The Source

by James A. Michener

  As for the worldly government of Safed, twenty-three thousand Jews, thirty thousand Arabs and I don’t know how many Christians are ruled by Turkish pashas sent down from Constantinople. The Turks collect taxes, set rules for the wool trade and provide soldiers now and then if bandits, called bedawi, move too close in their raids. The day-to-day life of Jews rests in the hands of their rabbis, while the Arabs are governed by their qadis, or judges, and the Christians by their priests. Since the arrival of Rabbi Zaki and Rabbi Eliezer there has been no death sentence and little divorce. I heard of some adultery but of not a single pauper who failed to receive charity. If the rabbis find time they teach the children to read, but here I do not find those systematic schools which were a credit to the Jews of Germany. Nor have I heard of any offenses against the civic peace. I was pleased to see that businessmen are not allowed extravagant profits, for during my visit Rabbi Zaki publicly rebuked Rabbi Yom Tov for not increasing the pay of his women workers when profits rose, and by public demand the wage was raised. I would that all Jews lived as just lives as I lived in Safed.

  Curiously, now that I am removed from the city I recall only one sound as my lasting memory of that hillside paradise. It is the call of the muezzin from the Arab minarets which surround the Jewish quarters, and as I hear it echo I remember how easily Jew and Arab existed in this city and wonder at the bitterness with which the Portuguese insisted that they could not live with Jews, and at the ugliness in German towns, and especially at the hatred which Spaniards in Amsterdam feel toward their Jews. One man told me, “Arab and Jew share Safed in peace only because each is ruled with equal harshness by the Turk. If Arabs ruled they’d abuse the Jews, and if Jews ruled they’d be intolerable.” I hope the rabbis of Amsterdam will advise me on this matter.

  Because our Jews in Europe are forced to lead far from perfect lives, I must not leave the impression that Safed is a paradise. If we must depend upon the purity of this city to lure the Messiah back to earth we may have to wait a long time. The men of Safed like women and they like wine. The latter they import in large tuns from Damascus, and the former they arrange for in a most ingenious and satisfactory way. Along the line where the two communities meet, the Arabs keep a house where Jewish men pay to visit girls brought down from Damascus, while the Jews maintain a house in which Arabs come to visit Jewish girls from Akka and Nazareth. I myself visited the Arab house one night, and it was a credit to the city. The rabbis themselves were lusty men and I was told in secret that Dr. Abulafia, much tormented at home by a shrewish wife, kept a mistress near the yeshiva where Joseph Caro taught, and I shall never forget hearing Rabbi Zaki recount with pleasure the story of great Rabbi Akiba, who, lusting for knowledge, once followed his teacher into the privy itself, “and from what he saw him do there Akiba picked up three good habits which he used ever after.” And when I asked, “What were the tricks of hygiene that Akiba learned in the privy?” Rabbi Zaki told me bluntly, and we would not do poorly if we adopted them in Amsterdam. Many of the poems we sang in the synagogues told of passionate love, and the women of Safed like fine fabrics and get them. Jewelry we could buy from the Arabs, and any man was considered miserly who did not buy his wife some, so when I left the city I gave four presents, and they were better made and cheaper than any I could have bought in Antwerp.

  Dom Miguel of Amsterdam concluded his remarks on Safed with a passage that would be quoted often in later centuries as a kind of ideal toward which Jews might aspire:

  I have traveled across the hills to Peqiin, and am seated in the cave where Simeon ben Yohai wrote the Zohar while hiding from the Roman soldiers, and I think I now understand Safed. If in the future men tell you that we Jews were intended to be homeless, without a land of our own, or that we cannot govern ourselves or live side by side in peace with others, send such liars to Safed, for there you will see Jew and Arab living in peace. You will see Dr. Abulafia ha-Sephard existing easily with Rabbi Eliezer bar Zadok ha-Ashkenaz, and you will see a hillside living happily under the law of Moses, and getting rich while doing so. But most of all you will see a fat little rabbi from Italy puffing up and down the steep alleys, bringing love to all men. In Jerusalem they told me, “In Safed you will find the capital of Judaism.” I did not, for to me Jerusalem will always be the capital, but I did find Rabbi Zaki, and he is the heart of Judaism.

