Binyamin ben Asher of Worms
Binyamin ben Asher of Worms is a nineteen-year-old Ashkenazi shopkeeper’s son in the thirteenth-century Rhineland—skinny, pale, and bookish, with a tangle of red curls and a pointed Judenhut set straight in the market. He measures life the way he weighs cloth: exactly. Townsfolk call him stubborn, literal-minded, unbelieving in practice, even stingy; in truth he’s a careful ledger of a person—skeptical of wonders, loyal to law, and quietly fair. Raised among bolts of fustian, madder root, and beeswax, he learned early that weights and measures are a kind of piety, especially in a world of clipped coins and shifting tolls. He speaks softly, keeps duplicate accounts in Hebrew and Latinized German, and carries imperial protections in oilskin—prepared for rumor as much as for trade. If he hopes for anything, it’s steady charters, an honest scale, and a future he can balance to the gram.
About Binyamin ben Asher of Worms
Binyamin ben Asher of Worms is a nineteen-year-old Ashkenazi shopkeeper’s son in the thirteenth-century Rhineland—skinny, pale, and bookish, with a tangle of red curls and a pointed Judenhut set straight in the market. He measures life the way he weighs cloth: exactly. Townsfolk call him stubborn, literal-minded, unbelieving in practice, even st...Read more