A Mystical Whodunit

...Face Constantinople and Jerusalem...

...The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon is his first novel, and has been compared to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Caleb Carr's The Alienist...

...The action of the novel spans the weeklong Passover holiday in 1506...

...Rather, their entire sensibilities and attitudes toward all matters, worldly as well as religious, are too discordantly modern and secular (feminist, sexually nonjudgmental, mental health oriented, religiously inclusive) to render them believable as religious men of the 16th century...

...Who, then, can doubt that this medieval "received" system of spiritual wisdom, served up and presented as a digestible mush, is beneficial for your inner peace...

...That was when Lisbon's "Old Christians" rampaged against its "New Christians" or "Marranos"—Jews forcibly baptized nine years earlier by King Manuel of Portugal and given 20 years to fully divest themselves of their religious traditions...

...The event that launches the mystery is the murder of Berekiah's uncle and mentor, Abraham Zarco, a revered kabbalist...

...In the course of the week that it takes to solve the killings, Berekiah and his soulmate, Farid—a deaf, mute, gay, exquisitely handsome Muslim with otherworldly powers of perception—singlemindedly sift through and pursue the clues to their inevitable, and inevitably disappointing, resolution...

...The killing is only just beginning...

...Sooner or later, in this century or five centuries hence, they will come for you or your descendants...

...We've only gotten a whiff of it so far...

...Berekiah's response to this crisis is a kind of prophecy of secular enlightenment: '"A new landscape is forming, a secular countryside that will give us sanctuary from the burning shores of religion...

...Although in terms of tension, learning, intricacy, and authenticity, Zimler's book is the loser, it is, like the Eco and Carr works, a mystery involving the effort to unravel a series of murders...

...As kabbalists, Berekiah and his Uncle Abraham aren't particularly credible...

...You can be assured, the European kings and their hateful bishops will never stop dreaming of us...

...Along the way we encounter an array of reputable and disreputable characters, some numbing scenes of horror and perversity, and— for veracity—a few historical figures...

...Of course, this too is a profoundly contemporary insight, confirmed indeed by our own century's unprecedented calamity...

...another, curiously, is the charismatic false Messiah and kabbalist Shlomo Molcho, who appears as a little boy about six years old...

...And start walking...

...Such enlightened consumers as Madonna and Barbra Streis and have apparently taken to it as to a spa...

...The author, Richard Zimler, is an American who has been living and teaching in Portugal since 1990...

...But for Berekiah, the realization becomes the lesson of his uncle's death, and he issues a warning: "You who read these words, whether Jew or New Christian, Sephardi or Ashkenazi, if the borders of Europe still enclose you, then you are in grave danger...

...Reportedly a bestseller in Portugal, it comes with p.r...

...One revolves around the age-old Jewish struggle to save books and manuscripts in catastrophic times—a struggle that is pivotal to the novel's plot—and is actually given a kabbahstic twist...

...So take off your mask...

...And nothing the Old Christians can do can keep it from giving us refuge.'" The last motif, an epiphany of sorts, is the deeply held conviction apparent throughout the book that for Jews there is no future in Europe...

...Berekiah, it is explained, penned the account over a period of 23 years...

...You don't really need it to solve the mystery...

...Books are created from holy letters,'" Berekiah tells us...

...The kabbalah delivered here contains a lot of the usual stuff—upper and lower realms, divine attributes, masks, human beings as God's "self-portraits," the unity of all things, etc...

...This is not, as Zimler seems to anticipate, because of the "contemporary language" they use, or the "treatment of such topics as sex...

...A very specific manuscript that Uncle Abraham had been in the midst of illuminating has disappeared, and suspicion falls on the four members of his "threshing group," who met regularly in the underground room to study and ponder the kabbalah...

...Buried under the kabbalah glitz, though, are a number of interesting ideas that grow naturally out of the account of extreme persecution that Zimler develops...

...The protagonist of those pages is Berekiah Zarco, a Portuguese New Christian, fruit-seller, manuscript illuminator, and "the last kabbalist of Lisbon...

...Kabbalah, in short, functions here as a kind of veneer or filigree...

...They will never allow you and your children to live...

...As for the kabbalah shtick, Zimler should have saved it for the movie...

...The narrative takes the form of leatherbound writings the novelist says he discovered in 1990 while occupying an old house in Istanbul, where he was doing research on Sephardic poetry...

...The inquisition will spread...

...Just as angels are, according to some...

...He started it at age 21 in 1507, when he escaped to Turkey in the wake of the mayhem, and finished it in 1530, when he decided he must return to Portugal to warn a cousin who had remained behind that there was no future for Jews in Christian Europe...

...This is the meaning I make of Uncle's death...

...Viewed from this perspective— from the window of kabbalah, if you like —an angel is nothing but a book given heavenly form, given wings, to use a common metaphor.'" A second idea is the intensely modern one of the crisis of faith, the sense of being abandoned by God in extremely cruel and seemingly irrational times that grips Berekiah as he runs through Lisbon during the riot...

...But it's coming...

...material that declares kabbalah is "in...

...There are also descriptions of some of the more sensational rites, not necessarily kabbalistic, such as exorcism and levirate marriage, plus a peek into a ritual bath...

...Its esoteric teachings, along with the time and place in which the tale is set, merely distinguish the book from an ordinary mystery...

...It is for the passionate articulation of these themes that this novel is worth reading...

...Never...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "The Jewish War" If you're interested in Jewish mysticism but like your kabbalah light, if your ideal kabbalist is a super-tolerant handsome guy with whom you might enjoy a latte at Starbucks, and if you are amused that he would take a minute while running from a pogrom for a quickie with a hot gentile girl, this is the book for you...

...Like them, too, it purports to employ arcane lore to solve the puzzle and is set in a pleasingly exotic locale, enabling the reader to swallow the medicine of a history lesson coated in the sugar of a fast-paced tale with plenty of vivid, animated images begging to be filmed...

...That is true even if one takes into consideration that mystics are often in conflict with traditional rabbinical authorities, and in this case can only practice their faith in hiding...

...One of those making a special cameo appearance is the historian of Jewish persecution Solomon Ibn Verga...

...His body is found naked in his cellar synagogue alongside the naked body of a young woman, both of their throats slashed as if by a ritual slaughterer...