The Saintly Men of Safed
Menorah made of gold in accordance with instructions laid down by God in Exodus 25: 31-40. Cast by Moorish workmen in Avaro, Spain, about 1240 C.E., during the period when Judaism was still permitted in that kingdom. Deposited at Makor June 21, 1559, after sunset.
It was an age of expansion. Constantinople, under Ottoman rule since 1453, was offering Europe such riches drawn from India and China as to make the dreams of Marco Polo seem unimaginative. Columbus had presented the world with a new hemisphere to balance the old, and daring Portuguese navigators were proving that cargo ships could reach the wealth of Asia by doubling the tip of Africa. Spain was amazing Europe with the wealth of Aztec and Inca, and all the world’s horizons were being expanded so that the center of power was no longer the Mediterranean; for on the Atlantic hitherto unimportant nations suddenly found themselves possessed of empires so enormous as to be indescribable. Even a trivial kingdom like England, beset on three borders by hostile Scots, Welsh and Irish, could visualize acquiring territory a thousand times larger than itself, while the Dutch were about to prove that they could establish commercial stations wherever their daring captains located safe anchorage and fresh water.
It was an age of intellectual discovery. From the cellars of forgotten monasteries, from the long-unused libraries of princes, and most often from Arabic scholars who had preserved the wisdom of the west, the books of Aristotle and Thales, of Plato and Euclid were rescued from the past to astonish men and enlarge their concepts. Dante and Boccaccio reminded a forgetful world of Virgil and Ovid, while the glories of Sophocles and Seneca awakened new appreciations of the drama. And not only was the intelligence of the past being discovered; each ship returning from Java or Peru brought with it, packed among the spice and silver, fresh discoveries of the mind, and thus the way was prepared for that succession of world-changers who followed Gutenberg, Copernicus and Galileo.
It was an age of religious explosion. For centuries Christian Europe had been united into one all-embracing Church, devout, competent and far-seeing. Recently Christians had been inspired by two victories: the expulsion of Islam from Spain and the first conversions of the Aztecs; now there was reason to hope that millions in Asia and Africa would join the Church, since missionaries of great dedication were on their way to these areas. For a brief moment it was logical to believe that the known world might soon unite under the leadership of Rome. And then Martin Luther strode with rude and giant steps across the boundaries of Europe, awakening men like Calvin and Knox who would destroy old associations and establish new.
It was an age of political invention. City states gave way to national units and barons surrendered to kings who found their support in the new middle class. Secular governments displaced religious as leaders began to study Machiavelli instead of Thomas Aquinas. The barbarians from the north were finally brought under control and Europe, having expelled the Muslim Arabs from Spain, now girded to fight back the Muslim Turks as they threatened the approaches to Vienna.
It was an age of growing freedom. Men who rebelled against the confinement of Europe were now free to try America and Asia. Any who had chafed under papal rule were welcome to adopt Lutheranism, and peasants who had silently borne the tyranny of landlords were now free to attempt a revolt. Law courts were strengthened and in the realm of writing and art men could break away from medieval restriction to follow Petrarch or Michelangelo. Each year brought new horizons, for this was the age of freedom.
But not for Jews. In 1492, after more than seven hundred years of faithful service to Spain, the Jews were expelled from that state. They fled to Portugal, where they were scourged, forcibly baptized and later exiled. In Italy and Germany they were forced into inhuman quarters where they wore inhuman costumes. At almost rhythmic intervals they were charged with murdering Gentile children for blood to be used at Passover. They were accused of poisoning wells, of spreading cholera, of knowing how to infect rats with the plague to decimate Christian communities; and they were particularly accused of posing as Catholics, accepting the holy wafer of communion and hiding it slyly under their tongues until they could produce it for blasphemous black masses. In an age of growing freedom they were constantly restricted as to where they could move, what they could wear and especially what occupations they could engage in.
