Her use of his real name struck with curious effect. He felt dizzy, as if a last chance were being offered him to preserve his true existence. “I am a Christian.”
Jael came to him, her pigtails swaying in the flickering light. She was more beautiful than he had remembered, an extraordinary girl who had once kissed him, who had wanted him as her husband. Extending her hands in a gesture of complete acceptance she said, “We are not Jews seeking a synagogue. We’re men and women seeking freedom.” And she pointed to several conspirators who were still pagans worshiping Serapis.
But Mark, son of John, had chosen another path which made it impossible for him to join Jael and her husband. When he refused her invitation to participate in the revolution she ordered two Jews against whom he had fought as a boy to grab his arms. “We can’t let you run away to warn the Byzantines,” she said, and he remained their prisoner as teams fanned out across the town setting fire to many buildings. He stood with his guards as enthusiastic messengers came back with reports of initial successes.
“A skirmish by the church. We killed four soldiers.”
“Abraham was captured, but we freed him.”
Toward morning Abraham appeared, with a gash across his forehead, and later Jael joined him. “We’re driving them from the town,” she cried and then, seeing Mark, she told his guards, “Let him go now. He can do us no harm.”
Through the rubble of dawn Mark went to the room of Father Eusebius, finding it untouched and vacant. The priest had fled to refuge in an improvised Byzantine camp under the olive trees, to which Mark now reported. The Spaniard was relieved to see him and with deep emotion embraced him like a son. “When you didn’t appear to help us,” Eusebius said, “I was afraid you’d reverted to the Jews.”
“They’re not all Jews,” Mark said, “and they’re not fighting you. Only the tax collectors. I was in your room. The church, too. Nothing was touched.”
This honest report reminded the Spaniard of lost opportunities, and he placed his fingertips over his eyebrows as if he was praying, then said, “Now it’s too late. Down that road from Ptolemais the German army is already marching.”
“Can you stop them?” Mark asked.
“I could, but the Jews have asked for war,” the priest said, “and war they must have.” He returned his fingers to his eyes, saying, “It was not planned to end this way. Neither Rabbi Asher nor I wanted this,” and he sat beneath the trees as his Byzantine soldiers took steps to protect the camp; but this was unnecessary, for the rebels were occupied in looting the town.
The Germans, on their route-march east, reached Makor at one that afternoon, and before Father Eusebius could instruct them otherwise, swept into the town, battering down the improvised resistance of the Jews and launching a systematic destruction of all Jewish homes, killing any occupants who did not surrender promptly. With fearful efficiency the soldiers, trained on western battlefields and hired as mercenaries by Byzantine emperors, cleaned out one area after another until they succeeded in pushing the last of the Jewish rebels down the steep northern flank of the town, pursuing them into the deep wadis, where they killed recognizable fighters. It was in this melee, deep in the wadi, that Abraham, son of the dyer Hababli, lost his vain and reckless life. His wife Jael, who tried to defend him against four Germans, fled deeper into the brush.
Other German units attacked the area in which Rabbi Asher had his groats mill, and the white-bearded old man tried to protect his property, but it was easily set ablaze by the soldiers, who began cuffing him about. John and Mark, having been sent in the wake of the troops by Father Eusebius, witnessed the abuse that the rabbi was taking and the blood that appeared on his beard as he ricocheted from one laughing soldier to the next.
“Stop it!” the big stonecutter cried, pushing the Germans away, but by the time he rescued the rabbi the old man was in pitiful condition, so with one sweep of his arms John lifted him and sought to carry him home. But Rabbi Asher’s home had disappeared with the others, so Mark led the way to Father Eusebius’ study, where the wounded old man was laid on the floor beneath the crucifix.
“Your day is over,” John told him bluntly as he wiped away the blood. “Go back to Tverya and build your law.”
“The law will exist here, too,” the battered old man whispered, but as he reiterated his basic belief the soldiers who had been deprived of their sport began shouting, “Why should Jews who crucified our Lord be allowed a synagogue?” And a mob turned toward the rugged, low building and began tearing it apart.
