Rashi's Daughters, Book III: Rachel

by Anton, Maggie

  “Let me see Papa. Let me talk to him,” Rachel cried out.

  “He’s at Shabbat services now: I can’t disturb him.”

  “But I never got to say good-bye,” she pleaded.

  It was too late. Mama and the herb garden were disappearing in a fog. “He says to pray Psalms 138 and 140 on your trip,” were Mama’s fading words.

  When Rachel woke up, she remembered that these were the psalms invoked to reawaken love between a man and a woman.

  Saturday night, the first of Elul, Rachel was about to blow out her bedroom lamp when Miriam called through the door, “Rachel, I hope you’re not asleep yet.”

  Rachel quickly let her sister in. “Non—I was just about to get in bed though.”

  “Elizabeth needs help with some twins she’s delivering, so I wanted to say adieu to you tonight, as I doubt I’ll be home in the morning.”

  “I’m glad you’ve come.” Rachel gave Miriam a warm hug.

  “Shemiah says you refused to let him go with you,” Miriam said with a frown.

  Before Rachel could reply, Joheved peeked through the slightly open doorway. “I thought I heard voices.” She tiptoed in and closed the door behind her. “I don’t think you should travel alone either.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be safe with all the merchants.” Rachel’s voice conveyed her determination. “My son has already spent too much time away from his wife, and I want him to be here with her, especially if I’m delayed for several months until Eliezer is well enough to ride.”

  Joheved’s eyes opened wide in surprise. “You mean . . . ?”

  Rachel smiled and nodded. “Rivka told me that Glorietta hasn’t immersed in the pond with her all summer.”

  “I’m glad you’re bringing Eliezer back.” Miriam’s expression clouded. “Papa’s death hit Judah very hard, and I don’t know if he can finish Papa’s kuntres without Eliezer’s help.”

  “I’m not sure Eliezer and I will stay in Troyes all the year.” When Rachel saw her sisters’ disappointment, she quickly added, “Of course we’ll be here most of the time, making sure the yeshiva thrives and visiting our grandchildren. But I’d like to travel in between fairs, for there are so many places we haven’t seen together.”

  “What if Eliezer still insists on living in Toledo?” Miriam asked.

  Rachel had prepared herself for that possibility. “We could spend part of the year there, with Eliezer opening a small yeshiva.”

  They might even work on the king’s translations together. After all, why should all that Latin she’d learned go to waste? For if she, a woman, could study Talmud, why couldn’t she study Ptolemy or Aristotle?

  “That’s a good idea,” Joheved said. “Meir and I are concerned that the only yeshivot left are in France.” She hesitated and lowered her voice. “If things go badly for the Franks in Jerusalem, I’m afraid they may take vengeance on the Jews here.”

  Rachel sighed. So Eliezer wasn’t the only one afraid of what those who worshipped the Hanged One might do in the future.

  “We must have faith in the Holy One, Who will never forsake us as long as we keep learning Torah.”

  “You’re right,” Joheved replied, as Miriam nodded in agreement. “And we must work to send Papa’s commentaries to all the foreign communities, so his words won’t be lost no matter what happens.”

  Miriam stepped forward and embraced Rachel for a long time. “I mustn’t keep Elizabeth waiting. Please be careful, and write us as soon as you arrive.”

  “And my little sister needs a good night’s sleep before her long journey,” Joheved added before following Miriam out the door and closing it silently behind them.

  The next morning Rachel rose to the sounds of one shofar after another blowing throughout the Jewish Quarter, their raucous calls intermingled with the peals of Troyes’ many church bells. Her necessities for the long journey were packed, but Rachel realized there was something she’d forgotten. She unlocked the chest at her bedside and took out her get from Eliezer. She noticed her hands were shaking and took a deep breath to calm herself. When she saw Eliezer again, she would return the divorce decree to him so he could destroy it.

  Don’t worry, she told herself, as she rode through the narrow streets leading to the fairgrounds, where the merchants from Sepharad were assembling. Wherever there were Jews in the world, there would be Torah study. And no matter what happened with Eliezer, no matter where she ended up living, Papa’s spirit would watch over her.

