Isabella of Castile

by Giles Tremlett

  While the Jewish elites in Spain boasted about their superiority in ‘lineage, wealth, virtues and wisdom’ over other Jews, a growing sense of pessimism began to spread. Some rabbis had fled, while others became prominent converts. A breakdown in the Jews’ intellectual traditions brought a growth in wild mysticism but, at the same time, despair that the messiah had still not come. The great Jewish communities were soon a shadow of their former selves. By 1424 Barcelona had found it unnecessary to designate a Jewish quarter. Toledo’s once magnificent Jewish neighbourhood is thought to have contained just forty households by 1492. In Burgos, where the former Solomon Halevi went on to become the city’s bishop as Paul of Burgos, those who refused to change found that the converts turned against them. ‘The Jews who have recently become Christians oppress and do much harm,’20 they complained. But in some smaller places Jews still outnumbered Christians. In the town of Maqueda, near Toledo, there were five Jews to every Christian. Crucially, they were also no longer economically important – jointly contributing just one maravedí for every 300 that entered the royal coffers.21

  By the time Isabella came to the throne, the remaining Jews – mostly firmer in their beliefs and toughened by almost a century of Christian aggression – had adapted to their reduced weight within Castile and Spain. They still had their own courts, paid their special taxes and had a sort of parliament of their own in Castile, with the monarch naming a rab mayor or chief justice to lead them.22 Communities survived in more than 200 cities, towns and villages – where their populations typically varied from 1 to 10 per cent of each place.23 There were some 80,000 Jews in Castile, or one for almost every fifty Christians, and another 10,000 in Aragon, or about one for every 100 of Ferdinand’s subjects in mainland Spain.24 With their numbers so vastly reduced, the Jews had also become a far more discreet presence and so less bothersome for those seeking hate figures or scapegoats for social or economic ills. Popular racial hatred, indeed, was now focused on their blood relatives, the conversos. Isabella was, initially, an active protector. From Seville, in 1477, she had issued instructions to protect the ‘good Jewish men’ of the frontier castle of Huete in a financial dispute with their Christian neighbours. She also sent a stern warning to the people of Trujillo when they turned on the local aljama that same year. ‘I order that each and every one of you from now on do not permit … anyone from that city or from outside it to bully or oppress these Jews … [nor] that they order them to clean out their stables or wash their tubs … nor should they billet ruffians or prostitutes or any other person in their houses against their will.’25

  Even in 1490, just two years before the expulsion, Isabella was busy fulfilling her royal role as protector-in-chief of the Jews. ‘By canon law and according to the laws of these kingdoms of ours, the Jews are suffered and tolerated and we order you to suffer and tolerate their living in our kingdoms as our subjects,’ she warned the burghers of Bilbao after they had refused to allow Jews to stay overnight in the city, forcing their traders into insecure accommodation in the countryside.26

  There were a handful of important Jews, too, close to Isabella in the court. Yucé Abranel was in charge of cattle taxes in Plasencia. Samuel Abulafia had been one of Isabella’s chief administrators for provisioning troops during the Granada War. Abraham Seneor, the rab mayor, had become chief treasurer of the Hermandades.27 He was also one of just seven men on Isabella’s council, which had grown in importance as it administered – with the help of the royal secretaries – the new powers that Isabella concentrated in her court. Isaac Abravanel, who had previously served in the Portuguese court, lamented that his own successful court career had meant that ‘all the days that I was in the courts and palaces of kings occupied in their service I had no opportunity for study and I did not know a book and spent in vanity my time and my years in confusion to acquire wealth and honour’.28 Prominent Jews were still being protected or sponsored by Grandees, aristocrats or bishops, with the bishop of Salamanca taking under his wing the talented astronomer Abraham Zacuto, who invented a copper astrolabe that allowed sailors to create better nautical tables – as the great Portuguese and Spanish navigators would eventually discover.29 More intimately, Isabella had turned to the Jewish doctor Lorenzo Badoç when she found herself struggling to produce male offspring. The monarchs freely expressed their immense gratitude to Badoç after the birth of Prince Juan; and among the rumours about Ferdinand’s own parents were that they had engendered him while both holding palm fronds in their hands – on the advice of a Jewish woman.30

