We are a Middle Eastern people

WE DO not know if Benjamin of Tudela — the Jewish Marco Polo — traded coral or gems. We do not know the name of his parents, or the names of his lovers. Nor do we know the site of his grave. But we know he travelled, for 10 years — some say 14 — and that he wrote. Or rather, he recorded. Benjamin left Spain around 1160 and returned in 1172. Seeking the blessing of the land of Israel he travelled — by boat, by camel, on foot — the long way round: through Genoa, Rome and Constantinople, across the Holy Land ruled by French-speaking Crusaders, and back through Aleppo, Alexandria and Baghdad.

The Rabbi left us The Book of Travels — and this, for secular historians at least, is a treasure to rival the Zohar. Why? Not only because no 12th-century traveller had a keener eye for the cities he visited — his descriptions of Constantinople are the most vivid then written — but because he wrote to record, and to count, the Jews.

They were silk weavers in Thebes; they were tanners in Constantinople; they were glass workers in Aleppo and Tyre. They were 200 in Rome. They were 7,000 in Mosul. They were a nation almost entirely Mediterranean and Middle Eastern. The Jews of Europe were for Benjamin only a few thousand — and only hearsay. Almost a rumour, spreading east in Northern France and Germany.

“They are full of hopes,” wrote Benjamin, “And say: ‘Be of good spirit, dear brethren, for the salvation of the Lord will be quick, like the twinkling of an eye.’ ”

Reading The Book of Travels one is left with one conclusion. Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaism, rather than a curio, is in the greatest sweep of Jewish history — the mainstream. Ashkenazi Judaism was the flickering. Next to non-existent in the early middle ages, ballooning suddenly, only to almost vanish from Europe in less than five centuries.

None were more aware of this than the rabbis, when the 15th-century Rabbi Mosses Isserles wrote his commentary on the Shulchan Aruch he was enshrining in Krakow specific, distinct customs and traditions, what he saw as a branch, not the trunk of Judaism. These rulings — as if for an offshoot — came to define the Ashkenazi rite.

Piecing through texts and cemeteries, historians have estimated the historical Jewish population. As Benjamin travelled in the 12th century, over 80 per cent of Jews lived around the Mediterranean and in the Middle East — scholars estimate less than 12 per cent were living in Europe. Until the 16th century, after the expulsion from Spain, the majority of Jews lived in Islamic lands: they were Mizrahi or Sephardi.

The history we know only too well meant the centuries of a Judaism centred in Europe are historically brief. In 1880, nearly 90 per cent of Jews were Europeans. In 1939, about 57 per cent were. Come 1960, still, some 27 per cent of Jews lived in Europe. Today, barely 10 per cent of Jews are European. The number of Jews in Europe has fallen from 2m in 1991 to less than 1.4m today.

Judaism is now slowly returning to what it always was: a primarily Middle Eastern phenomenon that Benjamin would have recognised much more than he would the shtetl. Today, roughly 45 per cent of the world’s Jews are in Israel (which has overtaken the United States, where some 40 per cent live).

With the Israeli Jewish population booming, with an average of three children per family, and the US Jewish population ageing and declining, the majority of the world’s Jews will again be Middle Eastern by 2050.

In Judaism, what was will be, and Europe was but a twinkling of an eye.

Ashkenazi Judaism was the ¼RûTN[RWP

Ben Judah is the author of ‘This is London’