Haven't they already suffered enough that you must send them to Staten Island?
What if Jerusalem had assented to the 1538 Sanhedrin.
- Thread starter jacob ningen
- Start date
Well... my aunt doesn't live there yet, so I guess it can't be that bad...
THE CONSUL JANUARY 1840
New
THE CONSUL
JANUARY 1840
JANUARY 1840
The voyage from Bordeaux to New York would have been more pleasant had Achille David Seligmann been able to make it in the spring, but the ship was well-found and the winds were favorable, so it wasn’t past enduring. And when the voyage passed, as all things eventually do, he was welcomed to America by a clear, mild winter morning.
It had only been nine years since he’d last seen New York, but the city seemed to have doubled in size. Buildings were going up everywhere, and the noise of the arguments between the construction crews and passing carters almost drowned out the Hudson steamboats’ whistles; the cart and carriage traffic was twice as crushing, the conversations seemed to be in several more languages, and the streets rumbled with the passing of the New York and Harlem locomotives. The landscape before Achille was one where even a Parisian might fear to tread.
His courage wouldn’t be needed today, though, because that wasn’t where he was going.
“Port Richmond, sir?” said a boy of eleven or twelve in response to Achille’s question. “Right this way, sir.” He led Achille through the maze of docks and warehouses to the smaller piers where the ferries waited. “That one,” he said, pointing to a wallowing tub of a barge that was already filling up with men in workman’s clothes.
Achille, who’d changed ten francs with the ship’s purser before landing, tipped the boy a dime and hurried to buy a ticket. The ferry cast off a few minutes later. The air became breezy as the boat cleared the Battery and entered New York Harbor, and most of the passengers went below; a few remained on deck, talking about the horse races and spitting tobacco juice over the rail, and Achille joined them to watch the coastline pass.
The harbor gave way to the Kill van Kull, the narrow strait separating Staten Island from New Jersey, and finally to Port Richmond, a town that Achille had come to know well in his last sojourn in the United States. The harbor spread out before him with its warehouses and cranes; beyond were hotels, lumberyards, dye-works, the oyster-barons’ mansions, and most important of all, the Westfield coach.
Whatever god of transportation was overseeing Achille’s luck that morning was still with him; the noon coach was drawn up outside the hotel. Its route led through a saddle between two hills and then down to the Amboy Road, which ran south through a low-lying country of woods, streams and small farms. At two o’clock, the winter shadows just beginning to lengthen, the land rose again, and there, at a small settlement by the bay, was Achille’s destination.
The village was dominated by an inn built in the French provincial style; the sign at its entrance read “Le Marais” and bore an image of the Sainte-Avoye synagogue. Next to it was the Boulangerie Cohen, the shop of Moïse the saddler where Achille had worked when he first came to America, the wooden stall where Jacob Lévy sold his orchard’s produce, the office of Lazar Bloch, Avocat. Achille stood in front of the inn and turned fully around, taking in stores and workshops and houses, and for a moment was again at home.
That was where Salomon the innkeeper found him.
“Achille!” Salomon cried, enfolding him in a bear hug. “It’s really you! I thought I’d seen a ghost! What brings you back to the United States?”
“You didn’t know? Louis Philippe has appointed me consul to Philadelphia – wasn’t it in all the newspapers?”
Both men laughed; the appointment of a provincial consul might merit two lines on a back page of the Moniteur, or then again it might not. “Come inside. You must get some rest, stay for supper – the Chambre introuvable is meeting tonight, and they’ll all be glad to see you.”
Achille obeyed, following Salomon to an upstairs bedroom where he put down his bags. He thought of taking a nap, but went down to the salon instead. It was past the lunch hour but the air was still fragrant with pipe smoke and the tables were littered with newspapers: the Herald and the Mirror, month-old Paris dailies, the Shaliach from Acre, the Modern Israelite. Achille picked up a copy of the last; he’d learned much of his English from the Modern Israelite, and even contributed a poem to it once. It had been a bad one, but seeing it in print along with the news and stories and essays had made him feel like an American Jew for a moment rather than an exile.
Salomon found him there again a bit past four. “They should start getting here soon,” he said. “And you – you’re going to Philadelphia by yourself? Still no wife?”
“I’m a confirmed bachelor,” Achille answered. That wasn’t entirely true; at eighteen, he’d exchanged vows with a man of the same age named François, only for François’s family to marry him off six months later. Since then, he’d learned to be more circumspect. But it was true enough for most purposes, and he was spared any further explanation by the first of the Chambre arriving.
Bloch, Cohen, Lévy, Todros – all the people whose names were on the buildings outside, all the exiles of the Restoration. They called themselves the Chambre Introuvable, the Jews who’d been as implacable as the ultra-royalists – the rabbis who’d been sentenced to exile during the White Terror because they’d refused to endorse the École nationale rabbinique’s ruling on monarchy; the civil servants and army officers who’d supported Bonaparte during the Hundred Days; the liberals who’d defended them in public. They’d found their way here as the Huguenots had – two peoples who France had no use for, making a new France on the bay, writing their poetry and political tracts for the Modern Israelite and the Franco-American journals, finding new trades in which to prosper…
Achille himself had been too young for that; he’d been only fifteen during the year of the White Terror. But he’d come from a liberal family, and things had become worse again when Villèle’s ultras returned to power in 1821 and still more so after Charles X became king. That was when…
“Achille!” said Daniel Cohen, entering the room – a different Cohen, a Daniel who Achille had come to know in the midst of the lion’s den. It had been 1825, Daniel was the lay president of the Bordeaux Consistory and an ardent republican, and he’d held meetings that he could no longer be charged with sedition for now that the White Terror was over – so the public prosecutor, supported by the bishop, had indicted him under the new Anti-Sacrilege Act and charged him with desecrating the host.