  If the Jews belonged to the queen, so did the rules governing them and she could change these at will. Measures forcing them to live apart in their own aljamas or to wear distinguishing marks had been passed earlier in the century but not applied. Now, as Isabella began thinking about unleashing the Inquisition on the conversos, she also decided to be stricter with ‘her’ Jews.31 Among those egging her on was the severe and austere Tomás de Torquemada – who shunned meat and continued to wear a simple friar’s habit despite the personal wealth that came with his status as one of Isabella’s senior churchmen.

  It was Torquemada who had urged her to drive Jews and Moors into their own separate neighbourhoods.32 The 1480 meeting of the Cortes in Toledo ordered just that, pushing the Jews into city ghettos, often behind walls.33 In some places this was a huge task, involving major changes to a city’s layout. In an operation that took longer than the projected two years, Jews had to be moved in, Christians moved out, walls built and thoroughfares cut. The aim was to avoid ‘confusion and damage to our holy faith’, according to Isabella and her husband. But it was also a way of tightening the noose.34 Those who wanted greater freedom could always choose apostasy. Jews were already expected to wear coloured badges on their right shoulder and, in an order issued two years previously, were banned from wearing silk or gold and silver jewellery because otherwise some might be taken ‘for churchmen or lawyers of great estate’.35

  The Inquisition brought with it further demonisation. If its task was to eradicate Judaism from the hearts of the new Christians, how logical it now seemed to view the Jews as a cancer in the body of Spain. That was certainly the conclusion that the first inquisitors, and Isabella, had reached when they expelled the Jews from much of Andalusia, nine years earlier, in 1483.36 Isabella had wanted the measure to serve as a warning to Jews elsewhere to stop them tempting people from converso families back into the fold. ‘The Jews from those aljamas were ordered to leave because of the wicked heresy,’ she and her husband explained.37 ‘We thought that would be enough to stop those of other towns and cities in our kingdoms and señorial lands from doing the same.’

  Expulsion, then, was intimately linked to the Inquisition and, especially, to the zealous friars and priests who served it. It was Torquemada, as inquisitor general, who signed the first expulsion order in 1492 – beating Isabella and Ferdinand to it by eleven days – though this was restricted to the Jews of the bishopric of Girona.38 ‘It was agreed with the sovereigns that I would send this letter in which I order each and every Jew and Jewess, whatever their age … to leave the city, its bishopric and all its towns and villages, with their sons and daughters, family members and servants, and not come back,’ he wrote.39 The Inquisition had discovered that the presence of Jews was one of the main causes of heresy, he argued, and ‘if the principal cause is not removed’ things would get worse.

  This was a clear, if mostly false, statement. But it was the logic of the times, and one that Isabella fully shared. In the fifteenth-century imagination nations were often seen like bodies, with the monarchs as their head. But bodies could also fall sick and purging was one way of curing them. Torquemada was careful to state that Isabella and her husband agreed with him. And just eleven days later, on 31 March 1492, they both signed the wider expulsion order, whose language coincided so closely with that of Torquemada’s that it is difficult not to see his hand in it.40 In this case, however, the order was far more dramatic, sweeping and
devastating.

  Isabella and Ferdinand stated that the 1480 order to isolate the Jews inside their own ghettos had not achieved its principal aim – of restricting communication between Jews and Christians and so preventing judaising. ‘It has been shown that great damage is done to Christians by the contact, conversations and activities that they share with the Jews, who always try – by whatever means they can find – to subvert and snatch faithful Christians away from our holy Catholic faith,’ they said.41 The innocent were tainted with the same guilt. ‘When some grave and horrific crime is committed by some members of a group, it is sufficient reason to dissolve and annihilate that group,’ they added. Isabella and her husband then stated that they had thought expelling the worst offenders from Andalusia would be enough. But they had been wrong. ‘So … after much deliberation, we have agreed to order all Jews and Jewesses to leave our lands and never come back,’ they said.42

