Rashi's Daughters, Book III: Rachel (54 page)

“You’re sure you can’t stay in Troyes and study astronomy here?” Rachel asked one last time. It was no use expecting him to give up his secular studies.

“I need the observatory in Toledo.” Eliezer’s voice was heavy with resignation. “And I need other astronomers and mathematicians to work with.”

“Just as I need my father and sisters for Torah study,” she replied. “I would never be able to study Talmud outside Troyes.”

He gazed at her sadly. He understood the Talmud’s powerful attraction; it used to be his passion too. But now he was hungry for new knowledge. “You might be able to teach Torah to some women in Toledo.”

She shook her head. “Like you, I prefer learning to teaching others.”
As long as Papa is still alive to teach me.
“Besides, women don’t study Torah in Sepharad.”
And I want both our children to be scholars.

“Just as men don’t study astronomy in Troyes.”

“Pesach will leave for Toledo with furs and woolens when the Cold Fair closes,” she assured him. “And Shemiah will come after Passover to meet your business associates and escort you both back for the wedding.”

“If everything is arranged, I should get to sleep. I have a long ride ahead of me tomorrow.”

They lay down together, each wrapped in their own linens, with what felt to Rachel like an enormous space between them. Restrained from touching him, she couldn’t help but think of sayings from the first chapter of Tractate Sanhedrin.

All that autumn Rachel tried to avoid thinking about Eliezer, but she couldn’t help recalling how he’d taught about the calendar’s calculation when she noticed that both Heshvan and Kislev were full that year. As Joheved predicted, the fall harvest was poor, forcing Count Hugues to release grain from the town stores. Papa’s grape harvest was only mediocre, and nobody was surprised at Hanukkah when the new vintage proved mediocre as well. Meat at least was cheap, owing to the high cost of feeding animals over the upcoming winter.

There were also benefits for Rachel’s business. Quite a few new clients needed to borrow money until the spring harvest, while Pesach brought back the plushest furs anyone had seen for some time. She also found that more people than usual were buying new woolen clothing, complaining that their old ones didn’t keep them warm enough or no longer shed the rain. Her bolt of Tyrian purple sold for an excellent price, after bidding from several royal houses. Thus when the Cold Fair closed and Pesach left for Toledo, she was able to provide him with sufficient credit to repay his loan and purchase whatever dyestuffs he wanted.

She did not, however, send a letter to Eliezer. Everyone at home was in good health, which Pesach could report to her husband in person.

Rachel kept her body occupied by pruning the vineyard and her mind engaged by studying Tractate Nedarim with Miriam. They had arrived at the sixth chapter, where she was pleasantly surprised to find another telling of the story of Rabbi Akiva and his beloved wife, Rachel, this one longer and more detailed than what they’d studied in Tractate Ketubot.

“Did you know this was here?” she challenged Miriam. Both Rachel’s sisters knew how much she enjoyed learning about her namesakes in the Bible and Talmud.

“
Non
, Papa has never taught this section.”

“Then let’s have him explain it to us,” Rachel said, never doubting that her father would do so.

And thus Salomon put aside his
kuntres
for a while to teach his daughters about this obscure piece of Talmud.

The
sugia
began, as did Ketubot’s, with Akiva, an uneducated shepherd, becoming betrothed to Rachel, daughter of his employer, wealthy Kalba Savua. Disinherited immediately, she sent Akiva away to study Torah despite their poverty. Twelve years later, he returned home a great scholar with thousands of disciples, only to hear one of her neighbors disparage him.

Salomon closed the book. “Let me explain this before we continue. Kalba Savua loved his daughter and was pressing her to initiate a divorce so she could marry someone more worthy. After all, Akiva was much older, had a son from a previous marriage, and was so ignorant he didn’t even know the alphabet.”

Miriam and Rachel nodded. They too would have been horrified if their daughters had run off with such a man.

“Even worse,” Salomon continued, “and this is what ‘not your equal’ means, Rabbi Akiva was a descendant of converts.”