  In only one respect did Dom Miguel fall into serious error regarding Safed: though the years were golden, the city was far from finding the secret to permanent civic harmony, for in early 1551 a severe contention broke out, and between the very rabbis whose harmony Dom Miguel had praised. Before long it involved the entire Jewish community and could in time have destroyed it had not prudent steps been taken to heal the breach. It began when a Jewish woman from Damascus wanted a divorce from a man who had lived briefly in Safed and whose family antecedents were uncertain. Rabbi Abulafia, still tormented by his own sin and unhappy in his marriage with Sarah—who grew more like her mother as the years passed—was inclined to aid others who had fallen into domestic trouble. So even though the legal position of the claimant was unclear, he granted the divorce. Rabbi Eliezer, who was not involved in this case, noted with some apprehension that this was the fourth time that Dr. Abulafia had ignored a strict interpretation of the Mosaic law, and Eliezer felt that the spiritual foundations of Judaism were under attack. Accordingly, he retired to the library which the Jews of Constantinople still maintained for him with their contributions and composed a harsh letter, filled with legal citation and the kind of blunt Germanic sentences he used in his codification of the law. The essential paragraphs read:

  Does Rabbi Abulafia think that he can issue such faulty divorces without censure? Does he plan to issue others in the future? If he does, we cannot see how the rabbis of Safed can any longer place credence in his decision in these or other areas. Surely a man who cannot understand the simple law of divorce can hardly be trusted to judge graver problems. By his arrogant and intemperate decisions Rabbi Abulafia raises in all minds three serious questions: “Does he know the law? Does he respect it? Will he in future observe it?”

  These are matters which go far beyond Safed. We who have been allowed by God to see the sad state of Judaism throughout the world, know that Jews are in peril and can be saved only if they live according to the law. Any rabbi like Dr. Abulafia who abuses that law helps to destroy Judaism. In circulating this necessary but unpleasant letter we are not concerned with his faulty decision in the Damascus case. That was an error which can be forgiven. But we are concerned with the majesty of law as it operates to save Judaism. And we say to Dr. Abulafia, “If your arbitrary decision in this case becomes a precedent, the basis for Jewish family life will be destroyed.” We know he cannot intend this, so in charity we must conclude, Dr. Abulafia does not know the law. Surely he does not wish to lead the Jews of Safed into those twilight areas where each man is his own judge, where all are free to write the law according to their own desires, and where the hard, clear light of Torah and Talmud is obscured.

  The letter, when it reached the alleys and synagogues, occasioned a fury of comment. It was the kind of document intended to make men take sides, and it succeeded. Rabbi Abulafia’s students were outraged and started drafting an answer which would show Rabbi Eliezer to be an idiot, but the doctor refused to be distracted by personal invective and halted his associates. He better than they understood the heart of Eliezer’s challenge, and he wished to place only the basic issue before the people. Therefore, in the weeks that followed Rabbi Eliezer’s distribution of the letter Abulafia worked quietly, saw his students each morning, prayed more than usual and spent his evenings discussing legal precedents with learned friends. Finally, when the tempers of his followers had cooled, he handed them a letter to circulate through the synagogues. It was a statesmanlike document, free of acrimony but filled with legal citation. Abulafia had dug out cases from six different countries supporting his decision in the Damascus divorce. He arranged his prec
edents so as to verify each procedure that Rabbi Eliezer had questioned. He showed that the practical law of divorce, as it now operated in the Jewries of Spain, Portugal, Germany, France, Egypt and Turkey, clearly supported his decision, so that any charge of arbitrariness or ignorance could not be sustained.

