God's Shadow

by Alan Mikhail

  Advocating, once again, for a halt to the importation of West Africans, a judge on Hispaniola wrote to the Crown in 1544 of the alarming influence of the “bad customs” of Muslims on the Taino. “It would be preferable that there weren’t so many ladino slaves born in this country,” he announced in his letter, “because they are a bad nation, very daring and badly inclined, and they are the ones who mutiny and make themselves captains. . . . The same was seen in the business of Enrique [Enriquillo].”

  Muslims continued to stream into the Americas over the course of the sixteenth century. Economic pressure easily overwhelmed caution. Between 1533 and 1580, for instance, the majority of the slaves taken to gold-rich Cartagena, Colombia’s largest port, were Muslims. Although they came from a broad range of ethnic and social groups in Africa—some were mutual enemies—once landed in places such as Cartagena, these Muslims found common cause against the Spanish. The Spanish thus laid the groundwork, unintentionally of course, for a novel brand of supra-ethnic Muslim solidarity in the New World that allowed Muslims to become a major force in the Americas. Indeed, as the scholar Sylviane A. Diouf explains, “if counted as a whole, on a religious basis rather than on an ethnic one the Muslims were probably more numerous in the Americas than many other groups of Africans.” In Cartagena, Wolof, Mandingo, Berbeci, and Fulani Muslims came together, thanks to their common allegiance to what one of the city’s Jesuit priests termed “the cursed sect of Mahomet.” After 1521, Muslim slaves from different backgrounds united to lead insurrections in Puerto Rico and Panama. In many of these cases, as in the Christmas Day revolt, Muslims aligned with non-Muslim indigenous slaves and maroons. Ultimately, it was not Islam that bound Muslims together and bound Muslims with others, but rather these individuals’ shared status as slaves or otherwise subjugated peoples—all enemies of the Spanish.

  Given their Old World enmities, Spanish colonists nearly always scapegoated Muslims as the instigators of these revolts—in Mexico in 1523, Cuba and Colombia in 1529, Honduras in 1548, and Venezuela in 1550—even when they were not remotely involved. In all these locales, the Spanish continued to accuse their Muslim slaves of proselytizing Islam to indigenous Americans. It became almost a knee-jerk reaction for the Spanish to ascribe all their New World problems to their Old World foe.

  Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Islam expanded throughout the Atlantic world. The number of Muslim slaves from around the Mediterranean—variously described as “Moors” and “Turks,” most likely North Africans—being imported to the New World increased at a higher rate than that of Muslim West Africans. This demographic shift was the result of the Spaniards’ greater reliance on galleys for transport in the Caribbean. Mediterranean Muslim slaves had long experience working the oars of these large vessels, since this was one of their primary functions in the slave economy of the Old World. In the early 1580s, for example, a galley commander in Cartagena wrote to Spain requesting that more enslaved “Moors and Turks” be sent as oarsmen because they “prove to be the best.” Records from 1595 of a galley in Havana show that nearly 30 percent of its crew was made up of Muslims from Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and Morocco. As with West African gold miners and the Muslim sugar slaves of Madeira, these predominantly North African Muslims possessed the technical expertise needed in the New World and thus, despite deep-rooted fears among the Christians, were sent in large numbers to the Americas.

  “THE CONQUEST OF THE EARTH,” wrote Joseph Conrad in his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, “which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only.” Although Conrad wrote these words about the Belgian Congo in the nineteenth century, he could just as easily have been describing the first few decades of Spanish rule in the Americas. It was certainly “not a pretty thing.” It is estimated that 90 percent of the native population of the Americas died between 1492 and the middle of the seventeenth century—a decline from sixty million people to six million—and that about thirteen million Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves. Never before in world history had genocide occurred on the scale of continents, obliterating languages and cultures, cities and histories. More than anything else, Spanish and other European ideas of the New World propelled these irredeemably wrenching conquests.

