At midnight, in gruesome jest, the round little general ordered the signal fires of Ma Coeur to be lighted, and they flamed as in the past and were hopefully seen at Acre, but in the silent morning, when the great engines of war were needed no more, the general ordered that Ma Coeur be leveled: “No tower here will ever again cause us trouble.” The slaves began, stone by stone, to throw down the turrets and to destroy this most powerful of the small Crusader castles. Work on which Gunter of Cologne had spent years was destroyed in days, and when it was clear that slaves could be trusted to complete the task the red-faced general ordered the mangonels and the ballistas and the turtles and the walking towers to be moved westward until they reached the walls of Acre, where the miners resumed their patient underground tapping until the sound echoed ominously throughout that city.
At Ma Coeur the slaves continued their work for the better part of a year, disassembling the castle as children might break apart a toy. Many of the larger stones were hauled away to build new Mameluke castles and smaller ones were broken and scattered over the landscape. The well shaft was filled in, and shortly there were no towers and no walls to betray where the castle had stood. The slaves withdrew and the spot was desolate. The once-lovely fields were barren and remained so; the ancient olives were untended and no human being lived where the town had existed for so long.
On his yearly trip in the winter of 1294 Muzaffar, a one-armed Arab still operating caravans out of Damascus, had difficulty identifying the mound of Ma Coeur, for the Galilee was covered with snow. He found the location only by spotting the roadway which had always climbed the hill to the zigzag gates, and here he halted his camels for a moment, bowing in reverence to the knight who had saved his life. “Poor men,” he whispered when his prayers were done. “They knew nothing of the land they occupied, so they built huge walls to lock reason out.” And he plodded his way westward to ruined Akka, where no bells rang and where the harbor was silting up.
In summer searing khamsins from the now treeless hills blew across the plains, bringing minute dust which eddied into the crevices, imperceptibly solidifying the fallen mass and slowly covering it. In 1350, half a century after the fall, numerous rocks were still evident, and shepherds remembered that there had been a castle; but by 1400—a century after the annihilation—only a few rocks were visible and people were beginning to forget what they pertained to.
Now the only visitors to Makor—for the Frankish name was forgotten, having passed into history with the last of the Volkmars—were jackals, which sent forth their strange, penetrating yowls when the moon was full, and which picked over the area for things that might be trapped in their swift rush. Birds flew over the mound and sometimes nested among the last of the whitish rocks strewn haphazardly in the dunes of sand. There were snakes and toads coming up from the malarial marshes that had taken the place of the irrigated fields which for twelve thousand years had fed the people of Makor. And there were a few rodents seeking for the wheat which once again grew wild.
By 1450 the wind had moved enough blowing earth into the area to cover completely every sign of human occupancy, and there were now none who recalled the name by which the place had been known. In fact, it had neither name nor visible existence. It was a mound rising from the foothills of the Galilean mountains; grass grew upon it and flowers, and three or four times a year some camel caravan from Damascus passed on its way to Akka—now a dismal port town in no way distinguishable from the other rotting towns along the once-noble Phoenician seacoast.
By 1500 the mound was higher and the obscurity greater. There was then probably no living human being who knew that Makor had ever existed or where Ma Coeur, that notable stronghold of the Crusaders, had stood. Historians and archaeologists had not yet begun to tantalize themselves with such concerns, but of course the name did continue to exist in that ancient list of towns, and occasionally some Christian scholar in Bologna or Oxford would idly speculate on where Makor, like the other vanished cities of the past, might have stood, while Talmudic scholars remained familiar with the name Rab Naaman of Makor but not with the village from which he came. For all practical purposes the name and the mound were lost. Only the olive grove existed.
Winds blew in from the desert. Inch by inch the tell grew, and the solitude increased. The silent mound slept beneath the sun, hiding the sweet well that through ten thousand years had brought life to so many. Its waters trickled away through subterranean channels until they entered the malignant swamp which extended itself year after year over the no longer fertile ground. How great the desolation was, how crushed and puny the grandeur that had existed here. Even the birds came no more, for the grasses that had grown centuries before now perished in the desiccated air; the mound had become part of a desert.
This land of richness and great orchards. This land where bees had made a honey famous before the Bible was composed. These far, sweet lands that had gladdened a man’s heart and made his wife sing. These sacred valleys where men had wrestled with the concept of God, and with God Himself. These marvelous hills where the baals had stood and the fair girls had danced naked, all slept under dust.
How contradictory it was: the swamps spread, wasting their waters, while at the same time the land became desert for want of water. Occasionally a tribe of Bedouins would sweep through the area, senselessly killing any farmers who might be trying to revive the soil, then passing on. Their coming was meaningless and their going was unrecorded; and the mournfulness of the land increased.
Then, in the early 1500s, a few men and their families began returning from the far ends of the Mediterranean and from ports in between. They were Jews, and they came not to Makor, from which they had sprung but of whose existence they knew nothing; they came to Safed, seventeen miles to the east, and a new cycle was begun which would later encompass Makor, too.
