“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 though 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.
“Whoever that girl is,” the duke cried, “set her free, whether she wins or not.” The crowd, staring minutely at every motion of the fat rabbi in recovering his pants, cheered and whistled. Zaki, hurt and far behind the others, tried to withdraw, but the Dominican poked him and informed him that he, like all the others, must finish the course.
Down the Corso, Zaki went, then back toward the cathedral; but as the runners re-entered the square the same girl pulled down the pants of another of the Jews, and the race ended in an obscene scramble, with firecrackers exploding, music playing and the crowd screaming its approval. Minutes after the others had finished Rabbi Zaki waddled up to the cathedral door.
Along with the five other racers he was handed his brown robe and red dunce’s cap. Dressed thus, he was shepherded into the cathedral, where the Jews of the community were assembled on wooden benches set off from the rest of the church by rope, and while the citizens of the town and many from outlying villages—for their small locales provided no such spectacles—crammed in to stare at the Jews and surround them with hostility, the prelates of the Church assembled and took their places on a wooden platform. The duke
and his escorts went to other specially erected seats and all listened as a haggard friar began a conciliatory sermon intended to show the Jews the glories of a gentle and forgiving Christianity.
“You swine, you pigs, you filth of the gutters,” he shouted at them, “you abominations, you unspeakable dogs of the outhouse, why do you persist in your contumacy? With your hooked noses you smell out the filth of the world and are content to lie in darkness and wallow in your own defecation. Your women are all whores. Your men are circumcised criminals. Your daughters are the bawds of the nation. You are the Anti-Christ and your sons shall perish in eternal hellfire. Why are you so obdurate?” For twenty minutes the friar, whose job it was to convert the Jews to a higher form of religion, hurled at them thunderbolts of scorn and poured over them the vials of his abuse. No crime was too contemptible for them to have committed, no malpractice too abominable for them to wallow in. It was a sermon that was being preached throughout the Christian world in those years and it was based upon a perverse logic, for with each fresh insult the Jews, roped together in their special area, knew that what the fiery man said was preposterous, and they concluded that if his Church were as ignorant of Judaism as he was, there was truly no sense in listening to its plea for conversion. If the Jews of Europe had had even the slightest inclination toward apostasy, their obligatory attendance at the yearly conversion sermon would have hardened their hearts against it.
Now the friar came to the second part of his plea: “You argue in the filth of your despair that God is one, whereas we know that He is three. How can you be so blind? So stupid? So contumacious? Why do you persist in holding to your Old Book when we have proved that it is faulty? Why do you refuse to accept the glorious New Book, which clearly contains the truth? God is three and all the world proclaims this fact. Can you not see that your Old Book was given you only temporarily so that the way might be prepared for the true words of the New? Why do you cling to your error? Why?”
And every Jew sitting by sufferance in the cathedral that day knew that he persisted in his error, his oftentimes fatal error, because he had been taught from the days of Abraham and Moses and Elijah that God is one, indivisible, alone and unknowable.
From the pulpit the friar now launched into the final portion of his sermon, using at last the soft voice of reason: “Come, Jews, who were once Christians, come back to the true Church while there remains a chance. Forswear your error. Surrender your blindness. Come back with singing hearts to that seamless robe where you will find peace and gentleness and love.” He paused. From inside the roped-off section faces of stone stared back. The friar, seeing the obdurate Jews and sensing their unwillingness even to listen, decided to remind them of the special condition in which they lived. “You are not ordinary Jews, men and women of Podi,” he began quietly, “you are people upon whom the baptism of Christ once rested. You are people who have gone astray, and unless you return quickly to the fold events of a terrible nature are bound to overtake you.” His voice rose to a dreadful, premonitory wail: “For if you do not return to the Church you will be dragged into the cellars to taste the rope, the fagot and the choking water. Your bodies will be broken and your hearts torn with anguish. The peace that I offer you this day will no longer be available, and you will march across the piazza not in the spirit of friendly sport as you did this day, but bearing a fiery brand which will be used to light the fires which will consume you. Fiends, idiots, sons of hell—repent now. Join the true Church now. Abjure the blasphemies of Moses and the old ways. Now, now!” He ended in a paroxysm of religious fervor, and Rabbi Zaki, who knew something of these matters, was terrified.
That night, after Rachel had belabored him again for being so fat and for having allowed the whore to tear down his pants in the race, Zaki started to speak seriously of his fear, but at this point his daughters took up the complaint and insisted that by next spring he lose his weight and not humiliate them. The sorely tried man was tempted to bang the table and cry, “We are not talking about humiliation! We are talking about our lives.” Instead, he waited for his womenfolk to complete their condemnation, which he knew they had a right to deliver—for they were wounded in spirit—and when they were done he said quietly, “The friar meant what he said. We shall be allowed a few more years. Then the burnings will begin.”
“Zaki!” his wife snapped. “Are you an idiot?”
“I am saying what I know to be true. We must leave Italy this week.”
