Blond and curly, His head full, frosty it seems sometimes, at other times golden — an inheritance, many have speculated, from a lover of a grandmother six times maybe great, willed to Him by some archduke or other minor noble who’d kept her, others hold, who this landed notable was sleeping also with the woman’s sister, Benjamin’s greataunt five times over. How else are we to explain, the scholars have asked, how else to explicate, to reconcile, call to account: how Benjamin received His own two eyes, as blue as a recessive flame, from a Cossack, even a Nazified Aryan, who’d perhaps raped a grandmother of His, though it’s said she’d liked it. How else to represent His full, Elvis kingfishy labial traits than as an inheritance from an Iberian peddler of fraudulent Scripture; His belly unmistakably that of a bearish Russian, hulking over the scrawny poultry limbs of a Pole; His nose that of a lusty Gypsy priest ordained in the Orthodox church, if only for the salary and shelter, or maybe that of the fake Father’s cow: a sinful snout, gigantically puffed; His heart, that of the most kindly Venetian whore, while others say her pimp, and as for His mind, O His mind — that of a rumpled, sleepless Viennese, who’d breathed feuilletons between aphorisms, his sperm a spurt of ink. As for the horns, though, that later horn in, those He gets from His mother…don’t look at me.
And so if the record above withstands judgment, the Tests, ten or no, and all its facts, names, and dates are for sure, verified, God’s honest, signed, sealed deliverance received with a profusion of thanks due to ineffably named offices as obliging as they might be obscure, then despite all the goyim involved, despite all the Prussians, the Russians, the pull and push of the Poles, His Affiliation is here proven, thus exiling any rumor, defamation, and libel outside the midst of our encampment: that though His father was not born Affiliated (how he’d allowed himself to become converted, out of love and, maybe, to get a job as an outwardly respectable lawyer with a decent firm of impeccable reputation), His mother was, was born Affiliated and, as the Law states more than once and simply, the bloodline lives and dies by the mother: this the opinion of one Rabbi Yosi the Galilean, who’s not to be confused with yet another Rabbi Yosi, whose Talmudic ruling permitting circumcision on the Sabbath would be invoked by both Hanna and Israel throughout the eight days following the Shabbos birth of their son, regaling their family, friends, and acquaintances and even those they’d meet on the street or at the store with the wisdom received — that circumcision, as a covenant that predates that of Sinai, in fact supersedes and defers the Sabbath Herself, and can indeed be thought of as more sacred, holier; how their rabbi had told them that, the same family rabbi who would’ve circumcised Him on that very Shabbos, had he been a firstborn himself, and survived. And what then, we might ask before we’re carried any further away from His origins, into the realm of history being written and rewritten today, what then of Ruth if you know her, Ruth a relative from way back then, toward the Root? Ruth that Moabite, that hardluck, hardliving gleaner, her bundling sheaves enough to last her the bitter cold of the winter that was also her womb, the widow of Mahlon, daughter-inlaw of Naomi and wife of Boaz, that almona aguna whose calling’s the confirmation of everything: her book ending with a genealogy of its own no less confused than that that’s been given above, which leaves her, through the seed of Obed and the water of Jesse, as the bubbe to end all bubbes — the grandmother of King David, and so, as tradition always tells us, the Matriarch of the Messiah: the King of Kings, if you will, May His Name be Perpetuated, Increased, to be from the upwardly mobile egg of a fallen, shellshattered mother; the Moshiach, the son of a convert, who would believe…Israel, are you there — what, if anything, does that explain?