People of the Book

by Geraldine Brooks

  “Judah Aryeh!”

  The rabbi’s head came up like a deer expecting one of the craftsmen’s arrows. But when he saw Vistorini, his wary expression eased into a smile of real pleasure.

  “Domenico Vistorini! It has been too long, Father, since I have seen you in my synagogue.”

  “Ah, Rabbi, a man can take only so many reminders of his own shortcomings. One may wish to learn from you and yet at the same time feel humiliated by your eloquence.”

  “Father, you mock me.”

  “No need for false modesty with me, Judah.” The rabbi was so famous for his silver-tongued biblical exegesis that he preached at four different synagogues on the Jewish Sabbath, and many Christians, including friars, priests, and noblemen, entered the Geto just to hear him. “The bishop of Padua, whom I brought to hear you last, agreed that he had never had the book of Job so well explicated,” Vistorini said. He did not add that he had heard the bishop preach on the same text some weeks later, in the Padua cathedral, and had thought the bishop’s sermon nothing more than flour already ground between the millstones of the rabbi’s intellect. Vistorini was sure that no few of the priests who came to listen did so in order to steal the rabbi’s words. For himself, it was not so much the content, but the polished and passionate mode of delivery that he wished to emulate. “Would that I held the congregation in my hand, as you do. I try to learn your secrets, to better deliver the word of Mother Church, but alas! they remain opaque to me.”

  “A man’s thoughts and the ability to express them come from God, and if my words find favor, may it be to his honor.” Vistorini suppressed a sneer. Could the rabbi really believe such unctuous platitudes? Aryeh noticed Vistorini’s displeased expression and changed his tone. “As to secrets, Father, I have but one: if the congregation expects a sermon of forty minutes’ length, then give them one of thirty minutes. If they expect thirty, then give them twenty. In all my years as rabbi, I have never once had a soul complain to me that a sermon was too short.”

  The priest smiled at that. “Now it is you who mock me! But walk with me a little, if you will, for I have a matter to discuss with you.”

  Judah Aryeh had straightened as he spoke to Vistorini, and now, protected by his eminent companion, he walked upright, his shoulders thrown back and his head erect. His dark hair escaped from the scarlet fabric of his cap in springy curls that were lit, like his beard, with chestnut highlights. Vistorini envied Judah’s physique, tall and well made, if somewhat spare, with an olive-gold skin unlike the pale flesh that marked so many scholars. But the impression was marred by that lurid head covering.

  “Judah, why do you wear that hat? You know it is not impossible for you to get leave to wear a black one.” The scarlet color was meant to recall the blood of Christ that the Jews had brought down upon their own heads. Yet Vistorini knew a number of Jews who had been granted exemption.

  “Father Dom, I know very well that with friends and money one may do almost everything in Venice. Money, as you well know, I have not. But friends, yes, I have several who would spare me this imposition. With a word here or there, I could, as you say, wear a black hat and pass about unmolested. But if I did so, I would not know life as the people in my congregation know it. And I do not want to be separate from them. I am vain enough to have my daughter sew my caps from velvet and line them with silk, but I will do as the law requires, for a man’s worth does not come from what he wears on his head. A red hat, a black hat: what matter? Neither one can cover up my mind.”

  “Well said. I might have known you would have your reasons as well tended as a Benedictine’s garden.”

  “But I do not think you asked me to walk with you to discuss millinery.”

  Vistorini smiled. He did not like to admit it, even to himself, but sometimes he felt closer to this witty, intelligent Jew than to any priest in his own order.

  “No, I did not. Sit a moment, if you will.” Vistorini gestured toward a low wall by the canal. “Read this,” he said, passing the book, opened at the offending passage.

  Aryeh read, swaying slightly, as if he were in synagogue. When he had finished, he gazed across the canal, avoiding his friend’s eyes. “Clearly in contravention of the Index,” he said. His tone was carefully neutral, expressing no strong emotion. Vistorini had often noted with chagrin that although Aryeh, like himself, had come to Venice from elsewhere, the Jew spoke with the inflections of a born Venetian; the soft, lilting dialect of the city, overlaid by the distinctive cadences of his own particular sestiere, the Cannaregio. The priest had tried to make his own speech sound native, but he could never completely shed the accents of his childhood.