  After this genocide, the “necessity” of slavery in a place like Hispaniola stoked the kinds of fantasies that had initially pushed Columbus across the Atlantic and into the horrific and complicated realities of colonial rule in the Americas. As history nearly always reveals, reality trumps fantasy. Thus, despite the Spaniards’ apocalyptic fears, Islam arrived in America and left its influential mark, paradoxically brought there by the Spanish themselves in their quest for land and riches. Melchor de Castro, who was wounded during the 1521 Wolof Rebellion, later designed a coat of arms for himself that featured a right arm clenching a sword above six severed black heads dripping blood—a motif he borrowed from Reconquista-era Spanish seals featuring the severed, bleeding, turbaned heads of Muslims. Later, a whole generation of Europeans in the New World would borrow the symbolism of severed Muslim heads for their iconography. This sort of continuity between Old World and New—continuities observed both in the Requirement and in Spain’s colonial land-tenure system, continuities forged by the extension of the war between Islam and Christianity to the Caribbean, continuities made relentlessly tragic through the decimation of native populations and the imposition of the transatlantic slave trade—affirm that 1492 did not separate the New World from the Old, the Americas from Islam.

  Quite the opposite: it bound them together, through blood and violence.

  CHAPTER

  11

  FINDING OTTOMAN JERUSALEM

  Expulsion of Jews from Spain

  THE YEAR 1492—IN WHICH COLUMBUS “DISCOVERED” AMERICA and Spain completed its Reconquista—marked another major geopolitical event as well: the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Jews had lived there far longer than either Christians or Muslims; indeed, Jews had called Spain their home before those two religions were born. The year 1492 was thus a turning point of epochal significance for world Jewry—a moment of loss but also a beginning. The dispersion of one of the Mediterranean’s deepest-rooted Jewish communities opened another chapter—their Ottoman story. Thus began Sephardic history; indeed, the term Sephardi refers to those Jews who trace their origins back to the community exiled from Spain in 1492. After often harrowing journeys across land and sea, most of these Jews eventually settled in the Ottoman Empire, joining its already significant and longstanding Jewish population.

  The largest Jewish city in the world after 1492—indeed, the only Jewish-majority city for two thousand years—rose in the Ottoman Empire. This was the humming port of Salonica (now the Greek city of Thessaloniki), on the hilly northwest coast of the Aegean Sea. Over the next four centuries, Salonica, “the Jerusalem of the Balkans,” became the global center of Jewish culture. Jews from all over the world were drawn there by opportunity, stability, and the city’s cosmopolitan character. Under Ottoman Islam, Jews mostly thrived—not just in Salonica but throughout the empire, even in an outlying city like Selim’s Trabzon. Remnants of these populations lived in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and throughout the Middle East as late as the mid-twentieth century. Selim’s personal physician, some of his most trusted advisers, and his munitions experts during his wars of conquest were descendants of Spain’s Jews. Thus, in the very moment that Europe exiled its Jews and Muslims, while enslaving Africans and decimating indigenous populations in the Americas, the Ottomans welcomed Jews (and Muslims) from across the Mediterranean world, integrating them into their empire—which, importantly, still had a Christian majority.

  FOR COLUMBUS AND THE Spanish regime he represented, the Reconquista and the search for a way to defeat Islam by heading west connected seamlessly to Spain’s efforts to cleanse itself of its Jews. “Your Highnesses or
dained that I should not go eastward by land in the usual manner,” wrote Columbus, “but by the western way which no one about whom we have positive information has ever followed. Therefore having expelled all the Jews from your dominions in that same month of January [1492], your Highnesses commanded me to go with an adequate fleet to those parts of India.” The fall of Granada and its annexation to Castile following years of war represented the culmination of the Inquisition that had been raging in Spain, and throughout Catholic Europe, for hundreds of years. Both Judaism and Islam were regarded by Christians as diseases plaguing Europe. From Amsterdam to Venice, laws prohibited Jewish and Muslim religious practices, stipulated that these communities could live only in specific neighborhoods, and sanctioned periodic outbreaks of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim violence. Pogroms targeting “Christ’s crucifiers” had occurred throughout the course of Spanish history, one of the most significant coming in 1391, when Christian mobs massacred scores of Jews across Spain’s major cities. Next came waves of expulsions from neighborhoods and even whole towns, and then a flood of forced conversions. Like former Muslims, former Jews remained under suspicion. Indeed, a whole arm of the Inquisition was devoted solely to determining whether Jewish and Muslim converts—conversos and Moriscos respectively—were truly Catholic in their hearts or were dangerous, conniving impostors.