LEVEL
III
The Saintly Men of Safed
Menorah made of gold in accordance with instructions laid down by God in Exodus 25: 31–40. Cast by Moorish workmen in Avaro, Spain, about 1240 C.E., during the period when Judaism was still permitted in that kingdom. Deposited at Makor June 21, 1559, after sunset.
It was an age of expansion. Constantinople, under Ottoman rule since 1453, was offering Europe such riches drawn from India and China as to make the dreams of Marco Polo seem unimaginative. Columbus had presented the world with a new hemisphere to balance the old, and daring Portuguese navigators were proving that cargo ships could reach the wealth of Asia by doubling the tip of Africa. Spain was amazing Europe with the wealth of Aztec and Inca, and all the world’s horizons were being expanded so that the center of power was no longer the Mediterranean; for on the Atlantic hitherto unimportant nations suddenly found themselves possessed of empires so enormous as to be indescribable. Even a trivial kingdom like England, beset on three borders by hostile Scots, Welsh and Irish, could visualize acquiring territory a thousand times larger than itself, while the Dutch were about to prove that they could establish commercial stations wherever their daring captains located safe anchorage and fresh water.
It was an age of intellectual discovery. From the cellars of forgotten monasteries, from the long-unused libraries of princes, and most often from Arabic scholars who had preserved the wisdom of the west, the books of Aristotle and Thales, of Plato and Euclid were rescued from the past to astonish men and enlarge their concepts. Dante and Boccaccio reminded a forgetful world of Virgil and Ovid, while the glories of Sophocles and Seneca awakened new appreciations of the drama. And not only was the intelligence of the past being discovered; each ship returning from Java or Peru brought with it, packed among the spice and silver, fresh discoveries of the mind, and thus the way was prepared for that succession of world-changers who followed Gutenberg, Copernicus and Galileo.
It was an age of religious explosion. For centuries Christian Europe had been united into one all-embracing Church, devout, competent and far-seeing. Recently Christians had been inspired by two
victories: the expulsion of Islam from Spain and the first conversions of the Aztecs; now there was reason to hope that millions in Asia and Africa would join the Church, since missionaries of great dedication were on their way to these areas. For a brief moment it was logical to believe that the known world might soon unite under the leadership of Rome. And then Martin Luther strode with rude and giant steps across the boundaries of Europe, awakening men like Calvin and Knox who would destroy old associations and establish new.
It was an age of political invention. City states gave way to national units and barons surrendered to kings who found their support in the new middle class. Secular governments displaced religious as leaders began to study Machiavelli instead of Thomas Aquinas. The barbarians from the north were finally brought under control and Europe, having expelled the Muslim Arabs from Spain, now girded to fight back the Muslim Turks as they threatened the approaches to Vienna.
It was an age of growing freedom. Men who rebelled against the confinement of Europe were now free to try America and Asia. Any who had chafed under papal rule were welcome to adopt Lutheranism, and peasants who had silently borne the tyranny of landlords were now free to attempt a revolt. Law courts were strengthened and in the realm of writing and art men could break away from medieval restriction to follow Petrarch or Michelangelo. Each year brought new horizons, for this was the age of freedom.
But not for Jews. In 1492, after more than seven hundred years of faithful service to Spain, the Jews were expelled from that state. They fled to Portugal, where they were scourged, forcibly baptized and later exiled. In Italy and Germany they were forced into inhuman quarters where they wore inhuman costumes. At almost rhythmic intervals they were charged with murdering Gentile children for blood to be used at Passover. They were accused of poisoning wells, of spreading cholera, of knowing how to infect rats with the plague to decimate Christian communities; and they were particularly accused of posing as Catholics, accepting the holy wafer of communion and hiding it slyly under their tongues until they could produce it for blasphemous black masses. In an age of growing freedom they were constantly restricted as to where they could move, what they could wear and especially what occupations they could engage in.
In this golden age of discovery the Jews discovered only the rope and the fagot. Each time a Jew was accused of having murdered a Christian child—and never once was the charge substantiated—some Jewish community would be wiped out in one ghastly slaughter. Each time a crime occurred near a Jewish quarter, that district would be stormed by indignant Christians and its inhabitants burned alive. And throughout the Christian world, come Holy Week, the friars would preach such sermons against the Jews that the enraged churchgoers would storm from their cathedrals to kill and maim any Jews they met, thus hoping to honor Him who had been crucified on Good Friday and risen in resurrection on Easter.
Why did not the Christians, since they held supreme power, simply annihilate the Jews once and for all? They were restrained because Christian theologians had deduced from passages in the New Testament the ambivalent theory that Jesus Christ would not return to earth bringing with Him the heavenly kingdom until all Jews were converted to Christianity, but at the same time 144,000 unconverted Jews were needed to be on hand to recognize Him and bear witness to His arrival. On this ambivalent theory two courses of action had been built: Jews must be converted; and those necessary few who refused must be kept in such obvious misery that all who looked could see what happened to people who denied Jesus Christ. So the Jewish districts multiplied, the harsh laws increased, and each year the Jews suffered unbelievable repressions. It was as if the Church kept them alive to remember the coming of the Messiah, the way a man keeps an aching tooth in his head to remind him of mortality.
