Rabbinical Knights [ENG]

Born in 1939 Michael Moorcock is an exceptional writer. He joined eclectic fantasy (there is no need to deny that the level of his works was uneven) with the career of musician and visual artist. But, for a history lover, the most interesting are the historical references Moorcock smuggled in his stories. 

In a short story od 1981 entitled "The War Hound and the World's Pain" the main hero - a Lutheran mercenary Ulryk von Bek, fighting in the Thirty Years' War, gets into trouble. Not only at the very beginning cannot get along with his Catholic superiors (there were a few Protestant qualified officers fighting for the Habsburgs - i.e. well-known Heinrich Holk), but also he is faced with the necessity of joining an expedition for some mystical relic. During his quest he visits many strange places, including an alternative reality where Carthage was the winner of the Punic Wars. Moreover, the Carthaginians accepted Judaism as their religion and the knight order there is not the one of the Templars, but of Rabbinical Knights. 

 

Heinrich Holk (1599-1633)

Although the vision of Jewish supremacy sounds very extravagantly, we can certainly notice an echo of discussion that flared up among historians (and in public) in Europe. In 1966 there was published a book of Paul Wexler "the Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic Jews". The author, having collected the ancient and medieval writers' pieces (i.e. those of Ibn Khaldun) introduced a vision of Judaism flourishing among Berbers and Carthaginians' descendants in North Africa. Moreover, according to Wexler all Berbers, before the Muslim conquest, were believed to favor the Jewish religion. It is the Berberian queen Dihja that were to stand for the symbol of the struggle against Islam (the leader of the Berberian country, of which the elites, just as Khazars, accepted Judaism). The most controversial of the theses included in this book was the claim (the one that expanded the theses of André Chouraqui in "Between East and West A History of the Jews of North Africa") that Judaic Berbers not only took part in the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, but also were the first to bring there the Jewish religion; furthermore, that they are the ancestors of contemporary Sephardic Jews. 

 

Cover of 1981

The historians who were in favour of such an argumentation presented some reasons why the North Africa's population was inclined to Judaism. The first of those reasons is its Semitic nature, more appealing to Phoenicians' descendants than Christianity; another is the traditional resistance of the province against Rome (unambiguously Christian from the time of Theodosius); the third is relatively open nature of the Jewish religion in diasporas in late antiquity. Anyway, the short nightmare of Ulryk von Bek and Sedenka the Cossack was also the issue subjected to academic discussion. 

Literature:

1) M. Moorcock, War Hound and the World's Pain, NY 1981; (wyd. polskie: M. Moorcock, Żołdak i zło świata, Warszawa 1994)

2) P. Wexler, The Non-Jewish Origins of the Sephardic, NY 1996;

3) A. Chouraqui, Between East and West A History of the Jews of North Africa, 2001;

4) S. Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, London 2011; (wyd. polskie: S. Sand Kiedy i jak wynaleziono naród żydowski, Warszawa 2014)