by Simon Schama
Jewish culture blossomed with as much energy and virtuosity as it had amid the caliphates of Granada and Cordoba. The debates between Maimonideans and anti-Maimonideans persisted, with the latter now invoking Kabbalist mysticism as a revelatory alternative to the analytical machinery of Greek logic. Rabbis of the one and other persuasion arrived in Majorca not because they had to but because they wanted to. And among them, as there had been in Cairo and Cordoba, there were sophisticated interpreters of the sciences that had come through Arabic sources, mathematics and astronomy especially. The star- measuring rabbis like Leon Mosconi, Ephraim Gerondi and Isaac Nifoci, clock- and astrolabe-maker to the court (along with quadrants and sextants), had special status (allowed, among other privileges, to carry a sword or poniard – no small thing in the fourteenth century) as did the usual company of physicians, for wherever they went Jewish doctors were still thought to carry special knowledge and healing powers. Indeed, the Christian population among whom they lived, not just in Majorca but the entirety of Christendom, could be divided into those who welcomed the ministration given by Jews to their bodies and those who were disgusted and terrified of it, believing their touch was that of the murderer and their potions the secretions of Satan.
The sign of a flourishing or at least stable community is the diversity of the ways in which Jews made a living and where they did so. As conditions stabilised, the Jews established themselves, by their own choice, in the south-east of Palma, in an area leading down from a small square towards the three gates of the Temple, Santa Fe and Calatrava. The fact of those three gates suggests the ease with which Jews could come and go. The Call was not yet a ghetto. Within the Calatrava in Majorca – and other towns where they settled, like Inca and Soller – there were silversmiths and goldsmiths, as one might expect, but also saffron growers and traders, and wine merchants (kosher wine, like kosher meat, did a brisk trade with the Gentiles). There were dyers and silk and linen drapers, soap-makers, and due to the close connection with Barcelona where the business was strongly Jewish, a speciality in paper, bookbinding and bookselling (another Nifoci trade), from account books to works in both Hebrew and Arabic as well as their translations, including the illuminated manuscripts that were increasingly prized. It was not a perfect life on Majorca, but then where was that to be found? It was a possible life, one in which the round of Jewish life – the Passover Seders, the weddings and funerals, the market days and the solemn fasts – could mostly proceed without terror. If there were, as always, waves of hatred and violence threatened and enacted from some of the villages and towns like Inca, where there was a murderous riot in 1373, the Jews living under Pere IV could expect to be protected from the fury, and for their assailants to be punished (as most often they were).
And yet, ten years after the great atlas of Cresques and Jafuda had been delivered to the French king, the Majorcan Jewish society in which it was made lay in ruins. By 1435 it had vanished completely, living on only in the secret life of the forcibly converted, the chuetas, with their furtive candle-lighting on Friday nights and remnants of food memories in the bean-rich, saffron-spiced adafina stew cooked overnight in bakers’ ovens on the Sabbath eve, a society whose descendants only now are discovering their Jewish ancestry. What had happened?
The rolling disaster which fell upon the Jews of Majorca, as it did on every major community in Sefarad in the summer of 1391, began with a voice. Historians are sometimes averse to explanations of causes reduced to the magnetism of individuals. And it is true that what happened in Spain was part of a pan-European insurrectionary movement in country and town against established authorities of the Church and royal state, perhaps a delayed response to their incapacity to protect their subjects from the death of one in three during visitations of the bubonic plague. But it was voices that dared to speak or shout shocking, violent things that the mighty dismissed as the howling of animals, until the howling brought down their walls and their thrones, and which turned resentment into havoc, shouting into mass murder.
In Spain the voice belonged to Ferran Martinez, the archdeacon of Ecija, about fifty miles west of Seville. What Martinez lacked in theological sophistication and learning, he more than made up for with the brutal clarity of his rhetorical violence. It was exactly his un- sophisticated force and outrageous willingness to defy royal authority in the name of a Higher Power which gave Martinez his popularity among the common people of town and country.7 For in a panicky world in which a third of the population had been carried off by the plague, and which believed it had been brought on as either a punishment from heaven or a demonic confederacy of Jews, heretics and lepers, such people had no time for the traditional Augustinian philosophy which preserved the Jews as witnesses to Christ’s salvific passion, nor the patience to persist with a slow drip of persuasion. Thwarted in the Holy Land, the fear and anger begged for a crusade, close and immediate, and if not the Saracens (mostly already defeated in Iberia), why not the devil-Jews?
