Monthly Archives: June 2020

Perry Mason and the Woman of Rome

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Bernice and I recently ventured into Jerusalem. We had to go for a routine medical test, and decided to live dangerously, and combine the visit with a couple of other errands. One of these was to go to the excellent specialist music store on the main pedestrian precinct, to try to get for Esther’s wife Ma’ayan a book of sheet music for jazz piano. We had seen the book on Book Depository, but we agreed that we should support the privately-owned, specialist shop, particularly as it had only just reopened after lockdown. It is a shop that I love going into – although ever since Michael left home we hardly ever have an excuse to go in. The shop window always boasts a delightfully eclectic assortment of instruments, and the array of acoustic guitars, ouds, with the occasional cello or violin along the walls inside the shop, all softly illuminated from above, always leaves me wondering whether man has ever put wood to more beautiful use than when carving musical instruments.

When I went in, I saw that there were no books or sheet-music on display. I assumed they had all been moved to the upper floor. When I asked the owner about the book, he smiled ruefully, and explained that they no longer stock any books: that entire side of their business has been killed by the internet. He also agreed with me that, if he did not stock it, nowhere else in Jerusalem would. And so, regretfully, we had to order the book online.

Don’t get me wrong. Bernice and I are huge fans of Book Depository, with its frequent discount campaigns, its bargain offers, its no-argument replacement policy for goods that arrive damaged or do not arrive, its charming bookmarks. I even enjoy the fact that books are dispatched separately, as the order is filled: I place one order of a dozen books, I forget what I ordered, and then I get the frisson of opening 12 separate surprise presents, over the space of a couple of weeks.

But (and it is a huge but) Book Depository is not the second-hand bookshop on the corner of the Lower Cranbrook Road and Ilford Hill, where I browsed many miles of bookshelves from my early teens onwards. It was there that I fed my first ‘literary’ addiction, buying, reading and then selling back probably 25 or 30 of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason stories. Google Maps street view shows me that the site is now a children’s clothing store, cramped uninvitingly between Chicken Hut and Dixy Chicken. In the early 1960s, however, it was between a cobbler’s, if I remember rightly, and a haberdasher’s. (For those below a certain age, ‘cobbler’ was originally a pejorative term indicating someone who had no skill. This meaning survives – in stage portrayals of Cockneys, at least – in such phrases as ‘cobbled together’ and ‘a right load of old cobblers’. Later ‘cobbler’ came to be used specifically in the shoemaking trade for someone who could repair shoes but lacked the skill to make them from scratch. Haberdashery is what I believe the ex-colonials call ‘notions’: buttons and sewing thread, sequins and trim, and all of the other paraphenalia of needlework and dressmaking.)

‘My’ bookshop was a place of mystery and hidden treasure. As I opened the door, the bell that hung above it would tinkle lightly, and the owner would emerge, badger-like, from the gloom of the back office. The lighting and ventilation helped to create an atmosphere that suggested the shop had been burrowed out of a hillside.

I think for me the greatest mystery of the place – and of second-hand bookshops in general – has always been the ubiquitousness of Alberto Moravia’s Italian masterpiece, translated into English in the Penguin edition – The Woman of Rome. From 1963 until 1986 (when we came on aliya), whenever I went into a second-hand bookshop, I looked for a copy of The Woman of Rome, and I never failed to find one. I am still unsure what to make of this. Did it indicate that it was an extremely popular book, since clearly everyone owned a copy; or, since everyone was getting rid of it, was it an extremely unpopular one? I can’t offer any answers, I’m afraid. I never actually bought, or read, it.

There are at least four ways in which second-hand bookshops are far superior to Book Depository. First, and most obviously, every book is a potential bargain. Books are among that special group of artifacts whose infinite variety age cannot wither, nor custom stale. (Note to self: There’s a good turn of phrase in there somewhere; must play around with it and see if I can use it again.) As long as all the pages are there, and all of the text is legible, a dog-eared, eighth-hand Penguin paperback copy of Women in Love offers exactly the same glorious literary experience as a signed, hardback first edition.

An added benefit, for the obsessive reader, is that, whereas you might be tempted, having discovered John Steinbeck at age 15, to order online everything he wrote, a second-hand bookshop compels you to space out your acquisitions, buying a new title now and again, whenever one surfaces on the shelves, and thereby avoiding binge-reading. (Incidentally, this also makes it much easier to control your spending!) In this way, I enjoyed The Red Pony, for example, on its own terms, rather than comparing it unfavourably with Grapes of Wrath, as I probably would have done if I had read them back-to-back.

In addition, second-hand bookshops usually strike the perfect balance between order and chaos. So, for example, non-fiction is usually divided into science, history, travel, biography, and so forth, and fiction is arranged alphabetically by author. However, the arranging is done not by computer according to Dewey number, or by banks of data inputters, but rather, typically, by one day-dreaming bibliophile, whose efforts, furthermore, are often thwarted by customers returning books to the wrong place.

