The Source by James A. Michener
“Then it must stand on end,” a listener from Egypt suggested, and this proposition the sophist demolished with witty evidence until all had to confess that they were listening to a brilliant man whose white beard and black skin lent dignity to their city.
Ptolemais in those days contained some sixty thousand people, including businessmen from Rome, who sent secret reports back to their senate, and as the young athletes from Makor watched these rich and varied persons at their work they came to understand how precious Greek citizenship could be and what a treasure they would gain for themselves could they become citizens, too. Of the sixty thousand, only five thousand were citizens, some thirty thousand were slaves, and the remaining twenty-five thousand were residents possessing no rights of voting or claims to consideration by the city-state. Jews fell mostly into the latter category, but as Tarphon explained to Menelaus, “This is the essential reason why it’s prudent for you to visit the doctor. For if you win at Antioch, you will be made a full citizen of Ptolemais. Only citizens can compete in the Olympics at Greece.”
“Are you a citizen?” Menelaus asked.
“I won my citizenship in the wrestling arena,” Tarphon said with visible pride.
“I shall be a citizen of this city,” the youth vowed and he asked the gymnasiarch to lead him to the doctor.
In a side street, not far from the theater, an Egyptian doctor accepted the two strangers, listened as Tarphon explained, then said, “Gymnasiarch, now you shall go, for this must be a matter between the boy and me.” Tarphon nodded, gripped his protégé by the shoulder and whispered, “This is the path to citizenship,” and he was gone.
As soon as the door closed the Egyptian startled Menelaus by ripping aside a curtain to disclose the marble statue of an athlete, naked and powerful. Grabbing a knife the doctor took the statue’s penis in his left hand and pretended to slice it with four sharp, deep cuts, crying, “This is what we do.” He was watching not the statue but the patient and saw with satisfaction that although Menelaus flinched, and blood left his face, he did not look away but kept watching the marble penis so as to judge whether he could bear the pain. Satisfied that he could, he bit his lip and waited. “Under this pain,” the doctor explained, “a Jew older than you, from Jaffa, committed suicide.”
“He was not seeking the prize I seek,” Menelaus retorted, whereupon the Egyptian moved swiftly at him with the knife, seeking to terrify him, but the young Jew did not flinch.
“I think you are ready,” the doctor said, “and you may scream as much as you will, for it will exhaust the pain.” And he made ready a table upon which the young man would lie, and called three slaves to hold him.
When Tarphon received satisfactory reports from Makor stating that the disobedient Jewish family had been executed and that any uneasiness resulting therefrom had subsided, and when the Egyptian doctor assured him that Menelaus had been unusually courageous and would soon mend, he assembled the rest of his team and led them home, where they were received in triumph, but it was soon noticed that Menelaus, the Jew, was not among them, and this, coming so soon after the executions, caused comment which the gymnasiarch allayed by announcing that a great honor had come to Makor: “Our young champion Menelaus has been invited to the imperial games at Antioch.” When the crowd stopped cheering he added, “He’s training in Ptolemais, but he will soon be home.”
He took three of the young men to the palace, where Melissa had a feast prepared for them, and there he announced that the young man Nicanor, who had triumphed over him in the race to Ptolemais, would henceforth be permitted to wear the town’s uniform, and ceremoniously he handed the young Phoenician the coveted garb. Melissa kissed the youth and then Tarphon said that he was going to the gymnasium, where he asked his slave to fetch Jehubabel.
The meeting was unpleasant. Tarphon began by explaining to the Jewish leader that in the case of the Paltiel family his hands had been tied. During his absence in Ptolemais the orders had come from Antiochus Epiphanes, and since he had not been able to return to Makor in time … Jehubabel looked at him with disgust, and this irritated Tarphon, who reminded him, “If I had been here I might have arrested you, too, for you must have been involved in this thing.” But Jehubabel, a timorous man in the beginning, was no longer to be frightened, and Tarphon, seeing this, tried to regain his friendship by other means, for the governor knew that if there was to be open enmity between them the control of Makor might become difficult. “Let’s forget Paltiel,” he suggested. “The important news is your son. He performed brilliantly. Wrestled with the best and defeated them all.” He pointed his finger at the pudgy Jew as if he were prophesying: “One day that boy will stand in the victor’s circle at Olympia.”
Jehubabel looked at Tarphon as if the latter were an imbecile, and he began to say what folly it was for the leader of a people to take pride in standing naked before them, as if athletic ability had any bearing on integrity; but instead he launched into an attack on Tarphon’s wife: “How can you presume to govern when you can’t control your own wife?”
Tarphon was stunned. “What do you mean?”
“My son. Your wife.” The round-faced Jew was scarcely intelligible, but Tarphon guessed that Jehubabel must have placed some ugly interpretation on a matter with which he was not acquainted.
“What has happened between your son and Melissa?” he asked.
“He’s in your house. At the gate she kissed him while you were watching. Have you no shame?”
