Crusades

The Crusades are a recurring historical subject in Shmuel Ash’s intellectual life, but the passages that mention them show more about how he uses history than about the campaigns themselves. They are one of the topics he can lecture on when someone tries to speak to him personally, linking his scholarly interests to the emotional evasions that shape his relationships.

A subject in Shmuel’s repertoire

In a letter to Shmuel, his sister recalls that he had recently left university, found work and lodging in Jerusalem, and mentioned Yardena’s marriage in only a few brief lines. She describes him as solitary even in childhood: absorbed in his stamp collection or spending hours alone on a rooftop, dreaming. When she had tried for years to talk with him about himself, he would evade the subject and begin speaking about David Ben-Gurion or the Crusades. His turn to history became, in her account, a familiar retreat from personal disclosure.

The recollection does not establish what Shmuel thinks about the Crusades or identify any particular campaign. Its significance is in the contrast his sister draws between his expansive historical talk and his near-silence about his own life. The Crusades belong to the subjects he can discuss at length while leaving his loneliness unspoken.

Historical study and emotional distance

Shmuel’s research into Jesus and Jewish history gives this habit a wider context. He pursues old texts and newspaper records with care, but his sister’s letter makes clear that historical discussion can also function as a barrier between him and the people who want to know him. The Crusades are named alongside David Ben-Gurion as a topic to which he shifts when conversation becomes intimate; the pairing places distant history and contemporary politics in the same repertoire of safer subjects.

The book therefore invokes the Crusades not through a battle scene or a historical account, but through a remembered conversational pattern. Their narrative force lies in that absence: they mark the distance between what Shmuel is prepared to explain and what he cannot readily say about himself.