The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  BALTHASAR VON UHRS stood in the cathedral clutching his gleaming miter and attempted to light a candle. His heavy breath made the weak flame flicker as he vowed not to rest until the day that Benjamin Spinoza lay stretched out in his own excrement and all his protectors dropped dead in horror.

  “God’s justice will make their corpses a feast for rodents and a banquet for worms,” he whispered, and kissed the crucifix that hung from his neck.

  Then he assiduously pulled all possible strings to make the Holy Father in the Vatican aware of the unrepentant Jewish philosopher. Von Uhrs addressed a letter to the Roman curia and provided a number of examples of Benjamin’s heretical declarations, most of which the grand master had fabricated.

  POPE CLEMENT X, then on the throne of the Vatican, was a man of action. When leading prelates wanted someone to be taught a proper lesson, he would dispatch a hired assassin. After paging through von Uhrs’s documentation, the pope decided that this dangerous Jew had to be silenced.

  The archives of Clement X, now in the Vatican library gave an account of the plans to murder Benjamin, who is described as the devil incarnate in human form. They are part of the public record.

  A REPRESENTATIVE of the Holy See gave an Italian murderer his instructions. The assassin suggested poison, since Benjamin’s weakness for sweets was common knowledge. The hired killer sewed an envelope of arsenic into the cloak he always wore on his travels. He explained to the grand master that the dose in the envelope was carefully calculated. He prepared a selection of chocolate-covered pastries and gave them to a servant to deliver. Unfortunately the inattentive servant left them at the wrong house.

  That night the dean of the university died in terrible torment. His sudden death sent wild speculation through Freiburg.

  THE ITALIAN ASSASSIN was ambushed behind the inn on a moonlit night by three men brandishing knives who were after his purse. He attempted to flee but then turned and knocked one of them unconscious. He plunged a knife into the neck of the second assailant, directly into the jugular, and the man bled to death immediately. The third man ran back to the inn and called for help. A crowd overwhelmed the assassin and took him prisoner.

  No one knew his identity. They knew only that he was from Italy, which meant there was no need to show him too much consideration. They took the Italian to the torture chamber. His guilt was manifest. He was charged with murdering a citizen of Freiburg. Everyone knew he was going to be broken on the rack and the wheel and killed.

  They stretched the naked Italian on the floor and bound him to four pillars. The chief official at the hearing knelt next to him and demanded his name. The prisoner refused to answer. In response the torturer leaned over and branded his chest with a red-hot rod. The Italian’s scream must have been heard for blocks.

  The official again asked for his name and again received not a word in reply. The torturer returned, this time with two glowing tongs. Desperate fear was evident in the eyes of the Italian. The branding irons were applied once more and held in place until his flesh turned black. The stink of burned flesh filled the torture chamber, and the prisoner appeared to have lost consciousness. The torturer’s assistant dumped a pail of water over the Italian and brought him back to consciousness.

  The torturer made preparations to brand the man again. The Italian was seized with fear when he saw the glowing irons again approaching his chest. He tried to save his life by confessing. He told them he was a hired assassin with many men’s lives on his conscience, but he murdered only when commanded to do so, never for the pleasure of it. He volunteered that he had poisoned the dean by mistake. He said he had been planning to murder Benjamin Spinoza with a dagger.

  The official asked who had sent him to Freiburg. The Italian answered that he was a mere instrument of fate, not subject to judgment by God or by men. The torturer again hefted his iron. The response was a weak whisper: “Balthasar von Uhrs.”

  The official gestured to the executioner, who took out a heavy wheel and rolled it several times across the Italian’s body. The pain was so intense that the assassin thought his brain was exploding through his ears. The torturer smashed one of his shins with the wheel. The Italian’s back contorted in pain and his body twisted in a terrific arc. He did not scream; a gurgling sound came from his throat. The torturer broke his other leg and then his arms, one by one. Finally the wheel slammed down upon his neck. The torture chamber became absolutely silent.

  The presiding official turned his face away. It was obvious that he was not used to such entertainment. He began to vomit.

