“Whoever that girl is,” the duke cried, “set her free, whether she wins or not.” The crowd, staring minutely at every motion of the fat rabbi in recovering his pants, cheered and whistled. Zaki, hurt and far behind the others, tried to withdraw, but the Dominican poked him and informed him that he, like all the others, must finish the course.
Down the Corso, Zaki went, then back toward the cathedral; but as the runners re-entered the square the same girl pulled down the pants of another of the Jews, and the race ended in an obscene scramble, with firecrackers exploding, music playing and the crowd screaming its approval. Minutes after the others had finished Rabbi Zaki waddled up to the cathedral door.
Along with the five other racers he was handed his brown robe and red dunce’s cap. Dressed thus, he was shepherded into the cathedral, where the Jews of the community were assembled on wooden benches set off from the rest of the church by rope, and while the citizens of the town and many from outlying villages—for their small locales provided no such spectacles—crammed in to stare at the Jews arid surround them with hostility, the prelates of the Church assembled and took their places on a wooden platform. The duke and his escorts went to other specially erected seats and all listened as a haggard friar began a conciliatory sermon intended to show the Jews the glories of a gentle and forgiving Christianity.
“You swine, you pigs, you filth of the gutters,” he shouted at them, “you abominations, you unspeakable dogs of the outhouse, why do you persist in your contumacy? With your hooked noses you smell out the filth of the world and are content to lie in darkness and wallow in your own defecation. Your women are all whores. Your men are circumcised criminals. Your daughters are the bawds of the nation. You are the Anti-Christ and your sons shall perish in eternal hellfire. Why are you so obdurate?” For twenty minutes the friar, whose job it was to convert the Jews to a higher form of religion, hurled at them thunderbolts of scorn and poured over them the vials of his abuse. No crime was too contemptible for them to have committed, no malpractice too abominable for them to wallow in. It was a sermon that was being preached throughout the Christian world in those years and it was based upon a perverse logic, for with each fresh insult the Jews, roped together in their special area, knew that what the fiery man said was preposterous, and they concluded that if his Church were as ignorant of Judaism as he was, there was truly no sense in listening to its plea for conversion. If the Jews of Europe had had even the slightest inclination toward apostasy, their obligatory attendance at the yearly conversion sermon would have hardened their hearts against it.
Now the friar came to the second part of his plea: “You argue in the filth of your despair that God is one, whereas we know that He is three. How can you be so blind? So stupid? So contumacious? Why do you persist in holding to your Old Book when we have proved that it is faulty? Why do you refuse to accept the glorious New Book, which clearly contains the truth? God is three and all the world proclaims this fact. Can you not see that your Old Book was given you only temporarily so that the way might be prepared for the true words of the New? Why do you cling to your error? Why?”
And every Jew sitting by sufferance in the cathedral that day knew that he persisted in his error, his oftentimes fatal error, because he had been taught from the days of Abraham and Moses and Elijah that God is one, indivisible, alone and unknowable.
From the pulpit the friar now launched into the final portion of his sermon, using at last the soft voice of reason: “Come, Jews, who were once Christians, come back to the true Church while there remains a chance. Forswear your error. Surrender your blindness. Come back with singing hearts to that seamless robe where you will find peace and gentleness and love.” He paused. From inside the roped-off section faces of stone stared back. The friar, seeing the obdurate Jews and sensing their unwillingness even to listen, decided to remind them of the special condition in which they lived. “You are not ordinary Jews, men and women of Podi,” he began quietly, “you are people upon whom the baptism of Christ once rested. You are people who have gone astray, and unless you return quickly to the fold events of a terrible nature are bound to overtake you.” His voice rose to a dreadful, premonitory wail: “For if you do not return to the Church you will be dragged into the cellars to taste the rope, the fagot and the choking water. Your bodies will be broken and your hearts torn with anguish. The peace that I offer you this day will no longer be available, and you will march across the piazza not in the spirit of friendly sport as you did this day, but bearing a fiery brand which will be used to light the fires which will consume you. Fiends, idiots, sons of hell—repent now. Join the true Church now. Abjure the blasphemies of Moses and the old ways. Now, now!” He ended in a paroxysm of religious fervor, and Rabbi Zaki, who knew something of these matters, was terrified.
