Rebecca of Salerno: A Novel of Rogue Crusaders, a Jewish Female Physician, and a Murder / Esther Erman. She Writes Press, 2022 (paperback, ebook). 250 pages.

Esther Erman’s latest novel, Rebecca of Salerno, comes nineteen years after her first, Just One. Both are historical novels featuring female Jewish protagonists during trying times for their people. Just One is half family chronicle and half afterlife fantasy, based on the history of the author’s own family in the Old World before and during the Holocaust. Rebecca of Salerno harkens much further back, to the Mediterranean of the 13th century, and is at once a murder mystery and a semi-sequel to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. But don’t expect a tale of valiant knights and gold-hearted outlaws here; neither Ivanhoe himself nor many other characters from the Scott novel appear. Instead, Erman follows Scott’s heroine Rebecca as she slowly recovers from and comes to terms with the traumas suffered in the earlier work. As Rebecca tells her own story, she naturally tells it differently than Scott’s omniscient narrator recounting a masculine tale of action and adventure.

The plot rapidly conveys her and her father Isaac of York into exile from England to Salerno in southern Italy, then a relative haven of tolerance between ethnicities, religions, and even sexes. There Rebecca establishes her independence and continues her career as a healer in the famed Scuola Medica Saleritana, first as a student and later an instructor. She finds a congenial friend and colleague in Rafael Lopez Dias, a fellow graduate and translator of medical texts. He would gladly marry, but she, still haunted by the memory of her hopeless infatuation with Ivanhoe, declines his proposals.

The meat of the story is Rebecca and Rafael’s joint investigation of the murder of a Crusader, pinned on Isaac Ben Shmuel, a visiting Rabbi from Egypt deeply unpopular among both the Jewish and Christian communities of the city. The two are convinced he is innocent, but the local authorities are content to execute him to keep the fragile peace between the townsfolk and the victim's fellow Crusaders, passing through Salerno on their return from the sack of Constantinople.

Our sleuths are hampered in their investigation by their religion and Rebecca's status as a woman. Their inquiries consist largely of social calls on various persons of high or low degree who, for one reason or another, they come to believe might know something. Few of those they question are cooperative; most, including the rabbi himself, are actively hostile to their inquiries.

On the upside, we are treated to a delightful picture of contemporary life in the Jewish Salerno of the period, with its civilized gossip, social rounds, and particularly cuisine; indeed, the author, if not Rebecca herself, sometimes appears less interested in the protagonist’s back story than what she ate! The milieu she brings to life for us is, however, quite fascinating.

Rebecca’s medical practice and the goodwill engendered by it ultimately loosen up enough witnesses to unravel the mystery. The truth is known about three quarters of the way through the book. But that turns out to be the easy part. There is still the matter of convincing self-interested and powerful members of the Jewish community and government alike to do what is right rather than what is convenient. Official inertia is reinforced by prejudice and the general imperative of placating the Crusaders. The reader may even feel for those trying to bury the truth, who really do have greater concerns than the fate of one unsympathetic man, whose exoneration may not just be more work than it’s worth, but blow the lid off Salerno's roiling tensions. The author, however, relentlessly keeps the the focus on the moral question by demonstrating her protagonists’ commitment to justice and truth, the authorities' ingrained and easy bigotry, and the corruption and cupidity of the government.

Rebecca and Rafael go to truly heroic lengths to see justice done. The ultimate result of their efforts illustrates the appalling strength of the currents against which they struggle, but also contributes to the resolution of their own issues. This novel teaches lessons on a number of levels, if not always the same ones. Fundamentally, it is a book about understanding, the perils and price of doing the right thing, and the tragedy of justice denied. It makes you think.

Rebecca of Salerno is an excellent book, but not perfect. It is sometimes marred by the author's choice to write a historical novel in contemporary usage. While avoiding forced and stilted language, this takes her a bit too far in the other direction on occasion--as when Rafael states “We need answers, pronto!” Which sounds more like a sheriff in the Old West than a scholar of the Middle Ages! Fortunately, the formality of the Salernian Jewish culture and folkways go a long way towards countering such lapses.

There are also a few long stretches of dialog where it is difficult to discern whether successive paragraphs should be attributed to different people or if the whole is simply one long speech by one of them. Rebecca and Rafael are often so in accord in their thinking that the speaker could be either. Their characters are not always well differentiated from each other. Thankfully, they are backstopped by a host of strongly delineated secondary characters, including Rebecca’s loyal but willful servant Nina, tortured matron Malka Freya Mendoza, and the dubiously trustworthy Duke Henry, to name a few.

But such quibbling risks presenting a false impression of the book, which as a whole is witty, worthy, and wonderful, a fascinating glimpse of a bygone age and of a woman who made her own way in it, in the author’s fancy if not actual history.

I understand that more accounts of Rebecca's adventures may wait in the wings. If so, I look forward to reading them. If not, the present novel still constitutes a satisfying and self-standing conclusion to the story of Rebecca as begun, once upon a time, by Sir Walter Scott.

Read it. You won’t be sorry.

Four out of five stars.

—Brian.