Джеймс Миченер - The Source

The priest and the Jew regarded each other in silence, then Menahem added, “He’s working inside,” and he led the tall Spaniard back into the synagogue, where in a corner Yohanan was mending a clay pipe. “This is my father,” Menahem said.

“Did you make the floor?” Eusebius asked.

“Yes.”

“You learn in Constantinople?” Demetrius inquired.

“Antioch,” Yohanan replied, and for the first time since he had begun working on this floor he experienced the satisfaction of watching experts who understood what he had accomplished accept his design as a work of art.

“Exquisite,” Father Eusebius said with controlled enthusiasm, and he could visualize such a pavement gracing his basilica, so on the spur of the moment he turned to Yohanan, saying, “Your work here seems done. In our basilica we have need for your skills.”

“That glass costs money,” Yohanan warned.

From a bag carried by an assistant Father Eusebius handed him more gold coins than he had ever seen before. “Buy the glass … now. We shall need a floor three times this big.” He turned to consult his experts, and they referred to their forthcoming basilica in such specific terms that Yohanan realized that in their minds it already existed. “Could we fit a floor this size into the space before the altar?” Eusebius asked, and his architect replied, “If we moved two of the pillars …”

“The pillars we won’t touch,” the Spaniard said abruptly, “but between them … Wouldn’t there be room?”

“Ample,” the architect agreed, but Demetrius pointed out, “In that case we couldn’t use a square design like here.” With his hands he indicated the dimensions available, and Eusebius nodded.

The Spaniard turned to Yohanan and asked cautiously, “Could you produce just as fine a work? In these dimensions?” and he moved his hands in the air as Demetrius had done.

Yohanan thought: These determined men have come to build, and I would like to work with them. Quietly he said, “I’m a Jew.”

Father Eusebius gave the dry, ascetic laugh of a Spaniard descended from a long-established family and said, “There may be sections of our church hostile to Jews, but not here in Makor. Have no worry. This one,” and with a slight nod he indicated his architect, “is from Moldavia and still worships trees. There’s a Persian who prays to fire. Our German troops are followers of Arius, who hold that the substance of God …” He stopped, reflecting that Yohanan did not require to know these matters, but as a man secure in his own strength he added gravely, “As a Jew both you and your skill will be welcome.” And he took Yohanan by the arm, leading him persuasively from the synagogue.

The next days were exciting. Father Eusebius relaxed his aloofness long enough to allow the local Syrian priest to identify the traditional spot where Queen Helena had knelt and this determined the altar area of the new basilica. Yohanan then watched as the Christians stepped back and forth across the area north of the synagogue, seeking the best position for their building, and since these were the days before the church insisted upon altars oriented to the east, many different locations were tested, but in the end Eusebius summoned Yohanan and asked him what he thought of a solution that would place the basilica at an angle to the synagogue, reaching toward the northeast. “Is the earth strong there?” the architect inquired.

“Of course, but you’ll have to tear down …” And Yohanan called off from memory the names of men occupying the houses of that area: “Shmuel the baker, Ezra, Hababli the dyer, his son Abraham … thirty houses!”

Eusebius nodded. “In the years ahead many will use this church. Pilgrims from lands you’ve never heard of.”

“But thirty homes!”

“What would you prefer?” the Spaniard asked, endeavoring to be conciliatory yet determined to be firm. “That we knock down your synagogue?”

When Yohanan realized what was involved he sent Menahem to Tverya, advising Rabbi Asher that he had better return to Makor at once, as decisions were being made which would alter radically the future of his town; and when the young man reached Tverya he found his rabbi and spelled out for him what was happening: “Thirty houses will be torn down. Most of them Jewish. Shmuel’s, Ezra’s, your son-in-law’s …” He ticked off the families who had been named for eviction. Rabbi Asher sat with his hands folded beneath his white beard and listened patiently, then said to his surprised foreman, “The discussions here in Tverya will not recess for three days, and for me to leave before they end would be impossible. Go, return home, Menahem, and tell the families that they will have to vacate as the priest has indicated. I’m sure the Christians will find them new land and new homes.”

“But, Rabbi Asher …”

“We’ve known for a quarter of a century that it was God’s will that this church be built,” the old man said, “and we should all have been prepared for this day. I was.” And feeling no panic he returned to the grape arbor, where the great expositors were tackling the question of the remarriage of a widow, a concern that could occupy them for several years.

But when the groats maker informed the other rabbis of what was happening in Makor they broke their legal discussion to inspect briefly the problem which had been encroaching upon them for some years. The rabbi from Sephet spoke for the majority: “I see no need for alarm. This so-called Christian church of Constantinople is merely Judaism in another guise. We’ve seen many such deviations in the past, and most have vanished.”

But the old Babylonian rabbi understood what was happening, for from his two rivers he had followed the impact of Christianity on the ancient religions of Persia and he appreciated the engulfing vitality of this new movement. “It is not as you say,” he warned. “Jews have one God, Christians have three, and their church is not a deviation but a new religion. Furthermore, in the past no major emperor embraced any of the earlier deviations, but Constantine did, and there’s the practical difference.”

“Have they such force, these Christians?”

“I saw their armies. They fight with a spiritual fire.”

The rabbi from Kefar Nahum said, “The only thing that disturbs me is the fanaticism of the pilgrims arriving in our town. Before Queen Helena’s visit we saw a few wanderers each year, but she stirred things up. Now hundreds come and ask, ‘Isn’t this Capernaum where the Jews rebuked Jesus?’ And they spit at the synagogue.”

“It isn’t the pilgrims that concern me,” the rabbi from Sephet reported. “It’s the tax collectors. They’ve been forced to become Christians. And feel it their duty to annoy us.”

The young rabbi from the white synagogue at Biri said he felt sure that the relations between Judaism and the new religion would stabilize satisfactorily. “As Rabbi Hananiah has just said, they are really Jews. They accept our holy Torah. They accept our God. We should regard them as any other minor sect …”

“No sect is minor,” the old scholar from Babylonia repeated, “if it enrolls the emperor.”

“We have outlived many emperors,” the Biri rabbi said.

The discussions now turned to a series of troublesome incidents which had begun to disturb the Galilee, and when the rabbis finished exchanging information it was found that in all towns except Makor there had been disturbances in which young Jews had resisted the Byzantine tax collectors, whose demands had become indeed excessive. In Kefar Nahum resistance had been so vigorous that Byzantine soldiers were required to put down the protests, but open fighting had not developed. When viewed together, as part of an emerging pattern, the brawling was ominous.