On the fraud and his audience - Alexander Bevilacqua in LRB

“David Reubeni posed a puzzle to contemporaries; he still poses one today. The Mediterranean world was turbulent in the early decades of the 16thcentury. The Ottoman Empire toppled the Mamluks in 1517, giving the sultan control over Egypt, Syria and much of the Arabian Peninsula; Western Christian rulers feared that they might be next. In the wake of Martin Luther’s censure of the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire was deeply divided. The Italian states suffered invasions made more violent by the use of newly developed firearms; Rome was sacked by the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, in 1527.
Many of the Jews who lived around the Mediterranean were on the move, and not by choice. Those who hadn’t converted to Christianity were expelled from the domains of the Spanish crown in 1492, and from the kingdom of Portugal in 1497. The experience of diaspora – initially in North Africa, Italy and the Ottoman Empire – was traumatic. In Italy, the physician and writer Judah Abravanel, who had been separated from his young son, lamented: ‘Time with his pointed shafts has hit my heart/And split my gut, laid open my entrails,/Landed me a blow that will not heal,/Knocked me down, left me in lasting pain.’ In such uncertain times, many dreamed of a distant saviour.”

(…)

“Reubeni spoke only Hebrew and Arabic. He kept kosher and observed religious fasts. But there were signs that he might be a fraud. He was penniless – he claimed that his money had been stolen in Cairo by a treacherous Egyptian – and expected to be housed and fed free of charge. He travelled with a motley and constantly changing coterie of hangers-on and servants, who were always getting into quarrels with one another and with him. Perhaps the pope and the kings agreed to meet him on the off-chance he might be the genuine article. As the historian Zvi Ben-Dor Benite has explained, Reubeni’s story might have seemed plausible because of ‘the long legacy of debates about the [lost] tribes that placed them in the distant, old, southern edge of the world ... and furnished them with military prowess’. Reubeni got a hearing, but no Christian ruler was persuaded to fund or arm him. Some Jews proved more receptive.” Reubeni insisted, quoting Amos 7:14, that he was not ‘a prophet nor the son of a prophet’, nor ‘a sage or a kabbalist’, but ‘merely an army commander’. Yet many of his followers believed him to be more than a diplomatic envoy – perhaps even the messiah.”

(…)
“The diary paints an unflattering portrait of its author. Reubeni could be an ungrateful guest, describing the home of one host as ‘a bad house with a bad smell’. When his interpreters stayed for Passover, he complained that they ‘caused me great expense because they ate a lot and had a taste for delicacies’. He also complained about servants: one of them, an early follower called Joseph, was prone to violence. It probably didn’t help that Reubeni seems to have seen wages as optional: ‘the servants who attended me did so on account of their love of God and did not ask for any payment.’ The diary is equally candid about his own bad temper. On encountering a locked door in a house where he was staying, he found an axe and smashed it. When one converso criticised Judaism, Reubeni reached out to strike him. His nemesis at the Portuguese court, a courtier called Dom Miguel, provoked particular rage in Reubeni, but anyone who displeased him or refused to do his bidding was ‘a complete villain’.” One question the diary leaves unresolved is that of Reubeni’s appearance. The contemporary consensus was that his skin was dark, even ‘black’. His follower Daniel da Pisa referred to his ‘black visage’; another witness described him as ‘black as a Nubian’. In the 16th century, Reubeni’s dark skin would have been as likely to inspire wonder as to trigger a sense of racial superiority. It’s true that Jews didn’t have entirely positive views about Black people.”

(…)

There is no evidence that Reubeni thought of himself as Black. In the diary he never describes his physical appearance or expresses a sense of kinship with the Black people he encounters. In Portugal, he purchased two enslaved young Black men, whom he called ‘Kushite slaves’.”

(…)

“Even the most charitable view of Reubeni must contend with the non-existence of the Jewish kingdom he claimed to represent. Did he believe his own story? His diary entries give nothing away. Other aspects of Reubeni’s narrative have also been called into doubt.” (…)
“But Reubeni shouldn’t be judged too harshly for making misleading statements, assuming different identities and keeping his true motivations to himself. In an age before photography, ID documents and searchable government databases, he was far from unique in pretending to be someone he was not. Assuming a false identity was so common that Miriam Eliav-Feldon has described the Renaissance as an ‘age of imposters’.”

(…)

“The obvious comparison is with Sabbatai Zevi, a 17th-century mystic and rabbi from Izmir who claimed to be the Jewish messiah then, when threatened by the Ottoman authorities, converted to Islam to save his own life, much to the embarrassment of his followers.
Nineteenth-century scholars tended to judge Reubeni sternly. The historian Heinrich Graetz described him as ‘an adventurer who intentionally deceived others’, while Adolf Poznański, a scholar of Judaism, thought him ‘devoid of all wisdom and learning, capricious and ignorant’. But after the First World War he was reclaimed as a Jewish patriot and a Zionist avant la lettre. In 1925 Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, published a historical novel called Reubeni: Prince of the Jews. Brod, who had seen Molkho’s prayer shawl and flag in Prague’s Pinkas synagogue, made Reubeni a Jew from Prague like himself. His Reubeni seeks to reawaken the pride of his fellow Jews; his goal is ‘to create a free people, without distorted souls and shrivelled bodies – a happy people, in whom the whole earth shall rejoice!’ The novel was adapted for the stage and performed in Tel Aviv in 1940. Four years later the Yiddish author David Bergelson wrote a play called Prince Reuveni, which draws parallels between the Inquisition and the Holocaust. Bergelson’s Reubeni wants the Jews to have ‘a foothold somewhere on earth’. The play ends: ‘you fight, my people, that is, you live, my people.’”

Read the article here.

If the renaissance was the age of impostors, what is our age?

Of course, the Messiah expects be housed and fed free of charge. That is one reason why this profession is still so attractive.

And also utterly modern is the distinction between self-perception and how other people see you. After all, what do we see in the mirror?

A black, Jewish Messiah, embraced by Max Brod. Once again a Messiah with a temper who believes that paying wages is something for lesser gods.