That night, after Rachel had belabored him again for being so fat and for having allowed the whore to tear down his pants in the race, Zaki started to speak seriously of his fear, but at this point his daughters took up the complaint and insisted that by next spring he lose his weight and not humiliate them. The sorely tried man was tempted to bang the table and cry, “We are not talking about humiliation! We are talking about our lives.” Instead, he waited for his womenfolk to complete their condemnation, which he knew they had a right to deliver—for they were wounded in spirit—and when they were done he said quietly, “The friar meant what he said. We shall be allowed a few more years. Then the burnings will begin.”
“Zaki!” his wife snapped. “Are you an idiot?”
“I am saying what I know to be true. We must leave Italy this week.”
“What do you mean, burning?” his wife heckled. “Because you are so fat that you fell down? Because the friar made his usual ugly speech? You grow suddenly afraid?”
“I am desperately afraid,” Zaki acknowledged. “That angry man meant what he said.”
“Where would we go?” Rachel demanded. “Tell me, where?”
Zaki lowered his voice, looked about the room and said, “Salonica. There is a letter from a German Jew who fled to Salonica, and he says that the Grand Turk …”
“To Salonica!” his wife repeated. She began laughing hysterically and pointing at her daughters. “Do you think I want them to marry Turks?”
Zaki waited for his wife’s contempt to die down, then said quietly, “Rachel, we are in trouble. I think we should sail for Salonica immediately.”
This was too much for Rachel. She rose from her chair, stormed about her husband’s mean shop and cried, “Has not the Pope himself assured us that we can live peaceably in Italy for as long as we wish? Are you a coward that you doubt his promise?”
“This Pope promised. The next Pope can revoke,” Zaki argued carefully.
“But he gave the promise because he knew that we were baptized forcibly. We were never true Christians, and like the good man he is he has allowed us to be Jews again. I do not wish to go to Salonica. I refuse.”
“Rachel,” the fat rabbi pleaded, “you asked me if I was a coward? Yes, I am. I listened to that man today and he was on fire. He sounded like the priests of Spain and Portugal. He will not rest until Jews like you and me are burned. Rachel, listen!”
But Rachel would not listen, and she refused to permit her daughters to listen, either. Tormented by that day’s confusions the rabbi’s family went to bed, but he did not, and in the morning, after prayers, he went to the ducal palace, where he waited for five hours until the duke allowed him to enter. “I want permission to take a boat to Salonica,” Zaki said.
“What!” the duke exploded. “You want to leave?”
“Yes,” Zaki replied.
“But why?”
“I am afraid.”
“Of what? Zaki,” the duke laughed thinly, “you mustn’t worry about the fun yesterday. We meant no harm. As for the girl who tore down your pants, the jailer put her up to it. Women are curious about these things, you know.” He chuckled at the harmless teasing. “Zaki, we meant no offe
nse. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of.”
“But I am afraid.”
“All right! Next year you won’t have to race.”
“It’s the sermon I’m afraid of.”
“That?” the duke laughed. “We have to do that. Once a year. Pay no attention to him. I rule this city.”
“Excellency, the friar meant what he said.”
“That fool? That clerk? He can do nothing, believe me.”
“Excellency, I am terribly afraid. Let me take my family to the Grand Turk.”
“No, by God! Not to that infidel.”
“Please. Evil days are coming here, of that I am sure.”
The duke found this statement offensive, for Pope Clement himself had promised that Jews baptized under force would be forever under the protection of the papacy and were free to practice their religion as they wished. It was expected that future Popes would repeat this promise. Therefore, when Rabbi Zaki expressed his wish to leave Italy, heading for the realms of the Turk, his plea could be considered only as an insult to the Church. “You cannot go,” the duke said, and the interview was ended.
At home the women deduced where the rabbi had been and they chided him for his faint-heartedness. Other Jews were summoned to ridicule him, and all pointed out that whereas the fears he expressed might have been logical in Spain or Portugal, where there was an Inquisition determined to uncover Jews masquerading as Christians, there was no logical ground for fear in Podi. “This is Italy!” they pointed out, taking refuge in the constant rationalization of the Jew: “It won’t happen here. The people are too civilized.”