  “It is a little more serious than that,” Vistorini said. “This kind of deliberately provocative text will bring the attention, the wrath of the Holy Office down upon the whole Geto. You would do well, my friend, to deal with this matter yourself, before we are obliged to do so. You should close down these printers.”

  Judah Aryeh turned to face the priest. “The author of this text did not write to provoke, but merely to express a truth as he conceives it. Your own theologians have tied logic in knots to advance a doctrine addressing this very same point. What is the Virgin Birth, after all, but the fumbling of minds striving to deal with the indelicate realities of the body? We Jews are merely more forthright about such matters.”

  Vistorini sucked in a deep breath and was about to protest when Aryeh raised a hand to forestall him. “I do not want to waste such a fine morning arguing theology with you. I think we learned long ago, you and I, how little profit there is in it. The merits or demerits of this particular work aside, I think you need to look realistically at where your office now stands with the state of Venice. The number of cases the Inquisitor is able to bring to trial here is falling year following year. And most of those that do come to court are quashed there for lack of evidence. I am not saying that we do not fear you, but we do not fear you as we once did. I will tell you what my people say of your office: that your poison has congealed, and that you have lost the recipe to brew more.”

  Vistorini picked at the lichen growing on the stone beside him. There was, as always, sense in what his friend asserted. The late pope, Gregory XIII, had identified the very weakness of which the rabbi spoke. “I am pope everywhere except in Venice,” he had said. But Vistorini sensed a dangerous mood with the new pope in Rome. He might not confront the doge and the Ten directly, but he could do it through the city’s Jews. Even a wounded beast can gather its strength for one last lunge of the claw.

  “Rabbi, I hope—and I say this sincerely—that you do not have cause to learn again the meaning of terror. Surely those among you who are descendants of the Spanish exile still remember the bitter conditions under which their grandparents were got hither?”

  “We have not forgotten. But there is not here. Then is not now. The Spanish Inquisition was a nightmare from which many of us still cannot awaken. And yet we Ponentinis, whose forebears experienced that great dispossession, are just one group, one set of memories. There are Hollanders, Tedeschis, Levantinis. How can we not feel secure here, when every noble family has its Jewish confidante, and when the doge does not even allow your Inquisition to force conversionist sermons upon us?”

  Vistorini sighed. “I myself counseled the Inquisitor against such sermons,” he said. “I told him it would only exasperate your people, not edify them.” The real reason: he had not wanted to expose the inferiority of his own preaching to congregations who had heard Judah Aryeh.

  The rabbi rose to his feet. “I must be about my business, Father.” He tugged at his hat, wondering whether it was safe to speak his mind. He decided that the priest had a right to know his reasoning. “You know that your church has always taken a view on these matters very different from ours, from the day that the first printing press was assembled. Your church did not want your holy scriptures in the hands of ordinary people. We felt differently. To us, printing was an avodat ha kodesh, a holy work. Some rabbis
even likened the press to an altar. We called it ‘writing with many pens’ and saw it as furthering the spread of the word that began with Moses on Mount Sinai. So, my good father, you go and write the order to burn that book, as your church requires of you. And I will say nothing to the printing house, as my conscience requires of me. Censura praevia or censura repressiva, the effect is the same. Either way, a book is destroyed. Better you do it than have us so intellectually enslaved that we do it for you.”

  Vistorini had no ready response to the rabbi, and that irritated him. He became aware of a dull thudding in his temple. The two men took a cool farewell of each other, and Judah Aryeh left the priest, still seated, by the canal. As the rabbi walked away, his heart beat hard. Had he been too forthright? Anyone overhearing their exchange would have gasped at his insolence and wondered that Vistorini didn’t have him sent to the Leads. But anyone overhearing would not have known the history that stood between them. They had been friends, in so far as such a word had meaning in their circumstances, for ten years. So why, the rabbi asked himself, was his heart pounding so?

