PAUL TO SAUL

By Robert M. Grossman

Beginning

He met Saul in later life. They both belonged to the same literary club, a rather staid gathering of wishful writers consisting of an array of accomplished men and women, many of whom were Waspish in manner and persuasion, others of whom were similar in manner but different in persuasion. At each meeting a member would read from his or her work. It may have been a piece on English or American history, an archeological study, a courtroom experience – any creation of fact or fiction that suited the member’s fancy. Saul read from his work at one of the first meetings Neal attended. It was entitled “A Different Direction.” The main character went by the name of Paul. After Saul finished his reading, Neal introduced himself.

“I’m curious about Paul. Are you Paul or is he completely fictitious?” Neal asked.

“I’m Paul and I’m not,” Saul responded.

“Like all fiction, I suppose,” said Neal.

Saul merely nodded and went on as though he had known Neal for years. “My given name is Saul P. Miner. The P, as you might guess, stands for Paul. I was one of the few Jews in a private school for boys here. That was in the late forties. You and I seem about the same age and …” he hesitated momentarily, “… the same religion. Maybe you had a similar experience.”

“I went to public school on the northwest side and Hebrew school, too,” Neal interjected with seeming pride.

Saul continued. “You had a much more religious upbringing than I did. My father was born in Poland in the early 1900s and came to America when he was only five. He grew up downstate in the town where my grandparents settled. After college, he met my mother and they moved here to start their life together. A private school was his way of opening a door for me. As soon as he could afford it, I transferred there from my public school. I was 10 at the time. That’s when I became Paul. My school application read ‘S. Paul Miner.’ My father knew nothing about the world he was sending me into, but he certainly knew it wasn’t a Jewish world, so he figured if I were known as Paul rather than Saul, it might be easier for me. I handily passed the entrance exam and the school probably welcomed the tuition since Wasp enrollment was down. When I was 14, I went east to prep school just like other kids in my class. There was no question that I was then Paul – though I never forgot that there was a Saul inside of me.”

As they were leaving, Neal asked if Saul had an extra copy of what he had read. “I’d really like to take a close look at it,” he said.

“Take this one,” Saul quickly offered. “Call me after you’ve finished. We’ll arrange to have lunch and talk about it.”

When Neal got home, he immediately opened to “A Different Direction.” This is how it read.

September, 1956

Paul climbed aboard the bus and took the first window seat he could

find. As it pulled out of the airbase, no one was sitting next to him. His plane had landed near Casablanca an hour earlier and he appreciated being left alone so he could absorb the storybook world unfolding before him. The evening hours would soon bring darkness to the sub desert terrain, but there was still enough light from the glow on the horizon to see dried-clay mosques with their domed roofs in the distance as the bus moved onward. Even though he had arrived without much sleep, the allure of observing droves of Arabs on the otherwise deserted two-lane highway kept him as awake and alert as a child playing with his new toys on Christmas morning. Most of the Arab men wore garments of sackcloth, often with hoods, and trudged along on their sandaled feet. Some were pulling donkeys laden with grain. Others pulled camels packed with cruses of what must have been oil, honey and flax. Many of the women were covered in a darkened fabric that concealed everything but their eyes, their foreheads and their bespangled and tattooed hands and feet. These Arabs were probably on their way to pray in one of those far-off mosques or assemble for a family meal of what was likely to be figs, dates and flat cakes of leavened bread heated on an open oven outside the metal shed or tent where they lived. It was soon too dark to observe anything other than an occasional light ahead. By the time Paul arrived at the base and was dropped off at the officers’ quarters, all he could see was the enlisted man on duty holding a flashlight and leading him to his room where he collapsed into sleep.

The Korean War had ended two years earlier but it was still very much alive when Paul applied to college. At his father’s insistence, he had skipped a year in prep school so he was sure to be young enough to avoid the draft prior to beginning his freshman year. He would then hopefully be safe until graduation. Once there, sensing he might ultimately have to serve in the military, he enrolled in the naval training program. That would lead to his becoming an officer on active duty for at least two years, but the notion of spending time overseas seemed enticing. Besides, that was four years in the future.

Those four years had now passed. Before leaving for Morocco, he was first sent to Navy Justice School where he spent six weeks learning how to prosecute and defend the accused in court-martials. Naval officers were not then required to have a law degree before trying cases, though his experience there did whet his appetite for law school one day.

As soon as he awoke the next morning, he threw the covers aside and stepped to the open window where he took in the view of his new, sun-drenched surroundings. The sight of the endless ocean in the distance and the towering irises just below, along with the appealing aroma of jasmine in the air, brought him excitement and wonder. If only a half-naked nymphet would now appear at his door, one wrapped in the delicate weave of sheer tulle hanging in folds from her well-formed hips.

There was a knock in that direction. “My God,” Paul uttered aloud, grabbing his bathrobe and moving swiftly to open the door. There, instead, stood an enlisted man who announced, “Sir, I know this is your first day, but if you’d like breakfast, it’s only being served for another half hour. I’m assigned to this floor. I’ll make up your room as soon as you depart for the officers’ mess.”

“Thank you. I’ll get dressed right away,” Paul stammered. He quickly put on his khaki uniform with the gold ensign bars on his shirt collar and hastened to breakfast. He wasn’t required to report for duty until the next day, so after eating alone in the empty mess hall, he decided to explore the base. He started down the path towards the main gate. On either side were expanses of meticulously leveled lawn, almost like carpeting. It looked as if it had just been cut that morning, which, it turned out, it had. In every direction he saw groups of Arabs on their knees, each caring for an assigned patch of green. Standing over the nearest of them was a man dressed in western garb. As Paul watched, the man moved to supervise another group which was planting what he later learned were date palm bushes and honey-scented pomegranates. The walkway he was on started upward and when Paul got to the top and could see the downward slope, off to the right was a golf course and on the left two sets of tennis courts. So far the only thing that didn’t fully resemble a 1950s suburban scene back home were the Arabs tending the grass, flowers and fruit trees, though in America they would have been called Negroes -- or “niggers” by more than some.

Paul found his way to the officers’ mess by lunchtime. As he stepped into the food line, he decided to introduce himself to the lieutenant in front of him. Arlen O’Day greeted Paul with a friendly smile and invited him to his table where there were several other officers. To his immediate right as he took his seat was Robert Gardner. Paul sensed he was Jewish, but that was probably just the impulse he had when meeting anyone for the first time whose name wasn’t O’Day. Regardless of his having lived away from home in a largely Waspish world ever since he was a young boy, unless someone was clearly not Jewish, Paul seemed always driven to wonder at each new encounter whether that bond, however tenuous, existed. He had learned over time that Jews weren’t the only ones who asked themselves that kind of question, but it was almost a given with the Jews he knew.

Another officer sitting to his left introduced himself. His name was Mark Medlock, which sounded about as non-Jewish as O’Day. Somehow, though, he felt an immediate affinity for Medlock. He was tall, at least 6’2”, and Paul almost always found a certain gentleness in tall people.

“You see all these guys,” Mark said, pointing to everyone at the table. “They’re Republicans. I suppose you’re one, too. I’m the only one who is voting for Stevenson.”

They all laughed. “We forgive you, Mark,” said Gardner. “You’ll only have to serve one extra year for that.”

“I guess I’ll have to serve an extra year, too,” said Paul. “I’m voting for him.”

“Christ, another intellectual,” exclaimed Gardner.

Mark turned to Paul and quietly said, “We’ll have to get to know each other. I only come to the base once a week or so. I’m stationed about 10 miles in the interior at the intelligence site. I spent nine months in Washington learning Russian and polishing my Arabic before coming over here. Most of the time I listen to chatter between Moscow and the Russian fleet in the Med, interpret it and pass it on to an appropriate source. That’s all I can tell you, but why don’t you come out one day when you’re free and I’ll show you around, at least what I’m permitted to show you. What’s your role on the base?”

“I’ll be involved in court-martial work, trying and defending. By the way, how do I get to your site?”

“If you have enough dough, you ought to buy a car. Most of us have one. You can buy a Volkswagen cheap or an M.G.”

The thought of owning, even driving, a Volkswagen -- of doing anything that was remotely German – instinctively repulsed Paul. In time that reaction would ease but never be gone. The next day he rose early and dressed soon enough to have a full breakfast and still make it to the legal department. Unfortunately, he got a little lost before finally arriving a few minutes late.

“Ensign Miner, you’re late. Don’t let it happen again. Don’t let it happen again.” This was how Paul was greeted by the lieutenant in charge, W. Frederick Carlson. Carlson had a pronounced accent, which turned out to be a Texas twang. He spoke at a staccato pace, repeatedly making the same point as though he were herding cattle to market.

“Now Ensign Miner, I assume you’re ready for your first assignment, your first assignment. You’re going to start out defending cases, and when I think you’re ready, real ready, you’ll prosecute. Understand. Defend first, then prosecute.”

“Yes, sir. Yes, sir,” Paul clattered back, trying to make it seem as though repeating yourself was quite natural.

“You only have to say it once, Miner,” Carlson grunted. “You’ve been to Navy Justice School, so I assume you know what you’ll be doing. I’ll give you one day, one day, to watch a court-martial in session to see how it’s done here. Then I’ll assign you to a case. Got it? Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Paul walked down the hall to the courtroom where he had been instructed to sit in on a special court-martial. It was the only case being heard that day. The judge, a lieutenant commander, and three other officers serving as the jury were seated on an elevated platform with an American flag behind them. He introduced himself to the judge and took a seat. There was nothing fancy about the room – no baronial setting like Paul’s image of a courtroom in the U.S. The proceedings were transcribed by a stenographer who first repeated the testimony word-for-word into a recording device through a rubberized mouth piece that reduced his voice to an uninterrupting whisper. If convicted, the accused could serve up to a year in the brig and receive a bad conduct discharge.

The sailor in this case was charged with sexually accosting an Arab woman. He had apparently made his way south to Marrakech -- how he got there was not clear -- and even though dressed in civilian clothes, he stood out in the Arab souk. When he cornered a young female whose headscarf rested on her partially exposed shoulders, someone immediately reported him to the local police. He was arrested and, fortunately for him, turned over to Air Force personnel in the area and ultimately sent back to the naval base. If the woman he accosted had been married with her husband standing nearby, the sailor might have been swarmed over and brutally beaten by a gaggle of angry Arab men. This would have been their way of rendering justice -- just as it once was among Puritans in America, and continued to be among southern whites against Negroes in Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama. That was Paul’s first hint of life below the Atlas Mountains.

He carefully watched the officer representing the sailor because that was the role he would play, though not in a special court-martial. In the beginning, he would be involved in summary proceedings where there was only one officer acting as both judge and jury, and the offense – such as gambling, drinking on duty or stealing an item from the navy exchange store -- was not as serious, carrying a sentence of 30 days or less in the brig. It would only be later that he would qualify to serve in a special -- or perhaps even a general -- court-martial.

At the close of the proceedings Paul reported back to Lieutenant Carlson. To his surprise, there were no summary cases scheduled for trial the next day and the special court-martial he had been observing was now recessed for an unspecified period because two of the three officers on the jury were also pilots who had to immediately fly their jets to a Sixth Fleet carrier for a brief but secret mission. Carlson told him to check in each morning in the event things changed.

Aside from his nighttime journey from Casablanca, Paul hadn’t yet seen any of the intriguing world that surrounded the guarded and pristine naval base. He had read about unrest in the central part of the country, and while the base’s personnel could leave its confines when they had time off, they had been warned to stay away from any area where there had been rioting. A list of those areas was posted at the main gate.

There was a war going on next door in Algeria, but at least it had not spread to Morocco. The two countries had different relationships with France. For the French, Algeria belonged to France in the same way that Alaska belonged to the United States. They owned it and were prepared to fight the indigenous Arabs to maintain that ownership. Morocco was different. Much of it had been under the aegis, not the ownership, of France for decades, and while many of the French who were born in Europe ventured to Morocco to live and hopefully thrive there, it was never treated with the same sense of belonging as Algeria. Only months before Paul’s arrival, the French had relinquished their protectorate role to the Moroccan monarchy, which proceeded to put down most of the rioting and secure to itself all but a small portion of the country that remained in the hands of Spain near, but not including, Tangier.

It was in the interest of the monarchy to keep the French inhabitants from leaving. The French model of government had been established and maintained since the early 1900s, and a smooth transition by the Arab elite meant that many of the government personnel who were French kept their jobs and only slowly trained Arabs to take their place. More importantly, the economy was largely run by the French. Except for land and businesses owned by the monarchy and its privileged entourage, most Arabs were employed in national and local French-owned companies. The breakdown was not unlike what Paul had seen on his walking tour of the naval base: groups of Arabs cutting grass and planting flowers and bushes overseen by a western-dressed supervisor, presumably a Frenchman.

At the lunch table during one of his first unassigned days, Paul asked if he could hitch a ride to town with anyone who was driving there. Gardner offered to take him.