It had been generations since the last time a Jew had been charged with host desecration – in 1761, at Nancy – and centuries since the libel had been common, but Daniel’s association with anti-clerical radicals made the accusation plausible, and in a deeply divided country the charge had been explosive. There were riots, not only in Bordeaux but in Paris and throughout Alsace and Lorraine; shops and homes were burned and people died. King Charles, to his credit, had sent in the army to suppress them, but there were many in his court and among the bishops who viewed the incident as an object lesson.
Achille, then, had been twenty-four, new to the bar, and willing to fight; he’d joined another young lion, Étienne Garnier-Pagès, as advocate for the defense. The trial took place in the courthouse of the College of Guienne, under heavy guard; the judges had ultimately been forced to acquit for lack of evidence, but it had been made clear both to Daniel and Achille that if they valued their safety, they’d best move elsewhere.
And so both of them had come here to the Chambre, Achille had earned his bread sweeping up at Moïse’s saddlery while he learned English, and they’d led the Jewish squad in football games against the Huguenots…
“When you left with Rottembourg and the others, we thought we’d seen the last of you,” Daniel said. And Achille had thought so too. The July Revolution and the amnesty of 1831 had been a godsend for him, a chance to return to his homeland and resume the practice of law. Some others had felt the same; General Rottembourg, though an American citizen and mayor of Westfield by then, was too much of a French patriot to resist the offer of pardon and reinstatement in his rank. He and Achille had returned on the same ship and sat together as lay members of the Third Paris Sanhedrin that had affirmed the consistories’ freedom of conscience; Rottembourg had taken command of the garrison at Dijon, Achille had reopened his chambers at Bordeaux, and America had gradually come to seem like a dream.
The arrival of the food interrupted these memories. Salomon was a fine cook and served up roast goose and greens, with fresh bread from Cohen the baker’s oven. The wine was from the Galilee – the French consistories had just begun to produce kosher wine for export, and of the wine that could be made from New York grapes, the less said the better – but the calvados was local, from Jacob Lévy’s farm, and potent enough that even the Huguenots swore by it.
The dinner continued well into the night; Achille related the news of other friends who’d returned to France, and the conversation ranged across continents and centuries. It was the conversation he’d grown used to in the Chambre Introuvable, the Jews whose souls no king could obtain, and he realized how much he’d missed it. He promised to visit again once he was situated in Philadelphia, a promise he intended to keep, and as the long day ended, he wondered what awaited him there.
_______
There was a railroad now from South Amboy to Camden. No railroads had yet been built in Bordeaux, and though Achille had of course heard of them, he still thought of travel in terms of a stagecoach’s speed. To leave South Amboy at dawn and to arrive at Camden when it was still morning and be at the Philadelphia ferry landing by noon… that was something new in the world. America was vastness, but it was being tamed.
As luck would have it, Achille’s seatmate on the Camden and Amboy Railroad benches, Max Gutheim, was also a Jew – born in Munich, he said, and living in America since the riots of 1819. He’d lived in New York for a while but had lately moved to Cincinnati where he dealt in wool, and was returning there from a successful trading journey to Bremen.
“You’re going to Philadelphia?” said Gutheim. “It’s a good city – everyone likes the Jews there except the Jews. And you won’t be one of their Jews, so even the Jews will like you.”
“We’ll see,” Achille answered, doing his best to be noncommittal.
They parted ways at the landing at the foot of Market Street, and Achille stopped a moment to get his bearings. Philadelphia was a city on a more human scale than New York – around the same size as Bordeaux, the size a city should be. It was bustling, but not chaotic; the streets were well-planned and well-kept. The people, at least in this part of the city, seemed prosperous; the men wore austere black suits and the women were dressed in the Paris fashions from two or three years ago.
It was the women’s dresses – the full sleeves, the frills below the shoulder, the hats – that gave Achille a strange sensation of having traveled back in time. The sensation wasn’t a bad one; 1837 had been a good year for him. He’d been elected a deputy as one of Garnier-Pagès’ republicans; they hadn’t had the numbers to do much more than needle the king, but they’d had a grand time doing that. Much better than ’39, certainly, when he’d lost re-election and his law practice had been slow to recover. The sleeves had been much narrower that year.
He took a room at the United States Hotel a few blocks from the landing, and went to present his credentials at the office of the mayor and city recorder – he wasn’t sure if that was what a consul ought to do, but someone needed to know he was here. The recorder’s clerks were welcoming, if curious; so, too, was the beadle at Mikveh Israel on Cherry Street. And when he returned to the hotel, a card had been left for him with a Spruce Street address requesting that he call at his convenience upon Rebecca Ingersoll.
New to Philadelphia as Achille was, he knew that such an invitation could not be ignored. There was little in either Philadelphia or the American Jewish world that Rebecca Ingersoll didn’t touch; she was a member of all the civic clubs and charities, the publisher of the Modern Israelite, the founder of half a dozen Jewish foundling homes and schools, and a poet and essayist in her own right. She was also, as Achille saw upon being admitted into her drawing-room, as beautiful nearing sixty as she’d been at twenty when she was Rebecca Gratz. She’d been famous for that even in England and France, and that had made Charles Ingersoll’s conversion to Judaism to obtain her hand in marriage only a passing scandal – as a London cartoonist had put it, he wouldn’t blame a man for kneeling to Satan if that was what she required of him.
