"No. Except for what I said a while ago about Solomon and Eleazar"
“Did you tell one or more Jews to accept baptism only to avoid death and afterward to revert to Judaism?”
"No."
"Were you ever present at the ceremony of the return of a converted Jew to Moses' faith?"
"No."
"Do you consider your own conversion invalid?”
"Yes."
"Why do you willingly expose yourself to the danger of heresy?”
“Because I wish to live in peace with myself and not with the world."
"Explain.”
"Since I don't know what Christians believe and why, since on the other hand I do know what Jews believe and why, and since I consider their faith to be proven by the Law and the Prophetic Books, which I have studied as a doctor for some twenty у eats, I say that, until it is proven to me by my Law and my Prophets that the Christian faith conforms to them, I will not believe in Christianity, despite the security offered me in the fold of that faith, I would rather die than abandon my faith."
This was the beginning of the debate over Christian faith with Baruch David Neumann, who continued to resist with the strength of his arguments, while the Most Venerable Father in Christ, Monsignor Jacques, by the grace of God Bishop of Pamiers, showed boundless patience in bringing the said Baruch to the Truth, sparing neither time nor effort. The Jew, however, obstinately clung to his belief, relying on the Old Testament and rejecting the light of Christian faith which Monsignor Jacques was so mercifully bestowing on him.
On August 16, 1330, Baruch finally wavered, confessed, and affirmed that he had renounced the Jewish faith. Since they had read to him the record of the hearing, the said Neumann, when asked whether he had made his confession under torture or immediately thereafter, answered that he had made his confession immediately thereafter, about three o'clock in the morning, and on that same day in the evening hours he made the same confession without having been first brought into the torture chamber.
This hearing took place in the presence of Monsignor Jacques, by the grace of God Bishop of Pamiers, Friar Gaillard de Pamiers, the Magistrate Bernard Faissasier, the Magistrate David de Troyes, a Jew, and us, Guillaume-Pierre Barthes and Robert de Robecourt, notaries of the Inquisitor of Carcassonne.
It is known that Baruch David Neumann appeared before the same tribunal on two more occasions: the first, in the middle of May of the following year, when he declared that after a rereading of the Law and the Prophets he had again swayed in his faith. There followed a long debate over the Hebrew sources; the patient and prolonged arguments of Monsignor Jacques led Baruch again to renounce Judaism. The final sentence carries the date of November 20, 1337, The record of the hearing, however, has not been preserved, and Duvernoy offers the logical hypothesis that the unfortunate Baruch had most likely died under torture. Another source tells of a certain Baruch who was sentenced for the same offense of thinking and burned at the stake some twenty years later. It is difficult to imagine that this reference is to the same person.
A NOTE
The story of Baruch David Neumann is actually a translation of the third chapter of the Registers of the Inquisition (Confessio Baruc olim iudei modo baptizati et post modum reversi ad iudaismum), in which Jacques Fournier, the future Pope Benedict XII, entered scrupulously and in detail the confessions and testimony given before his tribunal. The manuscript is preserved tn the Fondi Latini of the Vatican library, number 4030. I have made only certain minor omissions in the text, where there is a discussion of the Holy Trinity, Christ as the Messiah, the Fulfillment of the Word of the Law, and the denial of certain assertions of the Old Testament The translation is based on the French version by Monsignor Jean-Marie Vidal, former vicar of the church of Saint Louis in Rome, as well as on the version of the Catholic exegete, the Honorable Ignacio von Dollinger, published in Munich in 1890. These texts, with their useful and learned commentaries, have been reprinted many times-most recently, as far as I know, in 1965. The original manuscript (“a beautiful parchment scroll with a scribal hand in two columns”) reaches the reader as a triple echo of a distant voice-Baruch’s, if we include his voice in the translation, like a reverberation of Yahweh's thought.
The sudden accidental discovery of this text, the discovery that coincided with the happy completion of the story entitled "A Tomb for Boris Davidovich," left me with a feeling of miraculous illumination: the analogy with the story already told is obvious to such a degree that I see the identical motives, dates, and names as God's part in creation, la part de Dieu, or the devil's, la part du diable.
The consistency of moral beliefs; the spilling of the sacrificial blood; the similarity in names (Boris Davidovich Novsky; Baruch David Neumann); the coincidence in dates of the arrests of Novsky and Neumann (on the same day of the fatal month of December, but with a span of six centuries: 1330–1930)-all this suddenly appeared in my consciousness as an enlarged metaphor of the classical doctrine of the cyclic movement of time: "He who has seen the present has seen everything, that which happened in the most distant past and that which will happen in the future” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VI, 37). Polemicizing with the Stoics (and even mote so — with Nietzsche), J. L. Borges formulates their teachings as follows: “From time to time the world is destroyed by the flame that created it, and then is born again to experience the same history. Again the same molecular particles fuse, again they give form to stones, trees, people-even to virtues and days, because for the Greeks there is no noun without substance. Again each sword and each hero, again each trivial sleepless night."
In this context the sequence of variability is without great significance. Nevertheless, I chose the sequence of spiritual rather than historical dares: as I have said, I discovered the history of David Neumann after writing the story of Boris Davidovich.
The Short Biography of A. A. Darmolatov
{1892–1968}
In our time when many poets' destinies are shaped according to the monstrous standard model of epoch, class, and environment, and when the fatal facts of life-the unique magic of the first poem, the journey to exotic Tiflis for the jubilee of Rustaveli, or the meeting with the one-armed poet Narbut-are reduced to a chronological sequence without the flavor of adventure and blood, the biography of A. A. Darmolatov, though somewhat sketchy, is not without a lyrical core. Out of the confused mass of facts, there emerges a naked human life.
Under the influence of his father, a village teacher who was an amateur biologist and chronic alcoholic, Darmolatov was fascinated by the secrets of nature from an early age. On their landed estate (his mother’s dowry) in the small town of Nikolaevski, the dogs, birds, and cats lived in relative freedom. In his sixth year, in nearby Saratov they bought him Devrienne's Atlas of the Butterflies of Europe and Central Asia, one of the last valuable works of engraving of the nineteenth century. At seven, he assisted his father in dissecting rodents and performing experiments on frogs. At ten, reading novels of the Spanish-American War, he became a passionate defender of the Spaniards, and at twelve he hid a wafer under his tongue, brought it out of the church, and put it down on the bench before his dumbfounded friends. Reading the texts of Korch, he dreamed of ancient times, despising the present. There could be nothing, therefore, more typical than this provincial environment and this positivistically educated middle class; nothing more banal than this heredity, combining alcoholism and tuberculosis on the father’s side with the melancholic depression of the mother, a reader of French novels. Also on the mother's side was an aunt, Yadviga Yarmolaevna, who was living with them and slowly drifting into dementia-the only respectable fact in the poet's early biography.