“I’d like to get to the M.G. dealer. Is that near where you’re headed?”

“It’s in the French sector,” said Gardner. “I’m only going a few blocks from there. I’ll show you where. You can meet me after you finish.”

“Do the French and Arabs live apart?” Paul asked.

“Absolutely. That’s true in every sizeable town in Morocco. It’s like the whites and colored in our country,” he replied, seemingly pleased that he had drawn that analogy.

“Are there any Jews here?”

“I have no idea,” Gardner abruptly answered and immediately changed the subject. “I’ll drop you off now. The M.G. dealer is right down the street. I’m going a few blocks that way,” pointing in the opposite direction. “My car will be parked in front of where I’ll be. You can’t miss it.”

Paul made his way to the showroom. After looking over the various cars there, he got the price of one he liked and thought he could afford. If his father would advance him most of the money, he could repay him from a portion of each paycheck over the next two years. He told the dealer, who spoke decent English, that he was interested in the black M.G. convertible with the red leather interior and would be back as soon as he had the money. As he walked down the street to meet Gardner, he got his first real feel of life outside the base during daylight, at least in that part of town where the French lived.

The streets were paved, as against what he would later find in the Arab quarter, and those houses he could see had a distinctly French architectural flavor. Other houses, presumably larger ones with well-attended gardens, remained hidden from view by crenulated stone walls partly blanketed by trellises of jasmine and sprinkled all along the top of their wide heights with firmly embedded shards of cut glass to protect against unwanted intruders. Paul was struck by the level of fortification that the walls projected, but for him it was their contrasting colors that mostly drew his attention -- harsh white and yellowish stone offset by the rich blues and greens of painted doors and entry ways. The people he passed were almost all European-looking. He stopped at a bakery just to gaze at the display of luscious patisserie. He moved next door to scan the North African wines and spices. Most of the stores seemed on the verge of closing, which Paul later learned was a daily three hour ritual about this time. The store owners would walk home for their major meal of the day, then take their afternoon slumber and await the subsiding of the sun’s heat before reopening.

Paul found Gardner waiting for him on the street. During the ride back they talked about cars and other mundane topics, but Paul stayed clear of any sensitive subjects, at least for now. As they approached the base, he suddenly remembered to ask Gardner if there was a barber in town since he needed a haircut.

“You don’t have to go back into town for a haircut. There’s a barber on the base, right on the first floor of our building. He’s a Moroccan, an Arab, but he’s learned how to give an American haircut.”

The next morning Paul found his way to the barbershop after breakfast. The barber was certainly Moroccan – his skin was olive-colored and his hair black and curly – but all his equipment, including the chair, made the place seem like the local barbershop in America. The barber motioned Paul to the chair, placing the striped gown around his neck and spreading it to his knees.

“I assume you speak a little English. Don’t give me a crew cut, just a normal haircut.”

The barber nodded, then added, “I understand.”

Paul could see and feel that the Moroccan knew his craft. After cutting his hair in the way Paul wanted, he applied shaving cream to his sideburns and the back of his neck. Then he carefully used a straight razor to smoothly shave the creamed areas close and clean. This was the part of the haircut Paul always enjoyed the most.

“You do excellent work. It’s nice to see that local Arabs are hired on the base.”

The barber smiled.

“How did you get the job?”

“My friend works on the base. He makes sure the grass and flowers are kept right,” he said, searching for the best way to say it correctly. “He told me they needed a barber.”

“I think I saw your friend the other day. He was supervising the workers who were cutting and watering the grass. But he looked French, not Arab.”

“He’s not French and he’s not Arab.”

“What else could he be?”

“He’s a Jew. So am I.”

Paul felt a surge of delight and closeness.

“Are there other Jews on the base?”

Looking at Paul’s white face and American haircut, he answered hesitantly.

“Yes.”

Paul instinctively sensed his concern. “Don’t worry. I am a Jew, too.”

The barber’s eyes widened. He put his arm on Paul’s shoulder. “I am surprised. You are an officer. I didn’t realize they let Jews become officers.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that my navy is overflowing with Jewish officers, but there are some. You’ve probably even cut some Jewish hair.”

“We are Sephardic Jews. We have been in Morocco a long time.”

“When did your ancestors first come?” Paul eagerly asked.

