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.”
“It’s a street, hideously narrow, where Jews in Germany are forced to live,” Eliezer explained. “And soon we shall all be living there.”
“When we do, may we have the courage of Diego Ximeno,” Dr. Abulafia prayed, and the feud ended.
It would be incorrect to claim that in this critical debate the town itself had remained neutral. Safed was a place of singular beauty; from the edge of the fort crumbling on the hill down to the open fields that lay beyond the synagogue, sixteen narrow streets hung one below the other, connected by alleys which cut through at odd and inconsistent angles. In many places the streets were so narrow, scarcely three feet wide, that above them the houses joined and one walked as in a tunnel; there was an essential mystery about the place. Its location was such that frequently a cloud would drift into town and hang capriciously over some houses and not over others, and a neighbor could stand at his door and see the home of his friend mysteriously disappear—then reappear in sunlight as the cloud passed. The air of Safed was different, too—a clear, penetrating air that seemed to affect the lungs, causing one to breathe deeply with a kind of exhilaration—and through this clear air one could see unusual distan
ces with almost ghostlike penetration. In short, Safed was a town which enhanced the mystical interpretation of life, and it is quite possible that had the Kabbalists chosen some other spot in Galilee, their success might have been limited.
It was Elisheba who first noticed this partiality of Safed. One day she said to her father, “The town fights against you.” He laughed grimly, but she added, “Here I could almost become a mystic. The alleys are just as narrow as the Judenstrasse we left in Gretz. Why, then, do they seem so lovely?”
“Because here there is no iron gate keeping you from the fields,” he replied matter-of-factly.
Elisheba was now twenty and resembled her mother more than ever; she was tall and had her father’s dignity of movement but her mother’s love of children and fantasy. She had become the object of speculation, and even Spanish-speaking Jews began attending the German synagogue to see if Elisheba was in attendance. Many young men thought of marriage with the rabbi’s daughter, and some came to Zaki’s shop to discuss the matter with him. “Ask her father,” the fat rabbi told them.
“I’m afraid of Rabbi Eliezer,” they explained.
“I’ll speak to him if your parents ask me,” Zaki said. But to one young man, shorter even than himself, Zaki said, “Forget Elisheba. She’s tall and you’re short, and men and women who marry should fit together in all ways.” He arranged a different marriage for this suitor, and later the man said that the fit was good.
Twice Rabbi Zaki went to Eliezer to speak on behalf of suitors, but the German Jew, reluctant to lose his memory of Leah, told him, “Elisheba can wait a little longer. Besides, I like to watch her as she brings the books.”
In the next years Rabbi Zaki was struck by two personal tragedies which diminished his ebullience; the only consolation he found was in the fact that the first took place before the second, sparing his wife additional sorrow. In early 1555 Rachel fell ill. Dr. Abulafia was called and could do nothing for his mother-in-law; and some men claimed, “She’s poisoning herself with her own bile.” For some time she had gone back to heckling her husband as to why he didn’t build a big synagogue of his own plus a yeshiva in which to teach.
“I have nothing to teach,” he replied.
“You would have if you weren’t so fat,” she said irrationally. In bitterness and unfulfillment she approached her death, for the three marriages of her daughters were not working out well, but on her last morning she whispered, “Husband, I’d like a little glass of wine,” and for a while as he sat by her bed she relaxed her animosity and said, “We should have stayed in Salonica. But I agree that Safed is better than running half-naked through the streets of Podi. It was better this way … since you insisted on being so fat.” And with her death Zaki became lost in tragedy and for half a year was little seen in Safed.
At the end of 1555 his mind was taken from his loss by the arrival of a refugee from the Jewish community in Ancona, the Italian seaport north of Podi, and this man convened a meeting in the largest synagogue to report on the disaster that had befallen his city. “For long years,” he said, “we Jews who fled from Spain lived happily in Ancona and even had grandchildren born on Italian soil. I had a weaver’s shop.” He hesitated as if recalling some insupportable sorrow, then said softly, “Of eighteen who lived on my street, only I escaped.”
“What happened?” Rabbi Zaki asked.
“Four Popes in a row had confirmed our right to live in Ancona, even though we had been forcibly baptized when passing through Portugal. But this year came a Pope who announced that the Church must now solve the Jewish problem once and for all. We believe his nephew wrote out the new rules, but he issued them.”
“Are they much different from before?” Zaki asked.
The refugee turned to study the fat rabbi and said, “Aren’t you Zaki, who fled Podi?”
“Yes.”
“The new rules are different. First, no city in the world may have more than one synagogue, and if a city does, the others are to be torn down at once. Second, every Jew in the world must wear a green hat. Men and women. Sleeping and waking. Inspectors may break into the home at any moment to see that Jews are wearing their green hats. Third, all Jews in a town must live on one street.”
“For years we did that in Germany,” Rabbi Eliezer said. His prophecy was coming true.
“Fourth, no Jew may own property. If he now owns land he must sell it within four months for whatever the Christians wish to offer. Fifth, no Jew may engage in any kind of commerce, save the resale of old clothes.” He droned on through additional proscriptions: no Christian may work for a Jew; no Jew may apply medicine to a Christian; no Jew may work on a Christian holiday; nowhere at any time, not even in synagogue, may any Jew be addressed with a title like Messer or Rabbi or Master.
