1666
The Messiah’s soldiers were singing.
Jacob Zemach heard them before he saw them, thousands of voices echoing through the hills, singing the piyyut of Alkabetz as they marched up the Nazareth road.
Lecha dodi, likrat kallah – come, my beloved, let us greet the bride.
That was a Sabbath hymn, and it was not the Sabbath. But Shabbatai Zevi had made it his war song. Once, in Salonika, he had married the Torah; now, he claimed as a bride the Holy Land, the holy cities, and the entire Jewish people.
He was marching to take one of those cities now, at the head of that most uncanny of things, a Jewish army. And it would be his, if he could defeat the other army that stood in his way.
An army. Zemach shook his head, feeling not for the first time the inadequacy of words. The Livorno Guard, at least, deserved the name – they lived in barracks, drilled, and fought bandits. The Bedouins weren’t soldiers, but they had learned in a hard school of raids, and some of the townsmen – Jewish and Arab both – had served in the militia. But most were no more soldiers than Zemach was, maybe even less. He’d stood on the city wall in the siege thirty years past; most of the men ranked behind him hadn’t been born then.
What kind of battle is it, when the old men know war and the young do not?
If there were any answer to that question, it was lost in the moment, because that was when Zemach caught his first sight of Zevi’s army. If anything, Zevi’s followers looked even less military than the peasants and townsmen who opposed them, but they filled the valley from one side to the other: Jews from Egypt and Smyrna, others who had given their life savings to flee the inferno of Europe. At their head, on white horses, were Zevi and his prophet Nathan of Gaza, and in spite of himself, Zemach was arrested at the vision.
“Tall as a cedar of Lebanon, framed in a black beard, shining in beauty," Cuenqui had described Zevi, and he was. On horseback, robed in silk and armed with a sword, he looked like a king. His followers sang once again of greeting their bride, and for a horrible moment, Zemach wondered if he might be the Messiah after all.
“About five thousand of them, I’d say,” said the Livorno Guard captain beside him, breaking the spell. Zemach could count soldiers too – he’d been in charge of a militia company during the siege, because he hadn’t been a young man even then – and agreed. The men of the Galilee would be outnumbered two to one, and although Zevi had initially hoped that his march on Tzfat would be a triumphal procession, his followers were now prepared for battle. They had left off singing and were chanting now, over and over:
Shabtai, Melech Yisrael.
Closer to Zemach, officers were giving orders and men were scrambling into line. The Livorno Guard, who had muskets, took the front, augmented by those townsmen who had matchlocks from the days of the siege and who knew how to use them. The bulk of the army – the ones who had only swords or clubs or hand-cannons two centuries old – stood behind. But Zemach could also see messengers running or riding to either side, bringing orders to the Bedouin horsemen and the troops hidden in the woods and on the hillsides.
Closer and closer Zevi came. Zemach stood and waited, feeling every moment of his eighty-eight years. A man of his age had no business on a battlefield. But when there was no king in Israel, its judges must lead. The Sanhedrin, the qadis – they were imperfect men. But at least they were not kings.
A hundred yards separated the armies, and there were puffs of smoke rising in front of Zemach, followed a second later by the sound of gunfire and a second after that by shouts of anger and pain. Zevi’s army had drawn first blood. Some of the men beside Zemach moved to shoot back, but he shouted them down; “No! Wait!” he called, and he heard the same order from officers up and down the line. Zevi’s soldiers kept shooting, a few at a time, and it was hard to wait when the men next to you were being hit, but the officers kept shouting their orders, and the men, in spite of themselves, obeyed.
“Now!” shouted Zemach and the other judges and qadis and captains of the Livorno Guard, and the army of the Galilee loosed a volley at fifty yards. Its sound shook the valley, making the earlier gunfire seem like nothing, and it veiled Zevi’s forces in rising smoke; through that veil, Zemach heard cries of pain and shouts of consternation, and then a second report and more cries as another volley came from the men in the woods.
Zevi’s men were shaken – Zemach could see and hear that, he could
feel that. He could feel the arm of Adam Kadmon – the sefira of Gevurah, Strength – squeezing their hearts. A volley was stronger than a single shot. An army together was stronger than a mob.
But they were not
broken. Through the dissipating smoke, Zevi pointed his sword at the men of the Galilee, and his soldiers surged forward at a run.
Shabtai Melech Yisrael, they shouted as one, and the two lines crashed into each other with the ring of clashing steel and the hot iron smell of blood.
Zemach felt a hand pulling on his arm – the left arm, the arm of Gevurah. “To the rear,” said the Livorno captain. “This is no place for you.” Zemach shook the hand off. The captain was right, but in this moment he was a judge of Israel. With his right arm – the arm of Hesed, of kindness, the arm that should have nothing to do with battle – he drew his own sword, and stood where he was with only two lines of men between him and the enemy.
The line held – it wavered, but it held. But then Zevi was suddenly there, wheeling his horse and charging through the men of Tzfat. He swung his sword down, and the sword of Zemach, a man of eighty-eight, rose up to meet it.
In any sane world, Zemach’s sword would have flown from his hand and he would have been cut down. But Zevi was still an inexpert rider, and his stroke was unbalanced and weakened. Zemach’s parry was agony, but at the end of it, his sword was still in hand, and their eyes met as Zevi looked down at the man who had checked him.
And then the Bedouin riders came down the hillside shouting battle-cries and crashed into both of the Messiah’s flanks.
Now Zevi’s men did break. They had come to this valley ready for battle and victory, but not for this much struggle and death. And as Zevi turned to see what had caused his army such dismay, a bullet from a Bedouin matchlock hit him in the chest, and slowly, the cedar of Lebanon toppled in the saddle and fell to the earth.
Some of Zevi’s followers – the most fanatic of them – still fought. A shout of
Shabtai Melech Yisrael rose up from the left and, looking in that direction, Zemach saw Nathan of Gaza rallying a knot of swordsmen. But Nathan died too, falling to the sword of a Livorno Jew whose name Zemach didn’t know, and then it was well and truly over. The men who had followed Zevi gave way, running back to Nazareth, and the few who still stood were overwhelmed.
Zemach stood unmoving as the sound of battle was replaced by that of its aftermath: the cries of the wounded, lamentations over the dead. Hundreds of men who had come to sweep Zevi to his coronation lay unmoving in the valley, and so did far too many of the men of Tzfat and the Galilee. Zemach counted eight rabbis of the Sanhedrin among the bodies on the ground; men he had known for decades and with whom he had worked, struggled and argued. And there were many others; the cries of injured men would be accompanied tonight by those of widows.
One wounded man lay beside him, and he knelt. He was a medical doctor – he had been that before he was ever a rabbi, and long before he was ever a soldier or a judge. And at the end, it seemed, he would return.
Whoever destroys one life, destroys the world, and whoever saves one life saves the world. A universe of worlds had been destroyed this day – destroyed by a man who had thought himself their savior. Now Zemach would save one if he could.
