by Simon Schama
As the summer drew to its height and the exit deadline loomed, the Sephardim got themselves to ports and frontier posts as best they could.31 The edict had specified that the penalty for being discovered, unconverted, in the lands of the king and queen after 31 July was death. So there was some urgency to the exodus. Because of the many dangers on the road to Cadiz or the borders of Navarre in the northeast and Portugal in the west, many travelled in convoys made up of their neighbours, family, those they had known in their synagogues. A few chairs, a chest of clothes, cooking pots – especially if they were bound for the sea – and sacks stuffed with precious sacred books were packed on the lumbering carts, along with grandparents and the smallest of the children. Donkeys went at donkey speed, but in any case, the vast majority of Jewish Spain left their country on foot. This made them easy prey for bandits, as well as the host of people in a perfect position to exploit and prey on them: frontier guards (on both sides) who had to be bribed even though there was nothing to pay them with, other than the few possessions they had brought along. Often, when they arrived at exit ports, hard negotiations had to be transacted with unscrupulous captains, and while they awaited space on the ships, the Jews camped and slept in fields where at night they became a mark for local gangs of robbers.
Until the spectacle wearied, people came out from their houses and fields and stood in lines by the side of the road or path to watch the long trains of people moving, as best they could in the broiling heat of the Spanish summer, towards the coast and the Portuguese frontier. And unlike the screams of execration and death that had hounded Jews on the days of riot, they did so in marvelling, chastened silence. Even as bitter a Judeophobe as the priest Andres Bernaldez found himself unexpectedly moved, not least by the dignity and strength so many showed during the ordeal.
They went along the roads and over the fields . . . in much travail, and misfortune, some falling, others standing up, some dying, others being born, others still falling sick, and there was not a Christian who did not feel sorrow for them and wherever they went they [the Christians] beseeched them to be baptised and some in their misery would convert and remain, but few, very few did so, and the rabbis continually gave them strength and bade the women and girls sing and play tambourines and timbrels to raise the people’s spirits.32
So the Sephardim left Spain with their beautiful music filling their ears. But why, in particular, did the rabbis call on the women to sing? Because, of course, this was an exodus, one that must have been ordained by God as a new departure as He had when they had been delivered from Egyptian bondage. And along that way, as every man, woman and child who had sat at a Seder table, who had seen one of the illuminated Haggadot would know, it was Moses’ sister Miriam who sang and danced after the Israelites had passed safely through the Red Sea and the waters had closed over the hosts of Pharaoh. Bernaldez heard the music and the rabbis say that this time, again, God would provide miracles and lead them from servitude to the Promised Land.
That music would be heard again, in Salonica and Tunis, in Smyrna and Constantinople, in Venice and Khania. It had barely tuned up.
IV. To the Ends of the Earth
Far to the south of the Canaries, beyond the place where Cresques Abraham had Jaume Ferrer’s little boat sailing optimistically towards the mouth of the River of Gold, past Cape Bojador, the point after which currents of legendary treachery swept vessels beyond the hope of return, beyond all that, in the midst of the ocean, lay a vast island shield volcano, discovered by Portuguese mariners in 1470 and given the name São Tomé. On which latitude it lay could only be securely identified had the captain making for the island – Alvara da Caminha, Knight of the Royal Household – had the benefit of consulting the astronomic tables of Rabbi Abraham Zacuto, lately of Salamanca but now removed to Lisbon and of much use to the imperial ambitions of the Portuguese monarchy. The volcano had been extinct long enough for its lava rock to be covered in dense tropical vegetation, but until the Portuguese encountered it, no humans lived on São Tomé. Over the rainforests and the hills descending to the Atlantic shore flew the olive ibis, the tropicbirds and kites, and there, between the rocks and the jungle, in 1494, were some hundreds (some said thousands) of once-Jewish children. Many of them had begun their lives and grown up in Muslim Granada, home to hundreds of Jewish families when it fell to the army of reconquest, and who were immediately expelled. A number had joined the uprooted of Castile and crossed the Portuguese border in response to an offer of shelter from King João II. But this had turned out to be entirely mercenary and conditional. Other than the 630 families the Portuguese king had selected as being economically useful to the kingdom, the remainder of the Spanish Jews, perhaps as many as 80,000, were to move along after eight months and pay a hefty sum for the privilege of their short-term asylum and the right to depart.33
Countless numbers of those Jews, ruined by the many robberies, legal and illegal, perpetrated on them in the months of their exodus, were in no position to pay up, at which point João II declared them his enslaved personal property and distributed them as captives to his nobility, whose perennial factiousness could be sweetened by the gift of these bonded Jews who, even with rags on their backs, had their famous wits to commend them. Many he kept for his private reserve, and among them were the children who, once taken from their parents as slaves, could be sent over the seas to colonise São Tomé. Subjected to brisk conversion they would Christianise the island, and breeding with African slaves who were also brought there, would create a loyal, pious enterprising mulatto population which would be granted its freedom in twenty or so years.