So what Martinez preached from 1378 on, principally in the towns of southern Castile, was brutally simple: attack the Jews, wherever and whenever you can. Since by the Church’s own ordinances it had been illegal to build synagogues – ‘the house of Satan’ where ‘Christ and Christians are cursed three times a day’ – the solution was simple: tear them down and right away. As for those who frequented these sties of devilry they were to be offered a simple choice: immediate conversion or death.
In his way were the authorities of the Crown, outraged by Martinez’s denial of the Jews’ right to self-governance and communal justice under its protection, and even more scandalised by his claim to put them under his own jurisdiction. Repeatedly, under two kings and a regency, Martinez was ordered to retract these assertions and to stop preaching against the Jews. Any synagogues that might be damaged or destroyed as a result of his fulminations would have to be rebuilt on his account, a mighty empty threat. Many of the prelates of the Church, especially in Seville, where Archbishop Barroso came to view Martinez as a heretic and a rebel, were equally horrified; but others were just as wary of the power the friars had to whip up a canting mob. The fate of the Jews thus turned into a trial of strength between official and popular forms of Christian piety, and between the will of the Crown to hold the leaders of violent crowds to account, and its nervousness about stoking anti-establishment rage. Because there was a community of Catalan merchants in London, it was common knowledge how close a call it had been in 1381 for Richard II of England at the hands of Wat Tyler and the priest John Ball. In Spain there were similar men on the margins: soldiers and sailors, overdue for pay and looking for a fight; testosterone-charged apprentices with scores to settle, waving flags with crosses; wild-eyed friars who imagined they were hastening the Second Coming by converting or killing Jews; townsmen and peasants who believed the Jews were all extortionate usurers, bloodsuckers of the people. The issue for urban authorities was both how fiercely to resist popular agitation and how severely to punish malefactors. When exemplary punishments were carried out, the result was not encouraging for the forces of order and moderation. Two ringleaders of Martinez’s crowd publicly whipped for incitement on the orders of the mayor of Seville, the nobleman Guzman, resulted in his barely escaping the wrath of the people with his life. When King Juan I died in 1390 after falling off his horse and Castile fell into the hands of his son Henry III – yet another pre-adolescent boy – a vacuum of authority opened. Pressed by leaders of the self-governing aljama Jewish community who had even gone to the Holy See to extract a papal condemnation of Martinez, the Regency Council made the usual pronouncements and the archdeacon as usual ignored them. Martinez was turning from a nuisance into a revolutionary, and each time his defiance went unpunished he was reinforced in the sense that he – not the king or the archbishops – was seen to be enacting the true will of Christ. By early 1391 he had become unstoppable, giving orders on his own authority to the churches of Castile to destroy all synagogues forthwith.
The membrane
holding in all these centrifugal forces of violent disorder was easily broken through. In March 1391, attacks on the Jews in Seville were put down and punished. But in the first week of June, the onslaught on the juderia (now the quarter of Santa Cruz) began with a crowd of youths forcing the gates, urged on by Martinez and his friars, and rapidly turned into a holy war, with only one side armed. In a few days thousands were killed (some sources say four thousand, but that number is almost certainly too high), their bodies heaped on the streets. Of the synagogues in Seville which Martinez had said were earmarked for destruction, most were small and were burned to the ground with or without people inside them. Two of the three largest – including what is now the church of San Bartolomé – were immediately consecrated to Christ. Screaming women and children were pulled by the hair to baptism; those continuing to resist were sliced at the throat. Frantic multitudes of the innocent accepted, even begged for, conversion; their ancient and beautiful names were replaced by those of their godfathers and godmothers.
