Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Were there stables for the horses?” a boy asked.

“Not in the temple itself,” Leah explained, “but along the edges of the fields nearby there were many stables filled with swift horses, and boys and girls like you used to mount the horses and ride swiftly … Oh, you rode so swiftly over the meadows and down the roads and when you came to a brook you would lean forward like this and spur your horse and … Oh!” Leah threw her hands in the air. “You and the horse flew over the brook and you landed safely on the other side and you rode on and on in the free air and after a long while you stopped and turned your horses around—and what do you suppose you saw?”

“The temple?” a boy asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Rabbi Eliezer sat on a chair in the corner and buried his face. Leah, seeing him, thought that he might be weeping and she asked the children to go out and play, but Christian horses had been led into the narrow street to cart away the remnants of the synagogue, so she hid the noisy children in another home, that they might not witness the desecration, and then rejoined her husband.

He was not weeping. Rabbi Eliezer was not the kind of man to weep, but he did sometimes feel upon his shoulders a force greater than he could struggle with, and now he felt it, and seeing him thus his wife burst into tears. “Our lovely, lovely synagogue,” she cried. It had been a travesty of a place of worship, an obscene hovel, really, but it had been too large for the Gentiles to tolerate, and now it was gone. “O God of Israel, what did we do wrong?” she wept.

Coldly, because he did not dare set loose his thoughts, the rabbi said, “On Shabbat they are repeating the obscenity of kissing the Sow’s rump.”

“You?” she asked in an ashen voice.

“Yes.”

“No!” she screamed, and flung herself on the floor, clutching at his knees. “No! No!”

He smoothed her hair and began to laugh. “Yes, your husband. On Shabbat at noon. And you and all the Jews of Gretz will be there to watch. For me it will not be a humiliation, but for the men who have ordered it, yes.”

She looked up at her husband and he was strangely composed. She rose from the floor and sat beside him, asking, “What shall we do about the synagogue?”

“We will make this room our synagogue,” he explained, and he sent her into the street to ask the Jews to join him in prayer; and when the men were jammed in he recited from memory one of the great passages of the Torah, for in the community there was no longer a copy: “This is the promise of Moses our Teacher: ‘If from thence thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul. When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon thee, even in the latter days, if thou turn to the Lord thy God and shalt be obedient unto his voice; (For the Lord thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them.’”

On Shabbat, when they should have been in synagogue, the Jews in their tall red hats, long cloaks and yellow circles were marched through the iron gate of the Judenstrasse and up to the front of the cathedral, where they faced two of the most artistic stone statues in Europe, the “Triumph of Church over Synagogue.” To the left of the entrance stood the Church Triumphant, a graceful woman of exquisite features standing at rest and bearing in her right hand a stave adorned by banners, and in her left a cross topped by a crown of thorns. The excellence of the carving was demonstrated in her face, but the spirit of the Church as it showed in her eyes and firm chin was not peaceful, but condemnatory; not marked by conciliatory grace, but harsh and unforgiving.

The coldness of the statue was understandable, for it looked across the great entrance of the cathedral to a similar statue representing the Synagogue Defeated, and this woman was not beautiful. Her eyes were blindfolded and her mournful, humiliated head was bowed. In her right arm she carried a broken spear with no triumphal banners, and in her left a most curious object. It was the two-part stone tablet of Moses on which God had given him the law, but in this case the stones were broken, and the entire figure of the synagogue was one of desolation. Rabbi Eliezer, as always, studied only the broken tablets of Moses and wondered: What theology could construct a theory that a new Church could be built upon the destruction of all which had made that Church morally strong? Do they think they rescind the law of Moses by shattering his tablets?

His tormentors that day had little thought for the law of Moses, nor for anything else except the hearty horseplay of the Middle Ages, preserved in Germany long after it had vanished elsewhere; for after a perfunctory sermon which reminded the Jews of the merciful quality of the Church, they were herded to the northern side of the cathedral, where a robust statue more famous than either that of the Church or of the Synagogue at the entrance had been set into the wall. It was the notorious Sow of Gretz, and now as the populace saw the Jews herded before it, shouts of joy and festivity filled the old city.

The Sow of Gretz was a huge recumbent stone pig of evil visage lying on her side with some two dozen teats exposed. At half the stations little stone devils with amusing tails and saucy horns fed, while at the remaining teats Jews in disgraceful caricature feasted, the intended concept being that from the poisonous sow of Judaism all Jews sucked in contamination from the day of birth. If the carving had ended there it could have been accepted as rather vigorous religious homily, suited to the rougher tastes of an earlier day; but on the right-hand side of the statue the argument became more vicious. Here a devil lifted the tail of the sow to show to a Jewish rabbi the origin of the Talmud, for from the anus of the beast could be seen projecting the edge of the Jewish book, while the bowels ejected a heavy stream of defecation which struck the stone rabbi in the face. Throughout the centuries it had become customary for the Christian children of Gretz to paint the lines of defecation yellow and to continue the coloring across the face of the rabbi.

“For his arrogance the rabbi will now kiss the hind end of the Sow,” an official announced, and Eliezer was led to the rear of the statue and forced to bow down. But as he did so his revulsion was so great that he jerked backward and his tall hat fell off, and there was a scream of protest from the populace. “Hat, hat!” they shouted, and he was directed to replace it, but as he returned to the Sow the hat again fell off, so an official produced a string with which he tied the hat to Eliezer’s ears. The crowd cheered.

Now the rabbi prepared to kiss the Sow’s rump, and as he bent down he found that pranksters had smeared the statue with real excrement, and those in the crowd who knew what had been done giggled with knowing delight; but he kissed the Sow and then instinctively wiped his lips. The crowd protested, and officials decreed that he must perform his obeisance again without wiping his lips, and he complied.

That night he assembled in his home-synagogue some of the leaders of the Jewish community and read them a letter which had circulated secretly in Germany for some years. It had been written by a Jew from Gretz who had escaped the Judenstrasse and made his way to Turkey:In the realm of the Grand Turk even the poorest Jew can live like a human being. Constantinople lacks nothing, and is one of the finest cities in the world. I dress as I please and wear no special mark. My children do the same and are not beaten on the streets. We have built a fine synagogue, and one of our men is counselor to the sultan. Any man who can work is welcomed by the Turk.