The Jerusalem Parchment

by Tuvia Fogel

  “It’s an incredible story,” the Old Man began, “that starts in Calabria in the summer of 1070, exactly a thousand years after the destruction of your Temple, Master Ezekiel. Three rabbis from Jerusalem, during a vicious dispute with some local Benedictine monks, blurted out the secret of the confession. One of them said the body was stolen and proof would emerge when the Messiah will arrive, thanks to a map that had been drawn to find it. The monks, terrified by the threat, ran off north the next month, in search of rich nobles and clerics who could find the cursed map and destroy it before it destroyed Christianity!”

  The silence in the scriptorium was such that had an insect flown in, all heads would have turned.

  The Old Man wheezed on. “They founded an abbey at Orval, near Bouillon, which is why Godefroy was among the first nobles to be alerted to the terrible danger. It may even be that Urban II’s campaign to recover the sepulchre was really motivated by the search for the map, but Baldwin’s diary doesn’t say. . . . Anyway, in 1110 two surviving founders of Orval, two monks who had exchanged insults with the rabbis forty years earlier, came to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage, and to check on the search. They told King Baldwin the story from the beginning—and this is where it gets unbelievable . . .”

  The Old Man started coughing. Galatea rushed to his side, but he waved her away and continued. “The monks thought one rabbi had said ‘αλ μα μην που το πέτρα,’ or ‘al ma mi_ n pou to Pétra’—more or less ‘anything but Peter!’ But of course, how would Calabrian Benedictines know who al-Ma’moun was? When Baldwin heard the Greek phrase, he understood at once that what the rabbi had actually said was ‘Al-Ma’moun pou tou pétra;’ that is, ‘Al Ma’moun put it under the Rock’!”

  “But of course!” cried Yehezkel. “The letter in the geniza says the Parchment was confiscated by al-Ma’moun’s Abassid governor! That reckless rabbi even told the monks in Calabria where the caliph had put it, but they were too ignorant to understand him! Truly the ways of the Lord are mysterious. So what did King Baldwin do with the Parchment when he found it?” Yehezkel was an excited boy again.

  “That’s the ironic part,” said the Old Man. “He wrote that he showed it to a few people and then put it back where he’d found it, afraid of the fate that would befall a Christian king who found the confession! Which, by the way, confirms my theory on the source of circular maps of Jerusalem. One of the people Baldwin showed it to—apart from his wife, that is,” he said, glancing at Arnald, “must have made a rough copy, and the knowledge that it was a map of the Holy City did the rest.”

  The Old Man allowed himself a proud but brittle smile. He may not have deciphered the Parchment, but at least he’d solved the mystery of the origin of circular maps that had plagued him for half a century.

  “And you entered Omar’s Dome in Ayubbid Jerusalem and removed the Parchment from under the Rock? By yourself ?” asked Arnald, incredulous.

  “It wasn’t that hard,” said the Old Man. “I dressed as a Mohammedan and was even revered for the obviously long life Allah bestowed on me. The hardest thing was moving around the esplanade that the restoration works of al-Muazzam ‘Isa have turned into an immense building site.”

  The Old Man smiled as he thought back to what had surely been his final visit to the Holy City. “I went into the dome and prayed to Allah with everyone else, as I’ve learned to do over the years. Then I hid in a corner and waited for nightfall. Finding the niche in the gallery around the base of the Rock was child’s play. But believe me, pathetically weak as I have become, if anyone had stood between me and the Parchment in the dome that night, I would still have killed him!”

  “You are a braver man than a good portion of the knights I ride with every day!” said Arnald.

  The Old Man smiled. Yehezkel pulled out the copy of the rabbis’ letter he had made in the geniza. “Listen, Father. Four hundred years ago, a rabbi wrote that the map was drawn by a heretic. We think it must have been Elisha ben Abuya, because of a page of the Jerusalem Talmud that we deciphered with Don Sancio on the Falcus, before we had to beach the cog in a cove on the western end of Crete.”

  “Wait, wait, Rabbi, you’re losing me. First of all, where is Don Sancio de la Palmela now?”

  “I’m afraid he’s no longer with us, Father. He was swept onto the rocks in the cove and passed away in a Cretan village ten days after the beaching.”

