The Time of the Uprooted Read Online Free

monk—but I’m in poor health and I don’t have the strength to finish it. Help me out and I’ll make it worth your while.” How did he know Gamaliel could be of use to him? It was guesswork. They had met one evening at Bolek’s place. Gamaliel’s friend Bolek was a Polish Jew, who, on the infrequent occasions when he’d had too much to drink, would imagine he was a character in a Dostoyevsky novel. A dozen or so guests were sipping lukewarm tea, smoking up the room, and telling dirty jokes. Everyone was laughing, except Gamaliel. As he was leaving, the professor asked if he might walk a few blocks with him. As they were walking, the professor offered in a tremulous voice to hire Gamaliel as his ghostwriter. “I don’t know you,” he said. “I don’t know who you are; our friend Bolek has told me nothing about you. Still, I’m certain you’re a writer.” “But I haven’t published anything!” Gamaliel exclaimed. “One can be a writer without publishing,” said the professor. “And I haven’t written anything yet!” “One can be a writer without writing,” the professor replied, imperturbable. Gamaliel stole a glance at the professor, and could not help teasing him: “And can you be a teacher without teaching?” The professor gave him a serious answer: “A writer can write without having readers, but to teach, you must have students around you. And unless I finish my book, I’m likely to lose my classes.” And so Gamaliel accepted the bargain. He felt sorry for the professor, who really believed that his reputation and career depended on the publication of his work. And his honor, too. In a word, his life. “But I’m not a historian,” Gamaliel protested, and immediately regretted his words. It little mattered whether he was a historian; Bernard Murat was, and that was all that counted.
    Thanks to Murat, Gamaliel would read and reread the essential works on intellectual and spiritual life in the Middle Ages. He began with Europe, and then he focused his attention on Rome and Barcelona. Crescas and Pico della Mirandola, Averroes and Ibn Ezra. Maimonides, and, of course, Paritus the One-Eyed, that scholar whose imagination knew no bounds. How could one hear the voices of heaven, what was the true faith, and how could one recognize it? In those days, it was all too easy to fall into heresy. It was enough if you merely hesitated, or stood out in the crowd of the faithful, or refused to give the usual answers. Or if you said no: no to absolute power, no to the pitiless authority of the Church, and no, a hundred times no, to its dogmas. No to anything that denied freedom, even if you had to die for it, or with it. So it was that Giordano Bruno appeared as a hero in Bernard Murat’s book. Was Giordano at fault when he declared that without Creation there could be no Creator? Before they tore out his tongue, Giordano had a bitterly honest debate with his inquisitor, who for a moment almost gave in to pity, before he got hold of himself. Fertile imagination? Gamaliel went so far as to give his Giordano a companion in misfortune, a brother in his faith, a partner in his bold quest for the truth that is human, as opposed to the truth that claims to be divine. Gamaliel named this man Manuel de Toledo, and gave him the story of his life. One fine day, Manuel said good-bye to the three sons and a daughter he would never see again: He was arrested by monks at the command of the Grand Inquisitor. He would never leave the stifling, filthy cell, where the guard was Christ: a nod to Dostoyevsky’s Karamazov, of course. Despite his torturers, Manuel’s mind stayed clear and he kept his dignity as a free man. And meanwhile, Gamaliel’s wallet was fattening. But then in a moment of candor, the professor handed him back the manuscript, saying, “Fiction is a lethal trap for a historian like me. I’m better off doing without it.”
    Gamaliel’s second contract was signed under more down-to-earth circumstances.