The old man advised Salman to go home, collect his father’s writings, and set off without a moment’s delay for Córdoba, where he should seek out Rabbi Jacobo Tibbon and warn him that the new sultan wanted to destroy the work of Moishe de Espinosa.
BREATHLESS AND PERSPIRING, Salman paused briefly a little way outside the city. Everything he had collected for his hasty departure fit into his bundle: Sefer ha-Zohar and another manuscript or two, along with a crudely carved wooden box bearing a seal that he had discovered at the very back of the drawer containing his father’s notes. The box intrigued him.
He turned back and for a few brief moments took pleasure in the striking beauty of the Alhambra, framed by the towering mountains of the Sierra Nevada. He loved that place more then any other on earth. He already felt a certain longing to return—not to the house of his birth but rather to the places where sovereign peace had generously enfolded him in its arms, particularly to a clearing in the northwestern reaches of the great forest. He would often sit there watching the distant setting sun. Only now did he understand how much he was about to lose. His eyes filled with tears. He sighed deeply and cast a last glance at Granada, then began his long, wandering journey.
DAYLIGHT BEGAN TO FAIL, and Jacobo Tibbon pulled the candlestick closer to the page. Salman sat silent at the other end of the table while the rabbi examined the text. The learned man went through it carefully, caressing the page first with one hand and then with the other, then slowly following with his right index finger the characters inscribed there. Finally he leaned forward and kissed Moishe’s work, the Sefer ha-Zohar.
“Extraordinary,” muttered the rabbi with evident enthusiasm. “Your father, blessed be his name, answers many of the questions that have plagued me ceaselessly over these recent years. What he has written is an indisputable masterpiece. I will take great pleasure in using what is inscribed here for the religious debate next week in the market square. I am obliged to participate, even though it would hardly be wise of me to win. The Christian mob will seize the least pretext to attack us, plunder our homes, and slaughter us.”
Salman was perplexed by this and asked for an explanation. The rabbi told him that in a number of places the Catholic Church had acceded to pressure and staged religious debates that more often than not degenerated into farce. With these verbal contests the Christians intended to demonstrate the inferiority of the Jewish faith. The church was usually represented by converted Jews who hoped to win better positions for themselves by defeating the rabbis. Even though with their greater knowledge and superior rhetorical skills the rabbis were capable of easily demolishing the unsubstantiated declarations of their opponents, when all was said and done, they were forced to declare themselves defeated, especially in the face of the looming threat of reprisals. In Toledo, where one of these debates turned out differently than expected, the men of the church had tortured the learned Jews, obliging them to forswear their Jewish identity and denounce the Jewish faith. The rabbi explained to the tender young man that similar attacks had occurred elsewhere.
Salman couldn’t understand why the Catholic Church was doing this.
Tibbon replied that the church thirsted after great power and wanted to control everything on the Iberian Peninsula, including nonreligious areas of life. Ecclesiastical aims frequently conflicted with the interests of the civil rulers, and since a number of the Christian kings had Jewish counselors, the wrath of the priests was directed toward those influential men. The church insisted that if the Jews resisted conversion, they should be cast out and driven away just as the Moors had been. In response to church pressures a series of anti-Jewish measures had been instituted throughout Spain.
THE PEOPLE OF CÓRDOBA went outside on that unusually warm morning to the Plaza de los Reyes Católicos to attend the first religious debate between Jews and Christians. The vast plaza was full of monks, nuns, peasants, artisans, old folk, women, children, thieves, prostitutes, the crippled, and the maimed, as well as an occasional Jew. The surging mass of humanity followed the debate, spellbound.
Upon a tribune hastily erected for the occasion sat the elderly governor Hidalgo del Solís in the company of the ambassador of the Holy See, Miguel Cruz de Medina, canon of Córdoba Cathedral and director of the theological debate; various nobles from the ruling council; a couple of priestly scholars; a notary; an assistant; and two abbots invited to represent the Cistercian orders of Seville and Carmona. The most august citizens of Córdoba sat with their families upon the balconies overlooking the plaza, clutching colorful ceramic crucifixes and receptacles of cold water from which they frequently drank.