In only two ways did Jews share in the expanding spirit of the age: they were still encouraged to serve as moneylenders, which enabled them to keep alive; and in 1520 in Venice a printer struck off a complete printed copy of the Talmud. So bitter had been the Christian hatred of this Jewish masterwork, so often had it been burned by the authorities in Italy, Spain, France and Germany, that when it was finally put into type only one manuscript copy was known to exist. It was by a miracle that this summary of Jewish knowledge was saved … and the Venetian printer who thus rescued the law of Judaism was a Christian.
But in those dark days, when the Jews of Europe sighed at the stake and smothered in their districts without any moral protest from the Christian world, one gleam of hope began to shine from a most unlikely quarter: the inconspicuous hillside town of Safed in Galilee.
1
Rabbi Zaki the Shoemaker was a fat Jew, and this was his undoing.
In the Italian seaport of Podi, where he had taken residence after his marriage in 1521, the coming of spring brought moments of anguish to Jewish men who were overweight, because starting in March they could feel the eyes of their Christian neighbors probing their rolls of fat and calculating whether Zaki was fatter than Jacopo or Jacopo slightly fatter than Salman; and each man and his family began to worry. Nevertheless, the calculations continued, and as the twenty-first of March approached, the apprehension of the fat Jews became very real indeed, and each family asked in secret, “Will our father be chosen this year?”
Rachel, Rabbi Zaki’s wife, really had no cause for uncertainty, because Zaki was so gross that he was automatically selected, year after year. It was only a question of which five additional Jews would be chosen as his teammates, so that Rachel, freed from the calculations that tormented the other wives, could spend her whole energy castigating her unfortunate husband.
“Why are you so fat?” she plagued him throughout the year. “Moses isn’t fat. Is Meir fat like you?” She had lived with Rabbi Zaki for twenty years and had come, not without cause, to the conclusion that he was a poor specimen of manhood. He did not provide well for his family. He never charged enough for his shoemaking, allowing clever Italians to outwit him. And it was obvious now that he was not going to become a famous rabbi leading his congregation to fame. He was merely a fat man who most of the year seemed pathetic, and in March positively degraded.
The Jews of Podi were a close community, for during the expulsion of 1492 they had fled in a body from Spain to Portugal and then—after the shocking mass baptism ordered by the Portuguese government—from Lisbon to Italy. In the strictest sense Rabbi Zaki, his sharp-tongued wife, Rachel, and all the Jews of Podi were Christians, for they had been forcibly baptized—some bleeding from the mouth, some screaming—in Portugal; but a series of considerate Popes had decreed that the Christian Church could not accept the fruits of such baptism and that the Jews of Podi were therefore free to revert to their original religion, which was after all an offshoot of the Holy Bible. The generous Duke of Podi had welcomed them as industrious merchants who brought much income to his territories and had even encouraged them to have their own synagogue, so that gradually the persecution of Spain and Portugal was forgotten in the kindlier atmosphere of Italy.
One of the leading merchants of Podi was Avramo the redhead, Rabbi Zaki’s father-in-law, and as the Jews of the port looked at their pathetic little rabbi they often wondered how he had been able to catch the merchant’s daughter. Rachel had hoped for a better marriage than hers had turned out to be, for, as she frequently reminded both her father and her husband, “I knew even before we were married that Zaki would amount to nothing.” But her father had argued, “I think Zaki will become a fine rabbi, and you should be honored that he takes you as his wife.”
But Rachel was not honored. As a child in Portugal she had known Zaki as the fat one whom the others teased, and as an adolescent girl she had watched him grow even fatter, so that none of her friends looked on him with longing. Left alone, he had read Talmud and apprenticed himself to an Italian shoemaker, who had warned his parents, “You’re wasting your money. Zaki has such fat fingers he’ll not be able to hold the nails.” Still the amiable fellow had managed somehow to become both a rabbi an
d a shoemaker.
The Jews of Podi were never able to understand why a man like Avramo had agreed to give his daughter to such a clod, and when in later years Rachel herself raised the question, he explained, “When I looked at Zaki’s fat face and rolling eyes I knew that he was a good man, and good men make good husbands.”
The wedding had gone forward, and Rachel found herself tied to a man of no distinction who each March brought upon himself and his family an almost unbearable disgrace. “Why do you eat so much?” she screamed at him with increasing desperation as the years passed. “Does Meir eat like a pig, day after day? Tell me that.”
Zaki could only reply, “God must have wanted me to be fat.” He was an amiable hulk, a man who loved his shrewish wife, adored his three daughters and found joy in eating with his family and fulfillment in serving as a rabbi. Since he was a short man, enormously round, none need envy him and all could find amusement in him. What they saw was a kind of gelatinous good will, an oleaginous buffoon of the spirit. He did not consciously make himself ridiculous, but since he knew that he was so, he did not fight against his nature.
The Source: A Novel Page 92