by Simon Schama
It was too good to be true, was it not? For all their new-found fervour, had they not embraced the cross precisely so that they might become a parvenu aristocracy, lord it over the old and oppress the people with even harsher taxes and impositions? So the Old, which is to say real, Christians began to be on the lookout for signs that behind the ardent professions of faith the converts were secretly, still, impenitent Jews. And at this point Jewish historians themselves divide for reasons less to do with evidence than what they want from this post-traumatic, intense and tragically fraught moment. The great Israeli historian of Sefarad and the expulsion, Yitzhak Baer, wished so much to see the conversos and the Jews as in all deep respects one people, that he more or less echoed the view of the Inquisition that their Christianity was an expedient sham. But however baffling and almost inexplicable it is – especially to religious Jews – to contemplate hitherto learned and unimpeachably devout rabbis turning abruptly into ferocious Christian evangelists, this is certainly what happened to many of them. Pablo de Santa Maria and Geronimo de Santa Fe were not, alas, opportunists. Just what percentage of the conversos were authentically true believers in their new faith we shall never know. The sources are necessarily much richer concerning all those who did indeed hanker after their lost Judaism or much more, in evidence unearthed by the Inquisition in the 1480s and 90s, and accounts given by those who left for countries where they could revert to Judaism.
On the other hand, wishful pieties about Jewish solidarity and Inquisitorial over-reading aside, there is no shortage of signs that many conversos, in Toledo and elsewhere, did indeed find ways to remain at the very least connected to their co-religionists in the juderia. It was not that far a walk, much less a ride, from the Magdalena to the juderia, and there was doubtless something about the cooking aromas, the music, the pure force of habit, the Ladino gossip coming through an open window onto the street, that drew them. Some of their enemies knew that their food habits would betray their relapse. The nostrils of the priest-chronicler Andres Bernaldez, no friend to the Jews, were constantly twitching for a telltale whiff of ‘onions and garlic fried in oil instead of lard’. Anything fried in oil smelled evil, he thought, as did the Jews who made them their diet. You could tell a converso who had eaten at their tables just by the oily-garlicky stink coming off him. Then there was adafina, otherwise known as hamim, the covered-pot stew full of beans, chickpeas, vegetables and meat that Bernaldez also found disgusting and no one who had eaten it on the Sabbath, cold or warm, could resist. The Jews took it to a baker’s oven for slow overnight cooking on Friday so they would not violate the Sabbath day, and any converso drooling for adafina would have to be careful not to have a Christian servant carry it there.19 When the Inquisition was in full snooping mode, reports (usually by a servant again) of the mistress of a converso house cutting fat and sinew away from the meat (not actually a requirement of kashrut dietary laws), or more damningly purging the meat of its blood in salt water, constituted major evidence of their lapse back to Judaism.
The documented ways in which conversos kept the connection went well beyond the kitchen to more important things: giving money to the synagogues of the juderia for their upkeep and to the routine functions of the kahal – the tending of cemeteries, even the maintenance of Hebrew schools. And these connections went both ways. In return for the charity, they were given all-important information about the dates of feasts (like Purim, renamed ‘Santa Esther’) and fasts. Before the most ferocious policing of the Inquisition in the 1480s, with its horrifying web of informants, the pressure of intimidation and torture of servants and family members, it was still possible to adopt certain customs in the privacy of homes without necessarily attracting suspicion. Candles could be lit on Friday nights. Who, after all, did not light candles in the fifteenth century? Food never passed the lips on fast days? Who was to know about something that did not happen, especially if the servants were also conversos. The master and mistress donned fine yet sober apparel on feast days? But so might they to attend Mass. It was much more reckless to smuggle religious books into converso houses – especially the daily prayer book, the siddur, or a Passover Haggadah – and there is evidence before the years of the Inquisition of dangerous efforts to teach children, and indeed some adults, to memorise essential prayers of affirmation like the shema.