  The Old Man sighed. “I survived another good man . . . will only the evil ones outlive me? I know that page of Talmud. So you discovered who those weird, Persian-sounding names belonged to?”

  “We did. They were encoded with a cipher called ATBASH. Elisha ben Abuya was accusing Hanina bar Hezekiah of hiding a page from the Book of Ezekiel, ‘together with the oil.’”

  “The oil?” The Old Man looked up, excited. “You’re on to something, Rabbi!” he exclaimed. “One of the writings on the inner circle of the map says ‘the Oil!’ What else makes you think Elisha drew it?”

  “Well, he says that Hanina hid the page because it was a prophecy ‘fulfilled in the life of Yeshu ha-Nozri.’ Some sages hold that Elisha became a Christian, and Galatea here says that the page from Ezekiel does, in fact, describe Mary Magdalene anointing Jesus in Bethany, in the very words of the Gospels. So if Elisha became a Christian, he would want that prophecy to be found, wouldn’t he?”

  “Aahh . . . so those names were encrypted because Elisha spoke of Jesus!” said the Old Man. “But surely if he was Christian, he would never have drawn a map that led to the confession!”

  “Yes, I thought of that,” said Yehezkel, “and decided there was only one possible explanation: Elisha didn’t know the confession was in the hiding place with the page and the oil. Let me explain: Hanina put the oil, the page, and the confession in the hiding place just before the revolt against Rome; that is, thirty years after the death of Jesus. But Elisha lived eighty years later, over a hundred years after the Crucifixion! He must have discovered the hiding place of the page and the oil—the only things he mentions—but not the presence with them of the confession! And in his day, under Emperor Hadrian, Jews could no longer enter Jerusalem, so he couldn’t go and verify what was in the hiding place.”

  Galatea quietly fumed. “Why, in nine months,” she thought, “he never shared the reasoning he just expounded on Elisha and the confession! ‘Perfect confidence’ indeed! Ooh, but he’ll get what’s coming to him. This time he’s really asked for it!”

  The Old Man smiled. “Seems Arnald was right that your help would be the key to this riddle.”

  Everyone burned. Yehezkel wanted to decipher the Parchment as badly as the other three wanted him to do so. The Old Man abruptly put an end to the discussion of who had drawn it. “Come, now,” he said, standing up wearily. “Let me show you what the whole world is looking for.”

  A tall library covered the eastern wall of the scriptorium. The Old Man got down on his knees, removed a codex from the lowest shelf, and laid it on the floor. Then he slid his hand where the book had been and pulled a hidden lever. He stood up again and finally, with a smile to his audience, leaned on the side of the bookcase. The heavy piece of furniture slid soundlessly sideways, revealing a small door in the wall behind it. They all stared in disbelief, for they knew that on the other side of that wall was the courtyard.

  The Old Man gestured for them to follow and vanished, absurdly, into the wall.

  What the Templars had done—the Old Man himself conceiving of a whole secret room—was to build a straight, extremely narrow stone staircase inside the thirty-foot-long eastern wall. It climbed diagonally from one end of the wall to the other, giving access to a loft hidden between the ceiling of the scriptorium and the roof of the building.

  The space inside the wall was so narrow one had to turn one’s shoulders to avoid getting stuck while climbing. When all four had crawled into the loft—where Yehezkel and Galatea had to keep their heads down—the Old Man lit an oil lamp and raised a plank in the floor, the map’s l
ast defense. He brought the Parchment of Circles to the table in the center of the room.

  Once unfurled, the Parchment was about a foot square, its edges frayed and crumbling. Illuminated by the lamp, the circles were precisely drawn and still clear, but the Hebrew writing on them—four phrases on each circle, plus one in the center—was faded and not easy to make out. Yehezkel pored over it for five minutes, which, to the others, felt like an hour. At last he straightened up and hit his head on a roof beam.

  “Ugh! Yes, I can just about make out what he wrote. What we must do is copy the words exactly, but bigger, so we can see them easily as we try to solve Elisha’s riddle.” Then, as an afterthought, “Father, do you have an old-fashioned wax tablet somewhere, that we can erase over and over? Elisha was a kabbalist, they say, and one of the finest minds of his generation. This is not going to be easy . . .”

  “Of course I have wax tablets. Arnald, be a monkish knight; go down and fetch a couple of them. In the chest by the fireplace.”