In this golden age of discovery the Jews discovered only the rope and the fagot. Each time a Jew was accused of having murdered a Christian child—and never once was the charge substantiated—some Jewish community would be wiped out in one ghastly slaughter. Each time a crime occurred near a Jewish quarter, that district would be stormed by indignant Christians and its inhabitants burned alive. And throughout the Christian world, come Holy Week, the friars would preach such sermons against the Jews that the enraged churchgoers would storm from their cathedrals to kill and maim any Jews they met, thus hoping to honor Him who had been crucified on Good Friday and risen in resurrection on Easter.
Why did not the Christians, since they held supreme power, simply annihilate the Jews once and for all? They were restrained because Christian theologians had deduced from passages in the New Testament the ambivalent theory that Jesus Christ would not return to earth bringing with Him the heavenly kingdom until all Jews were converted to Christianity, but at the same time 144,000 unconverted Jews were needed to be on hand to recognize Him and bear witness to His arrival. On this ambivalent theory two courses of action had been built: Jews must be converted; and those necessary few who refused must be kept in such obvious misery that all who looked could see what happened to people who denied Jesus Christ. So the Jewish districts multiplied, the harsh laws increased, and each year the Jews suffered unbelievable repressions. It was as if the Church kept them alive to remember the coming of the Messiah, the way a man keeps an aching tooth in his head to remind him of mortality.
In only two ways did Jews share in the expanding spirit of the age: they were still encouraged to serve as moneylenders, which enabled them to keep alive; and in 1520 in Venice a printer struck off a complete printed copy of the Talmud. So bitter had been the Christian hatred of this Jewish masterwork, so often had it been burned by the authorities in Italy, Spain, France and Germany, that when it was finally put into type only one manuscript copy was known to exist. It was by a miracle that this summary of Jewish knowledge was saved … and the Venetian printer who thus rescued the law of Judaism was a Christian.
But in those dark days, when the Jews of Europe sighed at the stake and smothered in their districts without any moral protest from the Christian world, one gleam of hope began to shine from a most unlikely quarter: the inconspicuous hillside town of Safed in Galilee.
1
Rabbi Zaki the Shoemaker was a fat Jew, and this was his undoing.
In the Italian seaport of Podi, where he had taken residence after his marriage in 1521, the coming of spring brought moments of anguish to Jewish men who were overweight, because starting in March they could feel the eyes of their Christian neighbors probing their rolls of fat and calculating whether Zaki was fatter than Jacopo or Jacopo slightly fatter than Salman; and each man and his family began to worry. Nevertheless, the calculations continued, and as the twenty-first of March approached, the apprehension of the fat Jews became very real indeed, and each family asked in secret, “Will our father be chosen this year?”
Rachel, Rabbi Zaki’s wife, really had no cause for uncertainty, because Zaki was so gross that he was automatically selected, year after year. It was only a question of which five additional Jews would be chosen as his teammates, so that Rachel, freed from the calculations that tormented the other wives, could spend her whole energy castigating her unfortunate husband.
“Why are you so fat?” she plagued him throughout the year. “Moses isn’t fat. Is Meir fat like you?” She had lived with Rabbi Zaki for twenty years and had come, not without cause, to the conclusion that he was a poor specimen of manhood. He did not provide well for his family. He nev
er charged enough for his shoemaking, allowing clever Italians to outwit him. And it was obvious now that he was not going to become a famous rabbi leading his congregation to fame. He was merely a fat man who most of the year seemed pathetic, and in March positively degraded.
The Jews of Podi were a close community, for during the expulsion of 1492 they had fled in a body from Spain to Portugal and then—after the shocking mass baptism ordered by the Portuguese government—from Lisbon to Italy. In the strictest sense Rabbi Zaki, his sharp-tongued wife, Rachel, and all the Jews of Podi were Christians, for they had been forcibly baptized—some bleeding from the mouth, some screaming—in Portugal; but a series of considerate Popes had decreed that the Christian Church could not accept the fruits of such baptism and that the Jews of Podi were therefore free to revert to their original religion, which was after all an offshoot of the Holy Bible. The generous Duke of Podi had welcomed them as industrious merchants who brought much income to his territories and had even encouraged them to have their own synagogue, so that gradually the persecution of Spain and Portugal was forgotten in the kindlier atmosphere of Italy.