What this meant for me was that looking for another John le Carré was not a completely hopeless task, (although I could never decide whether he would be found between D H Lawrence and Harper Lee, or between Truman Capote and Lewis Carroll). At the same time, I always had to cast my net a little wider, in case something I was looking for had been bumped a little from its correct position.

However, on balance, I would say that the greatest advantage of the second-hand bookshop over Book Depository is serendipity*. I cannot easily ‘browse the shelves’ of Book Depository, and, if I do, I am very unlikely to stumble across something that has been misfiled.

In my second-hand bookshops, on the other hand, I have found a few absolute treasures that I had no idea I should be looking for. Almost always, it was the titles that attracted me. One day in the mid-1970s, for example, living in the cultural backwater of Bridgend, South Wales, I came across a title that simply begged to be bought, just to find out what on earth it was. And so I came to discover the utterly absorbing experience of reading Robert M Pirsig’s (the author’s name alone might have tempted me to buy the book) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I have seen this variously described as ‘The best-selling philosophy text of all time’ and as an attempt to unify ’holistic, subjective perspective with analytical, objective perspective’. It is part road trip, part philosophical musing. If you had asked me in my twenties whether it was readable, and whether it was worth reading, I would have answered ‘Yes and yes!’ enthusiastically. I recently rediscovered it on my shelves and reread it. Let’s just say that it, or I, or perhaps the world, or perhaps two or more of us, have changed since the 1970s.

It was again the title that seduced me into buying Harlan Ellison’s subversive and notorious overview of American television in the late 1960s, The Glass Teat. Not only was the subject-matter stimulating and thought-provoking, but the direct, vernacular prose was both articulate and immediate. We didn’t talk or write like that in Bridgend in the 1970s, and we certainly hadn’t talked or written like that in Ilford in the 1960s, but it was thrilling and vivid and intoxicating. (Almost all of you know me well enough to be aware that the effect wore off pretty quickly….but for a brief moment there I was of my time.) Unlike ZAMM, which is how we cognoscenti refer to Zen and the…, Ellison’s work is, for me, as fresh as ever. It still leapt off the page and hit me between the eyes with full force.

When I last visited a second-hand bookshop, I did it in style. We took the kids on a roots trip to Britain, in 2013, and spent a few days in Swansea staying with very good friends. Micha’el was, at the time, very interested in shamanism, and had tried, with no real success, to find some books in Charing Cross Road. He had been very impressed by Foyles, but not so much by the limited helpfulness of the staff, and so I decided that I would take him to the shrine of books. From Swansea, we drove one day to Hay-on-Wye, which has become the second-hand book centre of the United Kingdom (and possibly the world).

This small riverside town that lies on the Welsh-English border has a population of about 1500, and boasts over 30 bookshops, some specialist, some general. Micha’el and I split up to visit a few, and then met up again in the largest shop, housed in a converted barn, two floors high, with a soaring ceiling, inspiring a sense of awe similar to what one experiences in the great medieval cathedrals. It was a three-hour round-trip drive, but it was very much worth it just to see the expression on Micha’el’s face when he walked into the emporium, and to hear his enthusiasm when he found an assistant who could discuss with him intelligently the various branches of shamanism on which they had books in stock.

I wonder when I will again get to a second-hand bookshop. There are such shops in Jerusalem; Micha’el even worked in one several years ago. However, unsurprisingly, the bookshops I love are the ones whose stock reflects the tastes of people like me: usually more widely read, and almost invariably more adventurous than me, but close enough to me to be able to stretch out a hand and allow me, by stretching out my hand beyond my comfort zone, to grasp the book that they are offering. Now, if Book Depository could only develop an algorithm that did that, our library would be doubled in size….and our bank balance would be halved. Just as well they can’t, probably.

Of course, a well-rounded life is one that combines sedentary reading with healthy exercise.

*Serendipity: now there’s a word with a fascinating etymology. King Barham V, you hardly need me to remind you, was a Persian king who ruled the Sassanid Empire about 1600 years ago. Around his reign there was woven a fantastical tale, which passed into Persian folklore and was published in Venice in 1557. The book was eventually translated into English as The Three Princes of Serendip (which is the Persian name for Sri Lanka). It tells the story of the journeys of the three princes, who ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’. Enter, around 1750, Horace Walpole, a Prime Minster’s son, the architect of Strawberry Hill House (which was really the forerunner of all the grand Victorian public buildings in England) and the author of the world’s first Gothic novel – The Castle of Otranto. In his spare time, Walpole, enchanted by the tale of the three princes, borrowed the name of the princes’ birthplace to coin the term serendipity, meaning ‘the fact of finding interesting or valuable things by chance’. (Incidentally, Walpole is also responsible for the first recorded written use in English of over 200 other words, among them: souvenir, malaria, beefy and nuance.)

