The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Did Ferdinand and Isabella merely surrender to popular sentiment—which was not at all like them—or did they actually believe that the Jew had infested Spain and had to be removed? That anti-Semitism had become popular there is no doubt. It is also possible that when the Jewish court physician failed to save the life of one of her sons, the Infante Don Juan, Isabella may have become embittered against the Jews and been reminded of old myths of Jews as poisoners of wells and children. And anti-Semites among the Conversos had begun to tell the monarchs that most of the conversions were only feigned, and recalled an ancient Castilian legend that developed under the reign of Peter I. Peter, it was said, used to wear a waistband given him by his wife, Doña Blanca, who wanted to expel the Jews. His mistress, Doña María de Padilla, obtained the waistband with the help of an old Jew who was powerful at court, and the Jew placed a curse on it so that the next time Peter wore it—at a court ceremony, when he was in his full regalia—the waistband suddenly turned into a serpent and, before the eyes of the horrified onlookers, coiled itself around the king’s neck and strangled him.

  The Inquisition was first suggested to the king and queen by the Dominican prior of Saint Paul in Seville, backed by the papal nuncio, Nicolao Franco. The king and queen agreed, it is said, “reluctantly” that an “inquisition,” or inquiry, be undertaken, but placed the leadership of it in the hands of the great Cardinal of Spain, the Archbishop of Seville, Pedro González de Mendoza, who assured their majesties that the approach to Judaizing Conversos would be evangelical—through education, argument, and preaching, rather than force. But the lower clergy, the lesser nobles, and the general public quickly became impatient with the cardinal’s gentle ways and called for sterner measures. Of the cardinal’s methods, the historian Andrés Bernáldez wrote: “In all this, two years were wasted and it was of no avail, for each did what he used to do, and to change one’s habits is a wrench as bad as death.” In 1479, the king and queen—still reluctant—gave in to the popular pressures surrounding them and founded the Inquisition.

  Anti-Semitism became official, and the rulers embarked upon a policy of systematic expulsion. In 1481, Jews were ordered confined to their juderías. Next, a partial expulsion was ordered of all the Jews in Andalusia. In 1483, Jews were decreed expelled from Seville and Córdoba and, in 1486, from Saragossa, Abarán, and Teruel.

  On January 2, 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand arrived in Granada, the last state in Moorish power, to accept its final surrender and receive its keys. Slowly the banner bearing the Cross was raised over the Alhambra while, just as slowly, the crescent of Islam was lowered. It must have been a moment of unparalleled emotion, of momentous impact, as the Moorish King Boabdil the Young moved, on foot, toward the mounted Ferdinand, to offer the symbol of capitulation after over seven hundred years of Moorish sway. His head was high and proud. The Christian Reconquista was complete. Spain’s medieval era had come to an end. As the Cross and royal banner rose above the tower of Comares, the royal knights at arms chanted, “Granada, Granada for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.” Around her, the queen’s chapel of singers began to sing the solemn hymn of thanks, “Te Deum Laudamus.” Granada’s fall must indeed have seemed decreed by divine will. The queen, overcome, fell to her knees and wept. She was not quite forty-one years old.

  At this stirring moment when the youthful king in his turban walked slowly toward her, carrying the keys, when she flung herself to her knees convinced she must be witnessing an act of God’s holy will, did she remember the old accusations of how, seven centuries before, it was the Jews who “opened the gates” to ungodly Moors? Did she give weight to the powerful and long alliance of the two cultures, and did she now see the Jews and the Moors as inseparable enemy forces? Did she finally convince herself that what the churchmen and the nobles had been telling her was true, that Spain could triumph only if permanently cleansed of all unconverted Moors and Jews? It is more than likely, because three months after Granada’s fall the famous Expulsion Edict of 1492 was issued, with the solemn words:

  It seems that much harm is done to Christians by the community or conversation they have held and hold with Jews, who pride themselves on always attempting, by whatever means, to subvert our Holy Catholic faith … instructing our faithful in the beliefs and ceremonies of their law … attempting to circumcise them and their sons … giving or taking to them unleavened bread and dead meats.…

  We order all Jews and Jewesses of whatever age that before the end of this month of July they depart with their sons and daughters and manservants and maidservants and relatives, big and small … and not dare to return.

