Let’s look at Judah Loew, about whom this story gathers
itself like a cloud that rests on the shoulder of a mountain. He’s called the Maharal. In those days big rabbis have nicknames like sports stars and stars of stimmies. In the embattled ghettos, they are culture heroes and entertainers besides. His given name: Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Judah the Lion. A lion among the Jews.
The Maharal is a bright fierce man, a hotheaded kabbalist, steeped in ancient tradition so that Torah haunts and informs and sculpts the world for him, but curious, open to the science and the speculation of his time. The Maharal is a crabby saint of towering intellect with a fondness for having at the opposition with every weapon in his arsenal, from reason to high rhetoric to sarcasm to ridicule. He is free with his invective, his insults. In any intellectual contest, the desire to win takes him over and he fights to kill his opponent. He is almost alone in his time in believing that any opinion has the right to be uttered—he believes anachronistically in free speech, not because he is a relativist. No, he believes in the truth of his religion. But he believes too strongly in the sacredness of the intellect to cripple it by forbidding any ideas whatsoever. He conducts running wars of words with most other famous rabbis of his time. But in December of 1599, he receives a summons to debate a priest in public, a dangerous agon, because as a Jew he is supposed to lose. If he doesn’t, the opportunity of the Church for revenge will be multiple, swift or slow-moving as they wish, and neverending—or ending the usual way. It is not a time when someone wishing the sight should lack for the spectacle of burning Jews. But how can the Maharal throw the debate? G-d would not accept less than victory. As a Jew, he is obligated to use his entire mind. The early Biblical critic dei Rossi, whose ideas the Maharal detests, said if you want to offer a sacrifice to G-d, offer it to truth, and perhaps that is the only thing Rossi ever uttered with which the Maharal is in agreement.
The Maharal prepares for a public debate with the priest, Thaddeus, a Dominican formerly in the office of the Inquisition in Spain. Thaddeus was recently posted to Prague, where it is felt a climate of some toleration has been flourishing under the emperor Rudolf, which cannot be permitted to continue or to expand. Judah finds in his heart fury and contempt for this opponent who causes such ruin, torture and death in other lives while enjoying the security of his own position, but he strives to overcome his rancor. He wonders if he should not plead ill health, but special pleading seldom works. His health is fine,
although he is an old man, but he has been depressed this winter. He has not recovered from the death of his only son.
When he sees his son in his mind, he does not see the fifty-five-year-old with the gray streaks in his beard but rather the gifted but often too sensitive child with his weak eyes and quavering voice. He thinks he was a poor father to his only son and probably to his daughters as well, although he left them largely to Perl, his able balebusteh of a wife. He had huge expectations for the son for whom he had waited so long, the successor, the bearer of his name into the future. Now he has outlived him. This is a pathetic fate I particularly fear. I have raised an outlaw who operates far from me with a price on her head. Will I even hear of her death? While I walk through my busy comfortable days, often my mind drifts toward Riva. Like the Maharal, I have been a poor parent and a fine grandparent.
Although the Maharal is old—not as people call me old, and then I look with surprise in the mirror and say, Who is that bag with the crinkles and lines? Who loosened my teeth? Who slacked my tits? No, the Maharal was old enough to feel his age. My family tradition says he was eighty-one; the books report various birth dates and thus a medley of ages up to ninety-odd. I’ll accept the family’s memory. Nonetheless he is still active and still creative. His voice has lost none of its power, and his intellect is as honed as ever. He is perhaps a little wilder in his language, a little harder in debate than he had been in his middle age, for he feels himself with a short time left and much to do. His is a hard-driven and a passionate old age. He appears not shorter but taller than he had stood in his youth, with his eyes as bright and fierce as ever in a gaunter face. Instead of gentling his edges, age sharpened them. He is an eagle.
Judah moved to Prague forty years before, but always when it came time to choose a chief rabbi and he was the obvious man of eminence, he was passed over. Too deeply into the mystical kabbalah perhaps, too argumentative, too original a thinker. A troublemaker. Not that his light was exactly under a bushel. He ran a famous Talmud school. He was the friend of the wealthiest Jew in Prague, Mordecai Maisl. He was surrounded by disciples and colleagues. Just before he left Prague for the last period of exile, in 1592, the emperor Rudolf sent for him and saw him privately, unheard of treatment for a Jew.
