The Miraculous Rabbi of Barcelona

By Else Lasker Schüler

Translated by Sheldon Gilman and Robert Levine

Hear O Lord ….

Night gathers like a ring about my eyes,

My pulse transformed blood into flames

And yet all is grey and cold around me.

O God and I dream of death in the living day.

I drink it in water and choke on it in my bread.

My unhappiness cannot be measured by your scale.

Hear O God, in the blue that is your favorite color I sang the song of your heaven’s roof.

And yet I became too awake for your eternal breath.

I almost feel ashamed of my heart’s deaf scar before thee.

Where is my end, O God, for I looked into the stars, as well as into the moon in everything the valley of your fruit. The red wine is already becoming flat in its berry. And everywhere bitterness in every grain.

During the weeks Eleasar spent in ancient Asia, engaged in pious contemplation, the population of Barcelona took pains to persecute the Jews. They were once again the people who, with their exorbitant prices, had been making life hard for the Spanish merchants, and at the same time were spreading their ambitious message of redemption among the lower classes of the city. Apostle figures preached equality and fraternity, and they tore the hearts out of their breasts and handed them to the poor, as Jesus of Nazareth divided the bread of his blue heart among them. No matter how the Jews acted, however, they caused trouble, which basically had begun with a single, disappointed Spaniard, who had had some kind of unhappy confrontation with a Hebrew, which had then been skillfully promulgated among the people. Eleasar, the miraculous rabbi, returned, in the same year, in due course to Barcelona. His venerable head, mysteriously enlarged and made life-like, as if through a magnifying glass, bowed, framed in the bow window of the palace, nodding to every passerby, whether Jew or Christian. The whole Spanish city whispered anxiously about Eleasar. People said that he was Gabriel, the great archangel who had never died; the unmeltable snow of his beard enclosed the ark of the covenant. To the Jews, however, he was more recognizable; often they saw the miraculous rabbi smile; once he even clapped joyfully with his fine, long hands, and that was in a prayer before the altar, he had seen Jehovah … and became a child. As their fathers had done, the old Jews inscribed in the calendar of their hearts the day on which their highest rabbi had been born. On the seventh of the month of Gâm the children and children’s children and the children’s children’s children, they made a pilgrimage up the hill into the Jew’s palace to bring their miraculous priest branches of the forest, which were hung with berries, sweet and tart, because Eleasar loved the wild, growing corals, he inhaled the light with their fragrance in order to satiate and refresh himself with the pure flesh of the most modest fruits, and he had all other foods distributed to the impoverished of Barcelona. In this year, however, the Jews decided no longer to spare their holy jewel the sufferings which they expected annually in his absence, because he had turned away his great face from the city. On the same dewy evening, gathered in a cellar, the oppressed noble Jews decided to leave this world. Scattered and planted everywhere, the ingredients of the dough, they had become too weary of sweetening it, merely for the sake of a bitter, trivial aftertaste; an entire people was too weary of having been humiliated for millennia. In this way the tormented Jews, with a sense of hollowness, felt their fate. In them the longing for the lost land rose every higher, a land which really had only been leased to them, and each of them solemnly watered the bed of his memory; the miraculous rabbi could not reveal to them where they would land; in fact, some of the younger Jews had also taken root in Spain’s earth, in the intoxicating aroma of the roses, while their sisters’ eyes had awakened, painfully yearning for Jerusalem, the redeemer.

But Eleasar responded to the troubled congregation: “whoever does not carry in his hand the promised land will not reach it.” And in response to the question why would God reveal himself to all mankind as their most noble quality when so many creatures are godless, the highest priest said, with profound regret, that only a few knew how to be the gardeners of their God, to honor and to care for their most valuable seeds and he said that there was no greater impoverishment on earth than to allow the heavenly blossom of the heart to wither.

Whenever Eleasar the miraculous rabbi called out the venerable name Jehovah, the Jews heard it reverently, in the depths of their pulse, all the good deeds awoke, and they regretted what they had done wrong. The Spaniards, however, closed their ears to the redeeming sound that lacerated the temples of the Jews, irrigating them with divine lymph, at the cost of withdrawing a drop of blood from many an astounded person. – there once was a poet in the Jewish poet of Barcelona, the daughter of an aristocrat, who was in charge of the construction of the watchtowers of the great cities of Spain. Arion Elevantos, wishing for someone to carry on his profession, raised his daughter like a son. Early every morning Amran and her father climbed the new buildings, the highest ridges of the city, so that she often believed that she had been a guest of God. Her eyes looked widely into the hollow of the cupola, which was Lebanese cedar and pure gold. Arion spread over the roof of the splendid house financed by the rich Jews, to protect their miraculous rabbi from disturbance. While climbing down the ladder that led from the top, which had not yet been secured, the rash little Amran fell from the holy structure onto a sandy hill, on which Pablo, the mayor’s little son, was playing. And the boy thought that the pale Amran was an angel who had tumbled out of a cloud from heaven, and looked at her with wonder. Since that time, whenever Pablo thought of her, Amran was smiling in a dream.