“They have lived here ever since the Romans drove the Jews out of Palestine. Maybe they left for Spain or Portugal at some time and then came back after the Catholics forced them to leave or become Christian or be killed. We live in the medina where the Arabs live. Our part is separate from theirs. It’s the mellah. There are some Jews living in the French quarter. We don’t see them much. I don’t think they want to be part of us, part of the Sephardics.”

Paul found it hard to hold back tears. He wasn’t sure why he felt so emotional about what he had just heard, but the tears were almost there. The barber could see his reaction. He once again put his arm on Paul’s shoulder.

“I am Moshe,” he said.

“I am Saul.” He had not uttered that name since he was a small boy. He had always kept it secret, even from most of the few Jews he met at prep school and college.

“Are there other Jews working on the base?” he asked

“Yes. Each of us helps the other find work. We trust the Americans. If you do a good job, you keep it. We Jews do good work in any job we get. We always come on time. We stay as late as we have to. We know that’s what the Americans expect. That’s our way, too.”

“Would you take me for a visit to the mellah?”

“Yes, for sure. But you must wear your uniform. I want my family and friends to see an American officer who is a Jew.”

“Certainly,” Paul said. “Do you have a day off? Perhaps I could come with you then, if I am free.”

“I must work every day but Sunday. That is the American day off. I should go to synagogue on Saturday but if I do, I lose my job.”

“I will see you in the middle of the week,” said Paul. “By then I should know if I can make it the following Sunday.”

Paul firmly shook hands with Moshe. His surprise and warm response to this unexpected discovery gave way to a sense of excitement. He punched his fist into the palm of his hand as he walked to his room. He felt an almost biblical jubilance in meeting a Jew who could trace his ancestors to the Palestine of 2,000 years ago, whose olive skin must have meant that the farthest north his forbearers ever reached was Spain or Portugal or the other side of the Pyrenees in southern France, if that far north.

One of the books Paul brought with him was a collection of maps of the Middle East. He immediately opened it to check the distance from Jerusalem to Morocco. It gave him a sense of how long it took those departing Jews to cross North Africa on foot. Moshe’s ancestors may have been among the Jews who rebelled against the Romans in 70 C.E. and were exiled, or among the remaining Jews who rebelled and were exiled some 65 years later. Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria were in between. Many of the wanderers must have settled in one of these countries while others moved on to Morocco.

Paul had read and absorbed enough to know that beginning in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel, hundreds of thousands of Sephardic Jews spread from the Arab countries in the East to those all along the North African coastline began their return -- ultimately some 600,000 in all. Significant numbers of other Jews from northern and eastern Europe – Ashkenazi Jews -- had arrived before Israel was formally recognized, many at the turn of the 20^th century and later in the 1930s as Hitler came to power and unleashed his demented hatred of the Jews. The Sephardics had always lived in relative peace but as distinct minorities among the Arabs in the countries east and west of Palestine. Once the War was over and Israel came alive as a state, they finally escaped their second class status among the Arabs, though even as free citizens of Israel they found themselves treated as socially beneath the Ashkenazi Jews.

Paul also knew that the treatment of the Sephardics in Israel was not unlike that of eastern European Jews who immigrated to America around the beginning of the 20^th century. The Jews from Germany and Austria who reached U.S. shores some 50 years before looked down on them. There were certainly those among them who went out of their way to welcome and reach out to the newer arrivals, but not until after the Second World War did the barriers of separation between the two groups really begin to break down in the U.S. It was not unlike that in Israel. The Sephardic Jews, whose lives were influenced by the Arab setting they lived in for centuries, were treated less than fairly by the white-skinned Ashkenazi who had gotten there first. In some way, Paul also sensed, just as the evil of Hitler helped bring Jews together in America, the hatred and jealousy of the Arabs before, during and after the creation of Israel as a nation would ultimately help bring the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews together, if not among the first generation of arrivals, then, he felt, it would happen among their sons and daughters or grandsons and granddaughters.

At breakfast the following morning Paul sat next to Mark Medlock.

“Have you gotten a car yet?” Mark asked.

“Not yet. I’m on the verge of buying an M.G. but I still have to put the money together for it.”

“Listen, I’m driving out to my site in the next hour. If you’re free, why don’t you come with me and I’ll show you around. I’m parked in front of the B.O.Q.”

“If I can make it, I’ll meet you there in 15 minutes,” said Paul. He checked with Lieutenant Carlson who told him nothing was scheduled for that day.