  THE CHIEF OF POLICE summoned Benjamin and informed him that an Italian assassin sent to kill him had been arrested and executed. Benjamin was frightened and appalled. He could not understand why anyone would want to murder him.

  A terrific thunderstorm broke over Freiburg that night. Enormous lightning bolts lit the skies. Benjamin lay sleepless, prey to threatening apparitions. As soon as he closed his eyes, he imagined a dark-clad assassin crossing the threshold to kill him. He couldn’t get the thought of the Italian out of his mind.

  Years afterward Benjamin would describe how he wandered for the first time through the desolate dark landscape of madness that night. A mystical hazy veil oppressed his brain, disordered his thoughts, fed his suffering, and forced him into ceaseless brooding on his troubles.

  KONRAD VON HOHENWEILER was the most powerful man in Freiburg. An enlightened despot, he was no stranger to philosophy. In his youth he had drunk deeply from its springs; René Descartes had been his tutor for three years. Benjamin had won the prince elector’s good opinion with treatises on tolerance that stimulated the prince’s intellect and touched his heartstrings.

  THE PRINCE ELECTOR promised that his own bodyguard would offer protection to Benjamin.

  BUT IT WAS NO USE. Benjamin’s nerves were shattered. He hadn’t the slightest doubt that someone was plotting his death, no matter what others told him.

  He awoke every night thinking he could feel a knife thrusting into his body. If he was lying on his back, the knife was plunging into his belly or his neck. If he was curled up, the murderer was stabbing him in the back.

  Even during the day he expected to be stabbed at any moment. Without realizing it, he would often lay a hand across his throat as if trying to protect himself. Fear overpowered him the moment he stepped outside his house. As a precaution, he let his beard and mustache grow and disguised himself in hopes of escaping detection by the assassins lurking in the street.

  IN REACTION to these imagined threats, Benjamin—normally the most peaceful creature alive—would imagine striking dead the dark-clad assassin. In his inner eye he could see himself adeptly avenging himself upon the evil Italian. In one scenario he would wield an axe; in another he would use a knife. He was always careful to make sure that the blows he dealt were mortal and that the Italian was left lifeless. Over time these daydreams and fantasies grew worse. Benjamin saw himself sawing off the assassin’s head and ripping his intestines from his body. One night he saw himself pushing the dark figure off the church tower and heard the noise of the man’s skull smashing against the stone pavement. Another night during a thunderstorm he sent a lightning bolt to strike the murderer and watched the flames consume the dead body.

  Benjamin found no peace. Visions and nightmares constantly plagued him. He had to kill the Italian. The fate of the whole world depended upon it. After that, killing his assassin was not enough; the dark-garbed Italian had to be expunged, obliterated, reduced to nothingness. Even the memory of him, the knowledge that he had once existed in this world, had to be erased.

  BENJAMIN’S STUDY had two lead-framed windows, each consisting of twenty small panes looking out onto the inner courtyard. That dim little room contained only a bed, a chair, a rickety desk, and shelves filled with books.

  For twenty-nine years Benjamin had huddled here. He never left the room, not even to attend the funerals of his brother Bento and his wife, Mafalda. He was terrified the dark-clad a
ssassin would be lurking outside his door.

  Benjamin was completely isolated after Mafalda died. An eerie silence lay over his lodging. His sons never visited. A faithful old servant turned up every day at noon, pushed a plate of food through a slot in the door, and emptied the chamber pot. An unremitting unpleasant odor wafted out through the opening.

  Benjamin encountered only one living person in all those years. In the fall of 1692 a visitor was admitted to the house by the old servant, who whispered the man’s name almost inaudibly through the slot. The door, always kept barred from the inside, flew open. Benjamin had been waiting for this visitor for a very long time.

  BENJAMIN BURST into speech. He told his visitor that he hadn’t said a word to anyone for nineteen years. He had sunk for a long time in an incomprehending haze of madness. He had blindly paced back and forth in that small room. Days had given way to years and he never noticed.

