Trading in Medieval Religious Pluralism

On the banks of the Guadalquivir river in Cordoba stands a medieval tower that houses an organization dedicated to returning the city to the splendor it enjoyed at the end of the last millennium, when it boasted a contented populace of Jews, Muslims and Christians, the likes of which one finds nowadays only at Jesse Jackson rallies.

The great Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua shares this vision of a multicultural utopia that dimmed only with the advent of the second millennium. His latest novel, “A Journey to the End of the Millennium,” is set in the year 999 and is founded on the partnership of three merchants, a Jewish financier from Tangier, an Islamic trader who gathers their wares in the high mountains of Morocco and the financier’s exiled nephew, who wanders among the Christians of Andalus and Frankia, donning whatever habit and religion might best suit his commercial purpose.

The novel opens with the financier, Ben Attar, and the trader, Abu Lutfi, sailing the high seas in search of their wayward partner, Abulafia, who has severed their partnership, not because of problems among the three religions, but because of a sudden moral predicament. Self-exiled after the suicide of his young wife, Abulafia has finally succumbed to the enchantments of a widow from the Ashkenazic Jewish community of Worms in the Rhineland. A daughter and a daughter-in-law of a line of eminent Jewish scholars, Esther-Minna is intellectually and morally horrified by the discovery that her fiance’s partner and uncle, Ben Attar, has two wives. She will marry Abulafia only if he repudiates his uncle and dissolves the partnership.

Ben Attar, driven by love of his nephew, love of his two wives and a need to justify the Jewishness of his marital status to Abulafia’s new wife, loads his wives, his Ishmaelite partner, an Andalusian rabbi and his young son, an African slave, two camels, and a souk-ful of Moroccan spices and fabrics into a ship and sails north, to the mouth of the Seine and upriver to the island of Paris, where Abulafia and his new wife have taken up residence.

As the summertime lamentations of Tisha b’Av cross through the High Holy Days into the harvest Feast of Tabernacles, Ben Attar and his Andalusian rabbi match wits and hearts with Esther-Minna and the Jews of Paris and Worms. And while the Jews are fighting, with tragic results, over what it means to be Jewish, Christian Europe (in Yehoshua’s marvelous medieval portrait that smells less of a Bruegel barnyard than of a Bruges tapestry) is preparing to revenge itself against the inevitable disappointment, when the coming millennium fails to bring the return of the Messiah. “You will live,” a converted Jew tells the departing rabbi, but the Jews of Worms, the Jews of Metz, “they will not live.”

If the novel plays to the head more than the heart, this may be due to the intentional willfulness of Yehoshua, who, by refusing to name either one of Ben Attar’s wives, or any of the three young children whose fates are buffeted by the whims of Ben Attar and Esther-Minna, denies the reader the solace of sympathy that a name makes human.

Instead, Yehoshua’s parable forces us to confront issues at the end of our current millennium that are more important than the lives of any fictional characters. As we begin the year 1999 on the Christian calendar, Esther-Minna’s descendants in the religious right in Israel are asserting that the Orthodoxy practiced by a small minority of the world’s Jews is the only valid Judaism, while Ben Attar’s pluralistic descendants insist on justifying their Jewishness to a court that barely speaks their language. The tragedies caused by Esther-Minna’s repudiation and Ben Attar’s need for justification are as nothing compared to the tragedies occurring daily, as Israel journeys to the end of this millennium.