Джеймс Миченер - The Source

It was an age of religious explosion. For centuries Christian Europe had been united into one all-embracing Church, devout, competent and far-seeing. Recently Christians had been inspired by two victories: the expulsion of Islam from Spain and the first conversions of the Aztecs; now there was reason to hope that millions in Asia and Africa would join the Church, since missionaries of great dedication were on their way to these areas. For a brief moment it was logical to believe that the known world might soon unite under the leadership of Rome. And then Martin Luther strode with rude and giant steps across the boundaries of Europe, awakening men like Calvin and Knox who would destroy old associations and establish new.

It was an age of political invention. City states gave way to national units and barons surrendered to kings who found their support in the new middle class. Secular governments displaced religious as leaders began to study Machiavelli instead of Thomas Aquinas. The barbarians from the north were finally brought under control and Europe, having expelled the Muslim Arabs from Spain, now girded to fight back the Muslim Turks as they threatened the approaches to Vienna.

It was an age of growing freedom. Men who rebelled against the confinement of Europe were now free to try America and Asia. Any who had chafed under papal rule were welcome to adopt Lutheranism, and peasants who had silently borne the tyranny of landlords were now free to attempt a revolt. Law courts were strengthened and in the realm of writing and art men could break away from medieval restriction to follow Petrarch or Michelangelo. Each year brought new horizons, for this was the age of freedom.

But not for Jews. In 1492, after more than seven hundred years of faithful service to Spain, the Jews were expelled from that state. They fled to Portugal, where they were scourged, forcibly baptized and later exiled. In Italy and Germany they were forced into inhuman quarters where they wore inhuman costumes. At almost rhythmic intervals they were charged with murdering Gentile children for blood to be used at Passover. They were accused of poisoning wells, of spreading cholera, of knowing how to infect rats with the plague to decimate Christian communities; and they were particularly accused of posing as Catholics, accepting the holy wafer of communion and hiding it slyly under their tongues until they could produce it for blasphemous black masses. In an age of growing freedom they were constantly restricted as to where they could move, what they could wear and especially what occupations they could engage in.

In this golden age of discovery the Jews discovered only the rope and the fagot. Each time a Jew was accused of having murdered a Christian child—and never once was the charge substantiated—some Jewish community would be wiped out in one ghastly slaughter. Each time a crime occurred near a Jewish quarter, that district would be stormed by indignant Christians and its inhabitants burned alive. And throughout the Christian world, come Holy Week, the friars would preach such sermons against the Jews that the enraged churchgoers would storm from their cathedrals to kill and maim any Jews they met, thus hoping to honor Him who had been crucified on Good Friday and risen in resurrection on Easter.

Why did not the Christians, since they held supreme power, simply annihilate the Jews once and for all? They were restrained because Christian theologians had deduced from passages in the New Testament the ambivalent theory that Jesus Christ would not return to earth bringing with Him the heavenly kingdom until all Jews were converted to Christianity, but at the same time 144,000 unconverted Jews were needed to be on hand to recognize Him and bear witness to His arrival. On this ambivalent theory two courses of action had been built: Jews must be converted; and those necessary few who refused must be kept in such obvious misery that all who looked could see what happened to people who denied Jesus Christ. So the Jewish districts multiplied, the harsh laws increased, and each year the Jews suffered unbelievable repressions, It was as if the Church kept them alive to remember the coming of the Messiah, the way a man keeps an aching tooth in his head to remind him of mortality.

In only two ways did Jews share in the expanding spirit of the age: they were still encouraged to serve as moneylenders, which enabled them to keep alive; and in 1520 in Venice a printer struck off a complete printed copy of the Talmud. So bitter had been the Christian hatred of this Jewish masterwork, so often had it been burned by the authorities in Italy, Spain, France and Germany, that when it was finally put into type only one manuscript copy was known to exist. It was by a miracle that this summary of Jewish knowledge was saved … and the Venetian printer who thus rescued the law of Judaism was a Christian.

But in those dark days, when the Jews of Europe sighed at the stake and smothered in their districts without any moral protest from the Christian world, one gleam of hope began to shine from a most unlikely quarter: the inconspicuous hillside town of Safed in Galilee.

I

Rabbi Zaki the Shoemaker was a fat Jew, and this was his undoing.

In the Italian seaport of Podi, where he had taken residence after his marriage in 1521, the coming of spring brought moments of anguish to Jewish men who were overweight, because starting in March they could feel the eyes of their Christian neighbors probing their rolls of fat and calculating whether Zaki was fatter than Jacopo or Jacopo slightly fatter than Salman; and each man and his family began to worry. Nevertheless, the calculations continued, and as the twenty-first of March approached, the apprehension of the fat Jews became very real indeed, and each family asked in secret, “Will our father be chosen this year?”

Rachel, Rabbi Zaki’s wife, really had no cause for uncertainty, because Zaki was so gross that he was automatically selected, year after year. It was only a question of which five additional Jews would be chosen as his teammates, so that Rachel, freed from the calculations that tormented the other wives, could spend her whole energy castigating her unfortunate husband.

“Why are you so fat?” she plagued him throughout the year. “Moses isn’t fat. Is Meir fat like you?” She had lived with Rabbi Zaki for twenty years and had come, not without cause, to the conclusion that he was a poor specimen of manhood. He did not provide well for his family. He never charged enough for his shoemaking, allowing clever Italians to outwit him. And it was obvious now that he was not going to become a famous rabbi leading his congregation to fame. He was merely a fat man who most of the year seemed pathetic, and in March positively degraded.

The Jews of Podi were a close community, for during the expulsion of 1492 they had fled in a body from Spain to Portugal and then—after the shocking mass baptism ordered by the Portuguese government—from Lisbon to Italy. In the strictest sense Rabbi Zaki, his sharp-tongued wife, Rachel, and all the Jews of Podi were Christians, for they had been forcibly baptized—some bleeding from the mouth, some screaming—in Portugal; but a series of considerate Popes had decreed that the Christian Church could not accept the fruits of such baptism and that the Jews of Podi were therefore free to revert to their original religion, which was after all an offshoot of the Holy Bible. The generous Duke of Podi had welcomed them as industrious merchants who brought much income to his territories and had even encouraged them to have their own synagogue, so that gradually the persecution of Spain and Portugal was forgotten in the kindlier atmosphere of Italy.

One of the leading merchants of Podi was Avramo the redhead, Rabbi Zaki’s father-in-law, and as the Jews of the port looked at their pathetic little rabbi they often wondered how he had been able to catch the merchant’s daughter. Rachel had hoped for a better marriage than hers had turned out to be, for, as she frequently reminded both her father and her husband, “I knew even before we were married that Zaki would amount to nothing.” But her father had argued, “I think Zaki will become a fine rabbi, and you should be honored that he takes you as his wife.”