Rabbi Zaki, listening to the recital, tried to find what hope he could. “These are simply the old laws made harsher,” he said.
“But now we have two new ones,” the man from Ancona said, “and it was from these I fled. Thirteenth, all previous laws which granted Jews any kind of protection are abolished, and the fathers of each town are invited to impose any additional restrictions they desire. Fourteenth,” and his voice dropped to a whisper, “if the Jew protests at any point he is to be punished physically, with great severity.”
In the silence practical-minded Yom Tov ben Gaddiel asked, “But when the laws were announced did anything happen?”
“No,” the Ancona man said, and throughout the synagogue the Safed rabbis could be heard breathing with relief. “But on my last night in the city a Christian who owed me much money came quietly to my house and said, ‘Simon ben Judah, you’ve been a good friend. Here’s half the money I owe you. Flee the city this hour because at dawn there will be many arrests.’ I asked, ‘What for?’ And he shrugged his shoulders: ‘After all, you are heretics.’ And as I hid on the hill behind Ancona I saw, toward four in the morning, torches moving out through all the streets where Jews lived.”
“So what happened?” Rabbi Yom Tov asked.
“I don’t know. I escaped to Podi.”
“Were Jews arrested there?” Zaki asked, his big face wet with perspiration.
“No. Your duke said that in Podi the new laws did not apply and in this defiance he was supported by his brother, the cardinal. Agitated messengers came from both Ancona and Rome to argue with the brothers, but they stood firm and allowed no arrests. Nevertheless, I grew frightened and took passage on a Turkish ship.”
“Tell me,” Zaki asked. “Jacopo ben Shlomo and his wife Sarah, were they well?”
“They were well,” the Ancona man reported. “They still have their red house by the fish market.”
That night Rabbi Zaki returned to his lonely shoemaker shop and prayed, but his lips moved heavily, for he could see his Jews of Podi standing on the wharf that day so long ago, with signs of fire on their foreheads. And then, in the summer of 1556, Safed received, along with a shipment of wool, another of the terrifying broadsheets which cities in Europe found morbid pleasure in circulating during the middle years of the century. The new printing press in Podi had produced this one, which, with harrowing woodblock prints providing details, told the world that in 1555 and 1556 the Holy Inquisition had saved Podi by burning alive twenty-nine Jews, and the name, the description, the heresy of each was reported in detail, with twenty-nine woodcuts showing how each Jew had reacted to the fire.
Fat Jacopo, who had run in the last race with Zaki, had died praying. Thin Nethaneel had begged for mercy. And Sarah, the wife of Jacopo, had died with her hair a living torch. In horror Rabbi Zaki read the predicted history of his congregation; it was as if the Inquisition had reached across the Mediterranean, calling him back to the punishment he had escaped by flight.
It was then that Rabbi Zaki, the amusing rotund man, fell into that sense of guilt which characterized his last years. The two blows coming together affected him profoundly, for he felt that if he had been a better husband Rachel might not have grown
so bitter; and in fleeing Podi he had abandoned his congregation to the stake, just as surely as Dr. Abulafia had abandoned his family to its torture. For some months he was a man partly deranged by self-recrimination, and in neither Torah nor Talmud could he find consolation. He tried sharing his sorrow with Rabbi Eliezer, who had done the same in fleeing Gretz, but the austere German was so preoccupied with the law that he had no time to offer comfort, nor did the law itself, which stated what a man must do when mourning for the dead but not what to do when those dead were hung about his neck, burning in perpetual fire, so that the smoke blurred his vision. In his extremity he found aid in an unexpected quarter. Dr. Abulafia came to him in the shoemaker shop and said, “Zaki, father-in-law and friend, the time has come in your perplexity for you to study the Kabbala,” and the devout Spaniard explained in simple terms certain concepts of the mystical world that learned Jews had been perfecting in recent years. “The mystic perceives with his heart what his mind knows to be true … but cannot prove,” Abulafia began. “And we know that prior to creation God must have been immanent in all things. Without God there could be nothing. But if a merciful God is all things and is responsible for all things, how can we experience events like the burning of the Jews of Podi? Because just before God created the world, He voluntarily withdrew to make space for the physical world we see. But to remind us of His presence He left behind the ten vessels of which you have often heard me speak. And into these ten vessels He poured His divine light so that His presence might be amongst us. But after the first three vessels had caught their portion of the light and saved it for us, the lower seven were struck with such a flood of splendor that they could not retain it, and the vessels were shattered. Thus came confusion and tragedy into the world. Today you and I stand among the shattered vessels and the memory of our betrayals in Podi and Avaro. Sin is upon us and it becomes our responsibility, through dedication, prayer and extra-human effort, to reconstruct these shattered vessels, so that the light of God can exist in its intended receptacles. Zaki, you must co-operate with all men of goodness in their task of gathering together the shattered pieces and reconstructing the vessels.”
The Source: A Novel Page 104