“At night I hear the palm leaves rustling under your feet.

Sometimes I must cry because I am so happy for you –

Then a smile grows on your sleepy eyelids.

Or you feel a strange joy: the black Aster of your heart.

Whenever you go past gardens you catch sight of the end of your journey, Pablo.

It is my eternal thoughts of love that seek you out.

And often a light will fall from heaven, because my golden sigh seeks you out in the evening.

Soon the languishing month comes over your precious city;

flocks of birds hang like variegated grapes under the tree in the garden, and I wait, enchanted, draped in a dream.

You proud native, Pablo, from your face I breath strange sounds of love;

But in your temple I wish to plant my lodestar, to rob myself of my most splendid blossom.”

Suddenly one day signs in the harp-like characters of an old alphabet appeared to the Senor, who had already grown into a young man; the officials, his father’s subordinates, derisively interpreted them as the writings of rigid and stubborn Jews who, with their inflammatory writing, irritated his father, the chief counselor. The mayor’s son would gladly have knocked at the gate of the palace, to assure him of his unshakable feelings, of his respect for his people, but he feared the gossip of the town, and his father’s anger in particular. One day, however, he followed, wearing a disguise, a Jewish caravan, which went up the hill to the Jewish palace, and still felt in his heart the goodness of the blessing. The Spaniards only hesitantly allowed the synagogue to stand among the houses of their city, and perceived this foreign element as a fragile structure in their path. Hidden behind an inn in which Spanish students danced and caroused on the upper floors, or carried on dueling exercises in the rooms, the mysterious prayer house of the Jews lay. Sometimes the boisterous crowd, inflamed by hot wine, tramped past the door of the synagogue on Friday evening. The women behind the shutters trembled quietly, and Amram felt a sudden alienation grow between herself and Senor Pablo, the mayor’s son. The commandments of the Jewish prayer books read from right to left; therefore Jewish eyes, from their monstrous birth, must be focused in a different way from the rest of the world. Eyes which did not dare to remain fixed on a goal, eyes which hid themselves in the bindings of the book, always fled back into the column in the middle of the page. “Eyes which steal” – said the mayor forcefully to his son, who was growing pale, remembering the secrecy of the hour when they were both still children, and Amran, his “bride,” surrounded by the host of angels, with light in her eye, told him that she had murdered the tailor with her small dagger, and had buried him in the sand, even as the prophet who had done the same to the Egyptian who had abused the Jew chained in slavery. The children called this spindle-legged, gaunt candy-merchant, who had a small store behind the school, and was notorious for having sexually abused Jewish children often, “tailor.” He accused the innocent creatures of theft, because he understood, like a warlock, how to sneak sweets into their pockets. When he threatened to inform their parents of their crimes, these young, weeping victims allowed themselves to be dragged into a gloomy hole in the basement, where they endured his filthy lust.