Enter a Messenger

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As is becoming traditional, I must start with some housekeeping (a blogger’s work is never done, and all that). You may be one of those who smirked at my pitiful attempt at Psychology 101 last week, when I pretended I thought I could get into the mind of the confidence trickster. If so, you might be interested in hearing, from the horse’s mouth, a first-person account of the motivations of the con man. This is a keynote address given by Frank Abagnale in 2013 to, I believe, a conference for senior executives in Federal government in the US, and it not only alerts you to the liberties that Spielberg took with Abagnale’s biography in his film Catch Me If You Can, but also gives you insight into the man himself. Of course, as you listen, a little voice inside your head keeps asking whether you can actually believe anything he says, but both Bernice and I found this a very entertaining way to pass 30 minutes. You can watch it on YouTube here.

And now to today’s main course. I feel like an actor with a walk-on, one-line part in one of Shakespeare’s histories. Picture, if you will, a stage peopled by men all named after counties, with the most powerful, who is either the most handsome and manly or, more interestingly, the most shrivelled and ugly, enthroned, downstage left. (If this is one of those trendy modern-dress versions, the nobles may also have been updated, and be named after some of the newer counties: My Lord Tyne and Wear, what news of Merseyside? He is at odds with Greater Manchester. On reflection, I think we’ll stick to tradition.) I enter, upstage right, decked out in doublet and hose and a suitably flattering codpiece, and holding a rolled and sealed parchment, bound with a bright scarlet ribbon. I stride purposefully across the stage’s diagonal, extend the parchment towards the nobleman, bow with a flourish, and deliver my one line: News from Portugal, my liege.

Yes, my friends. I know that you have been waiting anxiously for the next instalment of the property tax story. Well, here it is.

You will remember that Micha’el paid the outstanding semi-annual property tax by bank transfer to the Portuguese Tax Authority, but, unfortunately, because of an unsympathetic bank-teller, the payment was not accompanied by the requisite document reference number or my NIF (the equivalent of a social security number). Consequently, the payment was not credited to my account with the Tax Authority. As 31 May, the final date for payment, drew nearer, I decided that it would be politic first to make a second payment correctly, and only then, at leisure, to try to locate the first payment in the system and get it credited to cover the second instalment due in November. Micha’el, bless him, transferred the money (this time effortlessly and accurately, through an ATM) and, last week, I made my way, again, into the labyrinth of the Tax Authority website, following the trail of thread that I had carefully paid out behind me on my last expedition. I remembered Citizen Kane (it suddenly strikes me that it is probably unwise to publicise one’s answer to a security question on one’s blog, but it’s too late now), and meandered almost effortlessly to my personal page. There, in my message inbox, was a long and very official-looking message from the Tax Authority, which looked like, and, as Google Translate confirmed, actually was, a statement of payment received. My disproportionate sense of achievement can perhaps be ascribed to my relief at no longer facing the prospect of a kangaroo trial, and an indeterminate period inside a Portuguese jail.

And then (Why, oh why, does there always have to be an and then?), when I woke up on Sunday morning, I found, in my inbox, an email from the Tax Authority which refused to yield its secrets to my cursory glance; all I could make of it was 25 June and 50,000 euros. Ever the optimist, I immediately assumed that I was being given until 25 June to pay a 50,000-euro fine for non-payment of the 50-euro tax. However, I decided to run the email through Google Translate before waking Bernice and telling her that we needed to pack immediately and make our way to some third-world country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Portugal. What a surprise when I did indeed translate it. This is what I read:

On June 25, the first 2020 special drawing of the “Lucky Invoice” will take place. Three prizes worth 50,000 euro each will be drawn. To qualify for the draw, simply request the insertion of your tax number (NIF) on all invoices.

As I contemplate the convoluted, and, doubtless, multiple navigations through the website that I will need to go through in order to be sure that I have, actually, requested the insertion of my tax number on all invoices, I just know that that word ‘simply’ is going to haunt me.

Equally intriguing is the fact that the prize money is not to be awarded, as you might have thought, in crisp 500-euro notes in a delightful pastel lavender shade. Nor even, since the 500-euro note is no longer being printed, in crisp yellow 200-euro notes. (Apparently, in common with Canada and Singapore, Europe is phasing out its highest-denomination bill in an attempt to make things more difficult for international terrorists, who will now need two large suitcases to carry a million euros in cash, rather than managing with one medium one, as in the past. As if the life of an international terrorist were not difficult enough already!)

But, no. Scrap that image of Bernice and I falling back onto a water bed with huge quantities of banknotes fluttering to the floor around us. Apparently, the award will be given in Certificados do Tesouro Poupança Crescimento, which I must admit sounds very impressive. It turns out that these are Treasury Savings Growth Certificates (which sounds almost as impressive). So that’s today’s addition to my Portuguese vocabulary. Certificados do Tesouro is obviously Treasury Certificates; Crescimento is clearly Growth, as in crescendo and a crescent moon. In that case, by a process of illumination, Poupança must be Savings, although I can’t find any etymological hook to hang this word on, so it will just be floating around inside my head for a day or two until it swims out of reach and is lost to me for ever.

