The Witch of Cologne

by Tobsha Learner

  She had an unusual childhood. Not only had her father married an outsider—a Sephardic woman—but their union was one of the heart and not the customary arranged marriage of Deutz. The young rabbi’s choice was unpopular and both his Spanish wife and their young daughter had suffered the brunt of the community’s xenophobia. Sara ben Saul died in childbirth when Ruth was six and the small girl wore the solitary air of self-containment that marks bereaved children. She lived alone with her father until his own brother, Samuel, was widowed and with his only son Aaron moved into the large brick house adjacent to the cheder where Elazar ben Saul, as chief rabbi, was entitled to live. The two brothers found solace in their companionship. Elazar, the elder, provided a kernel of stability for Samuel, the more extroverted man, while their children—both motherless—grew to be de facto siblings.

  Two years older, wild, defiant and dangerously intelligent, Aaron embodied everything the small girl longed to be. Ruth worshipped the thin boy whose passionate tantrums intimidated even his father. A dreamer, at night Aaron would keep the little girl awake while he whispered how when he grew up he would see countries his father had never seen. How he would travel as a Christian and be free to own land and trade with whomever he liked and employ more than two servants, the maximum allowed to a Jew. Both children knew these blasphemous fantasies could only be murmured in the shadows of the bedroom they shared tucked high into the rafters of the narrow house.

  Often, frightened for Aaron and his audacity, the small girl would creep into his bed and fall asleep in his arms. Nevertheless, both children shared an intense intellectual curiosity, which their fathers encouraged, and the small girl became infected by Aaron’s passion for free thought. A passion that was fully ignited by an encounter at a fair.

  The fairs—huge metropolises of tents and wooden stalls that blossomed like mushrooms beside the medieval walls of the cities—were thriving hubs of bustling commerce where all manner of entrepreneurial denizens, from Jews to gypsies, offered an immense variety of services from moneylending to diamond trading to lacemaking. Here marriages were made, wars declared and secret financial deals brokered.

  It was at the Naumburg fair that Ruth, having wandered from her father’s side, became transfixed by a Lutheran zealot standing on an old cart covered in straw. The little girl watched and listened, her green eyes dark with amazement as he held forth fearlessly, describing a free society, a place where all—Catholic, Lutheran, woman, Jew and Moor—were equal. The man, painfully thin, his beard pale with dust and a battered cap drawn low over his fiery eyes, spoke with a passion that captivated the young child. Even when pelted by rotten fruit, he continued unperturbed until he was finally hauled off the cart by the city guards.

  When Aaron and Elazar eventually found her, Ruth was still standing gazing at the spot where the zealot had preached, her mind saturated with dreams of a universe where she would be allowed to read the Torah, would be free to stand like a man with her father at the holy ark and to choose her own husband—notions that hitherto were unthinkable.

  The child was so quiet on the journey home that the rabbi was secretly frightened a dybbuk might have crept into the small girl’s soul. In a way it had: the world the zealot described haunted Ruth’s imagination. It was a vision that was to shape the course of her adult life.

  When Aaron was twelve, Samuel, a small man famous for both his short temper and his sense of humour, was unlucky enough to be caught by the Bund, a marauding band of anti-Semites who had crossed the Rhine seeking amusement.

  The young widower was driving back from the kosher slaughterer’s with a bag of headless chickens prepared for the Sabbath dinner when the rabble came across him. They made Samuel run like a cockerel himself, then hanged him from a tree. Aaron, hiding in his father’s cart, witnessed the whole event. The young boy would never forget the sound of his father’s voice cursing the edict which decreed that no Jew could bear arms as he saw the youths with their swords and knives bearing down on him. Nor would he ever forget the terrible powerlessness he felt as he remained hidden under the sackcloth while they strung his father up, legs kicking wildly, from the old linden tree in the centre of the town square while everyone else hid behind closed doors.

  A year later, just after his bar mitzvah, Aaron secretly joined a gang of Jewish youths dedicated to avenging the tragedies caused by the edict. One night, dressed in dark clothes, their faces smeared with soot, the boys travelled far beyond Deutz. They ambushed and killed a Catholic farmer who had recently slaughtered a Jewish family for squatting on his land.

