Read The Witch of Cologne for Free Online

There man is finally conquering the seasons; he is swept up in the urgency of the future, stopping only for the wild storms on the North Sea and the English war.
    In her tiny cottage on the edge of the town Ruth’s musings fill her mind, and with that meditation comes memory and questioning.
    She had an unusual childhood. Not only had her father married an outsider—a Sephardic woman—but their union was one of the heart and not the customary arranged marriage of Deutz. The young rabbi’s choice was unpopular and both his Spanish wife and their young daughter had suffered the brunt of the community’s xenophobia. Sara ben Saul died in childbirth when Ruth was six and the small girl wore the solitary air of self-containment that marks bereaved children. She lived alone with her father until his own brother, Samuel, was widowed and with his only son Aaron moved into the large brick house adjacent to the cheder where Elazar ben Saul, as chief rabbi, was entitled to live. The two brothers found solace in their companionship. Elazar, the elder, provided a kernel of stability for Samuel, the more extroverted man, while their children—both motherless—grew to be de facto siblings.
    Two years older, wild, defiant and dangerously intelligent, Aaron embodied everything the small girl longed to be. Ruth worshipped the thin boy whose passionate tantrums intimidated even his father. A dreamer, at night Aaron would keep the little girl awake while he whispered how when he grew up he would see countries his father had never seen. How he would travel as a Christian and be free to own land and trade with whomever he liked and employ more than two servants, the maximum allowed to a Jew. Both children knew these blasphemous fantasies could only be murmured in the shadows of the bedroom they shared tucked high into the rafters of the narrow house.
    Often, frightened for Aaron and his audacity, the small girl would creep into his bed and fall asleep in his arms. Nevertheless, both children shared an intense intellectual curiosity, which their fathers encouraged, and the small girlbecame infected by Aaron’s passion for free thought. A passion that was fully ignited by an encounter at a fair.
    The fairs—huge metropolises of tents and wooden stalls that blossomed like mushrooms beside the medieval walls of the cities—were thriving hubs of bustling commerce where all manner of entrepreneurial denizens, from Jews to gypsies, offered an immense variety of services from moneylending to diamond trading to lacemaking. Here marriages were made, wars declared and secret financial deals brokered.
    It was at the Naumburg fair that Ruth, having wandered from her father’s side, became transfixed by a Lutheran zealot standing on an old cart covered in straw. The little girl watched and listened, her green eyes dark with amazement as he held forth fearlessly, describing a free society, a place where all—Catholic, Lutheran, woman, Jew and Moor—were equal. The man, painfully thin, his beard pale with dust and a battered cap drawn low over his fiery eyes, spoke with a passion that captivated the young child. Even when pelted by rotten fruit, he continued unperturbed until he was finally hauled off the cart by the city guards.
    When Aaron and Elazar eventually found her, Ruth was still standing gazing at the spot where the zealot had preached, her mind saturated with dreams of a universe where she would be allowed to read the Torah, would be free to stand like a man with her father at the holy ark and to choose her own husband—notions that hitherto were unthinkable.
    The child was so quiet on the journey home that the rabbi was secretly frightened a dybbuk might have crept into the small girl’s soul. In a way it had: the world the zealot described haunted Ruth’s imagination. It was a vision that was to shape the course of her adult life.
    When Aaron was twelve, Samuel, a small man famous for both his short temper and his sense of humour, was