S. Agnon - Two Scholars Who Were in our Town and other Novellas

Then there is a clock in the king’s palace, made of human bones, and on the hour it can be heard tolling from one end of the city to the other. Even babes still in their mother’s wombs quiver at the sound. And the city has many gardens and orchards and bathhouses and places of amusement, each more beautiful than the next — beautiful within but filthy without. Numberless dogs roam the streets; nowhere in the entire world are there so many dogs as in Stambul. And unclean birds stroll about at their ease, gorging on the filth and the carrion. There are also rats as large as geese; and these dwell even in the mansions of the princes.

Furthermore, there are many fires in Stambul, and when a fire begins in one house, the licking flames consume all the houses in the whole street, since their houses are made of wood. Sometimes these fires burn three hundred or four hundred houses together, and sometimes even more. They take no steps to stop the fire; only, the watchmen of the city stand shouting, Allah is God and Mohammed is his Prophet.

The synagogues in Stambul are many, numbering a hundred and more, with rugs and carpets woven of gold and silver thread, on which great sages recline and teach the revealed and the secret Torah. They have many books in their possession and happy is the eye that has seen them all. Why, they even have that rare and precious volume, ‘Desire of the Days,’ which is a wonder, as the well-informed know. They exercise their authority by permission of the state and do not understand our own Yiddish tongue. So when anyone wishes to talk to them, he must speak in the Holy Tongue. They are clean in thought, and cleanly in dress, and pleasant in speech, and all their deeds are done gently, and their figures are princely.

Their customs differ from our own, and they put on their tefillin while seated, in accordance with the view of the sage Rabbi Joseph Karo. Some of them indeed put on two pairs of tefillin at the same time. They have no fondness for casuistry when they study the Talmud, their great strength being rather in erudition. But the love of the Land of Israel burns in their hearts, and when they go up to the Land of Israel they take with them the carpets on which they have studied Torah and burn them on the grave of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai on the thirty-third day of the Counting of the Omer.

There are Karaites to be found in Stambul who do not believe in the words of our rabbis of blessed memory but they are versed in Scripture and are as familiar with the twenty-four books of the Bible as an ordinary Jew is with his prayers; and they have synagogues of their own. They do not wear fringes as our own Jews do, but hang them up in the synagogue and look upon them in order to fulfill the injunction, ‘that ye may look upon it’; and they do the same with the palm fronds at the Feast of Booths. They have sages of their own who produce fresh interpretations and commentaries on the Torah every day; but they have no quarrel with our own Jews, since they must have recourse to us. For inasmuch as they still observe all the biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and do not defile themselves by attending to the dead when any of their own community dies, they must hire poor rabbinist Jews to perform the last offices of burial. In former times they used to sit in the dark on the Sabbath eve and kindled no light, until the light of our teachers was revealed to them. The Land of Israel is precious to them; they mourn over its destruction and donate vessels and money to their own House of Study in Jerusalem and find all kinds of excuses in order to go up and increase their number in the Holy City.

But they are not successful, for they behaved shamefully towards the works of our master, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon of blessed memory. For it happened on one occasion that the sages of Jerusalem had to take counsel in secret on account of impending evil decrees and events. So they gathered in the synagogue of the Karaites, whose synagogue lies lower than the other houses, so that no word said within it is heard outside. When they entered they saw that one step in the staircase differed from all the others. They investigated and found underneath that step a copy of Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon’s book, ‘The Mighty Hand,’ which had been placed there by the Karaites to be trodden upon and belittled.

Now the Kabbalist Rabbi Hayyim ben Attar of Morocco, who is known as the ‘Light of Life’ after his book of that name, was present on that occasion and he cursed the Karaites, saying, May their settlement never increase and may they never be worthy to pray with a full quorum. Since then no new Karaite has ever arrived in Jerusalem without another Karaite being carried out dead. Once a great number of Karaites went up to the Land together and were all carried off by the pestilence, may the Merciful One deliver us.

Well, our comrades stayed in Stambul waiting for a ship. One day they went to the grave of Job, and another they went to the grave of the author of ‘The Ordination of the Sages,’ who died there on his way to the Land of Israel; and yet another day they went to the port to see if a ship had arrived bringing Hananiah, of whom they did not yet despair. Was it possible that this Hananiah who had wandered over half the world and had overcome so many trials could have given way to despair when his ship went off without him? Assuredly he must have possessed his soul in patience and waited for another ship.

During those days Rabbi Shmuel Yosef, the son of Rabbi Shalom Mordekhai ha-Levi, sat before the sages of Constantinople and read all those books, great and small, good and upright, which are full of the fear of Heaven and of wisdom; and he increased in reverence and wisdom of the revealed and secret Torah, in grammar and in style, in the ways of the holy language and its secrets. There has come unto our hands a letter which he wrote to the society of the comrades, the hasidim who dwell in the city of Buczacz, may it increase. It runs thus:

We hereby inform you that we have reached in peace that glorious city Kushta, which is hinted at in the mystical work, ‘The Additions to the Zohar’; and blessed be his Name, for the way before us was good. Rain did not detain us on land nor storm terrify us on sea. Indeed it were fit and proper to inscribe all our journeyings and all the good deeds done unto us on the way by our brethren, the Children of Israel, in respect to food, drink, and lodging, and in respect to good counsel and proper guidance, by our brethren in the country of the Turk no less than those in the Land of His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of Austria. However, by reason of our sorrow at heart, we are deprived of the strength to continue with this account at length, for the upright Rabbi Hananiah, who is known unto you, did vanish of a sudden on the way. We do not know what has happened to him; but pray you to give notice of this to the Rabbi, long life to him. Indeed, we are aware that Rabbi Hananiah did not leave any wife behind him. Yet it may be there is a woman who is waiting for him to marry or reject her, according to the Law. Pray inform us how goes it with the learned, pious, etc., Rabbi Abraham the circumciser, may he increase in strength, and all that has befallen him; and pray transmit our regards to all our friends and those beloved of our soul who are forever engraved on our hearts; and so on and so forth.

In the inn where the comrades lodged there was a certain Sephardic sage, who had gone forth from the Holy Land as an emissary to rouse the cities of the Exile to remember the distress of the men of Jerusalem. He was an understanding and scholarly man, a Kabbalist whose figure was kingly and whose eyes had grown dim on account of the tears he shed, mourning that every city stands firm on its foundations, but the city of God is abased to the nether Sheol.