The Story of the Jews

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The Story of the Jews Page 50

by Simon Schama


  The persuasion trials were already out of date as a tactic. Ferrer’s methods, while also claiming to be a campaign of persuasion rather than force, were altogether more intimidating and physically histrionic. More eloquent and charismatic than Ferran Martinez, Ferrer appeared dressed in the coarsest of robes, a divine fulminator bearing on his scourged back the weight of sinful procrastination. Accompanying him were small armies of flagellants, walking in penitential processions, carrying torches and thrashing themselves with knotted leather scourges until the blood saturated their robes, throwing open the doors of synagogues. Ferrer himself, at their head, carried a cross in one hand and a scroll of the Torah in the other. Jews were forced to stand before their Ark while being treated to rants and chants. Every Jew over the age of twelve, of both sexes, was required to attend these preachings. Often, mere reports of the approach of the flagellant friars was enough to send Jews to the mountains or woods beyond the town.

  This was nothing compared to the upheaval that Ferrer demanded of Jewish lives. The annihilations of 1391 had torn Sefarad into three parts, each perhaps of 100,000: the first were the dead; the second the converted; the third, those who somehow decided to remain Jews whatever the oppression that lay in store. With those numbers in mind Ferrer demanded that the Jews be removed from any possible proximity to both the New Christians, lest they be ‘Judaised’ back into error, and also to Christian society itself. A great segregation was determined on and for Majorca, promulgated in 1413. This was the strategy of conversion through destitution, expressly meant to make daily life so unbearable that Jews would embrace the relief of the cross, and in countless cases it worked. Although most of the occupations from which they had made a living were not forbidden (especially those which sold goods to Christians, including meat and wine or any foodstuffs, as well as leather goods, gems and fabrics), Jews were to be removed from any residences in Christian districts. No Jew was henceforth allowed to lend money or to be a landlord, an attorney or a tax receiver, or indeed hold public office since any of those might make a Christian subject to Jewish authority. Nor, to the consternation of many of their regular patients, were Jews permitted to practise any form of medicine or barber-surgery, to sell or administer any kind of potion, tonic or syrup. The separation was to be hermetic. No Christian women, from the purest to the most prostituted, were allowed to enter the juderia by day or night, or even have a conversation, however ostensibly innocent, with any Jew. Obviously the old practice of wet-nursing Jewish children was over. And in fact through the long list of prohibitions it is possible to see exactly the informal and familiar life that had previously been enjoyed not only in Majorca but all over Aragon and Castile. Christians and Jews could no longer eat or drink together at any time. Jews were not allowed to visit the Christian sick, nor henceforth could they deliver any presents to them, neither baked cakes and bread nor spiced dishes, fruit and wine.

  Then, of course, there were the additional humiliations. No one was ever again to address a Jew as ‘Don’ or ‘Dona’. No Jew was allowed to wear scarlet or any brightly coloured clothes, nor any fine fabric like silk, much less adorn themselves with veils or jewellery of gold or silver. Only homespun fustian dress was allowed, especially for women, which would trail to the ground. All Jews were to wear the identifying badge of the wheel, and the men were forbidden to trim their beards. You needed to know who was a Jew and who wasn’t. And not least, Jews were now forbidden to read any books of the Talmud containing texts that could be interpreted as offensive to Christianity.

  Though Vicente Ferrer’s great segregation was made law in Valladolid in 1412, most of its most draconian restrictions proved impossible to enforce, and many were in any case revoked some years later when the lay rulers managed to reimpose their authority on the mad universe envisaged by the friars and the likes of Martinez and Ferrer. But it turned out to be the royal governors and courtiers and kings who were deluded. The great segregation promulgated by Ferrer in Majorca and throughout Aragon and Castile would return with a vengeance in the 1480s when Jews were given exactly eight days to remove themselves into zones designated as their only residences, usually morally and materially polluted sections of town, where the butchers threw offal, the tanneries stank and whores crowded the alleys. History frowns on anachronism, but what, the crematoria and the shooting squads aside, in the Nazi repertoire is missing from this list?

  The coup de grâce was provided by a blood-libel case in 1435, which turned the beleaguered community of the Call from demoralisation to panic.14 The only novelty was that the victim of Jewish parody crucifixion (as usual nowhere to be found) was said to be a Muslim. Tribunals were set up, the mobs of the city and country shouted, a rabbi was tortured, sentences of hanging (by the feet so that the agony was protracted) and burning handed down on four of those who had confessed to the crime. Terrified of a repetition of 1391, most of what was left of the Call fled to mountain caves near Lluch where they were preyed on by bandits and taken as captives back to Palma. Some days later, there was a collective request for baptism. In the circumstances the death sentences were suspended, the Jews lined up in procession and marched to the cathedral to hear a Te Deum. The next day saw the immolation of sacred books and objects: the scrolls of the Law fed to the flames. The sole remaining synagogue was locked, but not before an immense, beautiful candelabrum of three hundred lights – which a fond Majorcan tradition claimed had hung in the Temple – was taken and transferred to the cathedral, where you can still find it.

  It is not quite all that is left, though. In the DNA of 20,000 chuetas are embedded the Y chromosomes that identify them as the descendants of the converts of the fifteenth century. The Jewish story lives on in their bodies and, increasingly, in their reclaimed culture.

  II. Toledo

  ‘Jerusalem in Spain’? Well, that was said of so many places over the centuries by those who hoped and believed there could be a home in exile: Cordoba, Granada, even Seville. But was not Toledo’s very name a sign, almost a homonym for toledot, Hebrew for the generations?15 Yehudah Halevi and Moshe ibn Ezra had both lived and written their poetry there (although neither very happily). But, a Toledano might have insisted, just look at this city resting on hills, like the crown on King David’s head.

  You go looking for that Toledo, and the tourist office close to the great, adamant cathedral is eager to direct you to the town’s two restored synagogues and the Sephardi Museum. So you thread your way through the streets lined with marzipan shops, past the windows beckoning tourists to buy a glinting blade of Toledo steel, a carver, a machete, a little sharp something to be apprehended at an airport, past the Café la Juderia offering sandwich jamon iberico y queso, doubly unkosher, and you will finally come upon the steep alleys of the medieval juderia. And there they are: separated by a few hundred feet, both recovered from neglect and multi-purpose functions in the Jewless town: church, hospital and asylum for the Knights of the Order of Calatrava, army barracks, rabies clinic.

  They are still known, incongruously but inevitably, by their baptismal names, hence the oxymoronic Sinagoga de Santa Maria la Blanca and the even grander building named El Transito, for the Virgin’s ascension. In their different ways they both proclaim the possibility – against all theological and political odds – of the harmony of the monotheisms. Santa Maria la Blanca – once known as the Beit haKnesset Chadashah, the New Synagogue – was built in the first decade of the thirteenth century, probably by Joseph ben Meir Shushan, from one of the great Toledan Jewish dynasties serving the Castilian kings.16 And it is the most obviously mosque-like of any synagogue imaginable, the interior dominated by rhyming arcades of horseshoe-arched columns, surmounted by capitals decorated with pine cones and twining foliage in the sober style thought to have been promoted by the Almohades (who had mostly torn down synagogues in the era of their supremacy). This forest of arches is lit by small circular windows and hanging Moorish lamps. Though it seems unlike any other synagogue from the time it was built, it almo
st certainly wasn’t. At least one other synagogue in Segovia, destroyed by fire in 1900, was built in an almost identical style, with the same horseshoe-arch aisles, and the hybrid Judeo-Islamic forms might actually have been a preferred fashion for a Jewish culture in Christian Spain that was still steeped in Arabic language, science and literature. In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Toledan scribes like Israel ben Israel, from a family of multi-generational scribes, were creating Islamic style ‘carpet pages’ embellished with palmetto leaves scrolling and twining over the page, set at the front and back of Bibles, both as protection and ornamentation, a literary transcription of the architecture.17