“I thought I’d welcome you to the city,” she said. “We’ve written to your king many times to ask him to appoint a consul here – there is so much that Philadelphia and France share already, and so much more that could be heard. And I can also welcome you to the diplomatic corps – I’m a consul myself, by appointment of Her Grace the Nagidah of the Galilee.”
“Her Grace? Is that what she calls herself now?”
“Not in the Holy Land, of course. But when she corresponds with other countries, she needs a title, doesn’t she?”
That sounded like the nagidah; she was a subtle one, by all accounts, and choosing a title that carried no pretensions of monarchy but made her equal to or greater than anyone but a monarch was in character. Rebecca was rumored to be subtle too, and when she’d gone to the Holy Land six years past, she and the nagidah must have found things to talk about.
He wondered that even the nagidah would have appointed a woman consul, but then realized what diplomacy a Galilean consul in the United States would need to do, and he understood. Most of the Galilee’s trade with the United States was with its Jews, and most Galilean travelers in America and vice versa were Jewish, so who better to maintain those relations than the woman who was everything in Jewish publishing and education? What the nagidah wanted was a diplomacy of persuasion, of stories, of mutual learning, and Rebecca could provide that not only in America but elsewhere.
It struck Achille that Rebecca might not be a bad model for his own schooling as a diplomat.
“I’ll have to organize a reception in your honor,” she said. “This is Society Hill, you’re due some society. And Charles and I will take you around the clubs. If you’re interested in music, we have a fine symphony here, and the lectures at the Franklin institute are always well-attended. We adore Franklin here – another thing we have in common with you, no?”
He nodded, and let the conversation carry him; before long, he’d promised to write an article for the Modern Israelite about the possibilities for Jews in France and to bring her a sample of Staten Island kosher calvados that she could ship to Tzfat. “We’ll have to get our rabbi to approve it, of course – you’ll give him a letter of introduction?”
It was an exhausting evening, much as the previous one with the Chambre had been, and by the end of it, he felt simultaneously at the center of everything and the edge of everything. Maybe that was how a diplomat was supposed to feel, or a Jew, or an expatriate.
_______
He rented a house on Mulberry Street that was suitable for a consul but modest enough for his stipend. He put together a list of French citizens in Philadelphia and another list of people he might call upon if any of them got in trouble – the Ingersolls helped with the latter, as did Lazar Bloch, who visited from Staten Island. He was a guest at parties and attended concerts and lectures. He made the rounds of the civic clubs and chambers of commerce to speak of the bounties of France, and the wine importers and cheesemongers gave him some orders to send on the next ship. Rebecca persuaded him to volunteer at the Hebrew Foundling Home and to teach a civics class at the Sunday school.
It was a whirl for a week or two, maybe for three. He learned his way around the city, its rich and poor quarters, its high and low society. He learned where the Turkish baths were, though he held off going to them; he wasn’t as confident in his ability to enter that world discreetly here as he was in Bordeaux or New York. He almost asked Rebecca in an unguarded moment – something told him that she’d know, and that she wouldn’t be unsympathetic – but he didn’t dare risk it. All in time.
And by the third week, he had time. Once the initial whirl was over, his duties took less and less of his day; he had the time to explore, to be a fixture at the literary and civic societies, to think. And what he began to think was that he’d been exiled again.
“That’s usually what a consulship in a faraway place is, yes,” said Daniel Cohen, who was the next to take the Camden and Amboy and visit him. “And the time to do it was after you lost your immunity as a deputy. The only wonder is that they took eight months to make the offer.”
“They needed to find someone to bring it to me.” The person who’d offered the appointment to Achille had been a Foreign Ministry clerk, true enough, but he’d also been the brother of a man who Achille had made assignations with in the Turkish baths. He would never know which of them had been indiscreet, but the message had carried. And now he was exiled again – a gentleman’s exile this time, but he had no doubt that his two-year appointment would be renewed for as long as Louis Philippe was king.
“I need to find something to do,” he told Rebecca a few days later.
“That’s a dangerous question to ask me,” Rebecca answered – she always had jobs she needed someone to do, and she was never shy about assigning them. “But I’ll take it in the spirit it’s offered. Is there a recommendation I can make for you?”
“When I was here the first time, I thought of reading law – once I had the English for it, qualifying for the bar here. Lazar Bloch said I could read with him, but then the amnesty happened…”
“There are half a dozen lawyers I know here who would take you on…”
“And I’m grateful, but I think I might go learn with him. Staten Island is close enough that I can come and go when I’m needed, and the Chambre is the closest thing to a home I have now. What I need is a clerk to help with my duties when I’m there…”
“My youngest daughter can keep an office in order, and her French is excellent.”
Another woman diplomat? That ran in Rebecca’s family, it seemed. And who was really to say what was proper for a woman – or for a man?
“Done,” he said. He reached out his hand to Rebecca’s and shook it as he would a man’s. “I’ll show her the system tomorrow, and then I’ll go to visit Lazar.”
“Do it. And for when you come back…” She reached into her reticule – a gift from Paris – and handed him another card.
He was back at his house before he looked at the card – it was blank, not one of Rebecca’s regular visiting cards, and an address and a name were written on it in her hand. He knew what address that was. He didn’t know where she’d learned the name. But he was sure she would never say a word.
At the edge of everything and at the center of everything. And if he didn't miss his guess, he had years ahead of him to travel from one to the other and back again.
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Notes on The Consul
1. While New York City (which at the time was limited to the island of Manhattan) didn’t actually double in population between 1830 and 1840, it did grow by more than 50 percent, from 202,589 to 312,710. The period from 1820-60 was one of very fast growth for NYC, with the population growing by 50 percent or more in each of those decades. Staten Island, in contrast, had 6000 people in 1820 IOTL and 11,000 in 1840, mostly on the north shore and around Tottenville; ITTL, the French Jewish emigres have added about 3000 to the population counting natural increase and have shifted the balance south, which is where the historical Huguenot settlement was. The township of Westfield (southwest Staten Island) ITTL is a majority French-speaking enclave.
