The Source

by James A. Michener

  With these gloomy thoughts Rabbi Eliezer went slowly home like a man walking knee-deep in ashes, and there he found his wife sitting calmly among the children, sharing with them the only lasting reality the Jews had ever known: “In those days we owned a city on a hill to which men of every kingdom were welcomed in friendship. Jerusalem it was called, and inside its walls King Solomon built not a small synagogue but a temple standing upon an open space so great you could not walk around it. Not two of you together, Moishe starting at one end and Rachel at the other, could have run around that field in a whole day. There were trees with birds in them, and camels watering themselves beside the cool streams. It was a temple so beautiful that King Hiram of Tyre sent down a shipload of two hundred people to inspect it and tell him if it was as beautiful as the temples of Tyre; and two of his men cried, ‘Put out my eyes so that I need not tell the king that I have seen this perfect thing,’ and two other men said, ‘Let us stay in the land of the Jews, for we would be afraid to tell our king how great their temple is,’ and two other men, very important men in the city of Tyre, said, ‘Give us brooms that we may stay here the rest of our lives and sweep this temple, it is so beautiful.’ And in that way King Hiram lost six good men.”

  “Were there stables for the horses?” a boy asked.

  “Not in the temple itself,” Leah explained, “but along the edges of the fields nearby there were many stables filled with swift horses, and boys and girls like you used to mount the horses and ride swiftly … Oh, you rode so swiftly over the meadows and down the roads and when you came to a brook you would lean forward like this and spur your horse and … Oh!” Leah threw her hands in the air. “You and the horse flew over the brook and you landed safely on the other side and you rode on and on in the free air and after a long while you stopped and turned your horses around—and what do you suppose you saw?”

  “The temple?” a boy asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Rabbi Eliezer sat on a chair in the corner and buried his face. Leah, seeing him, thought that he might be weeping and she asked the children to go out and play, but Christian horses had been led into the narrow street to cart away the remnants of the synagogue, so she hid the noisy children in another home, that they might not witness the desecration, and then rejoined her husband.

  He was not weeping. Rabbi Eliezer was not the kind of man to weep, but he did sometimes feel upon his shoulders a force greater than he could struggle with, and now he felt it, and seeing him thus his wife burst into tears. “Our lovely, lovely synagogue,” she cried. It had been a travesty of a place of worship, an obscene hovel, really, but it had been too large for the Gentiles to tolerate, and now it was gone. “O God of Israel, what did we do wrong?” she wept.

  Coldly, because he did not dare set loose his thoughts, the rabbi said, “On Shabbat they are repeating the obscenity of kissing the Sow’s rump.”

  “You?” she asked in an ashen voice.

  “Yes.”

  “No!” she screamed, and flung herself on the floor, clutching at his knees. “No! No!”

  He smoothed her hair and began to laugh. “Yes, your husband. On Shabbat at noon. And you and all the Jews of Gretz will be there to watch. For me it will not be a humiliation, but for the men who have ordered it, yes.”

  She looked up at her husband and he was strangely composed. She rose from the floor and sat beside him, asking, “What shall we do about the synagogue?”

  “We will make this room our synagogue,” he explained, and he sent her into the street to ask the Jews to join him in prayer; and when the men were jammed in he recited from memory one of the great passages of the Torah, for in the community there was no longer a copy: “This is the promise of Moses our Teacher: ‘If from thence thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul. When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon thee, even in the latter days, if thou turn to the Lord thy God and shalt be obedient unto his voice; (For the Lord thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them.’ ”

  On Shabbat, when they should have been in synagogue, the Jews in their tall red hats, long cloaks and yellow circles were marched through the iron gate of the Judenstrasse and up to the front of the cathedral, where they faced two of the most artistic stone statues in Europe, the “Triumph of Church over Synagogue.” To the left of the entrance stood the Church Triumphant, a graceful woman of exquisite features standing at rest and bearing in her right hand a stave adorned by banners, and in her left a cross topped by a crown of thorns. The excellence of the carving was demonstrated in her face, but the spirit of the Church as it showed in her eyes and firm chin was not peaceful, but condemnatory; not marked by conciliatory grace, but harsh and unforgiving.

