Cosmopolitan Vision of Home, Subjectivity 59to empathic connection with “the Jews” whom he describes—we
are fully aware that we are being steered toward adopting a negative
impression of Servadio and the other Jews. Clearing these empathic
obstacles therefore requires a degree of cosmopolitan attentiveness to
cultural bias on the reader’s part.
While anti-Semitic in tone and ideology, labeling Servadio and
the others “conspirator[s]” and “cowards,” the narrator nonetheless
projects an image of self-regarded fairness and justice, stressing the
court’s “tolerance” toward the condemned (pp. 151–156). This air of
impartiality and commitment to truth is also projected by the nar-
rator’s punctilious observance of dates and time:
The Venetian trial against the Jews of Portobuffole, to be heard before
one hundred and fifty two Venetian senators, began on Tuesday 27
June 1480 and continued day after day, with only two interruptions:
29 June, which was the feast of the Saints Peter and Paul, and Sunday
2 July. (p. 149)However, the pretence of objectivity is later collapsed by the admis-
sion that the Jews in fact have a calendar system that is entirely
different from the Christian one: “The Jews of Portobuffole had
gathered [... ] to celebrate the night of the fourteenth day of the
month of Nissan in the year 5240 since the creation of their world”
(p. 57). Nonetheless, the narrative makes clear which system prevails
in the trial’s records. Indeed, as well as signifying their cultural sep-
aration and incompatibility, the narrator also appears to suggest that
the different calendars signify completely distinct worlds.
This idea of different temporalities and histories being reserved
for different cultural and ethnic groups presents a good opportu-
nity to return once more to Hilary Mantel’s objections to Phillips’s
juxtapositions of collective suffering (the Holocaust with slavery).
While above I challenge Mantel’s criticisms on the grounds that she
promotes a univocal conception of major historical events, we could
at this juncture critique them from another, perhaps more signifi-
cant, angle. In an interview with Paula Goodman, Phillips describes
the past as being like a “bloodstream” and stresses the need to “build
a human identity which is more fluid.”^78 However, by so arbitrarily
partitioning time and identity, the narrator of the Portobuffole story