2. Depending on how you look at it, the Jewish immigrants to the United States between 1815 and 1840 IOTL are either early forerunners of the Second Migration or a separate “Migration 1.5.” Like the Second Migration IOTL, many of them hail from the German states, and they’re starting to fan out from the East Coast to Midwest cities with German-speaking populations. On the other hand, the total volume of this migration is small – 15,000 to 20,000, which is enough to double the American Jewish population as compared to OTL but is dwarfed by the 100,000 to 150,000 who arrived IOTL between 1840 and 1860. It also includes a substantial French component, and AFAIK, there has never been a significant migration of French Jews to the United States IOTL.
Another thing that sets TTL’s early-mid 19th century migration apart is that it’s partly an ideological sorting. The immigrants are escaping repression and rising antisemitism, but they’re also choosing the American model of Jewish emancipation over the Napoleonic model – they’re voting with their feet for self-organized communities and individual liberty over state-supported communal institutions. There will be some migration the other way as well – as we saw in the 1814 story, the centralized and state-subsidized French Jewish community is able to offer funding and jobs to Jewish scientists and men of letters – and could result in Jews of different countries tending to have distinct attitudes toward citizenship.
3. The text of the Anti-Sacrilege Act, passed in 1825 by the ultra-royalist Villele government, shortly after the accession of Charles X, can be found at pages 104-107 of this article on the act’s legislative history. IOTL, the act was never applied against Jews. Both IOTL and ITTL, the death sentence for particularly serious violations was never applied, although a weaver named François Bourquin was sentenced to prison for theft of sacred vessels (he was later released under Louis Philippe). And yes, there was a host desecration libel in Nancy in 1761 IOTL, although such accusations were very uncommon after the 15th century.
4. IOTL, Rebecca Gratz never married, although she reportedly declined a proposal from a Gentile suitor which she would have accepted had he been Jewish. ITTL, this Gordian knot was cut in the manner of Alexander. Gratz being a famous beauty, Ingersoll being a man in love, the romance having a literary flavor, and Philadelphia being a philosemitic city by contemporary standards all combined to make the scandal a passing one, although if Sir Walter Scott truly did model the character of Rebecca in Ivanhoe on Gratz (the evidence for this IOTL is highly circumstantial, although it might actually be more likely ITTL due to Gratz’s greater prominence in the literary world), the TTL book might be rather different.
1. While New York City (which at the time was limited to the island of Manhattan) didn’t actually double in population between 1830 and 1840, it did grow by more than 50 percent, from 202,589 to 312,710. The period from 1820-60 was one of very fast growth for NYC, with the population growing by 50 percent or more in each of those decades. Staten Island, in contrast, had 6000 people in 1820 IOTL and 11,000 in 1840, mostly on the north shore and around Tottenville; ITTL, the French Jewish emigres have added about 3000 to the population counting natural increase and have shifted the balance south, which is where the historical Huguenot settlement was. The township of Westfield (southwest Staten Island) ITTL is a majority French-speaking enclave.
2. Depending on how you look at it, the Jewish immigrants to the United States between 1815 and 1840 IOTL are either early forerunners of the Second Migration or a separate “Migration 1.5.” Like the Second Migration IOTL, many of them hail from the German states, and they’re starting to fan out from the East Coast to Midwest cities with German-speaking populations. On the other hand, the total volume of this migration is small – 15,000 to 20,000, which is enough to double the American Jewish population as compared to OTL but is dwarfed by the 100,000 to 150,000 who arrived IOTL between 1840 and 1860. It also includes a substantial French component, and AFAIK, there has never been a significant migration of French Jews to the United States IOTL.
Another thing that sets TTL’s early-mid 19th century migration apart is that it’s partly an ideological sorting. The immigrants are escaping repression and rising antisemitism, but they’re also choosing the American model of Jewish emancipation over the Napoleonic model – they’re voting with their feet for self-organized communities and individual liberty over state-supported communal institutions. There will be some migration the other way as well – as we saw in the 1814 story, the centralized and state-subsidized French Jewish community is able to offer funding and jobs to Jewish scientists and men of letters – and could result in Jews of different countries tending to have distinct attitudes toward citizenship.
3. The text of the Anti-Sacrilege Act, passed in 1825 by the ultra-royalist Villele government, shortly after the accession of Charles X, can be found at pages 104-107 of this article on the act’s legislative history. IOTL, the act was never applied against Jews. Both IOTL and ITTL, the death sentence for particularly serious violations was never applied, although a weaver named François Bourquin was sentenced to prison for theft of sacred vessels (he was later released under Louis Philippe). And yes, there was a host desecration libel in Nancy in 1761 IOTL, although such accusations were very uncommon after the 15th century.
4. IOTL, Rebecca Gratz never married, although she reportedly declined a proposal from a Gentile suitor which she would have accepted had he been Jewish. ITTL, this Gordian knot was cut in the manner of Alexander. Gratz being a famous beauty, Ingersoll being a man in love, the romance having a literary flavor, and Philadelphia being a philosemitic city by contemporary standards all combined to make the scandal a passing one, although if Sir Walter Scott truly did model the character of Rebecca in Ivanhoe on Gratz (the evidence for this IOTL is highly circumstantial, although it might actually be more likely ITTL due to Gratz’s greater prominence in the literary world), the TTL book might be rather different.
