The Books of Jacob Read online

  Nahman is happy. He always sits behind Jacob. He loves to look over his shoulder. That is why he can relate to the Scriptures, it being written in the Book of Proverbs 25:16: “If you find honey, eat just enough—too much of it, and you will vomit.”

  Meanwhile, aside from hakkarat panim (knowledge of physiognomy) and sirtutim (knowledge of chiromancy), selected students—now including Nahman and Jacob—are instructed in yet another secret thing under the guidance of Isohar and Reb Mordke. In the evenings, just two candles are left in the small room, and the students sit along the wall on the floor. Their heads are to be placed between their knees. In this way, the human body resumes the position it was in inside the mother’s belly, and therefore, when it stayed in close proximity to God. When you sit like this for a few hours, when your breath returns to your lungs and you can hear the beating of your own heart, that’s when your mind launches its journeys.

  Jacob, tall and strong, always has the garland of an audience around him. He tells them tales of his youth in Bucharest, while Nahman mostly eavesdrops. Jacob tells how he stood up for a Jew when suddenly two janissaries sent by the agha attacked. Fighting with a rolling pin, he routed the Turkish guard. And when he was brought to court, not having done anyone any real physical harm, the agha so appreciated his bravery that he not only released him, but also presented him with gifts. Nahman obviously doesn’t believe him. Yesterday he told of a miraculous drill that, when coated in some magical herbs, could reveal treasure buried underground.

  Seeing Nahman’s gaze intently focused upon him—ordinarily Nahman instantly glances away when Jacob looks at him—Jacob provokes him in Turkish:

  “What’s your problem, feygele, looking at me like that?”

  He says it with the intention of offending Nahman, who squints with surprise. Even more so for the fact that Jacob has used the Yiddish word feygele—little bird—but also a man who likes men more than women.

  Jacob is pleased, for he has caused Nahman confusion, and he grins.

  For some time they seek a common language. Jacob starts with what the Jews of Smyrna speak, Ladino, and Nahman, not understanding, responds in Hebrew. Neither of them feels right chatting in the street in the holy language, so they break off, and Nahman switches to Yiddish. But here again Jacob has a rather strange accent, so instead he responds in Turkish, fluently, joyfully, as though finding himself suddenly on home turf, though Nahman doesn’t feel completely at home here. In the end they speak a mixture, not worrying about the provenance of words; words are not nobility that want their genealogical trees retraced. Words are merchants, swift and useful, now here, now there.

  What is the name of the place where people go to drink kahve? It’s a kahvehane, right? And a dark, stocky Turk from the south who goes home wearing goods bought at the bazaar is a hamal. And the stone market, where Jacob always goes during the day, that’s the bezestan, isn’t it? Jacob laughs. He has nice teeth.

  Scraps: What we were doing in Smyrna in the Jewish year 5511 and how we met Moliwda, and also, how the spirit is like a needle that pokes a hole in the world

  I took to heart what Isohar had taught us. He said that there are four types of readers. There is the reading sponge, the reading funnel, the reading colander, and the reading sieve. The sponge absorbs everything it comes into contact with; and it is evident he remembers much of it later, too. But he is not able to filter out what is most important. The funnel takes in what he reads at one end, while at the other, everything he’s read pours out of him. The strainer lets through the wine and keeps the sediment; he ought not to read at all—it would be infinitely better if he simply dedicated himself to some manual trade. The sieve, on the other hand, separates out the chaff to give a result of only the finest grains.

  “I want you to be like sieves, and to discard all that is not good or interesting,” Isohar would say to us.

  Thanks still to his Prague acquaintances and a widespread high opinion of Reb Mordke, we both found employment—to our great fortune—helping out the Trinitarians, who were buying Christian war prisoners out of Turkish slavery. We earned good money for this, too. We took over for a Jew who died suddenly from some fever and who needed replacing quickly. Our task was to supply them during the time of their stay in Smyrna; since I was now fluent in Turkish, and, as I have said already, my knowledge of Polish was fairly good, they engaged me also for the purposes of translation, thanks to which I soon became, as the Turks say, a dragoman, or an interpreter.

  The purchases took place at the port. The Trinitarians went down to the temporary cells where the prisoners were kept and conversed with them, to learn where they were from and whether they had families that could underwrite their ransom, repaying the Trinitarian brothers the money they’d put up.

  There were sometimes amusing stories, like that of the peasant woman from near Lwów. Her name was Zaborowska, and her little son, born in captivity, was called Ismail. This woman nearly ruined the transaction by insisting that she would not give up the Muhammadan faith and that she would not baptize her son, which, for the Trinitarian brothers, was a difficult potion to swallow.

