The Elixir of Immortality

by Gabi Gleichmann

  For more than a century he wended his way across the land from Andalusia in the south to the Pyrenees in the north. He stopped in tiny villages and in large cities, and encountered a foul stench everywhere. That unbearable smell was not due to the people’s custom of dumping their night soil in the streets, making the towns steam with the impurities running in the gutters. The stink that followed him on his journeys across Spain was caused by something else that was rotten through and through.

  MY GREAT-UNCLE would never speak about his own life to Sasha and me. When we asked about his background he didn’t reply and abruptly changed the subject. But just one time he mentioned, as if in passing, that he had lived in Vienna in the 1930s and worked on a study of the plight of the Jews in fourteenth-century Spain. I don’t remember how the subject came up. He summarized it for us. We always listened in admiration to his stories and they always cast a powerful spell upon me—except for that one time. That is why I remember the occasion so well.

  He said that just like Hitler, who had dreamed of a Germany of racial purity, the churchmen of the Spanish Inquisition were obsessed with limpieza de sangre, the purity of the blood. They suspected everyone of having impure blood and there was a requirement that people prove that in their veins there flowed not a drop of mala sangre, contaminated blood. The offices of the Inquisition were heaped high with reports of individuals designated to be examined, tested, and isolated from the rest of the population. My great-uncle explained that the manhunt was completely absurd, of course, considering that Spaniards were already a mixture of Basques, Celts, Iberians, Phoenicians, West Goths, Vandals, Arabs, and Jews. There was not a single racially pure person anywhere in the whole land.

  The Jews were special targets, he emphasized to us. In hopes of escaping the brutalities of the Inquisition, a minority of the Jews began to work for their persecutors. He called them “collaborators” and said that their denunciations split families apart. Worse, many converted to Christianity and accepted baptism so as to save their own lives and those of their children. This way they were permitted to reside outside the Jewish quarter, to avoid wearing the humiliating red badges sewn on the fronts of their garments, and to practice their trades.

  Sasha and I exchanged a puzzled glance as we tried to make out the meaning of the incomprehensible words “mala sangre,” “excluded,” “collaborators,” and “converts.” We wouldn’t have understood it any better even if our great-uncle had been able to communicate it to us in Spanish. He didn’t notice—or pretended not to notice—that we were listening to him without much enthusiasm, wondering what on earth he was talking about. We would have much rather listened to stories of his life in Vienna in the 1930s, but neither of us dared to interrupt him.

  Suddenly the door opened with a jerk and Grandmother stormed into the kitchen where we sat around the table. She stopped short and glared at my great-uncle. He tensed and fell silent.

  “Franci, you’re not feeding the children more of your absurd tales, are you?” she asked, a dangerous light in her eyes.

  “No, no,” he answered. “We were talking about chess. I was just telling the boys about that amazing championship match in the spring of 1921 between José Raúl Capablanca and the reigning grand master Emanuel Lasker. After four defeats, Lasker gave up and blamed it on his failing health. It was a world sensation. I’ll never forget the moment when I heard the news on the radio. It was on my last day of internment at the Emilia-Romagna prisoner-of-war camp. The next morning I was going to travel back home to rejoin my family.”

  “Franci, Franci. Mind your tongue! Be careful what you say,” Grandmother said. She turned on her heel and vanished from the kitchen as suddenly as she had arrived.

  My great-uncle’s response to her immediately awakened our interest. We wanted to know what he had been doing in a prisoner-of-war camp. We had no idea where Emilia-Romagna might be and even less what “internment” meant. But we were intrigued. We never found the opportunity to ask him about it, however, for as soon as Grandmother had left, Fernando went back to his account of what life had been like for the Jews in that cruel totalitarian medieval Spanish society ruled by the all-powerful clerics and their merciless courts.

