Josh Yehoshua Shachar is an inventor, mathematician and writer who resides in Los Angeles, California and Caesarea, Israel.

His books on diverse subject matters, such as remote navigation, robotics, biological pumps and problems in quantum mechanics, are in print by Optikus Publications.

THE DREAD IN THE LITERATURE OF THE ANONYMOUS

Dedication

To Dorit, Eliya, Dael and Moriya, without whose love and support my personal indulgences would not have been possible.

J o s h Ye h o s h u a S h a c h a r

THE DREAD IN THE LITERATURE OF THE ANONYMOUS

Copyright Josh Yehoshua Shachar The right of Josh Yehoshua Shachar to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84963 163 1

www.austinmacauley.com First Published (2013) Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd. 25 Canada Square Canary Wharf London E14 5LB

Printed & Bound in Great Britain

Acknowledgments
Ishayahoo Leibowitz and Richard Feynman, both men walked among us, but their integrity has set a new path for the orthodox intellectual.

The Spinoza Letters

Jerusalem 27.4.78

The figure of the narrator in this chronicle will for some reason remain dim. Sometimes the narrator will be like an all-knowing Greek chorus, capable of envisioning both past and present, never seen in reality, sometimes he himself may be surprised by the course of events, even though he is supposed to know their course. This is not a matter of sophisticated narrative techniques nor the deliberations of a writer trying to artificially arouse interest by creating confusion in the tradition of the puzzles so well loved by the writers of detective novels. The reason for this strange mixing between an all-knowing narrator and the position of a reader surprised by the development of events, arises from the causes that this story is intended to expose. I hope, dear reader, that in the course of reading these lines you will feel a kinship with that "strange and helpless fellow" as described by the Ministry of Immigration clerk who had handled the arrival of said person in our country and perhaps you will also be able to add a measure of your own experience in order to clarify the reasons and the more subterranean currents of mystery that ploughed and imprinted the fate of said creature.

It was the morning of 13/5/57, and the signs of the Passover that had just gone by were still evident in the little kitchen. Small matzoth crumbs dotted the tablecloth, blotched with the imprints of soup. Long-drawn expectations. A problem that began as a common event usually settled by meeting a postage clerk or tax and treasury officials. There were no oleanders by the house this year. Yehushua Perets, a Jewish immigrant from Algeria, walked around the unkempt asbestos structure, feeling a heaviness in his head, which had grayed during the few weeks he had spent in the Land of Israel. The quasi-drama began when we looked over the large crates, packed with the belongings that he had brought with him. He had thought to himself: The Land of Israel is surely a land where ink is expensive and hard to obtain, for the inhabitants of the land are mostly farmers. Paper is a product that according to his short historical awareness i.e. the Second World War was considered to be of value, and that should certainly hold true for the land of Israel. Moreover, he would not be able to carry out the mission he had taken upon himself to carry out in this remote region of earth without the products he had packed and kept throughout the long period during which he had prepared himself for the journey. When he surveyed his belongings he felt surprise and a suppressed dread that caused his abdomen to contract. The package wrapped in blue cotton fabric where his mother had placed the nine thousand pages written by his grandfather, David son of Sultana Perets, had vanished. Helpless, he paced the asbestos shack he had been given in the vicinity of Nachal Hadera, where his neighbors were people who spoke a language he did not understand, and whose customs he could comprehend even less. A heavy sense of alienation lay over him, the sun blazing throughout the day, the blinding light. He looked at the whitewashed house walls, his eyes sunken and

surrounded with a dark circular perimeter, bisected lengthwise by deep wrinkles, a mesh covered window sketched out the sight of a garden that grew wild with unidentified weeds. He started intermittently at the green and yellow squares, and despite his low physical condition arising from the structure in which he now lived and the rest of his needs that were now being supplied quite sparsely, his brain was focused (yes, it was his brain, because he felt the pain passing through his cranium) on the niggling question: "What will they think, mother and uncle Andrea Joseph Perets? This collection of papers has been in the family for about a hundred years. These are, briefly, the entire estate of the Perets family...surely Andrea could have transferred this collection of papers in a safer way..." Unpleasant smells wafted from the river with the warm wind that came from the East, the layer of air above the asbestos neighborhood seemed to have stopped moving and the sweat and sewage odors of the Maabara residents seemed to have dissolved together and solidified into a glue that closed over the neighborhood that sported the ostentatious name of Hamam Al Pasha, referring to the dirty public showers positioned at its end. Yehushua Perets slowly placed his spectacles on the support of his long nose, and the window began to clarify as objects slowly assumed as if out of spite the shape of the black frame of his glasses (which he guarded warily against the nightmare of losing or breaking them). He had been editing these pages for three years, a study of huge scope (as testified by the amount of paper that had accumulated) intended to clarify the literature of the anonymous by Mylius. The many problems that this matter evoked in him arose from the will of his grandfather David Perets, who demanded, on reaching the eighty first year of his life, that the most appropriate person from among his family members should handle his writings and publish them. His study covered nine

