London
With the help of G-d
To the learned Menasseh ben Israel, It is with a quaking heart for the death of your son that I write. Word that he had been gathered to his forefathers reached me only after my arrival here in London. I am told I arrived only a scant number of days after your departure from this teeming city to bear your son’s body back to Holland. I am told, also, that you are not well in body, and that your quarrel with the community here was fierce in the end.
It is my hope that as you accompany his body to its rest, you yourself will find comfort, and also renewed health.
As I am unable to speak with you in direct and intimate counsel, therefore I speak now on paper with the aid of one who sets down these words for me. I ask no reverence for my counsel, for surely you have better advisors than one so infirm as I. Yet, my esteemed friend, I have known you since you were a child at the knee of my friend your father. I pray, therefore, that you will consider my voice in this matter.
I write now to ease your heart as much as words on paper may. It is said in London that you believed your mission here to have failed. Yet it is my belief that in your days here in London you have planted a hardy sapling. This land will yet provide a safe home for the persecuted of our people, not in my days and perhaps not in yours, but surely in the lives of those now borne in their mothers’ arms. So said the old man: As a boy I gathered fruit from the trees planted by my forebears. Am I not, then, required to plant the trees that will sustain my grandchildren?
I come now in hope to the very London you rebuke. I departed Amsterdam not because I was forced to, for I was blessed in Amsterdam even in my infirmity to be supported by our community and aided by my students, so that my poverty was no burden in that city. Yet I chose to accept my nephew’s summons and to spend my remaining days here in London—yes, in this very community that refused your great hopes.
Your hopes were great indeed, my friend. There is no higher labor than that which you undertook, and the pledges you were able to secure for the Jews of this land surpass those any before you achieved. Yet no man can bring the Messiah unaided, no matter how his groans and the groans of our people rack the earth.
I beg you, then, to cease your bitter regrets, which give your soul no rest.
Your father, blessed be his memory, may perhaps never have told you that he and I suffered side by side under the cruelty of the Inquisition in Spain. Together we endured and witnessed what I shall not describe, your father being summoned thrice to torture and I twice, the second time resulting in the loss of my sight. Yet my ears remained undamaged, and I, alongside your father, heard daily the cries of those burning on the pyre. Do not think that all their words were holy.
Do not condemn, then, those who heed the call of fear.
May the names of the martyrs be blessed.
If my words cut, then let them cut as the physick’s knife, to restore health. And let my own imperfections, numerous as grains of sand, not mar my message.
My ship, with the help of G-d, proceeded through untroubled seas to London, and my nephew Diego da Costa Mendes has secured for my household a small residence on Creechurch Lane. I shall spend my remaining days offering my learning to these Jews who step so slowly in the direction of all you have envisioned for them. They have invited my meager scholarship, my dear Menasseh, because they are not ready for the force of yours. So you must know that your tenderest message of hope has indeed entered their spirits.
We are four: myself, my housekeeper, and the two orphans that I have taken with me, son and daughter of the Velasquez family of Amsterdam, both brother and sister being of good ability although the young man is lax in his studies, and it is with difficulty that I recall him to them. I venture out but little, for I have no yearning for the wonders of a city my eyes cannot see, but desire only to labor here until such day as the community may merit a greater leader such as yourself. I pray that you preserve yourself in good health until that day. I speak in the belief that anguish of the soul and of the body are but the two sides of one leaf, and I will say plainly that I fear for your well-being, which while G-d safeguards, he yet requires that we also shepherd.
My friend, I urge you. Do not succumb to darkness. Lack of hope, as I learned long ago, is a deadly affliction. And in one so highly regarded as you, it is not merely a blight on one precious soul, but a contagion that may leave many in darkness. Recall that the light you bear, though it may flicker, yet illuminates the path for our people. Bear it. For in this world there is no alternative.
If I could but offer to you the patience of the blind.
May G-d comfort you along with all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
R. Moseh HaCoen Mendes
3
November 2, 2000
London
She—the professor, Helen Watt—drove silently and without so much as a glance in Aaron’s direction. In fact, in the twenty-minute drive from her office Aaron’s questions had brought only perfunctory replies—as if she’d rethought her decision to include him in her project, and was stonewalling until such time as she could conveniently eject him from her car.
Well, if she was regretting her choice, she wasn’t the only one. The farther they drove, the more it seemed to Aaron that he’d made a mistake in accepting Darcy’s offer—a small holiday, if you’re so inclined, doing a spot of work for one of my colleagues in need of temporary assistance. The request had been impossible to refuse, delivered as it was in Darcy’s perennial air of wry cheer—a demeanor Aaron was certain was tattooed onto the English genome, right beside wry despair.
Though perhaps the cheer part was something one attained only after completing a Ph.D. Asking English postgraduates How’s your work?, Aaron had discovered, elicited only some variation on Bloody torture. Nor was this followed, as it would have been in the United States, by an invitation to confide about his own struggles, or perhaps even go for a commiserative drink or run in the park. If there was camaraderie on offer here in London, Aaron didn’t know how to access it. Or perhaps the English postgraduates simply didn’t like him. In fact the absolute freedom of being a postgrad here—no classes or exams, just acres of time in which to research and write—had swiftly revealed itself to be a glorified form of orphanhood. Which was why he’d been startled to be hailed in the hall by Darcy, even if all Darcy wanted to discuss was the possibility of a favor for a colleague with some intriguing papers to sort. The whole exchange had taken perhaps a minute; upon obtaining Aaron’s assent, Darcy had clapped him mildly on the shoulder—Good man—then turned to greet a passing colleague, dismissing Aaron. Was the conversation, Aaron wondered only later, a test? Did Darcy suspect just how far Aaron was from any sort of meaningful progress in his own work—and if Darcy did, was this invitation to take up a temporary project in fact the English version of dissertation euthanasia? He should have refused.