If they survived. The numbers who were landed and the numbers who were not killed off by diseases, hunger and hardship (though not by the ravening ‘lagarto’ – crocodiles – which had been feared) are impossible to pin down with any certainty. A sixteenth-century historian gave their number as two thousand, of whom six hundred survived into adulthood, but the figure seems too high for the modest ships that took them to have accommodated, even if many were very young and very small. Some hundreds there certainly were, and they did indeed remain to create a miniature colonial society growing and harvesting sugar and eventually the cacao that makes the best chocolate in the world. And they too, like the chuetas of Majorca, carry in their genes the indelible chromosomes of their origins.
João died in 1495 leaving no direct heirs, but before expiring he resolved to extinguish Judaism in his kingdom as exhaustively as his Spanish neighbours. The Jews on the other hand, once made over into proper Christians, were famously useful in two things that mattered to the ambitious Portuguese monarchy: nautical science and global trade. The thing to do, then, was to extirpate their religion. Accordingly, as in Spain, all synagogues and yeshivas were closed and an order went out to burn not their bodies, but their books, notwithstanding the fact that they had brought the new art of printing to Portugal, hitherto untouched by it. In 1493, the Jews still remaining in the country were required to bring to the Great Synagogue in Lisbon all their Bibles, prayer books, Talmuds, commentaries and philosophies, as well as any ritual objects containing Hebrew words like tefillin phylacteries and doorpost mezuzot, from where they would be taken to destruction. For countless numbers of them, the sacks and chests stuffed with Hebrew books they had been allowed to take from Spain were their only consolation for everything they had lost – house, garden, shop, money, country. They had kept them close through thick and thin, over the rivers and mountains of their exodus. And now their universe of words was being taken from them. Rabbi Abraham Saba witnessed a fellow Jew being beaten mercilessly with leather straps for ‘loving his books’ and clinging to them. Trembling with fear the rabbi carried the most precious of his own items out of town and hid them in the hollow of an ancient olive tree. Among those book-loving Jews who somehow managed to save their treasure was Isaac de Braga, who had made his way to Lisbon from La Coruña, along with the goatskin box-bound masterpiece. Had he stayed – or worse, had he like so man
y thousands of others returned to Spain having accepted baptism – any books he carried with him would have been confiscated and burned at the frontier and the world would have lost the most beautiful of all illuminated Hebrew books.
This was not the worst that the Portuguese kings could do to their new and unwelcome population of Jews. João II’s successor, Manuel, like his predecessor, was of two minds whether the kingdom would benefit more from the removal or the detention of the Jews, although either way their religion had to be made to disappear. His decision seems to have been made by the politics of royal marriage, for the price that Ferdinand and Isabella set on a match with their widowed daughter, also called Isabella, was that Manuel extend the expulsion to all of Iberia. Otherwise, they reckoned, the border between the two countries would remain porous enough to allow secret Judaisers to return. As it was, many thousands, crushed by destitution in Portugal, had decided to accept baptism and return to Spain, taking advantage of an additional edict issued by the Spanish monarchs in November 1492 – gratifying, perhaps, but also adding to the long neurosis about the true allegiance of the conversos.
