Paris: The Novel

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 theirdoom 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. Ifthe 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,