They read further:

The text continued with Rabbi Akiva finally returning, this time with twenty-four thousand disciples. But when his wife went out to greet him in her tattered dress, his students pushed her away, thinking she was a beggar. Rabbi Akiva stopped them, telling them that everything he, and consequently they, had acquired was due to her.

The happy ending, which Rachel and Miriam knew, followed. Kalba Savua, upon hearing that a great scholar has arrived in town, begged for release from the vow he made to impoverish his daughter. Rabbi Akiva reveals his identity, after which the grateful Kalba Savua gave his daughter and son-in-law half his wealth.

The text in Ketubot concludes with Rabbi Akiva and Rachel’s daughter marrying Ben Azzai and sending him away to study, but in Nedarim there is no further mention of Kalba Savua’s daughter or granddaughter. Instead the Gemara cryptically lists six ways in which Rabbi Akiva became wealthy.

“I’ve never heard of these.” And Rachel thought she knew all about Rabbi Akiva.

Salomon explained how Rabbi Akiva found gold coins in a ship’s figurehead and a chestful of treasure that washed up on the seashore. In addition he profited from a noblewoman’s loan and from a Roman convert, Ketia, who left Rabbi Akiva half his estate.

The tale of how he’d become wealthy through the wife of Turnus Rufus was more complicated, and for Rachel, problematic.

“Turnus Rufus was the Roman governor of Eretz Israel, and he would often challenge Rabbi Akiva to debate the meaning of Torah,” Salomon began. “When Rabbi Akiva won, Rufus was embarrassed in front of his court.”

Neither daughter had any questions so he continued: “One day when Rufus returned home in a particularly nasty mood, his wife asked why he was so upset. He complained about Rabbi Akiva, who taunted him, and his wife proposed a strategy to humiliate the scholar.”

“What did she do?” Rachel asked.

“She told her husband, ‘The God of the Jews hates lewdness. If you allow me, I will cause him to sin.’ Now Rufus’s wife was very beautiful, so she adorned herself and went to visit Rabbi Akiva. There she lifted her skirt to show her legs, in order to seduce him. But he recognized what she wanted and, in turn, spat, cried, and laughed.”

“How strange,” Miriam said. “What was he thinking?”

“That’s exactly what Rufus’s wife asked him,” Salomon replied. “He said that he would explain the first two, but not the third.”

Rachel and Miriam leaned forward to hear more.

“Rabbi Akiva spat with disgust because, despite her great beauty, she had come from a putrid drop of semen. He cried because her lovely body would one day lie rotting in the dirt.” Salomon paused and smiled. “What he didn’t tell her then was that he’d had a divine vision showing that she would eventually convert to Judaism and marry him.”

“Marry him?” Rachel exclaimed in dismay. “What happened to his other wife, Kalba Savua’s daughter?” Surely Rabbi Akiva would not take a second wife in addition to his adored Rachel?

“I don’t know. The Talmud tells us nothing more about her. Rabbi Akiva lived for 120 years: 40 as a shepherd, 40 studying, and 40 as a leader. Perhaps Kalba Savua’s daughter was already dead at this time.”

“Is there any more to the story?” Miriam asked.

“Indeed. When Rufus’s wife realized that her plan was obvious to Rabbi Akiva, she asked if she could repent. He assented, so she began to study for conversion. When Rufus died, Rabbi Akiva finally explained his laughter to her.”

“So once she became a Jew, they wed.” Rachel glumly finished the tale. “Which is how he became rich from the wife of Turnus Rufus.”

 

She slept poorly that night, terribly disappointed at how Rabbi Akiva’s romance with Kalba Savua’s daughter Rachel had come to naught. How could the Sages retell the couple’s tender story and then not explain what happened to her? Rabbi Akiva was the greatest scholar of his generation—his colleagues must have known her fate. Could Rabbi Akiva have divorced her? Had she come to a bad end, like Meir’s wife Beruria, and thus they chose to ignore her demise? Rachel took comfort in the knowledge that Papa had never heard anything else about her, good or evil, although he had been taught about Beruria’s suicide.