Elsewhere, very big fish were caught in St Peter’s net. The revered rabbi and tax-farming grandee of Burgos, Solomon Halevi, became the impassioned Christian, Pablo de Santa Maria, claiming retrospectively to have been philosophically persuaded by the teachings of St Thomas Aquinas rather than by the argument of the sword and the mob, and this was good enough for him to rise to become bishop of his city and, eventually, chancellor of the kingdom of Castile. His prize yeshiva pupil and disciple, Joshua Halorki, initially thunderstruck by his teacher’s apostasy, eventually overcame his revulsion to become the ardently evangelical priest Geronimo de Santa Fe, physician to the Pope. The apostasy was only the beginning of the harm they would inflict on the people of their former faith. But they were among the most relentless of the proselytisers. Halorki/Santa Fe argued the Christian case against his former fellow rabbis at a disputation held in Tortosa in 1413–14 (at some points using his knowledge of Kabbalism to demonstrate that the name of Jesus was immanent in the letters of Judaic mystery), and claimed, without much evidence, that he had converted two of them. Halevi/Santa Maria persuaded his two brothers to be baptised along with him and had his daughter and four sons baptised as well, though they had no choice in the matter. His wife of twenty-six years, Joanna, would have none of it and left him to stay faithful to Judaism. She died that way in 1410 – which did not, however, prevent the husband-bishop from having her interred in his cathedral, where she still remains.
In the months that followed, the butchery engulfed nearly every major centre of Jewish life in the expanded kingdom of Castile, many of them ancient centres of learning and culture: Cordoba, Lucena, Toledo. The signals to begin the march on the Jews became brazenly theatrical, often a peal of church bells or, as in Tortosa, a minstrel beating a drum and shouts of holy water or death to the Jews.8 In July, the terror spilled over from Castile into Valencia, now part of Aragon, where 250 died, and then into Catalonia, to Nahmanides’ Gerona, and finally in early August to Barcelona, where one way or another – mass conversion or mass slaughter – the entire ancient community was wiped out. Rabbi Hasdai ben Abraham Crescas, an anti-Maimonidean Talmudist, who had been treated by King Juan as an unofficial chief rabbi of Valencia, and had often been in his company, was in Barcelona during the worst of the carnage and left a graphic description of the murder inflicted on the defenceless, ‘the table of our disaster, set with poisonous plant and wormwood . . . Using bows and catapults they fought against the Jews gathered in the citadel, beating and smashing them in the tower. Many Sanctified the Name of God, among them my own [and only] son, an innocent bridal lamb; some slew themselves, others jumped from the tower . . . whose limbs were already broken before they reached halfway down . . . many came forth and sanctified the name [killed themselves] on the open street, and all the rest converted, with only a few finding refuge . . . and because of our sins today there is no one left in Barcelona called an Israelite.’9 According to Crescas, that went for the whole of Valencia and Catalonia. What still exists is Montjuic, a nice park for the tourists and once the cemetery of the Jews, hence its name. Its stones are scattered about Barcelona, extracted for the construction of this and that building in the elegant town.
No Jew in Majorca supposed the sea would keep the horror of Castile and Aragon from crossing to their island. When news arrived of the slaughters and mass conversions in Valencia, the leaders of the aljama went to the royal governor and asked for protection, as Jews had done to his counterparts all over Spain. Like them he did the best he could, gathering the Jews inside the Call at Palma, locking the gates and forbidding penetration by Gentiles of what became the Jewish compound. All over the island, apprehensive Jews in outlying villages came to the smaller towns on their mules, donkeys and carts as fast as the ponderous animals would permit, and many went on to Palma, its citadel being, as they thought, their only hope of survival.10 The great centre of the roving Jewish mind, the community of astrolabe- and atlas-makers, the star-measurers and compass-makers, was now a camp for the terrified victims of confinement, half shelter, half prison. Cresques Abraham had died in 1387, the same year as his patron Pere the Ceremonious, but his son Jafuda was still very much in business along with Nifoci and the rest of the geographers.11 They were there when the gates were slammed shut against a suddenly materialising army of seven thousand enraged provinciales brandishing flags with the crosses. The governor of the island attempted to temporise with the crowd who had been joined by the bandit gang of Antonio Sitjar, but against the enormous numbers he made no impression and was lucky, here as elsewhere, to escape with his life. Now the three gates of the Call were a liability as they spread the guards thin, and sooner or later one gate was stoved in and the massacre could begin in earnest. In two days there were at least three hundred bodies lying in the streets before the doors and inside the houses of the Jews, many of them women and children. The usual desecrations followed: synagogues destroyed or consecrated as churches, the Torah scrolls elaborately defiled and torn, and the holy grail of the crowd’s efforts granted – the destruction of documents of debt and contracts.
