"Thus began a controversy concerning the faith; the priest attacked the Talmud with powerful theological evidence, and Levi apprehended everything by the strong capacity of his understanding. At last he threw his Jewish bible away from him, impatiently saying: 'Let it be as it may, I abide by the faith in which I was born.' As on the following day the obdurate youth began to harp upon the same string, the priest set about the matter again in another way; he no longer spoke to him, but turned to his fellow-prisoners, and read to them divers evidence from the holy Scriptures, whereby he proved that the Messiah had already come.
"This, Levi listened to quietly and thoughtfully, and although he gave no indications of being inclined to the holy faith, yet it might be seen by his countenance that he was not as averse to the presence of the priest as yesterday. On the third day Levi, hardened as he might be in other respects, yet desired that the father should return in the afternoon, as his presence was a special comfort to him in his miserable position. When the priest promised him this as an encouragement, the stony heart appeared softened. In the afternoon, the father in his holy simplicity placed such reliance on the Jew, that he removed all the others, and remaining alone with him, kindly and urgently begged of him to give both himself and him consolation, by relating at his pleasure, as the greatest secret, truly and faithfully, what he knew of the death of Simon. At this unexpected address Levi was quite amazed; he continued long silent; but at last struck with the rare confidence shown by a Christian priest in a Jew, he conceived a high esteem for his uprightness, and persuaded by the father's promise of secresy, confessed before him and one of his fellow-prisoners, with great signs of sorrow, with bent shoulders and head hanging down on the left side, that he had, at the instigation of the father Lazarus Abeles, laid violent hands on Simon, and caused his death from zeal for the law of Moses.
"Upon receiving this confession the priest was exceeding joyful, and strove with all his powers, by arguments and urgent entreaties, to persuade him to turn himself magnanimously to God. But to this Levi would not return any satisfactory answer; and when, as evening twilight was creeping on, the priest prepared to go home, Levi raised his eyes to heaven, and said with a deep sigh: 'Father, where shall I be at this time to-morrow?' Whereto the priest replied: 'My son, in heaven, if you embrace the Christian faith; but if you die in Judaism, in hell as a hardened Jew.' Thereupon he in the most friendly way wished him a good night and a blessed end, and went away.
"On the following day the priest found the condemned man dressed in white linen for the impending tragedy, as if he had prepared himself to be baptized. After a friendly greeting the father asked him in which faith he had at last resolved to die? Hereunto Levi returned this answer: 'I will die in the same faith in which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob died. And as in the olden time Abraham offered up his son, so will I to-day sacrifice myself for my sins.' When the priest made a further rejoinder, he said with a pleasant countenance and in a calm manner: 'I humbly beg of you, father, not to trouble me any more about baptism, for I will now pray from the Psalms and prepare myself for a happy death.' Thereupon he began to repeat the Psalms, but without the girdle called a Tephilim, although the Jews usually consider prayer without binding the forehead and hands a sin. But he prayed with such contrition of heart and such vehement beating of the breast, and penitential tears, that his fellow-prisoners and all present were greatly astonished at his remorse.
"After a prayer that had lasted more than two hours he gave himself up quickly into the hands of the executioner, and thus accosted him with a cheerful countenance: 'Do to me what God and my judges have commanded you.' He then turned to his fellow-prisoners, took a friendly leave of them, and humbly begged of them to forgive his past failings.
"After ten o'clock they took him, amidst the gaze of countless multitudes, from the prison, and bound him in a hide, whereat he showed no sign of impatience or displeasure. Only he sometimes raised his bound hands in prayer to heaven. Thus was he dragged by a horse to the field of action. When he perceived that the accompanying priest in the middle of the Platz was in danger of being severely injured by a horse, he begged with sympathizing voice that he might go in front to avoid the danger."
Thus far the Jesuit's narrative. On the scaffold Levi made a manly confession of his deed before all the people, with a request that the witnesses who had only spoken the truth should no longer be kept in prison. The details of the execution were particularly horrible; the experienced executioner could not--so the writer states--break the strong body of the criminal on the wheel. At last Levi called to the priest by his side and asked him in a clear voice what he would promise if he should consent to be baptized? When the father promised him, besides forgiveness of all his sins, also a speedy death, Levi answered: 'I will be baptized.' The Church triumphant hastened to impart private baptism, much disposed to attribute this unheard of bodily strength and calm of the malefactor to a special miracle of Divine Providence. Levi repeated the prescribed formula with a strong voice, and received calmly the now effective stroke of death.
This is the sorrowful history of Simon Abeles. Whoever judges the Jesuit narrative impartially will discover in it something which the narrator wishes to conceal; and whoever contemplates with horror the fanatical murder, will nevertheless not spend much sympathy on the fanatical priests. They tear the scarcely born child out of the arms of its mother; they consider it a pious contrivance to steal the suckling secretly from her, by means of spies and tale-bearers; by promises and threatenings, and excitement of the imagination, they win hosts of proselytes in baptism to their God, who is very unlike the God of the gospel; with the skill of experienced managers, they make use of a miserable murder, for the sake of bringing on the scene a real tragedy, and of the dead body of a Jewish boy, in order by pomp and glitter and enormous processions, and if possible by miracles, to recommend their faith to both Christians and Jews. Their fanaticism, in alliance with the burgher magistracy and the compliant law, stands in comparison with that of a despised, persecuted, and impulsive race; cunning, violence, malice and a corrupt morality, are to be discovered on both sides.
During yet two generations, the zeal of the Jesuits against the Jews continued to work, the struggle of two foreign communities on German ground. The one consisted of the sons of the old dwellers in the wilderness, whose leader, the Lord Jehovah, brought them forth with their flocks and herds, going before them in the fiery pillar, and pouring his wrath on all who fell away from him. And opposed to these were the followers of a Spanish nobleman, who had undertaken the monstrous task of forming the souls of men like the wheels of a machine, making all the highest intellectual powers serve the one single object, of a priesthood to the one appointed officer of the great head of the church militant, Jesus.
What were Loyola and his school to the ancient Abeles and to Levi Kurtzhandl? How ancient was Loyola? Their fathers had slaughtered the sacrificial victim three thousand years before the first Jesuit had tortured a Jewish heart; their descendants, they were sure, would offer sacrifice three thousand years later in the kingdom of Messiah, after the last Jesuit had been collected to his mother Lilith. The fearful S. J. which shone in gold on the stones of the college, how long would it last? In the time of their grandfathers it had its origin, in the time of their grandchildren it would be erased. What was this new device to the seed of Abraham? An extravagance, a short plague of Egypt. Proudly did the Roman Catholic church look back on seventeen hundred years of victory and conquest, but more proudly did the despised Jew look upon his past, which stretches back to the dawn of the world, for his faith was seventeen hundred years old when Christ was baptized. Both the judgment of the pious fathers of the Church and the pious Jews was narrowed, and their comprehension of the Highest disturbed by old traditions.