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Saint Simonism is dead?
this is a dig at manischewitz on your(Edelstein's) part isnt it. I agree.
classical just the first citizen(wonder how hell react to Napoleon III)
The incident in the story involved one prosecutor and one bishop, but Charles X's reign in general was reactionary and repressive - the Anti-Sacrilege Act was from OTL, and some people really did go to jail because of it. And while Jewish emancipation in France was a done deal by then, there were still a minority among the reactionaries and in the Church who weren't completely reconciled to it. A host desecration libel - which, as I found, had a more recent history in ancien regime France than nearly anywhere else - would seem like a plausible charge to trump up against an annoyingly liberal Jew who holds communal office.
Also, the Napoleonic view ITTL of Jews as a potential political force, which the Restoration civil service inherited, is a two-edged sword - it means that France takes Jewish concerns more seriously (e.g. partially subsidizing the consistories ITTL rather than requiring the Jewish community to pay the whole freight as IOTL) but also makes French Jews a bigger target. A Jew who gets political in a way that Charles X doesn't like is less likely to be ignored.
Well, these are French people. They take wine seriously. (And I've had maple syrup less sweet than Manischewitz - I mean, what gives?)
We might find out. France is one of the countries that the nagidah would be most interested in having diplomatic relations with, given that it's one of the brokers between Egypt and the Porte and has assigned itself the role of maintaining the balance of power in the Levant. This might actually be an area in which the Zaydani emir follows her lead, as she would have an easier time getting access to the French court than he would. That in turn could give her leverage in negotiating the Galilee's position within the Zaydani state - it's leverage she doesn't need now (the Zaydani emirs have followed the traditional Ottoman approach of vassals governing themselves as long as they're loyal and don't cause trouble, and there are still bonds of affection between the two ruling families) but may need in the future under another emir.
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Consul, not ambassador. Consuls can serve anywhere. You'll notice that he presented his credentials to the mayor, not the president. The ambassador would be in Washington.
Thank you! I think it tied together several of the themes of this world.
THOSE WHO HUNGER MARCH 1840
New
THOSE WHO HUNGER
MARCH 1840
MARCH 1840
“There are too many Jews here,” said Pesakh Kaia, taking a deep pull on his pipe.
“It is true,” said Chaim Bakshi. He spoke the tongue of the Crimean Tatars, as all the yakhudiler did when they spoke among themselves. “This is a good land. It is a prosperous land. But there are too many Jews here.”
Pesakh leaned back against the cushions scattered across the floor of the tent and nodded. It was a pretty dilemma, was it not? The yakhudiler had come to a land with no Tsar and no Khan, where no one would tell them they weren’t allowed to farm or take their sons off to the army to make Christians of them. They were in a land where the people who came to them to have shoes mended or tinsmithing done placed their orders in Hebrew – even the Muslims and the Christians here could speak Hebrew when they needed it. And the meadow where they were camped, five miles west of Tzfat, was verdant and well-watered, a far cry from famine-stricken Crimea. But there were too many Jews.
“A hundred of them,” he said, “for every one of us. Even more than the mitnagdim.”
“Far more.”
Neither Pesakh nor Chaim wished any harm on the mitnagdim; they were fellow Israelites, and they were fleeing troubles of their own in Poland and Lithuania. Those who’d gone to Kishinev or Odessa had Pesakh’s prayers and blessing. But they’d come to the Crimea too, and there were already more of them in Sevastopol and Simferopol than there were yakhudiler in Karasubazar. And too many of them had looked upon the yakhudiler as blank slates on which to copy themselves.
As with the mitnagdim, so too with ha-Yishuv ha-Ivri. They were more subtle about it, to be sure; they’d made the yakhudiler welcome, brought food and medicines to their encampment, and never uttered a word of disdain. But though the men from the Or Tamid had given them nothing but praise, Pesakh could tell they were taking account. They would learn that most of the yakhudiler couldn’t read and would build schools; they would learn that the yakhudiler had no hahamim and invite them to accept one for their synagogue; they would bring Rabbi Moshe ben Yaakov’s eighteen principles of faith back to their academy and decide if they passed muster. They, too, would want to make the yakhudiler as they were.
They would never do so by force; they had promised that. The rabbis from the Or Tamid had explained the Sanhedrin’s jurisprudence on custom and made clear that they could only ban practices which were altogether contrary to the Law. But Pesakh had made a count of the yakhudiler that had made the journey to this land; there were eleven hundred forty-nine. The Jews of the Galilee numbered a hundred twenty thousand. It would take no force to make them as a drop of ink in a bucket of water. Especially since…
“I spoke with the nagidah’s men in Tzfat this morning,” said Chaim, “and they showed me their maps. There is no unclaimed land large enough for all of us to settle. They can settle a hundred of us here, a hundred there; some farmland in this village, some more in that one. They can keep us close – all the villages will be in the north. But not in the same place.”
“I didn’t expect they would. But I had hoped…”
“No.”
That was as final a word as any Pesakh could imagine, and it would be the end. Even if the villages were only a few miles apart, the yakhudiler would never again gather in one synagogue on the Sabbath. Only in the city might they do that, and they had never lived in cities.
“We could make the best of it,” Chaim said. “This is not a bad land, in spite of it all.”
“Or we could find another place.”
“There is no other place.”
“No,” said Pexakh as the last ember in his pipe burned out. “In the Galilee, there is not.”
_______
Pinchas, the nagidah’s man – the chief clerk in the office of land records – came to ma’ariv that night at the tent the yakhudiler used for a synagogue. They prayed kneeling on carpets as they’d done at home, and so did he; no one led and no one followed, so he prayed in his way as they did in theirs. After, he took the place to the side of the Torah with his maps and books, and the meeting was of a different kind.