  As soon as he turned off the fondamenta and out of sight of Vistorini, Aryeh leaned against the wall and breathed shallowly. The breaths hurt. He had had the pains for many years. He remembered well how his chest had ached the first day he met the priest, in the office of the Inquisitor. Judah Aryeh had taken a great risk. Few went willingly to the Holy Office, but he had asked to be heard there. He had spoken for more than two hours, in eloquent Latin, trying to obtain a partial lifting of the ban on the Talmud. The two-part work was the distillation of Jewish thought since the days of exile, and to be deprived of it had been a hardship, an intellectual fast that had begun to feel like starvation. For the Mishnah, the main body of the work, he knew there was no hope of reprieve. But for the second part of the Talmud, the Gemara, he felt he could make a case. The Gemara was an exchange of rabbinical opinions, a collection of arguments and disputes. This, he argued, could be seen as helping rather than harming the church, as it demonstrated that even rabbis disagreed on aspects of Jewish law. Surely the evidence of such divisions within Judaism could be used to strengthen the church’s case against his faith?

  Vistorini had stood behind the Inquisitor’s chair, his eyes narrowed. He knew the Hebrew texts intimately, having confiscated and destroyed so very many copies of the Talmud. He knew that any moderately learned rabbi could take the Gemara and reconstruct from it the text of the accursed Mishnah for his students. But the Inquisitor let himself be wrapped inside the rabbi’s skein of clever words. He gave the Jews leave to keep such copies of the Talmud as they had in hand, so long as they were properly expurgated.

  Although he had lost the match of wits, Vistorini had been impressed by Aryeh; by his learning, by his courage, but also by his cunning. It was, he thought to himself, like watching an alchemist show a deceptive increase. You knew there was some trick being played, yet observe as closely as you could and still the moment and the means of adding the extra ore would remain obscure to you.

  As the rabbi, giddy with relief at saving his texts, made to leave the Inquisitor’s chamber, Vistorini had leaned in close and whispered, “Judah the Lion. Better they should have named you Judah Shu’al.” The rabbi looked into the priest’s eyes and saw, not anger exactly, but the ambivalent emotion a loser has toward a worthy opponent. The next time Aryeh came to the Holy Office, he took a chance. He had the curate announce him to Vistorini as “Rabbi Judah Vulpes.”

  Vistorini came to enjoy sparring with Aryeh, who could appreciate a wordplay in three languages. The priest had led a solitary life. At the orphanage, his thick accent and the shame that seemed to shadow mentions of his past made him shy with the other boys. At the seminary, his interests and abilities had set him off from his peers. But with Aryeh, he could wrestle with an intellectual equal. He appreciated that Aryeh never wasted his time by trying to defend blatant heresy or clear violations of the Index. Sometimes, Vistorini allowed the rabbi to convince him. He would redact rather than destroy, and once or twice he raised his pen to reprieve a threatened text, writing the necessary words of authority on the first of its pages.

  His interest in Aryeh eventually led him to conquer a long-standing distaste, and cross the little bridge to the Geto. When he had been a seminarian, many of his fellow students had gone there regularly. Baiting the Jews had been a favorite sport for some of the youths; others had gone in an honest spirit of evangelism, to win souls. A few had gone to risk their own by taking part in illicit entertainments. But Vistorini had found the very idea of the Geto repellent. He would not willingly enter a gated neighborhood crawling with nothing but Jews. The very idea made him feel trapped, suffocated, unclean.

  The first Jews to settle in Venice in 1516 had been German loan bankers. Others followed, but were allowed to pursue only three trades: pawnbrokers, providing inexpensive credit to poor Venetians; strazzaria dealers, buying and selling used goods; or foreign traders, using their ties to the Levant to facilitate the city’s vast export and import business. They were permitted to live only in the small area that had once been the city’s iron foundry, or Geto, a walled island of ash, joined to the rest of the city by only two narrow bridges, gated and locked each night.

  But as the years passed, some Venetians had warmed to the presence of the Jews, hiring them to perform their haunting music, seeking them out as physicians or financial advisers. For the Jews, the fact that their property rights were respected and that they had protection of the law made Venice a promised land compared with conditions elsewhere.

