The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  Of course, public opinion immediately turns ugly. The local English merchants raise a fuss at the prospect of competition from some imagined Jewish influx, and the usual anti-Semitic rumors circulate: the Jews are buying St. Paul’s Cathedral for the sum of one million pounds . . . the Jews are coming to use the blood of Christian children in their Passover feasts. Poems were circulating about how Cromwell, before executing Charles I, had befriended the Jews because it was only natural that someone who wanted to crucify his king would want to take lessons from those who crucified the savior.

  So now, politically speaking, Cromwell can’t approve any substantial Jewish immigration. But he gets as far as letting the hidden Jews who are already in London be officially and openly Jewish . . . as long as they’re not too blatant about it, and don’t invite hundreds of their Jewish cousins to join them in London.

  Given that the last time we Hebes had been in England, the locals had taken to massacring us as calisthenics to warm up for the Third Crusade, stepping out as Jews must have seemed a dubious proposition. But bit by bit these London Jews start being more public about their religion. Meanwhile, though, Menasseh ben Israel has a big falling out with them. He doesn’t think the Jews are being bold enough about outing themselves, and he keeps trying to push Cromwell for fuller official acceptance. But the Jews of London don’t want him to do it—the Inquisition is still going on, remember, and even though London’s Jews are themselves safely out of Spain or Portugal, plenty of them lost family members to the Inquisition. They know just how bad things can be. And they’ve been living under cover in London just fine, thank you. Sure, they’re grateful to Menasseh that they’ve now got permission to be openly Jewish, but they don’t want to take instructions from some naive rabbi who spent most of his life in tolerant Amsterdam. They want him to stop pushing before he brings trouble down on their heads.

  Menasseh ben Israel insists, he tries to get Cromwell to press forward, and he can’t get anyone to budge. For all his effort, no expanding English Jewry, no Messiah, nada. Failure.

  Then Menasseh ben Israel’s son, who had traveled to London with him, dies. Menasseh goes back to the Netherlands. And then he himself dies there a couple months later, at the age of fifty-three.

  Oh yeah—and Cromwell up and dies right after this. So much for any guarantees of safety. At which point the gears start turning for the monarchy to return, and things start to look dicier again for the Jews.

  So now here’s why I’ve recited this whole interminable history, Marisa (and no, it’s not just because I had to memorize this stuff for my undergrad comps). Today, this afternoon, I literally had my hands on two letters sent from an obscure rabbi to old Menasseh ben Israel himself, reporting on the London community’s progress and urging Menasseh not to give up hope. And they’re not just dry stuff, Marisa. I read one and I have to say, I felt I was in the room with the guy who wrote it. I liked him.

  So there’s the history. But there’s another complicating factor: the documents are written in iron gall ink. This ink is such a fucking headache, Marisa. It’s the kind everybody used before they moved over to the soot-based stuff. Some varieties stay stable for centuries, and some batches eat through paper—and nobody knows why, because nobody knows exactly how iron gall ink was made. But the effect is bizarre and totally unpredictable. Say a man 300 years ago sat down to write a letter, and let’s say the ink that happened to be in his ink-bottle when he started was a good batch . . . now, 300 years later, what he wrote on the first page of the letter is readable, maybe just a bit blurred. But when he got to page two of the letter, let’s say he started a new bottle of ink, and this one was a bad one. So 300 years later half of the words written in that ink will have eaten through the paper. Single letters can get spliced out of the paper. Entire words or phrases can just dissolve themselves out of the letter, especially where the writer maybe lingered over a word (dripping extra ink) or wrote with a heavier hand to place added emphasis. If he let a blot form on a word . . . 300 years later the acids may have excised that word and only that word.

  I opened a ledger this afternoon, not knowing it was completely deteriorated inside, and the whole thing blew up in my face. I had paper ash in my eyelashes. Professor Ice Queen looked like she was going to behead me with her fountain pen.

  He stopped and reread by the faint light of the screen. His e-mail showed nothing of where he had hesitated—not where the clock had ticked as his hands lingered on the keyboard, not the unaccustomed indecision that made him drag his mouse back over entire blocks of text and click them into oblivion. His incapacitating, shameful yearning ate through nothing that was visible.

  So there you have it: we dive into the papers beginning tomorrow. A side trip into the late seventeenth century, a little breather from the Shakespeare work, which will probably enrich my approach to the dissertation when I return to it. Darcy, my advisor, seems pleased.

  Now write back and tell me all the clever and naughty things you’ve been up to, far from dusty libraries and nasty old Englishwomen, out there in the Promised Land where the men and women are bold and brave, and even shitty airline food, traffic jams, and taxes are good for the Jews.

  —A.

  He pressed Send, and regretted it.

  4

  November 22, 1657

  16 Kislev, 5418

  London

  With the help of G-d

  To the esteemed Menasseh ben Israel,

  Word reaches us here in London that you have traveled as far as Middleburg but are unwell.

