Source

by James A. Michener

  “Yes?”

  “And he has agreed to let us go.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ve also been to see the captain and he has agreed …”

  “Where?”

  “There’s no turning back, Rachel,” the fat rabbi pleaded. “Evil days are ahead in this city …”

  “Where?” she screamed. “Salonica?”

  “Yes,” he said bravely, raising his arms to fend off the attack that must take place.

  To his surprise Rachel sat down. She breathed heavily, made no other sound and hid her face in her hands. After a while she gave a low sob and summoned her daughters from the other room. “We’re going to Salonica,” she announced softly, like the whisper of a volcano afraid to explode. The oldest girl, Sarah, gasped and her mother leaped from the chair. “Yes!” she shouted. “Your father’s taking us to Salonica!” The youngest child began to cry and Rachel slapped her. “We’re going to Salonica,” she shouted in a hysterical giggle. “You’re all going to marry Turks.” She collapsed in the chair; even the older girls began crying, whereupon she stormed about the room, shouting, “We’re going to Salonica, oh, my God!” Then she slapped each of the girls harshly and announced calmly, “We shall do as your father says. No one in this room will ever again argue about his decision.”

  She kept her word. With demonic frenzy she applied herself to packing the family goods, but as she tied each parcel the Dominican friar would come to inspect it, reminding her that many of the things she wanted to take belonged, by agreement, to the Church. Once Zaki was afraid that Rachel would fly at the Dominican, but she patiently surrendered even the toys of her children. When the friar had completed his third scrutiny Rachel declared war, muttering, “Very well.” Digging up a secret hoard of forbidden gold pieces she sewed them adroitly into unlikely places, so that when the rabbi’s family was given its final searching she succeeded in smuggling so many coins that she could support the family for some years in its flight.

  The Jews of Podi came to the pier to bid their frightened rabbi farewell, and to him they seemed like a necklace of beautiful pearls strung along the dock, causing tears to well up in his eyes as he listened to their farewells; fortunately he could not hear their whispers: “Look at our crazy rabbi. Lost his head because a whore pulled down his pants.” And then, like the shadow of death crossing the waves, a darkness came over Zaki’s vision and he saw his beloved congregation as it was to be. There stood fat Jacopo, who had been in the race, and he would be burned alive in 1556. Beside him stood thin Meir, a cherished friend who would be burned alive in 1555. There were the sisters Ruth and Zipporah; the elder would be burned alive in 1555, but the younger would die in prison almost torn apart by torture. There was also the gentle Josiah, who would die at the stake in 1556, but because he was dim-witted he would escape death by flame, because at the end he would say uncomprehendingly, “Of course I accept conversion,” and the executioner would mercifully strangle him before the fires began.

  The cloud passed, and the doomed Jews stepped aside as the smiling Duke of Podi came onto the dock, crying, “Good-bye, Zaki. No one in Podi had bitterness against you. You’re being very stupid.” And one day this generous-hearted man would be humbled and hounded from his dominion because of the assistance he would give his Jews in their time of trial.

  It would not be proper to claim that on this day in 1541 Zaki foresaw these precise events in the darkened faces of his friends, but he knew with a certainty that similar things were bound to happen. To no one could he confide, not even to his bewildered, faithful wife, the reasons for his insight: “If men repeat often enough their hatreds the evil comes to pass.” He looked at his dear friends, his lovely companions doomed in their goodness, and he wept.

  His wife, ashamed of his latest display of cowardice, refused to weep. But as the ship started to move she cried hysterically, “We are going to Salonica.” During the first days of the tedious voyage she and her daughters kept to themselves, but when Muslim pirates threatened the ship she began to wail, “Is this what you are taking us to Salonica for?” And she made so much commotion that the captain bellowed “Rabbi, shut that woman up or I’ll let the pirates catch us.” Zaki went to his wife and pleaded, “Rachel, if we have escaped Italy, God will not abandon us to slavery now.” His wife looked at him with blank amazement and forgot the pirates: her husband was still talking gibberish, and she was so appalled to have married such a fool that she kept her mouth shut.