Eventually, these suspicions would turn into confessions extracted under terror and torture, waterboarding and the rack and rope, and would send conversos in their tens of thousands to the autos-da-fé – the ‘acts of faith’ that culminated in live burnings of those ‘unreconciled’ to the cross. Yet decades before the official introduction of a distinctively Spanish Inquisition in 1480, it was less the suspected relapses or deceits of the conversos than their social and political swagger which fed the flames of a New–Old hatred. The impotence (in Enrique IV’s case, literal) of a succession of Castilian kings exacerbated the suspicion that they had become the creatures of favourites like Alvaro de Luna, who sustained his own position as ‘Constable of Castile’ only with the direct help of both Jews and conversos. The closeness to Luna of the communal leader of the Castilian Jews, Abraham de Benveniste, his role as tax collector and informal treasurer, and the perception that conversos had made themselves a new court and bureaucratic elite, was an affront to Old Christian nobles.
When Luna paid a visit to Toledo, by way of imposing a special tax on the city, bells rang from what had been the New Synagogue and was now the tower of Santa Maria la Blanca. It was a call to arms against Luna, Benveniste and their converso allies in the town. The protest began spontaneously and the governor of the Alcazar, Pero de Sarmiento, put himself at the head of a rising that gathered instant support from the townsmen and peasants around Toledo.20 A direct attack was made on the houses of the most conspicuous conversos, like the Cota family of merchants and notaries. Hundreds were destroyed, the juderia also assaulted. Insults were thrown at the king himself, effectively putting Toledo in a state of revolt. In July, with the rebels still in command of the city, Sarmiento took it upon himself to issue a ‘Statute of Exclusion’, turning out conversos from any public office on the grounds that under the skin, they had (and would always have) the impure blood of Jews. ‘We declare the so-called conversos the offspring of perverse Jewish ancestors to be held by law as infamous and ignominious and unfit to hold any public office in the city of Toledo or to have any authority whatsoever over true Christians.’21
As Sarmiento’s statement of blood purity violated the Church’s teaching that the baptised must be treated all alike, Pope Nicholas V promptly banned the Statute of Exclusion, but the damage had been done and the principle of ineradicable racial distinction set down – indelibly, as it would turn out. In 1467, there was another attempt to launch an attack on the persons and property of the Toledo converso families, but they had learned their lesson from the previous riot only too well and had armed themselves with a formidable arsenal of heavy-duty Toledo weaponry, including crossbows and knotted ropes, and appointed a Captain Ferdinand de Torres as the officer of their self-defence corps.22 This new state of preparation as well as years of bitter putting up with insults against the ‘marrano’ pigs (the derogatory term that was coined in these years) may have led to an overreaction when a band of the armed men invaded Toledo Cathedral itself, triggering firstly a fight inside its precincts in which four clerics were killed in the affray, and then a wholesale urban civil war.
The cry of the armed invaders – ‘This is not a church!’ – was not calculated to win the conversos allies among the townspeople of Toledo, much less its priests. What was meant, of course, was that the cathedral had been colonised, institutionally as well as materially, by the politics of their adversaries. What it sounded like, however, was a repudiation of the holy place, complete with the astounding wood carvings that made its choir one of the most intensely felt places of piety in all Christendom. If ever evidence were needed of the suspect loyalty of the conversos, that miscalculated war cry
supplied it.
This was more than an absurd local fracas. It took place in the city of the tombs of the kings of Castile, and at stake in the civil war between the allies of the converso elite and their enemies was the historical identity of Castile and what was coming to be thought of as Spain. The impotent King, Enrique IV, was incapable of supplying that sense of Christian mission even though, coming to the throne one year after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, it could not have been more urgent. The purification of Spain was now the precondition of its kingdoms taking up the last Crusade, the true Cross. If the banner of Christ was to be lifted from the dust of Constantinople, it must fly over a Spain cleansed of Muslims, Jews and the quasi-Jews who masqueraded as converts. In this way the Jewish question moved to the centre of this struggle for self-definition in the time of its gestation as a supremely Christian kingdom, the next instrument of the coming of the Last Days.