Although a date was set for the expulsion from Portugal in 1497, Manuel remained eaten up by anxieties about the loss of assets. Could there not be a way, as yet untried, of inducing the mass of the Jews to accept the cross, thus avoiding the need to expel them? Perhaps the fate of the children of São Tomé gave him the idea. For on the night when families were cleaning their houses of leaven and preparing for the festival of Passover, soldiers swept down on the Jews gathered in Evora and then all the towns of Portugal and tore every child aged two and above from the desperately imploring grip of their parents. The joyous candlelight search for leaven turned instead into a hunt for children. Elijah Capsali, who heard the stories from Marranos who came to Crete, wrote that the soldiers searched for toddlers and youngsters ‘even in the corners and recesses of the houses’. On the first Seder night itself they returned to ‘rob the Jews of their treasure. The children were taken away and never seen again.’
Thousands more of the frantic parents were brought to Lisbon, and told they would be removed at the appointed date. Some of them took the opportunity to try and implore the authorities and even the king for the release of their little ones. Solomon ibn Verga, the author of a chronicle of persecutions, the Shebet Yehuda, and a baptised secret Jew who witnessed the misery, wrote of a mother who had lost six children and who in desperation sought out Manuel as he was leaving church after Sunday Mass. ‘She went to implore his mercy and threw herself before the feet of his horse begging him to return her youngest child to her but the king did not listen to her . . . The king ordered his servants “take her out of my sight” but the woman continued to plead her case with yet louder screams and they rebuked her whereupon the king exclaimed “Let her be for she is like a bitch whose pups have been taken away.”’ We know the names of many others, an endless inventory of heartbreak: Isaac de Rua and his wife Velida, who lost their eight-year-old Jacob, renamed Jorge Lopes; Shemtob Fidalgo and his wife Oraboe, who lost two-and-a-half-year-old Reina, renamed Gracia, and eight-year-old Abraham who became George; Estrela, the widow of Jacob Mankhazina, lost four-year-old Cinfana, adopted, for an unknown period of time, by a Christian cobbler neighbour.
Pending what they thought would be their expulsion – which would, at least, be some form of release – thousands of Jews (the historian Damiao de Gois says, a little improbably, 20,000) were crammed together in an ancient palace, punitively overcrowded, with little air and no privies. But then Manuel’s idea was to force conversion through the most brutal incarceration possible and the breaking of families, not to lose his Jews abroad. Every so often he would order the suspension of food and water, sometimes for three days. They were trapped in what was in effect an early version of a concentration camp with no hope of escape or reprieve except through conversion. In that spirit, when their guards had a mind to it, they beat the starving, sick Jews until they tired of the entertainment. Large numbers perished from the maltreatment, and those who barely survived were dragged by their hair to the font, some of them clutching their prayer shawls about them as they were manhandled into Christianity.
One Spanish Jew who escaped this fate was the astronomist and Talmudist rabbi, Abraham Zacuto.34 He had crossed into Portugal along with the tens of thousands hoping for some sort of benevolent respite if not resettlement. He was already famous, both for his devising of a copper astrolabe which gave more stable readings than the wooden instruments hitherto taken to sea, and more importantly for his Ha hibbur ha-gadol, an almanac measuring the positions of the sun, moon and planets with unprecedented accuracy, and written in Hebrew while he was a teacher at Salamanca University. This was Jewish learning, in a discipline which went all the way back to the sky-scanners of Qumran, and which the rest of the world wanted, even when it wished to be rid of its authors. The book had been translated into Castilian Spanish in 1481, and it was because João II’s physician Jose Vizinho (also an astronomer) was preparing a Latin edition that Zacuto received a special welcome. He was taken to the immense monastery-palace of the Templars in Tomar, north of Lisbon, with its serpentine staircases and gargoyle-encrusted columns, and given a cell for his own work. Zacuto’s famous presence may explain the survival of a solitary synagogue from late-medieval Portugal, in Tomar: an exquisite and tiny house of worship and study, just a simple room supported by slender piers. And while Zacuto was there, something momentous was happening to his work. A new Spanish edition was being prepared, this time on the movable type that would make it one of the first printed scientific manuals in Iberia.