Speaking of crescimento, the kids’ vegetable nursery is coming along nicely – obviously benefitting from some tender loving care.

Catch Me if You Can…and You Could…and You Did

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(Quick piece of housekeeping. For the last two months, a technical glitch has prevented anyone leaving a comment. Being me, I naturally, assumed nobody was interested enough. Last week, the problem was rectified. I look forward to a flood of feedback this week.)

I don’t know about you, but I find true-life accounts of confidence tricksters fascinating. I thoroughly enjoyed Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can, the fairly accurate film account of the extraordinary exploits of Frank Abagnale, who, posing as, among others, an airline pilot and a hospital doctor, forged payroll and other cheques worth millions of dollars. Leonardo diCaprio is immensely attractive as the con man, and Tom Hanks, as the stolidly determined FBI agent who tracked Abagnale for years, turns in a convincing and wonderfully observed performance. (When does he ever not?)

If you want to see whether Abagnale would have fooled you, watch the episode of television game show To Tell the Truth from 1977 that featured the real Abagnale and two other contestants, both posing as Abagnale, in an attempt to fool the panel. The relevant section is from 1:58 to 13:40.

On my morning walks a couple of weeks ago, I listened to a podcast from the BBC: a radio docudrama chronicling, over six 30-minute episodes, the story of Anna Sorokin, Russian-born, whose middle-class family moved to Germany, from where, after finishing high school, she escaped to Paris, and then, in 2013, New York, where she reinvented herself as Anna Delvey, an heiress about to inherit a multi-million dollar trust fund and looking to launch an arts centre complex in Manhattan. Over the next few years (and, for most of the time, by the seat of her pants and the skin of her teeth), she managed both to fool enough of the people enough of the time, and to talk her way out of enough tough corners, to enable her to live a millionaire lifestyle ($100 tips to busboys, champagne dinners in boutique hotels, taking three friends on an all-in two-week holiday in Morocco, staying at a $7000 per person per night villa). It is a fascinating story, as much about those she fooled and used as about Anna herself, and the blend of documentary and dramatization is very well-handled. It was directed by the masterly Sasha Yevtushenko (probably the only BBC Radio drama producer whose father featured on the cover of Time magazine for his achievements as a poet). You can hear it here.

Listening to it, I was struck by what I suspect may be a dilemma that many con artists face. Both Abagnale and Anna seem to have been seduced not only by the prospect of wealth and a glamorous lifestyle, but also by the attention and admiration that they would attract as a result of that lifestyle. Particularly with Anna, I feel that she wanted to be admired more than anything. This, I suspect, is also part of the reason why Abagnale chose such ‘sexy’ professions as airline pilot and hospital doctor. Unfortunately, the con artist is the one person who knows that what he is being admired for is a sham. Even sadder is the fact that the con artist knows that there is one genuine achievement for which he might be worthy of admiration: the extraordinary combination of social and other skills, and the dedication and energy, that he displays in maintaining the charade. The irony, of course, is that the only way the con artist can achieve recognition for that is to be exposed as a fraud. In Anna’s case, I wonder whether the one blatantly foolhardy decision she made at the end of her ‘career’ was deliberate, because she wanted the world to know what she had managed to achieve.

It was only after listening to the serial that I realized that I, in a very modest way, was involved in my own little scam, or, at least, deception, in posing as an expert on a range of subjects, including Portuguese history. And then, last week, my scam collapsed.

When Netflix come to film the story of my rise and fall, the screenplay I write (I’ve never seen the point in fantasising modestly, have you?) will contain three key moments, scenes whose significance is not immediately obvious.

The first is an apparently casual comment I made in my blog post of 24 March. After discussing the nature of my narrative construct, I wrote: So, bottom line: don’t take every word here as an accurate account: this is a blog, not a witness statement. This looks, in retrospect, like the kind of throwaway line, toying with the audience, that Orson Welles used so deliciously in his dazzling 1973 film essay about, among other things, art forgery and literary hoax – F for Fake.

Now we move back to December, and a conversation I had with my friend Seth, an amateur historian who wondered if I might be interested in seeing the PowerPoint presentation that he had put together after a Jewish heritage trip to Portugal.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when my nephew Saul WhatsApped me with the news that he has discovered that a work colleague of his is originally from Lisbon, can trace his family back through several centuries of continuous residence in Portugal, knows about both Belmonte and Penamacor, and is something of a history buff, even editing Wikipedia entries on the Jews of Portugal.

And yet, ignoring all these warning bells, I calmly put my head in the lion’s mouth by choosing, the very next week, to write about 1497 and the Belmonte community. My post was published at 9AM on 9 June, and, at 9:48, I received another WhatAapp from Saul, drawing my attention to what he called ‘one (perhaps) corrigendum’. (‘Corrigendum’! There’s a 400 shekels an hour lawyer’s word, if ever I heard one.)

Saul pointed out that his work colleague stated that the Jews were not expelled from Portugal, but, rather, the practice of Judaism was prohibited.

