Dogs of God

by James Reston Jr

  Isabella came in for her share of criticism in the Hebrew chronicles as well. In her complicity in the expulsion, she was likened to Jezebel, the wicked and evil genius of biblical Phoenicia, symbol of feminine depravity and betrayal. Some regarded the queen as the pure anti-Semite who was provoked by Torquemada and became the real instigator behind the expulsion, and whose problem was to overcome the softness in her husband’s heart, because of his Jewish blood.

  Why would the king and queen have done such a terrible thing? The question tormented the wise men among the Jews, and a number of explanations were put forward. One of the most interesting came from a rabbi and scholar named Solomon Ibn Verga. To him, Ferdinand was ashamed after the conquest of Granada and wondered how he could find favor in the eyes of his God, who had given him victory on the battlefield. “In what way can I promote my Creator who has given me the city of Granada into my hands,” the rabbi imagined the king saying to himself, “except by bringing under my wing the nation that walks in darkness, the lost lamb Israel, to return the silly, wayward daughter to my faith? I will say to the Jews, ”If you will denounce God, be baptized and bow in worship to my God, then the fat of the land you will eat like me. But if you refuse and rebel, I will exile you far away to some other land. After three months, there will not be even a crumb left of anything that is called Jacob.‘“

  If many vented their anger at Ferdinand, others were mired in terror and self-pity and self-loathing. They were living once again the prophecy of Moses. For their disobedience and transgressions, the Lord was scattering them and making them serve other gods, even ones of wood and stone which neither they nor their fathers had known. They would have no rest, but rather a trembling heart, the failing of eyes, the languishing of soul. King Ferdinand was an instrument of a vengeful God wielded against a sinful people. “In God’s hatred of us,” wrote one deportee, “He made Ferdinand King over all of Spain. In his evil decrees, the king did what his fathers and his fathers’ fathers had not done… And the Lord’s word was in the conflagration. The land of Spain burned with the fire of God.” From such divine vengeance there was no escape. Another writer found certification in the words of the prophet Jeremiah (48:43–44), “Fear, and the pit, and the snare shall be upon thee, O inhabitant of Moab, saith the Lord. He that fleeth from the fear shall fall into the pit; and he that getteth up out of the pit shall be taken in the snare: for I will bring upon it, even upon Moab, the year of their visitation, saith the Lord.”

  The year 1492 was the year of their visitation.

  Christian commentators naturally saw things differently. They too regarded Ferdinand as an agent of providence. The king had ordered the expulsion “in the love of God, when he could no longer bear the actions of those who had crucified Jesus.” Andrés Bernáldez, the scribe of the monarchs, the friend of Columbus and chronicler of his voyages, felt Ferdinand had done the Jews a great favor. In his chronicle he described how the rabbis of Spain explained Ferdinand’s action to their people. “They bade them know,” wrote Bernáldez, “that this thing came from God, who wished to lead them from servitude and bring them to the Promised Land. In this departure they would see how God would do many miracles for them and bring them from Spain with wealth and great honor, as they hoped; and that if they encountered any misfortune or setback along the way, they would witness how God would lead them as He had done for their fathers in Egypt.”

  Another Christian commentator felt that the expulsion touched upon the glory of religion. The edict might be cruel, he admitted, that is, “if we regard Jews not as animals but as human beings and creatures of God.” The Renaissance man, Pico della Mirandola, was ambivalent. “The sufferings of the Jews, in which the glory of Divine Justice delights,” he said, “were so extreme as to fill us Christians with commiseration.” And years later, Machiavelli in The Prince saw the expulsion not as a religious but as a rare act of political daring. Perhaps the edict was “pious cruelty,” but it was an example of how a successful prince can make good, if cynical, use of religion, thus enabling him to undertake greater and more heroic enterprises.

  As France closed its borders to the refugees, the path of least resistance led to Portugal. For a handsome price, João II had agreed to accept the deportees temporarily. After the refugee paid his exit fee to Spain, he faced an entry fee at the Portuguese frontier of 8 gold cruzados per person. More than half the Jews took this route.

