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big enough for them to lie down side by side to sleep ― the walls that seldom keep out the mobs that periodically rise to ravage and murder. It is not many years since a mob came raging through the streets and in a matter of hours slaughtered a quarter of the inhabitants, maimed and torn bodies flung down like bloody trash in the streets, fallen over cribs, impaled as they prayed, slashed open in the birthing bed. There was not one survivor who had not to bury a husband, a wife, a child, a mother, a beloved. In 1543 all the Jews of Prague were sent into exile, suddenly expelled from their homes with what they could carry and dumped into the hostile countryside to make their way elsewhere, anywhere else. Only yesterday the Jews of Prague heard talk from the burghers, from the crafts guilds too, that it is time they were exiled again. In Judah Loew’s lifetime all Jewish books were seized, many burned and the remainder bought back by a huge ransom. Every year the Jews pay a ‘leibzoll’ — a tax on their right to live.
    They wear on their coats, men and women and children, a yellow symbol proclaiming they are Jews. It is not the six-pointed star, the Magen David, because that symbol is only a local emblem on the banner of the community of Prague and will seem most unusual when it is used, as it will be for one of the characters we will shortly meet, on his tombstone. No, the badge required is simply a cut-out shape of yellow that every Jew must wear so as to be identifiable instantly. It has not been so forever. In fact if things at this moment are briefly a little better for the Jews of Prague, it is only a respite. Life has gotten markedly worse within their memory, and fortunately for their ability to sleep at night, they do not yet have any idea how bad it is going to get in a few years, when the Thirty Years’ War sweeps back and forth and back and forth like a mad scythe harvesting human heads.
    For centuries we had occupied a small, dishonourable but necessary role, because we were the bankers, the pawnbrokers, the exchanges, the source of loans; it was the work permitted us. But once Christians became bankers, Jews began trying to do the same work as everybody else, even though most trades were officially forbidden us. We had to make a living, and we couldn’t just take in each other’s washing. Up to the time of the first Crusade, Jews lived mostly in their own neighbourhoods as people do, near their relatives, their friends, but there might be three or four more and less Jewish neighbourhoods in a city like Prague, and if a Jew wanted to live someplace else, who cared? But from the first Crusade, the Church was militant, expanding, determined to conquer or extirpate other beliefs. The Fourth Lateran Council decreed Jews should be locked up in ghettos or expelled.
    In the ghetto at Prague there are a few quite rich Jews who still finance foreign trade and whose empire of interests is far-flung and daring, and many, many poor Jews. There are a handful, such as the Loews, in between the hell of the very poor and the heaven of the rich. But in Jewtown everybody, the rich Maisls, the middling Loews, the hungry searching through rubbish for a piece of kindling to burn, they are all crowded into a tiny place and they know each other by name and they all know each other’s business. It is a hot tight place, noisy day and night, where the ragpicker may also be a great scholar and the drayman a cantor who can sing till the birds faint or a fiddler who can make your bones shiver. The rich Jews try every few years to buy a house or some land outside, but they are too hated. No one will sell to them. If anyone entertains an offer, something happens to that seller or else that house or land goes at once off the market. So the rich, too, are stuck in this large quarrelsome family, stuck with the resentments and suspicions of the poor whose shacks and tenements press to the very walls of the fancy houses and whose smells and