All the next day Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi shut himself up in his room and forbade the shammes from admitting anyone to see him. A sobbing crowd squeezed into the stairwell. The pale shammes, his finger to his lips, stood on guard before the door. He knew all too well that the rabbi was speaking with the Lord and was not to be disturbed.
Late in the evening the rabbi called in the shammes and requested that he report the news. The news was terrible. One hundred and thirty more Jews had died over the course of the day. Corpses lay unwashed in apartments, because all the corpse washers had caught the plague and died. The families of the deceased were sitting shiva on an empty stomach, because all the members of the burial society had died. The families sitting in mourning were dying themselves. Of the ten people in the family of Symche the shoemaker, whose wife had died on the very first night, nine were now dead, and only the father was now sitting shiva.
The rabbi nodded his head in silence, listening to the shammes’s horrible reports. Then he asked for his tallith and went down to the synagogue. The shammes ran after him out of obligation and curiosity.
When Rabbi Eliezer appeared in the synagogue, a great hush ensued. Everyone knew that the rabbi had been speaking with God the whole day and that he had come to say something of import. All eyes were on him.
Standing on the steps of the altar, Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi turned his face to those gathered and started to speak in the solemn voice of a legislator:
“God has opened my eyes, and in the book of His wrath He has allowed me to invoke the pekuach nefesh, the obligation to save human life. For as long as this plague continues, Jews shall be absolved from sitting shiva over their dead and from performing the rituals of burial. During this plague the bodies shall be stitched in canvas without prior ceremony and carted off to the cemetery. God is putting us to a grave test, and only through prayer shall He be appeased. The Angel of Death, Malach HaMavet, has entered Jewish homes, and our mezuzahs have not protected us. The houses he has touched shall be unclean for forty days and must be evacuated. Pray and beg for mercy.”
Rabbi Eliezer, pale and swooning from weakness, descended the stairs and, supported by the shammes, left the synagogue, rumbling with a thousand feverish voices in his wake.
The events of the following days did not appear to show that God had been appeased. The pekuach nefesh somewhat reduced the number of corpses in the next few days, but the number never fell below a hundred daily. Plague-free apartments were swiftly becoming scarce. On the tenth day the housing crisis took on alarming proportions.
Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi had shut himself up in his apartment all this time, neither showing his face in the shul nor receiving anyone, entrusting the shammes to all his affairs. The besieged shammes could only tell the people that the rabbi seldom spoke to him, choosing to spend hours at a time conversing with God in his room.
On the tenth day, when there was no longer a single apartment in Hôtel de Ville that had not been infested by plague, the ten most elderly Jews came to the rabbi as a delegation. The shammes was bought off, and he tiptoed off to inform the rabbi of the men’s arrival.
After a long moment, the rabbi himself came out to see them. His face was more glassy than usual; it was terrible to think that his life was hanging by a thread.
When the shammes had brought chairs, it was old Mekhel, the biggest wholesaler in all of Hôtel de Ville, who spoke up.
“Rabbi,” he said in a defeated voice, “Rabbi, we have done everything as you said. You read out the pekuach nefesh from the book of divine wrath, and since then we have not sat shiva over our dead, and the bodies have been stitched up in canvas and sent to the cemetery without ritual burials. You said that the homes visited by the plague were to be considered unclean for forty days and evacuated, and we have followed your words. Yet the plague continues, and not a day passes when several dozen Jewish families do not fall victim to it. Our apartments are spilling over. Soon every single home will have been afflicted by this pestilence. There are no more apartments in all of Hôtel de Ville. Families of the infected are sleeping on the streets. What can we do, Rabbi?”
Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi smiled kindly, and his two eyes, trained somewhere beyond Mekhel, not seeing him, as though he were transparent, shone with the same smile as he replied in a faraway voice:
“There are still a great many apartments in the Jewish quarter, they are there for the taking.”
The elderly Jews exchanged glances. When the rabbi spoke of the important things his eyes saw, there was no way to perceive them with an ordinary mind all at once. A momentary silence fell. Finally old Mekhel gathered some courage and said:
“Rabbi, our minds are no match for yours. Your words are unclear to us. Which apartments do you have in mind that are there for the taking?”
Rabbi Eliezer was silent a moment and then responded as if to himself, in deep rumination:
“There are many apartments in the Jewish quarter whose doors are not protected by mezuzahs. It is through these doors that the Angel of Death has come to us.”
A long silence fell. Then the rabbi spoke further, as if thinking more out loud:
“Rabbi Hillel, wisest of the wise men, once said: During the times of Rabbi Ezra, when the Jewish nation was split asunder, and the plague of Christianity raged all around, the Jews surrounded their communities with high walls to protect themselves and preserve their order. Our contemporaries have given such Jewish towns a name: ‘ghetto.’ But the time came when the Jews grew weary of their fathers’ warnings and longed to spread their order amidst the foreigners, much to their own disgrace. Then they destroyed the walls surrounding their homes, and from then on the calamities of the Gentiles became their calamities as well, and God’s wrath has turned upon them. Until the Jews surround themselves once more with a wall impenetrable to all who are not their own, then the pestilence shall devour them, and Malach HaMavet, the Angel of Death, shall linger at their threshold.”
Whereupon Rabbi Eliezer ben Zvi made a sign with his hand to indicate that the audience was concluded, requesting the shammes to show his visitors to the door.
On July 30, at five in the afternoon, special editions of the newspaper appeared on the boulevards, announcing a new separatist movement. The Jewish population of the Hôtel de Ville district had seized the town hall and expelled all Gentiles from the whole of the area. The apathetic Christians generally offered no resistance. The only decisive opposition to the Jews came from the Saint-Paul neighborhood, inhabited by the poverty-stricken Polish population. Fired by their inborn anti-Semitism, the Poles put up an armed defense. This led to some bloody skirmishes, bringing losses on both sides, until the Jews’ superior numbers brought them victory.
The supplements made mention of a proclamation plastered all over the walls of Hôtel de Ville, addressed to the Jews of Paris. It apparently announced the constitution of an independent Jewish territorial community to be walled off from the rest of the city, to hold back the Aryan plague. It called upon all the Jews of Paris to move to this territory, expressing the conviction that the plague had descended on Aryan Europe for their centuries of oppressing the Jewish nation and would now spare the Jews if they maintained the strictest isolation.
This news caused quite a stir in the city. In the evening, long lines of automobiles loaded down with suitcases were seen traveling from the western and northern parts of the city toward Hôtel de Ville. Nobody tried to bar their way.