Father Eusebius, hoping to preserve something of his town, tried to halt the devastation, but the Germans would not recognize his authority and proceeded to rip down the fine slabs of limestone and to tear out the windows. By the time John and Mark reached the scene the structure was doomed and the two new Christians were sickened by what was happening; they had rejected the synagogue but were appalled that strangers should defile it as a building.
“No!” John shouted as he tried to protect what he had created, but now even the townspeople had joined in the riot, and when he ran into the building he saw that a team of Syrians had ripped down a lintel and were rushing with it toward one of the pink stone pillars to see if they could smash the lovely column, and they succeeded. Like a wounded animal, a thing alive and breathing, the precious column tottered, broke in the middle and crashed in pieces. A corner of the roof, set free, began to fall, and as it collapsed the final destruction was at hand.
“You, stand back!” the rioters warned John as he tried to halt their sacrilege, while others with poles and gouges began ripping up the mosaic.
“Death to the Jews!” the men shouted, wrecking in minutes the work it had taken John years to execute. With a frantic thrust he leaped at the men destroying the mosaic, but one saw him coming and jabbed him in the stomach with a pole. The stonecutter fell backward and the rioters left him where he lay.
The destruction could not be halted, for the hatred of the imperial troops was directed against abstract ideas: not Jews but the places where they worshiped, the homes where they lived. After a few hours no Jewish buildings remained in Makor, and it was apparent that henceforth there would be no place in the town for Jews. The Germans made this decision inevitable when, after having been brought under control by Father Eusebius, they trooped solemnly to the old Syrian church for prayers, after which they dragged the local priest to the ruins of the synagogue, where they made him sprinkle holy water about the shattered stones, consecrating the wreckage as a Christian church. They then paraded formally to Father Eusebius and said, “We’ve erased a synagogue and given you a basilica,” after which they stormed down the road to Tverya, where the destruction would be even more complete.
Night fell, and the punished town tried to re-establish itself. In his quiet room Father Eusebius did what he could to revive Rabbi Asher and was relieved when the bearded old man recovered. The Germans had knocked out two of his teeth and cut him about the mouth, but he was able to walk, and after midnight he left Eusebius to assemble and console his Jews. He found only desolation: of his six sons-in-law four were dead; the groats mill was no more, and when he saw the synagogue, only its gaping walls remaining, he felt as if his own life had been destroyed.
There were no homes standing to which the Jews could go, so they gathered in small crowds, looking to their rabbi for guidance, but he was too overwhelmed by the tragedy to tell them anything. But then from the wadi his daughter Jael appeared, accompanied by two of her widowed sisters, and the three girls seemed so heroic in their quiet willingness to proceed with life on whatever terms remained, that he gained courage from them and prayed aloud: “God of Israel, again you have chastised us for our sins, but in the ruins we announce that it is You we love, it is You we serve.” When he ended his lamentations he consulted with the older men of the community, asking their advice as to where the Jews should now move.
At dawn there came a flurry of hope. Perhaps it would not be necessary to move after all
, for Father Eusebius climbed on a trestle and announced, “As head of the Christian church in Makor I apologize to you for what happened yesterday. Our local soldiers, it is true, helped punish your rebels but they did not destroy your synagogue. My men did not burn your homes. You are welcome to live among us as before, and my workmen will build you a new synagogue.”
All who sought to avoid exile were inspired by this gesture, and an excited Jew cried, “We’ll rebuild the synagogue where it stood.”
“No,” Eusebius had to say quietly. “That site was consecrated as Christian ground. We’ll shift our basilica there, but you are welcome to the land we were going to use.”
“Consecrated?” the Jew asked. He had no home but he was worried about the synagogue.
Another protested, “A bunch of drunken soldiers forced a priest to scatter holy water …”
A Byzantine soldier struck the Jew across the mouth, and Father Eusebius explained, “Once a person or a building has been consecrated …”
“It’s not a building,” the first Jew cried. “It’s a ruin.” Again the soldier slapped him as a blasphemer.
