Month: April 2020

Filomena goes next, with another story of another Jew, Melchisadech, who also must reckon with Christianity as both a moral problem and an intellectual prospect.   Filomena frames it as a story within a story within a story, because now all three of the great monotheistic religions that rose on the southern and eastern extremities of the Mediterranean are in play–as competitors for the loyalties of people on the verge of the end times, all desperate for the right answer to the wrong question, which is, who or what will save us? In The Decameron story, Saladin the Saracen summons Melchisadech to a meeting where the intricacies of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity–the last for once absent an advocate–will be debated, as preface to an offer that can’t be refused.  If your answer is wrong, Saladin says in so many words, I’ll have you hounded or imprisoned, whereupon, as Sultan, I will seize your assets (these are liquid because Melchisadech the Jew, is, of course, a money lender).  If your answer is right, again in so many words, I’ll let you lend me money to pay off the debts my profligate kingdom has accumulated.  Melchisadech responds with astonishment and then a story about debt, inheritance, forgiveness, and forbearance, about the man who will be Lear. Filomena leads with a playful critique of reason or restraint that might as well be Nietzschean,...

Neifile goes next in The Decameron, Book/Novel 2.  She tells the story of Abraham the Jew, a devout adherent of the faith, who, being a friend of Johannot de Chevigny, a fellow merchant, is constantly subject to proselytization–convert now or forever find no peace!  Abraham finally says OK, OK, but I’m going to the headquarters, all the way to Rome, to see what your religion is made of.  There he finds strange grounds for new belief–he converts to Christianity because its practitioners are whoremongers, pedophiles, mendicants, and morons, yet their empire keeps expanding.  Here’s my retelling of that story for our times, as a screenplay, of course. ____ INT. Abraham bent over a church pew, the reverse shot shows his old friend John, another stalwart of the garment trade, pacing in the aisle.  The camera rises, we survey the incredible wealth and majesty of this cathedral, and the 2000-year old Church it represents. ABRAHAM: Jesus fucking Christ, wouldja?  [the cameras descend into standard shot-reverse shot format at eye level] I’m a Jew, what do you want, a conversion experience?  How can I be a Christian, what are you people FOR–except, what, the end of everything?   You hope for death, the end of the fucking world, so you can see the large one, the big guy who tortures us because he thinks it’s good for us?  This is not a...