  In the twelfth year something remarkable had happened. The memory of it gave him gooseflesh. A sudden darkness fell at noon, and Balthasar von Uhrs suddenly appeared in the room. The grand master had circled Benjamin seven times, apparently astonished, then stopped in his tracks. They regarded each other without a word. Benjamin had never met von Uhrs before that day. He recoiled from the strong stench emitted from the grand master’s mouth as the man told him they had been linked for ages, through many lifetimes. It all went back to a clash in Galilee at the time of Jesus. He said nothing more, except to declare that he had never regretted his campaign against Benjamin, and to assure him they would meet again in another few hundred years. Von Uhrs disappeared. With him went the Italian who had been standing outside the door.

  That night the heavens cleared and moonlight filled the room. After the fiends disappeared, the fog in Benjamin’s brain began to dissipate. He realized that night that someday a man would arrive to reveal the true path.

  “I have waited for that man for seven years,” Benjamin said, “and all that time I have tried to think of him as a friend and confidant who will console me, ease my mind, and help me to understand the meaning of my life. He will help me understand why I chose to live as I did, usually from fear, sometimes out of vanity, seldom guided by wisdom. I haven’t gone to sleep a single evening without visualizing him as my sole support, like a relative sitting all night in vigil by a sickbed, waiting for me to heal and prove worthy of him. I have sequestered myself in this room because I knew I could not escape this encounter. My whole life has been directed toward it.”

  THE VISITOR REPLIED with a smile that Benjamin was the only man alive who could understand him. Then he gave his name: Salman de Espinosa, the wandering Jew. He said that he had led death by the nose for more than three hundred and fifty years. Lengthy journeys across the four continents had taught him thirty-six languages, and his many lifetimes had endowed him with encyclopedic knowledge he now wanted to bequeath to Benjamin, his direct descendant and heir. Death had taken from him everyone he had loved, and for that reason he had been its sworn enemy. But now he and death had reconciled themselves with each other, and in less than seventy-two hours they would finally be united, because he had worked out how to reverse the elixir of immortality.

  Benjamin begged him to tell everything he knew, since time was so short.

  Salman told him the story of Baruch, the callow young man who had met Moses, heeded his command, left his father’s house, brandished a heavy sword in battle, and become personal physician to the Portuguese king; he described the medicinal potions that transformed old men into raging stallions and Baruch’s propagation of the Raimundo plant to honor the greatest love of his life.

  Salman told him of the great secret, the elixir of immortality that had been handed down from father to son—from Baruch to Simon, from Simon to Amos, from Amos to Shlomo, from Shlomo to Israel.

  Salman recounted the story of Israel, the physician who had twelve daughters before a long-awaited son came into the world; how Israel refused to speak to his eldest daughter, Leah, for almost thirty years because she had foreseen with her psychic powers that scandal would tarnish the family name; how after the death of his son he had worked out a system of encryption so he could pass the secret on to his grandson, then only two years old.

  Salman told of Chaim, the young doctor in Granada, and his moral lapse in poisoning his master, the worthy Sultan Muhammed II, in expectation of serving a wicked tyrant; and how the new sultan brutally executed him and threw his heart to the hounds for breakfast.

  Salman told of how his own father, Moishe, the Cabalist, neglected the family mission of safeguarding the great secret and instead devoted his life to investigating the secrets of the universe and interpreting apparitions in the vault of heaven; and of how he had left as his legacy a pioneering work of Jewish mysticism.

  Salman recounted his own life: how he was neither Jew nor Muslim; how he fled from Granada after his parents died; the encounter with Rabbi Tibbon and how Salman watched, helpless, as the rabbi was murdered. He explained why he had prepared and consumed the forbidden elixir that gave him immortality; he described his marriage and life in Seville, the century that he had spent in his peregrinations back and forth across Spain, the failed attempt to assassinate Grand Inquisitor Torquemada, and how he had been bound to the stake in Seville but had risen again from the flames without even a drop of sweat upon the least of the hairs of his head.

