The 13th Tablet

‘That’s some holiday.’

She pretended not to have heard his joke and continued.

‘Well, although he wrote a lot, and his Book of Travels is a very learned account of the socio-political world of his time, he was nevertheless a merchant and as such, spent a long time in Baghdad, which was a thriving and opulent Jewish centre.’

‘OK. So the man was a clever merchant.’

‘Are you going to interrupt me all the time?’ asked Mina.

‘No no, just get to the point.’

‘Fine. His writings were already disseminated in his lifetime but proper publications and most translations date from the 16th century onwards. The original and oldest manuscripts date back to the 12th century and are in the British Library, and the libraries of Rome, Vienna and Oxford. The British Library’s manuscript is the finest of them all, and the purest.

‘The purest?’ asked Jack, desperately trying to keep up with Mina’s account.

‘Yes, the other manuscripts contain pieces inserted by other writers. The British Library manuscript is bound with very few other works. Anyway, when I accessed it at the British Library for research, I noticed in the catalogue that there was another manuscript with the same number, 27.089.’

‘You actually remember accession numbers of manuscripts?’

Of course I do. I only worked on a few manuscripts by Tudela. I asked the librarian about this, he checked and said I had misread the number, which was actually 27.089bis. It was a sort of adjunct manuscript, a bundle of pages with Arabic poems. To cut a long story short, among them I discovered unpublished travel notes written by Benjamin of Tudela himself.’

‘Can we call him Benny? I’m not an academic.’

‘No we can’t. Don’t you respect anything?’ she replied, irritated.

‘Yes. You.’

She smiled and pulled her pocket computer out of her bag.

‘Here’s my rough translation of his travel notes: Free at last. This morning I took my first deep breath since that fated day in Nineveh. Who would have thought that keeping this secret would burden me more than my travel bags? Maybe I should not have read what I read; maybe I should have tried to turn my gaze away. Who knows? I have sent a letter to my dear friend Mordechai in Safed explaining my findings in the old synagogue in Nineveh. Maybe he will choose to pursue this quest. He is young, vigorous and learned. I am too tired to pursue anything but my young nephews who like to play hide-and-seek among the orange trees in our orchard. I will leave it to Mordechai and others to find out whether it is true or not. If it is, and the object is indeed found, it will be of the greatest importance not only for Jews, but for all mankind.’

‘Wow. What a story!’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Couldn’t you have begun with this? Which synagogue was it? I mean, where in Mosul?’

‘He describes a number of synagogues. Let me check the notes I’ve got on here.’

She searched for the right document on her pocket computer, ‘Here’s the passage, Travels 118–120:

It is a very large and ancient city, situated on the river Tigris, and is connected with Nineveh by means of a bridge. Nineveh is in ruins, but amid the ruins there are villages and hamlets, and the extent of the city may be determined by the walls, which extend forty parasangs to the city of Irbil. The city of Nineveh is on the river Tigris. In the city of Mosul is the synagogue of Obadiah, built by Jonah; and also the synagogue of Nahum the Elkoshite.’

‘So, which one is it?’ asked Jack impatiently.

‘I think it’s Jonah’s synagogue as it would have been the older of the two, but who knows? What’s really important is that we just stepped on the ruins of an old place of Jewish worship that corresponds to Tudela’s description of ancient synagogues and that this is where my weird tablet comes from.’