  And so the sad procession began. Even the most rabid Jew hater could not but be moved by the spectacle. Three days before their departure, the Jews of Segovia gathered at the graves of their forefathers and shattered tombstones to carry away the shards into exile with them. The sight of the bedraggled, wretched refugees along the dusty roads evoked great admiration. “Over the fields they pass, in much travail and misfortune, some falling, others standing up, some dying, others being born, others falling sick, that there was not a Christian but felt sorrow for them,” a witness wrote. “And always where they went the Christians invited them to be baptized. Some in their misery would convert and remain, but very few. The rabbis continually gave them strength and made the women and girls sing, and play tambourines and timbrels, to raise the people’s spirits.”

  The remainder left by sea, embarking upon whatever rattletrap tub they could find to take them. From Cádiz and Almería, they headed for North Africa, from Barcelona and Valencia to Italy or Turkey. As their property had been stolen from them in their own villages, and on the road to their embarkation points, so too many were attacked and robbed by their sea captains or by pirates once they were in open waters.

  “Half dead mothers held dying children in their arms,” wrote one commentator. “I can hardly say how cruelly and greedily they were treated by those who transported them. Many were drowned by the avarice of the sailors, and those who were unable to pay their passage sold their children.”

  If they made it safely to their destinations, thieves and slavers awaited them onshore. All suffered; many died; until, as one said, only a few remained of the many.

  And so on the 9th day of Av, they sat on the ground, wherever they were, tore the cloth from their Torah scrolls, dimmed their lamps, and read from the book of Lamentations. As Jerusalem was destroyed in the days of Nebuchadnezzar and Titus, so Jerusalem in Spain was destroyed. They were paying for their disobedience to the Law of Moses once again. Their affliction was of their own doing. Yet another generation was paying for the sins of their fathers, enduring the curse of Moab, finding themselves scattered even to the geographical limits of the known world.

  And what of the court rabbis, Don Abraham Senior and Don Isaac Abravanel? What would be their choice? To leave and take up the wanderer’s staff or to stay and betray one’s faith? The choice was Hobbesian in its horror and its impossibility, a Jewish version of the choice between the pit and the snare.

  For Don Isaac Abravanel the horror seemed the worse of the two, for he agonized about it more publicly. Because his faith was deeper, his disillusionment was more intense, and at first, he would seem ripe for apostasy. Later he wrote profusely about his initial confusion and bitterness. His anger was raw and vivid. Yet it was directed not at his royal tormentors but inward, at himself, at his own people, at the failure of his ancient texts, even at his vengeful God. His first reaction was to despair that all hope had been lost.

  The catastrophe was so much worse than anyone could ever have imagined. At first he seized upon the passage in the psalms of praise in the Haggadah (116:11): “I said in my haste all men are liars.” It seemed to Abravanel that in this disaster all the prophets, Moses with his promises, Isaiah in his words of comfort, Jeremiah and Ezekiel in their prophecies—all were liars. “Our hope is lost,” he despaired, “the anointed God of Jacob is dead or broken or imprisoned. His sun will not shine.”

  The pressure on him to convert was enormous, since he was famous in the land and vital to the financial well-being of the realm. When ordinary measures failed to work, harsher tactics were tried. H
is grandson was kidnapped and secretly taken to Portugal, where he was held ransom to conversion. Later, the boy’s father, Isaac’s son Judah, wrote a poem about the kidnapping.

  At the same time that exiles fled from Spain

  The King set up an ambush and bespake

  That I be barred from safely passing through,

  So that he might my youngest suckling take

  And make of him a convert to his faith.

  But the ploy failed.

  For one so devout as Don Isaac Abravanel, only one path was possible. It was consistent with the fate of his people and his fathers and himself. His forebears had fled Castile after the persecutions in 1391. They had gone to Portugal, settled and prospered, until he personally had been forced to flee the King of Portugal in 1483 in the purge of dissidents. Since Don Isaac now stood convicted of the capital crime of conspiracy there, Portugal was closed to him as a destination. He would take his family to Italy.