  A few minutes later when he noticed that we were less attentive than usual, he got up, took a pen and piece of paper out of a kitchen drawer, and began scribbling, preparing a diagram to show us that Salman de Espinosa had six male great-grandchildren and the eldest of them, Emmanuel, had six sons of his own, as follows:

  I.

  Ephraim. He lived as a pious Jew. On days other than the Sabbath and religious holidays he honored the covenant between God and Israel by wearing small black-lacquered boxes called tefillin, attached by winding leather cords seven times about his left arm, the one closer to the heart. As he recited Morning Prayer he would hold upon his head little boxes containing texts from the Fifth Book of Moses. He observed kosher and scrupulously adhered to tradition. In the autumn of his life he was obliged to flee the country and settle in Portugal. He was buried in Oporto.

  II.

  Elias. He accepted baptism but secretly remained a Jew. The spies of the Inquisition in the Ciudad Real noted that on Saturdays no smoke rose from his chimney (for the Jews neither prepared food on the Sabbath nor lit their fires) and he was arrested. He was charged with eating meat on days of obligatory fasting and reading the psalms of David in Hebrew. After several days of brutal torture they chopped off his hands and cut them into small bits. He was burned alive.

  III.

  Elon. He converted to Christianity at an early age after the face of Jesus appeared to him in a bowl of chicken soup his mother served him at Pesach. He decided that the purpose of his life was to promote Christianity and the propagation of God’s church. He discovered by accident that he could perform miracles. It was generally believed that he could make the deaf hear, the mute speak, and the blind see. He served for many years as the prior of the Dominican cloister in San Pablo and ended his days as the bishop of Santander.

  IV.

  Enoch. He fell in love with an elderly Christian widow and married her after converting to her faith. He studied law and became the mayor of Madrid, proved to be an outstanding administrator, and was named to a ministerial post in Castile. He persuaded the king and queen to publish a decree that obliged unbaptized Jews to wear a distinctive badge on their clothing and live in a walled-in sector of the city, separated from the general population. He died childless, a victim of internal hemorrhaging.

  V.

  Isaías. He was a clever man, a master of the art of concealment. As a young man he changed his name to Enrique Español, the goal being to erase all traces of his ancestry. He became a minion of the Inquisition, and he so surpassed his colleagues with his zeal in burning thousands of Jews at the stake that he quickly rose through the ranks. King Ferdinand became aware of his valuable contributions and he was granted the rank of commissioner as well as the responsibility of driving the Jews out of Spain.

  VI.

  Ezra. He was the family rebel. Because he had been fascinated as a boy by the stories of the Maccabee rebellion told by his father on Sabbath evenings, he decided to dedicate himself to resisting the forces of the Inquisition. He planned and participated in a failed attempt led by Salman de Espinosa to assassinate Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada. After enduring cruel torture he was forced onto the bonfire awaiting him in Seville. The last words from his lips before the flames ended his young life were, “Forgive me and show me your grace, Lord Jesus Christ.”

  ———

  AFTER HEARING all of this, it suddenly occurred to me that those distant relatives of mine were complete strangers to me. For a moment, their baseness and despicable characters made me ashamed to be a Spinoza.

  THE COMMON PEOPLE called them de Domini canes, the hunting dogs of God. The Dominicans were the bloodhounds of the Inquisition. They pursued heretics, those false Christians who pretended to have given up Jewish beliefs but clung in secr
et to certain traditions: they did not eat pork, they observed the Jewish Sabbath, or they fasted on days of repentance. They were called “Marranos,” a disparaging term that means “swine.”

  The Dominicans had informants to help them and their activity was greatly valued by the priests; vigorous, well-documented denunciation was a fine Catholic ideal. But in case the approval of the church were not enough, the informants were also encouraged with temporal compensation in the form of tax exonerations. In order to make it easier to frame denunciations, the Dominicans produced a manuscript detailing the twenty signs one could use to identify a Jew—by appearance, according to customary behavior, and by his manner of expressing himself.

  Marranos were hauled away from homes in town as well as from the Jewish quarter. The unfortunate victims were locked up in cellars of the cloisters that had been converted to the prisons of the Inquisition. There they were held and tortured by Dominicans and by members of the Santa Hermandad (Holy Brotherhood), a rabble consisting of robbers, soldiers, and amnestied prisoners. Many prisons were so overcrowded that the prisoners had to stand up even while sleeping.

  The Marranos were brought before so-called judges of the faith, with no idea of the charges against them and no way of defending themselves. Inquisitors wanted prompt confessions, and they did not care how they got them—whether with or without torture. Most of the time the summary trials ended with death sentences. Those could be commuted to life in prison if the culprits reconciled themselves with the mandates of the church. If it was later discovered that their conversions had not been in good faith, the hypocrites were promptly burned at the stake. Even individuals who had been dead for thirty years could be condemned as heretics. In such cases the remains were dug up and burned at the same time that their heirs’ possessions were confiscated.

  The Inquisition considered it of paramount importance to confiscate the property of its victims. This easily obtained revenue was divided between church and crown, but the determination of the respective shares was often a source of friction and dispute. The greed of the Spanish royal couple became notorious throughout Europe, and it was said openly that they had instituted the tribunals of the faithful only to enrich themselves with the wealth of the condemned. Such ridiculous assertions did not bother the royal pair in Madrid, however, as they dreamed of unifying Spain and instituting a new order in Europe under their rule. They knew all too well that undertaking the building of a new empire is possible only with a well-filled treasury.

  “There’s nothing new under the sun,” my great-uncle used to say. “Totalitarian systems copy and borrow ideas from one another. Hitler and Stalin can be blamed for a great deal, but certainly not for the originality of their thinking. They were not the first to invent informers, racial purity laws, torture, phony courts, forced confessions, or genocide. Like bastard grandchildren of Ferdinand and Isabella, those tyrants adopted the approach of the Catholic royals and applied modern scientific methods to make it more efficient.”

  IT WAS A SPRING DAY in 1420 when an anxious María de Torquemada told her father confessor that her pregnancy indeed was an easy one and she was suffering no discomfort. She confided to him that from time to time, however, she could hear the distinct sound of dogs barking in her womb. Bishop Pedro de la Cueva reassured María that the child she was to bear had from the very moment of conception been endowed with spiritual light. He took the sound of barking dogs as a sign that the child in her belly was Domini cane, a chosen one endowed by the Lord with the mission to serve as a watchdog to protect Christian flocks from Jewish wolves.

  Little Tomás was carefully cared for, for he was the nephew of the highly respected Cardinal Juan de Torquemada. He was separated from other boys when he turned six, and the Dominican monks took him in charge, but not until he became eighteen did he don the garb of the black brothers.

  “He had a gift for rhetoric,” my great-uncle told us, “and even as a young man he would preach to the monks who eagerly clustered around that young man as if they themselves were the apprentices.”

  “His eyes gleamed like stars and an aura radiated from him,” wrote one of the priests responsible for his theological instruction. “The enemies of the true faith are alarmed by him and their sleep is uneasy.”

  María de Torquemada was very proud of her son’s violent dedication to the faith. He never ate meat, he fasted two days a week, in every matter of consequence he invoked Saint Dominic and expressed himself in the same manner as that saint, and at the age of thirty-two he was appointed prior of the Santa Cruz cloister in Segovia as well as father confessor to Ferdinand and Isabella. This gave him great influence over the royal pair. But his adoring mother feared that one day Tomás might discover that his own grandmother was a conversa, a baptized Jewess, which meant that he would not be able to flaunt an exemplary certificate of limpieza de sangre, one reaching back to the seventh generation to prove that the blood flowing in his veins was pure.

  But Tomás de Torquemada, who insisted that everyone’s family tree be inspected, never made any effort to investigate his own. It may be that he was too intent on hunting down Jews and their offspring as if they were carriers of the plague and leprosy. He was intent upon persecuting them mercilessly, arresting them, ransacking their homes, torturing and burning them, and then demolishing their reputations and obliterating all memory of them.