Unity in purity was the message of the most influential of those who spoke to this heavily loaded historical moment: Alonso de Espina.23 A Franciscan friar, rector of the University of Salamanca, formidably eloquent preacher of sermons and one of the royal confessors, Espina felt misera Hispania, as he named it, horribly unequal to the mission to which it was called: the battle which would bring on the Last Days and the Second Coming. In its way were demons, and as was commonly known the Jews were the companions of the Devil. It was they who had suborned Alvaro de Luna and brought about his downfall. Espina had made it his business to spend time with the broken Luna, doubtless pressing on him the transgressions that had brought him to disaster. Indeed, he would not leave the fallen minister alone, walking the last steps with him to the executioner’s block.
In his Fortalitum Fidei written in 1461 (and subsequently much published around Europe), Espina collected an exhaustive anthology of all the demonologies of the Jews: well-poisoners, host-desecrators, child abductors and murderers. He had in fact been frustrated in an effort to destroy Jews in Valladolid accused in the usual way of child killing. Espina’s Franciscan allegiance was significant since the order had become strikingly more militant and aggressively confrontational than the Dominicans, and Espina took his message on preaching campaigns through Castile, especially in the north where his flocks were most attentive. His point was simple: the new Crusade, launched by Pope Calixtus III, could never be accomplished without a thorough cleansing of the kingdom – of the Muslims of Granada to be sure, but also of the Jews who had to be expelled entirely from Spain. If they remained there was no hope of making authentic converts since they would always be prey to the ‘Judaisers’ who were everywhere. Nonetheless he urged on Enrique IV an Inquisition expressly designed to weed out the false from the true Christians among the conversos. Initially the king embraced the idea, and after some reluctance, in 1461 Pope Pius II authorised it (with some reservations about ceding large powers away from Rome), only for the king to change his mind.
All of which appears as though the death knell had already sounded for the Jews of Spain. But – just as in Germany half a millennium later – an anciently settled Jewish population, inured to some hardships and much hostile screaming, can shut its ears to the clamour. And for all the Toledos, there were many places in Spain – in Aragon, as well as Castile – especially away from the major concentrations of Jews, where one would have been hard put to believe that Espina’s horrifying solution of expulsion was just around the corner. One of those places of historical innocence was La Coruña in the north-western province of Galicia.
III. Who by Fire, Who by Water
It is impossible, now, to recapture how young Isaac de Braga must have felt in 1476 when he first beheld the result of his commission. You can go to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and stand before the glowing leaves of his Hebrew Bible and if you are lucky you may even get to turn them, but still you will never come close to the euphoria that must have enveloped Braga on seeing it for the first time. La Coruña was a provincial place, a seaport, but hardly on the scale of Cadiz or Lisbon. And yet into this backwater, at some point in the fifteenth century, came a preceding marvel, the work known as the ‘Cervera Bible’, written around 1300 by the scribe Samuel ben Abraham ibn Nathan (whose broken tibia was recorded on its pages), spectacularly painted by the French illuminator Joseph Hazarfati, and with exquisite micrography supplied by one Abraham ibn Gaon. It was surely a look at the Cervera Bible that prompted the commission from either ‘the admirable youth’, as the scribe described him, or his father ‘the late and well-beloved Solomon de Braga, may his soul rest in the Garden of Eden’.24
The paradisial book that was the Cervera Bible had been much travelled, staying for a time in the late fourteenth century in Cordoba before ending up in La Coruña, where evidently the Braga family, starting with Solomon, clearly coveted something very much like it. So much so that the scribe of the new book, Moses ibn Zabara, made sure to include the treatise on biblical Hebrew grammar called the Sefer Mikhlol by the scholar David Kimchi, which had also been in the Cervera Bible. That work was so unappealingly dry that Joseph Hazarfati had abandoned all pretence at relating his illuminations to its strictures on syntax and the like and had run across the pages with his most imaginative figurations of birds and beasts, a diversion followed by Joseph ibn Hayyim, the illuminator of the Braga book. If in many respects the Braga Bible has an endearingly archaic quality to its design, it is also because both the patron and scribe presumably wished to say something about the vitality of tradition. Though it would be good to imagine the Braga Bible made without a presentiment of calamity, it is not impossible that the uncertainties of that moment, poised between hope and alarm, could have made the Bragas and their scribe and illuminator want to reassert the imperishability of Judaic beauty.