Governor Tarphon looked down at his folded hands. How could one explain anything civilized to the Jews? All during his years in Athens, Tarphon had moved from one principal home to the next, where beautiful women patronized promising young men and suffered no compromise in doing so. Sensible Greek matrons knew how to conduct themselves, and Tarphon had found that one of the finest rewards of his marriage was the spacious room in which his beautiful wife met with young men of varied accomplishments and encouraged them to further attainment; it was this interchange of philosophy and art and politics that sustained life, and Tarphon pitied the narrow-minded Jew who interpreted the process otherwise.
“You should guard your wife,” Jehubabel warned. “Like a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout is a fair woman without discretion.”
“What are you trying to say?” Tarphon asked in some exasperation.
“A man whose wife is a whore, what peace can he know?”
“Get away from here!” Tarphon cried, rushing from his chair to push the dumpy Jew from his room. He had tried, the record would prove how desperately he had tried, to conciliate Jehubabel, but it was now obvious that there could be no fruitful discussion between them. When he had Jehubabel at the door he warned, “The law will be enforced. And when we find the next circumcised child, you too will die. For you shared in the guilt of Paltiel.”
He shoved his guest through the door, but this placed Jehubabel under the statue of Antiochus, and with a courage new to him Jehubabel said scornfully, using the joke of the Jews, “Antiochus Epimanes,” meaning the fool, after which he spit upon the discus thrower, crying, “This vanity will perish,” and he left the gymnasium.
That evening Tarphon repeated the conversation for Melissa, and she was distressed that the Jew had made such a fool of himself. That he had misunderstood her actions she was willing to forgive, for Greek ways must seem strange to austere Jews, but she could not understand his failure to appreciate his own son. “In Menelaus he has the finest youth in Makor, but he seems determined to crush his spirit. Why can’t he simply accept the wonderful thing the gods have given him? And not see him as a criminal?”
She became so agitated that she insisted upon talking with Jehubabel, there and then, but Tarphon refused to argue any further with the Jew; so exercising her freedom as a Greek woman she summoned two of her slaves, who bore small lamps into the street, and thus she made her way to the home of Jehubabel, surprising him by insisting upon coming inside and sitting like a familiar neighbor on one of the
“Jehubabel,” she began in the Koine, “I am distressed at the enmity which has grown up between you and Menelaus.”
The Jew thought: She has ensnared my son, and now she wishes to entrap me. But for what purpose?
“And I am even more distressed that you have opposed my husband. Truly, Tarphon is the best friend you Jews could have. He has tried to soften every law.”
The Jew thought: Ah! There’s some new edict which Tarphon is afraid to discuss with me face-to-face. He’s sent his wife to trick me.
“My husband and Menelaus have both told me what you think of me. Believe me, Jehubabel, you are wrong. I have tried to help Tarphon bring Makor a good government and I have tried to show your son the greatness of our empire. But I am not important. Menelaus is. Don’t you realize what a magnificent son you have? That he could one day be governor of this district?”
Jehubabel drew back from this tempting woman. Now he could understand why Benjamin had fallen victim to her allurements: she was graceful and desirable and it was appalling that such a woman should talk of empire and the education of young men.
“Unless you work with us,” she was saying, “we’ll have difficult times in Makor. Next week there’s to be another search. For the circumcised ones.”
Jehubabel heard no more of what she had to say. He could think only of the baker Zattu and his wife Anat. With them he had conspired to break the law and if they were apprehended it was certain that this time he too would be executed. It seemed to him that Melissa was speaking of the trivial manipulation of society—if the Jews behaved, a boy like Benjamin might one day become governor—while Jehubabel was being driven to consider the ultimate relationship of the chosen people with YHWH. In his moral arrogance he could not understand that Melissa was speaking of neither politics nor society but of something quite different: the hungry yearning felt by many Greeks for a stern moral structure to accompany their exquisite sense of artistic and philosophic beauty. “Don’t you suppose we’re ashamed of the flayings?” she asked. To his deaf ears she made an impassioned plea for harmony between Jew and Greek, but Jehubabel now saw the latter merely as an oppressor of savage malignity; she pleaded with him for a further temporizing with Antiochus IV and his aspiring plan to Hellenize the eastern world, but for the Jew there was only Epiphanes, the would-be god who slaughtered infant boys. She tried to depict the world that could result when present religious irrationalities were controlled, but he would not hear. She spoke of a Greece that was reaching out to encompass the world, but he thought of a Judaism that was retreating within itself, seeking to purify itself for the tests ahead. The time for dialogue between Hellenism and Judaism had passed; briefly there had been a chance that between intellectual Greeks and moralistic Jews some kind of fruitful alliance might be achieved, with the lyric insights of the former uniting with the rugged power of the latter to create some new and vital synthesis, but the Greeks had behaved so stupidly and the Jews so stubbornly that now the rupture was beyond repair. Two hundred years from this night, not far from this very spot, Hellenism still searching would discover a more pliable religion arising in Galilee, and that union of philosophical Greek and Christian Jew would provide a spark which would ignite the world. Unaware that this was to happen, Melissa went sadly home, satisfied that in her generation the attempt would accomplish nothing.