  Figures are unreliable, but it is estimated that somewhere between 165,000 and 400,000 people emigrated from the peninsula in the months that followed. Obviously, the figure for those who chose the alternative, and remained to accept baptism, is even shakier, but it is generally placed at about 50,000. As Jews poured out of the country, the Sultan of Turkey, Bajazet II, is said to have commented that he “marvelled greatly at expelling the Jews from Spain, since this was to expel its wealth.” He said, “The King of Spain must have lost his mind. He is expelling his best subjects,” and he issued an invitation to Jews who so wished to come and settle in Turkey.

  It is no coincidence that Columbus’ expedition was launched that same calamitous year. It too was an extension, with the same mixed religious and commercial motives, of the Crusades; after the fall of Granada, the Home Crusade might be said to have been completed. The next logical step was westward, across the Atlantic.

  One of the charming legends that have been perpetuated about Queen Isabella is that she impulsively, one might even say girlishly, offered to pawn (or sell—the stories vary) her jewels to finance Columbus on his voyage. Like so many charming legends, this one turns out to be nothing more than that. True, Isabella’s treasury was nearly empty. But her coffers were rapidly filling up with property confiscated from departing Jews. Jews filled other roles in the expedition.

  When he first plotted his course, Columbus used charts prepared by Judah Cresques, known as “the map Jew,” head of the Portuguese School of Navigation in Lisbon. The almanacs and astronomical tables that Columbus gathered for the trip were compiled by Abraham ben Zacuto, a Jewish professor at the University of Salamanca. It was Señor Zacuto who introduced Columbus and the officers of his expedition to the prominent Jewish banker Don Isaac Abravanel, who was one of the first to offer Columbus financial backing. When still more money was needed, and when Isabella was at the point of abandoning the project for lack of funds, Abravanel turned to other Jewish bankers, including Luis de Santangel, Gabriel Sánchez, and Abraham Senior, who had played such an important role in bringing Isabella and Ferdinand to the altar. It is because of these bankers that the expedition was able to leave Spain under the Spanish flag and, as a result of their part in the undertaking, Columbus’ first word back to Spain about his discovery was addressed not to the queen—which would have been courteous—but to Señores Santangel, Sánchez, and Senior, his bankers, which was practical. As a result of these activities, Professor H. P. Adams of Johns Hopkins has commented: “Not jewels, but Jews, were the real financial basis of the first expedition of Columbus.”

  There is also a distinct possibility that Columbus himself was a Marrano, the son of parents named Colón, who had escaped from Spain to Genoa during one of the pogroms. He was certainly a very odd sort of Genoese. Why, for example, did he write and speak such poor Italian—and yet speak Castilian Spanish so fluently that he could move with ease in the highest circles of the Spanish court? Nothing but puzzles and blind alleys surround the actual place and circumstances of Columbus’ birth. For centuries, Portugal has refused to honor Columbus, claiming that he was a “foreigner,” and yet it is known that for several years before his expedition he lived in Portugal and was married to a Portuguese girl. (In 1968, Portugal remedied the situation by erecting a statue of him on the Portuguese island of Madeira.) Was Columbus a secret Jew? A large schoo
l of thought believes so. He certainly surrounded himself with Marranos and Conversos when he was making up his crew. Aboard the Santa María, both Mestre Bernal, the physician, and Marco, the ship’s surgeon, were Jews. The first man ashore in the New World was probably also a Jew: Luis de Torres, the official interpreter for the expedition. He had been brought along on the voyage because the expedition expected to reach the Orient.