  Ruth was in the small parlour helping Rosa, her nursemaid, to spin when Aaron ran in covered with dust, his hands bloody, a sword strapped defiantly to his waist. While Rosa ran for help, Ruth hid the weapon in her dowry chest and promised her cousin that she would never betray him.

  When the soldiers from Cologne finally raided the house they found the thirteen-year-old boy draped in his father’s prayer shawl, sitting stiffly in Samuel’s place of honour at the dining table. The dignity of the youth momentarily stunned them before they pulled the silent boy from the table and clapped irons on him.

  A week later, all six youths were found guilty, some of them aged as young as ten. It was then that Elazar, as chief rabbi, and the community leader, Hirz Überrhein, donned black hats and made their way across the river to plead with the city mayors for leniency. Despite their supplications, the boys were tried and executed. Their bodies hung on the city gates as a warning to all those who might harbour similar ambitions.

  Elazar ben Saul’s hair turned white overnight. He covered his windows, blocking out the sight of the Catholic city for a full six months in protest. Ruth’s childhood innocence was lost for ever, the security of the small world that surrounded her irredeemably destroyed.

  While her father buried himself in his grief, Ruth transformed from an outgoing optimistic child to a darkly serious young woman. It was as if some of Aaron’s spirit had seeped into her own. She started sleeping with the boy’s sword hidden under her pallet and slowly the dangerous dream of revenge began to ferment in her adolescent mind.

  A year later, when Ruth was approaching womanhood, Rosa decided that after all this turmoil the child was mature enough to receive her mother’s inheritance, hoping to give the girl back some faith after the trauma of Aaron’s execution. The Tikkunei Zohar was a collection of mystical texts that specialised in practical magic, both black and white—it would provide the young girl with guidance and, most importantly, personal and cultural self-esteem.

  As she lay dying Ruth’s mother had asked the nursemaid to become the guardian of the Zohar and to hand it secretly to Ruth when she was of age. The tome was the only heirloom Sara had been able to save from the annihilation of her family. The Navarros’ edition of the Zohar was signed by the greatest kabbalistic scholar of them all, Moses de Leon. Priceless, it was a magnificent leatherbound book sealed with an ornate lock encrusted with jewels that dated back to the fourteenth century.

  The Zohar was considered the bible for any aspiring kabbalist. But unlike their Sephardic cousins, the Ashkenazi Jews had determined that the only people allowed to study its teachings had to be over forty years of age and male. As a rabbi’s daughter Ruth was painfully aware of this strict law. Even Elazar himself, who had secretly taught his daughter how to read the Torah, risking religious condemnation and possible excommunication, was deeply shocked when the precocious young girl demanded that she also be allowed to study the Zohar. What Elazar did not realise was that Rosa had already begun Ruth’s education, narrating its contents to her in allegorical bedtime stories in Spanish, a tongue the rabbi had no knowledge of.

  On the occasion of Ruth’s first bleeding, Rosa took her into the synagogue in the middle of the night. They stood in the women’s section, a sealed-off balcony from which women were allowed to peer down into the main area of worship. From there they could stare at the altar with its brass gates where the scrolls of the Torah were kept beside the
everlasting light, the small bronze oil lantern that was kept burning always. There below was the domain of the men, the anointed keepers of the rarefied spiritual world of Judaism. A domain which Ruth wanted desperately to be a part of. Her nursemaid knew this and so, with trembling hands, conscious that she was breaking every religious law, Rosa handed over the ancient Zohar.

  In the dim candlelight, in the middle of the night in the silent temple—a venue so outrageous that Rosa knew it was safe—the young girl carefully turned the minute ornate gold key and lifted the ancient embossed leather cover. Immediately the secrets of the kabbala lifted from the open pages, flying dizzily around the closed balcony like a cloud of swarming butterflies, filling the air like a hailstorm of fluttering jewels to settle on the young girl’s trembling lips and eyelids: How to turn water into wine, how to bring a clay man to life, how to ascend to Heaven and consult with the angels, how to bring the dead back to life, how to exorcise a dybbuk, how to ward off the demon Lilith in times of childbirth…

  It was magic rooted in the ethics of living, but more importantly for Ruth, the book was a direct link with her own ancient Sephardic roots, a touchstone for her mother’s family and the relatives she had never known.

  From then on the girl devoted herself to her studies. She learnt that the Zohar contained a description of the essence of God, known in the kabbalistic text as Ein Sof—‘without end’—an explanation which deliberately encompassed God’s lack of boundaries in both time and space. She read how the kabbalists believed that Ein Sof interacted with the universe through ten emanations from this essence known as the ten Sefirot. The Zohar itself was divided into ten parts, one on each Sefirot, each section opening with a gilded representation of the emanation. The book began with the highest and worked down to the lowest, although the Sefirot themselves were not considered to be separate deities but intimately a part of God. Their configuration formed an illustration of the Divine connected in an instant with everything in the universe, including humanity. This idea captivated the young girl and, eager for more knowledge, she studied the manuscript late into each night, learning how all the good and all the evil man did resonated through the Sefirot and affected the entire universe up to and including God himself. She memorised the entire text, then began to introduce kabbalistic talismans into her own life—to protect her father, to make rain, to end a storm. On each occasion she recorded the cause and effect in a small diary she kept hidden with the tome. This journal was the forerunner of her scientific discipline, the training for later research.

  Ruth decided that she would draw on magical powers to avenge her cousin’s execution. If the Jewish elders of Prague could summon up a golem—a giant made from the river mud of the Moldau—she could do something similar. Inspired by the lingering heat of her dead cousin’s fury, the bond by which she kept Aaron’s memory alive, she started to make a plan. A witness herself to the terrible power of the she-demon Lilith, she had hidden behind a curtain and watched her mother bleed to death after giving birth to a tiny but perfectly formed dead baby boy. If Lilith could strike down two lives so easily, who knew what else she could do if summoned? The young girl decided to inflict the evil spirit upon the authorities of Cologne.

  To prepare, Ruth fasted for several days to ensure her body was pure enough to evoke the spirits. Feigning an optimistic disposition, she tricked Rosa into believing that her lack of appetite and strangely pale complexion were the result of an unnamed, unrequited infatuation. It was a notion the nursemaid found perfectly acceptable but one which the young girl found absurd.

  Ruth’s plan was to wear an amulet for warding off Lilith but to reflect the lettering backwards through a looking glass to cause the reverse effect: the amulet would summon Lilith instead of repulsing her. She also decided to write the incantation in her own menstrual blood, believing this to be so profane it could not but attract the female demon.

  The night of the waxing moon came. Ruth waited until the rest of the household was sleeping, then, after lighting four black candles placed at the points of the compass around her bedroom, she sat naked before a large curved looking glass and began to chant the kabbalistic incantations she had memorised to put herself into a trance.

  At the stroke of midnight Ruth found herself staring at her reflection in the dim looking glass. Her dark hair was loose over her shoulders, the amulet—a handmade card with the three angels, Snwy, Snsnwy and Smnglf, drawn on it—hung between her budding breasts. Closing her eyes she repeated over and over the different names she knew for the demon: Lilith, Karina, Tabi’a, the harlot, the wicked, the false, the grandmother of Satan—until, her head spinning, she began to feel as if her body was lifting from the ground and she had started to float. Her soul streamed out from the top of her head, beyond the ceiling, up into the night sky like light from a thousand candles.

  Just at the moment she was terrified that the sensation might be death, a noxious odour swept through the room. It was the smell of sulphur and decay, and under it lay a sickly musk, piercingly sweet, that reminded Ruth of old roses. She opened her eyes.

  At first, gazing transfixed into the misty glass, she thought she had imagined the slight movement in the shadows. But as she stared harder, a twitching bluish-white form came suddenly into focus.

  It was hideous. The creature, twisted like a crippled thing, lay on its side covered in its own slimy ooze. About seven feet in length, it had the upper form of a woman. A blindingly beautiful maiden with pale blue skin and large silver nipples, she was utterly without hair, her scalp an immaculate shiny dome. But what was most terrifying was her limbs. They ran from her sex into three long tails that Ruth recognised as eels. The writhing, shimmering, marish lengths snaked blindly across the wooden floor.

  Paralysed with horror the young girl could not move, could not utter a sound. Lilith, with a violent convulsion, lashed her whole length about the room so that she could lift her colossal face. Gleaming aquamarine in the candlelight, she glared at her summoner through the looking glass. Her luminous eyes fastened unblinkingly upon Ruth, each pupil shining emerald from lid to lid.

  ‘Daughter! On what premise have you awoken me? I am not pleased. What desire hath called the great Unmaker?’ Lilith spoke without moving her vast soft mouth.

  The demon’s voice filled the young girl’s head, its lascivious hiss making her simultaneously shudder with pleasure and retch with fear. All the commands she had learnt fled her as the abhorrent reality manifested. Shocked beyond thought she tried to scream but no sound emerged.

  Disgust rippled through the demon’s body as she gazed at the terrified girl. ‘You should not have taken my name in vain, girl. From this moment onwards I have marked thy soul as mine.’

  Her body shaking violently, Ruth’s voice returned and her cry of anguish filled the room.

  A second later she woke in her own bed shivering, with Rosa standing over her.

  ‘’Twas a dream, a nightmare, my child,’ the woman whispered, rocking the weeping girl to her bosom.

  She made her drink a glass of hot milk and cloves and left only when she was convinced Ruth had finally fallen asleep. As she crept across the bedroom floor, the nursemaid slipped on a piece of pungent reed still wet with river water. Puzzling over its origins, Rosa tucked it into her pocket, sensing that somehow it belonged to the phantasm her ward had refused to talk about and, if not disposed of, could be used against her in the future.

  For weeks afterwards Ruth would not sleep alone and she swore to herself she would never again treat the Zohar or any of its sorcery disrespectfully, especially the magic of the she-demon Lilith. But the idea of harnessing and defeating the evil spirit started to fester within her. She began to plague Rosa with questions about her mother’s death. Knowing that Lilith was the slayer of newborns and the stealer of the souls of labouring women, she wanted to find out whether the right precautions had been taken at her mother’s second birthing, whether her death could have been prevented.

  The old n
ursemaid, torn between earthly pragmatism and a stoic respect for superstition, evaded the young girl’s questioning until, worn down, she blurted out that Elazar, fearing the mysticism of his Spanish wife’s converso family, had torn away the amulets Rosa herself had hung to ward off Lilith when she realised that Sara was struggling badly. Shocked, Ruth asked whether her father was then to blame for her mother’s death? Rosa hastily explained that Sara had been narrow in the hips and birthing was difficult for such women, and that privately she held responsible the quack whom Elazar, desperate to save both mother and child, had rushed in at the last minute. A real butcher who had used birthing hooks, she told Ruth, gesturing graphically with her hands.

  The notion that she herself might become the saviour of such women started to haunt the young girl. She thought that, somehow, by becoming a midwife she might magically complete her own mother’s labour safely over and over, for the reward of seeing her mother live on, flushed with health, and her baby brother pink and fat at the breast.

  After months of nagging, Rosa finally allowed Ruth to accompany her to the birthing of a good friend. The young woman was having a difficult labour and the community doctor, Isaac Schlam, had been called in to assist. Rosa, busy helping the frantic doctor, asked Ruth to comfort the terrified mother during the delivery. She had excelled at her task, displaying a precocious gift of authoritative calmness which was of immediate comfort to the patient.

  Ruth was captivated by the whole experience; she was astounded that from agony such joy emerged. It was at that moment her ambition was cemented: she would become a midwife. Not a butcher, but one who used herbs and craft.

  Slowly her grieving over her cousin’s death subsided. But to keep Aaron’s memory alive, on the anniversary of his death she would take his sword and talk to it as if it were the boy himself, whispering all the dark adolescent secrets that had begun to crowd her heart, unaware that one day she would wear the weapon openly.