Rabbi Zaki for once in his life could not be swayed by either his friends or his family. He had a clear vision of what must inevitably happen in Italy, either with the arrival of a new Pope or with a change in the prosperity of the peninsula. “I am afraid,” he repeated stubbornly. “I saw the faces of the people yesterday. There was hatred in the cathedral.”
“He’s been making the same speech every year,” a cautious merchant repeated. “We’d feel the way you do, Rabbi, if we’d raced half-naked with the women laughing at us.”
“But you didn’t have to race, did you?” Rachel stormed. “Because you’re not fat like a pig.”
Zaki was stunned that his wife should have used this word again and in front of his congregation. With a pleading voice he whispered, “That is not a word to use against a rabbi.”
“But you do eat like a pig!” she cried, and he looked at the floor. It was a mark of the little rabbi that even in his humiliation he never once thought of leaving Podi without his nagging wife, even though he could easily have done so; two men from the city had fled to Amsterdam without their families, but he could not understand their behavior. He knew there was going to be terror in Italy and he could not abandon his stubborn wife and his unlovely daughters to face it, obstinate though they were.
“I am taking my family to Salonica,” he said quietly, “and if you men are wise, you’ll do the same.”
His wife was so irritated that she refused to discuss the matter, and the meeting broke up with a sense of frustration and fear. But in the morning Rabbi Zaki was back arguing with the duke, and after apologizing for any possible insult to the Duke, to the Pope or to the Church he again asked permission to emigrate.
“Give me one reason,” thundered the duke.
Zaki, during the night, had pondered half a dozen good reasons, but on the spur of the moment dismissed them all and said, “Because I have three daughters, Excellency, and like a good father I wish to marry them to Jewish men, whom I can find in Salonica.”
The duke considered this unexpected reasoning and began to laugh. “You have to find three husbands, Zaki?”
The rabbi said “Yes,” and sensing that he had enlisted the interest of the duke, added, “It’s not easy, Excellency. To find one good husband these days is not easy.”
“And you think that in Salonica …”
“Yes.”
The duke called in his younger brother, for whom he had obtained the appointment as Archbishop of Podi, and when that amiable prelate heard of Rabbi Zaki’s request to leave the city he did his best to quieten the Jew’s fears. “The duke commands here,” the archbishop reasoned, “and you should know that he will tolerate no act against his Jews.”
“I need you for my commerce,” the duke said.
“But I heard the friar say we were to be burned,” Zaki said. “I believe him.”
“That one?” the archbishop asked, laughing like a man recalling a pleasant day in the field. “You certainly know that my brother and I found his silly sermon as repugnant as you did, Zaki. Consider it only as a part of the Easter celebration and pay no more attention.”
“I cannot put it out of my mind. I am afraid.”
The tall archbishop summoned Zaki to the window and pointed toward the center of the piazza, where from a granite plinth rose a statue of the Duke of Podi astride a white stallion. The sculptor had caught the condottiere, sword in hand, at the moment of his conquest of Podi, and his manly bearing lent dignity and courage to the city he ruled. “Do you suppose a warrior like the duke would ever permit a preaching friar or even a Pope to determine his behavior?” The churchman laughed at the absurdity, but when Zaki repeated that he wanted to go, the archbishop shrugged his shoulders. “In Podi we hold no man against his will,” he said compassionately. “But regulations covering departures are administered by the friars,” and he sent for the very man who had preached the Lenten sermon.
The Dominican bowed to the duke, acknowledged the archbishop and looked with disgust at the Jew who defiled the ducal rooms. “He should not be allowed to leave,” the friar warned. “He was baptized a Christian and it’s abhorrent that he should join the Turk.”
“He’s determined,” the archbishop said, whereupon the Dominican asked for pen and paper and began listing the restrictions under which Zaki might depart: “He may take with him no papers proving that Christians owe him debts. Nor any books written or printed, no money minted in this state, no lists of names which might help the Turk, nor any instruments for the Christian sacraments. And at the pier, in view of all, he must kneel and kiss the New Testament, acknowledging its divine inspiration.”