  The order was absolute, though the intention was also to provoke a fresh round of conversions. It covered Jews of all ages, anywhere in their kingdoms. ‘We command that … if they do not obey and do as they are told or are found in our kingdoms or lands – or come here in any way at all – their goods be confiscated and given to our exchequer and that the death sentence be applied.’43

  Although the justification for all this was religious, the Inquisition also served to fan the flames of racial intolerance by, among other things, the repetition of long-standing slurs. The allegations circulating around Europe which claimed that Jews carried out the ritual killing of Christian children were absurd, but in 1491 the Inquisition claimed to have discovered a real case. For some unexplained reason the Inquisition jail in Segovia was holding a Jewish cobbler called Yucé Franco. This was already an abuse of its power, since its remit did not include Jews, but torturers obtained a strange confession. Franco told them that he had taken part in the crucifixion of a Christian child in the town of La Guardia, near Toledo, on an Easter Friday some fifteen years earlier.44 The child’s blood and part of its heart had then been mixed with a consecrated host and witchcraft employed in an attempt to provoke the plague. Ten years later, a Burgundian traveller would be told a revised version of the apocryphal story. ‘Eight or ten people, pretending to be Christians, secretly stole a seven-year-old child and took him to a mountain and crucified him in a cave like Jesus Christ … Then they jabbed a lance in between his ribs … But the child, before his death, spoke so wisely that they saw that clearly it was the holy spirit speaking on his behalf. They took him down from the cross and, when they had taken out his heart, they buried his body, then they burned his heart to ashes.’45

  The child was never named, no parents came forward, a body was never found and the case was heard in Avila rather than Toledo itself – almost certainly so that Torquemada could oversee it. Yet the cobbler Franco, another Jew and three conversos were declared guilty of ritual child-murder and burned at the stake after an auto de fe on 16 November 1491. It was a sign of just how far the Inquisition’s power, paranoia and ability to conjure up imagined crimes had developed.46 For those seeking the expulsion of the Jews the timing was perfect. Here were Jews consorting with conversos to carry out the most evil of acts. The outrage the case provoked, both in Isabella’s court and in the streets of Spain’s cities, must have been considerable. It can only have helped the queen make up her mind.

  27

  The Vale of Tears

  The Santa María monastery at Guadalupe, 15 June 1492

  Isabella must have looked with satisfaction on the scene that unfolded in the chapel of her favourite monastery at Guadalupe. The man before her was both a close ally and a Jew, but that was about to change. Abraham Seneor was one of the dozen men who made up her most trusted group of counsellors – the people whom she consulted frequently and leaned on for support. They included her beloved friar Hernando de Talavera, two cardinals and the loyal administrators Cabrera, Chacón and Gutierre de Cárdenas. Now, Seneor and his family were about to become Christians. Isabella was there, together with her husband, in the Gothic and mudéjar surroundings of Guadalupe to act as a godmother. The holy water was poured on them. The eighty-year-old Seneor changed his name to Fernando Pérez Coronel, while his brother-in-law Meir Melamed, Castile’s chief tax collector, and his two sons took the same surname.1 Iberia’s population of Jews – still the world’s biggest when those in Spain and neighbouring Portugal were combined – was reduced accordingly.2

  The sixteenth-century Jewish historian Elijah Capsali, a Jew from Crete whose uncle had been chief rabbi in the Ottoman empire, claimed that Seneor and Melamed had been left with little choice, with Isabella insisting that she needed the services of both men. ‘I have heard it rumoured that Queen Isabella had sworn that if Don Abraham Seneor did not convert, she would wipe out all the communities, and that Don Abraham did what he did in order to save the Jews, but not from his own heart,’ he wrote after meeting exiles who eventually found safety in Ottoman lands.3