Mark was waiting for him in his Sunbeam-Talbot convertible, one similar to the car Roosevelt and Churchill rode in during their meeting 13 years earlier in Casablanca. There was a narrow road that led to the intelligence site. The only sign of life was an occasional camel or donkey.

“Are you a Jew?” Mark asked out of the blue. Paul always felt a cringe whenever his identity was phrased that way. Spoken in a certain tone, it could be the same as saying “Are you a Jew boy?” or “Are you a kike?” or “Are you a Yid?” Paul had learned to handle that derisive phrasing on those relatively infrequent occasions when his identity was so questioned. He would either stand his ground with a confronting, unflinching stare at the purveyor until the latter sheepishly looked away, or, depending on the size and number of the opposition, get the hell out of there. But Mark’s tone had none of that in it. It was just a statement from someone who probably meant no more than the word itself. And, after all, he was voting for Stevenson.

“Yes, I am Jewish.” He hesitated to respond further.

“I’m from New Jersey -- not Amboy though,” Mark laughed. “Most of us in my town were Catholics but there were Jews and Protestants, too. When I was a kid, I worked over the summer cutting grass at my father’s funeral home. It was next to the local synagogue. I’d yell back and forth to the guys who hung out the window on Saturday. They needed relief from the heat inside, which, they’d tell me, mostly meant relief from the rabbi who had briefly left the room to take his fourth piss of the morning. We talked baseball. I was a Giant fan. They were for the Dodgers. We’d always have a pickup game after the rabbi granted them their freedom. They turned out to be just like me. I also knew a few Jews when I was in public school, and my doctor and dentist were Jewish. I then went to Loyola and those I met from that point on were mostly Catholics. You and I both feel the same way about Stevenson so maybe we’ve got other things in common.”

They soon arrived at the site, which was closely guarded and completely fenced off from its barren surroundings. There was only a three-story, windowless building behind the fences, and all one could see from outside the compound was an array of antennae on the building’s roof. This was the means by which that Russian chatter was translated and conveyed to the U.S. military throughout the Mediterranean. Paul met some of Mark’s fellow officers during lunch in one of the few unrestricted areas of the building, but none of them talked about their work – or even how they viewed the coming presidential election. This was a secretive bunch. Sports was the highlight of the discussion. Obviously, Mark was aching for more conversation than he got at the site.

The sun was still bright in the beguiling sky that Morocco had offered up every day since Paul’s arrival. Mark had assured Paul he would drive him to the main base if no one else was going in that direction, and since there were no departures scheduled that afternoon, Mark revved up his Sunbeam-Talbott and the two of them headed back.

About half way there, the car’s motor began to sputter. As Mark eased over to the side of the road, it completely died. After trying to restart it several times without success, they both got out and Mark raised the hood. He fidgeted with the battery connections and spark plugs, then hopelessly tried the ignition again. He got back out and looked in all directions. There wasn’t a camel or donkey in sight and the afternoon heat was becoming unbearable. All at once two men appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. They made some friendly gestures with their hands and then looked under the hood. They started talking to each other. They could have been speaking the Moroccan dialect of Arabic but Mark, as a linguist, assured Paul they weren’t speaking any form of Arabic he’d ever heard. There were Berbers from the Atlas Mountains in the vicinity who spoke their own dialect, Mark added, but it wasn’t that language either.

Suddenly, Paul sensed what he was hearing. The same guttural tone and nuance had been repeated time and again when he grudgingly attended religious school on Sunday as a boy. The language was rarely spoken in his home, so he couldn’t interpret the words. But he knew the sound. He knew the intonation. He turned to them and said in his halting French, “Je suis Juif,” hoping they would understand him, but all they seemed to see were his blue eyes, blond hair and khaki uniform. Then it dawned on Paul what he should do. Slowly but firmly he began to recite a prayer that almost every Jew has been taught, regardless of how little-trained in Hebrew or whether from as far away as Russia, Yemen or South Dakota. It was the prayer that reflects the Jewish concept of monotheism devised thousands of years ago: “Shema, Yisraeil: Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad! (Hear, O Israel: the Lord, our God, the Lord is One!)”

The two men’s eyes lit up. They quickly moved towards Paul with outstretched arms, threw them around him -- and immediately fixed the car. They then receded into the desert. Mark looked on in astonishment.