For even a spry old man it was a long walk out through the gates of the ghetto, across the Karl Bridge over the wide Vltava with its white rapids, through the streets of the Malá, Strana, where the nobility had been building themselves grand palaces
among orchards and pastureland remaining within the walls. Above the steep winding streets, the castle bristling with towers and spires loomed over its cliffs. He leaned on the arms of his son-in-law Itzak Cohen and his current favorite disciple, Yakov Sassoon. Up the long stairway he struggled, his heart shuddering his slight frame, while they dodged against the wall to avoid the horses ridden or led by. Below them the voices of the city rose like bright flapping banners to hang over the red roofs.
Judah passed through the massive gateway and two courtyards and up a great ceremonial stairway and through room after room, each ornate, huge, empty of purpose but filled with idle courtiers dressed in brocade and silk and velvet, with their heads riding on ruffs as if on plates, till he was forced to leave Itzak and Yakov in an anteroom. He was led at last into a smaller room hung with velvet, where in cabinets were displayed a narwhal’s horn, a two-headed embryo in a bottle, a mandrake in the form of a priapic man, all manner of minerals, lodestones. Judah had no time to stare before Prince Bertier greeted him, but Judah sensed another presence. As the interview proceeded jerkily, with long pauses and whispering, Judah deduced that the emperor was sitting behind a full-length velvet curtain, using Prince Bertier to put his questions. That didn’t last. The emperor became impatient with whispering the questions to Bertier and started speaking from behind the curtain; finally he burst into the room and took a chair. The subject of this most unusual interview granted a Jew was a secret; the histories are silent. Even in his account for posterity Itzak did not commit the subject of the conversation to paper. But the family has its stories, doesn’t it always?
Now the emperor held the Jews as his own—his own cow to milk, his own private tax vineyard out of which always more juice could be squeezed. With a great deal of fear and a hidden anger and his wits sharpened like throwing knives, the Maharal listened to the emperor. The subject that the emperor raised with him after much conversation about the universe and those strange new theories of Copernicus, which most people who had heard about them mocked openly and which the Church condemned, was astrology. All his advisers believed in astrology as a determinant of human character and fortune. His own fine astronomer, Tycho Brahe, cast horoscopes. What did the rabbi think?
The Maharal thought quickly. Astrology was a respectable business of the time, and as nowadays every rich macher has his chemistrician in residence to feed in exactly the right psychoactives
and monitor trace elements and nutrients in the blood and allergenic and immune system reactions, so the rich and powerful then had their pet astrologer to tell them the right times to act and to refrain from acting, the auspicious time for marriages and ceremonies. Judah surmised the emperor had been given a prognosis that made him uneasy.
Rudolf had the reputation for being a weak and indecisive ruler. He actually didn’t seem to like war much, considered a sign of a feeble character in his time. In truth, he encouraged science and the arts and practiced a mild religious tolerance, usually resisting the mad zeal of the Counter-Reformation, allowing both Protestants and Jews to worship as they pleased and giving the universities unusual freedom. Personally I’d rather live under him than under many a more famous and admired king of Prussia.
Why the Maharal? Now, only seven of the Maharal’s books had been published at this time, but several had been circulated in manuscript. Judah could be pretty sure that the emperor knew he had written a long essay, thoroughly demolishing that pseudoscience. Obviously that was why the emperor had chosen him, and he was not about to recant. The emperor was seeking a rationale for ignoring some piece of astrologically based advice, Judah deduced, and he would provide it. So be it. That is, according to family legend, what happened between Rudolf and Judah.
Shortly after this audience, the Maharal was once again passed over for chief rabbi of Prague. He promptly accepted a post at Posen and shook the dust of Prague from his hat, departing with his family.
He didn’t come back until they finally gave him what he wanted. Now, the legend that has attached to him belongs to this period when the Maharal has recently returned in triumph to Prague as chief rabbi. The Maharal is a learned man, not only in Torah and Talmud, not only in history, in the science and philosophy of his time, but also in the mysteries of the kabbalah. He makes an absolute distinction between the truths of science, which are based on observation and are always changing as the world is always changing (a radical concept because the world had been considered static and unmoving for centuries), and the truths of religion, which are of another order. In that sphere, thought is action and words are not signifiers of things or states but real and potent forces. This is of course the world of artificial intelligence and vast bases in which I work—the world in which the word is real, the word is
power, energy is mental and physical at once and everything that appears as matter in space is actually immaterial. Perhaps that’s why as I get older, I become more of a mystic. When I was young, sex and psychology obsessed me, fashion and flair; now that I come toward the end of my braided rope, I am fascinated by the holy and the powerful light that shines through history, the powers that enact their dramas through us, the good and the evil, the damage and the repair our wanderings and our choices commit.
