Dogs of God

by James Reston Jr

  On April 30, the Admiral was summoned to the Hall of the Ambassadors in the Alhambra. There, in the golden glow of the arabesque and beneath the intricate ceiling of mysterious, starry design, he collected his broadsheet parchment documents, embossed with the seal of the Spanish monarchy, and received his official sendoff. In this official sendoff, Columbus was, as usual, deft in stressing the themes that he knew were close to the royal heart. In a startling aside, he said,

  “I plead with Your Majesties to spend all the treasure from this enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem.” He meant to be a part of the full, absolute revelation, not merely a partial one. That Revelation, prophesied in the last book of the Bible, would involve the New World, the New Heaven, the New Jerusalem. This suggestion was well received, especially by Isabella, but it played to the apocalyptic longings of both monarchs.

  One final document was requested: an official introduction to imaginary Oriental potentates like the Great Khan or other Kings and Lords of India or the Emperor of the island of Cipangu or even the elusive Prester John. Three such introductions were provided, with the name left blank, for no one knew by what titles these exotic Brahmins might like to be addressed.

  “To the Most Serene Prince [blank], Our Dear friend, Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of Castile, Aragon, León, Sicily, etc. greetings and increase of good fortune,” the document read. “From the statements of certain of Our subjects who have come to Us from Your Kingdoms and Domains, We have learned with joy of Your esteem and high regard for Us and Our nation and of Your great eagerness to be informed about things with Us. Wherefore, we have resolved to send you Our Noble Captain, Christopher Columbus, from whom you may learn of Our good health and Our prosperity.”

  The Catholic monarchs made one final gesture. They appointed Columbus’s son Diego as page to Prince Juan, the heir apparent to the Spanish throne. This was a seminal honor that was accorded only to the sons of the most distinguished families in the realm, and it was evidence of how completely they had now swung over to Columbus.

  If in that last session in the Alhambra, Columbus pandered to the apocalyptic dreams of the monarchs—first Spain, then the New World, finally Jerusalem—he also flattered them on their victory over the infidel. He proposed to be the right arm of their crusade. “I saw the Moorish King come forth to the gates of this city,” he would say, “and kiss the Royal hands of Your Highnesses. As Catholic Princes devoted to the Holy Christian faith and propagators thereof and enemies of the sect of Mohamet and of all idolatries and heresies, you resolve to send me to regions of India to see princes and peoples and lands and to determine the manner in which their conversion to our Holy Faith may be accomplished.”

  Isabella and Ferdinand had made him join them as a dog of God. Theirs was a great crusade to purify the world of heresy and idolatry, as it advanced the glory of Spain. Columbus would rejoice in the fact that his glorious undertaking coincided with the monarchs’ decision to deal decisively with the superstition of Judaism.

  On March 30, 1492, a month before Columbus’s final sendoff at Granada, the Catholic monarchs issued a royal decree to expel all Jews from Spain.

  22

  The Pit and the Snare

  On November 16, 1491, six weeks before the fall of Granada and two months before Columbus was given his authority, an auto-da-fe was held outside Ávila in a meadow called the Brasero de la Dehesa (Brazier of the Pasture). At last, the case of the Holy Child of La Guardia came to its gruesome consummation. A formal condemnation was read, and then the prisoners were handed over or “relaxed” to their executioners. Some relaxation. The effigies of the three deceased Jews were burned first. Then the conversos, including Benito Garcia, who had repented of his sins and had asked to be taken back into the Church, were accorded the mercy of being strangled to death before being burned. Then came the climax of the spectacle: the bodies of the Jew, Yuce Franco, and his eighty-year-old father, were torn with hot pincers before their mutilated bodies were burned at the stake.

  Whether Torquemada was present for this gory Act of Faith is not known, but his ghostly figure hovered like the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse over the entire case from start to finish. The Grand Inquisitor had a larger agenda. The case of the Holy Child of La Guardia was central to his strategy for the final solution of the Jewish problem. The case was his catalyst. The condemnation of Benito García and his Jewish co-conspirators, Torquemada insisted, must be read from the pulpits of churches throughout Spain, accompanied by a warning to conversos not to associate with Jews, lest their minds be contaminated again by Jewish superstitions.