thousand pages, whose only focus was the status of bibliographic documents in "clarifying truth", but among the tracts obsessively and minutely dealing with the details and reasons of associating the author of a certain text, and the biographical and historical justifications gossip and hearsay that constituted the body of the notes, were interspersed offhand comments that developed into stories and chronicles, pseudo-histories that my grandfather had built around the case of Uriel da Costa and various episodes from the life of the divine philosopher Bendictus de Spinoza, whom my grandfather called "the young Baruch". Spinoza and the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, occupied about one third of his enterprise. Of special interest in his research which had an academic and meticulous look (the page margins were marked with an index, wherein the sources for his claims regarding the biographical assembly on which he based his arguments, were known only to himself) was the discussion of lost letters" that had not been included in Spinoza's posthumously published letters, the 1677 Opera Posthuma (a factual indication of this was found in the year 1900 in the letters of the publisher Martinus Nijhoff, which detailed their content and the way they were found). The letter on which Perets bases his sensual interpretation and his biography of Spinoza relates to correspondence between Madame Trachtenberg, who resided in Aristocrats Avenue by the German Cemetery in Amsterdam, and the young Beith-Midrash student, who was destined to light up the last sun of reason before the coming of the Modern Era, the genius philosopher Benedictus de Spinoza, the outcast. The north window of her home overlooked the grounds of the synagogue and hall of studies set up by the Portuguese Marrano Crypto-Jews. As befits a young widow, Madame Trachtenberg sat by her front window, so that the community goers may be able to witness her sad countenance as a "young widow", as was

customary in the Amsterdam community. When the appropriate days had passed since the demise of her husband she would be legally free to seek a husband or a lover. This is the period on which Perets based his calculations, founded on the single letter found by Perets, which he positioned as the keystone of an imaginary wall, on which he placed the description wherein, "Dame Trachtenberg informs the young man that she was breaking off their friendship, and as a consequence requests that their meetings be terminated, following the refusal (of the young man) to accept the offer proposed by her friend, the trader and rich benefactor of the community, Mr. ______ (his name is crossed out with black ink, which had been added in later years, probably by the learned Dr. Monikhof, around 1767, who also added such sentences that as a "scholar" he thought would provide the genius with proper citizenship as a legitimate son of the church, with such formulations as "following the example of our Lord Christ, our most eminent teacher) who claimed that the relationships of Madame Trachtenberg with a Jew who studies the secrets of Jewish wisdom is but a form of heresy liable to damage the spirit of her status. Such a relationship is liable to end in a severe economic calamity wherein she would lose the respectable inheritance left her by her husband, "an honest Christian man". The familiar style and the fact that the letter is written in a Flanders dialect of German, only provided Perets with the "scientific" proof and the sense of evidence ("evidentia", an important word in Perets' vocabulary) that this relationship does not concern a epistolary exchange between academic peers (Perets notes the custom of sending letters in the scholarly tongue of Latin) but rather a close personal relationship. Perets adds to this: "this is the focus of the powers displayed by the young man who so brazenly and audaciously accepted the excommunication and ostracism from the Amsterdam

community"... for an excommunication is no small thing, as when a community excommunicates one of its members, this entails both..."physical excommunication and spiritual excommunication, so that the spirit of the ostracized individual must forever wander between the heavens". The acceptance of his great excommunication with such patience, the Uriel da Costa case, his suicide and various other details explained by Perets on the basis of Madame Trachtenberg's letter to the young man (Perets identifies the letter on the basis of the address directed at Spinoza's brother Gabriel, who is mentioned in the accounting books because of a debt owed by Madame Trachtenberg to her business manager, Mr. Spinoza). Perets reports these details and others in his notes inscribed on the margins of the "Literature of the Anonymous" in the chapter entitled "Theology and Fear", where he wrote in the introduction: "dread is the root of soul development, loneliness is the stuff that feed souls who desire communion with God At the end of the chapter, one finds a pages where the ink has become smeared and erased, but at its edge one finds the words: Unio mystica*.