  In Jerusalem

  The Old Man turned to Arnald. “I know how your Cathar perfecti read this. They say Saint John’s cycles start on the left side of each circle, going round the bottom first, and they consider the inner one the path of the single soul, while the outer one is the Fate of Humanity.”

  “That’s right, Father. On the inner circle, a soul must be judged for the darkness it contains; only then can it be anointed with the Holy Oil and rise to join His Spirit. On the outer one, the Heart of the Messiah—not the Son of God, but the Messiah nonetheless—is sacrificed in Jerusalem and rises to His Place. And the Heavens in the center represent the eternal wellspring of both circles.”

  As Arnald explained Saint John’s theological summation, Galatea pulled on Yehezkel’s sleeve, her eyes glinting with excitement in the light from the lamp. “Yehezkel, have you added up the phrases?” she asked urgently.

  “Yes, I have,” answered Yehezkel with a grin. “It’s the first thing I always do.”

  Turning to the Old Man, he jested, “Did I introduce my outstanding pupil to you, Father?”

  “Gematria!” said the chaplain, lightly slapping his own cheek. “But of course! I only thought of the meaning of the words, not their numerical values!”

  “I told you Elisha was a kabbalist,” said Yehezkel. “Every single phrase on the horizontal axis of the map is worth three hundred and ninety-five. That cannot be a coincidence.”

  “Have you already added up the phrases on the vertical axis?” asked the Old Man feverishly.

  “Yes, of course. Give me a tablet, and I’ll show you all the values.”

  The chaplain stood behind Yehezkel as he wrote on the wax tablet with a small scimitar-shaped stylus. After a few moments, he sucked in his breath. “790 is twice 395!” he cried. “Any two phrases on the horizontal axis are worth the same as ‘My Spirit’ or the ‘Judge!’”

  “That’s not all,” said Yehezkel. “‘His Place’ and ‘In Jerusalem’ also add up to 790! Arnald, can you still defend the idea that this is only a prophecy and not . . . something else, too?”

  Arnald smiled, the quest for the Parchment’s real meaning drawing him in despite himself.

  Yehezkel said, “I think the way to read the map is to follow the sums. For example, what adds up to 790 should be read together. If you do that, ‘His Place In Jerusalem’ is practically the Parchment’s title! Also, one should read ‘My Spirit Judges the Sons of Darkness,’ since both are worth 790. Elisha is playing games with us here. But we have a card to play, too.”

  “What card is that, Rabbi?” asked the Old Man.

  “We already know where on the map the treasure is!” smiled Yehezkel. “Elisha said that Hanina had hidden the page ‘with the oil,’ so he must have drawn the map to show where the oil is!”

  “You mean . . . you mean each phrase on the map is a place in Jerusalem?” asked Galatea.

  “Well . . . isn’t that how maps work?” said Yehezkel, who was enjoying himself immensely.

  “Interesting,” murmured Arnald. “Could that mean that phrases with the same value . . . are places at the same distance from each other on the ground?”

  “Eureka!” cried Yehezkel. “I think you have it, my friend!”

  “But where are the places on the ground?” asked the Old Man.

  “Well, the moment I saw the Parchment,” said Yehezkel, “my first thought was: ‘If the center of a map is the Heavens, it can only mean that’s where the Kodesh Kedoshim was!’”

  “The Sancta Sanctorum of the Temple?” asked the Old Man. “That would put the oil 395 . . . ‘units’ east of it. What units of distance would Elisha use, Rabbi?”

  “Wait a minute,” interrupted Arnald. “Where on the map does it say east? The oil could be north of the Heavens, for all we know . . . or south.”

  “You’re right, Arnald,” said Yehezkel, “but let’s follow the Old . . . the chaplain’s thought through.” He turned to the Old Man. “Elisha would use cubits, I think; everything in the Talmud is measured in cubits. That’s from the elbow to the tip of one’s fingers—almost two feet, I’d say.”

  “Let’s see,” said the Old Man. “If the Sancta Sanctorum is the center, the oil is some eight hundred feet east of it. Assuming the Rock under which I found the Parchment is where the Sancta Sanctorum was located, as everyone always has, then what is on the esplanade eight hundred feet east of it, Rabbi? I don’t remember anything in particular . . .”