  Though the monarchs’ Expulsion Edict was quite specific, there was a certain leeway in its interpretation. Bribery was not unknown in the fifteenth century, and Portuguese officials were even easier to bribe than those of Spain, which was saying very little. The first Jews affected by the edict were the poorest, who could afford no bribes; richer and more prominent people could make arrangements. The royal matchmaker Abraham Senior, for example, who had served the king so well—he had helped the king pay off many of his mistresses, and came to his assistance whenever his amorous adventures threatened to be dangerous—was among the Jews who were given permission to take whatever personal possessions they wished out of the country, after a few routine donations were made to certain ministers and public causes. The government’s debt to Senior—in the stunning amount of 1,500,000 maravedis—was also ordered paid. Senior, however, after thinking it over, reported to his old friend and former house guest King Ferdinand that he would prefer to remain in Madrid, and that he would accept baptism as the price. The king was delighted, and the Senior family was baptized in the palace and changed its name to Coronel. Don Abraham, after all, was an old man, and perhaps he had grown weary of the struggle. His friend and former colleague Don Isaac Abravanal, offered the same terms, chose to leave Spain rather than convert, and thus the great Abravanal name was carried out into Europe and, eventually, the United States.

  The Jews who could not muster the price of a bribe were herded out of Spain like cattle. They were allowed to take nothing with them. To sell their houses or goods, they were forced to take whatever a buyer might deign to give them, and whatever they received was ordered turned over to the king. According to one chronicler: “They went around asking for buyers and found none to buy; some sold a house for an ass, and a vineyard for a little cloth and linen, since they could not take away gold.”

  While Columbus was assembling his fleet in Cádiz, he watched the harbor, which was filled with tiny boats waiting to carry away the Jews. If indeed he was the son of parents who were clandestine Jews, he must have viewed the hectic scene with queerly mixed emotions. The ships assigned to take the refugees were overcrowded, badly managed, and faced late-winter storms at sea. Those who boarded Turkish ships—sent by the sultan himself—found the Turkish sailors less hospitable than their leader. Some Jews had hit upon the idea of swallowing gold and silver pieces in order to take their money with them. Of these a rabbi whose father was one of the early exiles wrote: “Some of them the Turks killed to take out the gold which they had swallowed to hide it; some of them hunger and the plague consumed, and some of them were cast naked by the captains on the isles of the sea; and some of them were sold for man-servants and maid-servants in Genoa and its villages, and some of them were cast into the sea.”

  When Aunt Ellie reached this point in her stories, the children’s eyes would be as wide as saucers.

  * Prayer books in Spanish synagogues were promptly reprinted in Castilian, an interesting contrast to the attitudes of American Orthodox Jews of the twentieth century, who thoroughly disapprove of Reform congregations, where English, the language of the country, is spoken.

  * This Converso name change is fairly typical. The Converso felt a need to advertise his new faith with special enthusiasm, and often selected the name of a Catholic saint.

  4

  THE TWENTY-THREE

  On the first day of September, 1654, a tiny privateer, the Saint Charles, sailing under the French flag, appeared in what is now New York Harbor. It was something of a surprise to the fortress colony of New Amsterdam, which had been established on the tip of Manhattan island barely thirty years earlier, to learn that twenty-three of the Saint Charles passengers were Jews.

  More than 150 years had passed since the Expulsion Edict, and the Catholic monarchs had long ago been placed in their uncomfortable-looking repose. And yet the twenty-three were victims of the monarchs’ edict also, part of a continuing stream of escapees from Inquisitional Spain, Portugal, and all Spanish and Portuguese possessions on both sides of the Atlantic, where the Inquisition had been quickly established.