  In the days that remain to me I shall not attain your level of scholarship. I am unable to open for myself the doors of holy books, but must wait for a student to read their precious words aloud. Yet I will presume to speak to you once more. I have not told you, nor shall I, of all your father endured at the hands of the Inquisitors in Lisbon. You do not need to be told, for you have ever understood, and willingly labor on behalf of our people. Yet it is not required of you to bear on your own shoulders the burden of hastening the Messiah’s arrival, when we will throng to greet him with tears in our eyes.

  Unlike me, you are not yet an old man. May I then offer my counsel, that your able body and spirit might make use of it? The spark of your learning is still needed by the people. And, my son, if it is extinguished, even the blind will feel the darkness deepen.

  I beg of you to rest, to seek healing of the spirit and healing of the body.

  Our life is a walk in the night, we know not how great the distance to the dawn that awaits us. And the path is strewn with stumbling blocks and our bodies are grown tyrannous with weeping yet we lift our feet. We lift our feet.

  With the help of G-d,

  R. Moseh HaCoen Mendes

  5

  November 3, 2000

  London

  A brittle light stretched across the dark tabletop, across the manuscripts before him. Seated under the tall windows of the shelf-lined room the Eastons had turned over to them—the house’s old library, by the look of it—Aaron rubbed his hands together for warmth. The Eastons hadn’t provided a heater, and the house’s great hearths were in other, grander rooms. No wonder people had died young in the seventeenth century, he thought. Shivered to death, probably, in drafty rooms like this.

  Outside, a dusting of snow.

  Helen Watt sat opposite him, a separate set of documents laid before her, writing in pencil on a notepad. Upon Aaron’s arrival, nearly on time despite the sluggish bus, she’d greeted him with only a pointed glance at her wristwatch—and, as he’d spread notebook and papers around him, a cluster of facts: the records Helen had tracked down so far showed that the HaLevy family, to whom the house had belonged for a period of thirty-seven years, were Portuguese Jews who had arrived in London around 1620. The family also seemed to have owned a substantial house back inside the walled city of London. Possibly they’d used the Richmond house as a country residence—in those days London was defined by the City walls and Richmond was the countrys
ide, a half day’s ride by coach or a slow trip up the Thames.

  Other than that update and rapid instructions regarding which documents to start with (evidently she’d decided to trust his skills as a translator for the moment), Helen Watt had said not a word to Aaron in more than an hour—nor had she inquired whether he himself had troubled to do any outside research. Well, if she wanted to underestimate him, let her; he’d intended to tell her straightaway about the connection he’d discovered, but maybe he’d pick his own time to raise the subject.

  He surveyed the pages before him now. He’d chosen the best preserved of the first batch to begin with, and had made quick work of six documents, one each in Hebrew and English and four in Portuguese. Quick consultations with online resources had aided him past a few rough spots in the translations, and he was pleased with his progress, despite the stern looks Helen shot every time he turned to his computer. Bridgette had breezed by to set up a web connection for him, leaning past him at the table, her wrist brushing his as she typed in her password. He’d felt Helen Watt watching keenly then, too, and had laughed inside at the iron weight of her gaze.

  The document Aaron had just begun translating was a sermon, recorded in the same elegant sloping hand, the same aleph scratched at the bottom. He was beginning to feel a camaraderie with this Aleph—who had probably been trapped day after day in some chilly room like this one at the rabbi’s household inside the City walls—working hours on end, inked quill in his cramped hand. Slaving away to do the boss’s will.

  He chuckled aloud, and pretended not to notice when Helen’s head jerked up from her work.

  Opening a new file on his laptop, he began the translation. Upon the Death of the Learned Menasseh ben Israel, the sermon was titled. Below that: by Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes, to be read aloud to the congregation. The sermon was several pages long, and where some words had been crossed out and rewritten the ink damage was heavy. Nonetheless, Aaron found he could make his way through the text. The people of Israel gather in sorrow today . . . God will comfort the mourners . . . Slowly he typed the words into his computer, platitudes he recognized from his own father’s sermons. There was more substance here, of course, including a heartfelt tribute to Menasseh: The learned Menasseh ben Israel was a man who carried in his soul the knowledge of his father’s torment in Lisbon at the hands of the wicked . . .

  Following this prelude, the sermon turned from praise to careful persuasion—true to the form, Aaron noted. He’d heard enough sermons in his life to consider himself a bit of a specialist in the genre. As a boy he’d even whispered made-up bits of sermons before the bathroom mirror, emulating his father’s measured delivery and envisioning the day when he’d surprise his father with the information that he too (in Aaron’s youthful imaginings he’d be grown, a university student, magically transformed, every awkwardness vanquished) was going to take a pulpit. That vision had lasted until one Sunday morning when Aaron had come upon his father sitting at the breakfast table, already clean-shaven and reading the news—a sight Aaron had seen every week of his life, yet this time he understood it in a sudden fever of adolescent indignation: his father, shaking the spread newspaper into amiable submission before reaching for his coffee, wasn’t sifting the day’s news for any fresh truth, but simply for material that confirmed his own stance. The congregation—suburban, Reform—expected sermons that sampled the world and revealed threats worthy of a frisson—worthy perhaps of an uptick in charitable giving, perhaps a few evenings’ volunteer work. But not panic. Sermons that revealed the world as perhaps arduous, but never without mercy.

