The Source

by James A. Michener

  But when the searching fingers of the Inquisition began to clutch at one secret Jew after another, Ximeno had warned, “Companion, we had better burn our books,” and with moral confusion they had burned their copy of the Torah, even though it was a holy book for the Christians, too, and their tracts from the Talmud, but when it came time to burn the Zohar, Abulafia had promised, “I will burn it tonight,” and without telling Ximeno he had secreted it in a wall of his cellar, for the book which had illuminated his soul he could not burn. Later Ximeno had cautioned, “We must no longer write Hebrew letters. A child might find an unburned scrap or your wife might see scratches on the desk.” And they had formed the habit of sitting together in absolute silence, two secret Jews, each contemplating the mystery of God in his own way.

  It was surprising, Abulafia thought, that the Inquisition had not identified him as one of Ximeno’s friends, but he remembered that Diego had wisely refused ever to meet Abulafia socially; he had come always as a patient, claiming a persistent nasal condition. “I will not tell even you who the other Jews are,” he had once said, “for the day may come when we shall be called upon to resist harsh tortures and we must not know who our neighbors are lest we prove not strong.”

  Now, in the white room, Dr. Abulafia tried to reconstruct what he knew of Ximeno’s habits: He came frequently to visit me, and I was a Jew. He also visited the shop of Luis Moro. Could it be that … He slammed his hand across his lips to stop even the speculation, because if he were called to the torture he must not even have suspicions to give the judges. He would strike the name Luis Moro from his memory forever and if …

  “Oh, God! Oh, God!” he cried aloud. Then he quieted himself and wondered: How did Diego have the courage to keep my name from his lips? Abulafia wanted to utter lamentations in the streets for Ximeno, to pray for this great soul whose life had expired in flame, but he was afraid. Silently he wept, not even allowing the tears to form in his eyes lest his wife come suddenly upon him.

  Choking on his grief and sense of sin Dr. Abulafia reached a decision: I will flee Spain. I can no longer endure this horror. He hoped to find some quiet spot where he could study the Zohar in peace, seeking to find some way whereby the ten spheres of Godhood might lead ordinary men to an awareness of Him. But where could a Jew find freedom? And how could he escape Spain to get there? To Abulafia’s rapidly moving mind came the memory of a letter he had once seen from a German Jew who claimed that in the empire of the Grand Turk, Jews could live without persecution, and he began constructing an involved plan for reaching Constantinople.

  It was amateurish and almost impossible of execution, but he was in such a state of panic that he could be excused for his grotesqueries. First of all he would abandon his wife and children, and this was a grave decision of itself, for Maria Abulafia was a beautiful, compassionate wife whom he had loved deeply and his two sons were sturdy, laughing boys; but he reasoned: Even if they wanted to be Jews I couldn’t get them out of the country. And if they preferred to remain Catholic how could I trust them to keep my secret? He decided to tell them nothing, unable to realize that his own flight must surely bring them before the Inquisition as his suspected accomplices.

  Next he took another equally foolish step. He slipped down into the cellar, moved aside two stones and took out Diego Ximeno’s manuscript of the Zohar and a small seven-branched candelabrum, an heirloom menorah which Ximeno had given him on the day in 1522 when they had mutually confessed to being secret Jews. To try to smuggle these two items out of Spain, especially through the port of Seville, was madness, for detection would mean certain death, but he would not leave without them.

  In the morning he kissed Maria and the boys good-bye, informing them that he had been called to Seville on medical matters, and at an inn along the way he coldly forged documents directing him to proceed to Egypt on behalf of the Crown to investigate medicines developed by the notable Spanish doctor, Maimonides, who had served the Fatimid Caliph in Cairo. A more clever man would have produced a document so perfect that it must look suspicious; Abulafia’s was so patently absurd, with the royal seal—transferred from another order—upside down, that it passed as honest.

  In Seville he was nearly trapped three times: once at the inn where a suspicious clerk wanted to inspect his luggage and actually had the Zohar in his hands; once when he presented his forged sailing orders at the citadel; and finally when the Dominicans interrogated him, as they did all passengers, for final clearance. “Wasn’t this Maimonides a Jew?” they asked.