The Perets Notebooks

The reader must now be asking from whence does the omniscient narrator draw his ability to portray events concealed within the heart of the grandfather and his grandchild, as well as the links between events, as if he had been provided with a musical score, so that he is but a master transcribing the sketch and translating it into a color picture. It is no secret dear reader: I am an official with the immigration office in the city of Haifa, and I present the story of the aforementioned Yehushua Perets who talked with me a week before he left our country for reasons that I shall partially try to explain (I have left what could not be explained as it was). By virtue of my role I have negotiated with this "strange man" who related his tribulations from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure. He was forced to tell his story so that I may help him sell the few possessions that he had been given by the Jewish Agency, as he required the money in order to return to foreign lands, I think it was France. I will skip ahead and just add that the story related to me by the above person seemed "strange and impractical" but touching, and I would like to tell it so that those concerned (i.e. those authorized to handle immigration in the various offices) should know, for the story of immigrants is hard to tell, and most of them behave as if ostracized from the world. There are some for whom the harsh climate provides an excuse for restlessness, and there are some for whom the dream that originally brought them to this

land had been eroded by the clamor of the market places and the blazing heat of this sun over our head. I will not dwell on the introduction to the events at great length, reader sir, and I will try to present them exactly as they were related to me (as written by the aforementioned Mr. Yehushua Perets in the French language, and as I translated his words into Hebrew in an appendix to the report I sent to the central immigration authority, so that the general public may also be involved in what transpires in public administration). Perets Yehushua sat before his improvised desk trying to reconstruct the difficult chapter and remember what his grandfather wrote in the "Theology and Fear" chapter. The room lay before him. The rose in the window had wilted, the petals yellowed, though still crimson around the edges. For days he had been trying to write an essay that would clear his name from the accusations of the community. It was Friday eve. Uriel da Costa watched the oil dwindle from the lamp but dared not add more lest he shift from the angle in which his body lay. Full of tension, his muscles had frozen up and a dread filled his bones. The flame continued to diminish in the reddish light. The last month had isolated him from his loved ones. Even Deborah whom he had betrothed a year ago. He had slowly lost his confidence in the illuminati of justice and in his own way, once he understood that the legal process had been completed and that there were none who would stand against the communitys Rabbis in his defence. He opens his response with a request directed at the chief rabbinical magistrate, wherein he describes his "dictionary" and explains that his definitions are but "reasonable descriptions of true faith as well as a response to the question of why theology serves to mask the faith of the God of life"... This is the second week that he cannot progress beyond page nine. He becomes

discouraged, his will no longer has the power to process the thoughts that flow without constraint. Sharpness of mind and unity of text seem to have dissipated leaving chaos exposed. This bear grows tangled, the home is now tinged with the colors of the quarter during the times of the troubles (after the murder of the Portuguese Community secretary, of all places in the Jewish quarter it was the very agent who had sat in the interrogation of the witnesses who had given away the Crypto-Jews [the Marranos], and the dagger blow that had taken his life in the Jewish quarter had been the signal for the beginning of the Crusade initiated by the Holy See and the Holy Department to expunge heretics). He remembered this well, for the air of doom seemed to hang about the house like a portent, clinging to the many objects and scrolls that lay strewn about without order, hundreds of pages of preliminary manuscripts of his book, which would be published later, which he had perused in order to establish his name and clear it from the accusations of extreme heresy and blasphemy. On page nine the last of the pages he had written before he took his own life on the desk with the explosive gun ends the disorganized narrative with the following sentence: ... the human and the divine are alone in the temple... After this line, Ben Sultana Perets notes that "subsequent pages have scrawled notes of chapter headings, lines, hints regarding what he intended to write, to argue. ... The love of God is not to be found in the continuous power of repetition, but in revelation... man, blood and bile imprint his soul with steps to the transcendent, but he is but finely ground matter in the hallucinations of the spirit... what sense in marrying the ceremony of orderly work, if the blood bears dread and the ceremony... there are hidden paths on the way to the divine...