  The coldness of the statue was understandable, for it looked across the great entrance of the cathedral to a similar statue representing the Synagogue Defeated, and this woman was not beautiful. Her eyes were blindfolded and her mournful, humiliated head was bowed. In her right arm she carried a broken spear with no triumphal banners, and in her left a most curious object. It was the two-part stone tablet of Moses on which God had given him the law, but in this case the stones were broken, and the entire figure of the synagogue was one of desolation. Rabbi Eliezer, as always, studied only the broken tablets of Moses and wondered: What theology could construct a theory that a new Church could be built upon the destruction of all which had made that Church morally strong? Do they think they rescind the law of Moses by shattering his tablets?

  His tormentors that day had little thought for the law of Moses, nor for anything else except the hearty horseplay of the Middle Ages, preserved in Germany long after it had vanished elsewhere; for after a perfunctory sermon which reminded the Jews of the merciful quality of the Church, they were herded to the northern side of the cathedral, where a robust statue more famous than either that of the Church or of the Synagogue at the entrance had been set into the wall. It was the notorious Sow of Gretz, and now as the populace saw the Jews herded before it, shouts of joy and festivity filled the old city.

  The Sow of Gretz was a huge recumbent stone pig of evil visage lying on her side with some two dozen teats exposed. At half the stations little stone devils with amusing tails and saucy horns fed, while at the remaining teats Jews in disgraceful caricature feasted, the intended concept being that from the poisonous sow of Judaism all Jews sucked in contamination from the day of birth. If the carving had ended there it could have been accepted as rather vigorous religious homily, suited to the rougher tastes of an earlier day; but on the right-hand side of the statue the argument became more vicious. Here a devil lifted the tail of the sow to show to a Jewish rabbi the origin of the Talmud, for from the anus of the beast could be seen projecting the edge of the Jewish book, while the bowels ejected a heavy stream of defecation which struck the stone rabbi in the face. Throughout the centuries it had become customary for the Christian children of Gretz to paint the lines of defecation yellow and to continue the coloring across the face of the rabbi.

  “For his arrogance the rabbi will now kiss the hind end of the Sow,” an official announced, and Eliezer was led to the rear of the statue and forced to bow down. But as he did so his revulsion was so great that he jerked backward and his tall hat fell off, and there was a scream of protest from the populace. “Hat, hat!” they shouted, and he was directed to replace it, but as he returned to the Sow the hat again fell off, so an official produced a string with which he tied the hat to Eliezer’s ears. The crowd cheered.

  Now the rabbi prepared to kiss the Sow’s rump, and as he bent down he found that pranksters had smeared the statue with real excrement, and those in the crowd who knew what had been done giggled with knowing delight; but he kissed the Sow and then instinctively wiped his lips. The crowd protested, and officials decreed that he must perform his obeisance again without wiping
his lips, and he complied.

  That night he assembled in his home-synagogue some of the leaders of the Jewish community and read them a letter which had circulated secretly in Germany for some years. It had been written by a Jew from Gretz who had escaped the Judenstrasse and made his way to Turkey:

  In the realm of the Grand Turk even the poorest Jew can live like a human being. Constantinople lacks nothing, and is one of the finest cities in the world. I dress as I please and wear no special mark. My children do the same and are not beaten on the streets. We have built a fine synagogue, and one of our men is counselor to the sultan. Any man who can work is welcomed by the Turk.

  “I think we should go,” Rabbi Eliezer said.

  “You’re agitated by the dirty business of the Sow,” Isaac Gottes Mann argued. “They didn’t humiliate you, Eliezer.”

  “I cannot even remember that I kissed the Sow,” Eliezer honestly replied. “But I do remember the looks of hatred on the German faces. It is for their sakes that we should leave.”

  “Why do you worry about the Germans?”

  “If we cause such hatred in Catholic hearts, then we should go,” Eliezer replied simply.

  “Those people today?” Isaac countered. “If they didn’t hate us they’d find somebody else.”