  The dispersion following the Expulsion Edict was chaotic, following no set paths. Jews who refused to convert scattered in all directions—southward into Africa, eastward into Greece and Turkey, northward into Europe. Only one rule applied: the richer the Jew, the more liberal he could be with his bribes and, therefore, the freer he was in his choice of destination. The poorest Jews fled across the Gibraltar straits into the mountains of Morocco. The richest went to Holland—and for good reason. This tiny, doughty country had, from as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—just as it has today—a record and reputation of tolerance, of treating “outsiders” with respect and kindness. And so the Jews who escaped to Holland from Spain and Portugal found not only a friendly atmosphere where they could reestablish their congregations, but also a place where they could practice their businesses and professions. The city of Amsterdam was already an important money capital. In Holland the Sephardim were soon prospering again and occupying positions very much like those they formerly had held in Iberia. By the early seventeenth century, the Sephardim were an important part of the Dutch economy.

  And the Netherlanders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the most cultivated people in Europe. This was the great era of Dutch painting, of Frans Hals and Rembrandt and Vermeer. It was an age of opulence and luxury, and in Holland ordinary burghers enjoyed comforts in their homes that were found only in the palaces of princes elsewhere. Across the North Sea, in England, members of the royal courts were still eating with their fingers, throwing their bones to mongrel dogs who roamed, snarling, under dinner tables. They were using their sleeves for napkins, strewing the royal halls with rushes instead of rugs, and had barely begun to discover the use of window glass. The rich of Amsterdam, meanwhile, were living in houses with thick carpets from the Orient and beautiful furniture, eating off porcelain plates with all the table silver of modern times. The affinity between the elegant Dutch and the aristocratic Sephardim was easy to understand.

  Because the oldest Sephardic families in America can usually point to a Netherlands interlude in their collective past, they have an added point of pride. As one of the New York Nathans says today: “We were ladies and gentlemen in Spain, and we became ladies and gentlemen in Holland.” Cream rises to the top, regardless of its location.

  In the years following Columbus’ discovery, Dutch explorers, along with explorers from other European countries, fanned out across the Atlantic, establishing colonies in North and South America, the Caribbean islands, Africa, and the Orient. As the Dutch established colonies, Sephardim from Holland followed them, helping the Dutch put their colonies in business. As a result of the Dutch colonial thrust, Sephardic communities can be found today virtually wherever the Dutch had outposts—Guiana, Polynesia, the West Indies. The oldest Jewish cemetery in the New World is the Sephardic burying ground on the Dutch West Indian island of Curaçao.

  A particularly important Jewish settlement had been made in Brazil. Discovered by a Spaniard, Brazil was claimed for Portugal in 1500 by the Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvarez Cabral. Soon other nations were eyeing this vast and fertile land and its rapidly growing sugar industry. In 1624, the Dutch West India Company—backed by the Dutch government—launched a full-scale military campaign against Brazil and captured Recife, which brought Brazil into Dutch hands.

  Jews, many of them Marranos, had settled in Brazil during the century of Portuguese rule. With the Dutch victory and the abolition of the Inquisition—along with new arrivals from Holl
and of Sephardim who followed the Dutch conquest in a now familiar pattern—there was a great rush of reconversion to Judaism. Ex-Catholics were welcomed back into the synagogue, and before long Recife had a thriving and openly Jewish community.

  The position of Jews in Brazil was now equal to that of the Protestant Dutch, with the same rights and privileges, and was considerably superior to that of the conquered Portuguese Catholics, whom the Dutch naturally endeavored to keep powerless. Unfortunately for the Jews, this state of affairs lasted only thirty years. In 1654, after a long and bloody siege by the Portuguese, the Dutch surrendered Recife, and Brazil became once more a colony of Portugal. The Jews’ situation had changed utterly. The grim hand of the Inquisition reached out again.

  But the leader of the Portuguese invaders, General Barreto, was a reasonably lenient man. He ordered the Jews out of Brazil, but he didn’t hurry them unduly. In his diary, David Franco Mendes, one of the leaders of the Brazilian Jewish colony, and another early member of the ubiquitous Mendes clan, describes the situation: