The Books of Jacob

by Olga Tokarczuk

The priest believes—not only because he’s a priest, but also from his deep conviction—that everything in the Scriptures must be taken literally.

And Moshe is an honorable man, very learned; he studies Kabbalah, knows the whole Zohar by heart, and can “grasp the mystery,” whatever that might mean to Yehuda.

Real wisdom lies in linking everything together—that’s

Then droplets start to fall onto the floor from her diaper, and her grandfather rushes to pass her to her mother, Hayah. Hayah passes her along again to the other women, and the little one vanishes into the depths of the house, a trickle of urine marking her path along the worn floorboards.

A man has to be independent, self-sufficient, and ought to know a little bit about a lot. He also has to have one real skill that will allow him to make a living when he needs to—this is to be determined according to talent.

People who write books, he thinks, don’t want to have their own stories. What would be the point?

“From a single rule in the Torah, the Mishnah came up with dozens, and the Gemara many dozens more; meanwhile, in the later commentaries, there are as many rules as there are grains of sand. So tell me: How is it we’re supposed to live?” he would say, so dramatically that passersby would pause.

As a very pious woman, she did not recognize any Kabbalist teachings, and was suspicious, too, about our righteous Sabbatian rituals.

This makes sense: prophets never come from within. All prophets must come from elsewhere, must suddenly appear, seem strange, out of the ordinary. Be shrouded in mystery, like the one the goyim have, even, of the virgin birth. A prophet has to walk differently, talk differently. Ideally he hails from some unimaginable locale, source of exotic words and untasted dishes and unsmelled smells—myrrh, oranges, bananas. And yet a prophet must also be one of our own. Let him have at least a drop of our blood, let him be a distant relative of somebody we know, even if perhaps we’ve forgotten what they look like. God never speaks through our neighbor, through the guy we’re in a fight with about the well, or the one whose wife attracts us with her charms.

this beth midrash nonetheless works more like an anthill or a beehive, and if it is overseen by a queen, she can only be Wisdom.

“Every place has two characters—every place is double. What is sublime is also fallen. What is clement is at the same time base. In the deepest darkness lies the spark of the most powerful light, and vice versa: where omnipresent clarity reigns, a pit of darkness lurks inside the seed of light. The Messiah is our doppelgänger, a more perfect version of ourselves—he is what we would be, had it not been for the fall.”

Having traded the rest of his possessions for their safety, he put his whole family in their wagon and headed southeast, to Lwów, where their kin lived. It was a good idea: the Cossack element in this part of the world had already had its fun under Khmelnytsky in 1648. Gezerah—the Great Catastrophe—could not occur again. It’s just like what they say about lightning: It’s safest to stand where it’s already struck.

They came to the conclusion that the misfortunes of the preceding years had been blessings in disguise, for they made a kind of sense, foretelling the coming of the savior, just as painful contractions foretell the birth of a new person. As the world gives birth to the Messiah, it must suffer, and all laws must break, conventions be eradicated, oaths and promises crumble. Brothers must lunge at one another’s throats, neighbors hate each other; people who once lived next door must now slit one another’s throats in the night and drink down the blood that rushes up to greet them.

“So what will salvation look like?” she asked him once. Mayer, brought back to reality, stood up and leaned back against the stove. “It’s simple,” he said. “When the last little spark of divine light returns to its source, the Messiah will appear to us. All laws will be invalidated. The division between kosher and non-kosher will disappear, like the division between holy and cursed. Night will cease to be distinguishable from day, and the differences between men and women will disappear. The letters in the Torah will rearrange themselves so that a new Torah will come to be, and everything in it will be opposite. Human bodies will be light as spirits, and new souls will come down into them, straight from the throne of the good God Himself. Then the need to eat and drink will vanish, sleep will become superfluous, and every desire will dissipate like smoke. Corporeal reproduction will give way to the union of holy names. The Talmud will become covered in dust, completely forgotten and unnecessary. Everywhere will be bright from the glow of the Shekhinah.”

I took to heart what Isohar had taught us. He said that there are four types of readers. There is the reading sponge, the reading funnel, the reading colander, and the reading sieve. The sponge absorbs everything it comes into contact with; and it is evident he remembers much of it later, too. But he is not able to filter out what is most important. The funnel takes in what he reads at one end, while at the other, everything he’s read pours out of him. The strainer lets through the wine and keeps the sediment; he ought not to read at all—it would be infinitely better if he simply dedicated himself to some manual trade. The sieve, on the other hand, separates out the chaff to give a result of only the finest grains. “I want you to be like sieves, and to discard all that is not good or interesting,” Isohar would say to us.

That was how to understand Sabbatai’s actions. He chose freedom in his heart, rather than freedom in the world. He had converted to Islam in order to be faithful to his mission of salvation. And we fools expected him to show up before the sultan’s palace with a thousand armies bearing shields of gold. We were like children wanting wonderful toys, ahaya aynayim, illusions, magic for those with limited minds.

Moving the goal post.