  Popular loathing for Jews was inflamed throughout the country, as Torquemada hoped. Women and mothers were especially incensed. Inevitably, Jewish quarters were attacked. A Jew was stoned to death in Ávila, and the situation threatened to get out of hand.

  At first, no doubt from the prodding of her court rabbi, Abraham Senior, and his brilliant cohort, Don Isaac Abravanel, Queen Isabella’s instinct was to protect her Jewish subjects from this hate campaign. Indeed, she issued a decree to that effect. But the popular outcry over the La Guardia case raged beyond her control.

  Torquemada, meanwhile, went about laying his groundwork quietly and methodically. In early December 1491, he sent a portentous memorandum to the monarchs in which he complained that the restrictions on dress for Jews, including the wearing of the Jewish badge, were not being enforced. For one who himself wore the hair shirt, the clothes of both the Jew and the penitent seemed inordinately important to the Grand Inquisitor. He had become a specialist in garments of shame and discomfort. The year before, he had approved a new fashion for the penitent to replace the drab yellow of the traditional penitential cloak known as the sanbenito. The new style featured black or gray sackcloth, eighteen inches long and nine inches wide, on which a large red cross was to be displayed prominently front and back. Another point in the memo sought to restrict how Jews could exercise authority over Christians in the business of tax collection. If the crown were, by some chance, to lose its master tax agents, like Abravanel and Senior, who could replace them? Torquemada needed to plan ahead.

  By implication, these provisions targeted the special privileges of the two court rabbis, for their power had to be undercut if Torquemada was to realize his ambitions. The Grand Inquisitor was all too aware of the influence Senior and Abravanel wielded with the monarchs. Senior’s association extended back farther than Torquemada’s, to the days of royal courtship. His faithful service, his tax collection and war loans, his loyal embassy to his people for the crown, made him a formidable adversary and a significant impediment to Torquemada’s plans. Abravanel, in turn, had become the queen’s personal financial adviser and the crown’s main tax collector in central Castile, as well as the tax collector for the Cardinal of Spain, Pedro Gonzales de Mendoza. Importantly, with the royal treasury virtually empty as the royal army stood before the walls of the Alhambra, Abravanel had personally loaned 1.5 million maravedis to the queen to support the siege. The queen was deeply in his debt.

  At the time of the Torquemada memorandum, the negotiations with Boabdil for the surrender of Granada were well under way. One hundred and ten Jewish families lived in that city. The Inquisition insisted that they must be expelled as part of the final surrender agreement. One month would be given for them to settle their affairs and leave. The monarchs bowed meekly to this demand, and Torquemada and his new archbishop in Granada, Hernando de Talavera, watched closely as the families disposed of their property and packed up.

  Granada was to be a test of Torquemada’s wider master plan. But the actual launch of that master plan was a closely held secret between the monarchs and their principal prelates, the Grand Inquisitor, the new archbishop of Granada, and the Cardinal of Spain.

  If the immediate and indeed longer-range signs of impending catastrophe for Spanish Jewry were obvious and unmistakable, neither Senior nor Abravanel seemed to notice. Comfortable in their personal luxury, living gran
dly in the last vestiges of their golden age, secure in the knowledge that they had valiantly served the War Against the Moors with their loans to the crown, they were blind to the portentous rumblings. When the catastrophe hit them in March 1492, the blow seemed to come as a complete surprise. In the waves of anti-Semitism, the talk of pure Spanish blood, the ghettos, the fury of the Inquisition, the restrictions, the identifying cloaks, the expulsions in Andalusia and Aragon and Granada, the autos-da-fé, the greed of Ferdinand, the sanctimony of Isabella, the passion of Torquemada, the preparation for the Second Coming—all this, the burden of the past twenty years of Spanish history, was coming to fruition. Yet the two rabbis went blithely about their business.

