Paul Theroux: The Pillars of Hercules

“No. All sorts of businesses. We don’t manufacture anything. Some of us are in banking, or we have shops, or restaurants. Some are politicians.”

One of the Jewish restaurants was The Bomb House Lane Glatt Kosher Restaurant, where I heard Yiddish, Ladino, Spanish, English and Hebrew spoken, all at once, sometimes in the same sentence, under a picture of David Ben-Gurion and another of a girlish Queen Elizabeth II. Everyone in the place wore a yarmulke, even the funny little man depicted on the menu. Because this glatt kosher restaurant was in Gibraltar some of the dishes on the menu were Moroccan. The cook — along with most cooks, cleaners, bus drivers and waitresses in Gibraltar — was Moroccan. A good proportion of the Jewish diners had come from Morocco.

Glatt indicates a specific sort of kosherness in meat. The word glatt is Yiddish for “smooth” and signifies that after the animal was ritually slaughtered by a shochet , its lungs were examined and found to have no punctures. It also suggests that in life it had no imperfections on its skin: a cow with no spots, a calf an even shade of brown, a monochrome chicken, a fluffy little prancing lamb, a goat that was above reproach. The opposite of glatt is trayfe (or terefah) , meaning “torn”—and that could be a creature with a punctured lung, or a fatal laceration, or a suppurating wound. All this was discussed in the Talmud (which advocated the eating of several species of locusts, providing they were not trayfe). It was also somehow related to the idea of sacrifice — that if a lamb was worthy to be slain, it had to be the sort of lamb that would win a blue ribbon at a county fair. God loved you for sacrificing your best, most impressive animal.

Dietary laws fascinate me for the way they mingle good sense with utter foolishness. But for me the glatt concept was purely academic. I told the waiter I was not a meat eater and ordered fish.

My sea bass was grilled. It was a kosher fish, no imperfections, with both fins and scales. (Every fish that has scales also has fins, but not vice versa.) But when I stuck my fork into it the middle was still frozen and tasted trayfe. When I sent it back to be thawed and recooked, they obliged me. The bill was nineteen dollars — twelve handsomely engraved Gibraltar pounds — and so I complained, but it was no use.

Soon they would have competition from Mr. Wong and his joint-venture Chinese restaurant.

In the Jewish Social and Cultural Club a leaflet on a notice board announced Hillel Tours’ “Annual Trip to Spain.” It sounded as though this destination was remote — a journey to a far-off land — when in fact, if you walked down Bomb House Lane and looked west you could see Algeciras, and after a ten-minute stroll north you could spit to La Línea, where once there had been bullfights (Molly Bloom: “the bullfight at La Linea when that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear”).

But because Gibraltar has turned its back on Spain, Spain seems remote; and the Gibraltarian’s face is averted from Morocco. It seems irrelevant that Gibraltar occupies one side of the Bay of Algeciras. It is an inward-looking place, and in spite of its majestic position on the Mediterranean, hardly anyone seems interested in the water.

The exception to this apparent hydrophobia are the members of the Mediterranean Rowing Club, who scull a thirty-foot four-man boat called a yola , a very beamy craft made in Florence.

I went to the club, hoping to go for a row, but the Gibraltarians who showed me around said that the day was too windy.

“The prevailing wind is a westerly — a fresh, cool one, like today,” said Alfie Brittenden, one of the club’s rowers. “The Levanter is an easterly that brings humidity. Sometimes the Levanter makes a cloud form on the Rock.”

“Do you ever row across the Straits?” I asked.

“Occasionally we row to Morocco, for an annual charity event. But it’s very hard. There’s a four-knot current and rough water.”

“I was wondering whether I might bring my kayak here.”

“It would be suicide to try it alone,” Alfie said.

But another man at the club told me that I should not be intimidated.

“Ees there, Morocco,” he said. “Ees eesie.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You can’t loose eet.”

That night I went to the NAAFI at one of the military barracks near the harbor and watched a World Cup qualifying match, England versus Holland. The room was packed with hundreds of screaming, chanting England fans. At first England seemed to be holding its own. The whole room was united in its howling, but when Holland scored two goals in quick succession and England had no reply there was disappointment and then real anger among the soldiers who earlier had been screaming for blood. That loss cast a pall over Gibraltar, and the next day the Rock was in mourning for England’s interment by the Dutch.

Hearing nothing from Sir Joshua Hassan, I called his office and told him I was planning to leave soon. He apologized and said I could visit him that same afternoon.

He is the grand old man of the Rock, the father of modern Gibraltar. “Sir J. Hassan & Partners,” was on the top floor of a bank. On the wall of Sir Joshua’s office there was a large photograph of the man himself, at the time he was Chief Minister, addressing a vast crowd in Gibraltar’s main square. A framed charter signed by the queen. A gilded document: “We have inscribed your name in the Golden Book of Jewish Unity.” And a telegram from Prince Philip: “Congratulations on your well-deserved honour”—Sir Joshua’s knighthood.

He was dark and small and stout and lined, a kindly sloping presence, and he had the softest hands, and the limp handshake of an old woman. His Ladino accent and his solemn face made him seem at times not Jewish but Spanish, but his confidence and fits of sudden jollity transformed him into a Dickensian barrister. He was seventy-eight.

Realizing I did not have much time, I bluntly asked him about the status of Gibraltar.

“The person who says ‘I want Gibraltar to be Spanish’ does not exist in Gibraltar,” he said. “If Gibraltar is not my country, where is my country? Ha! We consider ourselves Gibraltarians irrespective of where we came from. We get along very well together.”

“So you are totally committed to Gibraltar,” I said.

Sir Joshua said, “Jews have a second loyalty — to Israel. But that is an emotional loyalty. My daughter lives there.”

His own people, he said, the Hassan family, had emigrated to the Rock in 1788, from Morocco — from a town just across the water, Tetouan. On his mother’s side, the Cansino family came from Minorca. “We’re all settlers here,” he said, “dating from roughly 1704.”

I said, “It amazes me how everyone quotes the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht when they talk about Gibraltar.”

“Because of the clause about Jews and Moors being forbidden to stay in Gibraltar more than a month. But they needed us. They had to look to Morocco for vittles. Because of realities they drove a coach and horses through the treaty.”

He shuffled some documents.

“I wrote a paper about it. My thesis was that Gibraltar developed despite the treaty.”

“Do you think the Chief Minister made any headway the other day at the U.N.?”

“Joe Bossano doesn’t know what he wants,” he said, and leaned towards me. “When people go berserk they ask for something they don’t understand. The idea of a colony smells bad.”

“So what’s the best solution?”

“It is very difficult! There are three choices for Gibraltar. Independence is one. Or, to be part of a state — but Spain is out of the question. Or free association, like the Cook Islands and New Zealand.”