  “I no longer want to be the cause of Christians’ committing sin,” Eliezer said, and his wife noticed that in three sentences he had moved the argument upward from German to Catholic to Christian; and when the men argued further, he said firmly, “I will not live with my brother if I cause him to outrage God.” Leah thought: This great, good man, constantly he lifts matters up to where they truly rest.

  There was a change in the discussion when Isaac, still hopeful that the Jew would find an honorable place in Germany, argued, “The dominance of the Church over us is limited, Eliezer. Before long Gretz may be a Lutheran city,” and spurred by these words the Jews in the crowded synagogue reopened the speculation begun twenty years earlier at the publication of Luther’s conciliatory letter on the Jews: Was there a possibility that a new kind of Christianity might replace the old?

  “We must pray for the triumph of Luther,” one of the hopeful Jews reasoned. “In all parts of Germany he is humiliating the Church, and with his victory our freedom will come.”

  A matter of real hope had been raised, a breath of fresh air sweeping down the centuries of persecution and entering even the crushed houses of the Gretz Judenstrasse. No Jew dared openly say that he prayed for the downfall of his ancient oppressor, for the Church had proved remorseless in its punishment of renegades, but it was agreed against Rabbi Eliezer’s advice to wait a little longer; and that night when the congregation had departed, even Leah whispered, “We should not go to Turkey, husband. Our children are happy here and we have a good life.” But Eliezer knew that she was not right. No life that involved the hatreds he had seen that day, even though no man had been killed or no house burned, could possibly be termed good.

  “Leah,” he said sharply, “it’s proper for you to create the dreams of children and to tell them of open fields, but don’t tell your husband that this rotten life is good.” He pointed at the bedroom in which he stood. “A synagogue of half a room, in which the rabbi sleeps.”

  Leah replied, “I am hoping that some day things may be better.”

  “The Jews of Germany always hope,” he said harshly, kicking his bed into position.

  Leah took him by the hands and asked, “Eliezer, tell me the truth. Why are you determined to leave?”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “Because to live as we do in the Judenstrasse is a moral outrage.”

  The simple truth stunned Leah and she said quietly, “I shall go with you.”

  Cryptically Eliezer added, “We may have to leave very soon. The books of the Jews are being burned, and unless my work is done quickly they may perish.”

  Then in 1543 even optimistic Jews like Isaac Gottes Mann learned what the future was to be, for Martin Luther, their one-time champion against the Church, turned on them with a fury that only a sage like Rabbi Eliezer could have predicted. Having tried vainly to convert the stiff-necked Jews to Lutheranism, and having found them as obdurate against Protestants as they had been against Catholics, Luther surrendered all hope for them and lashed out in rantings that came close to monomania or downright idiocy. “Well-poisoners, ritual murderers, spreaders of the plague, practicers of black magic” were some of the milder forms he flung at them. Jewish bankers, he said, stole the life-blood of the community while Jewish doctors poisoned Gentile patients. Synagogues must be destroyed, the Torah burned wherever it could be found, homes torn down brick by brick and Jews sent into the fields to live like Gypsies. “I would threaten to rip their tongues from their throats,” said the prince of Protestantism, “if they do not accept the proof that God is three and not one,” and he urged all God-fearing men to hound the Jews like wild beasts from the land.

  It was a shattering blow, the final closing of the door, for these charges would reverberate along the Rhine for centuries, finding voice at last in strange and hideous quarters. So that night Rabbi Eliezer announced to his family, “Tomorrow we start for Turkey.”

  “Do you know where it is?” the rebbetzin asked.

  “We shall go up the Rhine,” he replied, “cross over into Hungary, and go down the Danube to the capital of the Grand Turk.” And only his wife could visualize the terror and loneliness encompassed in those words.

  But Eliezer could not leave Gretz without discharging a final obligation to his community, and to that end he assembled the leaders in his narrow room, saying, “I think you ought to leave Germany now. Those who cannot risk the long journey to Constantinople should move on to Poland, where there is freedom.”

  This suggestion was greeted with protest, so he added, “I know how deeply you love Germany and how you hope one day to find peace here. Isaac Gottes Mann has consented to become the leader of those who stay behind, and under him may you find the peace you seek.”