  In his writings later, Rabbi Abravanel would insist that when the dire portent finally dawned on him, he had met three times with the sovereigns and vociferously protested to the king and a host of his ministers. “Three times with my own mouth, I implored him, ”Save us, O King! Why do you do this to your servants?‘“ At the rabbi’s protests, King Ferdinand remained stonily silent, his ears deaf as a viper. Queen Isabella stood ”on the King’s right to lead him astray.“ Piously, she whispered that God had put this obsession in the king’s heart. There was nothing she could do about it. She invoked Proverbs 21:1,

  “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water: he turneth it whithersoever he will.”

  “Do you think that we were the ones who said this to you?” she continued. “It is the Lord who placed that word in the king’s heart.”

  By contrast to Abravanel, Abraham Senior did more than employ empty words. Perhaps cold cash could speak louder. And so the most powerful and wealthy Jew in the land, perhaps in concert with Abravanel, offered 30,000 gold ducats to the Catholic king and queen if they would stay their hand. This was an enormous pile of money, nearly 4 million maravedis, truly worthy of a royal bribe, especially to a crown that was virtually broke. Ferdinand wavered, and it seemed for some days that the monarchs were reconsidering. Soon enough, Torquemada sniffed out this rumor and flew into the royal presence, brandishing a cross, his normally sallow face red with rage. He slapped the cross on the table before the startled monarchs and shouted,

  “I know what you are up to, King. Behold the crucifix of our Savior whom the wretched Judas sold for 30 pieces of silver to his enemies and betrayed our Lord to his persecutors. If you approve that deed, at least sell him for a greater sum. I resign from all my power. Nothing shall be imputed to me, but for this wicked deed, you will answer to God!” With that, he turned and stalked out.

  His theatrical raving had its intended effect. The monarchs looked at one another thunderstruck. There would be no more talk of Judas gold. Torquemada had won. Ferdinand contemplated the windfall. The heart of Isabella hardened. It was God’s will that Spain should be thus cleansed and purified, as a beacon to the world. This was preparation for the Second Coming, after which, guided by Spain, the New Heaven would be revealed on the New Earth.

  On March 31, 1492, they issued their formal Edict of Expulsion. The Jews of Spain were continuing their evil ways, “seducing faithful Christians to their own damnable beliefs and opinions, instructing them in the ceremonies and observances of Jewish law, holding meetings where they read to them and teach them what to believe, advising them of the Jewish fast days to observe, teaching them the histories of their law, instructing them about the Passover and other Jewish ceremonies, supplying them with unleavened bread and ceremonially prepared meats and persuading them to observe the Law of Moses, giving them to understand that there is no true law except the Law of Moses.”

  Nothing would dissuade the Jews from their hideous conspiracy against the true faith except their complete removal from the province of the faithful.

  “To this end we issue our Edict, by virtue of which we command all Jews, of both sexes and all ages, who live, dwell, and are in any way present in our kingdoms and lands, both natives and foreigners who in whatever manner or for whatever reason have come or are now here, that by the end of July of this present year of 1492, they be gone from all our kingdoms and lands, together with their sons, daughters, Jewish servants and familiars, without regard to rank or station, and of whatever age they may be, and that they not presume to return or even to pass through these realms nor any part of them under pain of death and confiscation of all their property.”

  A month after the Edict’s publication, heralds fanned out across the country to announce the edict in the cathedrals and town squares, accompanied by trumpeters and drummers. The action would have to reach many people. It affected all of “Jerusalem in Spain,” the traditional Hebrew designation for Sephardim. Spanish Jews were the descendants of Judean royalty who had lived in Spain for nearly one thousand five hundred years and graced Iberia with a long line of poets, scientists, diplomats, and philosophers. The shock was enormous. Because it took some days for the edict to be broadcast to the far corners of Spain, Torquemada, in the fullness of his generosity, extended the deadline for departure by a few days, to August 2. For his victims, the choice of that day was horribly appropriate. In the Jewish calendar it was the 9th day of Av, the day of mourning, which commemorated the destruction of the Temple and which became a portentous day for many subsequent catastrophes of the Jewish people.