  “Yes,” Abulafia replied, clenching his whole body to keep from trembling. “Hundreds of years ago. But he is treasured as a Spaniard.”

  “Why does the king want you to study Jewish medicine?”

  “You know what they say about Maimonides. If the moon had consulted him, it wouldn’t have spots on its face.”

  The Dominicans laughed. “Have you any Jewish blood?” they asked.

  “None.”

  “What are you carrying?”

  “Medical books.” And thus he fled Spain.

  As soon as his ship touched Tunis, Dr. Abulafia went ashore to find a butcher shop, where he slashed his outer garments and smeared them with blood. He paid a Muslim to carry the evidence back to the captain with word that the Spanish doctor had been stabbed by robbers and that his body lay somewhere at the bottom of the bay. He then carried his precious luggage to a small inn and waited nervously until he saw his ship sail back to Spain. His childish plot had worked.

  He summoned the innkeeper and asked to borrow a pair of scissors and a candle, after which he locked the door to his room and broke the candle into seven parts. Placing them in Diego Ximeno’s menorah he lit them, prayed in Hebrew and symbolically washed the water of baptism from his head. Then with trembling hands he took the rusty scissors and started to circumcise himself. The first cuts were so unexpectedly painful, the rush of blood so sudden, that he came near to fainting. But he strengthened himself, whispering, “Fool! Think of Ximeno’s feet,” and with a fortitude that had not previously been tested, he proceeded with his commitment. In exultation he threw open his window, crying in a loud voice the sanctified prayer of Judaism, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” Passers-by looked up at him as if he were a Jewish muezzin calling them to his mosque, and he shouted, “Ximeno, I am a Jew! I am a Jew!”

  And after many years he came to Safed, bearing a book.

  3

  The third Jew who made the long pilgrimage to Safed came not from raw fear, like Rabbi Zaki, nor from a love of Kabbalism, like Dr. Abulafia; he came impelled by a force greater than either of those: the moral outrage of a man disgusted by his society.

  In 1523 Germany represented an anomaly among the nations: Spain, Portugal, France and England, as rising national states, had expelled their Jews; but Germany, not to be united for several centuries, found no way to act as a unit and so began to accumulate those historic hatreds that were to erupt so savagely in later periods. For example, Cologne had expelled its Jews in 1426 but Frankfort had not. Augsburg, Nuremberg and Ulm had banished their Jews long ago, but the Rhineland city of Gretz, secure within its wall, still preserved a Judenstrasse where Jews were permitted to exist; and no resident of that quarter was more respected than Rabbi Eliezer bar Zadok, a descendant of the great family Hagarzi ha-Ashkenaz, whose ancestors had come from Babylonia as groats makers about a thousand years before. In 1523 Rabbi Eliezer was a tall, scholarly man who surprised strangers with his boyish jokes and love of good beer. At his wedding to the prettiest Jewess in Gretz, Leah the weaver’s daughter, he astounded the Judenstrasse by dancing all night, drinking beer with any who would join him and then in the cold dawn leading a group of scholarly Jews to the synagogue, where he lectured on the Talmud till nightfall, never mispronouncing a word. Friends asked, “But what of the bride?” and he replied with an extraordinary smile, “Leah and I are married for eternity. One night spent dancing with friends, one day spent honoring the Talm
ud we shall never miss.”