  In the weeks after the edict, he worked feverishly to liquidate his assets. His holdings were vast and complicated: leases, mines, lands, herds of cattle, properties, commercial ventures, tax fees. From the towns under his supervision in central Castile alone, he was owed more than 1 million maravedis. To collect these debts and to settle the books in good faith for the cardinal and the Queen of Spain was a gargantuan task, especially in an environment where debtors were stalling for time. Ironically, Abravanel sought help from the officers of the law to pressure his debtors to pay up.

  In late July, only days before the deadline, the clan of Abravanel gathered in Valencia for its departure to Naples. After all his trouble to salvage a vestige of his wealth, he would be permitted to leave the country only if he renounced his claim to funds owed to him by the crown itself. As a special dispensation to him, the crown relaxed its more stringent provisions and allowed him to leave with 1,000 gold ducats. (Later, Christian writers would tell of the anatomical marvel of Jews smuggling ducats out of the country in their stomachs. Women were said to be especially amazing. Some of them, it was claimed, could swallow 30 ducats at once!)

  The departure of the Abravanel family was delayed several days, since Don Isaac’s brother, Yose Abravanel, was called to testify at a trial of the Inquisition. Inquisitional trials in Valencia had the reputation of being spirited affairs. For Yose Abravanel, this last brush with the Spanish Inquisition was a detail, and he gave his testimony freely, to the prosecution. His affairs were in order. He had sold his house to the other court rabbi, Don Abraham Senior.

  The mind of Don Isaac Abravanel rested upon the larger tragedy. Of Spanish Jewry, he would write eloquently:

  “There never was such a chosen people in beauty and pleasantness. There will never be another such people. God is with them, the children of Judea and Jerusalem, many and strong… a quiet and trusting people, a people filled with the blessing of God with no end to its treasures.”

  In mid-May 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella left Granada and traveled north to the holy retreat of Guadalupe. Remote in rugged country of sharp defiles and mesas, the village was famous as a pilgrimage site. Its Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe on the town’s plaza was dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose statue there was believed to have been carved by St. Luke and which had miraculously survived the Moorish occupation until it had been discovered by a shepherd in 1330. Somehow it seemed appropriate that at this pivotal moment of religious history in Spain, Isabella and her crusading husband should surround themselves with pious friars and incense and sacred music and legends of saints and virgins, as they pondered the purification of their realm. The place exuded its evangelizing piety and had inspired the saying,

  He who is a count and wishes to be a Duke

  Becomes a priest in Guadalupe

  The royal retinue was joined by the court rabbi, eighty-year-old Don Abraham Senior. The pressure on him to convert was no less than it had been on Abravanel, and there were indications after the edict that he too was leaning toward exile. Queen Isabella was confident that she could persuade him otherwise. At his advanced age, twenty-five years older than his protégé, Senior was less able to endure the hardships of exile. He had even more wealth to lose, and his reach was national rather than regional. Should he defect as well, the finances for the nation would be thrown into total chaos. But he was also less inclined to choose his faith over his position in the court. If his love for his people was above question, the pleasure in his vast financial empire was great. More importantly, the sincerity of his religious beliefs had always been in doubt. A fellow rabbi had said of Senior that he “lacked knowledge and a fear of God.”

  The monarchs needed to be sure, and Queen Isabella stepped into the breach. If Senior did not convert, she threatened coldly, she would obliterate the Jewish community totally and pulverize their properties. And so, the apologists wrote later, Senior “did what he did to save the lives of many people, and not of his own desire.”

  On June 15, 1492, six weeks before the deadline, in the apse of the Church of Santa María de Guadalupe, Don Abraham Senior was baptized in the Christian faith with the grace of the Holy Spirit. They made of it an extravagant affair. The royal council was in attendance, including Rodrigo Maldonado and the converso and Columbus saviour Luis de Santángel. The Cardinal of Spain officiated, as the papal nuncio stood at his side. The king and queen assumed the role of godparents as Senior took the aristocratic name of Fernando Núñez Coronel. The very name was an amalgam of all the right touchstones: Fernando, after King Ferdinand; Núñez, a common forename in the House of Mendoza; Coronel, suggesting a colonel or a person of rank. Within a few weeks, in addition to his normal duties in the exchequer, he was appointed the alderman of Segovia, a political post that only a Christian could hold.

