Authors: Kenneth Wishnia
“Well, what do you know? I thought you were made of clay,” said Zizka, turning the lantern on me. “Who’s he?”
Kromy said, “The new shammes of
Jew
Town
. A newcomer.”
“Newcomer, huh? You picked a hell of a day to start work. Think you can get your friends out of this?”
“They’re not my friends yet. But they are my people,” I said.
Someone outside swore at us, but I couldn’t make out the thick Moravian accent.
Julie said, “How long do we have to sit here? We have a lot to do today.”
“Really?” said Zizka, his eyes fixed on the dried bloodstains on the floor. “What’s so damn urgent, if you don’t mind telling me?”
“We have to rid the house of
khumets
before midday.”
My stomach tightened. Julie was such an innocent, she didn’t realize what trouble her plain speech was causing.
“You have to rid the house of
what
?”
I said, “All traces of leavened bread.”
“And why is that? Because you don’t want us to find all the evidence of blood in your Passover bread?”
“We don’t cook with blood. The Torah forbids—”
“Kromy, have you searched the house yet?”
“Not yet, sir. I was waiting for more men, and I didn’t want to take my eyes off these Jewish swine for an instant.”
Zizka nodded. “You two, go upstairs with Kromy and search the place.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What are we looking for?” said one of the guards.
“Evidence of illicit wealth,” said Kromy.
Zizka said, “Bottles, jugs, vials, basins—anything that might contain blood. And not just in the obvious places. The Jews are extremely clever about these things.”
“Yeah, sometimes we hide it in our veins,” I said.
Zizka glared at me as if he’d never heard a Jew talk that way before. Maybe he hadn’t. Kromy and the two guards left the shop and clomped up the outside stairs.
Their first reaction to this crime is to seek vengeance, not justice
. I had to do something to prevent a disaster. That such a mission was probably doomed to fail did not excuse me from trying. As Rabbi Tarfon says, “It’s not your job to finish the work, but you are not free to walk away from it.”
Looking at the girl, I tried to imagine who could have done such a thing. Certainly not Jacob Federn. Nobody kills a harmless child and leaves the body in his shop to be discovered by an angry Christian mob the next morning. The only way out of this mess was to discover what was gained from this girl’s death. But how could I do that? They’d never let me openly question any Christian witnesses. They might not even let me walk around the Christian streets of
Prague
. I had to confer with the great Rabbi Loew about this. He’d know what to do.
A great crash shook the ceiling as Kromy and his goons started tossing things around upstairs.
I told the sheriff, “Somebody ought to tell the girl’s parents. They’ve been searching for her all morning, calling her name from one end of town to the other.”
“I don’t need any advice from you, shammes,” said Zizka. But he dispatched a guard to Janek’s apothecary shop, then he ordered the three remaining guards to transport the victim’s body to the Town Hall.
The guards knelt beside the girl’s body. Just as they began to lift, one of them gasped, dropped the girl and pointed. Her neck wound had begun to flow with fresh blood. They all knew that such a thing only happens in the presence of the victim’s killer. The guards crossed themselves and swore at the cowering family.
Zizka brought the lantern closer. He stuck his finger in the victim’s blood, and pointed it at the Federns. They pulled away from his finger as if it oozed with the great pox.
“So, you shrink from the sign of your own guilt!”
“It’s not guilt, it’s a commandment from the highest authority,” I said. “Any contact with human blood makes us unclean for a week. Are you unclean from contact with blood, Reb Federn?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Are you,
fraylin
Federn?”
The women cried and denied it.
I turned to Sheriff Zizka. “With your indulgence, my good sir, I don’t believe that a Jew would ever lie about such a thing.”
“And I didn’t believe Jews really did such things till I saw it with my own eyes,” said Zizka. “Put them in irons.”
“Yes, sir.”
The guards closed in around the three accused criminals, the women emptying their eyes of tears and begging for God’s intercession.
I played the one card I had left in my slim hand. “I know that the evidence implicates this humble family, but according to the Carolinian Code, the Jews are the emperor’s concern, and are subject to his benevolent protection.”
Zizka said, “Is that so? Well, I didn’t bring my copy of the
Carolina
with me, but somehow it stuck in my mind that it also calls for the burning of unbelievers and sorcerers, and if you ask me, these Jews are both.”
“Then you’re supposed to summon the royal guards. Jews are under their jurisdiction.”
“Not for murder, they aren’t.”
“In all matters—”
“This is a matter for the city. Come on, you—”
The municipal guards seized Freyde and Julie. A couple of them struggled to force the irons around their wrists, knocking over boxes of feathers, which flew around as the women cried out in despair.
Another crash came from upstairs.
Seeing his stock damaged and his women manhandled so harshly, Jacob finally stood up and took responsibility.
“They had absolutely nothing to do with this. It’s all my fault.”
“Jacob, no—!”
