26 Adar, 5425
Amsterdam
To Rabbi HaCoen Mendes,
Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca has received your report regarding the progress of the congregation’s return to tradition in London, which shall with G-d’s will prove favorable. Rabbi Aboab has instructed me to dispatch this reply to you, as his labors on behalf of our blessed community here in Amsterdam leave him little time for such correspondence.
You and I are not acquainted, yet I have been assured of your merits and your sufferings under the cursed Inquisition, and the long devotion you have shown in your work in London, such as will be rewarded in the world to come. I am, however, obliged to tell you that the new-formed Mahamad of London has already reported to us all that you describe in your recent letter, and now that the honored Rabbi Sasportas will soon be installed in the community we will of course be honored to receive such communications from him. You must not strain your health to produce such an account as you have given. Your age merits that you rest, and you may do so glad in the knowledge that your congregation’s esteemed leaders do all that is required. Benjamin HaLevy, whose name as you know is held in high respect, tells us of the Ets Haim house of Jewish learning lately founded in London with generous gifts by men such as himself, and he reports that he long ago removed his two sons from your tutelage and has set them to study there, to be examples to the community of the strength of the Council’s institution of Jewish learning.
Happy is the teacher whose students grow beyond his reach, so you are to be praised, for surely these two young men of Israel have learned all that you had to teach them.
On the matter of your inquiry as to whether we might publish a book of your teachings here in Amsterdam, I will say that of course we will be honored to do so if it is deemed suitable. You are aware, no doubt, that the London Mahamad, in its growing labors to safeguard the strength and virtue of the Jewish community of your city, has banned the publication of any work without its prior approval, but I am certain that when you show the Mahamad the work of your hand it will quickly approve its publication. I respectfully await word of your Mahamad’s authorization.
Lastly, in response to your question, I am asked to relate to you that all congress with the heretic de Spinoza is forever banned, and this ban is not subject to any limitation. The passage of time does not lessen the dangers of exchange with him, nor does it make him more likely to be persuaded of wisdom. He has left our city and our souls are eased for it. Rabbi Aboab has instructed me to make this matter clear.
In trust of the coming of the Redeemer, whose rumor reaches Amsterdam even now, and I a young man who trembles at the approach of Eternity,
Avner Ben-Samuel
Aaron finished the translation. The retort about Spinoza was an eye-catcher, of course. He wondered what Helen would make of that. Had someone—Aleph—wished to contact Spinoza, despite his excommunication for heresy? It seemed unlikely. Probably the rabbi, who might plausibly have taught Spinoza as a youth in Amsterdam before his apostasy, had wondered about the permissibility of dropping a line to his old student. In any event, this would make for another paper—any authentic document that mentioned Spinoza, even the thinnest reference, could be spun into a publication. It should have put Aaron in a good mood—yet he couldn’t deny that this letter irked him. Couldn’t Aboab or Oliveyra have at least done HaCoen Mendes the dignity of answering him personally? Or didn’t seventeenth-century rabbis believe in professional courtesy? It was no shock, of course, that HaCoen Mendes was being supplanted—the London community had, inevitably, organ-ized itself, and had invited the acclaimed Rabbi Sasportas to be their synagogue’s first Haham. Their loss, thought Aaron. Within the year the great Sasportas would have fled the plague and London, never to return. London’s Jews would have done better to skip the celebrity rabbi and stick with someone like HaCoen Mendes.
He called up the next document by its code: RQ206. A few moments later, Patricia set it—a stack of six or seven handwritten pages—on the cushion in front of Aaron.
March 23, 1665
7 Nisan, 5425
To Daniel Lusitano,
My distress grows with every hour I meditate upon your letter. And so I hope you will forgive the crowding of one missive atop another, as my thoughts crowd like sheep at the pasture gate when a wolf prowls. In my own darkness I see perhaps too vivid a picture of the error that lies before your community in Florence. It is an error not only of soul but also of body, for they that muster for the next world before it has come can only betray their lives in this one. Long have I heard rumor of Sabbatai Zevi and yet I remained foolishly silent, and I can only rebuke myself that it has taken a new report of the threat from my beloved student to awaken me. What small help my thoughts may offer is ever at your disposal, and so I set forward the following additional arguments.
Aaron read on. HaCoen Mendes laid out his case patiently, if laboriously. Sabbatai Zevi was a pretender; the true Messiah, sent by the Almighty, would be recognizable by certain traits, among them a lack of ambition for earthly power. As Sabbatai Zevi declared himself Messiah among Jews from Smyrna to Salonika to Aleppo—and as his fame drew adherents in congregations throughout Europe—he was an increasingly dangerous manipulator of the people’s desperate hopes.
Aaron had read this sort of argument before, and found himself skimming. But when he reached the fourth page, he set down his pencil.
He’d seen cross-written documents before. It had been a common enough practice, where paper was scarce or expensive, for the writer of a seventeenth-century letter to complete one page, turn it upside down, and ink another full page between the lines already written. But he’d never seen a cross-written document like this. In its orientation on the cushion before him, the page of Portuguese offered itself first to his eye. Yet midway through the page another text rose up, sprouting between the lines like a counterargument arising from unknown depths. The page grew abruptly crowded, the rabbi’s Portuguese interspersed with another message, upside down. Aaron leaned closer. The upside-down writing was in Hebrew, with the exception of one line in English. It was Aleph’s familiar handwriting, yet different—the words slanting from haste or urgency. He turned the other pages as swiftly as he dared, scanning both texts, trying to understand what was before him. Two messages, Portuguese and Hebrew, proceeding in opposite directions, their logic converging and then separating, their conclusions farther and farther apart.
“Patricia,” he said.
She didn’t hear, or if she heard perhaps she wished him to announce his dependence more clearly.
“Patricia,” he called softly, the humility in his voice unfamiliar.
She came.
“Please.” He motioned impotently with his hands: invert the document.
She stared. After a moment she seemed to understand. She pulled cotton gloves from a pocket, lifted the pages, and resettled them efficiently on the angled cushion. As Aaron gripped the nub of a pencil and began transcribing the Hebrew, Patricia lingered a long moment at his shoulder—as if mesmerized herself by the urgent counterpoint of the two languages on the page.