  The conversion was a great victory for the crown. The cash flow to the royal treasury was safe. The message spread rapidly that the most prominent Jew in Spain had become a Christian. In the Jewish communities the reaction was amazement and sadness, but most of all, embarrassment. Senior, nay Coronel, stood alone, an anti-leader and heretic to Judaism. Among the thousands who converted, compared to the tens of thousands who went into exile, only he had stature and influence. He would be cursed as the “enemy of light,” and a number of his own immediate family rejected his path.

  For many, the word of his conversion fired their determination further.

  “Let us be strong, for our religion, for the Law of our fathers before our enemies and blasphemers,” one of their wise men proclaimed. “If they will let us live, we shall live; if they kill us, then shall we die. We will not desecrate the covenant of our God. Our heart shall not fail us. We will go forth in the name of the Lord.”

  23

  The Curse of Palos

  PALOS

  On May 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus left Granada for Palos. He traveled the coach road 170 miles due west to Seville, descending from the plateau of Granada into the luxuriant breadbasket of the glorious and now fallen Caliphate of Al Andalus. Through the foothills and fertile fields of the Genil Valley, past ancient olive orchards and wheat fields and groves of scarlet oak and palmetto, the towns he passed had been of stategic importance in the War Against the Moors: Santa Fe, Loja, Antequera, and Marchena, where the hero of the war, the paragon of medieval chivalry, Rodrigo Ponce de León, the marquis of Cádiz, had retired to his ducal palace and would soon be dead of weariness. In Moorish Marchena, thoughts of both the past and the future raced through the Admiral’s head. Here Boabdil had made his last gasp, one that had made Columbus’s journey across the Ocean Sea possible. The town was also the birthplace of his ever faithful Franciscan friend Antonio of Marchena, the amateur astronomer of the monastery at La Rábida in Palos.

  His journey was slow, for Jews choked the roads. If Columbus was touched by the sight of these wretched refugees, there is no suggestion of it in his writings or those of his son. What he did write to his patrons in this prologue to his voyage was his self-serving celebration of their a
ctions against the Moors and the Jews, praising the king and queen as “enemies of the sect of Mahomet and of all idolatries and heresies.” He gloried in the fact that the monarchs had approved his voyage in the same season as they had exiled all Jews from the realm.

  Columbus then came into the great valley of the Guadalquivir. After tarrying briefly in Seville with his mistress, Beatriz Enríquez de Arana, he continued west 40 miles into the valley of the Rio Tinto, arriving at Palos on May 22. The journey of 300 miles had taken him ten days.

  At the Monastery of La Rábida the brothers Antonio and Juan Perez greeted him excitedly, for his arrival at last as an official agent of the crown and an Admiral of the Ocean Sea was a personal triumph for the friars. Having been Columbus’s constant advocates throughout, the brothers had always hoped that Palos and their monastery would share in the great glory they imagined lay ahead. No doubt, the candles burned late and low that night, as the map of the known world was spread out on the heavy walnut table in the refectory, and the difficulties of finding the ships and recruiting a veteran crew were discussed into the wee hours of the morning.

  The following day, on a promontory overlooking the Tinto just outside the village, a formal assemblage of local dignitaries, the mayor, alderman, and constables of Palos, gathered on the steps of the Church of St. George. The church had once been a mosque, its Moorish arch still visible within a later Christian makeover, and it stood in the shadow of a Moorish castle on higher ground. With Columbus and the friars at his side, the notary public stepped forward to proclaim the royal decree in important, stentorian tones. The officials of the town stiffened as the preamble of the decree was read. “You will know that, because of certain acts performed and committed by you to Our detriment, you were condemned by Our council and obliged to provide Us for twelve months with two caravels equipped at your own expense, whenever and wherever by Us, under fixed penalties, as is provided in detail in the aforementioned decree which was pronounced against you.”