Source

by James A. Michener

  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 religion 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.’”

  The compassionate words caught the imagination of the Jews, and one summed it all up: “He will let us work.”

  But at this moment Rabbi Eliezer came through the iron gate, and seeing the crowd of people, joined them to hear the last words of the monk’s message. In him, too, a surge of hope rose, but being a cautious man he asked to see the pamphlet, and as he studied it in silence and tried to formulate a guess as to what had been in Luther’s mind as he wrote, he came to the sobering conclusion that the Jews would be wise not to pin their hopes too strongly to the Lutheran banner, and he said so.

  “What do you mean?” Gottes Mann asked. “He says right here that Jews are to be treated like human beings.”

  “Yes, he does,” Eliezer agreed.

  “Then I think we should support him,” Isaac said, and his suggestion gained some support.

  “False,” Eliezer objected.

  “How can you say that?” his uncle asked. He was the principal moneylender and a man of prudence.

  “We know the Church,” Eliezer replied. “And how it treats Jews. But we don’t know this monk, Martin Luther.”

  “Read his words, Rabbi!” one of the men pleaded.

  “I have,” the tall man replied, “and I know what Martin Luther means now, when he wants to use us against his own Church. But what will be his position if he wins? Will he not insist that we convert to his religion?”

  At first Eliezer’s argument made no sense. As one Jew argued, “After this long night of oppression Martin Luther comes along and says, ‘In your treatment of Jews you are more like animals than Christians.’ I say, Trust Luther and hope for his triumph.’”

  “No,” Eliezer warned flatly, “there will be no support for Luther from the Jews of this city. We must not create a new opponent to supplant the old.”

  He asked to borrow the pamphlet, and as he walked to the two tiny rooms in which he lived, airless and cramped, with his wife, his baby, his mother-in-law and two aunts, he felt certain that his decision was correct; but when he had gone over the pamphlet word by word he called his wife, and since she could not read, he read the words to her and watched as she sat with her hands clasping her knees, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen; and at the end of the reading he asked, “What do you think of the message?”

  “He says a lot that I like to hear,” she replied.

  “But what does he mean?”

  “I suppose that he has two things in mind. To use us now and to convert us later.”

  “Exactly,” Eliezer cried. He had been married to Leah for two years, and his joy had not diminished. She was as perceptive as she was beautiful, and as affectionate with the people of the Judenstrasse as she was with her own son. She wore her hair parted in the middle and drawn down over her ears, so that her clear, bright face was framed in black. She had lived most of her life inside the locked gate of the quarter, for her father had wisely anticipated trouble if so lovely a Jewess were allowed to be seen by the young men of the city; and after her marriage to the rabbi, Eliezer had also asked her to stay close to home for the same reason. There had been many incidents in which attractive Jewish girls were raped or killed, and the authorities could find no way to punish the malefactors, principally because judges were reluctant to interpret rough play with Jewish girls as in any way criminal.

  So for the next ten years Leah, the young rebbetzin of Eliezer bar Zadok, knew only the Judenstrasse, and here she shed a kind of radiance which made the narrow street livable. She was not a midwife, but most pregnant women wanted her to be with them during the toils of childbirth, and she had helped many. She was gifted with the needle, and in the semi-darkness of the Judenstrasse homes she taught young girls how to care for their fathers’ clothes. Best of all she had a vivid imagination and loved to tell old stories about the heroes of Judaism, and mothers of the narrow street grew to expect their children to be at Rabbi Eliezer’s, listening to the rebbetzin as she embroidered fabulous backgrounds to stories which in the Bible required only a few sentences.

  “Now you must not think that Jael was any ordinary wife,” Eliezer heard her saying one day as more than a dozen children listened. “Oh no! She was tall and she had red hair, and when she was no older than you she went into the Sinai Desert and tamed a lion, for she was never afraid. She knew how to weave and had many dresses of red and gold and blue, and she found colored stones to make for herself a necklace. Believe me, when Jael was married to Heber it was one of the biggest weddings you’ve ever seen. People came from villages far distant. They rode on horses and on camels, and Jael’s younger sister—she was about your age—came riding on the tame lion, and some of the guests had to walk for three days to get to the wedding.”

  “Were they allowed to leave the Judenstrasse?” a boy asked.

  “Moishe!” she cried. “In those days we had no locked streets or iron gates. Don’t you know how we lived then? We had beautiful villages under the open sky, and palm trees bending with dates, and men like your father had horses on which they rode for miles along green fields. Maybe your father, Rachab, would have tended bees, and wherever he went on his white mule there were flowers, and in the woods there were lions for brave men to hunt, and at the edge of the desert there were camels which you could ride—if you were clever enough to catch them. And everywhere there was beauty. The lakes … the lakes were so big you could not possibly walk around them, and a man named Nethaneel had a boat on one of the lakes, and after the wedding he took all the children on the lake for a boat ride.”