When the terms of departure were agreed upon, the Duke of Podi signed the paper and in later years this fact would be remembered against him. The archbishop signed, too, and this was also recorded. Finally the Dominican thrust the document at the Jew, warning him, “If one item is transgressed, you may not depart.”
But Zaki had his permission, and in a kind of mysterious terror he fled the room where he had always been treated so justly by the duke and his brother, for he sensed the deepening of a tragedy whose outlines he only vaguely understood; but as he crossed the piazza on his way to talk with a ship captain about passage, he stopped at the marble statue of the condottiere and muttered a prayer, “May God, Who allowed you to conquer this city, allow you to keep it.”
Then, as he neared home, he began to sweat, for although he had convinced the duke, the archbishop, the friar and the ship captain, he still had to convince his wife, and this would prove most difficult of all. But on one point he felt not the slightest uncertainty: even though he knew that tragedy was about to engulf Podi, if his wife and daughters refused to flee with him he would have to remain with them. “Rachel is sometimes a trial,” he muttered to himself, “but no man can desert his wife. Besides, she’s given me three lovely daughters.” For her sake he prayed that he could persuade her to leave the city.
When he reached his shoemaker’s shop he tried to put on a look of firmness and he must have succeeded, for Rachel saw that a decision of moment was about to be announced.
“I’ve been to the duke’s,” he began.
“Yes?”
“And he has agreed to let us go.”
“Where?”
“I’ve also been to see the captain and he has agreed …”
“Where?”
“There’s no turning back, Rachel,” the fat rabbi pleaded. “Evil days are ahead in this city …”
“Where?” she screamed. “Salonica?”
“Yes,” he said bravely, raising his arms to fend off the attack that must take place.
To his surprise Rachel sat down. She breathed heavily, made no other sound and hid her face in her hands. After a while she gave a low sob and summoned her daughters from the other room. “We’re going to Salonica,” she announced softly, like the whisper of a volcano afraid to explode. The oldest girl, Sarah, gasped and her mother leaped from the chair. “Yes!” she shouted. “Your father’s taking us to Salonica!” The youngest child began to cry and Rachel slapped her. “We’re going to Salonica,” she shouted in a hysterical giggle. “You’re all going to marry Turks.” She collapsed in the chair; even the older girls began crying, whereupon she stormed about the room, shouting, “We’re going to Salonica, oh, my God!” Then she slapped each of the girls harshly and announced calmly, “We shall do as your father says. No one in this room will ever again argue about his decision.”
She kept her word. With demonic frenzy she applied herself to packing the family goods, but as she tied each parcel the Dominican friar would come to inspect it, reminding her that many of the things she wanted to take belonged, by agreement, to the Church. Once Zaki was afraid that Rachel would fly at the Dominican, but she patiently surrendered even the toys of her children. When the friar had completed his third scrutiny Rachel declared war, muttering, “Very well.” Digging up a secret hoard of forbidden gold pieces she sewed them adroitly into unlikely places, so that when the rabbi’s family was given its final searching she succeeded in smuggling so many coins that she could support the family for some years in its flight.
The Jews of Podi came to the pier to bid their frightened rabbi farewell, and to him they seemed like a necklace of beautiful pearls strung along the dock, causing tears to well up in his eyes as he listened to their farewells; fortunately he could not hear their whispers: “Look at our crazy rabbi. Lost his head because a whore pulled down his pants.” And then, like the shadow of death crossing the waves, a darkness came over Zaki’s vision and he saw his beloved congregation as it was to be. There stood fat Jacopo, who had been in the race, and he would be burned alive in 1556. Beside him stood thin Meir, a cherished friend who would be burned alive in 1555. There were the sisters Ruth and Zipporah; the elder would be burned alive in 1555, but the younger would die in prison almost torn apart by torture. There was also the gentle Josiah, who would die at the stake in 1556, but because he was dim-witted he would escape death by flame, because at the end he would say uncomprehendingly, “Of course I accept conversion,” and the executioner would mercifully strangle him before the fires began.