  The pirates were outdistanced, but the ship was forced to land in

  “Why do you worry about the Germans?”

  “If we cause such hatred in Catholic hearts, then we should go,” Eliezer replied simply.

  “Those people today?” Isaac countered. “If they didn’t hate us they’d find somebody else.”

  “I no longer want to be the cause of Christians’ committing sin,” Eliezer said, and his wife noticed that in three sentences he had moved the argument upward from German to Catholic to Christian; and when the men argued further, he said firmly, “I will not live with my brother if I cause him to outrage God.” Leah thought: This great, good man, constantly he lifts matters up to where they truly rest.

  There was a change in the discussion when Isaac, still hopeful that the Jew would find an honorable place in Germany, argued, “The dominance of the Church over us is limited, Eliezer. Before long Gretz may be a Lutheran city,” and spurred by these words the Jews in the crowded synagogue reopened the speculation begun twenty years earlier at the publication of Luther’s conciliatory letter on the Jews: Was there a possibility that a new kind of Christianity might replace the old?

  “We must pray for the triumph of Luther,” one of the hopeful Jews reasoned. “In all parts of Germany he is humiliating the Church, and with his victory our freedom will come.”

  A matter of real hope had been raised, a breath of fresh air sweeping down the centuries of persecution and entering even the crushed houses of the Gretz Judenstrasse. No Jew dared openly say that he prayed for the downfall of his ancient oppressor, for the Church had proved remorseless in its punishment of renegades, but it was agreed against Rabbi Eliezer’s advice to wait a little longer; and that night when the congregation had departed, even Leah whispered, “We should not go to Turkey, husband. Our children are happy here and we have a good life.” But Eliezer knew that she was not right. No life that involved the hatreds he had seen that day, even though no man had been killed or no house burned, could possibly be termed good.

  “Leah,” he said sharply, “it’s proper for you to create the dreams of children and to tell them of open fields, but don’t tell your husband that this rotten life is good.” He pointed at the bedroom in which he stood. “A synagogue of half a room, in which the rabbi sleeps.”

  Leah replied, “I am hoping that some day things may be better.”

  “The Jews of Germany always hope,” he said harshly, kicking his bed into position.

  Leah took him by the hands and asked, “Eliezer, tell me the truth. Why are you determined to leave?”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “Because to live as we do in the Judenstrasse is a moral outrage.”

  The simple truth stunned Leah and she said quietly, “I shall go with you.”

  succeed in routing out a Jew, and if you triumph over this devil, great grace is yours.

  A few days later the distinguished advisor to King Charles of Austria and Spain, Counselor Diego Ximeno, whose ancestors had for eleven hundred years lived in Spain as Jews, and for the last century as converts to Christianity, happened to choke as he was eating a piece of pork. Inadvertently he allowed the pork to fall to the floor, where, seeing it ruined, he absent-mindedly ground it into the dust with his heel. A jealous neighbor detected him doing these things and next day satisfied himself beyond question that Diego Ximeno was a secret Jew because he spotted the robust, handsome counselor washing his hands three times in the course of one day, whereas a believing man would not have d
one so.

  Accordingly, this trusted friend went quietly to the office of the Inquisition and reported: “I have strong reason to suspect that Diego Ximeno is a Jew.” The Dominican in charge of recording accusations raised his eyebrows, for although in recent years some rather prominent citizens of Avaro had been caught in the nets of the Inquisition, no one of Diego Ximeno’s importance had yet been apprehended, and to catch a man of his dignity would bring the local office into national prominence. Senior officials of the Inquisition were therefore summoned and the informant was questioned avidly. “For some time,” he told them, “I have suspected Diego of being a secret Jew, but not until the paper arrived telling me what specifically to look for did I know how to trap him.”

