When a seemingly-simple mission to Lisbon goes immediately awry, young Joshua ben Elazar is confronted with the reality of life as a Jew in the early medieval world: welcome some places, harassed in others, always balancing between the dominant Muslim powers and encroaching Christian lords. As he travels from Iberia to the Red Sea, it also becomes clear that Jewish identity itself is neither monolithic nor static, and Joshua must choose for himself what traditions and duties will define his life.
James Hutson-Wiley’s THE MERCHANT FROM SEPHARAD’s greatest strength is how it embraces the complexities of the early medieval Mediterranean world. Social, political, mercantile, and military relationships bound together alliances and rivalries of Christian and Muslim proto-states, most of which displayed some degree of ethnic and cultural mixing. Of course, this dynamic could play out dramatically differently from one place to another, and this lends much of the excitement and drama to the text: a Muslim official might be understanding and generous, or he might abuse the law for his own profit; a Christian lord might rob and kill innocent passersby, or offer them aid and send them on their way; even Jews might refuse to help one another based on competing interpretations of scripture or diverse political views. This is compounded by the realities of pre-modern travel. Unexpected storms sink ships; poor planning leaves caravans lost in the desert; banditry ruins fortunes and ends lives in an instant. Joshua’s journey involves navigating both of these concerns: the company he keeps and the beliefs he professes make any crisis a potential for profit or disaster.
While Joshua’s world is complex, his narrative is not. Hutson-Wiley’s prose is clear and uncluttered (some small copy-editing issues with quotation marks notwithstanding), but the narration is somewhat detached, even in moments of high drama; episodes like a flight from a burning warehouse or a sudden skirmish between Christian and Muslim soldiers pass by in a few short paragraphs. (This choice accurately reflects the style of many primary-source travel narratives, but those sources are not novels – their conventions and expected audiences were different, and the rehearsal of descriptions and events without much tension or introspection leaves a novel feeling shallow.) Joshua frequently behaves with youthful naivete bordering on stupidity (a one-sided, uninteresting romance subplot is the best example), but as a narrator he never develops the critical distance necessary to reflect on his poor choices, or to exhibit how much wiser he’s grown. This shallowness can also extend to the treatment of deeper themes.
The distinction between rabbinical traditions and textual fundamentalism is well-drawn and interesting, for instance, but the treatment of slavery essentially panders to the reader. Joshua is an anachronistic abolitionist, an outright fantasy; in the ancient and medieval periods, it’s historically unclear that even enslaved people themselves believed that the institution of slavery should be abolished (much as modern American workers often wish for better jobs, but may not necessarily critique capitalism itself). Unfortunately, the desire to spare the protagonist some unlikeable traits (and to make some spurious denials about the involvement of Jewish merchants in the larger system of the medieval Mediterranean slave trade) prevents the text from engaging and improving a reader’s understanding of historical realities. The story looks like the early medieval Mediterranean – the people and places are correct, and major events happen when and where they should – and indeed, it captures much of the individual experience of a young merchant bouncing from port to port, meeting new people and ideas. However, it does little to elucidate the underlying systems by which that world functioned, substituting some anachronistic values to create a more relatable world instead.
James Hutson-Wiley’s THE MERCHANT FROM SEPHARAD ultimately falls back on simplistic moralizing, but its portrayal of burgeoning globalism in the early medieval Mediterranean is compelling enough to keep the pages turning.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader