The Running Years

by Claire Rayner

  And her death saved her children, for her husband, the bereft and frantic Simão Da Montana turned back to his Jewish family in despair and renounced the church so that when the time came Isabella and Ferdinand, seeking to rid themselves of Jews for good and all, issued their edict, he found he would like in consequence.

  In Granada in 31 March 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand signed their decree.

  From Dona Ferdinand and Doña Isabella to the Jews of all cities and towns, villages and places in our kingdom and under our rule. We hereby order all Jews, male and female of whatever age who live in our kingdom, those who were born here and those who were not, to leave our kingdom by the end of the month of July next year. They must leave with their sons and their daughters, their Jewish servants and their families and abjure Spain. They shall not ever again be permitted to live in there former residence…

  The little boats began to leave, slipping away from Barcelona and Tarragon, Valencia, Alicante and Cartegena, Malaga and Cadiz and very port in between. They left their land and workshops behind them, but took some gold and jewels, tied around their middles, and all their families. Two hundred thousand of them went, some said.

  Not so the Conversos. For the next four hundred years that hated inquisition went on. Long after Torquemada closed his fanatically gleaming eyes in death his successors carried on his work with enthusiasm, though it dwindled in its later years. A later King of Spain, Ferdinand VII, abolished the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1820, although it was not until 1834 it was finally to splutter and die. Not that it mattered to the people in the tightly packed ships bobbing about on the seas around Spain in 1492. They had more important matters to think about. Like living.

  Doña Rachel died at sea, crossing the Bay of Biscay, to be wept over by those of her family who had escaped with her. Yet she died content enough, for she had been right, as Doña Susannah had been. The true Jews, those who had resisted conversion, had lived. Stripped of almost all their rights, hungry and frightened, their few remaining possessions on their backs, they were again traversing a hostile world. But they were alive. They had a future, however grim.

  7

  Day succeeded day as water and food ran low, and babies were born and circumcised and old people died and were consigned to the sea as Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, was intoned over them. They slipped ashore where they could go to refill the water barrels and barter what few bits and pieces of value they had left for sacks of grain and then took off again, hoping, praying, expecting daily to make a safe and final landfall.

  Those who took to the Mediterranean were fortunate, by and large. Many dies of course, if not of scurvy or fevers, then by being swept overboard from the crowded decks on blustery nights, and many of the wooden ships bucketed themselves to death and sank with all hands. But many of them managed to cross the threatening expanse of heaving water and find refuge.

  There were those who reached Italy, to come ashore bedraggled and half dead at Genoa and Livorno, or even as far south as Naples. One group reached Sardinia and hoped to settle there only to discover that there too the Jews had been expelled by decree and were on their way somewhere else. So they took to sea again, and went to the North African shore, to Tunis and Algiers, and so on inland to Fez.

  One most brave captain, who had been prudent enough to take the biggest ship he could find, stock it high with food and water and limit the number of his passengers, however much they pleaded to be allowed to overcrowd themselves, struck far to the south east, delivering the remnants of his human cargo – for many died of sheer misery on the long way – to Smyrna and then to Salonika. Others, less ambitious but still far flung, plunged deep into the Adriatic and came ashore at Venice. Those who settled there did quite well. Not so their friends who had come to land on the other shore, on the Hungarian side; they were set on by bandits and killed for the rags of clothes they stood up in, and their few remaining trinkets.

  Those who left Spain from the port of Cadiz, which included the majority of the Da Montanas who survived, fared better. Their captains opted to travel north, hugging the Portuguese coast for the first weeks – they travelled very slowly – as the frightened passengers discussed the possibility of coming ashore at Lisbon or Oporto. But good sense prevailed, for as Simão Da Montana pointed out, ‘A Kingdom so close to Spain – how can it escape the same infection as that which has fallen on us?’ In which he was wise, for the Portuguese Jews were to be expelled barely five years later.