One of the leading merchants of Podi was Avramo the redhead, Rabbi Zaki’s father-in-law, and as the Jews of the port looked at their pathetic little rabbi they often wondered how he had been able to catch the merchant’s daughter. Rachel had hoped for a better marriage than hers had turned out to be, for, as she frequently reminded both her father and her husband, “I knew even before we were married that Zaki would amount to nothing.” But her father had argued, “I think Zaki will become a fine rabbi, and you should be honored that he takes you as his wife.”
But Rachel was not honored. As a child in Portugal she had known Zaki as the fat one whom the others teased, and as an adolescent girl she had watched him grow even fatter, so that none of her friends looked on him with longing. Left alone, he had read Talmud and apprenticed himself to an Italian shoemaker, who had warned his parents, “You’re wasting your money. Zaki has such fat fingers he’ll not be able to hold the nails.” Still the amiable fellow had managed somehow to become both a rabbi and a shoemaker.
The Jews of Podi were never able to understand why a man like Avramo had agreed to give his daughter to such a clod, and when in later years Rachel herself raised the question, he explained, “When I looked at Zaki’s fat face and rolling eyes I knew that he was a good man, and good men make good husbands.”
The wedding had gone forward, and Rachel found herself tied to a man of no distinction who each March brought upon himself and his family an almost unbearable disgrace. “Why do you eat so much?” she screamed at him with increasing desperation as the years passed. “Does Meir eat like a pig, day after day? Tell me that.”
Zaki could only reply, “God must have wanted me to be fat.” He was an amiable hulk, a man who loved his shrewish wife, adored his three daughters and found joy in eating with his family and fulfillment in serving as a rabbi. Since he was a short man, enormously round, none need envy him and all could find amusement in him. What they saw was a kind of gelatinous good will, an oleaginous buffoon of the spirit. He did not consciously make himself ridiculous, but since he knew that he was so, he did not fight against his nature.
“God wanted someone He could laugh with in the afternoon,” he told his wife one day.
“He got someone the whole town laughs at each spring,” she stormed.
“I didn’t make myself fat,” he said weakly.
“You did, too!” she cried. “For years you’ve been eating like a pig.”
“Rachel,” he pleaded. “Not that word.”
“I withdraw the pig,” she snapped.
“But you are fat,” his unlovely daughter Sarah complained.
“I am the rabbi,” he said quietly. “Even if I were as thin as Meir, the Christians would still choose me.”
The idea—a new one that Rabbi Zaki had developed subconsciously at that moment—hit his wife with some force and she stopped feeling sorry for herself. She looked at her grotesque husband and for a fleeting second half understood the point he was making, but even as he spoke he had fish sauce on his jowls and his logic was destroyed.
“Go ahead!” she lamented. “Eat and grow fat and make us ashamed of you.” The girls wept.
In humiliation Zaki listened to the grieving, then said, “They will choose me again, and again you will stand in the sun and watch me, and there is no escape. But they choose me because I am the rabbi, and I think it is better that I am fat and that they laugh at me because of my fatness and not because I am the rabbi. Would you have it otherwise?”
Of course they chose him. For several hundred years the dukes of Podi had provided sport for the community by assembling, at the spring equinox, a carnival of mountebanks, jugglers, fools and dancers. There was gaiety for one day, even if it fell in the midst of Lent, and in recent years the climax was reached by the race between the fat Jews and their next-street neighbors, the town prostitutes. For this race, which had grown famous in eastern Italy, the six fattest Jewish men were chosen, stripped down to a pair of thin underpants and driven barefoot to the starting line, where they took their places among the frowzy, boisterous whores.
The excitement of the race, which drew thousands of people from towns as far distant as Ancona, arose not only from the joy of seeing the fat Jews puffing nearly naked through the streets while the populace threw things at them—not hurtful things like rocks, for that was forbidden, but harmless items such as eggs and chicken feathers smeared with honey—but also from the fact that the little pants which the fat Jews had to wear were so constructed that along the route there was always a chance for the Christian women to get a fleeting glance at what the mysterious rite of circumcision did to a man.
