The Maestro took Monnikenstraat to cross over the Archerburg canal and Elias wondered if his steps were not headed toward the now nearby Oude Kerk, the temple erected by the Christians, converted a few decades before by the Calvinists. But when he reached Oudezijds Voorburgwal, he turned to the left, distancing himself from the building with Gothic towers where he had buried his wife a few months prior, and entered the first tavern of the many that sat on the banks of the canal. The young man, although familiar with the Maestro’s fondness for fermented beverages, found it strange due to the early hour at which he sought it out.
Increasing his precautions, Elias approached the place, surely full of mercenaries arrived from England, France, and even the kingdoms from the East to fight against Spain for the good salaries the Republic paid. The door of the place, in recent fashion, had been outfitted with an enormous transparent glass, through which the young man looked inside. He didn’t need to search around too much, but he did have to withdraw his face quickly: the Maestro, his back to the street, was already settling into a table where, on the opposite side, sat Elias Ambrosius’s former teacher, Hakham Menasseh ben Israel. At that moment, the former rabbi, always a glutton for earthly pleasures, was sticking his nose in the brown paper bag weighed down with the aromatic American leaf to breathe in its warm perfume of far-off lands.
* * *
For months, the reckless idea had been circling around in Elias Ambrosius’s head to approach his old teacher and confess his aims. But that day, as he saw him drink, smoke, and pat the Maestro’s shoulder several times, he made the decision. Weighing his possibilities, he concluded that that man was his best and worst option, but, clearly, the only one within his reach.
Hakham ben Israel lived in a wooden house, more ramshackle than modest, in Nieuwe Houtmarkt, on the so-called island of Vlooienburg, on the banks of the Binnen Amstel, very close to where the Maestro and his now-deceased wife had lived a few years before. Perhaps Elias had visited the dwelling of his religion, rhetoric, and Hebrew language instructor more frequently than could have been prompted by mere nostalgia for his school days, because there he could breathe in the most genuine atmosphere of Amsterdam’s Jewish quarter: a mix of messianism and reality, of divine predestination and mundane behaviors, of culture that was open to the world and renewing ideas but also carried centuries-old Hebrew pragmatism. And also because in that house he could be in contact with the Maestro’s spirit.
The physical conditions of the Hakham’s dwelling obviously contrasted with the circumstance that his wife, the mother of his three children, was a member of the Abravanel family, once rich and powerful in Spain and Portugal, and now again rich and powerful in Venice, Alexandria, and also in Amsterdam. The Abravanels had arrived in the city even after Elias’s grandfather Montalbo, but as opposed to him, as the passengers of a merchant ship, weighed down with bags of gold coins and chests of diamonds, and with political, social, family, and commercial contacts worth several more thousands of florins. A line of advisors, bankers, and royal civil servants to the Iberian crown before the fateful year of 1492, the propagators of businessmen, doctors, and even poets of renown throughout the West, the Abravanels appeared to be predestined for wealth, power, and intelligence. But the Hakham’s house had nothing to do with the first two of those virtues; on the contrary, the place announced that commercial skills were not its inhabitants’ forte. (He was the founder of several businesses, among them the city’s first Jewish printshop, which was soon defeated by the competition and sold to another Sephardic Jew.) Above all, the building’s precariousness and rotting wood evidenced that his relationship with the affluent Abravanels was none too cordial. Nonetheless, perhaps the best proof of the existing distance between the savant and his relatives was the one that cut short Ben Israel’s career as a rabbi: if he had the support of the powerful clan, he would not have failed in his efforts for that coveted role.