“Tell me about the land you had in the Crimea,” he said. “The crops you grew.”
“The old Tsar gave it to us,” Pinchas answered. “Alexander, may his memory be blessed. He decreed that we were different from the other Jews and that we could farm, and he gave us land outside Karasubzar, where we’d lived before.” He’d told this part of the story to others that the nagidah and the Or Tamid had sent, but never to Pinchas. “We kept chickens and sheep, but we’d always done that. We learned to grow barley and buckwheat; we raised onions and beets and cucumbers and wine-grapes. We prospered. And then Nicholas, curse him, cast us forth with hardly a day to prepare. We went back to the trades we’d known, but then the famine…”
Pinchas nodded; everyone knew of the famine that had ravaged all the Crimea and slain one in eight of the yakhudiler. There were laments of the famine already in the books of stories and proverbs that every family had, the books that were carefully tended over the centuries and added to each generation in the Tatar language but in Hebrew hand. Pesakh had written one such lament himself, scribed on the stormy voyage from Sevastopol.
Maybe it was the famine, on top of the loss of their land and the pressure of Russians and mitnagdim both, that had convinced so many of the yakhudiler that Rabbi Alkalai was right and the hundred years that would herald Moshiach were at hand. There were songs of Moshiach too in some of the family journals; Pesakh had scribed one for a family that lacked their letters. But no messiah had been needed to persuade them to leave a starving land.
With an effort, Pesakh wrenched his mind away from memory and back to what the clerk Pinchas was saying. He was showing the yakhudiler plots of land marked on the map, presumably plots that would be suitable for the crops they knew how to grow. He was pointing to streams, wells, pastures that were shared in common between villages, places where houses and sheds and chicken-yards might be built.
He was pointing to parts of fourteen villages.
The householders among the yakhudiler looked on with interest, asked about details of the soil and water, questioned Pinchas on the laws that governed the village commons. But Pesakh could sense their dismay. He could see them looking to him and Chaim, their eyes a silent question of whether the men who’d led them out of famine together and to the Holy Land together could keep them together.
Finally Pesakh stirred. “Reb Pinchas,” he said. “We are grateful for what the nagidah and the Sanhedrin have done for us. But is there truly no place where we can stay together?”
“Not as farmers, no – not unless you would have us take land from others to give to you, and you know the taste of that already.”
Pesakh cast his eyes downward; he did know the taste of being cast off one’s land, and the rebuke had been earned. “You speak only of the Galilee, though…”
“The nagidah cannot grant lands that are outside her domain.”
“And the Sanhedrin? Its domain is the entire Land of Israel.”
“The Sanhedrin has no domain. It has jurisdiction as a court, but it governs no country and owns no land except the synagogues and holy places. It cannot grant farmland to you.”
Pesakh held Pinchas’s eyes. “Is there someone then who can?”
“There may be. And he will be in Tzfat tomorrow to take council with the nagidah. Maybe he will also take council with you.”
_______
Chaim Bakshi had gone into Tzfat many times to trade or to meet with the government and the Or Tamid, but in the weeks since the arrival of the yakhudiler, Pesakh had done so only once. Tzfat was a city of forty thousand inhabitants, as big as Sevastopol; it rose in layers up the mountainside, and the people and goods in its streets and markets were from all corners of the world. It had been a marvel to Pesakh the first time and it was still one now, and the greatest marvel of all was that his felt cap, striped cotton shirt and trousers, and colorful over-robe drew hardly any notice.
The Zemach house by the east market was two hundred years old and had been rebuilt time and again after sieges and earthquakes, but the nagidah still lived there, and it was there, with the letter that Pinchas had given them, that Pesakh and Chaim gained entrance. The two yakhudiler expected that they would be conducted to an audience chamber but the silent major-domo instead brought them to a library where two men and a woman sat at a table.
Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad Zahir al-Zaydani, the emir; Dalia Zemach, the nagidah; Netanel bin Saleh, the Av Bet Din. All three were roughly of an age, this or that side of sixty; they had grown gray, but Pesakh could still see what they had been in their youth.
“I cannot grant land outside the Galilee…” the nagidah said, echoing Pinchas’s words of the night before.
“And Abd-al-Rahman Khan is the one who can?”
“I think I have never been called Khan before,” said the emir with obvious amusement. “Share a pipe; tell me why the Galilee is not the land for you.”
“It is, I think,” said Chaim. “We will make the best of it.” But Pesakh asked again the question that his people had asked him.
“I am building cities,” said Abd al-Rahman, “but you aren’t city folk. And I have granted farms and pastures, but I don’t think you’d care to join the villages where I’ve done so.”
“Then there is nothing?”
The emir started to say something, but the nagidah held up a hand. “Tell me more of your trades,” she said. “I know there are many shoemakers and tinsmiths among you. What other trades do your people follow?”
“Some of us are harness-makers,” began Chaim, and Pesakh continued, “we have saddlers and farriers, and some of us make blankets and hats; we have tailors and joiners as well.”
The nagidah looked at the emir. “You are a Bedouin, Abu Hamid.”
“Yes, I am, Umm al-Hikma.” The amusement was still in the emir’s voice. “And in the Nabulsi lands, some tribes ride still from pasture to pasture. Harness-makers, farriers, saddlers…”
He turned to Pesakh. “I will send a message to my brother-emir. And you, Pesakh Bey – Pesakh Khan! – will learn his answer before the week is out.”
_______
In the end, a hundred twenty-eight of the yakhudiler – Pesakh still kept a close count – chose to stay with Chaim and settle in the northern Galilee. The rest, with their tents and animals and tools and books, marched to the border with an escort from the Polish Regiment, and were met there by a Nabulsi cavalry troop that took them the rest of the way.
