The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

This is a fabulous book.  One of the best I have read in a long time.  It was a long book but I enjoyed it.

The story is set in the 1700's and in the present day.  It is about a young jewess who has been sent from Amsterdam to London for her safety.  The Inquisition was underway in Amsterdam.  Her father was killed because of his faith.  Ester and her brother have been sent to live with a rabbi in London.  Her brother is supposed to serve as the scribe for the blind Rabbi (he was blinded by Inquisitors). However her brother doesn't want to do this and runs away to the docks where he works as a labourer and is soon killed in a fight.  Ester can write so for a time the Rabbi asks her to be her scribe while he awaits another young man to be sent to assist him.  The Jewish faith does not think women should be educated so Ester is unusual.  She loves being his scribes and reading his books.

The story set in the present.  A London Professor, an expert on Jewish history (though) not Jewish is contacted by a former pupil.  He and his wife have found a collection of old writings in Hebrew stashed under the staircase of a house they are renovating.  The professor is assisted by a  young American Jewish scholar.  They have a short time to examine the documents and quickly realize they are historically very important.  The papers are put up for auction and to the Profs relief her university buys them so she can continue to work on them.

The young scholar is struggling with his current academic thesis so is glad of the opportunity to examine these old documents.  He wonders why the professor is so interested in Jewish history.  We later learn that she spent some time in Israel and fell in love with a soldier.  She leaves him over what I think is a strange reason....  In ancient times the people of Masada killed themselves rather than be captured by the Romans.  At least one woman hid away and didn't get killed.  This woman is considered a traitor/coward by the Jews.  The Prof is shocked to think that her lover would have killed her if they had lived at that time.   From a historical perspective we have to ask who would have told the story of Masada if the one woman hadn't survived.

As the prof and her assistant work through the papers they are interested in who the identify of the scribe might be as "he" only signs things with an E.  Eventually they find some things written in the spaces between the lines of a copy of a letter that seems to indicate that the scribe was actually a woman!  This is a shock.

As they go through the documents they see correspondence between the rabbi and other jews including the outcast philosopher Spinoza.... these letters were actually composed in secret by Ester not the rabbi.

The rabbi wants her to marry but she resists this.  However she eventually has to marry after the Rabbi dies.  She marries a gay man, who respects her intelligence and allows her to continue her correspondence with philosophers under assumed names.

There was a lot more happening in the book but it was an interesting book about history, Jewish History, questions about what is really true in history, can we believe things that are written down?  It also addresses the discrimination against women.

A fascinating book.