DAUBMANNUS, JOANNES

(17th century)--"Typographus Iaonnes Daubmannus," A polish printer. In the first half of the 17th century he published a Polish-Latin dictionary in Prussia, but the same name appears on the title page of another dictionary, published in 1691 under the title Lexicon Corsi--continens colloquium seu disputationem de religione . . . . Thus, Daubmannus also appears as the first publisher of the book whose second edition the reader now has in his hands. The very next year, in 1692, the Inquisition had ordered the Daubmannus edition of The Khazar Dictionary destroyed, but two copies escaped this fate and remained in circulation. Daubmannus probably obtained the material for his dictionary of three dictionaries on the Khazar question from a monk of the Eastern Christian order, but he himself added to this material and therefore appears not only as the publisher of The Khazar Dictionary but also its editor.

This can be seen from the languages used in the edition. The accompanying Latin text was probably written by Daubmannus, because it is unlikely that the monk knew Latin. The dictionary itself, however, was printed in Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek, as well as Serbian, this being how the text was submitted to the publisher.

Title Page of Daubmannus' Book on the Khazars (destroyed)

But a German source claims that the Daubmannus who published the 1691 Khazar Dictionary was not the same Daubmannus who published the Polish dictionary in the first half of the 17th century. According to this Prussian source, the younger Daubmannus had been crippled in early childhood by a disease. At the time he was not called Joannes Daubmannus but Jacob Tam David ben Yahya, which was his real name. "May he be cursed day and night" were the words a woman who sold paints and dyes reportedly hurled at him. Why the curse was uttered is unknown, but it was effective. It was the beginning of the first month of Adar when the boy returned home in the snow, curved like a saber. From then on he dragged one arm along the ground, and the other carried his head by the hair, because it would not sit straight on its own. That is why he went into printing: it was a job in which he could lean his head on his shoulder without its bothering him; indeed, that position was even useful. He smiled, said, "The dark is like the light," and was hired by the real Daubmannus, the elder Joannes. He never regretted it. Just as Adam christened the day of the week, so he gave names to the seven arts of bookbinding, sang as he picked the letters out of the wooden box, and for each letter had a different song. To look at him, one would not have thought he was at war with his affliction. But it happened that a well-known healer was passing through Prussia just then, one of those rare people who knew how Elohim had wedded Adam to his soul. So Daubmannus the elder sent Jacob Tam David the healer to be cured. Jacob was already a young man; he had a broad, what they call "well-salted" smile on his face, different-colored stockings on each leg, and in the month of Elul, faster than the hens could lay them, he ate scrambled eggs from a furnace where in summer the eggs were kept in the draft of the chimney. When he heard about going to the healer, his eyes glinted in the blade of the knife with which he was cutting the bread; he tied his mustache into a knot and rushed off, carrying his head in his hand. It is not known how long he stayed abroad, but during one sunny day, Jacob Tam David ben Yahya returned from Germany hale and hearty, straight and tall, but under a new name. He had taken the name of his benefactor Daubmannus the elder, who had sent him away as a hunchback and now welcomed him back with joy and these words: "One cannot speak about half the soul. Otherwise we would keep one half in heaven and one half in hell. You are the living proof."

Indeed, with his new name the young Daubmannus begun a new life. But his life was as two-faced as the double bottom of an Erdely plate. Daubmannus the younger continued to dress foppishly and carry two caps to the fairs, one under his belt and the other on his head, changing them periodically to look handsomer. He was, in truth, a handsome man; he had flaxen hair that had grown in the month of Iyar, and had as many attractive faces as the month of Sivan has thirty days. People felt it was time for him to marry. But ever since he had regained his health, that familiar smile of his had left his face. That smile, which he would blow away in the morning when he entered the printer's shop, would, as it used to, be waiting for him in the evening at the shop door like a dog, but he would catch it in flight with his upper lip, as if keeping a false mustache in place. That is, in fact, how he wore his smile. It was rumored that when he had discarded his hunched back and stood up straight, the printer had fallen pray to fear. He was afraid--it was whispered--of the height from which he now observed the world. of the new vistas he could not recognize, and especially of his equality with other people, over whom he now towered, he who had once been the lowest of the low in the streets.