  Yet even as he had compiled this part of the letter, he had confessed to himself that any scholar who analyzed his precedents would become aware that step by step, from Spain to Turkey, a chain of distinguished rabbis had been moving slowly and perhaps unconsciously away from a strict interpretation of Torah and Talmud. Encouraged by liberalists like Maimonides a group of rabbis had begun to evolve a tradition of their own, and Abulafia knew that it was at this revisionist tradition, and not at Abulafia himself, that Rabbi Eliezer had been striking in his letter. But this aspect of the controversy the Spaniard chose to avoid; his clear eye was focused on still another battleground existing between the two men, and it was to this fundamental topic that he addressed himself in the final pages of his letter:

  I deny that the argument of the learned Rabbi Eliezer bar Zadok ha-Ashkenaz concerns me personally; indeed, I believe he has done Safed and Jews of the world a favor in raising the abstract points he has. Nor does the legalistic problem of adhering too much to Maimonides or too little to the Talmud involve me. Here again I believe that Rabbi Eliezer has performed a service in pointing out these divergencies. The real problem upon which we are engaged, and upon which I shall be happy to remain engaged, is this:

  Can Judaism prevail if it is tied to a narrow interpretation of the law as conceived and administered by a body of older rabbis? Must we not in the years ahead revitalize our religion by infusing it with the day-to-day revelations experienced by common men? I believe in strict observance of the law, as I have shown in the preceding citations, and I would be shamed in my own eyes if I felt that I had strayed from one iota of that law as it has evolved in the lives of real men and great rabbis. I render no decision before I know what is being done in Paris, Frankfurt and Alexandria, for I am a servant of the law as it develops in the lives of men. But I also believe that Judaism, to prevail, must avoid becoming the preserve of a few men who, by their legalistic approach, stamp out the ordinary joy of life and its mystical appreciations.

  With this courtly letter the battle was joined. It never became a personal brawl between Eliezer and Abulafia; the other rabbis and the good sense of the two participants prevented that. But it did become a fundamental confrontation between the two dynamic forces of Judaism in that age: Ashkenazi legality versus Sephardi mysticism; or, to put it another way, the conservative force of the rabbi versus the expanding social vision of the community; or, the great restraining tendency of Talmud versus the explosive liberation of Zohar. On these grounds the battle was fought.

  The men around Dr. Abulafia—and they were the most persuasive in Safed—had a clear vision of what might happen to world Judaism if the rabbis prevailed. “It will become,” one of them predicted, “a religion much like the yolk of an egg. The meat will all be there, clean and pure at the center, but it will be protected from common understanding by the crystallized white of the egg, legalism, and by the impenetrable shell, rabbinical force. All that can save us is the lifting of this vital yolk clean out of the shell and the sharing of it with average men.”

  Abulafia himself did not reason in this manner. He said, “The mysteries of the Zohar are no more understandable by the common man than is the law of the Talmud. We shall always need rabbis, in the future more than in the past. But the exhilarating beauty that is found in the Zohar must be left free to illuminate the souls of all men, and if laws prevent this, then laws must be modified.”

  Rabbi Eliezer, alone in his study, cut off from the popular rabbis by his austere nature and from the masses by his lack of a synagogue, talked mostly with his eighteen-year-old daughter Elisheba, who had her mother’s intelligence as well as her beauty. To the girl he said, “It isn’t a matter of Abulafia or me. Nor of law and mysticism. He is very right in his refusal to argue on either of those levels, but his experience has been only with Spain, where Jews lived wherever they wished and where persecution, when it did come, came to each man of himself. On the other hand, I know what happens in lands like Germany, where Jews are driven into narrow streets. And, Elisheba, most of the Jews in the world are going to live that way from now on. What can it mean to such people, freedom? We’re not concerned with the personal happiness of Uncle Gottes Mann, the honest businessman, may God preserve him wherever he is. We’re concerned with how four thousand Jews, living on top of one another, can exist. And they can exist and preserve their religion only through the most careful observance of the law.” One night he shouted in anguish, “They keep talking about Safed! I’m talking about the world. Without the law, what will bind the Jews together?”