It is a beautiful sight to behold, and not only for Nahman; he can see that everyone enjoys the double image—only united are the siblings complete. Should man in fact not be like this, double? What would it be like if we all had twins, boys for girls, girls for boys? We could all talk without words.

Then the oldest of the men, Reb Mordke, begins to lecture on the soul. It is in effect in three parts, he says. The lowest part—the hungering part, the desiring part, the part that gets cold—that is nefesh. That part animals have, too. “Soma,” says Moliwda. “The higher part, that’s the spirit, ruah. That part animates our thoughts, makes us become good people.” “Psyche,” throws in Moliwda. “While the third part, the very highest part—that’s neshama.” “Pneuma!” Moliwda exclaims. “What a fine discovery for me!”

Moliwda doesn’t know yet that in every language Jacob speaks you can detect a foreign accent.

Then I saw this “company” myself—paupers and mendicants, the kind who will never have a place to hang their hats. Sick and broken people desperate for some small miracle, though desirous still of scandal and sensation. Youngsters who had run away from their homes and their heavy-handed fathers; merchants who, out of lack of equilibrium, had lost everything, and now, full of bitterness and spite, were seeking any kind of satisfaction; all types of madmen and those who had simply fled their families, having had their fill of dull obligations. Add to this, too, female beggars and ladies of light virtue, sensing the advantages of being in such a big group. Not to mention the abandoned women, widows no one wants, children in hand, as well as Christian ragamuffins, and vagrants without any sort of occupation. This was the element that began to follow Jacob, and if you were to ask them what was happening and in whose wake they were following, none of them would know how to respond.

Soon everyone in Salonika recognizes Jacob, and Reb Mordke and Isohar decide they should release him from the obligations of trade. And that they, too, ought to dedicate themselves exclusively to study. “Take care of whatever you have to, but don’t try and make any new contacts,” says Reb Mordke to a shocked Nahman. “What do you mean?” asks Nahman. “How will we live? How will we eat?” “Alms,” answers Reb Mordke matter-of-factly. “But work has never been an impediment to studying before,” says Nahman. “Now it is.”

“In our country, even a foreigner can find support.” This treasurer gave me a spiteful smile and looked me in the eye for the first time: “So what did you come wandering in here for, leaving behind that magnificent country, since things were going so well for you there?” I was about to come back with a clever retort when Jacob, who until that moment had been standing calmly behind me, shoved me aside and shrieked at him: “How dare you ask why we left our country, you little scumbag?!” The other man took a step backward, frightened by Jacob’s tone, but he didn’t answer, and in any case he would have been unable to, for Jacob was already leaning in to him and shouting: “Why did Jacob the Patriarch leave his country and go to Egypt? Isn’t that where Passover comes from? If he had stayed in his country, you would have no holiday now, you scoundrel, and we would have no need for holiday meals!”

He starts by saying he’s a simple man, a simpleton, but just the way he looks at them makes them lose their self-assurance. Soon they are standing in the crowds with the others, differentiated only by their thick furs and the feathers in their hats.

What appalls everyone and makes them stomp and shout? It’s the fact they have to ford the Nazarene faith as they would a river, and that Jesus was a shell and a shield for the true Messiah. At around noon, the idea seems shameful. By the afternoon, it’s up for discussion. By evening it’s been assimilated, and late at night it’s perfectly obvious that everything’s exactly as Jacob says.

What could I say? She may have been right. On the other hand, maybe God was taking away my children so as to bring me closer to Jacob.

She stomped through the village to the redheaded Nahman’s home, where the Lord had stopped in for a bit.

The bishop has had enough problems with the local Jews. What an infernal tribe, insidious and insistent—whenever you throw them out, they come slinking back around the edges, so there’s nothing you can do about them short of something decisive, irreversible. Nothing else helps.

Every Book is a Graft of new Information.

“The tradition of our fathers has been to say nothing on matters connected with Sabbatai Tzvi—nothing good, and nothing bad; to neither censure nor condone. And were someone to insist on asking questions, were someone to be curious about the way things were, then he must be threatened with herem.”

Those who have not glimpsed it close up—and most haven’t—have no idea of the enormity of the institution that is this Mosaic faith. Brick after brick, plus vast, squat vaults that fortify each other—it is almost impossible to imagine how anyone could have come up with such an architecture ever. Father Pikulski believes that God did in fact make a covenant with the Jews, did love them and hold them close to him, but that he cast them off. He withdrew and gave the world over to a nice, clean, fair-haired Christ, in a simple robe, focused and determined.

“Why does the ox have a tail?” he asks. The room falls silent, intrigued by the posing of such a stupid question. “What kind of holy book is it that puts such questions to its readers?” Krysa goes on with that finger, which slowly turns toward the rabbis. “The Talmud!” he exclaims after a moment. The room bursts out laughing. The sound rises to the ceiling of the courtroom, a space unaccustomed to such merry outbursts. “And what might the Talmudic answer be?” asks Krysa, whose scarred face has flushed. After a pause, he answers his own question triumphantly: “Because it has to chase away the flies!”