The church bells tolled to mark the opening of the debate. Cruz de Medina stood up, extended his arms, and began his invocation, which was entirely too long and tiresome. Once he had finished, he summoned forth the participants, instructed them to take the customary oath, and enjoined them to participate assiduously in the debate. Jacobo Tibbon nodded in agreement but said nothing, while his opponent replied in a ringing voice, “Amen!”
The rabbi’s opponent was one of the so-called new Christians, the converted Jew Gaspar Santa María, who claimed that he was among the few initiates who knew the secret reasons for the Jews’ stiff-necked insistence on maintaining their ancient faith. He had formally pledged to the pope to convert at least ten thousand of his former coreligionists to the true teachings by demonstrating to them that the Christian world was full of miracles, while their Elohim, whom they persisted in calling the Ultimate, was a tyrant and a vengeful, wicked old man.
With the very first exchange it was obvious to all that Santa María was no match for the rabbi, either in knowledge or in eloquence. The rabbi outshone him in every way, demonstrating his prodigious intelligence and wisdom with each response.
Under the pressure of the occasion and increasingly unsure of himself, Santa María fell into a confusion in his exposition. He began to stammer. The rabbi commented that in his opinion conversations such as this one were extremely beneficial; they were healthy intellectual exercises that always taught him something new while encouraging him to think more clearly, since the contention between differing views encouraged him to rise to previously unimagined heights. It was important, therefore, to seek out opportunities to encounter the views of others and embrace them with open arms instead of sharpened claws.
Santa María felt insulted by this remark. He replied that Jews were not as intelligent as the twisted logic of the rabbi sought to suggest. They were merely sly and cunning because they were born filled with black gall, a fact for which there was ample evidence. That verbal thrust drew thundering applause and prompted shouts of delight from the crowd.
The rabbi was not at a loss for a reply. He praised his adversary for his candor and high spirits and especially for the fact that he was not holding back his emotions. Then he said that no assertion shocked him, no views offended him, and there was no concept so nonsensical or ridiculous that he would refuse to consider it, as long as both parties to the discussion were seeking to discover the truth.
Only a few applauded that reply. Salman was one of them.
Santa María went on the attack. He proclaimed that all Jews were evil and bore the collective guilt for crucifying Jesus. The Sanhedrin, the great Jewish council of Roman times, had formally condemned the Son of God to death, and therefore all of them—his voice rose almost to a falsetto—would inevitably wind up in eternal damnation and their bodies would be roasted over the coals like lambs on a spit.
The rabbi responded that he honored truth and welcomed it wherever he found it. He willingly surrendered to truth and lay down his arms in defeat at its approach. But the truth just enunciated, he added after a momentary pause, was one that would not stand up to impartial examination. The first point was that the Jewish people were not responsible for the death of Jesus; the culprits were a small group within the religious and political establishment. In the time of Jesus only ten percent of the Jewish people lived in the land of Isra
el, and no one could in good conscience hold the Jews of other lands and their descendants centuries later responsible for the decision of the Sanhedrin. Questionable trials and executions have occurred throughout all ages, the rabbi said pointedly. Few people would be left on earth if one had held whole peoples responsible for every unjust verdict in history and had persecuted and murdered the innocent for those miscarriages of justice, as Christians had done with the Jews.
The rabbi noted that unlike his opponent he had no experience with hell, so he could not express an informed opinion about its existence. Even so, he knew that the picture of a dark, cruel place that people had once found comical, even impossible, had now been described by priests so convincingly and with such imaginative detail that many had begun to believe in its existence.
“When a lie is repeated long enough, people accept it as the truth because they need to believe,” the rabbi emphasized.