They crossed the river Jordan and climbed into stony, arid hills drained by wadis that were dry ten months of the year. The sight wrenched from Pesakh his famine song, the one he’d added to his family journal during the crossing of the sea, and its words came from his lips as he rode at the head of the column:
Barren was the land, the land was bare of bread;
Bare of bread were our tables, tables laid for the dead;
The dead bade us to go, to go across the sea;
Across the sea to the land, where hunger would not be…
Had he come from one barren land only to be led to another?
But the land changed again as they passed the crest of the mountains, and the eastern slopes were green; the soldiers led them at last to a land between hills where there were springs and streams and where ruined houses and a crumbling Roman theater lay among the fields. “This will be yours,” said the captain, who was Muslim but who spoke Hebrew in the Romaniot way as some of Pesakh’s ancestors had done. “The water is held in common with the tribes who pasture here, and I will show you the lands that must be left for the herds, but there is land enough and more for you to build houses and farm. There has been no town here for four hundred years, but there will be now. This is Amman.”
“Come look at the land that the emir has given to us,” he called to the yakhudiler behind him. Twenty years ago and more, he’d said the same thing to his family at their first sight of the land given them by the Tsar. And he’d said that, too, at their last sight of that land, when Nicholas’s Cossacks had driven them from it and into famine.
But here, if the Name willed it, they would stay.
Notes to Those Who Hunger:
1. I’m grateful to @Meshakhad for sending me a copy of Anatoly Khazanov’s 1989 research paper on the Krymchaks; they are neither numerous nor widely studied, and the sources available online are sketchy and sometimes contradictory.
If I had to describe the Krymchaks in one word, it would be “layers.” They started with the original, Greek-speaking Jewish population of the Crimea, which goes back a long way (no one’s quite sure how long), assimilated to Crimean Tatar language and folkways after the Tatar conquest, and themselves assimilated Italian, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Caucasian and Persian Jews who arrived in dribs and drabs over a period of centuries. Around the turn of the 16th century, Rabbi Moshe ben Yaakov, originally from Kiev, synthesized a minhag that combined all these traditions, somewhat like what the Sanhedrin has been trying to regulate and systematize ITTL. In the 19th and 20th centuries IOTL, there were further changes from the arrival of Polish Jews and the vicissitudes of Tsarist and Soviet politics, and ultimately, massacres at the hands of the Nazis.
For much of the early 19th century, both IOTL and ITTL, the Krymchaks (who didn’t yet use that name, and ITTL never will, instead continuing to call themselves “yakhudiler,” the Tatar word for Jews) tried to differentiate themselves from other Jews of Russia and, like the Karaites, establish themselves as more indigenous and thereby obtain exemption from the restrictive laws of the Pale. They were far less successful at this than the Karaites; the Tsarist government classified them as “Rabbanists” or “Talmudists” and denied them exemption from residency restrictions and cantonist conscription. At one point in the early 1840s IOTL, they did get a grant of agricultural land, but they were evicted without compensation after ten years and resumed their prior status as impoverished craftsmen (most often shoemakers) and small traders.
ITTL, they do slightly better, at least for a while; the success of the Chabad Regiments leads Alexander I to cast about for other non-mainstream Jewish communities whose loyalty he can cultivate and who he can set up as a counterweight to the bulk of Russian Jews. The Krymchaks thus get their agricultural settlement in 1817 rather than 1843 and achieve a modest prosperity in the 1820s and early 1830s. But then Nicholas I, being who he is, decides that they’re filthy Zhids after all and kicks them off their land, casting them into poverty and putting them at the mercy of the recently-arrived Polish Jews who are resentful of their hitherto more favorable treatment. That, a famine in 1839, and the messianic prophecies of 1840 are enough to get them going – the first time ITTL that an entire Jewish community, albeit a small one, has packed up and joined the Yishuv.
This should not be taken, BTW, as an indication of how Nicholas I’s policies will affect the Chabad principalities – as soldiers, they’re in a different category, and we’ll find out what happened to them soon.
2. The folk song in the story isn’t historical, and I honestly have no idea if Krymchaks used that poetic form. According to Khazanov, Krymchak families kept private books of proverbs, stories, and folk songs, but few of these have been preserved (by the mid-20th century no one could read them anymore) and none exist in any archive available to the public. He does, however, quote a couple of lines from a folk song about a 20th-century famine, so the topic at least is a historical one.
3. At this time IOTL, Amman had been abandoned since the 16th century and would remain so until the Ottoman Empire settled Circassian refugees there in 1878. The Krymchak settlement ITTL is for many of the same reasons – the Nabulsis are building a network of towns in their periphery to serve as markets and administrative centers and to integrate the nomadic Bedouin tribes into the state, and a thousand grateful refugees make an ideal founder population. Also, the trades the Krymchaks practice – shoemaking, harness-making, saddlery, tinsmithing – are the kind that still-nomadic Bedouins (or even those who are inclined to take Nablus’s bribes to settle down) will value. Of course, this also means that the Krymchaks may become part of a fraught relationship between the Bedouin tribes and the state, and we might see in the future how that plays out on all three sides.
1. I’m grateful to @Meshakhad for sending me a copy of Anatoly Khazanov’s 1989 research paper on the Krymchaks; they are neither numerous nor widely studied, and the sources available online are sketchy and sometimes contradictory.