  As the argument grew keener, the rift down the middle of the community widened. The camel caravans kept hauling finished cloth to Akka and continued to bring raw wool back, so that everyone was making money, but Rabbi Zaki was worried. In his simple, clumsy way he saw more clearly than either of the main protagonists that this rupture must be healed, but neither man would make a conciliatory gesture. So he went at last and humbled himself before Rabbi Eliezer, but when the interview began he was distracted by the arrival of Elisheba, her hair drawn straight against her ears and tied at the back in a long pigtail; and like the fool his wife had claimed he was he forgot the main purpose of the meeting and said, “Rabbi Eliezer, you should be finding your daughter a husband.”

  The rebuke was so honest, and so unexpected, that the austere German Jew began laughing. “You’re right,” he chuckled. “I’ve been diverted to less important things.”

  “We all have been,” Zaki agreed. “The whole town’s been talking about Talmud and Zohar, Maimonides and Abulafia. Don’t you honestly think we ought to get back to work, all of us?”

  “Do you understand what the argument’s about?” Eliezer asked.

  “I try to. Dr. Abulafia is worried about the present. You’re worried about the future.”

  Again Eliezer laughed and drew his daughter beside him. “You come awfully close to the truth,” he confessed. Then he grew grave. “But I can foresee a day not far off when the Jews of the world, distraught and each with his own vision of God, will hear some crazy man shouting, ‘I am your Messiah! I have come to save you!’ And unless at that moment the God-struck Jew is standing firmly on the law and protected by it, he is going to dance in the air and cry, ‘The Messiah is at the gates and I am saved from the Judenstrasse.’ ”

  “From what?” Zaki asked, and the German drew back as if the man he was talking to had not his alphabet, knew not the basic words he was speaking.

  Then he said, “We Jews can be stupid people, Zaki. Only the law keeps us strong. We are a people of the Book and the day will come when only the Book will preserve us from ourselves.”

  “I believe you, Rabbi Eliezer, and now can we have peace?”

  “Yes. I have made my statement and I will keep silent.”

  “I’ll go see my son-in-law,” Zaki said, and when he had left, Eliezer said to his daughter, “There goes a saintly rabbi. To Rabbi Zaki, Dr. Abulafia is not a man who has torn Safed apart and endangered Judaism. He is his son-in-law.”

  At the home of the Kabbalist, Zaki was assured by Sarah that she “had told the rabbi a hundred times to stop writing letters.” Dr. Abulafia laughed uneasily, whereupon Rabbi Zaki suggested, “I think it’s time you leave the coolness of your library and come down the hill to my shoemaker shop.”

  “Perhaps so,” Abulafia said, and he reached for his prayer shawl. As he left the house Sarah yelled at him, “And listen to what my father has to say,” and Rabbi Zaki thought: Now I’m a prophet!

  He sent a boy to fetch Rabbi Eliezer, who came down the hill, and the three men sat in the shoemaker’s shop and discussed the altercation. Rabbi Zaki said, “I think we have all stated our positions clearly.”


  Eliezer corrected him: “You haven’t said anything, Rabbi Zaki. What is your position?”

  “That there are six hundred thousand faces to the Torah and that two of my dearest friends on earth, Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Abulafia, have each seen one of the faces and from it gained great illumination.”

  “We have been arguing about fundamental differences,” Abulafia protested.

  “Is there anything more fundamental than the Torah?” Zaki asked.

  “No,” Eliezer replied. “I shall write no more letters.”

  “Nor I,” Abulafia promised.

  Rabbi Zaki asked Rachel to bring some wine, and said, “You have each wondered if I understood the argument. I do. Abulafia is fighting for the right of the individual Jew to approach the Torah on his own level and to find joy therein, and to this I agree. Eliezer is fighting for the right of Jews as a group to exist, and of this I approve. The job of a poor rabbi like me is to see that each of these desirable goals has a chance of succeeding. But the word ‘Judenstrasse’ I do not understand, and I wish someone would explain it.”