smote their chests three times while repeating the confessional por mi culpas, and they filled the coffers with their pennies, buying scraps of the martyred girl’s dress, locks of her golden hair, and other holy relics to take home and worship, which clearly demonstrated the sincerity of their devotion.
One of the Fuggers was there to ensure that every penny was properly recorded.
And to top it off, some Dummkopf had decided that today would be the perfect day to cram the whole population of the Judenstadt into a single church and force them to listen to a conversionist sermon. So the town sheriff had to drag his men out of bed and pull them off other duties just to handle the crowds.
And now thousands of Jews were standing out in the cold, waiting to have their ears inspected for wax or cotton plugs before they were allowed to enter the church. They were patted down one by one and directed to stand against the north wall while guards patrolled the marble tiles armed with pikes and paddles in case an impiety was whispered or a drowsy head nodded off.
As the Mass dragged on, the bishop’s eyes wandered to the face of Jesus in a high relief of the Last Supper. It was odd how the sculptors had elected to carve such deep worry lines into the Savior’s brow, when the current preference was to depict the passive tranquillity of a being who was not of this earth. This Christ who stood before him was a man of flesh and blood whose halo receded into nothingness. You could barely see it. Bishop Stempfel would have to have a talk with the master craftsman and remind him that such literalism was dangerously close to the Protestant heresy.
The same was true of Die Silberlinge, another high relief sculpture of the silver-tongued Judas betraying his master for a bag of coins. The sinister group of conspirators hid their crooked features behind their cloaks as they whispered to each other, in stark contrast to the open and honest faces of the other witnesses to the Passion. And all of them except Judas wore the pointed “Jewish hats” that were still common until quite recently, when they were replaced by the yellow badges. And so the moment of Christ’s capture, the judgment of Pilate, and the Stations of the Cross all depicted Jews as living memories in a way that made it look like the Jews were still betraying Christ. No wonder the common people hated them so much.
Once the guards established order, Brother Popel began his sermon, which relied on stitching together tried-and-true phrases, and included whole passages repeated word-for-word from the mundane lectures at the Jesuit college.
The bishop looked upon the Jews, and saw their cheeks sunken with hunger and their thrice-turned clothes falling to shreds before his eyes. Where were all the gold teeth and diamond brooches that the Jews had allegedly acquired by squeezing the Christians for so many years? It could have been a clever subterfuge, but it wasn’t easy to fake sunken cheeks.
So Brother Popel wasn’t going to save any souls by telling these world-weary Jews that they needed to learn the true meaning of the Old Testament by abandoning their false interpretations of it and focusing on “the plain sense of the text,” which he tried to quote in Hebrew.
When the bishop saw that the Jews were desperately trying to keep from laughing at the priest’s awful pronunciation, he interrupted the sermon by ringing a little bell he kept on a nearby table for just such a purpose.
The priest’s words echoed and died, and all eyes turned toward the bishop, who summoned Brother Zeman and instructed him to read aloud from the Book of Exodus.
Zeman approached the rostrum with his chest puffed up like a game-cock’s. He licked his fingers and turned the pages of the massive gold-trimmed Bible until he found the place that the bishop had indicated. Then he took a couple of practice breaths, and launched into a long passage in Latin.
When he finished, he looked up from the book, exulting in this moment of glory, and the sound of his heavy breathing could be heard from a great distance off.
Zeman looked lost for a moment, then his years of training took over.
“Verbum Domini,” he chanted.
“Amen,” the congregation responded.
But before the Mass was ended, upon the bishop’s signal, Popel announced that a great debate was about to occur in which the Jews would be called upon to