Paris: The Novel (24 page)

Jacob had been baptized into the Christian faith a week later. Renard had made the arrangements with a priest, and it had been discreetly done. For Jacob had been so afraid that the shock of his conversion might cause his wife to miscarry that neither she nor Naomi had any idea of it until two weeks after his son had been safely born. They called the little boy Jacob, since it was the family tradition. During this time, he did not go to the synagogue, but allowed it to be thought that this was because he would not leave his wife’s side.

When at last he told Sarah, she had been greatly shocked. He explained
to her in secret what Renard had told him, and why he had done it. When he had finished, she said nothing for a few moments, and then remarked with some bitterness: “So, I am to lose every one of my friends.”

Had she not been nursing her baby, and caring for Naomi, he supposed she might have said a lot more than she did.

As for Naomi, the little girl was mystified. The first night after she was told she was to be a Christian, he had come to say prayers with her as usual, and she had begun:

But there he had gently stopped her, and explained that from now on she should begin her prayers with a new prayer.

“It is a very beautiful prayer,” he promised. “It is addressed to the one Lord, the God of Israel, and of all the world. It begins ‘Our Father …’ ”

“Am I not to say the Shema anymore?” she asked.

And with a sudden pang of grief he found himself telling her: “Christians sometimes say the Shema, too, in Latin. But it’s better that you use this other prayer instead.”

When Naomi asked her mother about it the next morning, Sarah told her firmly that she must obey her father and that he knew best. But that afternoon she came in crying because another little girl had told her that the prayer was used only by the enemies of her people. Soon, none of the other children in the quarter would speak to her.

She could not be told the secret about the coming expulsion. It was too dangerous, and she was too young. Jacob could only watch her suffering and comfort her as best he could.

It was clear they had to move.

If Henri Renard had been the cause of all this pain, he certainly kept his promise when it came to helping his friend once he had made the fateful decision. He had already prepared the ground, both with the priest who baptized Jacob, and with a wide circle of influential merchants and their families.

“You’ll remember his father the physician, of course,” he’d say. “One of the most trusted men in Paris. So Jacob grew up among Christians like myself from his childhood. He couldn’t discuss it publicly, of course, but to my certain knowledge he has been considering converting for nearly a
decade.” Technically, since he himself had broached the subject to Jacob years ago, this was true, if somewhat misleading.

As a Christian, Jacob was not supposed to practice moneylending. But in no time Renard had got him into the merchant guild. There were plenty of opportunities for a man of his skill and fortune to make money as a merchant, and he was soon an active dealer in the city’s great cloth trade. Renard had also helped Jacob find the house in the rue Saint-Martin.

“It’s only a short walk from Les Halles, and it’s in my own parish of Saint-Merri, so we can hear Mass at the same church,” he explained. And he ensured that the newly converted family—for Sarah and Naomi, however unwillingly, had also been baptized—were welcomed by their fellow parishioners. So at least they now had neighbors who spoke to them, and Naomi had the chance to make new friends.

The greatest relief for Jacob, however, had been the health of his newborn son. The birth had not been as difficult as feared. The baby was in good health, and within weeks was giving every sign of being robust. So far, at least, it seemed that God had not turned His face away from Jacob. Indeed, Jacob even wondered if it was possible that the Lord might be pleased with his conversion.

Strangely, during the whole business, the reaction that troubled him the most, the words that haunted him, came from a man he didn’t even care for.

The morning after his conversion had become known the rabbi came straight to his house.

“Is this true, Jacob ben Jacob? You have converted? Tell me this is not true.”

“It is true.”

He had expected the rabbi to be angry. But there was an even more striking reaction, a look so deeply carved in the lines of the rabbi’s face that it gave him a new dignity. It was grief.

“Why? Why have you done such a thing?”

“I have decided that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah.”

It was not true. He could not tell the rabbi the truth. And as he stared at this man he did not like, he felt a sudden and terrible guilt. He longed to cry out: “I did it because the Jews are going to be expelled. I did it to save my family.” But he could not. There lay his greatest crime. He was doing nothing to warn his own people. He was going to wait as their
doom approached, watch while they lost everything, including their homes, and were cast out to wander the world.

“Will you betray us then, Jacob ben Jacob?” the rabbi asked bitterly. “Will you be another Nicolas Donin?”