  Rabbi Eliezer studied quietly in a corner of the room, and after a while one of the older girls who wore pigtails asked, “But why did Jael take a hammer and drive a nail into Captain Sisera’s head?” The rabbi leaned forward to catch his w
ife’s explanation, for the Talmud taught that Jael, in order to trick her enemy, engaged with him in seven acts of sexual intercourse, after which she drove a nail through his skull.

  “If I explained to you now, Miriam, you could not possibly understand. So believe me when I say that Jael was one of the gentlest women of the Jews. Tell me, Miriam, do you think that a woman who could tame a lion would be other than gentle?”

  “What does a camel look like?” one of the little boys asked.

  “You’ve never seen a camel?” Leah cried. “It’s got fur like a lion and a tail like a tiger and four fast feet like a horse, and big teeth that tear down the tops of trees, and it sleeps in a little ball, like a kitten. You should have seen Jael and her husband Heber and their children when they rode on camels through the flowers. They would wave to people on the lake, and in the evening they would have dances in great open spaces under the stars. Did you really think that in the old days we proud Jews lived in narrow alleys like this?”

  Frequently Rabbi Eliezer felt tempted to halt his wife’s storytelling, for later the children would have to unlearn most of what she told them, but he never spoke to her about it. For later when the children grew up and married and went to live in the corner of some crowded room, to have their own children who would know only the Judenstrasse, it was desirable that they had at one time known of open spaces and self-respect; and the errors did no harm, for later they would remember only that Jael was a heroic woman who had killed a man in order to save Israel.

  But the day came when even Eliezer realized that he must put a stop to his rebbetzin’s wild storytelling, for as he sat on his bed one morning, apparently reading, he heard Leah telling the wide-eyed children, “The ark Moses found in the desert was as long as this house and twice as big, all covered with gold like Gottes Mann’s cane, and in it he put the tables of the law and carried them for forty years across the desert. The desert?” She paused. “It’s as big as all the land from here to the city wall, flat and with lovely grass growing out of the sand, and flowers as far as you can see. And each night it grows a loaf with dark crust beside each flower, and in this way God kept his Jews alive for forty years.”

  “What happened to the ark?” a boy asked, imagining himself on the flowering desert.

  “It was lost,” the rebbetzin said, smoothing her hair back from her forehead, “and we were all sorry. We wept. We tore our clothes. And then one day King David found it, tucked away in a small village, and he was so happy that he began to dance and to sing and to drink great mugs of beer. And he danced all night. And as he danced what do you suppose he did?”

  “Kissed the girls?” Miriam in pigtails asked.

  “Yes. He did that too. But he also composed more than a hundred psalms of joy.” It was at this point that Rabbi Eliezer felt obligated to halt his wife, but for some reason he did not do so, and Miriam asked, “Is it true, Rebbetzin, what my mother says? That on your wedding night your husband danced all night?”

  “Oh yes!” the rebbetzin said. “When we Jews lived freely, under the open sky, with the flowers of the desert about us, we danced all the time. It’s only here that we’ve forgotten, Miriam, and when the rabbi danced at our wedding he was restoring the days of King David.”

  And Rabbi Eliezer looked above the heads of the little children and saw his wife looking at him with love, and he said unexpectedly, “Children, you must go home now,” and when they had left he sent his son from the crowded room too, and he embraced Leah as if it were the first time he had been alone with her. “You are my lovely psalmist,” he whispered. “In your distorted and contrary way you bring me truth.” He kissed her ardently and felt her cool hair tumbling about his face, and from the crowded alley they could hear the cries of children.

  In late 1533, as a result of this tender interruption, it came Leah’s turn to summon the midwife, and a girl was born named Elisheba, and now with two children of her own Leah was hardly ever seen without a cluster of young ones about her heels, and almost every day she had to tell them another story from the Hebrew past: of Samson and the far fields he had owned, where a man could ride in any direction for days without coming to the boundaries; and of Miriam, the great dancer, who had an orchestra of maybe seventy musicians and not less than sixteen different costumes; and finally of a shepherd boy named Samuel, who used to wander along paths that took him through fields and into forests and along lakes and across a land that was memorable. Whenever Leah told her stories children were able to visualize their Promised Land.

  These were the happiest years that the Judenstrasse of Gretz ever knew, and none of the inhabitants had greater cause for joy than Rabbi Eliezer and his wife. His congregation was attentive to his leadership, and conflict within the quarter was scarcely known. His family constituted an almost ideal Jewish home, except that now four additional people from another family were cramped into the back room. He had no space to study, but he could always retreat to the synagogue and the rickety table with its candle and Talmud.