When my phone rang 30 minutes later, and I saw that it was Seth, I knew what he was phoning to tell me, even though he would have me believe he was phoning to enquire about the general well-being of Bernice and myself.

So, I checked back on my sources and quickly realized that I had leapt to a mistaken conclusion. So (and here we come to this week’s real subject), I believe that some of you may have been under a misapprehension after reading last week’s blog.’ Some of you may have been under a misapprehension.’ So much more civilized than ‘I made a false statement’, don’t you think? I’m considering applying for a job as a Government spokesman.

Oh, the hell with it. I was wrong! Satisfied?

Let me at least try to put the record straight. The story of the Portuguese monarchy’s treatment of its Jewish subjects at the end of the 15th Century is a little more complicated that I suggested last week.

In the wake of the expulsion from Spain in 1492, tens of thousands of Spanish Jews fled to Portugal, where King John II granted them asylum in return for payment. However, only eight months later, the government decreed the enslavement of all Jews who had not yet left Portugal. In 1493, King John deported thousands of Jewish children to the recently established colony of São Tomé in Central Africa, where many of them soon died.

King Manuel I, who succeeded John after his death in 1494, was a pragmatic man, who well understood the contribution of Jews to the Portuguese economy, tax-collecting, and professions, and was loth to lose that contribution. However, in 1497, Manuel married the widow of John’s oldest son, Alfonso. Isabella, his bride, was the eldest daughter of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile. (Do try to keep up at the back, there!) She had spent part of her childhood in Portugal, and subsequently had been very popular in Portugal during the years of her first marriage. When Alonso was killed in a riding accident, Isabella became convinced that his death was a punishment from God for Portugal sheltering Spain’s Jews rather than expelling their own. She became very religious, and followed an ascetic lifestyle of mourning. Although she had vowed never to marry, she was eventually persuaded to marry Manuel, on condition that he expel all Jews from Portugal who would not convert to Christianity. He agreed to her ultimatum, and they married.

However, Manuel still wanted to keep as many Jews as possible in Portugal, and so he devised a plan. He ordered that Lisbon was to be the only port of embarkation Jews could use. On March 19, 1497 (the first day of Pesach), Jewish parents were ordered to take their children, between the ages of four and fourteen, to Lisbon. Upon arrival, the parents were informed that their children were going to be taken away from them to be raised as good Catholics. Some children were literally torn from their parents, while other parents chose to kill themselves and their children rather than be separated. Eventually, many of the parents agreed to be baptized, along with their children, while others succumbed and handed over their babies.

Later that year, another 20,000 Jews came to Lisbon from all over Portugal, to prepare for departure to other lands. They were herded into the courtyard of the palace of Os estaos, and were approached by priests trying to convert them. Some capitulated, while the rest waited around until the time of departure had passed. Those who did not convert were told they would forfeit their freedom and would become slaves. More succumbed. Finally, the rest were sprinkled with baptismal waters and were declared New Christians.

This explains why there were so many anusim, or crypto-Jews, in Portugal in the following centuries, in contrast to Spain. Of course, the Portuguese Inquisition, which flared up intermittently until its eventual abolition in the first part of the 19th Century, ensured that those New Christians who were not prepared to give up their Jewish identity had to be very circumspect in their practices.

There! I feel much better for having confessed my sin. However, you should now be even more aware that what I write is not necessarily to be trusted. Sadly, the more we bend the truth, the more pliable it becomes.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s someone at the door. I suspect it may be Tom Hanks, wearing glasses with thick, black rims, so I’m just going to nip out the back to climb the garden wall and make my escape.

Before I go, here’s a young man who is still in the blissful state of being unaware that such a thing as human deceit even exists.

A Later Post

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You won’t recognise that title, but it is in fact a quote from my post of 10 December last year, which, by the time you read this, will be 6 months ago! At that time, I discussed the expulsion of Jews from Portugal, and ended a very brief account with:

The movement of Jewish populations triggered by the expulsions and persecution dramatically impacted what are now the districts of Castelo Branco and Guarda, including the town of Penamacor. However, I am going to leave writing about that until a later post.

My plan was to wait until Bernice and I had visited the town of Belmonte, before writing about it in detail. However, since we failed to make it there in our first two trips, and since we now have no idea when our third trip will be possible, and since I feel that, for the last couple of weeks, I have been treading water, and infuriating those of you who are only here for the Iberia (Double Diamond nostalgists click here) and couldn’t care less about my reading habits or my pseudo-intellectual pretentious pontifications about Art, and since I cannot think of anything else to write about Portugal, this seems like the perfect time to tell you about Belmonte. I apologise to those of you who are familiar with the subject, and even more to those of you who, unlike me, have actually visited the town, but I think it is a tale that bears repeating.

Our story begins in1497, with the expulsion of Jews from Portugal, after probably at least 13 centuries of Jewish life there. Following the expulsion, those Jews who remained faced either conversion to Christianity or imprisonment and execution. Of those who converted, some were not prepared to surrender their Jewish identity; their conversion was purely expedient, and they became crypto-Jews, or anusim. Over the years and the centuries, their identification with and knowledge of Jewish life understandably faded, until the 20th Century, by which time, at least as far as the rest of the Jewish world was aware, none of the anusim remained in Portugal.