  On they went, round past Corunna to Capo Ortegal, on into the Bay of Biscay. That was hell indeed, and there were those who found it in their hearts to envy old Doña Rachel her release by death there. What were they suffering this misery of sea sickness for, after all? A delayed death when they arrived God alone knew where?

  Wicked thoughts, said Simão Da Montana and he harangued them into strength again. His own suffering and status as a man bereaved by the Inquisition had given him another status, that of the leader of their shipload, and they listened to him, and huddled into the corners of the decks, slippery as they were with sea water and vomit, and prayed and wept and prayed again.

  The reached the other side of the Bay as summer died in October gales, rounding Finisterre, beating the Gulf of St Malo, going they did not know where any more. So long had they been on this floating slum that it had become home. There had been two weddings and half a dozen births and more deaths than Doña Rachel’s, and a sort of government had been set up by Don Simão, and they were content enough. Here at sea where the world was safe and sure and the sun rose each morning and set each evening with its utterly predictable pattern, where there was no Inquisition to turn the world on its ears and perhaps force the sun one day to rise in the west, there were less fear, less need to cower against the sins of other men. Here there were just themselves and their God. It was not a bad way to be.

  So, they took on more supplies at Cherbourg and went on, through the English Channel, staring with vague interest at the towering white cliffs of the cold dreary island that had given the narrow waters their name, and then curved southwards towards the coast of the Low Countries, as those white cliffs, beetling over the turbulent waters, sank into the mist. ‘Shall we go there?’ asked a child, who was beginning to feel restless, and was one of the ignorant young ones who wanted the journey to end. ‘Shall we do there?’

  ‘Not there,’ said Simão. ‘Not there. Too cold. Too northerly.’ In fact some of the ships that were behind them, which had also come bobbing cork-like and indomitable across the Bay of Biscay, did turn north and land in England, coming ashore at Hastings where, had they known it, some of their more remote ancestors had landed wi6h William the Conqueror, four hundred years ago. They vanished into the raw mists and biting cold of that dank island, and found comfort and peace there. Their place at last had come.

  Simão Da Montana’s place came when their vessel, now beginning to shop more water at a time than they could pump out, rounded the coast of Flanders. There were mists hereto, spreading themselves wraithlike across the great sand spits and mud flats of that low-lying coast, but somehow he felt a beckoning there. Perhaps it was that he had had time to contain his grief for this dead Catalina. Perhaps it was because of a stirring of his old instincts to prosper rather than merely survive; whatever it was, he called a council of the men of the ship, and told them, rather than asked them, to settle there.

  ‘I believe that God is telling us that this is where we shall find peace and goodness of God stirring in me. He is calling us to this place and we must heed Him.’

  The other men, less mystical than Simão, whom they regarded as somewhat touched in his head by all his suffering, and lacking his sense of a personal relationship with Jehovah, yet agreed. So far, safety at sea had been enough. Now they too were ready for more. Anyway, they were hungry, and food was running out as fast as water was running in. They had barely enough left in personal gold and silver to start themselves up again in business wherever they happened to land.
The place and time had come.

  Which was how they arrived in Amsterdam, after twenty weeks at sea, slipping up through the Zuider Zee into its snug harbour, to come ashore and stand swaying weakly on its well found jetty as they looked about their new home. They found some Jews there to welcome them, secret ones of course, for practising Jews were welcome nowhere. They were wise people who had also come from Spain some years ago. They had seen the way the wind was blowing long before and slipped out of their homeland before there was any compulsion to do so, while they had been to bring their fortune with them.

  They had brought their good hearts too, and took care of the new arrivals. ‘Do not,’ they warned them, ‘make display of yourselves. You may not confess in public to being Jews, remember that. There remains the Spanish domination.’

  ‘Then we must go on,’ Da Montana asked alarmed. ‘We can’t stay. They’ve expelled us once, and will do it again. The Inquisition – ’

  ‘No’, said their mentors and laughed. ‘No. The people of these low lands are not the peasant of Sepharad, and never you think it. They will never have the Inquisition here. They have refused it. Good Catholics though they are, they have no lover for Spanish ideas or Torquemadas of their own. Keep quite and be discreet and you will prosper here.

  Some of the travellers believed what they were told, but many didn’t, and they restocked their poor old ship, and set off again, planning to go further north to Hamburg. Among those who stayed were Simão dam Montana and his three children (the baby girl had died three were out at sea). He stayed because he discovered that one of the party of Marranos who met them was a kinsman. Jacob Damont.

  ‘It is better not to sound too Spanish, you know.’ Jacob told Simão. ‘I shall tell my friends and colleagues that you are Simon Damont, my cousin. They’ll be glad to know you because they are glad enough to know me. I think we can find work for you. One way or another. And I have a daughter who in a year or so will be ripe for that lively looking lad of yours, the bigger one. How old do you say his? Twelve? Hmm. Nearly ready for you to be thinking of a bride for him. Hey young Fernando? Another three years or so, and you can settle down nicely. Nicely…’

  Simão Da Montana felt surprisingly comfortable as he walked alongside his kinsman across the bridges towards his home in the east of the City of Amsterdam. Simão Da Montana. Those had days were gone, as dead as his Catalina. Now he was Simon Damont, a new citizen of a new land.

  Times were good again for the children of Susanna. Life in the northern land was safe as long as they were discreet about being Jews and did not publish their practices. Simon learned to live with the climate and its rains and mists and accepted with a philosophical shrug the rheumatism that came to plague his old age. ‘Better to be racked by the screws of my own bones than to be pulled on a Spanish rack,’ he would tell his grandchildren, and they would look at each other and make little grimaces, for they were bored, very bored, by Grandpapa’s tales of the bad old days.

  They weren’t event sure they believed half of them; how could they believe, living as they did in their big comfortable houses alongside the canals of their beautiful Amsterdam, growing fat and sleek on their grate meals of butter and cream cheese and good roast goose? They had busy happy lives, the young Damonts, in their hidden, private classrooms, learning the Talmud and the great stories and the complexities of industries and law, and scorned their ignorant old grandfather, who shared none of the scholarship. He told them that he was ignorant of the Books of the Law and the stories Moses and Isaac and Jacob and all the Mishnan and the Midrash because of his past sufferings, because he had been forced to embrace the Cross. They did not believe that, for did he not sit with the other men when they prayed in their houses, secretly, his shawl over his head?

  Simon did not object to their scorn. He knew of it, and smiled into his beard at it. To have children like these large and noisy downy-checked boys, tall and straight and free to walk with their heads up, looking everyone in the face, unafraid and even haughty ,was what the hell of their grandmother’s death and the journey that followed their expulsion had been about. He and his Catalina had suffered that the children might laugh at their stupid old grandfather.

  That he had done quite well since his arrival in Amsterdam added to his self-esteem, and so made him even more tolerant of his grandfather’s intolerance. By the time Jacob Damont had led him and his sons from the jerry towards their new home in the city, all his money had gone. What little he had been able to take away from Cordoba had gone in victualling the ship, buying tar and canvas for repairs, seeing his fellow passengers on their way to Hamburg.

  But that had not mattered; Jacob ad talked to him long into that first night in his snug house, while the children slept curled up together in their cousins’ beds, and mapped out a plan. He would make a loan to Simon, a sizeable loan, for the purchase of gold and tools. The Simon would employ three of his fellow travelers who had decided, like him, to remain in Amsterdam, and who were, God be praised, goldsmiths. They would make their necklaces and trinket boxes, their rings and bracelets, and Simon would sell them. There should be enough in the enterprise to make a profit and pay off the loan within a reasonable time.

  Jacob was wise indeed. Within a couple of years Simon had a thriving business. His employees worked hard and made enough for themselves to but small but comfortable houses in the less elegant parts of the city, and he made enough of pay off his debts to his kinsman, and buy even and more fashionable home for himself and his growing sons.

  Another ten years, and he was even more established. Linked now to Jacob by the marriage they arranged between their children, and making enough profit to be able to enlarge his business, he employed seven goldsmiths, as well as dealing more and more in precious stones in addition to precious metal.

  He never married again. He had been thirty years old when he lost his Catalina, but theirs had been a love match, and he could not contemplate ever sharing with another woman what he had known with her. It would have been a desecration of her memory. But he was content enough, looked after by a plump Dutch housekeeper, his sons and daughters-in-law treating him with respect due to one of his importance, and with his growing brood of grandchildren.

  They were as fecund here as they had been in Spain, the Da Montanas. By the time old Simon Damont was called to his fathers and to his Catalina again in 1517 there were fourteen grandchildren, born of his sons, and the oldest of them, Simon (for in accordance with Sephardic customs the oldest grandchild was named for his paternal grandfather) was already betrothed.

  This Simon, who mourned his grandfather the requisite number of days, although only his uncles sat on low chairs with their heads smeared with ashes and their garments torn, praying morning, noon and evening, felt a genuine sense of loss. In his young years he had with his brothers and his cousins laughed at the old man, but now he knew better. Though only twenty years old, he was, he felt, in touch with the realities of life in a way he never had been in his boyhood. ‘They were stern realities,’ he told himself. As he took spade in his hand and threw earth on his grandfather’s in its grace, then made way for his brothers to do the same. ‘The new world the old man brought us to is full of promise for energetic people like me. I’ll make it better for him.’

  Confused thoughts for who could make life better for a dead man? But young Simon Asher Damont knew what he meant, and he meant it wholeheartedly. He vowed that he would always remember the old man and his stories of Spain, the ancient Sephardic of his people.

  The future looked rosy for Simon, as he mourned his grandfather. The people of the mountain had come to a safe haven, and he was going to make sure it would be a rich and comfortable one was well as safe.

  But despite his pretensions, Simon Asher was drawn away from the Sephardic practices of his grandfather’s family. The magnet was a red-headed girl named Sarah Van Praag.

  They were outlanders, the Van Praags, his wife’s family, essentially coarse and uncultured. Not his pr
ecious Sarah, of course, but her father and brothers, newly come to Amsterdam from Hamburg, were a rough lot. Nevertheless, they had sent Sarah into marriage with a good dowry, and they were good businessmen however uncouth they might seem to Simon Asher Demont’s fastidious family. With their many cousins in not only Hamburg but also Leipzig and Lublin and Vienna, the offered a useful network for a young man with his eye on the newly developing trade routes that were opening up, and which needed financing. Simon’s brothers Solomon and Elias were deeply entrenched in the family gold and precious stone business, and he could use them as part of his new business schemes.

  They would, like his cousins by marriage, support and interest in him, though Simon Asher never truly understood what it was about these alien people that made them so successful. Indeed, the Van Praags themselves could not. They knew that they intended to prosper where other did not. That a few crowns in their hands could be doubles, trebled, quadrupled, in a fraction of the time it took some of their Christian neighbours. Not all of them; some of them. There were Christian merchants as hard working, as busy, as efficient as they were themselves and they too prospered. But by and large, it was the Jews and especially the Van Praags who did best. Why?

  ‘It’s because we never feel settled,’ old Isaac Van Praag told his son-in-law. ‘When you feel comfortable in a place, when you know tomorrow or the day after it doesn’t matter, you’ll still be there and able to collect your debts, it takes the edge off you. But us – how do we know what will happen next? Sure, sure I know, thirty-five years I lived in Hamburg. It’s a long time. But I remember another time when had to leave Nancy, in France where my mother was born, because they started bating the Jews again. So we had to go. And debts we hadn’t collected, we had to leave behind. My father told me then, it’s a bad thing to leave your debts uncollected. They don’t love you any better for it, your neighbours, believe me. All the time they owe you, they hate you. So collect soon, and they hate you a shorter time - and you’ve got your money safe in your hand to lend again. Remember that, Simon Asher, and you’ll be as good a banker as your brothers-in-law.’