That bitter dispute had occurred a few years before, when the Sephardic Jews, increasingly more numerous and prosperous, decided to breathe life into the Talmud Torah, the religious and community assembly in which they founded the city’s three existing congregations, and, as part of the fusion, they decided to do away with some rabbis, whose salaries were paid by the community. And among those cast aside was the embarrassing Menasseh ben Israel. Despite his fame as a writer, Kabbalist, and disseminator of Jewish thought, the scholar had to resign himself from then on to the poorly compensated condition of Hakham, professor of rhetoric and religion, although he was allowed to keep a seat on the city’s rabbinical council. Despite that fiasco, the learned man took public pride in his blood ties with the famous line, since, as several members of the family and he himself had been responsible for proclaiming, there was reliable proof that the Abranavels were directly descended from the house of King David and, consequently, the Messiah to come (whose arrival, according to well-versed Kabbalists in the West and mystics in the East, appeared to be closer every day) would bear that last name … And thus the Awaited One could well be one of the former rabbi’s children, conceived in an Abravanel womb.
Despite having to live counting the dusty centimes in his pockets, the scandalous rabbinical humiliation, and his Portuguese and sustained fondness for wine, Menasseh ben Israel continued to be one of the most influential men in the community and, incidentally, for three years had been the director of Nossa Academia, the school founded by the powerful Abraham and Moshe Pereira. In his youth, in order to print and circulate his writings, he had founded that first Jewish printshop in Amsterdam, and, as much as the business ended up being a fiasco, it was an enlightened decision as a platform for his ideas and for disseminating knowledge of many classics of Jewish literature. His own books, written in Spanish, Hebrew, Latin, Portuguese, and English (he could, besides, express himself in five other languages, including, of course, Dutch), moved around half the world and had readers not only among the Jews of the West and the East (his Nishmat Hayim was already considered one of the most substantial Kabbalistic commentaries), but also among Catholics and other Christians. He had found this last audience through his works such as The Conciliator, a curious Hebrew view on the sacred scriptures, an inclusive perspective that marked the coincidences between the Catholic and Protestant readings of the text and those that had been made over three thousand years by the sons of Israel. All of his works were read by his former student—who was encouraged by his grandfather—but, among them, Elias Ambrosius continued to prefer the booklet De Termino Vitae (whose original, which rapidly became a scandalous success, the printshop had put together), since it communicated to the young man that notion of life and its demands, of death and its anticipations, that pleased him so much as a conceptualization of human existence, here and now.
Perhaps because he was such a peculiar nonconformist, landed in the middle of a newly formed and turbulent community, that, to strengthen itself, had to rely on the most ironclad orthodoxy, Ben Israel’s career was as full of successes as of setbacks. But, without a doubt, because he was an iconoclast capable of revealing the riskiest ideas (either due to their novelty or to how conservative they were) and living a public life at the limits of what was accepted by Judaic precepts, his links with the rest of Amsterdam’s Protestant society came to be closer and more fluid. And if visible proof was necessary of how deeply those ties ran, in the small living room of his very humble dwelling was the testimony: there, defiant, hung the portrait that, a few years before, the Maestro had done of him, when he was already the Maestro and the most well-known and sought-after painter in the city. That drawing, in which the then rabbi displayed a wide-brim hat, a trimmed beard, and a mustache, in the style of the villa’s burghers, emanated life thanks to an impressive job on the eyes, from which shone the intelligent vulture gaze that characterized the model and that the Maestro knew how to reflect so well. The work served as a magnet that, on each visit to the house, Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila contemplated until he nearly wore it out, and turned o
ut to be another one of the reasons that fed the young man’s growing desire to approach the Maestro and imitate him.
The friendship and trust between a painter who was critical of dogmatic Calvinism (although a member of his friend Cornelis Anslo’s Mennonite sect) and a controversial Jewish scholar became stronger perhaps because neither of the two professed the exclusion of others and less still did they resign themselves to the intellectual possibilities offered by their time. Both men, thwarted in their aspirations to social ascent, had ended up proving to be incapable of following accepted norms for a successful Dutch painter and for a preeminent Jew, those canons and preferences established in time by ancestral traditions or maintained out of convenience by those wielding money and power; those men upon whose capital, whether they liked it or not, the painter and the student of sacred texts had to rely.
