UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY

by Umberto Eco

  "So for you the Englishman and the Jew are the same?"

  "Almost. You ought to read what a leading English politician has written in his novel Coningsby — a certain Disraeli, a Sephardic Jew who converted to Christianity. He had the temerity to write that the Jews were going to take over the world."

  The following day, Toussenel brought me a book by Disraeli where he had underlined whole passages. "You never observe a great intellectual movement in Europe in which the Jews do not greatly participate. The first Jesuits were Jews. That mysterious Russian diplomacy which so alarms western Europe, who is running it? The Jews! Who is taking over almost all of the professorial chairs of Germany?

  "Note that Disraeli is not a mouchard who is denouncing his own people. On the contrary, he is praising their virtues. He writes quite shamelessly that the Russian minister of finance, Count Cancrin, is the son of a Lithuanian Jew, in the same way that the Spanish minister Mendizábal is the son of a convert from Aragon. Soult, an imperial marshal in Paris, is the son of a French Jew, and Massena was also a Jew whose original name was Manesseh . . . And there again, that mighty revolution being plotted at this very moment in Germany, who is behind it? The Jews. Look at Karl Marx and his communists."

  I wasn't sure if Toussenel was right, but his philippics indicated how the more revolutionary circles were thinking, and it gave me several ideas . . . I was doubtful that documents against the Jesuits would be saleable. Perhaps to the Freemasons, but I still had no point of contact with their world. Writings against the Freemasons might have been of interest to the Jesuits, but I didn't yet feel able to produce any. Against Napoleon? Certainly not to sell them to the government. And the republicans were a good potential market, but after Sue and Joly, there was little more to be said. Against the republicans? Here again, it seemed as if the government had all it needed. And if I offered Lagrange information on the Fourierists, he would have laughed — who knows how many of his informers had already visited that bookshop in rue de Beaune?

  Who was left? The Jews, for heaven's sake! Deep down, I thought it was only my grandfather who had been so obsessed, but after listening to Toussenel I realized there was an anti-Jewish market not just among all the descendants of Abbé Barruel (and there were quite a few of them), but also among revolutionaries, republicans and socialists. The Jews were the enemy of the altar, but also of the ordinary people, whose blood they sucked. And they were also the enemy of the throne, depending on who governed. I had to work on the Jews.

  I realized that the task would not be easy. Some in church circles might be impressed by a recycling of Barruel's material, with the Jews in league with the Freemasons and the Templars to bring about the French Revolution, but it would be of no interest to a socialist like Toussenel. I needed to say something more specific about the connection between Jews and the accumulation of capital and a conspiracy with the British.

  I began to regret that I had never wanted to meet a Jew in my life. I realized there was so much I didn't know about the object of my repugnance, which was becoming more and more suffused with resentment.

  I was grappling with these thoughts when Lagrange presented me with an opportunity. Lagrange, as I have noted, was always arranging meetings in improbable places, and this time it was to be at PèreLachaise. This was a good idea. Here, after all, we could be mistaken for relatives searching for the grave of a dear departed, or for romantics revisiting the past. On this occasion we were standing reverently beside the tomb of Abélard and Héloïse, a place of pilgrimage for artists, philosophers and lovers, appearing like ghosts among ghosts.

  "Simonini," Lagrange said, "I want to arrange for you to meet Colonel Dimitri — that's the only name he's known by in our circles. He works in the Third Department of the imperial Russian chancellery. If you were to go to St. Petersburg and ask for the Third Department, everyone would look at you blankly, as officially it doesn't exist. Its agents are appointed to keep an eye on revolutionary groups — the problem there is much worse than it is here. They have to watch for those taking the place of the Decembrists, for the anarchists, and now for the discontented so-called emancipated peasants. Tsar Alexander abolished serfdom several years ago, and there are now around twenty million free peasants who are supposed to pay rent to their old masters for plots of land too small to give them a living, and large numbers of them are invading the cities in search of work."

  "What does this Colonel Dimitri want of me?"