“Ruin or not,” Eusebius said, “it was consecrated. And as I warned you when John and Mark were baptized, once the water has been placed, nothing can remove it.” He was about to speak further when Rabbi Asher, in one of those penetrating visions that sometimes reveal themselves to God’s Men, realized that it had been God’s wish that this synagogue be destroyed. It had been started in the first place only because Asher had misinterpreted the vision in the olive grove, and it had been finished by a profane man who had later turned renegade. It had been too arrogant, too beautiful with graven images to be a synagogue, and God had wiped it out; for the essential religious structure of the Jewish faith would never be an ornate or garish building. It would be the law. If ten Jews assembled in a mud hut and the law was there, then God was also there; and Rabbi Asher saw that if the Germans destroyed Tverya, too, the expositors who were collecting that law would be forced to gather in Babylonia, where the Talmud could be completed. It was not his responsibility to mourn over a lost synagogue, but to get ahead with the compilation of the law. In his extremity he remembered his own parable about God and Rab Naaman: “One shred of law administered with compassion is worth a hundred towns.”
Therefore he turned his back on Father Eusebius and to the astonishment of his Jews announced, “This day we march to Babylonia.”
Some refused to follow his leadership; they would go into exile through Ptolemais, shipping to Africa and Spain. Others would try to remain in Makor, but they would not be permitted to do so; there would be no synagogue and since they did not wish to accept Christianity, they would drift down the coast to Egypt. A few did convert, but most bundled up what clothes they could borrow from their Christian neighbors and in the afternoon of that mournful day gathered at the slope where the zigzag gate had once stood. A few stopped to weep at the shattered synagogue; a few said farewell to Christians who had befriended them; but most turned their faces resolutely toward the east—to Babylonia, where Jews would still be free to follow the teachings of the Torah.
Among those who assembled to make the long march was Jael, and when Mark saw her about to leave forever he went to her, and in view of all, said, “Jael, don’t go. Stay here with me.”
With contempt she looked at the renegade and drew away from him as if he were contaminated. He repeated his pleas, while Jewish women in small groups moved back so as to avoid contact with him. “Jael, on your wedding day you came to me,” he said. Like a child he pointed toward the ruins of the groats mill, as if to remind her of the exact location of her visit.
She scorned him, turning away with loathing, and her widowed sisters formed a circle about her, as if to provide protection although she needed none. For the third time he appealed to her, and now she spoke: “I would not touch you with my foot. When we needed your help you whined, ‘I am a Christian,’ and you allowed real men to face death alone.” She made a horrible rasping sound in her throat, an animal utterance of complete rejection. The Jews began to spit at him, old women with no teeth and young children with no fathers. With her slender hands, which had once caressed him, leaving their fingerprints on his heart, she bade him leave and he did so, with the jeers of his people echoing in his brain.
He went to the bare white room of Father Eusebius, where for some hours he prayed before the crucifix, a tortured man who had not been allowed to be a Jew and who was not accepted as a Christian; and at the end of his vigil he understood that it was his destiny to seek out the solitary ones who served God in the deserts of Syria.
At the edge of the town he had loved so much Rabbi Asher ha-Garsi mounted his white mule and led his Jews into exile. On the first night the rabble slept by the roadside, on the second in Sephet, and on the following morning the old rabbi did a remarkable thing: during all the time that the ruins of Tverya were visible from the road leading out of Sephet he refused to look at them. Hababli the dyer walked beside the white mule and said, “I can see no houses in Tverya, Rabbi,” but the old man stared ahead. If the lovely city was in ruins, he would not honor the destruction by looking, and by mid-afternoon the lake and the glory were gone, and he had not said farewell; but in the evening, when the exiles were lost in low valleys from which Tverya could no longer be seen, the old man went apart from the others and turned his face toward where the city of the Herods had once stood—that glorious site by the hot baths and the lake, where the expositors had argued under a grape arbor—and he knelt in prayer, directing his thoughts neither to God nor to his memory of Tverya, but rather to that cave which lay in the hills above the town: Rabbi Akiba, in the years ahead let me have the courage you had. In Babylonia let me have the insight into God’s love that you had. And in the morning the little old man led his Jews out of Palestine and into the long Diaspora that would extend itself through nearly sixteen hundred years.