  The committee itself had a much longer list of ways to catch a Jew than the one which it had sponsored in print, and one by one these questions were put to the excited witness and he was led to review his years of friendship with the counselor, until all reached the conclusion that Diego Ximeno at one time or other had been guilty of almost every act that betrayed a secret Jew. It was safe for the informer to make his nebulous accusations, for under the codex of inquisitorial procedure he would never face the man he was condemning, nor would Ximeno ever be told who had informed against him or what had been the charge. At the end of several hours the priests conducting the interrogation thanked the neighbor, and when he was gone, concluded, “At last we have caught a truly great one. Honor is ours.”

  That afternoon uniformed guards of the Inquisition marched to Ximeno’s office and without advising him of any particulars arrested him and hauled him away to a cramped, dirty subterranean cell, where he was kept in absolute silence for four months. The inquisitors knew that they must prepare their case against such a man with care, for even though he had had Jewish ancestors a hundred years ago he also had great influence with the court, and his arrest had already caused many horsemen to ride between Avaro and Vienna. Finally the Inquisition was ready to interrogate the prisoner, which it did with secrecy and solemnity, but since Ximeno was not told what the specific charges against him were, he confessed to nothing. On the second day no progress was made, nor on the third, so on the fourth the court convinced itself that in Diego Ximeno they had a secret Jew who was going to prove exceedingly difficult.

  Accordingly, he was returned to solitary confinement, where he languished for the rest of 1540 and all of 1541, during which time he was required to pay substantial sums for his keep and for the marshaling of further evidence against him. Regardless of the eventual outcome of his trial he was being financially ruined, and he knew it.

  The Avaro chapter of the Inquisition could afford to move so deliberately because of the significance of the work in which it was engaged. Before it became powerful in Spain the Inquisition had been in existence as a necessary arm of the Church, for some six or seven centuries, during which it had served to protect Christianity from numerous heresies. For the first half-thousand years of its operation it had been a generally benign office, but with the ascendancy of Tomás de Torquemada as Inquisitor-General of Spain and his elevation of the Inquisition to a position independent of both Pope and emperor, the policing powers of the body had degenerated into a kind of panic and terror: in a period of seventeen years, some 120,000 of Spain’s inquisitive intellectuals were killed. And then, with Torquemada dead and the Faith apparently secure against false movements, a time was reached when the terror could be relaxed, but at this moment Martin Luther in Germany launched the most dangerous heresy of all, so that even a fool could see that the true Christian Church was imperiled by Protestantism. What was almost as disturbing, certain Christians like Erasmus of Rotterdam were writing books that cunningly mocked the Church, and as if this danger were not enough, Jewish families who had some centuries before accepted baptism into Christianity were discovered to be secretly adhering to old Judaic rites. Thus the Church was beset from without and from within, and only the Inquisition, superior even to the Pope, could hope to root out the heresies, burn the incriminating books and track down the Lutherans and the secret Jews.

  The official figures for the Inquisition of Avaro illustrate the Church’s response to the peril it faced. In the two centuries before the arrival of Torquemada, Avaro beheaded only four persons, and these were grievous enemies of the Church who refused to recant gross sin. But from 1481 to 1498, under the whip of Torquemada, the Avaro judges executed eleven thousand heretics. In the quiet period that followed, the number dropped to less than twenty a year, but in 1517, with the appearance of Luther as a mortal threat and with the influx of works by Erasmus, the number of executions rose sharply.