  "He's collecting documents on the Jewish problem, which are, shall we say, compromising. There are many more Jews in Russia than here, and in the villages they pose a threat to the Russian peasants, since they can read, write and above all count. That's not to mention the cities, where many of them are thought to belong to subversive sects. My Russian colleagues have two tasks: first, to see whether and where the Jews pose a real danger, and second, to direct the peasants' discontent against them. But Dimitri will explain everything. It's no concern of ours. Our government is on good terms with the Jewish financiers in France and has no interest in stirring up resentment against them. All we want is to be of service to the Russians. In our job, Simonini, it's a question of 'You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours,' and we're only too pleased to offer you to Colonel Dimitri — though officially, of course, you're nothing to do with us. I forgot to mention: before Dimitri arrives, you might wish to know about the Alliance Israélite Universelle, established about six years ago in Paris. Its members are doctors, journalists, lawyers, businessmen, the cream of Parisian Jewish society — all, shall we say, of liberal persuasion, and certainly more republican than Bonapartist. Their aim is apparently to help victims of persecution from every religion and country in the name of the Rights of Man. Until proved otherwise, they are citizens of the utmost integrity, but it is hard for our informers to infiltrate them, because Jews know and recognize each other, sniffing each other's bottoms like dogs. But I'll put you in touch with someone who has managed to gain the trust of some Alliance members. His name is Jakob Brafmann, a Jew who converted to the Orthodox Christian faith and became professor of Hebrew at the theological seminary in Minsk. He's in Paris for a short stay, working for Colonel Dimitri and his Third Department. Since Brafmann was thought to be a member of the same religion, it was easy for him to make contact with the Alliance Israélite. He'll be able to tell you something about them."

  "Excuse me, Monsieur de Lagrange. If this Brafmann is Colonel Dimitri's informer, he will already have told Dimitri all he knows. There's no point in my going to tell him all over again."

  "Don't be naive, Simonini. Of course there's a point. If you give Dimitri the same information that he's heard from Brafmann, he'll regard you as someone whose news is reliable, since it confirms what he already knows."

  Brafmann. From my grandfather's stories I expected to meet someone with the profile of a vulture, with fleshy lips, the lower lip heavily protruding like a Negro's, deep-set watery eyes, eyelids less open than those of other races, wavy or curly hair, ears sticking out . . . Instead, the man I met had a monkish appearance, a fine gray beard and thick bushy eyebrows with those Mephistophelean tufts at each corner that I had seen among Russians and Poles. Religious conversion evidently transforms not just the soul but also facial appearances.

  He had a particular liking for good food, though he displayed the voraciousness of a provincial who wants to try everything but has no idea how to create a proper menu. We had lunch at Rocher de Cancale in rue Montorgueil, which used to serve the finest oysters in Paris. The place had closed twenty years earlier and then been reopened under new ownership; it wasn't what it used to be, but it still had oysters, and for a Russian Jew it was good enough. Brafmann began with a few dozen belons, then ordered a bisque d'écrevisses.

  "For such a thriving race to survive over forty centuries," Brafmann told me, "it had to establish a single government in every country where it was living — a state within a state — which it has maintained ever since, even when its people have been
scattered for thousands of years. I have found documents that prove the existence of this state, this law: the Kahal."

  "And what is it?" I asked.

  "The institution dates back to the time of Moses. After the Exodus, it no longer operated openly but was confined to the synagogues.I have found documents for the Kahal in Minsk from 1794 to 1830. It's all written down. Every detail is recorded."

  * * *

  The man I met had a monkish appearance, a fine gray beard and thick bushy eyebrows with those Mephistophelean tufts at each corner.

  * * *

  He unrolled various scrolls covered with symbols I couldn't understand.