If I had to describe the Krymchaks in one word, it would be “layers.” They started with the original, Greek-speaking Jewish population of the Crimea, which goes back a long way (no one’s quite sure how long), assimilated to Crimean Tatar language and folkways after the Tatar conquest, and themselves assimilated Italian, Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Caucasian and Persian Jews who arrived in dribs and drabs over a period of centuries. Around the turn of the 16th century, Rabbi Moshe ben Yaakov, originally from Kiev, synthesized a minhag that combined all these traditions, somewhat like what the Sanhedrin has been trying to regulate and systematize ITTL. In the 19th and 20th centuries IOTL, there were further changes from the arrival of Polish Jews and the vicissitudes of Tsarist and Soviet politics, and ultimately, massacres at the hands of the Nazis.
For much of the early 19th century, both IOTL and ITTL, the Krymchaks (who didn’t yet use that name, and ITTL never will, instead continuing to call themselves “yakhudiler,” the Tatar word for Jews) tried to differentiate themselves from other Jews of Russia and, like the Karaites, establish themselves as more indigenous and thereby obtain exemption from the restrictive laws of the Pale. They were far less successful at this than the Karaites; the Tsarist government classified them as “Rabbanists” or “Talmudists” and denied them exemption from residency restrictions and cantonist conscription. At one point in the early 1840s IOTL, they did get a grant of agricultural land, but they were evicted without compensation after ten years and resumed their prior status as impoverished craftsmen (most often shoemakers) and small traders.
ITTL, they do slightly better, at least for a while; the success of the Chabad Regiments leads Alexander I to cast about for other non-mainstream Jewish communities whose loyalty he can cultivate and who he can set up as a counterweight to the bulk of Russian Jews. The Krymchaks thus get their agricultural settlement in 1817 rather than 1843 and achieve a modest prosperity in the 1820s and early 1830s. But then Nicholas I, being who he is, decides that they’re filthy Zhids after all and kicks them off their land, casting them into poverty and putting them at the mercy of the recently-arrived Polish Jews who are resentful of their hitherto more favorable treatment. That, a famine in 1839, and the messianic prophecies of 1840 are enough to get them going – the first time ITTL that an entire Jewish community, albeit a small one, has packed up and joined the Yishuv.
This should not be taken, BTW, as an indication of how Nicholas I’s policies will affect the Chabad principalities – as soldiers, they’re in a different category, and we’ll find out what happened to them soon.
2. The folk song in the story isn’t historical, and I honestly have no idea if Krymchaks used that poetic form. According to Khazanov, Krymchak families kept private books of proverbs, stories, and folk songs, but few of these have been preserved (by the mid-20th century no one could read them anymore) and none exist in any archive available to the public. He does, however, quote a couple of lines from a folk song about a 20th-century famine, so the topic at least is a historical one.
3. At this time IOTL, Amman had been abandoned since the 16th century and would remain so until the Ottoman Empire settled Circassian refugees there in 1878. The Krymchak settlement ITTL is for many of the same reasons – the Nabulsis are building a network of towns in their periphery to serve as markets and administrative centers and to integrate the nomadic Bedouin tribes into the state, and a thousand grateful refugees make an ideal founder population. Also, the trades the Krymchaks practice – shoemaking, harness-making, saddlery, tinsmithing – are the kind that still-nomadic Bedouins (or even those who are inclined to take Nablus’s bribes to settle down) will value. Of course, this also means that the Krymchaks may become part of a fraught relationship between the Bedouin tribes and the state, and we might see in the future how that plays out on all three sides.
Wow! What are the chances that Krymchak!Amman ends up having the old name of Rabbat Ammon? While it will undoubtedly end up majority Arab Muslim (unless the major transjordanian city is somewhere else like Irbid), it's Krymchak foundation could affect it like the Circassians did OTL.
Speaking of the Circassians, it will be very interesting to see what will be done with them ITTL. The holy land is both fuller and more autonomous here, so it's not out of the question that only few, if any, make it to either side of the Jordan river; but if they do, they'll find communities that share their disdain for the Russian Empire in the Krymchaks (and other Jewish groups that might make or have made Aliyah from there).
The absolute last thing the Sanhedrin will want to do is open up a can of worms about whether the Transjordan Bedouin tribes are descended from Ammonites, but there may be poetic references to that name, and eventually archaeology.
Amman will indeed end up a mostly Arab Muslim city - it won't grow as big as OTL because it won't be a national capital (Nablus, OTOH, might become a city of a million or more), but it will still become a transportation and market hub in the twentieth century. The Krymchaks won't escape becoming city folk in the end. But for the most part they won't mind - as seen in the story, they'd rather be a minority among Muslims than among Jews as long as their rights are protected, because (occasional mixed marriages aside) the Muslims won't try to assimilate their faith. And the Krymchak neighborhood of Amman will be the old city, and they'll be influential in its language, politics and cultural life.
Most of them will probably settle in Anatolia as IOTL, but I wouldn't rule out at least some going to Egypt and the Levant, which don't belong to the Porte anymore but which might welcome martially-inclined immigrants as they have in the past. Some may show up in the Hejaz as well, and probably more of them than OTL will go to Iran (and from there, possibly, to Afghanistan and India - there may be a maharaja or two ITTL with a Circassian Guard). And they very well might bond with the Krymchaks, the Jerusalem mitnagdim, and other exiled Russian Jews over shared grievances against the Tsars.
I don't understand the potential significance of this descendance. Is it because of biblical commandments to fight the Ammonites? IIRC that mostly applies to the Edomites.
But speaking of descendance, how does the Sanhedrin view the fact that many levantine Muslims and Christians are very likely descendents of Jewish/Samaritan converts? I'm not aware of any OTL Jewish religious opinions on the subject beyond crazy ramblings on the part of certain elements of the Israeli far right.
