A Journey to the End of the Millennium (Harvest Book) [Paperback]

Set in the years just before the Christian Millennium in 1000 CE, this the story of a commercial partnership. Ben Attar is a Sephardi Jewish merchant from Tangier. Like the Muslims, the Sephardim were allowed to have more than one wife, and Ben Attar has two - an older and a younger one (their names are never given); he loves them both and the two women live in amity with each other. He has a Muslim partner, Abu Lutfi. The third partner was Ben Attar's beloved nephew Abulafia, who had settled in France and travelled through Europe selling the goods brought from Africa by the other two. In France he had met and married Esther-Minna, a Jewish widow from Worms in the Rhineland. The religious leaders of Ashkenazi Jews had recently ordained that only monogamy was lawful; and when Esther-Minna learnt that Ben Attar had two wives, she insisted, strongly supported by her brother Yehiel Levitas, that Abulafia should give up his partnership with the other two. Her motives were complex: the dictates of Ashkenazi orthodoxy, the longing to have her husband cease his long travels away from home, the fear that she too might have to accept a second wife. Her insistence distresses not only Abulafia, but Ben Attar, too; and the uncle undertakes a special journey, together with his Muslim partner, his two wives and the learned Rabbi Elbaz from Seville, to Paris, in the hope that Esther-Minna might be persuaded both by biblical precedents and by the harmony in his family that his double marriage might be acceptable and the partnership with his nephew might be resumed.

When the party reaches Abulafia's home in Paris, its owner is desperately torn between his love of his wife and his love for his uncle, and the first two sections of the novel chart the many tortuous events which follow, and which eventually move the action from France to Germany. In each country Rabbi Elbaz pleads Ben Attar's case before a Jewish tribunal, using different arguments in each case. In each case, however, the decisions of the judges can hardly be said to be the result of Ashkenazi versus Sephardi religious principles, but of emotional spasms. That certainly muddied the issue in contention.

The narrative in third and last part takes a new direction, which I did not think was satisfyingly integrated with the theme of first two. For all its merits, I found the whole story too drawn out, at times rather tedious, and the end both convoluted and unsatisfying. But merits it has. It conveys the feel of the Middle Ages. The translation by Nicholas de Lange is quite remarkable: I do not know whether the style of the original Hebrew is anything like that of the English - the prose flows rhythmically through long sentences, (for me the verbal equivalent of the Vltava movement in Smetana's Ma Vlast), uninterrupted by any dialogue, and occasionally almost soporific.

The sympathies of the author are with the Sephardim, and with what they have in common with their Muslim brethren. These are often referred to as Ishmaelites, to remind us that Ishmael, from whom the Arabs are deemed to have descended, was, like Isaac, a son of Abraham's, so that they are brethren in fact.

The Millennium, while meaningful to Christians, had no significance to Jews or to Muslims. The journey of Ben Attar takes place in a Christian Europe in which serious persecution of the Jews is still a century away. Jews (like Esther-Minna in this novel) can still have Christian servants, for example. The few references to Christians in the novel are not (with one exception) particularly threatening and so marginal to the main story that the significance of the title escapes me.