  And so may the spirit of Rabbenu Salomon ben Isaac continue to watch over all the daughters of Israel who study Talmud.

  epilogue

  SALOMON BEN ISAAC’S LEGACY CONTINUED through his eleven grandchildren and numerous great-grandchildren. By the time Joheved died in 1135, outliving her sisters and brothers-in-law, her son Jacob, now called Rabbenu Tam, was recognized as the undisputed head of Ashkenaz Jewry. Interestingly it was Hannah’s son who became the outstanding scholar and leader of the next generation, not one of Salomon’s grandsons’ sons, as his family’s greatness continued through the female line.

  Sadly the erudition, creativity, and tolerance of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance were to be short-lived. As Rachel and Eliezer feared, the Crusades opened the Levant to Christian merchants, and by the thirteenth century, the great Italian city-states had supplanted Jews as long-distance traders.

  In early 1171, the first accusation of ritual murder in France was leveled against the Jews of Blois, resulting in thirty-one Jews being burned at the stake—including Count Thibault’s Jewish mistress, who refused to forsake her people. In that final year of his life, Rabbenu Tam unleashed his formidable influence to provoke such widespread condemnation of the events in Blois that even King Louis publicly proclaimed his refusal to believe such scandalous charges against the Jews.

  But in 1187, when Saladin united Egyptian and Turkish armies to recapture Jerusalem, nobody could save the Jews after that.

  The failed Third Crusade demoralized France, and after the disastrous Fourth Crusade, which ended with the sack of Constantinople, Christian fighting Christian, the Church turned its eyes toward Europe.

  The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 decreed that Jews must wear special badges to distinguish them from the rest of the population, an edict enforced in England and royal France, but ignored in Provence, Spain, and Champagne. The thirteenth century saw a growing concern with heresy, leading to the Talmud being burned in Paris in 1242.

  Worse was yet to come. In 1267 the Inquisition was established to punish Christian heretics, as well as Jews who “induced” Christians to convert. Champagne was no longer a haven. In 1268 the count confiscated all Jewish goods and loans to finance a crusade that ended dismally with the death of King Louis in Tunis. Ritual murder accusations came to Troyes in 1288, where thirteen Jews were turned over to the Inquisition, found guilty, and burned alive.

  The final blow came when the entire Jewish population of France was expelled in 1306, forcing more than twenty thousand Jews to leave Champagne. Thus, just two hundred years after his death, Salomon ben Isaac’s many descendants abandoned their homes and fled to every corner of Europe: Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Provence, Italy, and Spain. More expulsions followed, scattering his seed further. A statistician at Stanford has calculated that someone with European Jewish ancestry today is almost certainly descended from Rashi.

  As his descendants spread throughout Europe and the Levant, they brought with them his Torah and Talmud commentaries. Eliezer may have been correct in his predictions of the Crusades’ devastating effect on Ashkenaz, but he was wrong in saying that Salomon’s words would die with him.

  Today more Jews study Rashi every day than all other Jewish scholars together—in synagogues, yeshivot, and Jewish homes throughout the world. Some say that without Rashi’s kuntres, Talmud would be lost to Judaism and the Jewish religion would be very different, if indeed it existed at all.

  And just as Talmud study has continued to thrive in our generation, as w
omen find the subject no longer closed to them, so there is a new future for the Jews of Troyes. Empty of Jews for five hundred years, the city has been repopulated by a community of Sephardim expelled from Muslim Algeria when the State of Israel was established in 1948. Across the street from their synagogue sits the Rashi Institute, founded in 1989 to study the history of French Jewry.

  Indeed some of my own research was done within its walls.

  afterword

  ONE QUESTION MORE THAN ANY OTHER INTRIGUES my readers: what is fact in Rashi’s Daughters and what is fiction?

  Salomon ben Isaac was a real man, whose commentaries and responsa contain thousands of words about his life, his community, and his opinions. Regarding him, I have made every attempt to be as historically accurate as possible, and when forced to be creative, I have used the wealth of information contained in his writings to stay true to his character as I know it.

  His daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren are also historical figures, as are the various clerics and feudal lords who appear in this book, and I used their real names whenever they were known. I did have to invent a name for Rashi’s wife, and for some of his granddaughters as well, because the names of most Jewish women in history have been lost to us. I also fabricated a few grandchildren who would die young, ensuring that my tale reflected this sad historical reality that was the eleventh century.