  The people of Abraham, Jacob, and Isaac had one option only to avoid exile: to convert immediately to the Christian faith. How many Jews took this plunge no one can say, but the offer caused its own havoc, as the churches were swamped with simple peasants who were terrified and had suddenly seen the light. On one morning in Teruel alone, while the local rabbi was detained in his house under house arrest, one hundred persons were baptized. Elsewhere, prominent and influential rabbis were given one day to leave their communities, and three days to leave the country. The number of the converted was higher in Aragon than elsewhere, since Torquemada, with the sufferance of Ferdinand, insisted on the disposal of Jewish property there being handled directly by the Inquisition. Each Jewish household was required to appraise the value of its property and report the figure to the Inquisition. Across Ferdinand’s ancestral realm, Christians were forbidden to trade or to have contact with departing Jews.

  With the country in chaos, Ferdinand, with no hint of irony, wrote to Torquemada: “I have been informed that the banishment of the Jews is now public, and that many of them want to become Christians, but are suspicious of doing so out of fear of the Inquisition. They worry that the most minor error that they commit will result in the execution of grave penalties against them.” Royal orders were quickly drawn up to facilitate conversion and give the new converts time to adapt to the ways of their new faith. Guarantees were given that no harm would befall the converts. And Torquemada himself, in the sweetest of tones, encouraged Jews to return to the Mother Church, “whose arms are always open to embrace those who return to her with repentance and contrition.”

  As individual Jews considered their horrible fate—to leave or convert, to flee to Italy, Portugal, North Africa, or Turkey, to sell their land and houses to scoundrels and parasites for a pittance—the spiritual police, the Santa Hermandad, pondered the immense logistical problems of the exodus. Ironically, Abraham Senior, as treasurer of the Hermandad, was drawn into the planning for the deportation of his own people. As the titular leader of all Spanish Jews and the chief magistrate of Jerusalem in Spain, it fell to him to oversee the disposal of Jewish property. While the regulations announced that Jewish property was to be sold at “fair and equitable prices,” a vast rip-off got under way. Its essence was distilled in a sentence by the court chronicler, “they exchanged a house for a donkey or a vineyard for a piece of woolen or cotton cloth.” Royal storehouses filled with silverware, china, jewelry, goblets, and valuable textiles. (Some of these were later sold to finance the second voyage of Christopher Columbus.) Debts to Jews were supposed to be paid promptly, but most delayed their payment until after the deadline for departure and thus avoided the obligation altoget
her. Synagogues and their cemeteries were turned over to the royal treasury or converted to Christian churches. Gold-embroidered and silk-covered Torah scrolls were confiscated. No gold, silver, or precious stones could be taken out of the country.

  At this colossal disaster, the emotions of the deportees ran the gamut: anger, fear, uncertainty, confusion, despair, self-loathing.

  To most of the victims, King Ferdinand was the arch villain, the incarnation of this evil, the messenger not of God but of the Devil. He was the new Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon in the sixth century before Christ who destroyed Jerusalem and “who dimmed the beauty of our light and threw down from heaven the pride of our glory.” He was like unto Nabal in I Samuel (25:25), a man of great power but of churlish and evil ways and disobedient to King David. “Nabal is his name and folly is in him… His heart died in him and he became as a stone and ten days later, the Lord smote him and he died.” Ferdinand was Sennacherib, the Assyrian king of the eighth century B.C., “who mingled the nations and scattered Jews across the earth.” The refugee who made that remark might only hope in his anger that Ferdinand would suffer the same fate as Sennacherib, that his host would be destroyed when field mice again might devour all his quivers and bowstrings and the thongs that bound his soldiers’ shields.