He stopped for a moment to collect his thoughts. Then he said, “From the time of Jesus up to our own day the world has been filled with violence, pillaging, and lies, and Christians have shed more blood than other people have. Nor have they been such shining lights of morality among the peoples of the world. So when my honorable opponent threatens us Jews with eternal hellfire, he must be evoking a place populated principally with Christians.”
A deathly silence enveloped the plaza, as if Tibbon’s words had fallen into a world without sound. Santa María was perspiring copiously and pulling nervously at his beard, clearly shaken by the rabbi’s convincing logic. The longer that painful silence continued, the more the faces in the crowd darkened. The displeasure grew in ferocious silence and was just about to burst into violent indignation when Cruz de Medina stood up and clapped his hands to distract the people. He saw that the representative of the church had been left speechless. To stave off defeat and its consequences, he stopped the debate, commenting that the sun stood at its zenith and the heat was unbearable. He stretched his hands up toward the heavens and exhorted them all to join in a moment of silent prayer. With his eyes closed and his head tilted slightly to one side he seemed to be listening to a distant voice.
The theological debate was scheduled to resume three days later.
FOR THE FIRST TIME in his life Salman had seen enemy faces up close and experienced a terrifying hatred directed at him. He was seized with a fear of those around him and wanted to run from the plaza, but a tall dark man in stinking filthy rags blocked his way. Everything about the man was huge—his head, his shoulders, arms, hands, and feet. Next to that unkempt giant, Salman looked frail and insignificant. The man grabbed him and lifted him up. An icy voice whispered into his ear, “Tonight I’ll be coming to kill you.”
That afternoon Tibbon’s friends assembled at his house. The rabbi read a prayer of thanksgiving and bowed before the Almighty who had given him the strength to sustain that first part of the theological debate without falling prey to arrogance or vanity. He entreated the creator of the world and the human race not to permit the days of the Jews in Córdoba to be turned into nights of uncertainty. A lively discussion ensued about the possible consequences of the rabbi’s incontestable triumph.
The companions in the room agreed that there was a risk—some of them even insisted it was an imminent risk—that a raging mob would attack the Jews under cover of darkness. They urged Tibbon to barricade himself inside his house.
The rabbi refused to heed such advice. He said it was the duty of the intelligent man to resist specters born of fantasies and fear. He declared that he would lose no sleep that night over imaginary threats.
Rabbi Tibbon asked one of his friends, the silversmith Luis Abudalfía, to lodge Salman in his house for the next several days, since he himself could not guarantee the boy the care and feeding adequate to the needs of a young man.
DARK HAD HARDLY FALLEN over the Jewish quarter when several dozen masked men carrying pikes, axes, and shovels attacked Jews in the narrow streets. Innocent women and men in their path were mercilessly struck down and left bleeding.
The clandestine gang was directed by Father Dominic Martínez, a Catholic priest from Madrid whose long experience of life in the cloister not only had provided him an extensive knowledge of Catholic teachings but also had filled him with an unreasoning hatred against Jews and other unbelievers incapable of reciting the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Credo. One night the Virgin Mary had answered his silent prayers by appearing in a dazzling light in his cramped monastery cell. She had informed him that the devil had insinuated himself into the bodies of Jewish scholars so as to propagate his wicked gospel. She reminded him of hell’s eternal torments for those who fail to combat evil and cast it out. The Virgin instructed Martínez to go forth into the world to preach against the Jews, for the Last Judgment was close at hand. She promised never to abandon him as long as he remained pure in heart. That visitation provoked him to scourge himself every evening or to ask another priest to lash him with a whip of hemp fiber.
During the afternoon this same Father Martínez had assembled in his church a band of devoted Christians who were fiercely merciless brawlers. He prefaced his sermon by quoting the Holy Scripture: The Messiah had already come and would return again on the day of the Last Judgment. He eloquently incited the assembly against Jacobo Tibbon, asserting that the rabbi had deeply grieved Jesus Christ and the holy word during that morning’s debate, because he had spun a web of elaborate Jewish lies. He concluded his violent accusation of the rabbi by declaring that true Christians with their hands on the cross could never accept such infamous doings. He exhorted them to teach the Jews a lesson, offering the prospect of looting the vast riches hidden in the rabbi’s cellar.
The surging mob stormed through the streets to Tibbon’s house. The rabbi, weary with the weight of his nearly seventy years, opened the door, regarded the men with a dignified smile, greeted them simply, and invited them to enter his house for an inspiring exchange of theological views. For a moment the masked men stood there transfixed; then crude reality stepped forward, wrapped in the soiled cloak of Tomás Huerta. He was a rough-hewn character, an inveterate drinker who wound up in bloody brawls every week and indiscriminately mistreated everyone who got in his way; when he sobered up he would always rush to Father Martínez to confess and do penance. Huerta shouted that the Jew had a box of enough gold coins to fill up all their houses. That was the signal to invade the house. To their great disappointment, the masked guests found nothing in his simple dwelling but worthless household goods and piles of Hebrew manuscripts. A couple of well-aimed hammer blows to the head left the old man lifeless on the floor. Tibbon was spared the sight of men turning everything upside down, tearing the Holy Scripture to shreds, and emptying their bladders throughout the house.
To purify Córdoba of the evil spirits that were the rabbi’s familiars, they set the house on fire.
NEARLY SIX MONTHS had passed since those tragic events. Even so, Salman’s throat closed up in misery when after wandering for a week along narrow paths in the sun and the wind, in the rain and the cold, he stepped across the threshold of Gabriel Abudalfía’s house in Seville and reported the death of the rabbi. The merchant listened attentively to Salman’s account. He wanted to know everything about the deaths of his father and mother, the new sultan of Granada, the religious debate, and the atrocities committed in Córdoba. He heard how his sister-in-law Henriette had succumbed during the epidemic of typhoid fever, leaving her husband, Luís Abudalfía, alone with five children. This was why he had sent Salman to Seville. At the end of his long tale, the boy broke down in tears. Gabriel Abudalfía clapped him kindly on the shoulder and assured him he was welcome to stay in their house for as long as he wished.
Salman had brought the little wooden box with him on his hasty flight from Granada. When he broke it open a year later, the contents surprised him. He had expected to find some part of his father’s writings meant to be kept secret. Instead, within the box there lay an indecipherable text and
a written history of the Espinosa family. He could see from the handwriting that neither of the documents had been composed by his father.
The family history had been noted down by someone he had never heard of but who was clearly from his own lineage: court physician Israel de Espinosa, in Lisbon, in the month of Nisan of the year 5062 according to the Jewish calendar—that is, in May 1302.
The text had no chronological order at all. Salman had the impression that Israel must have written in great haste and had no opportunity to edit it, for it seemed as if the whole history of the great family had occurred in the same era and simultaneously. It was a holy mess, hastily outlined and fragmentary, with many names, parallel and sometimes incomplete anecdotes, sudden unrelated changes of subject, and various apparently unrelated commentaries. None of this inhibited Salman. Fascinated, he read it all, skipping nothing.
He turned the pages, intent on learning more about his own origins. When he grasped the fact that he belonged to a line with an urgent mission in this world, he felt prouder than ever, and his sense of isolation dropped away. Now his life had meaning. He resolved to discover his own role and mission as part of that family line. It was clear that he would have to discover the meaning of Moses’s prophecy, so it was vital to decipher the obscure, illegible document.
In the flickering candlelight of long winter nights, as freezing winds howled around the Abudalfía home, a Salman indifferent to the world outside sought to tease out the secrets of the enciphered document. He worked his way farther into the text with every passing night, but he could not get at its hidden meaning, no matter how much attention he devoted to it. Fruitless months went by, but the boy refused to give up. His determination was unshakable, for nothing was more important to him than the goal of his search. He was convinced that his whole future depended on decoding the cipher.
The Elixir of Immortality Page 22