Is it fair to tell this tale? It is a tale of kabbalah, of religious magic. Most scholars insist that it has no basis in the life of this exemplary religious thinker and educational reformer, this historian and polemicist. What has he to do with the creation of monsters? But as a woman who spends her working days creating fictions and monsters, how can I feel I am committing calumny against Judah? I believe in the truth of what is perhaps figurative, although Moshe Idel has found recipe after recipe, precise as the instructions for building a yurt or baking French bread, for making golems. I cannot always distinguish between myth and reality, because myth forms reality and we act out of what we think we are; we know on many levels truths that are irrational as well as reasoned or experimental. Our minds help create the world we think we inhabit. I am myself a magician who last fall seduced a machine, so I can project myself back into the Maharal and say that he, too, may have created the being that folk memory records as his. Do you not think, my friend, that you are something beyond the ordinarily human, a miracle?
Thus when the Maharal that winter begins to feel danger growing and a net of intrigue tightening around his people, where shall he turn but to mystical lore? The Prague Jews are penned in their ghetto, and there is nowhere to escape and nowhere to flee. The Jews of Spain who had lived a thousand years in peace and high culture were overnight exiled from the land they thought theirs, torn from their roots and their graves and their synagogues. The Jews of England were expelled to penury and wandering. The Jews of Portugal were ripped from their homes. How can he save the Jews of Prague?
Every year on the Day of Atonement, he recites from the pulpit the poem written by Avigdor Karo mourning the three thousand Jews slaughtered when the Prague ghetto was attacked by a mob armed with swords, maces, pikes and sickles. Afterward the royal chamberlain convicted the Jews of inciting to riot and fined them five tons of silver. If Rudolf is apt to
spare them, he has other, more pressing concerns. The Jews are expendable. The rich local burghers hate them. As a visible separate people, they are always in danger. The Counter-Reformation is gathering intensity and momentum. The Church is militant and enraged at the stubbornness of the Jews, so like the stubborn refusal of the Protestants but easier to quash.
One new danger is the blood libel. At Pesach, we open the door at the Seder every year to let Elijah, the great prophet of hope and freedom, enter if he will come to us. I can remember explaining to Riva, I can remember explaining to Shira, and yes, Gadi too, for by then Sara was too ill to make a Seder and both Avram and Gadi came to us, how that custom originated in the terrible years of the blood libel. Then Christians believed that Jews put the blood of Christian children into the Pesach matzoh. It’s a bastardization of the story of Exodus, the death of the firstborn and the Jewish children passed over by the Angel of Death, a confusion with the wine of the Seder altered in their Mass into blood. What have we to do with blood, who are forbidden to consume it? So we began opening the door, to show we have nothing to hide. Will Shira ever come home again for Pesach? Married to that arrogant and broken creature. Now divorced, but loitering in the closed corporate world.
Another increasing danger is the priest Thaddeus, who has come to Prague from Spain particularly to carry out the aims of the Inquisition. He simply cannot believe that Rudolf permits the Jews of Prague to have a publishing house that prints books in Hebrew, to march in processions, to engage however controversially in trades and sciences. He cannot believe that the emperor’s own mathematician, the great astronomer Tycho Brahe, treats the Jew David Gans as a colleague and lets him work in his observatory, the most modern in all Europe, or that Johannes Kepler, Brahe’s brilliant assistant, and some of the other local intellectuals are reading in the kabbalah and discussing it. Here in Prague Jews and Christians are arguing together over heretical ideas such as the planets revolving around the sun, and they are not being promptly forced to recant or being burned in the public square—not yet. But Thaddeus has his fierce duty to perform. He is a vessel through which the passion for what he holds as truth roars in torrents. Like Savonarola in Florence, who made a pyre of art he considered sensual and decadent, who burned all the Renaissance paintings he could lay hands on, Thaddeus is a fiery orator who stirs a crowd with ease. People in groups are the organ he likes to play. Above all, his hatred is sincere. He sees the Jews as a
disease creeping through Europe the way two hundred and fifty years earlier Jews had been blamed for the Black Plague. It is an intellectual plague he sees running rampant in Prague. Dangerous thought is a disease that rots souls.