  He was the acknowledged leader of the Jewish community, the judge of the Judenstrasse. More than any other Jew in Gretz he was free to move about, and although he was forced to observe all normal laws governing Jewish quarters, he alone managed to accept them with a certain dignity. For example, although he was a tall man he was forced by law to wear a Jew-hat almost three feet high, conical in shape, red in color and with a brim twisted to form devil’s horns, so that when he moved about the city he could be identified as a Jew. He was also required to wear a coarse woolen coat “which must reach to within two inches of the earth,” and this gave him the figure of a witch and was an invitation for the rabble to chase him through the alleys; but Eliezer wore his coat with such dignity that on him it became a kind of uniform, honored by the man who wore it. In the middle of the coat’s back, like a target, was sewed a bright yellow ring signifying—as if additional signs were needed—that the wearer was a Jew, and the same ring, smaller in diameter, was repeated in front over the heart. It was this loathsome stigma that invited the Gentile community to despise even a dignified Jew like Rabbi Eliezer, for wherever he walked the yellow badge proclaimed, “Here comes a Jew!” The circle was interpreted by some to represent a coin, ridiculing the only profession allowed the Jews; but most knew it to be a reminder of the holy wafer used in communion, which Jews were accused of stealing to profane in their obscene rites. It was this symbol, more than any other infliction, which kept the Jew apart from honest people; and if boys threw stones at Jews, it was partly because the slowly moving circles made irresistible targets.

  There were other irritations. Eliezer, as a rabbi, would normally have grown a long beard, but since beards were a sign of German respectability, he must keep his short. He was not allowed to walk near the cathedral, to be on the streets during Holy Week, to converse aloud where others could hear him during church services, or halt at any time to speak with children lest he lure them into apostasy. Worst of all, he was required both by law and by custom to live within the Judenstrasse, which in Gretz was a concentrated horror. In the twelfth century two rows of large houses had been erected for Christians, and because enmity had developed between the owners, a space was left between the rows, and here brawls used to occur. The authorities were forced to build two walls sealing the houses off from each other, thus creating an empty space, forty-four feet wide, into which had been squeezed two rows of Jew houses along an alley six feet across. On the street level the houses seemed almost to touch; but as more and more Jews were crowded into the area, each narrow house had to be built higher and higher until finally only a small section of sky was visible: the Judenstrasse was permanently in shadow, its rooms gasping for air and its inhabitants crowded beyond belief.

  One end of the street was blocked by a house which rose five stories, cutting off the sun, while the other was guarded by a stout iron gate, above which rose another house, so precious was the space. Thus the narrow area was closed at all points, and at dusk each day the iron gate clanged shut to be locked by a Christian guard whose salary the Jews were forced to pay. Inside the gate, where each Jew must see it daily, rose an obelisk commemorating a crime supposed to have been committed by the Jews of Trent some years before. Each of the four sides contained bas-reliefs showing details of how a saintly child had been tortured to death by hideous Jews in long cloaks, while above ran the legend: “Sacred to the memory of the Christian boy, Simon of Trent, whose body was used as a blood sacrifice by the Jews of that city in the year 1475, for which unnatural crime all the Jews of Trent were burned to death.” It was a solemn reminder of the volcanic passions that might erupt at any moment against Jews, made more poignant by the fact that sometime after the mass burning, it was proved beyond question that Simon had not been touched by the Jews, and that the whole affair must be excused as another unfortunate mistake.

  In each narrow room of the Judenstrasse lived an average of six persons, so that the number of Jews in the city was not insignificant, but they were not allowed to work in the Christian areas of the city, nor to join any of the guilds where men worked as artisans, nor to buy or sell merchandise of any kind except amongst themselves, nor to engage in any kind of enterprise except moneylending, which the Church still forbade to Christians; and it was not unusual to see the Christian dignitaries of Gretz come furtively to the Judenstrasse money shops, seeking loans, and then some months later to lead the rabble in to kill the moneylenders, burn the account books, and thus erase all debts.

  Apologists for the system pointed out: “Having the Jews assembled in one place affords them protection in case of trouble,” and perfectly sincere Christians who had never seen the incredible conditions believed this. They also argued: “Jews like to live in a Judenstrasse. They thrive on it, don’t they?” This reasoning was, in a perverse way, proved true by the Jews themselves, for when they found their families crowded into loathsome quarters, they adhered even more stringently to their strict sanitary laws, and at the same time Jewish medicine, which Christians ambivalently scorned and sought, protected them from many of the plagues which swept the free population. The Talmud itself had said: “No Jew may live in a city that lacks a good physician.”