  So they had kept coming: the Ponentini, expelled from Spain and then from Portugal by the Catholic monarchs. Then the Tedeschis, fleeing pogroms in the German cities; and the ever-restless Levantinis from lands such as Egypt and Syria. The community had swollen to near two thousand souls, their dwellings piled one atop the other, six or seven large families together, until the Geto had the densest population and the tallest structures in Venice. When Vistorini asked the way to Judah’s synagogue, he was directed to a tall, narrow apartment building. At the top of a steep, dark stairwell, the rabbi’s house of worship shared roof space with a dovecote and a chicken coop.

  Although he had first been drawn to the rabbi as a kindred intellect, it was weakness, not strength, that had sealed their bond. One afternoon, Judah had happened to be walking in the area between the Geto and the priest’s church, taking the narrowest callettos and rughettas so as to escape harassment on the more crowded thoroughfares. He had interrupted a cutpurse who was bending over the body of his victim. The man ran off, and Judah recognized Domenico, drunk, his head bleeding from the robber’s blow, his cassock soaked in urine. The rabbi had taken a great personal risk, missing curfew, to obtain clean linens and help the priest get sober, so that his church never knew what a shameful spectacle its representative had made of himself.

  When Domenico tried to thank Judah, the rabbi muttered that he too had a weakness that Satan exploited from time to time. He would not say more. And yet that weakness gnawed at his mind, distracting him from his prayers by day and from the tender exchanges with his wife by night. As he slumped against the wall in the calle, he knew that the pain in his chest did not come only from the boldness of his exchange with the priest. Nor was it his morning’s errand—illicit, dangerous—that had set his heart skipping and thumping. Both those things combined with the nagging voice in his head, the tempter’s voice that he could not quiet. He had tried, God his witness knew how he had tried, to arrange to leave Venice before Carnivale was to begin in just a few days. He had wanted to put himself out of reach of sin. The ability to go behind a mask, to be another man, to do what a Jew may not do—the temptation overwhelmed him. The year before, he had managed to get a position as a tutor outside the city. But the season of Carnivale had been extended year by year, and suitable appointments had become hard to find. He had applied to tutor a youth in Padua, and to take the bimah for a sick rabbi in Ferrara. But neither situat
ion had been offered to him.

  As Carnivale drew closer, his wife, knowing the danger, had gone through his box, searching among his clothes for the mask and cape that would make him indistinguishable from a Venetian Gentile. Eventually, she found where he had concealed them, among the notions and bolts of cloth belonging to their daughter, the seamstress. She had taken both items directly to the strazzaria and sold them. He had thanked her for it, kissing her tenderly on the forehead. For a day or so, he felt profound relief that the props of his disgrace had been put beyond his reach. But soon, all he had been able to think about was Carnivale, and the opportunity it afforded him.

  Even now, when he needed his wits, the serpent wrapped itself around his every thought, squeezing out reason and conscience. He made his way to the set of steps near the Rialto where he had been told to wait. He did not like to stand so, exposed, in the heart of the city. He sensed people staring at him. Citizens pushed past him, muttering disparaging comments. It was with great relief that he saw the gondolier expertly poling the boat toward the steps. The boat was painted an austere black, the color mandated by laws to discourage Venetians from ostentatious displays of their wealth. The uniform color, as well as the legendary discretion of the gondoliers, helped trysting lovers maintain their anonymity.

  Aryeh made his way gingerly down the slippery stone steps, aware that the sight of a Jew boarding a gondola was no very common thing. He was nervous, and the fluttering of his heart made him a little dizzy. A Venetian would have reached out to take the gondolier’s elbow as a way of steadying himself as he boarded, but Aryeh was unsure how the gondolier would feel about being touched by a Jew. The superstition that such a touch could be used for Jewish witchcraft, to pass evil spirits to Christians, was widespread among Venetians. Just as he placed his foot in the boat, the wake from a passing craft tipped the deck. Aryeh wobbled, waving his arms like windmills, and landed on his rear. From the Rialto came coarse laughter. A gob of spittle traveled over the canal wall and landed on his hat.