This was a searing accusation. For every Jew knew that Nicolas Donin, the Franciscan who’d persuaded Christendom to burn the Talmud, had been born a Jew himself. Nothing was more terrible, it was often said, than the vengeance of the traitor.

“Never!” he cried. He was deeply hurt. But it was the rabbi’s parting words that would haunt him.

“You call me a fool,” the rabbi said. “But it is you who are the fool, Jacob. You convert. You join the Christians. And you think: Now I shall be safe. But you are wrong. This I know, and this I tell you.” He shook his head. “You are a Jew, Jacob. And no matter what you do, no matter what the Christians say—believe me—you will never be safe.”

So Jacob attended church and learned what it was to be a Christian. In a general way, through his intimacy with friends like Renard, he had always known. But because it was his nature to be intellectually curious, he began to study the religion to which he had committed his family. The Old Testament he knew well. Now he studied the New. And he was interested to discover how directly, how intimately, the one grew from the other. To him, Jesus and his disciples did not seem like Christians at war with a Jewish culture they shunned. They were Jews. They were Jewish in culture, they obeyed Jewish laws, followed Jewish observances. They read from the Torah, and sacrificed at the temple in Jerusalem.

As for the Christian message of love, who would argue against that?

When Renard had urged him to remember that the Christian Church had begun as a group of Jews who recognized that their rabbi had been the promised Messiah, Jacob had assumed it was to help him convert and save his skin. And it probably was. But, in fact, Jacob now concluded, his friend had spoken the truth. As he read the Acts of the Apostles, it struck him forcibly to what an extent the first Christians were Jews, and how easily—but for Saint Paul’s persuading the Savior’s reluctant family and friends to let the Gentiles join them—they might have remained a Jewish sect. Time, and the tragedies of history, accounted for all the rest.

But no man could ignore that long history. It could not be done. If
the Church regarded him cautiously, if the rabbi no longer spoke to him, if his wife was unhappy and his daughter mystified, he could not blame them.

Meanwhile he waited, with a heavy heart and secret shame, for the terrible blow that was about to fall upon the Jews of France.

Weeks passed. Nothing happened. He wondered if Renard had made a mistake about the king’s intentions. Had he put his family through untold misery for no good reason at all?

But Renard had not been mistaken. The king had indeed been planning to strike at the Jewish community—but not in the way that he and Jacob had expected.

For in the year of Our Lord 1299, Philip the Fair announced that he would no longer protect the Jews from the Inquisition. The blow was as cunning as it was vicious.

What had the king done? Nothing. What might the Inquisition do? Anything. Was the king losing any revenues he might collect from the Jews? No. Was he proving his piety? Yes.

And what did this mean for Jacob?

“That I converted, thinking that my own people would be thrown out of Paris. Whereas now they remain here, and hate me more than ever. That I converted to be safe. Whereas now, the Inquisition will be encouraged to watch me like a hawk, and if they decide that my conversion was not sincere, they will say that I am a Jew after all, and they will attack me for perjury, and who knows what else. For all I know, they will burn me alive. That is what the king’s action means for me,” he said miserably to his wife.

“For us,” she corrected, grimly.

But the Inquisition had left him alone. In his favor was the fact that the Jews of Paris so clearly hated him, and that, thanks to Renard, the congregation of the Saint-Merri parish continued to embrace him as one of their own.

The family settled into a Christian life. It was strange to them not to celebrate the Sabbath on a Saturday anymore. The observance of the Christian Sunday was a far more lax affair. He missed the passionate
intimacy of the Jewish Passover. He missed the haunting, melancholy sound of the cantor in the synagogue. But the Christian services had their beauty too.

“Our life,” he told his family, “is not so bad.”

Whatever she thought, Sarah saw no use in complaining. Little Jacob, growing up in an extended circle of the Renards and their friends, was too young to have known anything else. As for Naomi, she seemed to adapt. She made new friends. As far as Jacob knew, she never saw any Jewish children at all.

Jacob rented a storehouse nearby where he kept the great bales of cloth in which he now dealt. He took on an apprentice, who slept in a loft over the store to guard its contents. A year after converting, he had bought the orchard of apple and pear trees by the hamlet on the slopes to the northeast of the city, and on Sunday afternoons the family, often accompanied by the Renards, would usually walk out there and, after inspecting the orchards and gazing down upon Paris, return by another path that led them past the fortress of the Temple Knights and thence into the city. It was pleasant exercise.

Five years had passed in this manner, without incident.