the fault of one man. His name was Gessius Florus, he was the procurator, or financial administrator of the Roman province of Judea. Gessius Florus was a petty official with too much power, and a very nasty piece of work.

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What do you do when you are born into a large, wealthy and prominent family, where expectations are riding high for your success, but you know you are not really needed? Because you have brothers in the family firm who are just as capable as you, and you only work in the business because family convention says you have no choice? Likewise, what do you do when you and your family are the victims of antisemitism, simply because of their wealth, blamed for events far beyond the family’s control?

These were two of the dilemmas facing Edmond de Rothschild in Paris, as he tried to make a career for himself worthy of the family name, a career that would make full use of of his undoubted skills and talents.

Baron Edmond James de Rothschild was the youngest son of James de Rothschild and the grandson of Mayer Amschel and Gutle Rothschild. Residents of the Frankfurt ghetto, his grandparents had founded the family bank and spawned a family now ranked among the richest in the world. James de Rothschild, himself the youngest of his siblings, had married his cousin Betty (the Rothschilds tended to marry among themselves). They’d had five children, the oldest a girl and then four boys. James had been sent by his father to open a branch of the family bank in Paris, which he dutifully did, but he’d already had the biggest adventure of his life as a young man. The Duke of Wellington had entrusted his brother Nathan in London with the transfer of the wages of the British forces fighting Napoleon in Europe; requiring him to make sure that the troops received their money safely. Nathan enlisted James’s help, getting him to smuggle the vast sums of money across the English channel, past the noses of Napoleon’s guards and distribute it to the various British commanders in Europe.

James had done everything asked of him, dressing up in a variety of disguises to pass undetected, time and again, through France. After that experience, James found running the Rothschild banking house in Paris somewhat dull.

James’s four sons all went into the family business, the bank known as Rothschild Frères. After James died, his oldest son, Alphonse, became the head, his younger brother Edmond working dutifully under him, as was expected. He directed the family’s railway construction company and travelled to Bukharu (now in Uzbekistan) to investigate the local oilfields. But one suspects his heart wasn’t truly in it.

Art and science were Edmond’s great passions. He built up a collection of over 40,000 drawings and engravings, including 100 by Rembrandt, many of which he eventually donated to the Louvre in Paris. He founded several scientific research bodies and sponsored archaeological investigations in Egypt, Syria and Palestine. But he refocused his energies in 1882, after he'd had his first serious exposure to antisemitism. A major French bank, the Unione Générale had collapsed and, even though the bank’s founder and managing director was arrested for fraud, the blame for the bank’s collapse was placed on ‘Rothschild and his gang’. It was not a pleasant time for the family.

The experience affected Edmond’s response when, shortly afterwards, he received a visit from Rabbi Shmuel Mohilever, one of the leaders of the emerging Zionist movement in Russia. The situation for Jews in Russia was desperate. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II the previous year had resulted in a wave of pogroms, as fierce and as murderous as any that had gone before. On top of the violence, the Russian government was introducing a raft of discriminatory anti-Jewish measures, limiting their rights to residency, imposing quotas on the numbers who could attend educational establishments, barring them from many professions and making it nigh on impossible for craftsmen and artisans to find employment. It made Edmond realise how mild, in comparison, his family's experience of antisemitism had been.

Rabbi Mohilever and his colleagues were convinced that the only solution to the suffering they saw all around them was to encourage Jews to leave Russia and settle in Palestine. It was for this purpose that Mohilever was travelling to see Edmond. He was hoping for financial aid.

The Chief Rabbi of Paris, Zadok Kahn, brought Rabbi Mohilever to meet Edmond. There was no reason to imagine the meeting would go well. On the face of it, the wealthy, art loving, Parisian sophisticate had very little in common with the impoverished, yeshiva educated rabbi from Bialystock. Initially, Mohilever was overwhelmed by Edmond’s polite but distant manner. For a brief moment,” he wrote, “I was flabbergasted, but then I suddenly reminded myself of the great purpose for which I had come, and I ignored my weaknesses and fragile health.” He told Edmond that he had neither the education nor sophistication to address him in the way that he was used to, but that he had a proposal upon which the spirit of the Jewish people depended. He said that he knew that he might be sent away empty-handed, but at least he would have fulfilled his obligation, he would have carried out his mission to request assistance.

The proposal that the rabbi put before Rothschild was to lend his organisation, Hovevei Tzion, the Lovers of Zion, funds to buy land for an agricultural settlement in Palestine. The reason that Rothschild agreed to help was not because he was touched by the rabbi’s religious simplicity or by a heart rending appeal. He agreed to help because he could see that Rabbi Mohilever was a credible, practically minded individual who had come to him, not with dreams and fantasies, but with a plan. Mohilever and his colleagues in Hovevei Tzion had been running agricultural camps in Poland and Russia. They understood the scale of the task ahead of them. They were well connected; Mohilever had come to Rothschild with recommendations from other possible benefactors in Europe. And he had prepared for the meeting well. As the discussions between the two men developed, Mohilever introduced Rothschild to the leader of the small settlement in Palestine which was already beginning to farm the land they hoped to buy. For Edmond, the proposal that the rabbi put before him was as well thought out and practical as any other business deal he had evaluated.

That Baron Edmond considered the rabbi’s proposal from a practical point of view, rather than sentimentally, was confirmed some years later when he met Theodore Herzl, the architect of the Zionist movement. Herzl also wanted money but Edmond refused to support him. He did not believe that political Zionism was a practical endeavour, he could not see Turkey, which governed Palestine, or the Great Powers agreeing to the creation of a Jewish State. He turned out to be wrong of course, but it shows that he was pragmatic in his outlook; his support for Mohilver’s agricultural settlement in Palestine was because he believed it was realistic, not because he shared the rabbi’s dream.

Baron de Rothschild’s support for Rabbi Mohilever’s plans was just the beginning of his involvement in building a Jewish homeland. He made sure that the settlement, Rishon le Zion, lived up to the meaning of its name, First in Zion, by buying more land and funding new projects. He gave the settlers economic security by investing in agriculture and industry. He opened wineries both in Rishon le Zion and further north in Zichron Ya’akov, and set up factories for the production of silk. He did this for five years without even visiting Palestine, only in 1887 did he and his wife Adelheid sail to Jaffa.

Theodore Herzl has gone down in history, quite rightly, as the man whose vision and passion led to the creation of the Jewish homeland. But Baron Edmond de Rothschild prepared the ground. As the deteriorating situation in Russia and Poland created successive waves of immigration to Palestine, it was the infrastructure that Edmond built there which helped the immigrants to settle.

Edmond ended his direct involvement with Palestine in 1899, transferring responsibility for his projects to the Palestine Colonial Association, set up originally to assist Jewish immigrants to Argentina by Baron Maurice de Hirsch. But Edmond’s connection with the land never dimmed. He died in 1934 and the following year so did his wife Adelheid. In April 1954 their remains were transferred from Paris to the new State of Israel. They were met with a 19 gun salute at Haifa and given a state funeral. They are now buried close to the settlement Edmond founded in Zichron Ya’akov.

Edmond de Rothschild discovered his answer to the question of what to do if the family business doesn’t need you. He was born into riches and lived a charmed and privileged life. But he took it upon himself to invest time, energy and money to make the most of his opportunities; arguably far more so than if he had simply sat out his years working in the family bank.