“What do you mean, burning?” his wife heckled. “Because you are so fat that you fell down? Because the friar made his usual ugly speech? You grow suddenly afraid?”
“I am desperately afraid,” Zaki acknowledged. “That angry man meant what he said.”
“Where would we go?” Rachel demanded. “Tell me, where?”
Zaki lowered his voice, looked about the room and said, “Salonica. There is a letter from a German Jew who fled to Salonica, and he says that the Grand Turk.…”
“To Salonica!” his wife repeated. She began laughing hysterically and pointing at her daughters. “Do you think I want them to marry Turks?”
Zaki waited for his wife’s contempt to die down, then said quietly, “Rachel, we are in trouble. I think we should sail for Salonica immediately.”
This was too much for Rachel. She rose from her chair, stormed about her husband’s mean shop and cried, “Has not the Pope himself assured us that we can live peaceably in Italy for as long as we wish? Are you a coward that you doubt his promise?”
“This Pope promised. The next Pope can revoke,” Zaki argued carefully.
“But he gave the promise because he knew that we were baptized forcibly. We were never true Christians, and like the good man he is he has allowed us to be Jews again. I do not wish to go to Salonica. I refuse.”
“Rachel,” the fat rabbi pleaded, “you asked me if I was a coward? Yes, I am. I listened to that man today and he was on fire. He sounded like the priests of Spain and Portugal. He will not rest until Jews like you and me are burned. Rachel, listen!”
But Rachel would not listen, and she refused to permit her daughters to listen, either. Tormented by that day’s confusions the rabbi’s family went to bed, but he did not, and in the morning, after prayers, he went to the ducal palace, where he waited for five hours until the duke allowed him to enter. “I want permission to take a boat to Salonica,” Zaki said.
“What!” the duke exploded. “You want to leave?”
“Yes,” Zaki replied.
“But why?”
“I am afraid.”
“Of what? Zaki,” the duke laughed thinly, “you mustn’t worry about the fun yesterday. We meant no harm. As for the girl who tore down your pants, the jailer put her up to it. Women are curious about these things, you know.” He chuckled at the harmless teasing. “Zaki, we meant no offense. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of.”
“But I am afraid.”
“All right! Next year you won’t have to race.”
“It’s the sermon I’m afraid of.”
“That?” the duke laughed. “We have to do that. Once a year. Pay no attention to him. I rule this city.”
“Excellency, the friar meant what he said.”
“That fool? That clerk? He can do nothing, believe me.”
“Excellency, I am terribly afraid. Let me take my family to the Grand Turk.”
“No, by God! Not to that infidel.”
“Please. Evil days are coming here, of that I am sure.”
The duke found this statement offensive, for Pope Clement himself had promised that Jews baptized under force would be forever under the protection of the papacy and were free to practice their religion as they wished. It was expected that future Popes would repeat this promise. Therefore, when Rabbi Zaki expressed his wish to leave Italy, heading for the realms of the Turk, his plea could be considered only as an insult to the Church. “You cannot go,” the duke said, and the interview was ended.
At home the women deduc
ed where the rabbi had been and they chided him for his faint-heartedness. Other Jews were summoned to ridicule him, and all pointed out that whereas the fears he expressed might have been logical in Spain or Portugal, where there was an Inquisition determined to uncover Jews masquerading as Christians, there was no logical ground for fear in Podi. “This is Italy!” they pointed out, taking refuge in the constant rationalization of the Jew: “It won’t happen here. The people are too civilized.”
Rabbi Zaki for once in his life could not be swayed by either his friends or his family. He had a clear vision of what must inevitably happen in Italy, either with the arrival of a new Pope or with a change in the prosperity of the peninsula. “I am afraid,” he repeated stubbornly. “I saw the faces of the people yesterday. There was hatred in the cathedral.”
“He’s been making the same speech every year,” a cautious merchant repeated. “We’d feel the way you do, Rabbi, if we’d raced half-naked with the women laughing at us.”
“But you didn’t have to race, did you?” Rachel stormed. “Because you’re not fat like a pig.”
Zaki was stunned that his wife should have used this word again and in front of his congregation. With a pleading voice he whispered, “That is not a word to use against a rabbi.”
“But you do eat like a pig!” she cried, and he looked at the floor. It was a mark of the little rabbi that even in his humiliation he never once thought of leaving Podi without his nagging wife, even though he could easily have done so; two men from the city had fled to Amsterdam without their families, but he could not understand their behavior. He knew there was going to be terror in Italy and he could not abandon his stubborn wife and his unlovely daughters to face it, obstinate though they were.
“I am taking my family to Salonica,” he said quietly, “and if you men are wise, you’ll do the same.”
His wife was so irritated that she refused to discuss the matter, and the meeting broke up with a sense of frustration and fear. But in the morning Rabbi Zaki was back arguing with the duke, and after apologizing for any possible insult to the Duke, to the Pope or to the Church he again asked permission to emigrate.
The Source: A Novel Page 93
