A Word, Only a Word

A German town in the sixteenth century, a Jewish physician's daughter, a Christian boy, and one word — spoken, not meant — that decides both their lives. Ebers was an Egyptologist who found the medical papyrus that bears his name and wrote fiction to fund the digging; this novel steps out of Egypt into Reformation Germany, and the machinery of religious hatred in a small town is documented with a scholar's exactness. Fifty-nine plates, from Dürer's Erasmus and Munch's Death and the Child to Schinkel's townscapes, follow the tale's movement from the sixteenth century into the grip of inherited fear.