  Yehezkel scratched his beard. “I was never in Jerusalem, Father, something I hope to remedy soon, with God’s help. But I do remember the dimensions of the Temple courtyard, and eight hundred feet is about the distance to the eastern boundary of the esplanade.”

  “So the oil is on the edge of the esplanade? That doesn’t make sense,” said the Old Man.

  “It would be easy enough to verify, though,” said Yehezkel. “A cubit is also the length of an average step, so one would only have to count 395 steps eastward from the Rock under the dome. But then what do you do, start digging?”

  “Ha, ha!” laughed the chaplain. “Al-Mu’azzam’s mamluks would whisk you off before you had even unpacked your shovel!”

  Yehezkel leapt at the chance. “No, Father, that wouldn’t be the problem. Don’t ask me how I got it, but I have a written permission from the sultan himself to search the esplanade, even belowground. Of course, if I knew where someone had already dug tunnels . . .”

  The Old Man smiled. “Oh, what luck! I happen to have the maps drawn by Hugh de Payens a hundred years ago! I’ll be happy to let you copy the overview map that shows the access to each tunnel.”

  “I accept gratefully, Father, although this,” said Yehezkel, pointing to the parchment on the table, “is what we must carry a copy of. There’s an enigma in Jerusalem, as a hermit once said, and the time to solve it has finally come! Arnald, is it too much to ask you to escort us to Jerusalem?”

  “Of course not, but as a Templar I won’t be allowed into the city. Besides, I’ve been absent without leave for long enough to get in trouble as it is.”

  “Excellent,” said the Old Man. “You’ll stay tomorrow and leave the next morning. For now, I’ll assign comfortable cells to you so you can clean up and rest a little. The meals in the refectory are a monk’s fare, but if you come to my apartment at twelfth hour, I’ll have someone prepare a proper Italian dinner for the four of us. After all, we must celebrate unlocking the secrets of the Parchment!”

  The siege of Damietta over, Château Pélerin’s garrison reverted to its contingent of fifty knights, thirty sergeants, one hundred archers, two hundred squires, and forty Saracen slaves. Every corner of the castle throbbed with activity, from training jousts in the courtyard to residual construction works, but the Old Man seemed to live in a château of his own, somewhere in the Midi, and the sacristy in which they ate a delicious candlelit dinner that evening easily deserved the name “apartment.” The chaplain’s tastes and habits were not those of a monk, and Yehezkel won
dered if at some point he would get a chance to ask about his real identity.

  The Old Man was in an ebullient mood as he poured Cypriot wine in four silver goblets several times during the meal, never looking a day over eighty. “I feel young, I tell you! I like to think I’ve improved with age, like good wine. My heart is lighter and my mind clearer at ninety-five than at thirty or sixty. I emerged rejuvenated from each molt, laughed at the skin I’d shed, and moved on. Despite the wisdom of old age, I am as unpredictable as a madcap youth. That’s why my moves always surprise the Spaniard!”

  Galatea, already a little tipsy, said, “Arnald says that in your youth you were a pupil of Saint Bernard. So how did you come to embrace Cathar and Manichean teachings on Sophia and against Rome?”

  “Arnald also says,” butted in Yehezkel, “that you favor those working for a new religion that would keep our common father Abraham’s lesson on justice and charity, and scrap what came after him.”

  “Non est peccatum nisi contra conscientiam,”*57 recited the Old Man softly. “That would be my new religion! I was too young to hear him teach in Paris, but Pierre Abelard was my ideal thinker.”

  “Then it figures,” said Galatea, “that you became a good friend of Father Makarios.”

  “Oh, you met the one I used to call the Old Man? Is he still meditating on a Cypriot mountain?”

  “He is,” said Galatea. “He was the one who told us of the letter in Fustat.”

  “I told him about that,” grinned the Old Man. “But to answer you on the love of Sophia, I always had nothing but contempt for Saint Augustine’s disesteem of women. You know, his works were only translated into Greek a few years ago. What a good, long theological run the Greeks had without him! What a shame the cursed Venetians thought of spreading his sick ideas in the Polis!”

  “But Augustine also said Jews shouldn’t be killed,” said Yehezkel, “since exile is their punishment for refusing to accept Jesus as the Messiah. In a sense, we Jews owe him our survival in Christian lands.”