By the time Paul was dropped off at the base, he and Mark had talked enough to seem like old friends. Mark was fascinated that the barber on the base, who had also cut his hair, was a Jew, not an Arab, and that he had invited Paul to visit him at his home in the mellah. He continued to be struck by the arrival of two Jews from the desert who, upon hearing the Hebrew recital of an ancient prayer, felt an immediate kinship with the white-skinned Paul.

For Mark, a believer in the solution by Augustine and Aquinas to what for Paul were sophistic arguments concocted to justify some kind of divine yet inscrutable harmony between revelation and reason -- the two nevertheless carefully and comfortably joined in Mark’s eyes at his Catholic hip – the solution was for him an affirmation of the Bible’s authenticity; it was, even more persuasively, the very means by which God, either through Jesus or by Himself, Herself or Itself, restored his Sunbeam-Talbott to life through the mystic emergence and handiwork of Paul’s Jewish brethren.

For Paul, it was the meaningful serendipity of bonding with his Sephardic kinsmen, whether on the base or in the desert, who were still very much alive in the modern world of the 1950s, yet able to trace their Judaic lineage several thousand years back to the Roman conquest of Palestine. This led him once again to ponder whether Granger was a Jew who was in hiding from both his past and his present, just as he, Paul, had once been.

Mark’s reaction to his Jewish encounters, whether as a boy in New Jersey or now with Paul, could have been quite different. Paul thought of the Catholicism that had spawned and carried out the Inquisition, that had cruelly vilified those who did not accept the precepts of the Vatican, that had bred popes who hated the Jews. He also thought about his own experiences in prep school and college when he and his few Jewish friends exchanged stories of ugly incidents with Catholics. But there was none of that in Mark. He seemed a good man, a warm and inquisitive man, a man who could be trusted, and his upbringing as a Catholic, both at home and at school, must have played a role in that. What to make of it?

February, 2007

Neal put down what he had read of “A Different Direction.” Early the next morning he called Saul and they arranged a lunch within a few days. As they sat down at the restaurant, Saul immediately asked Neal for his reaction.

“I liked what I read,” Neal responded, saying what any reader would tell an author face-to-face. “There are many things that came to mind as I read it, and we could spend all day talking about them, but in the interests of time let me deal with one that stood out for me.”

“Shoot.”

“You refer a number of times to Paul’s white skin as against the olive-colored Sephardic Jews he meets,” said Neal. You and I have white skin. If all Jews come from the same source, shouldn’t our skin have stayed olive-colored? I assume it’s because over the centuries we Ashkenazi Jews lived further north of the equator than the Sephardic Jews.”

“I’m glad you noticed Paul’s emphasis on that,” Saul responded. “The distance from the equator is surely a factor, but it would only be an essential one if our ancestors with white skin could trace their roots back to the northern regions of Europe for tens of thousands of years, which they can’t. The reason the Nordic tribes had white skin is because they’d been there for 25 to 50 thousand years, maybe even longer, but not two thousand years. That’s just not long enough. Most of the progeny of the Nordic tribes continued to dwell in northern Europe over the millennia, the same as the progeny of those from the Middle East continued to dwell nearer the equator. The original Jewish tribes, of course, came from the Middle East, probably somewhere in the biblical region of Canaan. They certainly didn’t come from any place that would have made yours and my skin white.”

“Well,” said Neal, “your grandparents and great grandparents came from Poland. Mine came from Lithuania. I can’t believe the weather didn’t affect their skin color even if they hadn’t lived there for thousands of years.”

Saul knowingly smiled and went on. “I don’t think that’s what did it. Look at black people today. Many of their ancestors lived in the northern regions of this country for hundreds of years, yet the weather seems to have had no effect on their skin color. Most of them continue to be the same dark color as their forebears. Why didn’t their skin turn white after being up north for several centuries?”

Saul continued. “Actually, a very small number of Africans who weren’t brought over as slaves originally came here in the 17^th century and settled mostly in South Carolina. They were treated differently when they arrived. How come? Because their skin was practically white when they stepped off the boat. They were the product of a white European man and a black African woman. European men had landed in western Africa in the 15^th and 16^th centuries to seek their fortunes and many of them impregnated, and some married, African women, a few of whom were the daughters of tribal kings. Their offspring could have been white, brown or black. Those who were white and came to America as teens or adults did so in the name and under the guise of their European fathers, not their African mothers.”

“What does this have to do with the Jews?” Neal asked with some impatience.

