Sacrifice (The Hebraica Trilogy)
Gloucester, 1168: Zev is in love with Arlette, but she is promised to a man of higher status in the city’s close-knit Jewish community. Then the futures of all of them are upended by the discovery of the murdered nine-year-old Harold. The child’s body is nailed to a cross and bears the marks of torture, elements that mimic not the factual details of the murder of the child William of Norwich in 1144, but of the highly coloured account of William’s death by the Benedictine Thomas of Monmouth – proof, if any were needed, that fake news is not a new thing, nor is its power to deliberately incite violence. In both these historical cases the local Jewish community was blamed, in early instances of the “blood libel” that persisted even to the case of Mendel Beilis of Kyiv in 1913.
Jordan’s depiction of a mediaeval Jewish community in England in the years prior to expulsion in 1290 is masterly, and the orchestrated repercussions of the murder on its innocent members are terrifying. Occasionally Jordan lapses into the sensational. Thus a rape is regrettably described from the perpetrator’s point of view, thus bordering on the voyeuristic; the victim wouldn’t have been thinking about her breasts being “pert” or about being the possessor of a “tender virginal opening”.
In this thriller, there are interests at work more powerful than this Jewish community, no matter how prosperous some of its members. Who stands to gain from the persecution of the family of Moses le Riche? Those who owe him money, or those astute enough to want to exploit the wealth that comes to the shrine of a martyr, especially when poor Harold turns out to be the illegitimate child of someone very important indeed?