  The historic triumph at Granada served as the staging ground for the final eradication of Judaism and Islam from Spain. Even though the enemy on the battlefield was a Muslim kingdom, there was a widespread belief that Jews had materially aided Granada’s Muslims and that some had even taken up arms alongside them. What is more, the fall of Granada proved a huge economic windfall for the Spanish Crown. Not only did the victory release funds that had been tied up by the war, but the subsequent seizures of Jewish (and Muslim) money and property swelled the state’s coffers further (Spain’s expulsion decree, echoed five centuries later by the Nazis, expressly forbade Jews from taking gold and silver with them). Funds for Columbus’s journey across the Atlantic thus came from both these sources: the war chest Spain had accumulated to battle Islam, and the confiscated assets of Jews and Muslims.

  On March 31, 1492, nearly three months after the fall of Granada and six weeks before Columbus left the city after having received royal sanction in the Moorish-turned-Catholic citadel of Alhambra to begin his preparations for crossing the ocean, Spain promulgated its official decree of expulsion. It began by summarizing the underlining logic:

  [I]t is evident and apparent that the great damage to the Christians has resulted from and does result from the participation, conversation, and communication that they have had with the Jews, who try to always achieve by whatever ways and means possible to subvert and to draw away faithful Christians from our holy Catholic faith and to separate them from it, and to attract and pervert them to their injurious belief and opinion, instructing them in their ceremonies and observances of the Law, holding gatherings where they read unto them and teach them what they ought to believe and observe according to their Law, trying to circumcise them and their children. . . . This is evident from the many declarations and confessions, [obtained] as much from the Jews themselves as from those perverted and deceived by them, which has redounded to the great injury, detriment, and opprobrium of our holy Catholic faith.

  The decree then detailed how the expulsions were to occur:

  We . . . having had much deliberation upon it, resolve to order all and said Jews and Jewesses out of our kingdoms and that they never return nor come back to any of them. . . . [W]e command all Jews and Jewesses of whatever age they may be, who live and reside and are in the said kingdoms and seignories, natives and non-natives alike, who by whatever manner or whatever reason may have come or are to be found in them, that by the end of July of the present year, that they leave the said kingdoms and seignories with their sons and daughters, male and female servants and Jewish domestics, both great and small, of whatever age they may be, and that they dare not return unto them, nor be in them, nor be in any part of them, neither as dwellers, nor as travelers, nor in any other manner whatsoever, upon punishment that if they do not thus perform and comply with this, and are to be found in our said kingdoms and seignories and have come here in any manner, they incur the penalty of death and confiscation of all their belongings for our treasury, and such penalties they shall incur by the very deed itself without trial, sentence, or declaration.

  In just four short months, from April to July of 1492, the Jews of Spain—a community that had persevered if not prospered for more than a millennium—faced a bleak choice among three repugnant alternatives: conversion, flight, or death. The expulsion decree rehashed many familiar themes permeating the anti-Jewish sentiment that had intensified in Spain over the previous few centuries: the corrupting influence of Jews on Christians, the threat posed by their laws to Christian law, and the larger falsity that they held vast amounts of property to the detriment of Christians. The Spanish Crown’s ultimate goal was the total Christianization of Spain by the excision of such cancerous tumors as Jews and Muslims, and so, after the fall of Granada and the anti-Jewish expulsion efforts, many Muslims were expelled as well, mostly to North Africa, and the violence against them would continue until their final expulsion in 1614. But in the immediate aftermath of 1492, Jews bore the brunt of the fanatical vision of a pure Spanish Catholic state.