Jafuda Cresques and Isaac Nifoci, who had managed to get themselves into the citadel, were among the hundred or so (in a community of over two thousand) who opted for baptism rather than death, the map-maker taking his godfather’s name and becoming Jaume Ribes. And for Jaume, sometime Jafuda, baptism delivered on its promise of rewards in this world as well as the next. Along with his former apprentice, Samuel Corcos (now known as Mecia de Viladesters), he was able to continue his map-making and painting, and in 1399 received another commission for a grand, royally scaled mappa mundi. At some point he moved from Majorca to the royal courts in Barcelona and Saragossa. The ‘New Christians’ were, in fact, in a prime position to cater to the demand among Old ones for Hebrew illuminated Bibles, psalters and breviaries which they decorated with all the flourish they had brought to illuminated maps. Scribes, bookbinders and booksellers all thrived in this business, and the ‘conversos’ were confident enough of their new identity to have the island’s leading architect, Guillermo Sagrera, build them their own church of Nostra Senyora de Gracia. Another group in the church of Santo Domingo forthrightly but paradoxically declared themselves to be of the ‘natione israelitica’. The confidence seemed mutual. After the spasm of violence subsided, the royal authorities moved in hard on those who had been the ringleaders of the mobs, both in Majorca and elsewhere in Aragon. Queen Violant was said to be especially indignant at the defiance of royal authority. The bandit Sitjar and the mob leader Luis de Bellvivre were taken and hanged. Demands were made for the return of plundered property and there were even edicts allowing those who had been forcibly converted to return to their faith.
Yet for all the map and book men who did well and settled for the new faith, there were many who never recovered from the breaking of their communities. The Jews of Inca, Soller, Sineu and Alcudia never came back to their towns in the hills and by the sea. Despite an official attempt to pre
vent them leaving Majorca and depriving it of the asset of its Jewish communities, the vast majority had changed their minds again about which of the two monotheisms offered less chance of persecution, and crossed the Mediterranean to Muslim North Africa where they settled in distinctive communities in Algiers and Fez, where Cresques Abraham had painted the six-pointed star of David.
However much the Crown and the mayors and alcaldes of local towns were sorry to see the Jews go (and said so), many in the radicalised Church thought good riddance. It had been one way to get shot of the obstinate Jews. Another way had been to kill them. But had the third way, conversion – precisely the goal so many had long argued and yearned for (including the Majorcan theologian Ramon Llull)12 – truly worked? How Christian, really, were the New Christians? Was it not a sign that they congregated in their own churches, even presuming to call themselves ‘Israelites’? These suspicions had multiplied quickly all over Spain once the blood had dried and the dust settled after the traumatic upheaval of 1391. Perhaps the conversos had accepted baptism merely to escape death but remained inside their hearts, heads and homes loyal to their blind old faith and its ways. Even worse, might not those secret Jews corrupt sincere converts to return to the old religion as (in a long-hallowed phrase of Christian paranoia) ‘a dog returns to its vomit’?
It was these fears and suspicions that brought the most famous of the militants, Vicente Ferrer, to Majorca in 1414–15. It was the year after another show dispute-cum-trial of Judaism held at Tortosa, before an audience of almost a thousand, including courtiers, bishops and cardinals, seated, according to Solomon ibn Verga’s account in his Shebet Yehuda, on seventy thrones and presided over by the schismatic Pope Benedict XIII.13 For the Pope it was an opportunity to establish his credentials as the true personification of the faith militant, and he opened the proceedings by announcing that ‘I have not sent for you in order to prove which of our two religions is true; for it is a known thing that my religion and faith is true and that your Torah was once true but was abolished’. Geronimo de Santa Fe began ferociously by quoting Isaiah to the effect that if the rabbis refused to ‘reason’, ‘ye shall be devoured with the sword’. But his line of argument was familiar to anyone who had studied the Barcelona disputation, namely that the man-made Talmud had fraudulently usurped the divine authority of scripture to disguise the fact that the Bible had prophesied so precisely the Messiah Jesus Christ, and so on.