  In my first book, I built upon two popular legends about Rashi’s daughters—that they studied Talmud and prayed with tefillin. But there is a less-well-known legend that says they wrote the commentary on Tractate Nedarim that has come down to us as Rashi’s, which is clearly not in his usual terse and pithy style. To this day, the author of this text remains unidentified, but my careful study suggests a feminine point of view.

  Not everything written about Rashi’s daughters is legend. Much is recorded about Joheved and Meir, including when they died and what Meir said at her funeral. Less is known of Miriam and Judah. We know the names of their children and that their eldest son, Yom Tov, served as rosh yeshiva in Paris. And in Rashi’s commentary on Tractate Makkot 19a, we find the words Judah wrote upon his father-in-law’s death.

  But so little data exists concerning Rachel and Eliezer that some scholars doubt Rashi had more than two daughters. The main evidence comes from a letter Rabbenu Tam wrote to his cousin Yom Tov that mentions the divorce of their aunt Rachel from Eliezer, plus the existence of a grandson of Rashi’s named Shemiah, who is neither Joheved’s son nor Miriam’s.

  Not much from which to write a historical novel.

  My first challenge was to create a plot involving Rachel and Eliezer’s divorce; yet I knew I had to take care in making them both sympathetic and heroic figures. There could be no villains in Rashi’s immediate family. Aware that some of the eighteenth century’s finest yeshiva students abandoned their Talmud studies when the Enlightenment opened the great European universities to them, I decided to make Eliezer similarly tempted by the ancient Greek knowledge being rediscovered in Spain during his lifetime. To my surprise, I learned that Arab astronomers had postulated a heliocentric planetary system hundreds of years before Copernicus.

  With Eliezer committed to his secular studies, Rachel would be forced to choose between the two men she loved most—her father and her husband. She would face the choice of leaving her family and moving with Eliezer to Spain, where women were hidden away at home and certainly didn’t study Talmud, or staying to care for an increasingly enfeebled Rashi in Troyes, where the massacres of the First Crusade threatened the Jews’ very existence.

  Ah yes—the First Crusade. Since I planned that my trilogy would end with Rashi’s death in 1105, there was no avoiding the First Crusade and its disastrous consequences for Rhineland Jewry. So I carefully salted the first two volumes with imaginary characters who’d be living in different Rhineland cities in the third—Catharina and Samson, Aunt Sarah’s son Elazar, Judah’s early study partners Daniel and Elisha. Then I took Jewish historical descriptions of the horrific events and had my characters experience them, using the original wording as much as possible. I apologize for the graphic violence, but I wanted to stay true to the eyewitness reports. It was a truly terrible time.

  How the martyrs of Mayence, Worms, and Cologne died is factual, as is the fate of Emicho’s men and the pilgrims who followed Peter the Hermit. However, the legend of a dying Rabbi Amnon writing Unetanah Tokef, one of the most powerful prayers of the Days of Awe, is completely unfounded. In fact, the prayer seems to have been composed, not in eleventh-century Mayence, but in Eretz Israel hundreds of years earlier. But the legend is so pervasive and compelling that I reworked it into a version that might have happened, or at least cannot so easily be disproved.

  My portrayals of life in Tunisia and Sepharad are taken from documents in the Cairo Geniza, but there is no evidence that either Eliezer or Rachel ever stepped foot out of Troyes. All of their travels are the product of my imagination, as are their occupations. Yet we know that in addition to being vintners, some of Rashi’s family earned a living from wool. Research showed that Rashi’s description of the horizontal loom in his kuntres is the earliest mention of such a device and that the first fulling mill appeared in northern France during his lifetime.

  Also during the twelfth century, wealthy clothing entrepreneurs emerged who employed all the laborers involved in the production of these expensive fabrics, eventually eliminating the previous system in which workers bought their own raw materials and equipment and then sold their product to the next craftsman in the chain. Amazingly, 80 percent of international trade in the Middle Ages consisted of luxury woolens and silk.