By then, Jews had started to return to Portugal, the Inquisition having formally ended after 330 years, in 1821. Some affluent families of Sephardi Jewish Portuguese origin returned to Portugal from Morocco and Gibraltar, and, in 1904, the first synagogue to be built in Portugal since the 15th century was inaugurated in Lisbon.

20 years later, the most unlikely player came on the scene: Samuel Schwartz, a Polish Jewish mining engineer, who had studied in Paris and worked throughout Europe, settled with his wife and child in Lisbon in 1917, in order to put some distance between his family and the World War. While he was conducting surveys for potential tin-mining sites in North-East Portugal, he stayed in Belmonte, a town of about 7,500 people, less than 30 miles from the border (and about the same distance from Penamacor).

There had been a Jewish community in Belmonte at least since 1295, and possibly a century or more earlier. As was the case with other towns close to the Spanish border (including Penamacor), this community had been augmented in the wake of the Spanish expulsion in 1492 by Spanish Jews hoping that, after a brief spell in Portugal, they would be allowed to return across the border, or, failing that, when this specific wave of antisemitism passed, they would be able to steal back across the border into Spain. In fact, of course, the Portuguese expulsion of the Jews followed five years later, in 1497, and the Jewish community of Belmonte, together with all the others in Portugal, disappeared.

While Schwartz was staying in Belmonte in 1917, a chance remark from a shopkeeper led him to believe that there might still be Jews among the local population. He made enquiries, and eventually met a group of crypto-Jews.When he first encountered them, they were diffident and evasive. As he gradually won their confidence, they eventually shared their traditions with him, but refused to accept that he was Jewish. They had believed that they were the only Jewish community in the world. When he saw them lighting an oil lamp on Shabbat eve, and told them that Jews in other countries usually light candles, they were scornfully sceptical, declaring that candles were so fundamentally associated with Catholic ritual that it was inconceivable Jews would adopt them. 420 years of living a secret Jewish life, with no formal education, and with rituals being passed down within the family, had eroded the vast majority of their Jewish knowledge.

They knew no Hebrew, praying in Portuguese, and using a liturgy that bore only faint traces of the standard Jewish liturgy. They marked Shabbat and some holidays, not only by lighting oil lamps (in a place where neighbours could not see them), but also by refraining from eating pork, instead cooking beef and rabbit sausages, highly seasoned with salt to disguise the origin of the meat. They marked three holidays: Pesach, on which they ate matza, Yom Kippur, when they fasted, and Purim, which they marked principally by fasting. The Fast of Esther, in Jewish tradition, falls on the day before Purim; Purim itself is a very joyous holiday. They observed these holidays a day or two before or after the correct date in the Hebrew calendar – a tradition which probably arose so as not to arouse the suspicions of the Church authorities. At least one member of the community feigned an allergy to leavened bread, and ate matza throughout the year, so that his eating it on Pesach would not arouse suspicion. For the same reason, they would meet to play cards on Yom Kippur, specifically so as not to appear to be worshipping.

Eventually, Schwartz convinced them of his Jewishness by reciting the Shema, which is arguably the cornerstone prayer of Jewish faith. His audience did not recognize the Hebrew, except for the repeated word Adonai (the Lord), which was the only Hebrew word that had survived in their community. This one word persuaded them of his good faith. Incidentally, Schwartz noted that, every time he uttered the word, the older women in the community covered their eyes, as Jews do when reciting the first lines of the Shema.

Even after the Belmonte anusim had accepted that there were Jews outside their town, practicing their religion openly, they were initially reluctant to change their ways. Eventually, however, they sought to rejoin their fellow-Jews, and wished to affiliate with the rest of the Portuguese Jewish community. There were those in the wider Jewish world who were keen to return them to the mainstream Jewish fold. In Portugal, these included Schwartz himself, and also Artur Carlos de Barros Basto, a descendant of New Christians who had achieved importance in Portuguese national life and also espoused Judaism. Some British Jews also showed considerable interest in educating these Portuguese descendants of anusim and returning them to standard orthodox Judaism. Unfortunately, Schwarz and Barros Basto did not get along well and mutual antagonism and suspicion characterized their relations. At the same time, the British efforts did not bear fruit.

The Belmonte Jewish community is in many ways unique. It has very unusual practices, some of which I described earlier. Also unusual is the arcane selection of festivals that have survived in the community. It has been suggested that the fact that the Fast of Esther is one of the few holiday observances that survived in the community may be due to a readiness to adopt Queen Esther as a counterpart to the Virgin Mary, so venerated in Catholicism. Their celebration of Pesach venerates Moses in a similar way.

