Джеймс Миченер - The Source

At a sign from the Dominican, prostitutes and Jews started running, and a gasp of joy rose from the crowd when one of the fat Jews fell right at the start. “Clumsy! Idiot!” they screamed, pelting him with vegetables. He stumbled to his feet and tried to overtake the others. With outrageous irrelevancy Rachel thought: Thank God it wasn’t Zaki.

Three times around the piazza the racers went, with prostitutes screaming and the six fat Jews silent. The audience, having cheered the start, was quiet now, waiting for something memorable, the Christian women watching dry-lipped as the inadequate pants flapped open and shut. Then it happened. Rabbi Zaki was in second place when one of the whores leaped forward, clutched at his pants and pulled them down about his knees. His fat legs, completely incapable of stopping, tangled themselves in the cloth and he went tumbling across the stones, skinning his knees and exposing his nakedness.

“Whoever that girl is,” the duke cried, “set her free, whether she wins or not.” The crowd, staring minutely at every motion of the fat rabbi in recovering his pants, cheered and whistled. Zaki, hurt and far behind the others, tried to withdraw, but the Dominican poked him and informed him that he, like all the others, must finish the course.

Down the Corso, Zaki went, then back toward the cathedral; but as the runners re-entered the square the same girl pulled down the pants of another of the Jews, and the race ended in an obscene scramble, with firecrackers exploding, music playing and the crowd screaming its approval. Minutes after the others had finished Rabbi Zaki waddled up to the cathedral door.

Along with the five other racers he was handed his brown robe and red dunce’s cap. Dressed thus, he was shepherded into the cathedral, where the Jews of the community were assembled on wooden benches set off from the rest of the church by rope, and while the citizens of the town and many from outlying villages—for their small locales provided no such spectacles—crammed in to stare at the Jews and surround them with hostility, the prelates of the Church assembled and took their places on a wooden platform. The duke and his escorts went to other specially erected seats and all listened as a haggard friar began a conciliatory sermon intended to show the Jews the glories of a gentle and forgiving Christianity.

“You swine, you pigs, you filth of the gutters,” he shouted at them, “you abominations, you unspeakable dogs of the outhouse, why do you persist in your contumacy? With your hooked noses you smell out the filth of the world and are content to lie in darkness and wallow in your own defecation. Your women are all whores. Your men are circumcised criminals. Your daughters are the bawds of the nation. You are the Anti-Christ and your sons shall perish in eternal hellfire. Why are you so obdurate?” For twenty minutes the friar, whose job it was to convert the Jews to a higher form of religion, hurled at them thunderbolts of scorn and poured over them the vials of his abuse. No crime was too contemptible for them to have committed, no malpractice too abominable for them to wallow in. It was a sermon that was being preached throughout the Christian world in those years and it was based upon a perverse logic, for with each fresh insult the Jews, roped together in their special area, knew that what the fiery man said was preposterous, and they concluded that if his Church were as ignorant of Judaism as he was, there was truly no sense in listening to its plea for conversion. If the Jews of Europe had had even the slightest inclination toward apostasy, their obligatory attendance at the yearly conversion sermon would have hardened their hearts against it.

Now the friar came to the second part of his plea: “You argue in the filth of your despair that God is one, whereas we know that He is three. How can you be so blind? So stupid? So contumacious? Why do you persist in holding to your Old Book when we have proved that it is faulty? Why do you refuse to accept the glorious New Book, which clearly contains the truth? God is three and all the world proclaims this fact. Can you not see that your Old Book was given you only temporarily so that the way might be prepared for the true words of the New? Why do you cling to your error? Why?”

And every Jew sitting by sufferance in the cathedral that day knew that he persisted in his error, his oftentimes fatal error, because he had been taught from the days of Abraham and Moses and Elijah that God is one, indivisible, alone and unknowable.

From the pulpit the friar now launched into the final portion of his sermon, using at last the soft voice of reason: “Come, Jews, who were once Christians, come back to the true Church while there remains a chance. Forswear your error. Surrender your blindness. Come back with singing hearts to that seamless robe where you will find peace and gentleness and love.” He paused. From inside the roped-off section faces of stone stared back. The friar, seeing the obdurate Jews and sensing their unwillingness even to listen, decided to remind them of the special condition in which they lived. “You are not ordinary Jews, men and women of Podi,” he began quietly, “you are people upon whom the baptism of Christ once rested. You are people who have gone astray, and unless you return quickly to the fold events of a terrible nature are bound to overtake you.” His voice rose to a dreadful, premonitory wail: “For if you do not return to the Church you will be dragged into the cellars to taste the rope, the fagot and the choking water. Your bodies will be broken and your hearts torn with anguish. The peace that I offer you this day will no longer be available, and you will march across the piazza not in the spirit of friendly sport as you did this day, but bearing a fiery brand which will be used to light the fires which will consume you. Fiends, idiots, sons of hell—repent now. Join the true Church now. Abjure the blasphemies of Moses and the old ways. Now, now!” He ended in a paroxysm of religious fervor, and Rabbi Zaki, who knew something of these matters, was terrified.

That night, after Rachel had belabored him again for being so fat and for having allowed the whore to tear down his pants in the race, Zaki started to speak seriously of his fear, but at this point his daughters took up the complaint and insisted that by next spring he lose his weight and not humiliate them. The sorely tried man was tempted to bang the table and cry, “We are not talking about humiliation! We are talking about our lives.” Instead, he waited for his womenfolk to complete their condemnation, which he knew they had a right to deliver—for they were wounded in spirit—and when they were done he said quietly, “The friar meant what he said. We shall be allowed a few more years. Then the burnings will begin.”

“Zaki!” his wife snapped. “Are you an idiot?”

“I am saying what I know to be true. We must leave Italy this week.”

“What do you mean, burning?” his wife heckled. “Because you are so fat that you fell down? Because the friar made his usual ugly speech? You grow suddenly afraid?”

“I am desperately afraid,” Zaki acknowledged. “That angry man meant what he said.”

“Where would we go?” Rachel demanded. “Tell me, where?”

Zaki lowered his voice, looked about the room and said, “Salonica. There is a letter from a German Jew who fled to Salonica, and he says that the Grand Turk …”

“To Salonica!” his wife repeated. She began laughing hysterically and pointing at her daughters. “Do you think I want them to marry Turks?”

Zaki waited for his wife’s contempt to die down, then said quietly, “Rachel, we are in trouble. I think we should sail for Salonica immediately.”

This was too much for Rachel. She rose from her chair, stormed about her husband’s mean shop and cried, “Has not the Pope himself assured us that we can live peaceably in Italy for as long as we wish? Are you a coward that you doubt his promise?”