“Is it good like that?” asks Nahman, placing a small Turkish purse of delicate goatskin—it looks like it’s embroidered with crystals and turquoise, beautiful handiwork—discreetly on the small table by the door. The bishop can guess what is inside—they wouldn’t have come with just anything. It will contain expensive stones, enough of them to set a whole monstrance. Imagining this makes his head spin. But the bishop has to focus. It’s not easy, for this seemingly small matter has suddenly taken on enormous dimensions: the opponents of these ragamuffins have gotten to Baruch Yavan, aide to Chief Minister Brühl—on the bishop’s table lie letters from Warsaw, relating in detail all the palace intrigues—and now wield this powerful man at court, the Polish king’s most important adviser. Who would have thought that kissing a naked woman in some village in the middle of nowhere would ever attain such proportions?
The bishop takes the purse, and in so doing, he takes Frank’s side, though the brazenness of this Jew annoys him. The Jew demands a disputation. Demands protection. Demands land, to settle down “quietly,” he says. And furthermore: the Jew demands ennoblement. The bishop must thoroughly protect them, and then they’ll get baptized. He also wishes for those most eminent among them (here the bishop struggles to imagine their “eminence,” for they are after all only leaseholders, furriers, shopkeepers) to be able to try for ennoblement according to the law of the Commonwealth. And that they might gain the right to settle down on church lands.
The other one, the redhead who translates for Jacob, explains that the tradition since back when they lived in Spain was to organize such disputations when some thorny question arose. The time has come to do so. He translates Frank’s words:
“Take even a few hundred rabbis and intelligent bishops, and lords, and the best scholars. Let them debate me and my people. I’ll answer every question they ask, because the truth is on my side.”
They are like merchants come to make a profit: their asking price is high.
But they also have a lot to offer in return, the bishop considers.
What Bishop Dembowski ponders as his face is being shaved
It really is strange how very cold and damp the bishop’s mansion is in Kamieniec Podolski. Even now, in summer, when in the early morning the barber comes, the bishop as he sits must warm his feet with a hot stone wrapped in thick linen.
He has had his chair moved to the window, and before the barber sharpens the knife, wiping the blade on the leather strop with great pomp and circumstance, before he prepares the lather and carefully—so as not to sully His Holiness in any way, God forbid—covers up his shoulders with embroidered linen towels, the bishop has time to look over the latest missives from Kamieniec, Lwów, and Warsaw.
The day before, the bishop met with a man called Krysa, who is apparently working in the name of Jacob Frank, but also seems to be playing his own hand. With great determination, the bishop has been summoning the so-called Talmudists, learned rabbis from all over Podolia, asking them to participate in the disputation, but the rabbis have been dodging his summons. Once, twice, he has ordered them to appear before him, but they haven’t done so, evidently holding the office of the bishop in contempt. When he fines them, they just send Hershko Shmulewicz, a very clever Jew, apparently a representative, who comes up with every conceivable excuse on their behalf. Meanwhile, the contents of their purse are very concrete, if decidedly less elaborate: gold coins. The bishop attempts not to betray that he has already taken a stand, and that it is with the other ones.
If only he could understand these Jews the same way he can more or less comprehend the intentions of a peasant! Yet here you have their tassels, their hats, their bizarre speech (which is why he is so favorably disposed toward Pikulski’s efforts in this regard, to master their language), their suspicious religion. Why suspicious? Because it’s too close. Their books are the same, Moses, Abraham, Isaac on the stone under his father’s knife, Noah and his ark—all of it’s the same, and yet, with them it appears in some strange new context. Even Noah doesn’t look the same, exactly—he’s disfigured, somehow, and his ark is not the same, but rather Jewish, more ornamental, Eastern, bursting at the seams. Even Isaac, who was always a blond little stripling with rosy skin, has now transformed into a wild child, sturdier, not quite so defenseless. With us, everything is somehow lighter, as though more conventional, sketched in an elegant hand, thinks the bishop—delicate, meaningful. Their faith is dark and concrete, almost uncomfortably literal. Their Moses is an old pauper with bony feet; ours a dignified elder with a flowing beard. It strikes Bishop Dembowski that it is Christ’s light that illuminates in such a way the Christian side of the Old Testament—the one we share with the Jews—hence these differences.
The worst is when a foreign thing is disguised as something that belongs. As though they were mocking us. As though they were making a joke out of the Holy Scriptures. And there is one more thing: their stubbornness! After all, the Jews have been around for longer, and yet they persist in their error. It is certainly not unreasonable to suspect that they must be up to something. If only they were as open in their behavior as the Armenians. When the Armenians are up to something, you know it’s only ever over gains that can be measured in gold.
What are all these Jews discussing? wonders Bishop Dembowski, observing them from the window as they gather in small groups of three or four and debate in their halting, singsong language, accompanying their words with movements of the body, too, and gestures: they stretch their heads forward, they shake their beards, they hop like someone burned when they don’t agree with the reasoning of one of the others. Is it true what So?tyk, a friend the bishop trusts, always says about them? That, urged to do so by some commandment, by some dark beliefs they hold, they permit in their squat, damp little houses such practices as require Christian blood? God forbid. It can’t be, and the Holy Father in Rome has stated clearly that they must not believe in such things, must snuff out the rumor that Jews make use of Christian blood. Oh, but just look at them. Out of the window, the bishop watches the small square in front of his mansion where a seller of paintings, a young boy still, shows a holy picture to a girl dressed in the Ruthenian style in an embroidered shirt and a colorful skirt. The girl cautiously touches with the tip of her pinkie the little depictions of the saints—this Jewish salesman has both Catholic and Orthodox likenesses for sale—while he pulls from his breast pocket a cheap little medallion and places it in her hand; their heads lean in to almost meet over the medallion of the Virgin. The bishop knows the girl will buy it.