But Zacuto’s Perpetual Almanach for the Movement of Celestial Bodies did not have to wait for print to change the world. It had already been taken by Columbus aboard the Santa Maria, as he waited impatiently in the roads of Cadiz for the port to be unclogged of all the ships taking Jews to their various destinations and appointments with pirates, shipwreck and sometimes asylum. The two events of the year were never disconnected in his mind. Zacuto’s published work had reinforced the advocacy of Isaac Abravanel and the converso Luis Santangel for Columbus’ voyage west to find a new route to India. And as the lingua franca of the Indian Ocean was commonly known to be Arabic, Columbus made sure to take with him the Jew Luis Torres, skilled in Arabic, as a translator-interpreter, and converted just in time for the proprieties to be observed on the voyage. In the end Torres would be left behind by Columbus in the Caribbean, dealing with the different challenge of understanding and being understood by Carib and Taino ‘Indians’. Columbus’ journal opened with the mysterious but somehow profound connection playing in his brain: ‘Having expelled the Jews from your dominions Your Majesties ordered me to proceed with all sufficient armament to the said region of India.’
For everyone, it was always about Jerusalem. Reaching India by sailing west was the next step to the last irrevocable Crusade, the true reconquest and the onset of the Last Days. But why not try the east? In Tomar, it seems likely that Rabbi Zacuto met with the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama before the voyage that took him past Cape Bojador, past the island of orphaned children, around the Cape and suddenly north up the African coast. When da Gama returned triumphantly from his expedition bearing spices, animals and a Polish Jew who had settled in India, Zacuto had long gone, but there was no question that da Gama’s success had been enabled by taking aboard the rabbi’s Perpetual Almanach which gave him a secure reading of latitude. Thanks to the rabbi, the great captain and founder of Portugal’s Asian empire knew, more or less, where he was.
But where was Abraham Zacuto? Where were his people? What had become of them? Where would they go now that the great experiment of living among the Christians seemed to have been eclipsed? Neither copper astrolabe nor celestial almanac were of any use against pirates, and the ship on which Zacuto sailed south, like tens of thousands of his co-religionists, back to the Muslim world of the Barbary States, was twice captured by corsairs, plundered an
d ransomed. Eventually, around 1504, he made it to Tunis, and there he embarked on an altogether different voyage, one through time rather than space. The Sefer Yohassin, The Book of Lineage, is not to be compared with his science.35 Nor, despite Zacuto’s obsession with tracking together the events of the Gentile world with those of the Jews, is it really history. The scientifically minded German Jewish historians of the nineteenth century dismissed it as so much nonsensical fantasy, incapable of distinguishing between myth and truth – but then, equally missing the point, the same thing had been said about Herodotus.
It is true. Rabbi Zacuto’s genealogy is not history, not as the readers of this book would recognise it. But it is an encounter with the teeming generations, from the patriarchs through the rabbis and sages to men Zacuto might have known. It is not history because despite the ostensible obsession with chronology, all these people who made up the Jewish past and who inhabited the Jewish here and now seem to be living at the same time, coming together in a thunderous cacophony of mutual interruption. There goes Shammai sounding off again; there is Rabbi Ishmael who says ‘go tell Rabbi Akiba he has made a mistake’; there is Ben Ha-Ha ‘who I have heard is identical with Ben Bag-Bag for they have the same numeric value, that is bet and gimel equals five’; there is Shmuel not yet Hanagid sitting selling spices in his shop in Malaga with no inkling that he would be the great minister of the Berber king; there, scribbling away in Arabic, is Maimonides whose remains were taken to Palestine where brigands set upon the coffin and would have heaved it into the sea had not thirty men been unable to lift it from the ground, so allowing the great philosopher to be buried among his fathers at Tiberias. There too at the end are the orphans who had been taken ‘to the islands of the sea’.