The Fruit of Her Hands: The Story of Shira of Ashkenaz Review

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(More customer reviews)Michelle Cameron's THE FRUIT OF HER HANDS tells the surprisingly fascinating story of Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg, Germany, the greatest Talmudic scholar of the 13th century, as seen through the eyes of his wife and soulmate, Shira.
The recorded history of Rabbi Meir, who is Cameron's ancestor, says nothing about his family other than he had a son, Suesskind, and several unnamed daughters. But Cameron reasoned that such a remarkable man would have had an equally remarkable wife, and so she invents Shira, the only daughter of a widowed French rabbi with a thirst for learning and a mind of her own.
The novel deftly weaves Meir and Shira into some of the darkest chapters of medieval Jewish history: The Paris disputation (trial) and mass burning of the Talmud in 1240-42, the blood libel of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln in 1255, and King Rudolph I's decision in 1286 to enslave the Jews of Germany, which forced Meir to flee to Palestine, only to be captured en route and imprisoned for ransom.
Meir and Shira also become entangled, politically and personally, with the villainous Nicholas Donin, a radical Jewish scholar who is rejected as a suitor for Shira's hand, excommunicated by the Chief Rabbi of Paris, and eventually becomes a Franciscan monk. Donin takes his revenge by convincing Pope Gregory IX to condemn the Talmud for blasphemy and King Louis IX of France to confiscate and burn 12,000 copies in Paris.
Cameron stays true to history and does not inflate Shira's role unduly. She is no proto-feminist or free-thinking firebrand, but rather an obedient daughter, a loving wife, and a restrained (if highly intelligent) observer of events whose greatest concern is keeping her family safe. Her greatest enemy after Nicholas Donin is her hypercritical mother-in-law.
Even so, Meir and Shira's struggle to survive and even thrive in an increasingly anti-Semitic Europe, the wealth of detail about Jewish life 700 years ago, the illuminating snippets of Talmudic wisdom and Jewish poetry, and Cameron's clean and lyrical writing make THE FRUIT OF HER HANDS a marvelous read and a remarkable achievement for a first-time novelist.

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