In any event, Joseph ibn Hayyim was restrained neither by any visible sense of foreboding, nor for that matter by conventional canons of reverent decorum. His work glows with intense radiant colour, gold and silver, lapis blue and carnation, and rumbustious narrative animation. Jonah falls into the maw of the Great Fish (for that is the literal translation of the Hebrew); bearded David sits resplendently upon his throne; dragons do their worst, and phalanxes of cats do battle with the enemy mice.25 The illuminator’s name on the colophon page at the end of the work is formed of an eye-popping circus of acrobatic forms, some taken from playing cards, or the more picaresque sculptural decorations on cathedrals. But unlike the sinners who appear in those penitential porches, Joseph ibn Hayyim’s naked women and men are mischievous and smiling as they bound and bend over the page. Everyone involved in the production of this Bible must have been cheerfully broad-minded.
That breadth extended to the religious traditions on which the Braga Bible drew for its stupendous imagery. The menorah is there in golden glowing splendour, much as it was on the mosaic floor of the Sepphoris synagogue a millennium earlier, though in the Bible a lion (serving both for faith in the kings of Castile as well as memories of Judah) is crouched beneath it rather than rampant beside the Ark. But sometimes the space of the Temple is evoked in forms more in keeping with the decoration of the Quran and there are passages where the twin scrolls of the Torah, enclosing passages of its text, are actually framed by the horseshoe arches of Islamic architecture, as close to a perfect synthesis as one could imagine. Likewise, carpet pages of densely formed abstract patterning belong indivisibly to what had come to be the Judeo-Arabic tradition. Gothic imagery is also abundantly present in the bestiary of animals, birds and vegetation that in the earlier days of illumination had been the speciality of Christian artists, but which by the fifteenth century had been fully mastered by their Jewish counterparts.
And this is just as well because very soon, such collaborations between Christian artists and Jewish scribes would be a thing of the past in Spain. In 1483, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, united as king and queen of Spain since 1474, went ahead with the great erasure of Jewish life in Spain promoted by the Dominican Vicente Ferrer
and the Franciscan Alonso de Espina as a condition of Christian triumph. Persuaded that New Christians would always be tempted back into Judaism so long as there were Jews close by, and that the Church was mortally threatened by the presence within it of such Christians of wavering faith, Jews were expelled altogether from Andalusia, deemed the province most infected by the plague of Judaising. In short order they were turfed out of the cities in which they had been rooted for a thousand years, Cordoba and Seville, impoverished and homeless. These were also the places, moreover, where convivencia, cultural coexistence between Islam and Judaism, between Arabic and Hebrew philosophy, science and literature, had been most richly produced.
But then the Jews were not persecuted by Christians for keeping themselves apart, for their alleged remoteness. They were persecuted for their dangerous openness, for their cultural nomadism, for their unwelcome closeness. They were never separate until Christians enforced the separation.
Which they now proceeded to do. Beyond Andalusia, the draconian regulations anticipated in Ferrer’s provisions of 1412–13 and the Toledo Statutes of Exclusion fell upon the necks of all Jewish towns, doubtless including La Coruña. Jews were to remove themselves virtually overnight – the grace period was eight days – from districts in which they had long been settled, and some of which had gates and walls to serve them in times of trouble. New zones of residence were designated by the authorities, most often in the poorest and squalid periphery of the city, set deliberately at a distance from their shops and workshops. And since the plan was to ruin them into conversion, they were forced to sell their properties – which included communal buildings, of course – for a pitiful fraction, usually 10 per cent of their actual value. Thus they were twice defrauded, on the sale and then by the inflated prices they were obliged to pay in their places of re- settlement. With this plan two goals were achieved for its architects: to ruin as many Jews as possible into conversion, and then set a cordon sanitaire around the rest so that they would be hermetically sealed off from both Old and New Christians alike. It was, in effect, an internal expulsion. And it was of course an inhuman degradation.