Thus Makor, for the fourth time in its history, was for the moment stripped of Jews. Sennacherib had destroyed them. Nebuchadrezzar had led them into captivity and Vespasian into slavery, but each time stragglers had returned to rebuild petty settlements. Now the Byzantine expulsion threatened permanent results, for it had involved religious motivations, and these were apt to be longer-lasting.
When the final Jew was gone, when Mark had disappeared into the Syrian desert from which he would emerge years later a theologian of great power, John the stonecutter took charge of leveling the synagogue to make way for the church, and with each rock he shifted, an ache moved in his heart. The little animals he had carved with such love had been smashed by the rioters; the decorated lintels were knocked down; the marching swastikas were gone; the pillars were upended; and his poetic floor had been gouged out. The only sensible thing to do was to erase all memory of the place, setting aside such stones and pillars as might be used again. Accordingly, the hulking stonecutter directed his workmen to salvage the unbroken pillars and to make bands of iron to restore those that had been fractured. He organized teams of women to gather in baskets the mosaic cubes and to clean them for reuse, but when the new basilica was completed, usurping the site of the synagogue, and when the time came for designing the mosaic floor, John found that even though he had at his disposal the same colored stones as before, he was unable to re-create those joyous memories of his youth.
LEVEL
VI
A Day in the Life of a Desert Rider
Ornamental work carved in white limestone to decorate the Chapel of Omar set aside for Muslim worshipers in the Basilica of St. Mary Magdalene at Makor. Installed October 18, 644 C.E. (A.H. 22). Defaced with a panel of crosses by Crusaders from Germany, May 24, 1099 C.E. Deposited on the afternoon of March 26, 1291, during the siege of the town.
Jews had been living in Makor for two thousand, eight hundred and thirty-seven years before the first Arabs settled there, but the soldier who brought the Muslims to this town was a singular person and his arrival was an aff
air of moment.
In the city of Tabariyyah, on the cold rainy morning of November 22, 635, two different squadrons of Arab raiders saddled their camels in the pre-dawn light that sifted down upon a crowded caravanserai standing beside the lake. They were about to participate in a meaningful experiment whose results would go far to determine the nature of Islam in Palestine and Africa. The men of the first squadron, reflecting from their white robes the lights of a campfire, were agitated and noisy, moving this way and that with curved swords gleaming as they prepared to embark upon a dangerous mission. They were led by a small, wiry Arab of marked energy, the captain Abu Zeid, whose fiery commands, whispered like the utterances of a serpent, bespoke the violence with which he had led his desert troops in their conquest of rich Byzantine cities. As he strode among his men, testing their saddles and their swords, his face was sometimes illumined by red flames from the fire and he seemed an avenging demon hovering at the edge of Tabariyyah, ready to strike with great fury. Finally he could control his impatience no longer, and without awaiting official orders from the silent headquarters building, sprang into the saddle of his gray mare, kicked her flanks vigorously and led his troops through the gates and into the darkness, crying, “To Safat! Allah will lead us!” Stragglers lounging by the camp cheered as the troops rode forth, while warriors who watched them go said with practiced judgment, “By nightfall Safat will be Arab.” There might be no residents surviving in the city, and houses might be roofless, but they would be Arab.
When that first violent squadron was gone another became gradually visible in the dark shadows encompassing the caravanserai: these men were not mounted, nor were they nervous. They moved with quiet determination among their camels, tying down burdens and tightening saddle straps as if they were about to depart on a trading expedition where all things were known except the price of cloth. They were Arabs, all of them, and like the first group had proved themselves in the capture of Damascus and the occupation of Tabariyyah. They constituted one of the finest segments of the Arab army, and whereas the riotous troops of Abu Zeid had been thrown against Safat to kill and burn, this second contingent had been held in reserve for the more significant part of the test.
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