  "Every Jewish community is governed by a Kahal and subject to an autonomous tribunal, the Beit Din. These documents are from one Kahal, but they're just the same as those for every Kahal. They tell us how members of a community must obey only their own court and not that of their host state, how festivals are to be observed, how animals must be specially killed and prepared (the impure and corrupt parts sold to the Christians), how every Jew can obtain a Christian from the Kahal whom he can exploit through usury until he has taken all his property, and no other Jew has rights over that same Christian. The lack of mercy toward the lower classes, the exploitation of the poor man by the rich man, are not crimes, according to the Kahal, but virtues when practiced by a son of Israel. Some say that Jews are poor, especially in Russia. This is true. Large numbers of Jews are the victims of a secret government run by rich Jews. I'm not against the Jews— I was, after all, born a Jew — but against the Jewish ideal that wants to replace Christianity. I love the Jews . . . may Jesus, whom they assassinated, be my witness . . ."

  Brafmann had found his second wind and ordered aspic de filets mignons de perdreaux. But he returned almost immediately to his scrolls, which he handled lovingly. "And as you see, they're all genuine. That is proved by the age of the paper, by the uniformity of the scribe's handwriting when he drew up the various documents and by the identical signatures from different dates."

  Brafmann had already translated the documents into French and German. He had been told by Lagrange that I could produce authentic documents, and asked me to make him a French version that would appear to date from the same period as the originals. He also needed these documents in other languages, to show the Russian secret service how the model of the Kahal was being followed in various European countries, and particularly by the Parisian Alliance Israélite.

  I asked how it was possible, from documents produced by a remote eastern European community, to demonstrate the existence of a global Kahal. Brafmann replied that I need not worry about that. These documents would be useful as supporting evidence, proving that what he had to say was no mere invention, and in any event his book would be sufficiently persuasive in its condemnation of the true Kahal, that great octopus whose tentacles extended across the whole civilized world.

  His expression hardened, and he assumed almost that eagle-like appearance that would have given him away as a Jew, which, after all, he still was.

  "The fundamental feelings animating the Talmudic spirit are an overweening ambition to dominate the world, an insatiable lust to possess all the riches of those who are not Jewish and a grudge against Christians and against Jesus Christ. Until such time as Israel is converted to Jesus, those countries which offer a home to such people will always be regarded by them, to quote the Talmud, as an open lake where every Jew can fish freely."

  Exhausted by this tirade of accusations, Brafmann ordered a dish of escalopes de poularde au velouté, but it was not to his taste and so he changed it for filets de poularde piqués aux truffes. Then he took a silver pocket watch from his waistcoat. "Oh dear, it's late," he said. "French cuisine is exquisite, but the service is slow. I have an urgent meeting and must go. Let me know, Captain Simonini, whether you can find the right kind of paper and inks."

  Brafmann had just concluded the meal with a vanilla soufflé. I was expecting that a Jew, although converted, would leave me to pay the bill. On the contrary, with a lordly gesture Brafmann insisted that he should pay for our snack, as he casually described it. No doubt the Russian secret service allowed him princely expenses.

  I returned feeling puzzled. A document produced fifty years ago in Minsk, with detailed instructions about whom to invite or not invite to a religious festival, hardly demonstrates that such rules also apply to the actions of great bankers in Paris or Berlin. What is more, one must never, never, never work with genuine or half-genuine documents! If they already exist, someone can always search them out to prove they are incorrect . . . If a document is to be convincing, it must be created ex novo. And where possible, the original must not be seen but only talked about, without reference to any precise source, as happened with the Three Kings, whom only Matthew mentions in a couple of verses, not saying what they were called, or how many they were, or that they were kings, and all the rest is tradition. Yet people think of them as being just as real as Joseph and Mary, and I know their bodies are venerated somewhere or other. Revelations have to be out of the ordinary, shocking and fantastical. Only then do they become credible and arouse indignation. Is a peasant in a vineyard in Champagne going to care whether Jews make their fellow Jews do this or that at their daughter's marriage ceremony? Does this prove that the Jews are trying to pick the Champagne peasants' pockets?

  And then I realized I already had the document I needed, or at least a convincing framework — much better than Gounod's Faust, which Parisians had been raving about for the past few years. All I had to do was find the right contents. I was, of course, thinking of the Masonic gathering on Thunder Mountain, of Joseph Balsamo's plan and the Jesuits' night in the Prague cemetery.