  There was another translator who worked for the Trinitarians, a man who intrigued me immediately, for I heard him conversing with someone in Polish, though he was dressed according to the Turkish style. He had hair lightened by the sun and a close-cropped reddish beard. He was of a stout and sturdy stature—it seemed safe to assume he’d be enduring and hale. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, but I did not wish to bother him until the proper occasion arose. At some point, he noticed that I was trying to explain something in Polish to newcomers from Lesser Poland who had come all the way here in order to buy back their relative, and he came up to me and, patting me on the back, embraced me as one of his own. “Where are you from?” he asked without ceremony, which moved me to my core, as no nobleman had ever treated me with such sincerity before. And then he addressed me in good Hebrew, as well as in Yiddish, our native tongue. He had a deep voice; he could orate. I must have made a stupid face, for he burst out laughing—loud, tipping his head back, so that I could practically peer down his throat.

  Some mysterious business dealings, about which he did not wish to speak, had brought him to Smyrna, though he did claim to be the prince of an island in the Greek sea, which was named the same as he: Moliwda. But he told us this as if casting us a fishing line—would we believe him, would we allow ourselves to be caught? He spoke as if he did not fully believe himself, as if he had in his possession several other versions, equally true. In spite of this, we stuck together somehow. He assumed a sort of fatherly role with respect to me, though he was but a few years older. He asked us all about Poland—I had to tell him of completely ordinary things, which visibly cheered him: how the nobility and the bourgeois get along in Lwów, what the shops are like, whether you can find good kahve there, what the Jews do to earn their living, and what about the Armenians, what people eat, what type of alcohol they drink. To tell the truth, I was not much acquainted with Polish affairs. I told him of Kraków and Lwów, described Rohatyn in detail, as well as Kamieniec and my hometown, Busk. I must admit that neither of us was able to avoid those sudden waves of homesickness that strike travelers when they find themselves distant from their native lands. But it seemed to me that he had not seen his home in a very long time, as he asked after such trivial and mundane things. Instead, he told of his adventures at sea with pirates, and he so described the marine battles that even the Trinitarians in their white habits and crosses squatted down beside us in order to hear. With the brothers he switched to Polish, and from the way they spoke together (I did not yet understand everything then), it was evident they valued him very much and treated him in an exceptional manner, as a true nobleman. They called him “Count Kossakowski,” which in some strange fashion took my breath away, since I had never looked upon a count from such proximity, even though he was quite a bizarre sort of man.

  The longer we knew Moliwda, the more he surpr
ised us. As though it weren’t enough that he read and spoke fluent Hebrew, he also knew the foundations of gematria! He quickly demonstrated knowledge that far surpassed the horizons of any ordinary goy. He spoke Greek, and could write in Turkish so well that he could issue quittances in it.

  One day Tovah from Nikopol showed up at Isohar’s. We had not yet met him, but we had heard only the highest praise of him, and had even studied his book and his poetry. He was a modest and reserved man. Everywhere he went, he took his thirteen-year-old son with him, a beautiful boy; together they gave the impression of an angel looking after a sage.

  The disputations that began with his arrival led us into completely uncharted territories.

  Isohar said:

  “There is no sense in awaiting major events anymore—solar eclipses, floods. The odd process of salvation is going on right here,” and he beat his breast so that it thundered. “We are rising from the deepest depths, just as he has risen and has fallen in that unrelenting battle with the forces of evil, with the demons of darkness. We will free ourselves, we will be free on the inside, even if we are to be slaves here, in the world . . . Only when we are free will we raise up the Shekhinah out of the dust, we the ma’aminim, the true believers.”

  I wrote down these words with a joyous sense of satisfaction. That was how to understand Sabbatai’s actions. He chose freedom in his heart, rather than freedom in the world. He had converted to Islam in order to be faithful to his mission of salvation. And we fools expected him to show up before the sultan’s palace with a thousand armies bearing shields of gold. We were like children wanting wonderful toys, ahaya aynayim, illusions, magic for those with limited minds.

  Those of us who think God addresses us by means of external events are wrong, as naive as children. For he whispers directly into our innermost souls.

  “It is a great mystery and an extraordinary one that he who is most beaten down shall become our redeemer—he who has reached the bottom of the abyss of the most horrendous darkness. Now we await his return; he will come back in various guises, until the mystery is fulfilled in one—when God incarnates as a man, when the Devekut occurs, and the Trinity prevails.” Isohar pronounced the word “trinity” more quietly, so as not to rile those who believed that such a weak Messiah would be too Christian. But does not every religion have some truth to it? All of them, even the most barbaric, have been permeated by the holy sparks.

  Then, from within his haze of smoke, Reb Mordke spoke:

  “Or maybe the Messiah gave us an example, that we, too, would follow him into that darkness? Many in Spain converted to the faith of Edom.”

  “God forbid,” said Tovah. “It is not for us insignificant persons to imitate the Messiah. Only he is capable of venturing into mud and filth, submerging himself fully in it, and coming back out in one piece, completely clean, unsullied.”

  Tovah thought that it would not do to get too close to Christianity. When later, excited, we discussed the Trinity with others, he claimed that the Christian teachings on the Trinity are a distorted version of an older understanding of the divine mystery, which no one can remember anymore. It is but a pale shadow, riddled with mistakes.

  “Keep your distance from the Trinity,” he warned.