One day a large ship stood in the marketplace. The efforts of people, horses, and oxen were unable to remove from the city this mysterious vehicle, which interrupted business and commerce. But the angry citizens advised their mayor to seek counsel from old Gabriel, the wise magician, and they pointed to the glittering Jewish house, its windows bleeding suns. And the Spanish patricians, the citizens, the workers, as well as many Jews, led by Pablo’s father, the mayor of Barcelona, stood before the gate of the golden palace, having overcome their inhibitions, in their zeal to see the rabbi. The small, polite group of the Jewish elders, who had decided to inform their miraculous rabbi of their fears gently, to ask him not to leave the city in that year. From the blessed height Barcelona could be seen, emptied of people, barely surviving in the valley. Only the mayor’s big, long-haired dog, Abraham, restlessly raced through the city, through the streets of Barcelona, constantly sniffing around the ship, which had heard overnight the longing of two people below. Unconcerned, Senor Pablo and Amram, the Jewish poet, played at the wheel, as children do, who take pleasure in their fantasies, just as they had played on the holy hill in front of Eleasar’s palace, after the slight accident. Transfigured by their transcendent love, they remained invisible, behind the wing of the sail. And the dog had been the only eye-witness of how the tremendous emissary from the sea, moved by love, gliding delicately through the marketplace, through the city streets, that spread their arms reverently, then disappeared carefully through the gate, like a festive bridal carriage. Eleazar refused to receive the mayor with the crowd accompanying him because what good would it do to talk to people who are asleep. In addition, the small number of Jews who did not act with solemn reserve, as befits the heirs of an old race, made him worry, as did the tales told by the Jewish patriarchs who, without being noticed, had left through the garden gate of the lofty palace. During the night, incensed by the refusal of the rabbi, the Christians felt justified to begin the pogrom. The Spanish shouted, with their fists clenched towards the hill, “Gabriel, he is the false archangel, the evil magician, who had lured the big ship from the ocean, and he was helped in this conjuring by one other than Arion Elevantos, who knew the vaults, the secret passages of the Jewish palace, for he had built it, and the evil powers of its occupants, who could make the breath of the people of Barcelona freeze. Even the Bible tells how the devil had hid himself behind the long tally of his sins, and to kill, “Beat him to death, the old pimp!!!” The confused Christians, superstitious, contented themselves simply by breaking the windows of their good, happy architect; they had forgotten that he had sheltered, free of charge, thousands and thousands of the poor. They gagged him: he, however, laughed in his surprise, even as a boy exults when a playmate grabs him in the game of cops and robbers; when the wife of the mayor approached, and whipped up the already excited crowd to kill the father of the Jewish daughter who had kidnapped her son. She herself ripped the heart out of the breast of the innocent victim, putting it down like a red paving stone, on which stray dogs could do their business. And the Jews, who had always awoken at the name of Jehovah, all lay mutilated, bitten to pieces, faces separated from bodies, childrens’ hands and little feet, the most tender human foliage, were lying all over the streets, into which the unfortunate had been driven like cattle. But the evening winds, the sweet deceivers, which were singing around the great palace of the miraculous rabbi, brought false tales, like dreams, chanting, “On the hedges your unsuspecting sons, Eleasar, are sitting, counting the days and hours which separate them from Palestine, and with silk and pearls the fine daughters of David are embroidering pillows for your blessed hands, Eleazar. Soon Passover will approach and the bakers will bake sacred unleavened bread for your table, miraculous rabbi. He leafed through the pages in the atlas of creation and read how in the beginning the father fashioned the world out of earth and water, his anniversary cake made out of mannah, with all the golden ingredients of his divine blood, and took from his baking-tray man, and from him he again fashioned the multitudes of nations out of him, and invited them all to a common meal. Close to his heart, however, he placed the Jews, who, although few in number among all nations, he summoned them with a knowing nod, and for that reason they behaved more responsibly and more meekly to him. And Eleasar sang the praises of the “All kind father,” saying that he plucked the star from his garment, and lifted the child to himself among the nations, and placed the light in the child’s brown forehead. With this small light on the divine body of the watchman of the world the Lord made the enlightened Jews a nation of prophets, to serve him in every land, in every nation, everywhere. Amen. Although the great sister nations were not to receive the exalted radiance, God compensated them by preparing a home between the green foliage of the august earth, on the rocking, refreshing, comfort of the river, and under the pure winter snow of the air, so that each person wisely would maintain loving order among all peoples of the world, over all peoples of the world. The great hermit closed the yellowed book, whose commandments had faded in the hearts of most of the creatures, as well as in the blood of the Jews. He loved his people, and constantly answered their questions about the homeland evasively. Compelled to leave the cities, in which from the very beginning they were destined to sow God, the Jewish thoughts, which were still awake, fled into the bosom of the high priest. But the miraculous rabbi did not dare to make the tired, chosen ones mindful that Palestine was only the observatory of their home.

Now Eleasar’s eyes, fixed on Barcelona – split by a flash of fears – wept. “Lord, in truth, the boat on the waves of the sea awakened the sanctity of your name.”

In vast longing for the third time in his life, the prophet called the venerable name of his lord. At the redeeming sound of the name Jehovah, the dead of the dead awoke. It was the Christians, and through them all the Christian nations of Christendom. But he did not trust the repenting brethren nations and their awakening! The omnipotence of his great Lord annoyed him.

Hebrew

Inscrutable are the ways of the eternal ... “you allowed your dear son to be constantly slaughtered, so that the trumpet of your holy name should awaken the nations of Christendom, and you reward their abominable deeds with enlightenment.” And Eleasar waited in the garden of the palace for God, the longed-for guest. Finally the invisible one offered his father’s hand to the impatient man. Within in the most solemn room, however, the servant of the priest, with trembling knees, saw his great, holy master reach into the cool glow of the air, seized him, like the courageous toreador seizing the horns of the bull – and then the bleeding, miraculous rabbi lay on the arabesque. He fought in riddles throughout the night with God; darkened, he turned from him. The priest shook the columns of his house until they broke like arms. Its roof rained down in heavy blocks and smashed the houses on the street into a huge quarry. But he, the great miraculous rabbi, the embodiment of a nation, transfigured by the golden, crumbled mosaic of the cupola, hurled himself upon Barcelona’s Christians, who were contritely laying the last tormented Jews to rest, and extinguished the light in them, crushing their bodies.

The angels covered the table with a cloud-white cloth for the heavenly meal, and God took out of his bowl the heart of the worthy man who had returned home, to test the consecrated, stubborn metal, O Eleasar’s heart rubbed against itself, enflaming his stone!

Jerusalem, pour your wine into his jug and preserve it and let it ferment in the valley.