“This is the struggle of greater forces . . .” “It was the same with Sabbatai. They put him in prison, too . . .” “That’s how it has to be. Imprisonment is part of the plan . . .” “This had to happen, and now everything will start . . .” “These are the last days . . .” “This is the end.”

It was written in Hebrew: “Im Ata Ma’amin sheAta Yahol Lekalkel Ta-amin sheGam Ata Yahol Letaken.” If you think you are capable of destruction, think how you could build. It was from the Besht.

Around him, people spoke another language, had different faces, and Jan thought that he had died and found himself in purgatory, and that for some reason purgatory was Jewish.

And because the Jews are always afraid—whether it’s of a Polish lord, or of a Cossack, of injustice or hunger or cold—they live in a state of extreme uncertainty, from which Jacob is a kind of salvation.

“And then there are children, of course. What ultimately ends up happening is shared children. How do you know that that young thing that lay with you last night won’t have a child soon? And whose will it be? Her husband’s or yours? That binds them together tightly, too, since that way they’re all fathers. Whose child is Shlomo’s youngest daughter?” asks Moliwda, now absolutely intoxicated.

Tightening the cult

“You embolden your people to be with one another but not like they want, not just following the call of nature—you decide, because you are their nature.”

“But this was a blessing received through deception and theft,” Moliwda interjects. “Exactly. Jacob himself defied the law and deceived his father. He went beyond the law, and because of it, he became a hero.” Moliwda is silent for a moment. “But later, Jacob, once he was himself a patriarch, guarded the law. That is so perverse: when you need to be, you are against the law, and when it serves your purposes, you’re for it . . .” He laughs.

There was once a sage in Wilno named Heshel Tzorev, and he taught how according to gematria there exists a numerological identicality between the words Polin, or Poland, and the name in the Bible of Esau’s grandson, Tsefo. Esau’s guardian angel—and that of his family—is Samael, and he is also the guardian of Poland. Poland should rightly be called the Kingdom of Edom. The name Tsefo has the same Hebrew letters as tzafon—north—and they have the same value as Polin-Lita, or Poland-Lithuania. And as is known, Jeremiah 1:14 says that when salvation comes, it will start in the country in the north, meaning Poland and Lithuania.

With gematria, you can make Torah say near anything.

When they asked me about the Trinity, I would raise my hand to my forehead and touch the skin there, saying, “The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

These animals were not ex putri materia, or multiplying out of rot, like Muckworms, Fleas, for those can always genus suum reparare (renew their tribe), even though they will die out; wherever something breaks down, dies, vermin will be born there at once. Nierembergius, the Author of the Natural History, considers that these Animals the Lord God did not create, for their Mother is corruption or rot. It’s hard to grasp what’s going on when you are reading Polish. As a language, it’s quite strange.

For the time being, no one notices, and they all trustingly call each other what they always have: Hayim, Sprynełe, Leah. But those names have already lost their luster, dulled, like snakeskins from which the life has faded even before they’re shed. So it is with the name Pesel, which slides off the girl like a too-big shirt, and underneath, the name Helena is already coming into its own, though for now it is still very thin, like skin after a burn—completely new, almost transparent.

“They are no longer Jews, and we are not bound to act toward them as we would toward our fellow Jews. They are like that mixed multitude, that mongrel horde that joined in with the children of Moses as they fled from Egypt: half-breeds and harlots, fops and thieves, suspect types and madmen. That’s what they are.”

A man’s voice suddenly begins to sing the Shema, but the others instantly quiet him. The Queen of the Shabbat passes over their heads, not even grazing them, and travels straight into the Jewish quarter on the other side of town.

Hana whispers to him that the Lord has put on his tefillin and is now performing a secret act with Hershel, something called “bringing the Torah into the latrine.” “With Jan,” Nahman corrects her gently.

“But books are like soldiers. They should always be standing at attention, one after the next. Like an army of mankind’s wisdom.”

“If you don’t know that, you don’t know anything,” Jacob says, annoyed. “David and Sabbatai were secretly women. It can’t come to salvation any way other than through a woman. I know that now, and that’s what I’m here for. From the beginning of the world, that Virgin has been dedicated to me alone, to no one else, because I can protect her.”

“Yehuda, you have plunged a knife into my heart today. But you will come back to us. One day you will come back.”

He could, after all, have healed Naaman with one word, but He had him go bathe in the River Jordan instead. He could have healed the blind man with His universal love, but instead He mixed saliva with mud and put it on his eyes. He could have healed everyone at once, but instead He made the pharmacy, the medic, medicinal herbs. His world is one great oddity.

“El Shaddai,” Jakubowski says in a whisper. They freeze, and now you can hear their uncertain, shallow breaths, the roar of the blood in their veins, the beating of their hearts. You can hear Nahman Jakubowski’s stomach growling; you can hear Ezdra swallowing saliva. The silence is so dense that they can feel on their skin its cold, slick touch. Yes, without any doubt, God is here.