“Let’s go back a few thousand years. In what I wrote, Paul quotes the barber as saying that his Sephardic ancestors were exiled from Israel by the Romans sometime between 70 and 135 C.E. – maybe even before then. Many came across North Africa. Others went east into Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, even Ethiopia, Yemen and India. Some made it to Greece, Rhodes and Turkey. But a few went north, as far north as what we now call Germany, Poland, Russia – we don’t know exactly where, but somewhere north. It was probably only a small number of enterprising men -- mercantile traders. They took with them their olive skin, their Jewish intellectual and commercial curiosity and ingenuity and their Hebraic rituals and beliefs. How come the progeny of these olive-skinned Jews didn’t stay olive-skinned? As I already told you, the skin of the progeny of most African slaves remained black even after they escaped or were freed and lived in northern states and Canada for centuries.”

“Don’t tell me it’s what I think it is,” said Neal, looking astonished.

“Exactly. They bonded with white-skinned, non-Jewish women in the 1^st and 2^nd centuries. There weren’t any Jewish ones around. And these women converted to Judaism. For the Jewish traders that was a must. Converting to Judaism – learning its meaning -- was a pre-condition of their coming together. The Nordic women probably had no religion to speak of. They may have been Huns or Vandals or Visigoths. The attraction of these few Jewish men, who had ventured north not to conquer but to thrive, and who spoke of a monotheistic god who demanded decent, moral conduct, must have been appealing. And regardless of whether there were no Jewish women to turn to, the Nordic women who became their wives must also have been quite appealing – intuitively bright and beautiful. All it took were a few generations of the offspring of this small group of Sephardic traders and Nordic women. These Jewish offspring, a good number of whom must have been white-skinned, continued to marry one another and multiply as early as the 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th centuries because they either chose to live apart from the non-Jewish populations or were forced to do so. In any event, well before the Jews were herded into ghettoes around the 14^th and 15^th centuries, what we now call Ashkenazi Judaism began to take hold.”

“That’s a little hard to believe,” interjected Neal. “How do you know that these first Jewish men didn’t come with their Jewish wives? How do you know that it wasn’t something different they ate in northern Europe that brought about the color change?”

“We don’t know for sure, but it isn’t as though every Jew in ancient times could trace his or her roots to Abraham. And, after all, even Abraham had a child, Ishmael, by a non-Jew, Hagar. That was because, just as the first Jewish men up north had only Nordic women to create progeny with, Abraham turned to Hagar when he didn’t think he could have a child with Sarah.

“Then take the Samaritans. As far as we know, they didn’t come from Isaac, Sarah’s son by Abraham, or Ishmael. They dwelled in ancient Israel and, while some retained their Samaritan heritage, others became Jews and still others ultimately became Muslims. Those who became Jews were not born that way. Or take the later conversion of the Khazars to Judaism. The Khazars ruled over a vast area stretching from western Kazakhstan to eastern Ukraine between the 7^th and 10^th centuries. The empire’s ruling class and part of the general population adopted Judaism as their religion during that period. It’s quite likely that Khazars, whether before or after they converted, intermarried with Jews in the regions they controlled. We don’t know the skin color of their progeny, but the point is that the progeny of the original tribes of Israel and Judah, once they spread north beyond the Middle East and even while still there, married others who were not born Jewish. So I strongly believe that our white skin is essentially traceable to the marriage of those first olive-skinned Sephardic merchants to northern, white women who converted to Judaism, out of which Ashkenazi Judaism arose. And today eighty percent of all Jews are white-skinned Ashkenazi -- and that’s even after Hitler’s annihilation of six million of us.”

“So we’re not as pure as many of us once thought,” Neal finally conceded, “at least pure in the biological or genetic sense.”

“I’m glad you see what I’m trying to convey,” said Saul. “It does shed some historical perspective on the extent to which young Jews in our country are now marrying non-Jews. I don’t think it reflects a significant falling away from Judaism, in spite of what much of the Jewish establishment says and fears. Perhaps the non-Jews are attracted to their Jewish partners for the same essential reason that the Nordic women were attracted to the Sephardic men. And well over half of the children of those marriages are being raised as Jews. On top of that, many of today’s younger Jews, and not just the Orthodox, are more bound to their Judaism, whatever form it may take, than those who were born or came here in earlier generations.

“Maybe now that Jews in America are free to choose what they want – they are choosing what they are. After all, I was once Paul. I am no longer what I am not. I am what I am. I am Saul. I am Saul.”