Through his former tutor, Elias knew of the long talks held in the artist’s studio, at the Hakham’s house or in Amsterdam’s beer halls where the two men loved meeting up and handing themselves over to libations, dialogues in which those opposing yet kindred spirits usually referred to their disagreements and notions. Their often insolent ways of behaving in public had also contributed to garnering them the attention of an ebullient community for whom the enjoyment of freedom of ideas and creeds had been established as the most valued good to which all who lived there had the right, including the sons of Israel: there was a reason that the Jews did not just consider it a New Jerusalem but also called it Makom, “the good place,” where they had found the acceptance of their customs and faith and, with it, the peace to live their lives, lost in almost all other places in the known world.
That morning, when Raquel Abravanel, poorly coiffed and sour-faced (as always), received Elias, she immediately spit out that her husband was still sleeping off the ethylic excesses of the previous night and closed the door in his face. Leaning against the doorway of the house, just under the mezuzah, the cylinder with a fragment of the Torah devoted to reminding those who entered or left the dwelling that God is everywhere, the young man decided to wait out his teacher’s recovery, since he was determined to have the difficult conversation with the man most capable of helping him or sinking him. An hour later, far too underdressed for that morning’s cold, sporting the dirty trousers and threadbare cape with which he usually walked around the city to make more patent his nonexistent interest in material goods and in his neighbors’ opinions, his host settled down on the step with the young man and offered him a mug of warm, watered-down wine, sweetened with honey and flavored with cinnamon, similar to the one he himself was drinking.
Elias asked him how he felt. “Alive” was the response of the Hakham, who, strangely, did not seem to have any desire to digress. What did Elias want to see him about? Why so rushed? Wasn’t he cold? And what had become of that ingrate Amos? The young man decided to start with what was easiest for him, even though it wasn’t in reality, because his brother Amos, also a former student of Ben Israel’s, had had a spiritual crisis and had become one of the followers of Breslau, the Polish rabbi, the most recalcitrant local defender of Judaism’s religious purity and, as could be expected, a public enemy of Ben Israel and his ways of thinking. Because of that, he gave the most polite and simultaneously explicit response that popped into his head:
“Amos must be reading the Torah at the German synagogue,” he said. He took a sip of the already cold wine and, without further hesitation, dove into what really interested him. “My dear Hakham, I would like for your friend the Maestro to accept me in his workshop. I want to learn how to paint. But I want to learn with him.” The professor continued drinking from his mug, as if the words of his former student were an intranscendental commentary about the state of the weather or the price of wheat. Elias knew, nonetheless, that the learned man’s mind must be digesting those words weighed down with complications and placing them on the balance against the counterweights of what was logical, possible, admissible, and intolerable.
Few men in Amsterdam knew more than Menasseh about the reality of living with secrets and hiding behind a mask: in his Portuguese childhood, when he was still called Manoel Dias Soeiro, he had been ripped from his home and hidden in a monastery where, for several years, some Franciscan Friars, without much mercy, had educated him as a Christian, teaching him (rod in hand) the reasons for which he should spurn and repress the practitioners of the religion of his ancestors, who were directly responsible for the death of Christ, practitioners of ritual sacrifices of children, stinking of sulfur and greedy by nature, among many other sins and stigmas. His stomach, forced to digest pig meat, blood sausage, and as much treyf food as it could occur to the priests to serve, became weak to the point of developing a chronic illness that still plagued him and produced painful vomiting. But, he had also learned to survive in an adverse environment, to keep silent and know how to hide himself in the masses, to be neither seen nor heard and, above all, to take from that hostile environment the lessons that could be useful in the most diverse circumstances. He had come to the conclusion, thanks to his theological repressors, that the human being is a creature too complex for someone (“Apart from God, of course,” he would tell his students, as Elias always recalled) to think himself capable of knowing him and judging him, while freedom of choice should be man’s first right, since it had been given to him by the Creator: since the beginning of the world, for his salvation or perdition, but always for his use.
