Neither did Rabbi Elbaz disclose the next day, at the morning prayer, the secret of the single judge—not even to his employer, the merchant, who stood stiffly among the worshippers at the side of his beloved nephew, the curly-haired conditional partner, whose musical talents enabled him to join even in the most complex chants of the Rhenish congregation, so that the leader, Joseph son of Kalonymos, feared for a moment that he had a rival. But when they took out the scroll of the holy law and laid it upon the reading desk, and Joseph son of Kalonymos blew upon a massive twisted yellow ram’s horn the threefold blasts prescribed by tradition, a vague terror fell upon Rabbi Elbaz. It was as if the raucous, insistent sound of the German ram’s horn contained a new and urgent warning for him. However, he composed himself, particularly after the scroll was replaced in the holy ark and Joseph son of Kalonymos turned to him and invited him to grace the service by blowing the little black southern horn that the rabbi had managed to conceal from the eyes of the customs officer in Verdun.
And so, slowly, with restrained excitement, the first day of the festival passed, and after it, in leisurely fashion, amid persistent drizzle, the second day too, whose afternoon service was followed immediately by the evening prayers for the Sabbath of Repentance. And still Ben Attar did not know, and may not even have wanted to know, in which of those black-beamed wooden houses raised on stilts his two wives were secreted. The gray autumn skies of the German town seemed to have soaked up the North African merchant’s constant dual love and filled his soul with a tangled despair that was apt to cloud his mind, so that for a moment there was a fear that he might leave everything behind him, take the strongest and best of the four horses that had faithfully brought them here from the Seine from the stable behind the synagogue, and gallop back alone to Africa.
If at the outset Ben Attar had wanted to prove, as in Paris, his quiet ability to realize fully and in perfect equality his rights and duties as a husband, he had quickly understood, perhaps because of the way the local Jews had managed to isolate him from his wives right from the start, that it was not from the man that they were expecting proof here, but from the wives. But proof of what? he wondered again as he noticed his wives reappearing in the women’s synagogue on the two days of the festival. Was it religious piety, he mused in irritation, or was there also an intention of tarnishing their souls with fear and perhaps even guilt, as though the great love that had delighted and continued to delight them both had been illicit from the outset?
From the moment that Master Levitas had placed before the community Rabbi Elbaz’s firm request to appeal to the decision of a single judge, the spirit of the Jews of Worms had flagged, since for several days they had been entertained by the thought that they would dispel the tedium of the ending of the festival and the Sabbath with a pleasant discussion of the fate of three women. But when they were assembled in their synagogue after the closing ceremony of the Sabbath, not to sit in judgment as a community but merely to be passive spectators, waiting to see which scholar the busy little rabbi would choose, they still did not imagine that he would place a further constraint upon them and adamantly insist that the hearing should be held behind closed doors, so that the judge who dared to sever north and south forever would not be supported by the presence of a fanatical assembly.
Thus they were reluctantly made to put up a double curtain in the synagogue, to separate the public from the space reserved for the court. But for all his stubbornness, the rabbi could not prevent them from improving the light by increasing the number of candles and lanterns, so they would not miss seeing the litigants as they were summoned into the small, hidden space next to the holy ark. True, it was not as it had been in the large space of the winery in Villa Le Juif, where the torchlight had cast mysterious, enlarged shadows into the corners of the hall so that the judges, sitting on wine casks, could imagine that they were floating in the depths of hell, where all mortals, men and women alike, are split into their dual human nature; here in Worms the Andalusian rabbi wanted to define a small, well-lit space, where the parties to the dispute and the witnesses would be pressed close together with each other and with the arbiter, whom it was now time to detach from the assembly of Jews filling the synagogue.
Even though the candidate, Joseph son of Kalonymos, was sitting apparently absent-mindedly in a corner, half listening to the chatter all around him, it seemed that he had had a premonition that he would be chosen, not so much from the readiness with which he handed his candle to the man sitting next to him or the alacrity with which he rose to his feet, but rather because he had remained wrapped in his prayer shawl after the evening prayers. He may have wished to excuse himself to his friends for being chosen, as though the judge’s seat that he was being summoned to occupy were merely the natural extension of the lectern where he regularly officiated, as an ordinary elderly man, undistinguished from his fellow men and sounding the ram’s horn as occasion required.
A stir of disappointment ran through the faithful public as they divined how cleverly the Andalusian visitor had chosen from among them a lenient judge, who, although his strength was in his voice rather than in his intellect or his book-learning, could not be disqualified, for who could claim that one who was deemed fit to represent the congregation by leading the prayers was not fit to represent it by serving as arbiter? But there were a few men, among whom naturally was Master Levitas, who knew and remembered that the man who had been selected was not only a widower who had had experience of two wives, albeit consecutively and not concurrently, but had also been a candidate for betrothal to Mistress Esther-Minna, and who suspected that what had been denied him in the past might well stir his antagonism in the present.
Master Levitas darted behind the curtain, where Rabbi Elbaz was already escorting an embarrassed Joseph son of Kalonymos to his seat and standing Ben Attar and Abulafia facing each other, wishing to exploit the momentum of the amazement he was causing and to open the proceedings at once, apparently counting on a lightning hearing that would be conducted in the holy tongue alone. But Levitas, grasping with alarm the sudden deterioration of the situation and the possibility that because of his own and his sister’s excessive self-confidence the sly rabbi from Seville might succeed in securing a verdict against them again, in the heart of their native country, burst into a frantic discourse in the harsh local German dialect, leavened with flattened Hebrew words. Whether he did this to save precious time or to foil the rabbi’s understanding, he addressed himself boldly to the judge, who all the time kept anxiously tightening his grayish prayer shawl around his shoulders.
The whole of Master Levitas’s impassioned speech concerned only one demand: that his sister, Mistress Abulafia, should be brought into the hearing, for she counted herself as a party to the case no less than her husband. Although the suggestion made Joseph son of Kalonymos’s heart quake, he did not grant his consent before turning to the foreign rabbi who had chosen him, questioning whether the wife could be brought in, even though she was apparently not a member of the partnership herself. For a moment the rabbi seemed taken aback, but even though he saw no way of opposing the request, he still refused to make a concession for nothing, and so, without knowing why or wherefore, he suddenly sought to balance her presence with that of the three Ishmaelite sailors or wagoners, for it was thanks to their toil no less than to divine favor that the parties had arrived here safely.