  It is significant that in this period of sixty years, from 1481 to 1541, not a single professed Jew was executed by the Avaro Inquisition. If any man, upon arrest, could say boldly, “I am a Jew and have always been known as one,” he was banished from the realm, but he was not burned. The Spanish Church had to despise him and send him on those mournful wanderings which the New Testament had predicted, but it never touched him. At the same time, however, the Avaro Inquisition had rooted out some eight thousand people whose families had once been Jews but who had converted to Christianity, accepting baptism and full membership in the Church while secretly continuing to practice Jewish rites. And of these eight thousand faithless ones more than six thousand had been burned alive. There was the girl Maria del Iglesia, whose family had been Christian for three centuries, who fell in love with the young man Raimundo Calamano and in a moment of courtship confidence confessed to him that she and her family observed Passover: he ran straight to the Inquisition, and three days before she was to marry, troops broke into the Del Iglesia home to find forty-one Jews eating matzoth, and all were burned alive. There was the renowned scholar Tomás de Salamanca, who taught the youth of Avaro, and one day his nine-year-old son burst into the street, shouting, “My father whipped me. He fasts on Yom Kippur.” So after investigations extending over a period of seven years, sixty-three close associates of Tomás had to be burned alive. What was especially frightening was the fact that among the confessed Jews were seventeen nuns who had held Jewish rituals in their convent, thirty monks, seven priests and two bishops. The Church was being dangerously corrupted from within, and only the most painstaking investigation could protect it. For that reason the case against Diego Ximeno, counselor to the king, moved slowly.

  At the beginning of the third year Ximeno was again summoned before the tribunal, which now had in its possession a voluminous file of material linking him to Judaism. Informants as far away as the Italian city of Podi and the German city of Gretz had made depositions damaging to him, and the judges were completely satisfied that they had a secret Jew. Now the problem was to force him to confess and to incriminate others in Avaro who might have masked their evil practices as successfully as he had done. Over a period of four days he was interrogated in minute detail, and when he proved obdurate the tribunal had no alternative; they had to commit him to the torture.

  He was dragged immediately to the subterranean vault long used for the purpose of extracting confessions, but he was not, as some might suspect, thrown into the hands of brutal men free to abuse him at will. He was delivered to a skilled and patient priest who had been conducting such interrogations for many years and who was assisted constantly by a knowing doctor who had learned from experience what torment the human body could absorb without expiring. There were few deaths from torture in the dungeon of Avaro.

  On the other hand, the ordinary workmen who administered the three tortures which were allowed had become callous experts who had acquired a score of tricks guaranteed to break down the resolve of any secret Jews, so at the moment when Diego Ximeno was thrust into the dungeon these men already knew that he was someone special sent to test their skill. If they extracted a confession, they would be rewarded; if they failed, they would be rebuked. It was therefore a poignant moment when the handsome man of fifty, stalwart even after two years of imprisonment, stum
bled into the torture chamber, gained his footing and stood in quiet defiance before the interrogating priest.

  “Do you confess, Diego Ximeno?” the priest asked. The prisoner looked at the Dominican with contempt, whereupon the priest, who had often seen that particular look at the beginning of his interrogations, but never at the end, said to the doctor, “The prisoner refuses to speak. Is he qualified for the question?” The doctor studied Ximeno and thought: He’s arrogant and he’s in strong health. This one may take a long time.

  The doctor nodded to the scribe sitting at the feet of the priest. It was this man’s job to record confessions and to confirm in writing that humanitarian safeguards were observed in the torture room. “Write down,” the priest directed, “that the prisoner was found qualified for the question.”

  With this the Dominican signaled to the workmen, who with lightning force grabbed Ximeno, pinioned his arms and stripped him naked before he knew what was happening. With equal speed they lashed his hands behind his back, fastened twenty-pound weights to each ankle, and by means of a heavy rope attached to his wrists hauled him some forty feet into the air. From below, the foreman of the workmen shouted, “You’ll talk, Counselor.” They left him suspended for nearly an hour, while his arms, wrenched upward from behind, slowly pulled his shoulders from their sockets.

  The ache throughout his body had become almost more than he could bear, and the Dominican, seeing his anguish and sensing that he might be ready to speak, came below him and called, “Diego Ximeno, do you now confess?”

  Still uninformed as to the specific charges against him, Ximeno bore his pain in silence.

  “Diego Ximeno,” the priest pleaded, “if you are in pain now, believe me it is only a beginning. Please confess or we must apply the question.” The prisoner made no response, so the priest returned to his small dais, instructing his scribe to record the fact that the prisoner had been offered mercy.