“Silence, woman! Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Zizka. “You swear that your wife and daughter are innocent?”
“I swear.”
Zizka was clearly pleased with this statement. He probably figured that eliminating the women made things simpler, since women are much more difficult to prosecute in these matters. They have a much higher threshold for pain, for one thing.
“Then who were your accomplices?” he asked.
Jacob hesitated. There was no right answer to this one.
“Answer the question, Jew.”
I said, “He doesn’t have to answer. This line of questioning is reserved for the formal inquest at the emperor’s court.”
“Well, aren’t you the little Jewish lawyer. Go ahead. Try to use your clever words to get past me.”
“You don’t have to be a lawyer to know a frivolous murder charge when you see one,” I said, meeting the sheriff’s gaze.
The sheriff was only a couple of inches taller than me, but he had more than enough clout to back up his threats. Feathers drifted in the air between us. Zizka seemed to be suppressing a smile.
“Don’t listen to his lies,” said the woman with the blue kerchief, standing just outside the doorway.
“Just let us do our jobs, ma’am.”
The sheriff spoke to the whole room, but he was looking at me. “Now here’s how it’s going to be. Either the accused, Jacob Federn, tells us who his accomplices were, or you personally deliver them to us, shammes.”
“The imperial law code forbids the application of collective guilt—”
“You better shut up before I take you in as well, Jew. You know very well how to force the murderers to come forward.”
I opened my mouth to protest, and found that a feather had planted itself in my beard.
Zizka delivered his ultimatum. “You’ve got three days. And if we don’t get the truth out of this fellow, we’ll hold the whole community responsible. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when Monday morning comes around and you’re empty-handed.”
A few of the bystanders snickered.
“We’re going to seal up
Jew
Town
, effective immediately. If anyone tries to escape, it’ll be taken as proof of guilt, and we’ll burn the whole damn ghetto down to the ground.”
CHAPTER 6
EVERY NOW AND THEN the Christians go a little crazy.
Did any of them stop to think about who might profit from this crime? Or consider the possibility that someone might have wanted to stir up hatred and mayhem for unknown reasons? No, all they can see is bloodthirsty Jews everywhere they look. They see what isn’t there and don’t see what
is
there. And they think that what ever they can’t explain must be inherently evil. This is only partly true.
The rabbi in Slonim says that we spend every hour of the day surrounded by evil spirits who press in on us from all sides like an invisible army, and that the only reason we
don’t
go crazy is because most of the time we simply don’t realize that they’re there.
But there are other unseen forces that hover around the edges of our experience. The
Slonimer Rebbe
will also tell you of the
tsadek nister
, the hidden wise man who labors among us, perhaps as a humble shoemaker, whose inner wisdom and strength remain invisible to the outside world. The Jews say that at any given time, there are thirty-six such men in the world, who are known as
lamed-vovniks
, and that for their sake alone, God keeps the universe in one piece. Their true value is so carefully hidden that even
they
may not realize who they are.
For this reason, the great
ReMo
, Rabbi Moyshe Isserles of Kraków, always encouraged us to read the
khokhmes khitsoyniyes
, the “external wisdoms,” because he believed that all forms of wisdom were ultimately derived from the Torah. So we read Pomponazzi, who was excommunicated for claiming there is no way to prove that the soul is immortal, and Kopernikus, who dislodged mankind from his privileged location at the center of the universe, and Friar Bruno, who was excommunicated
three times
(which I believe is a record of some kind) because he didn’t believe in the power of miracles, prayer, or divine intervention in our daily lives. And what did it get us? Did the Christians really care if we read their heretics?
No, but the other rabbis did. They tried to silence Rabbi Isserles and shut his yeshiva down, denouncing us as
fraydenkers
. Freethinkers. The label stuck.
Then Rabbi Isserles, may his memory be a blessing, passed on too soon, and I woke up to find out that the Freethinkers weren’t welcome at the other yeshivas.
So I had to prove myself all over again by toiling among the bookshelves, and never venturing beyond the Jewish Quarter, past the
Corpus Christi
Church
, or across the
Vistula
to the main market square.
But I was never mystical enough to suit the mystics, or rational enough to suit the rationalists, or compliant enough to become a follower of any of the established schools of thought. So they made me deliver firewood to the study rooms and haul buckets of heavy tiles up to the roof in the middle of winter to help chop off the ice and patch up the holes.
They assigned me to classrooms with no heat and more than forty children, in direct violation of the Talmud, which states that a teacher shall have no more than twenty-five pupils at one time (Bava Basra, 21a). When I pointed this out to my new masters, they told me to comb through three centuries of rabbinical
responsa
to find supporting citations, and to present my case to the board of rabbis for review if I wanted them to take my petition seriously. I took up the challenge, and I labored with such determination that I attracted the support of Rabbi Ariyeh Lindermeyer, called Ari
der royter
because of his flaming red beard, and the way his face flushed when he was making a particularly impassioned argument.