‘The abattoir administrator and veterinarian Siegmund from Basel,’ Gubser said, ‘has established that the death of an animal in shechita takes between one and a half and three minutes. One and a half to three minutes! And killing slowly, when one could do it quickly, is in my view, gentlemen, nothing but animal torture.’
The first row applauded, and the rest of the audience joined in.
Gubser counted out a whole list of authorities, all of whom described shechita as unnecessarily cruel and no longer in line with the times. During his list of names, titles and the same unchanging arguments, certain of the guests’ heads were starting to sink to their chests when Gubser switched direction.
‘Anyone who knows me,’ he said with his hand on his heart, ‘knows that I am a simple person, a man of the people, and I like to call a spade a spade. If it were up to me, I would say at this point, “That’s it, that’s enough, you know how you have to vote in August.”’ He raised his hand to stop the incipient applause. ‘But here we are, not at an assembly of our league, as one might think in the presence of so many dear and familiar faces, but at the inaugural meeting of the Endingen Popular Education Association. That means that it is not only one side that has the floor; the other side must speak too. How do we say that in Latin again?’
‘Audiatur et altera pars,’ squeaked the schoolmaster.
‘You see how much more intelligent that sounds if you don’t understand it?’
The audience laughed gratefully.
‘So I shall now hand the lectern over to a man who has opinions quite different to my own about shechita.’
Somewhere in the hall a shrill whistle rang out.
Gubser shook his head disapprovingly. ‘Please, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘What will our adjudicator from Lemberg think of us?’
Again all heads turned to Reb Tsvi.
‘I shall now pass the floor…’
Pinchas straightened his tie.
‘It is my great pleasure to pass the floor to…’
Pinchas made a sudden decision. He took his kippah from his head and put it in his pocket.’
‘… I shall pass the floor to a man who has studied everything to do with shechita from the bottom up.’
Pinchas got to his feet.
‘No Jewish haste, Herr Pomeranz,’ said Gubser. ‘It isn’t your turn yet.’ His smile was one of toxic friendliness. ‘It is our honour to be able to greet a real rabbi, who will explain to us everything that we do not yet know.’
For one confused moment Pinchas thought that Gubser, unaware that a reb is still a long way from being a rabbi, had suddenly decided to invite the shnorrer Tsvi Löwinger to the lectern.
But it was far worse than that.
With the elastic gait of a tightrope-walker, his watch chain dancing merrily on his belly, a man whom Pinchas would never have expected to see here skipped onto the stage.
Dr Jakob Stern.
33
The defeat was worse than anything that Pinchas could have imagined in his worst nightmares.
Dr Stern, who was also impertinent enough to greet him from the stage as if they were old friends and sparring partners, knew exactly how to get a meeting going. He was a Jewish scholar of the Talmud, he said by way of introduction, a modern Talmud scholar, please note, one who fully and completely accepted the duties of the modern world as Herr Gubser had just accurately described them; after all, we were no longer living in the eighteenth century, but in the nineteenth, and there was no room now for bigoted hypocrisy and wrongheaded piety. (A shout from the first row: ‘Quite correct!’)
It was with a heavy heart that he had to admit that if truth be told, of course there were still many fellow holders of his office who, in what they called their faith — but faith was not the same as knowledge — were so stubbornly blockheaded that they couldn’t even spell the word ‘progress’. But such people had, if he might put it in the clearest of terms, no business being in modern, enlightened countries like Switzerland, and might be better off retreating as quickly as possible to those dark realms where their medieval world-view still prevailed. To Lemberg, for example.
Heads turned to the back.
Reb Tsvi, who spoke only Yiddish, hadn’t quite been able to follow the speaker’s words. But he had understood the name of his home town, and when everyone looked at him now he thought he was being welcomed, and waved back.
The hall growled like a watchdog.
He himself did not come from a metropolis exactly, Dr Stern continued, but from the little town of Buttenhausen in Swabia, which could easily be compared to Endingen. But it was his experience, he said, and bowed to his audience, a magician who is about to pull a rabbit from a hat, it was his enjoyable experience that in smaller places of this kind practical common sense was at home precisely among the so-called simple folk, who weren’t afraid of a bit of hard work, and who had acquired everything they owned through the sweat of their own brow.
Yes, said the hall, that was exactly how it was, and if people at the top would only listen to them more often, lots of things would be better.
In the big cities people liked to believe, Dr Stern said, that they were the navel of the world, when in fact they were a quite different part of the body, of which one might only be aware if one looked backwards.
He had often used the joke before, and knew that he would have to give the hall time. But then they exploded with laughter and struck the tables with the palms of their hands.
Dr Stern gave a complacent little skip. His watch chain skipped with him.
So he knew, he continued, that the people before him today were not the kind who would allow their minds to be obfuscated in the long term with big words and complicated theories.
Certainly not, the hall opined, and waved the waiters over with their beer glasses, which were empty yet again.
But it was precisely that kind of obfuscation being practised from a particular direction, and it was urgently necessary that a fresh wind be allowed to blow in. The whole debate was in fact entirely without foundation. Absolutely unnecessary. To prove this to them, he invited them to take an excursion into the world of the Talmud, an obscure and strange world, he must say without further ado, in which many people had got lost in the past. The man from Lemberg — heads turned — in his outmoded garb was a good example of the kind of people who flourished in that world. But he promised his listeners, Dr Stern said, that he would take them by the hand and guide them safely out of the labyrinth of pseudological pitfalls. Were they brave enough to follow him on this expedition?
The people in the hall didn’t quite grasp what it was that he wanted of them, but they were certainly brave, and they liked this speaker. They had only known him for a few minutes, but they were putty in his hands.
All the fat volumes of the Talmud, Dr Stern said, were concerned only with using all kinds of logical convolutions and distortions to derive from the Old Testament laws and prohibitions that were not even mentioned in it. One must imagine such a Talmud rabbi as a less-than-pure lawyer, who liked nothing more than to talk to pieces the clear and intelligible text of a contract until it seemed to mean the precise opposite of what was actually agreed in it. Would anyone who has endured such legal acrobatics to his own detriment in real life now please raise his hand?
It had happened to all of them at least once.
Then they would easily be able to understand what he was about to explain to them. In the Mosaic Law, to which rabbis referred constantly as the supreme authority, there was in fact — and this would come as a surprise — not a single word to say that animals destined for consumption need to have their throats severed with a long knife. Not a single word!