A more disturbing example of the community’s uniqueness is that, as a result of centuries of inbreeding, many of its members have endemic health problems, suffering from night blindness, among other afflictions. One family has a gravely ill daughter as a result of genetic complications. This endogamy has led to the community sometimes not being welcomed by the Jewish communities of Lisbon and Porto.

In the religio-political complex that is characteristic of official Jewish life in Israel (that shouldn’t have offended more than half my readership, should it?), the status of the Belmonte community members is not clear-cut. Some officially returned to Judaism in the 1970s, and opened a synagogue, Bet Eliahu, in 1996. There is a community rabbi from Israel, under the auspices of Shavei Israel (Returnees to Israel), an organization which seeks out and supports fringe Jewish communities. The members of the Belmonte community as a whole, however, have not yet been granted recognition as Jews. In a very real sense, it seems to me impossible to deny their Jewishness. Indeed, their achievement in sustaining their faith against incredible odds over 400 years is surely something essentially Jewish.

One astonishing prayer in the community’s liturgy is a 13-line rendition (in Portuguese, of course) of Maimonides’ 13 articles of faith. The hymn is very close in structure and content to Yigdal, which is the standard Jewish liturgy’s poetic rendering of the same 13 articles. In the words of a report about the community in the Israeli daily paper Haaretz:

One cannot help but wonder how this hymn survived. The mind boggles to think that Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith, composed in the 12th century and chanted toward the end of the morning service on weekdays, became part of a Portuguese prayer recited by crypto-Jews who did not even know the Hebrew language existed and refused to talk to Schwarz because they believed that secrecy was integral to their religion. Incredibly, Maimonides’ “Thirteen Principles,” or the hymn based on it, has survived in Portuguese for 500 years; and they never even heard of Maimonides. Which shows how cultural values can live in dark and unknown corners for hundreds of years until one day they burst forth into the light, virtually unchanged, despite a change of language.

If you want to read or watch something more about this unique community, there are two resources I would recommend.

After serving as Israel’s fifth president, and then as Minister of Education and Culture, Yitzchak Navon left political life to pursue other interests. Navon was always a champion of Sephardi culture, and promoter of Ladino, the Judaeo-Spanish language derived from Old Spanish and spoken by Iberian Jews. He travelled to Spain and Portugal in 1992, to mark the 500th anniversary of the expulsion from Spain. He was accompanied by a TV film crew, and produced a 6-part documentary series. This included a visit to Belmonte, which you can watch
either with Navon narrating in Hebrew (no subtitles) here, (the visit to Belmonte starts around 45:07 minutes into the clip)
or with a narrator speaking Navon’s words in English, here (the visit to Belmonte starts around 53 seconds into the clip)

An interesting account of a visit to Belmonte, with a wealth of detail about the community’s customs and liturgy, appeared in Commentary in 1967. You can read it here.

And finally, here’s a Jew in Portugal pictured hiding from the authorities just a few months ago.

Art’s Art and Others’ (and Others)

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Confined to barracks for the last 13 weeks, Bernice and I have been devoting significant time to watching some of the offerings online of plays, (principally from the National Theatre), operas and programs on the visual arts. When we feel our eyes going square, we switch to reading. And when my eyes demand a complete rest, I turn to music. This artsfest has led me to muse about the nature of each of these arts, and, in particular, the relation of each to interpretation.

The art that lends itself most easily to interpretation may well be music. If you want to go along with me (it will take less than ten minutes, and hardly hurt at all), then please listen to this very straightforward (and fairly parve – neither meat nor milk) rendition of Dvořák’s best-known Humoresque. Now, hear what Art Tatum (for my money the greatest jazz pianist) does with the same delightful little jewel. You certainly don’t have to agree, but at least listen to his interpretation.

So, I hear you wearily ask, what’s the point? The point, I think – and bear with me here because, as always, I am making this up as I go along – is that as a performance art, music is, by definition, interpretational, and, given the nature and limitations of musical notation, music is arguably the art form most open to interpretation. This is true even if the performers are not rearranging the music or improvising on it, or playing a set of variations (as Tatum arguably is).

To illustrate this last point, listen to two mainstream classical performances of the Allemande from Bach’s English Suite No 1. The first is from Gustav Leonhardt, playing on a harpsichord from the period of Bach. The second is from Glenn Gould, idiosyncratic Canadian pianist. They are both playing all (and only) the right notes, and, unlike Eric Morecambe, in the right order. (If you don’t get that reference, click here, but only after you have read the rest of the blog.) Two questions: Do you feel that you have just listened to two versions of the same piece of music, or two different pieces of music? And how much of the effect that the music had on you is Bach and how much Gould or Leonhardt?

Another quick question: Is it possible that if Bach heard Gould or Leonhardt (or Dvořák heard Tatum), they would say: ‘A-a-ah-h-h! So that’s what I meant by that!’?

If I wanted to risk losing half my readers (if I haven’t already), I would now offer you Klemperer’s and Bernstein’s conducting of Mahler’s 5th symphony, and then, as the ultimate in how the same thing can sound different, Glenn Gould’s 1955 and 1981 recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations: the same piece of music played on the same instrument by the same performer, but two completely different interpretations.