  But in 1542 Isaac the moneylender came forth with a proposal: “I have made profits and would like to contribute a new synagogue to the Judenstrasse, one of which we could be proud.”

  Rabbi Eliezer rebuked him: “The city law says we must live with the synagogue we have.”

  “The new one could have benches,” Isaac argued, “and a study place for you. It would be a credit to the Lord.”

  Eliezer argued against the proposal, telling the would-be donor to give his funds to the poor, but Isaac pointed out that in the present period of religious uncertainty the town burghers might be more lenient. So against his better judgment Eliezer went before them and announced, “The Jews of Gretz request permission to build a cleaner synagogue.”

  He got his answer quickly: “It would be an insult to the city, and would constitute a challenge to the supremacy of the cathedral. Since the Jews must already have the money in hand to commit this sacrilege, we hereby fine the Judenstrasse a sum equal to the cost of building a new synagogue.”

  Rabbi Eliezer had to protest the unfairness of this fine, and the city elders turned their wrath on him: “And for his contumacy, the rabbi of the Judenstrasse is to be tried for opposing the operation of holy law, because the Bible says that Christians were abused in the synagogue, hence it must be an abomination of wickedness.”

  A court was convened and Eliezer was summoned to trial, but Church officials protested that no Jew could properly swear to tell the truth, especially not on the Bible, which they denied, so an ancient Germanic custom was invoked, and into the court was hauled the bloody hide of a freshly killed pig. The rabbi was required to cast off his shoes and stockings and to stand barefooted in the pig’s bloody skin and repeat, “May the skin of this pig envelop me if I lie, may its meat choke my mother, may the head of the pig be transformed into the head of my daughter and may the swinish blood be smeared upon the foreheads of my children for three generations if I do not tell the truth.”

  Rabbi Eliezer, who had taught himself to read seven languages, stepped like a criminal onto the pigskin and swore. The officials then required him to repeat after them the routine confession: “I am a filthy Jew whose people crucified the true Christ. I am a wanderer who has no home save where the benevolence of the Church provides one. I am evil and corrupt and an abomination to all men. I poison wells, spread the plague and kill Christian children for their blood. My women are whores and my fate is everlasting hell, for I am the enemy of the Church and of all good Christians.”

  Next Rabbi Eliezer publicly admitted that this description accurately characterized him, after which he was required to attest, on the blood of the pig in whose skin he stood, that he came before the court not as a rabbi, the leader of a congregation, for to admit the presence of such leadership might be interpreted as acknowledging the lawful presence of Jews, but as a man alone, asking for an intemperate request. He was forced to kneel down, placing both hands in the pig’s blood, and he did so.

  No
t only was the denial of a new synagogue confirmed, but the synagogue already standing in the Judenstrasse was ordered to be torn down, since it was a source of evil and an offense to Christ. And as penance for his personal effrontery Rabbi Eliezer would be required next Shabbat to kiss the hind end of the Sow of Gretz in front of the assembled citizenry.

  Defiled and torn in spirit the rabbi returned to the Judenstrasse and informed his Jews that they were about to lose their synagogue. In the narrow alley he announced, “It is a judgment upon us because of our arrogance. When will we learn, O Israel, that we serve the Lord not in buildings but in our hearts? The sin is upon us, not upon them who destroy the building. The lamentations are ours, for we caused them with our vanity. When the building is torn down we shall all watch, and we shall wear mourning, for the sin is upon us.”

  He went to the ritual bath to cleanse himself of the defilement he had suffered in the Christian court, but as he lay in the consoling waters he heard children shouting, “Here come the men with the axes!” He reached the street in time to see a score of workmen start their demolition of the synagogue. With crowbars they ripped down the door and with fire borrowed from the kitchen of a Jewish home they started a conflagration into which they threw the door, Eliezer’s old table and the rickety chair. The raised desk from which the Torah was read they pitched into the flames and then Eliezer watched with dismay as they tore down the embroidered covering of the cupboard and tossed it irreverently onto the fire; it was as if they had thrown a woman there, for the fragile cloth was beautiful, and a man tried to rescue it but was driven back.

  Then Eliezer’s dismay became unbelieving tragedy when the workmen ripped down the cupboard and shook it to dislodge the parchment scroll of Torah. As the holy book rolled in the dust, the destroyers kicked it toward the flames. Deftly one of the men caught the scroll with his toe and lofted it in a graceful arc so that it fell into the fire, where flames quickly reached for the sheepskin and consumed it.