  For other events in Rachel and Eliezer’s life, I borrowed liberally from the medieval responsa literature. The incident where Joheved put the milk spoon in the meat pot is from Rashi’s own responsa, although he doesn’t state which daughter was responsible. Rashi also answered many questions about forced converts after the First Crusade, and I used the responsa from the man with an apostate brother to complicate Rachel’s life. Eliezer’s capture and self-ransom in the forest actually happened to another merchant, but it was too good a tale to ignore. Jewish women had little difficulty obtaining a divorce from their husbands at this time—unlike today—so I had Brunetta demonstrate the procedure.

  I tried to incorporate many of the local political events. Young Count Eudes died mysteriously on New Year’s in 1093, his successor Hugues barely survived an assassination attempt by his favored servant, and Érard of Brienne launched his attack soon after. The scandal of King Philip leaving his queen for the beautiful Bertrade is well known, as is the influence of Countess Adèle in Champagne’s affairs.

  In Spain, where Jews thrived despite (or because of) the constant battles between Spaniards and Moors, I placed Eliezer in the thick of the cultural and historical milieu. King Alfonso’s conquest of Toledo was a turning point in the Reconquista, and I couldn’t resist including El Cid as well as the poet Moses ibn Ezra, astronomer and philosopher Abraham bar Hiyya, and Arab mathematician Ibn Bajjah (the concentration of intellectual giants in Sepharad at the dawn of the twelfth century was extraordinary). It was quite an effort for me to assimilate the ideas of Ptolemy, Aristotle, and Philo well enough that I could then convey their essence to my readers.

  As in the first two volumes, the magical and medical remedies, as well as the astrology and demonology, came from the Talmud itself or other medieval sources. I could never have invented such bizarre stuff.

  Speaking of the Talmud, the passages quoted are: Berachot 10a and Shabbat 23b and 34a (chapter 2); Kiddushin 29b, Rosh Hashanah 33a, and Niddah 31b (chapter 4); Berachot 55b (chapter 6); Eruvin 100b and Shabbat 73a (chapter 7); Ketubot 51b (chapter 8); Shabbat 21 (chapter 9); Berachot 55a (chapter 10); Avodah Zarah 18a (chapter 14); Shabbat 66b and Kiddushin 33 (chapter 15); Shabbat 75a (chapter 16); Avodah Zarah 18a and Moed Katan 20b and 22b (chapter 17); Berachot 55a and Sukkah 29a (chapter 18); Taanit 30b (chapter 20); Rosh Hashanah 20-21
(chapter 24); more Rosh Hashanah 21 (chapter 25); Sanhedrin 38b (chapter 26); Nedarim 20b (chapter 27); Nedarim 50a and Sanhedrin 7a (chapter 29); Shabbat 67a (chapter 32); and Makkot 19a and Berachot 5a (chapter 33). All translations are my own.

  For those readers interested in my many sources, a bibliography is located on my Web site, www.rashisdaughters.com, under “historical info.”

  I thank you for sharing this journey with me. My hope is that, just as I enjoyed and learned a great deal from writing Joheved, Miriam, and Rachel’s stories, so you did as well while reading them.

  glossary

  Adar Final month of the Jewish year: Purim falls on the Fifteenth of Adar. An extra month, Adar II, is added in leap years.

  Allemagne Germany

  Angleterre England

  Baraita A source cited in the Talmud that is not found in the Mishnah.

  Bavel Babylonia

  Beit din Jewish court

  Bima Pulpit. The raised platform in synagogue where Torah is read.

  Bliaut Tunic. The outer garment worn over a chemise by both men and women.

  Brit milah Ritual circumcision, performed when the baby boy is eight days old.

  Chacham Jewish scholar

  Chalitzah Jewish ritual that frees a childless widow from levirate marriage.

  Compline Last of the eight canonical hours, approximately 3:00 a.m.

  Dinar Gold coin. A unit of money equal to 240 deniers, silver pennies.

  Disner The midday meal in medieval France, usually the largest meal of the day.

  Distaff The stick that holds the raw wool or flax to be spun into thread.

  Edomite European non-Jew (Talmudic term for Roman)

  Elul Sixth month of the Jewish calendar, the month prior to Days of Awe.

  Erusin Formal betrothal that cannot be annulled without a divorce but does not allow the couple to live together.