  This image got etched into my memory: three grown men, bearded, enveloped in the quivering light of an oil lamp, whole evenings spent talking aimlessly of the Messiah. Every letter that arrived from brothers in Altona or Salonika or Moravia or Lwów or Kraków or Stamboul or Sofia was cause for another sleepless night, and in Smyrna at that time our thinking gradually got more harmonious. Isohar seemed the most restrained, while Tovah could be sarcastic, and I must confess that I avoided his furious gaze.

  Yes, we know that since he, Sabbatai Tzvi, had come, the world had had a different, deadened countenance, and though it appeared the same, it was in fact a completely different world from the one before. The old rules no longer applied; the commandments we had once followed to the letter, trusting as children, had lost their logic. The Torah seems the same, and nothing in it has literally changed, no one has transformed the letters, but it can no longer be read in the old way. In those old words, a completely new meaning appears, and we see and understand it.

  Whoever in this redeemed world keeps to the old Torah simply honors the dead world and the dead law. This man is the sinner.

  The Messiah will complete his painful journey, destroying empty worlds from within, reducing dead laws to rubble. We must thus annihilate the old order, so that the new one may prevail.

  Do not the teachings and the Scriptures show us clearly that this was precisely why Israel was scattered over the face of the earth, so that every spark of holiness could be collected, even at the farthest reaches of the world, and from its deepest depths? Has not Nathan of Gaza also taught us that at times those sparks have lodged deeply and shamefully inside matter, like jewels that have become lodged in shit? At the most difficult moments of tikkun there was no one able to extract them again, except for that one person—it was for him alone to enter into sin and evil in order to retrieve the sparks of holiness inside. This is why Sabbatai Tzvi had to accept Islam, had to betray on behalf of all of us, so that we would not have to do the same. Many are unable to understand this. But we know from Isaiah—the Messiah must be rejected by his own as well as by outsiders. So goes the prophecy.

  By now Tovah was preparing to leave. He had bought silk brought here by ship from China, and Chinese porcelain, carefully packed in paper and sawdust. He had bought Indian oils. He went to the bazaar himself to get presents for his wife and his beloved daughter, Hana, about whom I heard for the first time then, without yet knowing how things would turn out later. He perused embroidered slippers and scarves shot through with gold thread. Reb Mordke and I went to him as he was resting, having sent his aides to the customs offices for firmans, since in a few days they were to set off again for home. Thus everyone who had family in the north was now writing letters and packing up small parcels so that they might accompany Tovah’s caravan over the Danube—to Nikopol and Giurgiu, and from there onward to Poland.

  We sat beside him, and Mordechai brought out a bottle of the finest wine. As a man unaccustomed to drinking, Tovah was affected quickly. After two glasses, his face softened into an expression of childlike surprise, his eyebrows rising, his forehead wrinkling, and I became aware that now I was seeing the true face of this wise man, that Tovah had always been on guard until now. Reb Mordke started to poke fun at him: “How can you not drink, when you own your own vineyard?” But the purpose of our visit was something else entirely. I felt just as I had when, in the past, we had made matches for young people. Now, the youth to be matched was Jacob. We pointed out that he was often in the society of the Salonika Jews, who were supporters of Konio, the son of Baruchiah, which Tovah liked very much, as he, too, had allied with them. But both Reb Mordke and myself kept on obstinately returning to something else, and our obstinacy—the obstinacy of “those two from Poland,” as Tovah called us—was like a spiral that at first seemed to be abating, but that soon returned to the same place as before, except in slightly different form. The place to which every conversation returned, after the furthest-reaching digressions and the widest-ranging associations, was Jacob. What did we want? We wanted to marry Jacob to Tovah’s daughter, and in that way, to make Jacob a respectable man. An unwed Jew is no one, and he will be taken seriously by no one. And what else? What idea came into our heads as if by miracle? It was a bold thought, maybe dangerous, but I suddenly saw it in its totality, and it struck me as absolutely perfect. As if I had understood at last what all of this had been for—my travels with Reb Mordke, all of our studying. And maybe it was the wine that relaxed my mind, for suddenly everything became so clear to me. Then Reb Mordke said on my behalf:

  “We will arrange his marriage with your daughter, and he will go to Poland as a messenger.”

  That was what we wanted. And surprisingly, Tovah did not say even one word ag
ainst it, for he had heard, of course, of Jacob, as everyone had.

  So we sent for Jacob, and he came after a while, and with him came a whole pack of boys his age, and some Turks. They remained on the other side of the square, while Jacob stood respectfully before us. I remember that I got goose bumps at the sight of him, I felt my body tremble, and I experienced a love greater than I had ever felt for anyone before. Jacob’s eyes were shining with excitement, and he struggled to repress that ironic smile of his.

  “If you, Mordechai, you, Tovah, and you, Nahman, are the sages of our age,” he said with exaggerated deference, “then surely you will be able to transform ordinary metal into gold. That way I will know for certain that you are messengers from on high.”

  I didn’t know if he was just playing around or being serious.

  “Sit,” Reb Mordke snapped. “That kind of miracle only the Messiah himself can work. You know that. We’ve talked about it before.”

  “And where is he, this Messiah?”