  Where should the Jewish plan for the conquest of the world start? Obviously from their possession of its gold, as Toussenel had suggested. Conquest of the world, to frighten monarchies and governments; possession of its gold, to satisfy the socialists, anarchists and revolutionaries; destruction of healthy Christian principles, to worry pope, bishops and other clergy. And introduce a bit of that Bonapartist cynicism Joly had used so well, and the Jesuitical hypocrisy that both Joly and I had taken from Eugène Sue.

  I went back to the library, but this time I was in Paris, where I could find much more than in Turin, and here I found more pictures of the Prague cemetery. It has been there since the Middle Ages. The burial ground could not be extended beyond the permitted area, and so more graves were added over the centuries, one on top of the other, until there were perhaps a hundred thousand bodies, and the number of gravestones grew, until one was almost touching the next, covered

  by fronds of elder and without any portraits to decorate them, since the Jews have a terror of images. In their fascination with the site, engravers had perhaps exaggerated their depiction of the stones, which mushroomed from the ground like moorland shrubs bent back by the winds — the space seemed like the gaping mouth of a gap-toothed old witch. But thanks to some of the more imaginative engravers who had portrayed it in moonlight, I immediately saw how I could make use of that unearthly atmosphere, placing — among the stones that looked like paving slabs upended by some subterranean tumult — the bent, cloaked and hooded figures of rabbis, with their graying and goatish beards, intently conspiring, inclined like the gravestones against which they were leaning, so they formed a forest of wizened ghosts in the night. And at the center stood the tomb of Rabbi Loew, who in the sixteenth century had created the Golem, a monstrous creature who was supposed to avenge all Jews.

  Better than Dumas, and better than the Jesuits.

  My document, of course, had to appear in the form of an oral testimony by a witness to that terrible night — a witness forced on pain of death to remain anonymous. He must have been able to enter the cemetery at night, dressed as a rabbi, before the ceremony had begun, hiding behind the heap of stones that formed Rabbi Loew's tomb. On the stroke of midnight — as if the distant bell of a Christian church had blasphemously summoned
the Jewish gathering — twelve figures wrapped in dark cloaks would arrive, and a voice, seeming to rise from the depths of a tomb, would welcome them as Roshei Botei Avos, the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel, and each of them would answer, "Greetings to you, O son of the damned."

  This is the scene. Just as on Thunder Mountain, the voice that summoned them asks: "One hundred years have passed since our last assembly. Whence do you come and whom do you represent?" And the voices answer in turn: Rabbi Judah from Amsterdam, Rabbi Benjamin from Toledo, Rabbi Levi from Worms, Rabbi Manasse from Pest, Rabbi Gad from Kraków, Rabbi Simeon from Rome, Rabbi Sebulon from Lisbon, Rabbi Reuben from Paris, Rabbi Dan from Constantinople, Rabbi Asser from London, Rabbi Isascher from Berlin, Rabbi Naphtali from Prague. Then the voice of the thirteenth member of the gathering calls each of them to declare the wealth of his community, and calculates the wealth of the Rothschilds and the other great Jewish bankers around the world. In this way, he arrives at the figure of six hundred francs for each of the three and a half million Jews living in Europe — in other words, two billion francs. "It is still not enough to destroy two hundred and sixty-five million Christians," says the thirteenth voice, "but it is enough to make a start."

  I still had to decide what they would say, but I had mapped out the conclusion. The thirteenth voice invoked the spirit of Rabbi Loew; a bluish light shone from his tomb, becoming harsher and more dazzling; each of the assembled twelve threw a stone upon the grave and the light gradually faded. The twelve began to melt away in different directions, swallowed up (as they say) by the darkness, and the cemetery returned to its spectral, lifeless melancholy.

  So, Dumas, Sue, Joly and Toussenel. The only thing missing, apart from the mastery of Father Barruel, my spiritual guide in the whole plan, was the point of view of a fervent Catholic. Lagrange, at that very time, while urging me to hasten my contact with the Alliance Israélite, had spoken of Gougenot des Mousseaux. I knew something about him. He was a Catholic monarchist journalist, who had been interested in magic, satanic practices, secret societies and Freemasonry.