The hall was amazed.
‘Only in the fiftieth book of Moses, chapter twelve, verse twenty-one, does it even mention the subject. You are certainly all Bible-reading men, and you know the passage off by heart (laughter), but for the few who might not be able to remember it right now, he would happily repeat it: “If the place which the Lord thy God hath chosen to put his name there be too far from thee, then thou shalt kill of thy herd and of thy flock, which the Lord hath given thee, as I have commanded thee, and thou shalt eat in thy gates whatsoever thy soul lusteth after.”’ As soon as Dr Stern quoted verses from the Bible, in spite of all his unbelief he assumed once more the god-fearing expression that had certainly served him well in his time as a pulpit orator.
‘“Thou shalt kill of thy flock as I have commanded thee,” it says, and nothing more. Not a word about long knives or severed throats. Only “as I have commanded thee”. But how God commanded is recorded nowhere in the Bible, you can read the Old Testament from cover to cover and the New straight afterwards. And because it doesn’t say anywhere, interpreters and exegetes set about referring to an oral tradition that no one could prove and no one could refute. This is more or less as if, to put it in the simplest terms, one were to write in a contract with one’s neighbours: “we want to keep it as we have always kept it.” Then at some point a lawyer and twister of the law would come along and slip the most impossible things into the clause, until eventually one had not only granted the neighbour a right of way, but signed over one’s house and chattels.
‘“Thou shalt kill of thy flock as I have commanded thee.”’ In a religious sermon, the exception rather than the rule in the Jewish tradition, the orator would quote a verse from the Bible over and over again, to highlight a different interpretation and suggest an even deeper wisdom could be gained from it. Dr Stern, delivering a kind of sermon of his own, did the same.
‘“Thou shalt kill of thy flock as I have commanded thee.”’ However, slaughtering was also mentioned in another passage of the Old Testament, where it was expressly stated that one had to spill the blood of the animals. ‘“Thou shalt offer the blood upon the altar of the Lord Thy God.”’ But in those verses they meant only sacrificial animals, not everyday slaughter, which is something quite different. The Bible also made a linguistic distinction, and they were to forgive him if he now had to make a slight detour into philology. ‘You know how we scholars are: we always want to prove that we’ve actually learned something at university.’ (Laughter.)
It was really only in those passages discussing the slaughter of sacrificial animals that the Bible used the word ‘shachat’, which meant the slicing of the neck, and whose linguistic root was also present in the word ‘shechita’. But where the everyday killing of animals was concerned, as in the verse he had just quoted, the word was ‘sabach’, and anyone could see that two very different words also meant two different things, that much was obvious to anyone who hadn’t twisted his brain into a knot studying the Talmud. Where it said ‘shachat’, the animal’s throat had to be sliced. The word ‘sabach’ also included any other method of killing.
Of course the rabbis had noticed this contradiction as well, and as religious shysters they had tried to magic it away with an argumentative somersault. Ramban, for example, who was one of the most important Talmudic commentators, had seen fit to interpret the clear word of the Bible thus: ‘When God said “Thou shalt slaughter as I have commanded” he did not mean “In everyday life”, but: “As I have commanded in the case of sacrificial animals.” Hence Ramban, believing that he knew better than God himself, claimed that what the Lord had really meant was, “Grab your knives and slash away!”’
The hall cried, ‘Boo!’ and was proud to have caught a medieval scholar cheating.
‘Of course this is quite a hairy argument,’ said Dr Stern, and was now unable to stand still with delight at his own brilliance. ‘But then these gentlemen sometimes are quite hairy, like our friend from Lemberg who is so industriously taking notes at the back.’ Laughter and general head-turning.
Reb Tsvi hadn’t been taking any notes at all, just trying to follow the address as best he could. But in the heads of the participants he was now a spy, someone who had come to keep an eye on them, and they really didn’t know why they should put up with such meddling.
‘I’ll sum up,’ said Dr Stern.
Perhaps they should just throw the interloper out the door. What was the point of having bouncers?
‘I’ll sum up!’ There was no bell with which they could have called the meeting to order, but Dr Stern hammered on the lectern until they listened to him again. ‘According to Mosaic law, and I say this to you as a trained Jewish theologian, there can be no question of so-called shechita as a religious duty. All rules in that direction are an invention of medieval Talmudic Judaism, and cannot be derived from the word of the Bible itself. So there is no reason to agree to any exceptional laws on the basis of a false understanding of religious tolerance. Thank you for your attention.’
The hall cheered him, and as he left he thanked them for the ovation with a series of tripping little steps and bows that would have befitted a circus performer. He looked as if he would have liked to come on stage again and deliver his whole speech again da capo.
But now it was Pinchas’s turn to speak.
It was a disaster.
They didn’t listen to him at all, and why should they have? The shopkeepers and craftsmen and farmers in the hall had all suddenly become specialists in religious history as well as ancient Hebrew linguistics, and wouldn’t have their heads muddled up any further. Every time Pinchas tried to start talking about the moral obligation of a tradition many thousands of years old, they bellowed sabach! and shachat! to drown him out. He had only to say, ‘In my experience!’ and already they were shouting, ‘Experience as an animal torturer!’ and the roaring started up again. Master butcher Gubser had shown them that shechita was nothing but bloodthirsty carnage, and this Dr Stern had also told them that the Jews had even forged the Holy Bible. So why should they listen to him?
Gubser’s comparison of methods of slaughter had been one-sided and partial. But how to refute it? He would no longer be able to find anyone to listen to that kind of evidence here. You can’t halt the storm with your bare hands. And Dr Stern’s distortion of the Talmud? How was Pinchas supposed to argue with that? With Rashi and Onkelos and other sages? They would have mocked him as a medieval sophist. No, the hall had delivered its verdict, and was announcing it in drunken chants.
Then they started singing too, only to drown him out at first, and then because they liked it. ‘Hail to Helvetia,’ they sang, and all bold sons they were, as once St Jacob saw, ready for fight. Their mouths opened and closed as if all by themselves, and no longer belonged to them, they drummed out the beat on the tables with their beer mugs, and would probably have marched off somewhere if they could, no matter where.
In the front row the schoolmaster had stood up and was waving his arms around, trying to calm everyone down. But the song was stronger than he was, and his waving gradually turned into conducting, he picked up the rhythm, and guided it and for the first time really belonged to this founding evening of his Popular Education Association. Master butcher Gubser and his animal protectors sat there with their arms folded and had nothing to do with the whole thing.
The people were just singing for themselves now, and had completely forgotten Pinchas. He carefully took one step aside, and then another, the alley was quite close by, and then he had reached it and disappeared behind the stage. On a small table beside the curtain pull was a half-empty beer mug. Here Dr Stern had probably given himself Dutch courage before and after his performance. A small door leading straight to the street was open.