I am no musician, and not even very knowledgeable about music, but I can understand why some musicologists prefer to read a musical score rather than going to a concert or even listening to recorded music, with the coughs and chair squeaks mercifully absent. Only in their head can they hear what the composer wrote (or, I suspect, their own interpretation of what the composer wrote). They want the unmediated experience.

At the other end of the interpretative scale from music are, it seems to me, painting and sculpture. Here, the creator presents a finished work and the consumer’s interaction with it is almost completely unmediated. No performer presents the work to me. And yet, of course, the museum or art gallery chooses to display the painting or statue in a specific position in a specific room, next to specific other works, lit in a specific way. We can surely view all of these decisions as mediations or interpretations of the work, quite apart from any explicit notes displayed next to the piece or in an accompanying catalogue.

The question of background notes leads me to my next set of questions. To what extent, and in what ways, does knowledge of the artist’s biography contribute to (or perhaps influence) our appreciation and understanding of the work? For example, do we need to know about van Gogh the man in order to view, be moved by, appreciate, understand his work? And here come a few more troubling questions that follow on the heels of that one. I have long ‘known’ that Carl Orff was a Nazi sympathizer in the Berlin of the 1930s and 40s. Does this ‘fact’ influence the quality of his music? In background reading for this post, I have just discovered that the ‘fact’ of that sympathy is far less certain than I have always believed. Does my discovery of this alter the music qualitatively? If we were to learn tomorrow that Picasso poisoned and dismembered red-headed men in his spare time, would that change the nature and quality of his art, objectively? Or subjectively? Does the word ‘objectively’ have any relevance in matters of art, or is art appreciation all subjective, and the high esteem in which Rembrandt is held ‘proves’ his objective standing as an artist no more than the results of one general election (or even several general elections) prove the objective superiority of the majority party? No answers, people, just questions.

Perhaps halfway between music and painting comes theatre. I am sometimes tempted to think that theatre is as freely open to interpretation as music, but, on reflection, for me at least that is not the case. If I hear an interpretation of a piece of music, however far removed from the original, I feel the power of the original in it. Barry Manilow’s Could It Be Magic, for example, is still invested with Chopin’s Prelude in C minor, on whose melodic and harmonic frame Manilow hung his song. However, I have seen some theatrical interpretations that seem to me to have no connection to the essence of the work they are interpreting. I wonder whether that is because theatre operates at a more explicit, intellectual, verbal, literal level than music.

Despite that, clearly theatre is very much an interpretative art. Indeed, I expect practitioners of the art – directors and actors – would argue that there is no point in staging a play if the production does not have something new to say about the work. I also suspect that this is more true for theatre than for music. If we go to a concert specifically because a certain artist is performing a certain work, we may well be hoping to hear the songs or music we love played in the interpretation we are familiar with. However, we would probably not want to see Judi Dench reprising her performance as Lady Macbeth in an identical revival of the Scottish play. Most vivid in my mind, because I have seen it most recently, is the National Theatre production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in which Tamsin Greig played Malvolia (rather than Malvolio, as written by Shakespeare): turning this character (and also Feste) from a man into a woman not only seemed appropriate in a play that is so much concerned with gender identity and confusion, but also, for me, seemed to help the production to actualise its decision to expose the full force of the cruelty of the trick played on Malvolio/a and his/her subsequent incarceration.

Which brings us back, inevitably, to literature. Where does fiction, for example, lie on this spectrum of interpretability? At first sight, it would seem to be, like painting, complete in itself and not open to interpretation. Even more so than in a gallery, nothing mediates between the work and the consumer. For the reader, one page of black type on white paper looks almost indistinguishable from another.

I am tempted to think (and this may simply because I am a words person rather than a pictures person, but I don’t think so) that a great novel contains within it the possibility for a wider range of understanding and interpretation than a great painting does, or, at least, that more of this range is accessible to the general reader. This is partly because of the amount of space and time it covers – there are more words in a novel than brushstrokes in a painting, and very few people spend an hour a day for a month looking at a single painting, but such a parcelling of time is quite normal for reading a novel. I feel that it may also be because words are more equivocal, ambiguous, nuanced, than paint. It may, of course, also be because I, like most modern non-specialist consumers of art, am better educated and more experienced in interpreting novels than painting.

Certainly, the experience of reading aloud to Bernice over the last couple of months has made me far more aware of the way in which we, as readers, are constantly interpreting the books we read, in an effort to understand and possess them.

So, music, painting, theatre, literature – which is the greatest art? Fortunately, the pantheon of arts is not an Olympic Games. Each of the arts is a gold medallist and our lives are enriched by both the depth and the breadth of the art we consume. Of all the things we have binged on over the last couple of months, the arts may well be the least unhealthy.

And finally, for those who don’t read the blog but scroll straight to the bottom, here’s a couple of portraits of the artist as a very young man (taken three months ago). As you can see, I had the temerity to disturb him in mid-flow.