When he talked about this matter to his students, Ben Israel would repeat his favorite quote from Deuteronomy, “I, God, have set before you life and death; blessings and curses: choose life,” highlighting the possibility of choice more than the final choice itself, and many times, as the climax, he would narrate the extraordinary story of one of his distant in-laws, Don Judah Abravanel, the man who, for the salvation of his life and that of his lineage, had chosen to publicly hand over his faith and deny all of his convictions. According to the story (Elias always believed it to be fiction on the Hakham’s part to emphasize the family’s messianic destiny even more), that man was the son of the powerful Isaac Abravanel, who gave so much support and so much money so that the Genovese Columbus could set sail with his vessels and bring power and glory to the Spanish Crown. Nonetheless, he also had to flee the country where for many centuries his ancestors had lived and prospered in order to seek refuge in Lisbon, like many other Jews pursued by the bishops of that same Spanish Crown (which, before expelling them, had confiscated their very considerable goods, as Grandfather Benjamin always recalled whenever he spoke of this and other persecutions). But, according to the teacher’s story, it was in the year 1497 that Judah Abravanel lived the greatest moment of his existence: he, his wife, and his children, along with dozens of other Sephardic families, ended up confined in the cathedral in Lisbon and, by royal decree, were placed before the terrible choice to which Christians reduced the options of practitioners of the Law of Moses. Either they accepted Catholic baptism or they were taken to torture and death on the bonfire. (At this point—Elias remembered well—Hakham ben Israel would usually make a dramatic pause, destined to feed the awe of his pupils, although he saved the best silence for later on.) Many of the Jews trapped in the cathedral, hundreds of them, in order to not see themselves humiliated by the act of baptism, decided to die for their faith sanctifying the name of God. They chose sacrifice, as ordered by the Scripture, and began to kill their children and wives, and then killed themselves: if they had weapons, they slit their own throats, they cut their own veins, they wounded themselves in the heart, and if they were unarmed, then they strangled themselves with their belts and even with their own hands, and later sacrificed themselves by beating their own skulls against the temple’s columns, which, it was said, still dripped with the great amount of blood absorbed by its stones. But not Judah Abravanel, the Hakham would say at this point of the story. That denial fell like a wave of relief over the adolescents, who were terrified by the story of other Jews’ suffering i
n a way that they, the fortunate inhabitants of Amsterdam, the New Jerusalem where the doors had been opened to the sons of Israel, could not imagine enduring.
Judah Abravanel, whose line—as was well-known—went back to the very house of King David, was a doctor by profession and would be the poet who, under the name Léon Hebreo, would write the famous Dialoghi d’amore, read several times by Ben Israel to his students. A learned man, pious and rich, he had been trapped by the most painful circumstance and made his choice: Don Judah had taken his wife and children by the hand and, slipping about in the Jewish blood spilled in the Christian temple, had advanced toward the altar, clamoring for baptism (and here the Hakham made his longest silence). Choosing life. Even as his heart wept, conscious that his decision broke one of the inviolable precepts (“Do you know what those precepts are?”), Don Judah Abravanel walked willing to throw it all to the fire, to lose the salvation of his soul, but conscious of what his life and the lives of his children meant or could mean for the history of the world according to the cosmic proportions of a rigorous divine plan: they were the open channel on the path of the Messiah … Besides, with the example given by that man, considered a stalwart of the community, Don Judah saved the lives of many of the Jews enclosed in the church, who, knowing his prestige, influenced by his lineage, decided to imitate him …
Thanks to that act, incidentally, the Hakham would say—more relaxed, perhaps even with a hint of irony—Judah Abravanel was alive enough to flee Portugal with his people, settle in Italy, and, in the most favorable circumstances, again acquire wealth and return to the faith in which he had been born and where he was meant to be. In any event, Don Judah, perhaps forgiven by the infinite understanding of the Holiest, blessed may He be, had left behind a moving lesson (and here, the skillful narrator would usually allow a last silence to fall): at each moment, the wise man should act in the best way his intelligence deems, because the Creator has given humans that capacity for a reason. The Holiest had taught His people that no power, no humiliation, not even the most heated repression or conglomeration of pain and fear, could blow out the flame of desire for freedom burning in the heart of a man willing to fight for it, willing even to humiliate himself to reach that freedom, and He had taught them, after life was over, to trust in the Final Judgment. Because the desire for freedom is inseparable from the individuality of man, that intricate divine creation.
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