When she was gone Jehubabel did not hesitate. He sent his wife to summon the leaders of the Jewish community, including the baker Zattu, and when they were assembled in his kitchen he said, “Next week there will be an inspection of all male babies.” Zattu paled, but he had known that sooner or later this moment must come, so he was prepared for it, but he looked to the older men for guidance, and Jehubabel was ready. He said, “We must leave Makor.”
“For where?” Zattu asked.
“The swamps. The mountains.”
“Can we live there?” the baker asked.
“Can we live here?” Jehubabel countered.
There was earnest discussion of how the Jews might survive outside the town, and all were apprehensive until Jehubabel reminded them, “For centuries our people lived in that manner, and we can do so again.”
“But we will be so few,” Zattu argued, even though it was he who risked the sentence of death.
Then for the first time in his life Jehubabel became prophetic: “I believe that other Jews in other towns must realize that with the Greeks there can be no hope. I believe other Jews are holding discussions like this … tonight … now.” He stood silent, and his listeners could visualize the perplexity with which their fellow Jews were facing the great persecution. And after midnight they agreed that at the first sign of the next general search, those in that room, and their families, would flee Makor to make their lives in any way they might among the swamps and the hills; and as each man left, Jehubabel inspected him and asked, “Is it a pledge?” And it was so pledged.
At the end of the week, when tension was high and no one knew where the next blow would fall, a welcome diversion came with the return from Ptolemais of Menelaus, accompanied by a team of wrestlers who had come by ship from Cyprus. Tarphon announced happily that he would sponsor a public exhibition between the Cypriots and the men of Makor, at which he would wrestle the second man of the Cyprus team. “Their champion will be met by our champion, Menelaus!” Proudly he placed his arm about the shoulder of his returning protégé, and the young athletes filed off to the gymnasium.
That afternoon the gymnasium was thrown open, and the stone seats of the exhibition hall quickly filled with townspeople. Jews were forced to attend, it having been found that otherwise they would refuse to participate in what they held to be pagan rites, so in the front row, across from Melissa’s box, sat Jehubabel, his arms folded stubbornly across his fat stomach, his eyes fixed on the sanded floor of the arena. To have to watch one’s own son parade his nakedness was humiliating, but to attend on this particular day, when the fate of the Jewish community was in jeopardy, was abhorrent, and he would not try to hide his sense of insult.
Trumpets sounded, and from a door leading to the dressing rooms the six young men of Cyprus marched out, naked, tanned from their life aboard boats, and confident. They had come from a major island of the Ptolemaic empire to show a small provincial village on the outskirts of the Seleucid empire how men from a cosmopolitan center conducted themselves, and they paraded a certain appealing arrogance. Melissa, looking at their superb bodies, thought what a handsome lot they were, and how surprised at least the first two were going to be when they struck young Menelaus and her husband.
Another flurry of trumpets caused a different door to open, and from it marched the six local athletes, led by the red-haired gymnasiarch, manly and stalwart as he had been during his championship days in Athens. He was still a superb human being and the local audience applauded, but as the men lined up in the center of the arena a murmur began in the front rows, then climbed through the stone seats and at last erupted into cheering applause as the population saw the transformation that Menelaus had undergone. All evidence of his circumcision was gone, and since many knew how painful this operation was, cries of approval began to greet the young champion.
“Menelaus! You are one of us!”
An old man who had once been champion in Tyre shouted, “He is a Greek! He is a Greek!” And young women who saw with interest the transformation began to applaud and call the name, “Menelaus!”
At first Jehubabel had refused to look at the entrance of the athletes, but when he heard his son’s name being shouted with approval he had to look up, and he saw his son standing not far from him, relaxed and marvelously handsome, his skin lightly rubbed with oil. At first Jehubabel could not understand why the people of Makor were applauding him, and then the baker Zattu, who might at any moment be flayed for having consecrated his son to YHWH, nudged Jehubabel and pointed to the result of the operation. The Jew’s eyes rested with astonishment upon the visible proof of the boy’s
As planned, he headed for the swamp, and by nightfall a few Jews had joined him. Some of the leaders had managed to flee the gymnasium. Lesser ones, hearing the battlecry, had lowered themselves over the town walls with ropes, and there were undoubtedly others who had escaped but who had not yet joined up with the fugitives. Jehubabel’s wife had not received word in time, and she would be lashed to death, but Zattu, his wife Anat and their son had escaped.
They were a sorry lot, a handful of unarmed Jews hiding in a swamp without food and led by a man who had just murdered his son. They could hear the heavy splattering through mud of Greek soldiers trying to seek them out, and they could catch words of the Koine as the Greeks passed by, but at dusk the sounds halted and they were left alone. When they were satisfied that their persecutors had gone, Jehubabel assembled them in prayer, and without recourse to the tedious proverbs of his commonplace life, said, “Adonai, this day we place our lives in your hands. We are nothing. We are a miserable, lost group of Jews with no food and no weapons. But we are convinced we shall prevail against the madman who dares to call himself God-Made-Manifest. Adonai, show us what we must do.”