To the Jews, nakedness in any form was humiliation, but to run in the Podi pants, with the penis popping in and out, was abhorrent. Not only Rachel, but the other wives as well, and Jewish men who did not run, wept for Israel.
In 1541 the twenty-first of March was a hot, bright day, and during the morning hours the mountebanks and jugglers did good business. Members of the ducal family moved austerely through the crowd, nodding somberly as townspeople assured them, “This year it’s to be a fine race.” In the mid-afternoon there were games of football and the offering of free drinks, ending with a horse race through the streets and across the public square. It was a day of relaxed festivity, much relished in the midst of Lent.
But it was the late-afternoon spectacle that the people wanted, and toward five o’clock the town constable aroused cheers by bringing from the jail six notorious prostitutes, assuring them that any who finished within the first three places would have the remainder of their jail sentences remitted. “But to win,” he warned them with broad winks, “you must pull and trip the fat Jews or they will finish ahead of you.” The six bawds said they understood.
The crowd cheered the girls and began betting on them, but everyone waited for the real contestants; and at five, when the first sunset of spring began to throw gold on the cross of the cathedral, the duke ordered a bugler to sound the trumpet. Now the crowd roared and formed a path which led to a roped-off section of the piazza. A hush fell over the rabble as the Duke of Podi signaled to the cathedral, out of which issued a stunning procession of clergy dressed in the vestments of the Christian Church. Impressive both in detail and mass the body of clerics moved in regal fashion across the piazza, taking its position beside the improvised ducal throne. Again the trumpeter blew, and again the crowd cheered, for from a narrow lane leading to the Jewish quarter came a motley crowd led by six men in long brown robes, each marked by a bright yellow star.
In the lead was Rabbi Zaki, ridiculously fat, a man not over five feet three inches tall and weighing at least two hundred and twenty pounds. His bare feet padded across the stones and his dunce’s cap, tall and red, bobbed in the late sunlight. The mere sight of him caused the mob to shout with joy. Behind the racers, each sick with apprehension, even thoug
h the brown cloaks still covered them, came the entire population of the ghetto, for each Jew unless he were near death and excused by a Dominican friar was required to witness the humiliation of his people.
The contestants were led to where the six prostitutes waited, and one of the girls elicited shrieks of approval when she pulled Rabbi Zaki’s robe apart, peeked at his trousers and screamed, “I saw it.” She made an indecent gesture to the crowd. Rachel and her three daughters, who had been herded into the front ranks of the Jewry, kept their eyes on the ground, but a barefooted friar in charge of the Jews shouted that they must look up. The girls did so in time to see their ridiculous father stripped of his robe, so that he stood almost naked in the fading sunlight while the crowd shrieked with delight.
The duke himself addressed the contestants: “This is to be a fair race, three times around the piazza, down the Corso and back to the cathedral. Any girl who finishes in the first three will have her sentence excused.” At this the crowd cheered. “But if any Jew finishes in the first three he is granted privileges for one year. Race well. Ignore the crowd. And I shall wait for you at the finish.” He bowed handsomely to the racers, signaled the trumpeter and retired.
At a sign from the Dominican, prostitutes and Jews started running, and a gasp of joy rose from the crowd when one of the fat Jews fell right at the start. “Clumsy! Idiot!” they screamed, pelting him with vegetables. He stumbled to his feet and tried to overtake the others. With outrageous irrelevancy Rachel thought: Thank God it wasn’t Zaki.
Three times around the piazza the racers went, with prostitutes screaming and the six fat Jews silent. The audience, having cheered the start, was quiet now, waiting for something memorable, the Christian women watching dry-lipped as the inadequate pants flapped open and shut. Then it happened. Rabbi Zaki was in second place when one of the whores leaped forward, clutched at his pants and pulled them down about his knees. His fat legs, completely incapable of stopping, tangled themselves in the cloth and he went tumbling across the stones, skinning his knees and exposing his nakedness.
The Source Page 92
