“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.
Not 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.
From the Jews came a long wail: “God of Moses, take back your Torah!” And they began to rend their garments as if death had visited that place, and Rabbi Eliezer, tearing his long-coat, prayed aloud, reciting from the Psalms of David: “ ‘Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them. They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.’ ” Thus in their moment of humiliation he tried to console his people, but in the midst of his prayer his voice dried up, not from fear and not because of the flame, but because from the synagogue the workmen had brought the precious scrolls of the Talmud, and these rare books they now threw into the laughing fire.
A young boy whom Eliezer had been teaching the Talmud saw the precious works strike the flame, and he was so desirous of knowing the secrets of these books that he broke away from his mother and tried to rescue them. He rummaged among the brands, clutching futilely at the parchments, and the Christians, seeing that he could accomplish nothing, indulged him; but at last the flames drove him back and he stood beside the rabbi, not yet aware that his hands were badly charred. “ ‘Be not thou far from me, O Lord,’ ” Eliezer prayed. “ ‘O my strength, haste thee to help me.’ ” And the men with the axes worked on.
When the fires were burned down, when the charred hands of the would-be scholar were bound, Rabbi Eliezer stood looking at the gutted synagogue, recalling those wintry nights when candles had lighted the faces of old men studying the Talmud and those bright, hopeful Shabbat mornings when frightened boys of thirteen had stood before their elders to announce in piping voices, “Today I am a man.” Where now would the old men read, where now would the young proclaim? He looked with affection at the roof, to which each year for many centuries the storks had come in spring from the Holy Land, to the gaping door at which travelers had always found a welcome, and at the hollow interior, where generations of Jews had learned the principles by which men can live together in harmony. This synagogue had been a force for great good in Gretz, and in destroying it the Christians had weakened themselves.
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 st
ables 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.”
The Source: A Novel Page 98