The next morning she decided to go to Ramerupt, where the sight of lambs frolicking in the new grass never failed to cheer her. She was not ready to admit that the sight of Dovid the Fuller also raised her spirits; yet she avoided stopping at the manor house and rode straight for the fulling mill instead.

She could hear the hammers thumping, but the place looked deserted. Fighting her disappointment, she rode around to the back, convinced that she’d find no one there as well. Her heart leapt to see Dovid, alone, teaseling a woolen.

As he helped her dismount, she asked, “Where is everyone?”

Dovid showed no sign of resentment. “Now that the ground has thawed, the villeins are busy plowing furrows and planting spring crops.”

“Can’t Joheved find you at least one helper?”

“Not today. It’s the feast of the Annunciation.”

Rachel rolled her eyes. The heretics had so many feast days it was impossible to keep track of them. “What is this one for? And why aren’t you in church?”

“The feast of the Annunciation celebrates the revelation to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive a child without sin, who would be the Son of God. This Incarnation took place nine months before Jesus was born, and thus is observed on March 25.” Dovid ignored her second question.

“How can you believe that a virgin, who had no relations with a man, conceived a child?” she demanded. The very idea of the Holy One impregnating a woman was repugnant.

“Because the prophet Isaiah clearly states, ‘
Ecce virgo concipiet, et pariet filium, et vocabitur nomen ejus Emmanuel
.’ ” He emphasized the word
virgo
.

“That can’t be what Isaiah said,” she retorted. “Isaiah spoke Hebrew, not Latin; and if he’d meant a virgin, he would have said
betula
, the Hebrew word that appears many times in the Torah and always indicates a virgin.”

Surprisingly Dovid’s response was curiosity, not anger. “What word did Isaiah use? How would you translate the verse?”

“Isaiah said
almah
, which means a young woman,” she said. “So the true translation would be, ‘Behold, a young woman has conceived and will bear a son. And she will name him Immanuel.’ ”

“A young woman . . .” Dovid stopped to think.

“Not merely a young woman, who might be a virgin or not.” Rachel added her father’s explanation. “But a young wife, a newly married woman, whom no one would expect to be a virgin.”

“How do you know that?”

She paused to think of another time
almah
appeared in scripture. “In the Song of Salomon, the king speaks of the sixty queens, eighty concubines, and
alamot
without number in his harem. Surely these are not virgins but merely young women.”

“Even if you’re right, the Church would never admit it.”

Rachel nodded. It would undercut their entire heresy that the Hanged One was conceived without a carnal father.

“Suppose I were to grant that Isaiah does mean a virgin,” she continued. “Still the verse cannot refer to Mary, because the word
harah
is in the past tense. Thus the young woman meant here has already conceived the child in Isaiah’s time. If Isaiah were speaking of the future, he would say
tahar
, ‘she will conceive.’ ”

“I believe you,” Dovid replied after some thought. “For even in the Latin, it is not
virgo
but
puella
and
virginem
that mean virgin.
Virgo
could mean just a young woman.”

“How is it that you know Latin so well?” Rachel asked.

“I was brought up in a monastery, remember?”

“They taught you fulling and Latin, how very useful.”

“Since the Bible was written in Hebrew, it would have been more useful to learn that language.”

“I have it.” Rachel clapped her hands in excitement. “I’ll teach you Hebrew and you can teach me Latin.”

Dovid’s smile lit his entire face. “With pleasure.”

thirty

As soon as her younger sister came through the gate, Miriam stopped weeding the herb garden and hurried to greet her. “It’s good that you’re home. Papa has been asking about you all afternoon.”

“I was in Ramerupt,” Rachel replied, as though that explained everything.

“I know where you were, and so does Papa. He wants to know what you’re doing there all the time.”

“Why?” Rachel made no attempted to hide her irritation. “Does he think I’m neglecting my duties here?”