  Salman told how on the same night in 1492 that the Jews were driven out of Spain, he sailed westward with Christopher Columbus aboard the Santa María, serving as the Hebrew interpreter on the quest for a new homeland for the Jews; of the long journey across the Atlantic; of going ashore on the islands of the West Indies and of the inhabitants who spoke perfect Hebrew; of the Spaniard Hernán Cortés, who with a force of four hundred men subjugated the widespread domain of Montezuma; and of the conquistadors’ expeditions in search of Mexico’s gold, exploits of men so cruel that they made the lackeys of the Inquisition seem like innocent choirboys.

  Salman told of his own restlessness: the fact that he never lingered anywhere more than a month or two; his work as a rabbi, an artisan, a teacher, a physician, a printer of books, an artist, and a counselor to royalty; how he had climbed the snow-covered plateaus of the Andes, crossed the desert sands of the Sahara, bathed with holy men in the Ganges River, washed his clothes in the China Sea, and wooed the young wife of an elderly Russian governor in Siberia; how he had witnessed all of life’s misfortunes, sorrows, illnesses, injustices, earthquakes, and floods, as well as all its famines, plagues, and epidemics.

  Salman told Benjamin how he had trailed his own descendants at a distance from Spain to Portugal and thence to Holland. He had patiently waited for ages to find someone in the Spinoza family who could understand him and take up the burden of the heavy legacy Moses had long ago laid upon the family.

  “I do not offer you eternal life or redemption,” Salman said. “What I offer is knowledge that you must investigate, collect, keep safe, and pass along. I have taken great pleasure with all I have learned even though I have not managed to change the world, overcome stupidity and evil, or give people their due recognition and justice. I have not performed heroic deeds or saved anyone’s life. But I am not discouraged, for I know that you and those who come after you will achieve more than I. Take this, my dear man, so I can die in peace.”

  He took from his knapsack his father’s manuscripts, his own manuscript The Seventh Book of Moses, and the recipe for the elixir of immortality, just as it was written out by Israel, his grandfather’s father. He handed it all to Benjamin.

  “Beyond all doubt this is a holy day and not a dream,” Benjamin responsed. “I accept your gift and open myself to the radiance of its wisdom. May it penetrate my being and illumine every part of my body. My heart is racing and my pulse is thundering at the glorious, life-giving splendor of your gift.”

  “My son,” said Salman, “a few hours before I appeared here, I consumed seven drops of the freshly prepared elixi
r of immortality. The second dose serves as an antidote to the first. I am not entirely certain what will come to pass, but my calculations suggest that this body I have inhabited for more than three hundred and fifty years will dissolve within seventy-two hours. I can already feel the change. The skin covering my chest has become so thin that it is almost transparent. I must leave you now. We will meet again in eternity.”

  Benjamin’s eyes flooded with tears. They embraced. Then Salman left that little room and set forth on his last journey.

  BENJAMIN DEVOTED the remaining ten years of his life to writing The Elixir of Immortality. He was fully aware that only a handful of individuals would ever read it, but he spared no effort in creating an absolute masterpiece, profoundly intellectual and elegantly written.

  He dedicated the work to his four sons, even though only Aaron, the eldest, would ever read it. He wrote, “This is your own history. The future is up to you.”

  HOW DID BENJAMIN SPINOZA DIE?

  Immanuel Kant claims in his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer that Benjamin hanged himself from the branch of an apple tree. Bertrand Russell, on the other hand, says that he died after he broke a hip, and Isaiah Berlin writes in a letter to an Israeli colleague that Benjamin drowned in the North Sea. Marx and Engels maintain that he died in prison. Lenin said the same thing and added that the Inquisition had tortured him to death.

  Benjamin’s death is a subject of contention among academics.

  TWO OIL PAINTINGS portraying Benjamin have come down to us. One is titled Philosopher B. Spinoza and is signed by the mannerist painter Michael Lukas Leopold Willmann, a great admirer of Michelangelo. Commissioned by the University of Freiburg, it was finished some time in the early 1670s; the exact date is unknown. The painting was displayed in the left wing of the Faculty of Philosophy.