  In the middle of the Judenstrasse stood one narrow room, musty and cramped, the center of Rabbi Eliezer’s joy. It was his synagogue, and few houses of God have ever been so mean as this ugly little hovel in which the Jews of Gretz were forced to worship; it had no benches, no windows, no shelves for manuscripts. Jews who wished to pray sat on the floor, or, when the room was crowded, stood. There was a raised desk from which on Shabbat the rabbi’s uncle, Isaac Gottes Mann, read the Torah, and there was one small shred of adornment: in front of the cupboard where the scroll of Torah was kept, hung an embroidered cloth. And that was about all, except that in one corner, for use on weekdays, there stood a patched and rickety table more than a hundred years old, plus one chair and a candelabrum; it was here, day after day through the long years, that Rabbi Eliezer studied Talmud, endeavoring to identify the legal and moral bases of his faith. Among the Jews of Germany it was recognized that if he were permitted long life he must surely become one of Judaism’s luminaries.

  In another corner of the synagogue was an area in which Rabbi Eliezer conducted school for the young boys of the Judenstrasse, and all under his care learned to read, for repeatedly he told parents, “Teach your son to read and you give him four arms.” To Eliezer it was offensive to use the synagogue in this way, for boyish recitations interrupted the reading of older scholars, but in all the Judenstrasse not one additional corner could be found.

  It was not by preference that the Jews of Gretz occupied so mean a synagogue; under existing law they were allowed no better: “The Judenstrasse may contain a synagogue providing it be not large, nor so high as the cathedral, nor adorned in any way. Once built, it may never be changed in any detail, no matter how slight, without approval of the bishop.” The Jews did not like to see their learned rabbi studying at his rickety table, and some years ago had built him a better, but the guard at the iron gate had gotten wind of their move and had alerted the officials, who had confiscated the new table, fined the Jews and ordered the old one returned.

  It was curious, Rabbi Eliezer reflected, that these degrading restrictions had originated not with civil legislators but with the Church. As he explained to his congregation: “The same religion which seeks to win us to its bosom through conversion also forces this Judenstrasse upon us to prove how merciful it is.”

  Actually, in Gretz there was little attempt at conversion, for no Jew would leave the guidance of Rabbi Eliezer and no Christian would welcome him if he did. Centuries before, Gunter the Crusader, in his rough German manner, had summed up the local attitude about conversion: “A converted Jew is like chicken manure, hot when it leaves the bird but cold when it hits the ground.”

  Furthermore, at this particular time in Gretz there was little reason for Jews to envy Christians, for the latter r
eligion was shattered by contention. Though in 1517 the Jews had watched with indifference as Martin Luther, a monk who spoke Hebrew, launched his first shafts against the parent Church, now in 1523 a surge of hope sped through the Judenstrasse when Isaac Gottes Mann brought home a copy of Martin Luther’s first public statement regarding Jews.

  “It’s unbelievable!” he cried as Jews assembled in the alley.

  “What does he say?”

  “He calls it Jesus Was Born a Jew. And I could not believe my eyes when I read it.” Carefully he recited the singing words:

  “Our fools and jackasses, these priests, bishops, sophists and monks have treated the Jews in such a fashion that if a man wanted to become a true Christian he might better become a Jew. Were I a Jew and saw what blockheads and windbags rule and guide Christendom, I would rather become a sow than a Christian. For they have treated the Jews more like dogs than men. Yet the Jews are kith and kin and brothers-in-blood of our Saviour. If we are going to boast about the virtues of race, Christ belongs more to them than to us. To no other people has God shown such favor in entrusting them with His Holy Word.”

  Isaac looked up, and the hope that he saw in the eager faces infected him and he cried, “May God give Luther victory! If he wins he will abolish the Judenstrasse, because listen to what he says next: ‘My advice, therefore, is to deal decently with this people. So long as we resort to violence and lies and slander, and so long as we forbid them to work and trade and mingle at our side, thereby forcing them into usury, how can we expect to win them or better them? If we wish to help them we must employ not Papist law but Christian love. We must give them a friendly hand, letting them work and thrive in our midst, in order that they may have reason and occasion to become of us and with us.’ ”