Beneath these street rumors coursed others, graver still, told in hushed whispers, and they were as heavy as the silt on the bottom of the river. According to one of these terrible stories, the source of Daubmannus' erst-while youthful cheerfulness and spirit, despite his affliction, was the fact that, hunched and bent as he was, he could reach down and suck at himself, and so he learned that the male seed tastes like a woman's milk. This was how he kept renewing himself. But once he stood up straight and tall, this became impossible. . . . These were just the sorts of stories that make a person's past as opaque as his future, but everyone could see that since his recovery, the young Daubmannus often played an unusual joke on the boys in the workshop. He would interrupt his work for a minute, touch the ground with one hand, and with the other take hold of his head by the hair and stand up straight. It was then that the old, well-salted smile would spread across his face and the former ben Yahya would sing out as he had not been heard to sing in a long, long time. It was not hard to guess what happened: in order to be healed, the printer had to give up more than it was worth, and it was not in vain that he said, "Germany returns to me in my sleep like an undigested lunch." Worst of all, he no longer enjoyed the work of a printing shop. He would fill his rifle with the type letters and go hunting.

But at the decisive moment, like the stone that separates the water of one stream into two seas, was again his encounter with a woman. She came from far away, wore violet dresses like the Jewish women in Greece under the Turks, and was the widow of a Romaniot who had once made kachkaval cheese near Kavalla. Daubmannus caught sight of her in the street. Their hearts met in their eyes, but when he extended two fingers toward her she said, "Non-kosher birds are recognized by the way they separate their claws on a branch into pairs rather than into three and one. . . ." And she refused him. This was the last straw. Daubmannus the younger completely lost his head. He had already decided to abandon everything and leave town when the elder Daubmannus suddenly dies. One evening a Christian monk walked into the shop Daubmannus the younger had now inherited, carrying three heads of cabbage on a spit and bacon in a bag. He sat himself by the hearth, where a kettle of water was boiling, threw some salt and the bacon into it, sliced the cabbage, and said, "My ears are filled with the word of God, and my mouth with cabbage."

His name was Nikolsky and he had once been a scribe at the St. Nicholas monastery by the Morava River in which long ago the maenads had torn Orpheus apart. He asked Daubmannus whether he would like to publish a book whose content was rather strange, so much that nobody would probably dare print it. Daubmannus the elder or ben Yahya would have turned down such an offer without thinking twice, but Daubmannus the younger, confessed as he was, realized that this might be his chance. He agreed, and Nikolsky began dictating the dictionary from memory until, at the end of seven days, he had dictated the entire book, all the while eating cabbage with his incisors, which were so long they seemed to grow out of his nose. When Daubmannus received the manuscript, he gave it unread to the typesetter and said, "Knowledge is a perishable commodity; it can turn sour in a second. Like the future." As soon as the dictionary was typeset, Daubmannus printed one copy with the poisonous printer's dye and immediately sat down to read it. The more he read, the stronger the effect of the poison, and Daubmannus' body became more and more crooked. Every consonant in the book seemed to strike some part of his body. The hunched back returned; his bones reverted to the original position in which they had grown and locked long ago around his bowels; as his read his bowels reassumed the position that they had been accustomed to since childhood; the pains that had paid for his health now subsided; his head once again dropped into the palm of his left hand, while his right dropped to the ground, and as he touched it, Daubmannus' face lit up again as in childhood, beaming a forgotten smile of beatitude that gathered together all his years. And then he dies. Through that blissful smile the last letters he had read in the book dropped out of his mouth: Verbum caro factum est, "The Word became flesh."