  Read the newspaper, Aaron’s father liked to say, you’ll grow to be an educated man. Aaron had taken the advice to heart. And had read enough, by age fourteen, to see that his father’s safe sermons bore no resemblance to the sheer bloody courage the world required.

  Neither, to be honest, did Aaron’s own petty teenage cowardice; his tendency to split hairs when what was required was action; his tendency to inflate personal slights—in the classroom, on the playing field, with the girls he dazzled and then bewildered. Not that any of that seemed to hinder him: he was the high school smartass goading teachers while his classmates guffawed. He was the college freshman who didn’t miss a beat when his Modern American History TA took him aside with the air of one delivering a painful but necessary blow: I understand no one offered to partner with you for your research project. It might help, Aaron, if you’d “get rid of that smirk”—the TA making air-quotes on pronouncing the last words, to show Aaron that he was only repeating a complaint made by fellow students. (It might have helped, Aaron had thought, if he’d actually wanted a partner.) An ex-girlfriend, in a bitter outburst she obviously hoped would wound Aaron, had even called him Teflon Man.

  But sometimes when he talked about history his voice cracked.

  He gave himself credit for not waging war in his father’s home—if only because his father’s cheerleading brand of Judaism never seemed worth the melodrama of a fight. Instead he’d quietly turned his back on the version of manhood he’d been groomed for. And in the place of religion and all that went with it—community, party line, family—he’d set history: the one thing that struck Aaron Levy as worth being humble for.

  He made his way slowly now through the dense Portuguese of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s sermon. As he translated, he could feel the words attempting to corral the listeners into considering their own priorities.

  The labor Menasseh ben Israel gave his life to, as surely as the martyrs still give their lives in the flames of the Inquisition, is of a breadth and depth that will sustain the most weary soul. Do not consider then, however learned you are, that your knowledge is complete. For learning is the river of G-d and we drink of it throughout our lives.

  Though the vocabulary and substance could not have been further from the sermons Aaron’s own father delivered, this one was clearly heading for a familiar destination. Educate your children. Join the Temple Brotherhood. Donate.

  Ignorance is now your great enemy, and I do none any favor by flattering you that you are not ignorant.

  Now there was a sentence Aaron’s own father would never have dared speak to his own self-satisfied congregants.

  Being Jews now in the light of day, you may wish a rapid remedy for your ignorance. Glimpsing the void in your souls, you will by nature wish for that which will fill it at once. It is from this wish that you must be on your guard, and discern the light of true learning from the false. There will be those who would sell you false knowledge and promise ready redemption. Yet it is only G-d who chooses the time of His revelations, and when He brings us to the world to come it will be sudden and not of our planning. It is not G-d’s will, nor was it that of Menasseh ben Israel, may his memory be a blessing, that Jews should wager on the Messiah as dicers will, but rather that we labor steadily and humbly all our days.

  The sermon ended there. No phrases to soften the message, no consolation. Only this stark warning.

  Aaron reread, impressed. Was HaCoen Mendes trying to inoculate his listeners, as early as 1657, against the quickening spread of false-messiah hysteria? At that date Sabbatai Zevi, the most devastating of the messiah-imposters, whose delusional claims would roil Jewish communities throughout Europe, had yet to build his enormous following. But perhaps HaCoen Mendes had already heard rumor of Sabbatai Zevi’s rise and was beginning to develop the counterarguments that he’d later lay out in more sophisticated form.

  It would interest the scholarly community, this one.

  He saved the file in which he’d translated the sermon and turned to the next document in his pile. The ink damage was heavy, the English handwriting halting, with some strike-outs where the writer had reconsidered his spelling. At the bottom of the last page, the initial aleph. Clearly Aleph was less comfortable in English. Stood to reason, if Aleph, like the rabbi, had arrived in England only a few months before writing this.

  Aaron began reading from the beginning.

 
Upon the Death of the Learned Menasseh ben Israel, it began. He read the first lines and saw that it was merely a translation of the Portuguese sermon. Good—he could compare it to his own translation later, see how his Portuguese scored against Aleph’s English. Me and you, Aleph, he thought. A friendly translation-smackdown across three and a half centuries. Relieved and suddenly hungry, he stood, pushed his chair far from the table, and stretched for the ceiling with an ostentatious yawn.

  Helen looked up.

  “Lunch break,” he said. He took his sandwich from his bag and settled on a chair in a corner, away from the table where the documents were spread.

  Dropping her glasses to her breastbone, Helen blew out a long breath.

  “What did you find?” she said.

  He unwrapped his sandwich. “First, two letters in Portuguese, addressed to HaCoen Mendes. One regarding books he’d asked to have sent to him from a bookseller in Amsterdam. The other telling HaCoen Mendes about a student who will be coming to study with him and proposing a weekly fee. After that, something in English, a bill for a purchase of candles.” He bit into his sandwich and chewed.