I am thus on my Knees in the extreme Hope that Your Excellency will prepare the Foundations for these Baptisms and put your full Authority behind our Cause.
In the meantime I shall try for the support of the Nobles and the Inhabitants of Lwów while I am in this Place. What we need is financial Support, or any kind of material Support, for this enormous Multitude of Jewish Wretches who are camping out on our Streets. I assure Your Excellency that it is reminiscent of those sprawling Gypsy Caravans, and that eventually the City will cease to be able to deal with these street Encampments. Unfortunately, apart from the Lack of Food, there are also far less pleasant physical Exigencies, and this is slowly becoming a Problem. It is difficult to pass through the Halickie Przedmie?cie without covering your Nose, and it is very hot again, which renders those Odors all the more upsetting. And although the Shabbitarians seem very well organized themselves, I still wonder if we ought not to provide them some other Place to stay outside the City, with which I turn to you, and also to His Excellency, Bishop Za?uski, and I shall deliver a Letter on this Matter to our Primate as well. I myself am considering lending for a time my Manor in Wojs?awice to Frank’s Family and closest Associates, while they await a more permanent Residence. My Place, however, requires Repairs to the Roof and the Introduction of many Amenities . . .
Of the troubles of Father Chmielowski
This year of the comet is a year of problems for the priest. He thought that in his old age he would take refuge in his presbytery among the mallow and the bittercress (which help with his joints), but instead there is always some tumult, some clamor. Now there is also this runaway, and Roshko’s aversion to him. The priest is putting up a fugitive with a frightening face and has no intention of turning him in to the authorities, although he should. He is a good man, gentle and so unfortunate that even looking at him breaks the Father’s heart and makes him think very intently upon divine mercy and goodness. Roshko, meanwhile, is as hard on the runaway as ever, and the priest worries that eventually he’ll spill their secret to someone. Father Chmielowski is sure that Roshko is jealous, which is why he has been making an effort to be kinder to him and has started paying him an extra grosz, yet Roshko has continued to stomp around in a foul mood. So now, while he is in Lwów for a few days, Father Chmielowski wonders whether they are at each other’s throats. Of this, however, he does not tell Mrs. Dru?backa in his occasional letters, the writing of which brings him great pleasure, because it gives him the impression that someone is actually listening to him at last, and not on some scholarly subject, but rather a human one. Sometimes he composes them in his head for days on end, like now, as he sits almost falling asleep in morning mass with the Bernardines. Instead of praying, he thinks about what to write. Maybe something like this:
. . . My case with Prince Jab?onowski will end up in court. I will defend myself, which is why I am now writing my remarks, in which I attempt to prove that the books and the information therein contained are a common good. For they belong to no one, and at the same time to everyone, just like the sky, the air, the smell of flowers and the beauty of the rainbow. Can you steal from someone the knowledge he has amassed for himself from other books?
Now that he finds himself in Lwów, he has ended up in the very center of the disputation. The bishop is busy, the whole town is eagerly preparing, and no one has the time to work on behalf of Father Benedykt’s cause. So he has stayed here with the Bernardines, going to every hearing of the Jews, taking notes, and writing them up bit by bit in his letters to Mrs. Dru?backa.
. . . You were asking what I have actually witnessed myself, and so I ask you in turn, Your Ladyship, would you have been able to stand, or even to sit, in one place for as long as I sat there? You can take it from me that the hearing was incredibly boring, and that everyone was only interested in one thing: Are the Jews in need of Christian blood?
Father Gaudenty Pikulski, a learned Bernardine of the Lwów order, a professor of theology, and a gentleman “highly trained in the Hebrew tongue,” did a wonderful job. He and Father Awedyk wrote up the whole Lwów hearing and added to it all the information we have these days from all kinds of books and records. With evident erudition, he put the question of ritual murder to detailed analysis.
In support of the accusation of these Contra-Talmudists, he attempted to provide further evidence, drawn mainly from the manuscript of one Serafinowicz, the rabbi of Brze?? Litewski, who in 1710 in ?ó?kiew was baptized and, having publicly confessed that in Lithuania he himself twice committed ritual murder, described all the evils and blasphemies that the Jews commit throughout the year, according to the order of their holy days. These secrets of the Talmudists were already fully published by Serafinowicz himself, but all copies were bought up and burned by the Jews. The beginning of the agonies of Christian children with the distribution of their blood for consumption occurred just after Christ’s death, for the reason that I put to you here in a direct quote from Fathers Pikulski and Awedyk, Your Ladyship, lest you think I am inventing it all:
“When after the propagation of the holy Christian faith Christians began to rise against the Jews and condemn them, the Jews came together to determine ways in which they might appease the Christians and render their hearts merciful toward them. They went at that time to the Jerusalem rabbi, the eldest one, by the name of Ravashe. This rabbi tried every natural and unnatural method, but, finding that the Christians’ fervor and vehemence against the Jews could not be softened, he at last ventured into the Book of Rambam, the most famous of the Jewish scholars. In that book, he read that the effects of a harmful thing can only be lessened by the sympathetic application of a second thing of the same kind, which the aforementioned rabbi translated to the Jews as follows: The flame of Christian obstinacy against them could only be stifled by spilling the blood of said Christians. From that time on, they began to capture Christian children and to viciously murder them, in order to render the Christians milder and more merciful to them, and they put it down for themselves as a new law, as the Talmud clearly and extensively describes in their book Zyvche Lev.”