The Vampire and The Wandering Jew by Barak Bassman

Author:Barak Bassman [Bassman, Barak]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-26T16:56:02+00:00

VII. The Jewish Monk

Brother Nicholas had first felt the stirrings of his Christian faith when he was twelve years old. It had happened on a Saturday afternoon. The lord who owned the town where his family lived had been unwell. The lord’s estranged wife, who had fled far away to her family’s lands, had recently died. According to the rumors that spread about, the lord was now racked with guilt about the coarse peasant mistresses he had kept in her place and the litter of bastards he had sired. Under the guidance of his previously neglected confessor, he turned to prayer, contrition, and the generous endowment of monasteries. And as a further part of his penance, he ordered his Jews—including Brother Nicholas’s family—to assemble in the town’s church on that Saturday afternoon so that a local priest could preach the true Gospel to them and urge them to accept baptism.

The town’s Jews were upset at this decree, but what could they do? Their homes and livelihoods depended upon their lord’s goodwill. For many years he had left them in peace, too busy fornicating, drinking, and hunting to care about them. Perhaps, the Jews whispered to each other, this newfound zeal is just a passing fancy. We will humor him and sit in his church and listen politely to the priest’s silly nonsense.

Yet when the time came, the short walk to the church proved hard. The Jews spoke not a word to one another as they filed awkwardly and haltingly into the pews, beneath the glaring, disapproving eyes of a tall statue of some Christian saint.

Yossele (as Brother Nicholas was then known) sat with his tate, who held his hand tightly. He had never been inside a church before. It was the tallest building he had ever seen—his eyes could barely make out the stone arches on the high ceiling. There was an immense altar in front of the pews and behind it rectangular panels of stained glass lit up by the afternoon sun.

The stained glass pictures were full of bright, vivid colors, much more intense than anything Yossele had ever seen before. There was a gaunt man nailed to a wooden cross with a crown of thorns upon his head and his ribs protruding from his chest. His eyes, filled with such pitiable suffering, looked out at the silent, tense Jews in the pews. Next to him was a woman weeping. Her face was pretty, and her skin was unblemished and blindingly white, so different from the dirty, wrinkled faces of the women Yossele saw in his father’s bakery shop.

A plump, self-assured Christian priest confidently strode up to the lectern and looked out at the assembled Jews, who averted their eyes from him. After a moment of silence, this priest then launched into his sermon. He spoke of how the Jews had betrayed their covenant with God and were now scattered and dispersed, reduced to powerlessness and exile as a righteous punishment for their many and terrible sins. He thundered that they had betrayed and murdered their savior Jesus, and they must now repent.

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