  El Transito has an even more startling testimony to the staying power of the cultural harmonisation, since the inscriptions that feature in its profuse stucco work include not just passages from the Psalms in beautiful square-form Sephardic script, but quotations from the Quran in Arabic, including invocations to ‘peace, happiness and prosperity’. Muslim Mudejar craftsmen and artisans might have worked on the stupendous hall of prayer, nine and a half metres high, but it is inconceivable that they furtively smuggled in lines from the Muslim holy text. Rather, the great patron of the place, the treasurer to King Pedro the Cruel of Castile, Samuel Halevi Abulafia, must have specifically commissioned them, not least because his own name and work is eulogised on the wall. In Cordoba, there is a miniature version of the great Toledo synagogue, also replete with the lacy weave of Mudejar stucco, with its multiplying star forms, acanthus leaves and winding foliage. And there too are Hebrew quotations from the Psalms and Prophets. But the Cordoba synagogue was created earlier in the century when there was more sensitivity to the strident complaints being made by the friars about Jews building new synagogues in flagrant violation of papal prohibitions to the contrary.

  If you build it, make sure everyone knows. That went as much for Samuel Halevi Abulafia as for modern philanthropists wanting their wall plaques of gratitude. Abulafia liked to boast of his perfect taste: the glories of the building, its wrought lamps and the beauty of the bima, or reading dais. Though those have long gone, the majesty of the lofty, spacious hall – the grandest imaginable – is perfectly restored, with its high-perched women’s gallery also adorned with Mudejar decoration and inscriptions. For this kind of synagogue you dressed up. It was, as the architectural historian Jerrilynn Dodds has acutely seen, dangerously close to being a palace chapel, a spectacular setting for the courtier aspirations of Abulafia himself.18 So it is not surprising perhaps that it was barely completed before his fall from grace; it might even have been the reason for it. Pedro, embroiled in a civil war with his half-brother Enrique (who was to kill him), was unhappy with being stigmatised as the ‘King of the Jews’ and compromised by accusations that courtier-financiers like Abulafia indulged in outrageous displays of splendour while the people groaned in misery. By dint of his stunning new synagogue, Abulafia was the most obvious sacrifice, and he was duly arrested and executed. One of the wall inscriptions had praised the king as a ‘great eagle with immense wings’, set there by the Jew who never imagined that he might be the prey.

  The Toledo synagogues remained, but the implied declaration of affinity between Judaism and Islam they embodied gradually turned into a liability, as the Christian Reconquest struggled to complete its campaigns against the last holdout fortress kingdom of Granada. Indeed, anyone who had managed to see the Alhambra there would have had no difficulty recognising the stucco decoration of El Transito as an echo of that palatial style. Increasingly hostile Christian writers and preachers began to invoke the ancient tradition that it had been Jews who had betrayed the Visigothic city to the Arab armies in the eighth century. Indeed, given the brutality of Visigothic–Christian persecution the Jews would have been crazy not to have actively sought an alternative overlord.

  But just as Jews were useful commercial and cartographic intermediaries to the rulers of Aragonese Majorca, so their familiarity with Arabic was needed by the Castilians as a conduit to the mathematics and astronomy (and to a lesser extent philosophy) of the Muslim world. The interest was as much strategic as intellectual. In the second half of the thirteenth century under the relatively benevolent rule of Alfonso X, known as ‘the Wise’, Jewish Toledo became the great centre of translation of Arabic and Hebrew literature – science, philosophy and poetry – into Latin, but more significantly into the tongue that would assert itself as ‘Spanish’: the Castilian vernacular. Alfonso, who wrote poetry and cantiga songs, was eager to become adept at all kinds of wisdom and, like so many before and after, subscribed to the legend that the Jews had access to esoteric knowledge – astrological, alchemical and astronomical. One of the Jewish translators who contributed to Alfonso’s multicultural Book of Astronomical Knowledge, Yehudah ibn Moshe, was also prevailed upon to translate Hebrew works on magic, in particular the art of conjuring qualities from stones, expressly for the king. By the thirteenth century, the Sephardic community itself was beginning to write as well as speak less in Arabic than in the Judeo-Castilian called Ladino. Not for the first time it is possible that it was through song that the seeds of a common culture were sown. Ladino songs in praise of El Cid, romances of the French, Provençal, Catalan and Castilian kings, princesses and knights – many of them with a lilt that comes straight from the Arabic musical world – are as much evidence of a shared sensibility as the hybrid architecture. Yet it is nonetheless a remarkable thing that some of the earliest romances of Spanish literature were formed in the crucible of the Judeo-culture it would soon be determined to annihilate.