  That was wrong. In fact, Seneor had been an Isabella ally ever since he and Cabrera had held the city of Segovia for her against Enrique IV’s privado, Juan Pacheco. Their action, which included bringing about a temporary reconciliation with her half-brother, had been crucial to her future success. And both had stayed loyal. Seneor, a wealthy man, had financed Isabella and the later campaign against Granada to the tune of almost 2 million maravedís. He went on to become both rab mayor – the royal-appointed head of Castile’s Jews – and treasurer to the Hermandad General. He was one of the richest men in Spain and his family was sufficiently grand for it to be exempted from the rules banning Jews from wearing silk and crimson. Already, some in the Jewish community disliked Seneor’s family intensely. He was certainly not above using dirty tricks, accusing the converso Juan de Talavera of witchcraft – a matter for the Inquisition – after the latter accused him of overcharging and creaming off part of the taxes paid by Spain’s Jews.4 Other Jews were less charitable about the conversion, with an elderly rabbi from Málaga, Abraham Bokrat HaLevy, angrily denouncing Melamed’s change of heart. ‘He was named Meir [“he who gives light”], but there is no light in him at all … His name is in reality the thickest of darkness.’5

  Another writer from a leading Aragonese family of Jews saw Seneor, Melamed and a group of converted rabbis as traitors who, worse still, dragged some of the less well-educated along with them. ‘People who did not understand what they should do followed these leaders who had used their wisdom to do evil, and they too left the fold,’ he lamented.6 Yet while Seneor and other prominent members of the Jewish elite converted and continued their lives almost as before, it seems that most Jews did not.7 They had good reasons not to. Their families had survived the pogroms of a hundred years earlier. They had been courageous and convinced enough to stick to their faith. They had also witnessed the Catholic church’s suspicious, violent attitude to its own converts. The charred corpses on the Inquisition bonfires were proof of that. ‘The Jews despaired and all feared greatly,’ reported Abravanel.8 ‘Each said to the other, “Let us strengthen one another in our faith and the Torah of our God, against the enemy who blasphemes and wishes to destroy us. If he lets us live, we shall live, and if he kills us, we shall die, but we will not desecrate our covenant and we will not retreat.” ’9

  The last Jewish Passover celebrations in Spain began two days after the expulsion decree was signed. Those who received the news before Passover started were thrown into shock, dressing in sackcloth and ashes on the first day and refusing to eat or drink. ‘Even those who did eat, did so with the bitterness of the bitter herbs in their mouths,’ reported Capsali.10 Others watched with alarm as their own distant relatives, now conversos, joined the movement to expel them. In Aragon, the de la Cavallerias looked on aghast as a cousin bearing their surname led the charge against them. ‘Alfonso [de la Cavalleria] thought evil of God’s nation, he and a group of his friends … conspired to wipe out the name of Israel from the land,’ wrote one chronicle
r.11

  So it was that the Jews began to pack those few belongings they were allowed to take with them. Rabbis who stayed true to their religion tried to stiffen spines, preaching to them as they went. ‘Their rabbis … encouraged them and gave them vain hopes, telling them that they should realise that this was God’s will, that he wanted to free them from slavery and take them to the Promised Land; and that as he led them out they would see God perform many miracles for them, and that he would ensure they left Spain rich and with great honour.’12 They also recalled a previous great exodus in the history of the Jews, when they had been forced out of Egypt. ‘A mighty torrent of people left: the old and the young, men and women … travelled in search of a safe haven,’13 said Capsali. But such safe havens were few and far between. The Ottoman empire, normally accessible only after journeying through less hospitable lands, welcomed them as, initially, did the kingdom of Naples and Portugal (though further expulsion awaited them from both these places). Some, too, ended up in the lands of the Egyptian Mamluk sultans or in the kingdom of Fez.14

  In the edict expelling the Jews, Isabella and Ferdinand had both guaranteed their physical safety and placed severe restrictions on them. ‘So that the said Jews and Jewesses, during the period up to the end of July, can organise themselves, their goods and their wealth in the best way possible, we hereby take them under our royal protection,’ they said.15 ‘They may sell, barter or transfer all their movable and immoveable goods, and dispose of them freely until the end of July; and during that period, no harm, injury or wickedness can be done to them or their goods … They may take their possessions and wealth out by sea or land, as long as they do not take gold, silver, coins or other things banned by the laws of our kingdoms.’ While the guarantees were only partially respected, the restrictions seem to have been applied rigorously.