  “Reconsider!” Gottes Mann begged his nephew. “This madness will pass and we Jews will know centuries of wonderful accomplishment in this beautiful land, for we are Germans.”

  “I feel myself charged with saving the soul of Judaism,” Rabbi Eliezer said, and next morning he was off. But as he led his family for the last time through the iron gate his rebbetzin looked back with longing at the little children who were weeping to see her go, and she uttered the lament of all Jewish mothers who left the ghettos which they had tried to make endurable: “Our little street, what a kingdom of love it was.”

  When the family of Bar Zadok approached the border of Germany they were overtaken by a gang of men on horseback who noticed the beauty of the two women, Leah and Elisheba, then nearing eleven, and they began to molest them, so that the rabbi and his son had to defend their womenfolk against the horsemen, who shouted, “Let’s have fun with the Jewesses!” A heavy fight ensued, with the men lashing out at the four Jews and finally knocking Leah to the ground.

  When Eliezer saw his wife fall he leaped at one of the assailants, caught him by the leg and tried to pull him from his mount; but the others rode back furiously and their horses trampled the fallen Leah so badly that she died. With anguish greater even than he had ever known, Rabbi Eliezer buried his wife and led his children toward Hungary.

  In that country the rabbi’s son fell ill, and there was no money to buy his cure, and he, too, died. But after a long time the tall scholar and his daughter Elisheba came to Safed.

  • • • THE TELL

  “Jesus Christ!” Cullinane cried, bursting from sleep and finding himself bolt upright in bed at three in the morning. He was covered with sweat, and the vision he had been having of the two trees remained as clear as the stars shining through his tent.

  The first tree he had seen as Major Cullinane, flying his bomber into the Atsugi air base in Japan at the end of World War II. One March morning at an inn where he had taken a char
ming Japanese girl he had lain in his bed after a session of exquisite love-making and had idly spotted a cherry tree which an early warm breeze had teased into sending forth the first flowers of spring. It had been a different kind of tree from those he had known in America: a huge, gnarled trunk several feet across and apparently dead, except that from it sprang one splendid branch which was vitally alive and about to be covered with flowers.

  “Why don’t they cut the old tree down?” he had asked the girl.

  “Cut?” she had echoed in disbelief. “I bring you here … the best tree in Japan … very famous.” And with gestures she had explained that the Japanese prize such a tree above all others, for it reminds the viewer that it is ancient and near death, but that one powerful strain of life still pulsates through the bark; and as he had lain there, enjoying the girl and the quiet inn and the old tree, he had caught something of the spirit of Japan and its strange values.

  “In America,” he had said, “any self-respecting farmer would cut down an old crock like that. But I see what you mean.”

  Later the same girl had taken him to the bonsai mart in Tokyo, where he had seen dwarf trees, sixteen inches tall and two hundred years old; and his pleasure in their beauty had been so evident that she had taken him to her uncle’s, and for the first time he had become aware that she was not a prostitute but a sensitive girl with a college education, caught up in the aftermath of an imperial war. And she had shown him her uncle’s bonsai, famous in Japan—a dwarf cherry tree more than three hundred years old, with a trunk even more dilapidated than the one at the inn. It was almost hollow, black and lifeless, with numerous holes worn through it where branches had once grown; and again one single bright limb flourished, covered with blossoms.

  “It’s a miracle,” the old man had said, “the foundation and the flower.”

  The second tree he had found at Makor, that very old olive, a gaunt, dismembered relic whose trunk existed only as a dead cavity surrounded by fragments of life, but like the cherry in Japan this patriarchal thing—perhaps two thousand years old—sent forth from its always-dying body persistent branches of great beauty, and they bore fruit. On first seeing this miraculous olive he had not remembered the cherry in Japan, but one day in August while sitting beneath its branches and trying to evoke the Makor of Emperor Vespasian, he happened to look at the tree in a new way, and he had snapped his fingers, crying, “It’s just like that cherry tree Tomiko showed me in Japan.” He had remembered the girl’s name, and the inn, and her uncle’s bonsai.