  The moment of cultural harmony did not long survive Alfonso X, who died in 1284, except in the carpet pages that illuminated the Hebrew Bibles. Beneath the refinement of elite taste, ugly prejudices (and the beginnings of a friar-driven campaign for Christian conformity) were beginning to make the survival of pluralism difficult and eventually impossible. In 1349, the rumour that Jews had brought plague to exterminate Christians resulted in bloody assaults in Toledo. Another burst of violence in 1367 burned down almost a thousand houses in the juderia. Drawing on the resilience which was by now second nature to Jews, the community learned how to rebuild, repair, restore. Between the sudden nightmares it went on with its business, its studies, its work, settled down, even prospered. Migrants from other towns arrived, putting enough pressure on space that a second area of settlement, the alkana, took the overflow. On the eve of the terror of 1391, the two Toledo communities boasted nine thriving synagogues and five houses of Bible and Talmud study.

  Just because all this was happening under the nose of Toledo Cathedral, the Jews became a target for the friars. On the fast day of the 17th of Tammuz, ostensibly commemorating Moses’ destruction of the first edition of the Ten Commandments, Jewish Toledo was hit by the same mob rampage that had destroyed the community in Seville and would go on to Palma and Barcelona and countless other places of their long-settled life in Spain. The desecration of the synagogues and scrolls, the plunder of ritual silver like Torah crowns and the pomegranate-decorated handle finials, the rimmonim, as well as the burning of houses and indiscriminate murders, are known from a heartbreaking elegy written by Jacob ibn Albeneh in the idiom of the maratiyeh, the Hebrew dirges that were a Toledo speciality. The list of destroyed places and slaughtered men is exhaustively distressing: the hazan cantor Saul; the rabbi Isaac ben Judah; Isaac ben Shushan, whose body was perforated with stab wounds; and, worst of all, Abraham ben Ophrit, identified as a bachur, which means he might have been any age from twelve to sixteen, for some unknown reason mercilessly stoned, dragged over the cobbles of the streets, shredding his flesh, then partially burned before his corpse was thrown in the river from where it had to be fished out by his ‘aged’ parents. The Sifrei Torah, the scrolls of the Law, were taken out from the arched New Synagogue and elaborately desecrated before a crucifix was planted between its two Arks. (In some Sephardic synagogues, when a new Ark was built the old one was left in place.) In the royal retreat bac
k from anarchy to order, some of the damage was made good. But in 1411, Vicente Ferrer arrived with his army of thrashing flagellants, and Joseph ben Meir Shushan’s New Synagogue became, definitively, the church of Santa Maria la Blanca. It seemed like the triumph all true soldiers of Christ had been wanting: two-thirds of the Jews were made to disappear, either through the action of Toledan steel, or the baptismal waters; only the stubborn third persisted in their wretched blindness.

  And then, all too soon, the victory generated suspicions. Toledo’s ‘conversos’ threw themselves at the Saviour, embraced the rites, the utterances, the penances, took Communion, crossed themselves with the best, indeed were so completely of their new faith that it struck some as, well, a little odd, yesterday’s beard today’s tonsure. How they strutted their conversion, the Old Christians thought, moving out of the juderia and into the elegant district of the Magdalena near the Alcazar palace, with its stone fronts and walled gardens. And now they were Saved, everything was open to the conversos: marriages with the nobility (who had an eye to their money), their old occupations, and anything which could profit them both in status and fortune through serving the king. The fact that Old Christians were required to welcome them without reservation into the society of the saved, only made this unforeseen situation more aggravating.

 

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