  Death was clearly the worst of the three options. The majority of Spain’s estimated 275,000 Jews chose flight, but some 100,000 opted for conversion. Becoming Catholic allowed Jews to keep their property, homes, and trades, sparing them the agony of uprooting themselves and starting over in an unknown place with an uncertain future. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of these conversos came from the upper echelons of Spanish Jewish society. With the most to lose, they had the greatest incentive to convert and remain. Given the heightened hostilities of the Inquisition and the Reconquista, however, stipulations about conversion proved more stringent than ever before. In its most generous assessment, the Crown regarded conversions under threat of death or expulsion as insincere and thus suspicious. More sinisterly, they viewed these conversions as part of an infidel plot to embed unbelievers in the very heart of Christianity in order to corrupt it from within.

  Despite their apprehensions about conversos, the Spanish nevertheless gained several advantages from Jewish converts. First, they swelled the ranks of the Christian flock. Second, they kept any remaining Muslims from finding allies against the surging Christian majority. Finally, and quite practically, conversion helped to lessen the potentially massive social and economic disruption caused by thousands of departing Jews. It preserved the social fabric of Spanish cities by maintaining many of the same individuals, now conveniently Catholic, in their important positions in the Spanish economy and bureaucracy.

  For the majority of Spain’s Jews, though, conversion was a step too far. They believed in God’s plan for them—and if that meant flight, then so be it. For these devout souls, abandoning Spain was less painful than abandoning Judaism. One could toil in a foreign land or strive in a new line of work, but one could never find a new God or a new identity. As the prominent Iberian rabbi Isaac Abarbanel, victim and chronicler of the expulsions, put it, “If [our enemies] let us live, we will live; and if they kill us, we will die. But we will not profane our covenant, and our hearts will not retrogress; we will walk forward in the name of the Lord our God.” This walk forward led them out of Spain.

  The Catholic priest Andrés Bernáldez watched with evident sympathy—albeit, perhaps, with an eye to proselytizing opportunities—as his country’s Jews began their journeys:

  In the first week of July they took the route for quitting their native land, great and small, young and old, on foot or horses, in carts each continuing his journey to his destined port. They experienced great trouble and suffered indescribable misfortunes on the road, some falling, others rising, some dying, others being born, some fainting, others being attacked by i
llness. There was not a Christian but that pitied them and pleaded with them to be baptized. Some from misery were converted, but they were the few. The rabbis encouraged them and made the young people and women sing and play on pipes and tambours to enliven them and keep up their spirits.

  None knew what the future held, and, given the anti-Jewish posture of nearly all European states, most had no clear sense of where they might go. France and Britain had banished their Jewish communities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In Germany, many towns had blamed Jews for the scourge of the Black Death and had subsequently expelled them. And Italy, given the viciously anti-Semitic attitudes of a succession of popes and secular rulers, was all but closed off to Jewish immigration.

  With its geographic and cultural proximity, Portugal received the largest number of Spain’s Jews, about 120,000. But King João II, Moor-slayer and sponsor of several of Portugal’s West African expeditions, was as hateful and fearful of Jews as his Spanish counterparts, and quickly enacted policies to push out the refugees. He required that they purchase extortionate entry and residence permits valid for only eight months, after which they were forced to flee again. Those unable to meet the border fees were sold into slavery. And, in an inexplicably cruel move, the king forcibly separated more than a few refugee parents from their children, whom the king sent to the Atlantic island of São Tomé, off the West African coast. This recent Portuguese acquisition, right on the equator, was “inhabited by lizards, snakes, and other venomous reptiles, and was devoid of rational beings.” The children were tossed mercilessly from ships onto the desolate island’s beaches, where “almost all were swallowed up by the huge lizards on the island and the remainder, who escaped these reptiles, wasted away from hunger and abandonment.”