There are many approaches to the interpretation of the "Literature of the Anonymous" those hundreds of books that papal excommunication and state persecutions had conspired to feed the ignorance of the masses by locking the mention of both writers and writings in a subterranean trench where the materials were organized ("the liberty list") and ordered in a kind of underground library. An intellectual with a tendency to investigate the hidden materials of the spirit could get a copy that linked and displayed the writer, the publisher and the year in which the manuscript was written. This network of documentation, known as the Mylius Notes were adapted by my grandfather, Ben Sultana Perets with the precision worthy of an engineer and with a power of the imagination only achieved by the writer of the Divine Comedy. A kind of symmetry hidden among the details the blood of the hero, the gentle soul of the maiden, the pain of the author, the fact of the spilling of Christ's blood, the color of the roses on that fateful day on which God created a rose bush in the demonic center of the ocean, exuding the perfume and silence that marks the day, and many more details arranged in a system that seems to have been planned down to the minutest details by a powerful divine engineer who knows how to perfect the details down to the very last process of creation. (Tailoring the alloy to the spring that activates the mechanism, while annealing in the "the right kiln" brings the spring to its "nature", etc.). This powerful advancement was attained at the address of Ben Sultana Perets in the format used to present his observations. The first notes that he had scribbled were found within a kitchen recipe notebook to which he meticulously attached another piece of paper where he elucidated what he thought was unclear in his explanation, and after another year or five, would add another bit of paper, which he glued like a patch onto the notebook. At the edge he would record the date on which he saw

fit to explain or refine what he had written before, and also added the circumstances under which he was required to add another tier to his understanding. This tier was placed like a column in the secondary book, and from 1902 onwards, another tier was added on the left, wherein he wrote for about thirty years, touching on events perpetrated by the brown fascists and the black uniforms, where the earth stood still and the shrieks of rage against the silent God prevented the earth from turning, etc. It is here that he hinted of the coming of the black-winged birds and other portents that synergistically fortified the will of the Messiah to arrive, and other such things. Ben Sultana Perets commentary on the "Literature of the Anonymous" is based on principles embedded in the other Order. His logic draws on surprising sources. He would calculate the manuscript publication dates as if the period itself required the text in order clarify God's will on earth, so as to illuminate the way of the lost in the deep darkness of impurity and defilement. He was wont to link the appearance of a book or "pamphlet" to an important event in the life of this or that community and was always privy to some chain of expected events to which no one else had access, living in a light filled future when the kingdom on earth is transformed into a kind of enlightened kingdom of priests. It seemed as if the sciences served him to bring the day of the King-Messiah closer: mind-boggling inventions such as various aircraft and instruments of war did not obstruct his path, but were rather added as part of a totality known only to himself. He considered progress to be a kind of mechanism, liberating God from his obligation to care for the needy and the sick a kind of symmetry that deemed something sacred to be buried within an order that finds parallels in everything. Ben Sultana Perets commentary on the "Literature of the Anonymous", Collecting the names of the excommunicated

recorded in that book which is an expression of the dread of truth... these world reformers are constantly concerned to sublime the tangible, to explain away the pain and the sickness, justifying them by the supreme and inexplicable grace of God populating the natural world with creatures of order paper sketches, ultimately justifying..." It would be an impossible task to describe the habits and facial features of Ben Sultana Perets as described by his thirty-second grandson (I think), suffice it to mention to the reader that Ben Sultana Perets, the secretary of the Jewish community at the French colony of Oran in Algiers was the founder of the Maghrebis' Hovevei Zion Association, through a pamphlet that he published in 1925 wherein he apprised the Association of his claim regarding the nomination of the leader Binyamin Zeev Herzl to the position of "God's President" the highest civilian position after that of God's representatives on earth: King David. This turn of events was destined to lead our acquaintance Yehushua Perets to our Land, a quarter of a century later but before I should get ahead of myself, I will describe the other details that the above has given me. Details that may illuminate the problem and provide us with a path to his wondering soul. From his opening explanation, Ben Sultana Perets goes on to the final episode, the fate of Uriel da Costa, whose end "did not pass critical review...". You the reader must be wondering why Ben Sultana should claim that the end of the above did not pass such scrutiny (what is he an omniscient God capable of reading minds and comprehending their necessary culmination? [readers note]), the historical value of the facts scattered like grains of wheat in the history books and the notebooks of the various regimes, seemed to him to be without value. He rejected the simplistic rationalism of causes and effects linked to each other as if they were some kind of woven fabric that has a finite

primary source, etc. He viewed the novels of the eighteenth century as a fiction arising from the same optimism that he found in the German scholar Emmanuel Kant: The kind that naturalizes religious ideas in the service of the "narrative the allencompassing soul, the transcendental unity of the I within that strange kingdom: "the kingdom of ends".