  AFTER THAT NIGHTMARISH NIGHT in Seville, Salman was seized by the feeling that life had given him an unexpected gift: the possibility of freedom, the gift of the ability to leave everything behind. Everyone, including all three of his sons, assumed that he was one of the four thousand innocents murdered, mutilated, and burned to unrecognizable remains on June 6, 1391.

  Salman was not used to freedom. His adult life had been dedicated to duty and work. His first responsibility had been to create a family; then he had trudged to attend the burials of his parents and four brothers. Later he was so terrified of losing his own family that terror made him completely forget the great secret of the Espinosa family entrusted to his safekeeping. But once his wife, two daughters, and five of his grandchildren were dead, he experienced a sudden almost overwhelming desire to break free. The thought that struck him like a physical blow as he wandered through the ruins of the judería was that having tasted of the elixir of immortality and looked death in the face, he should devote his life to helping those held as virtual prisoners in the narrow alleys of the Jewish quarter, helping them achieve their own freedom.

  That was the beginning of it all.

  He set out on winding roads that led him from south to north and back again from north to south, striding onward energetically without flinching before spring thunderstorms, the burning heat of summer, or winter snowstorms. He encountered the people of his faith from east to west and for a hundred years he tirelessly assisted them. He quieted their droning litany of complaints by providing answers to difficult questions, not only those about spiritual matters but also those about the body. He gave them wise counsel and resolved practical everyday problems—always for free, without asking for a single peso or a scrap of bread. He dressed simply and never raised his voice. Everywhere he went, he fearlessly attacked the Inquisition’s shameless manipulations and its brutal advance. He delivered no sermons or words of praise, nor did he manifest the slightest ability to work miracles. He turned up wherever he was most needed to help people bear the various disasters that afflicted their lives—suffering, persecution, illness, and death. He was known by many names, though not by his own. In most places he was called “the wandering Jew,” and no matter how hard the men of the church tried, they could not stamp out the legends that the common folk wove about him.

  SALMAN HAD FOLLOWED Tomás de Torquemada in secret through almost all of the kingdoms of Spain. He watched in Zaragoza as Torquemada pressed the rulers of the city to wall up the Jews and to sentence a married Catholic woman to a hundred lashes before expelling her from the city for visiting a Jewish home. In Valladolid he heard
Torquemada issue orders to burn effigies of Jews who had fled abroad to escape the Inquisition. From a distance he observed the Grand Inquisitor in his quest to carry out divine justice as Torquemada’s forces searched the cemetery of Ávila for the bones of a rabbi who had been dead for fifty years. He listened in Toledo when despite the pope’s injunction against fanning the all-consuming fire of hate against those of another faith, Torquemada responded to his appointment as Grand Inquisitor for the Holy See in Castile and Aragon by declaring his intention to rid Spain of the Jews. He authorized any and all means to that end.

  Salman had come to know Torquemada well after those many years, although he had never stood face-to-face with him for a close-up view of his bloodthirsty smile. He knew the Grand Inquisitor’s thought process and his motivations. He knew that the most hated man on the Iberian Peninsula was deathly afraid, obsessed with the thought that someone would murder him. He noticed that the demon priest never traveled alone; on his journeys he was surrounded by a bodyguard of fifty mounted inquisitors and two hundred foot soldiers. Salman knew that the foul smell from Torquemada’s mouth was the breath of death itself and every ounce of the fat prelate’s flabby body corresponded to ten human beings he had sentenced to the flames.

  SALMAN HAD NO INTENTION of doing away with Torquemada. Leading Marranos—baptized Jews who secretly clung to their ancient traditions—had gathered in the house in Seville of the wealthy Don Jehuda de Veras. After a long discussion of the Book of Judith, the biblical account of how a Jewish woman killed the Assyrian ruler Holofernes in order to save her people, they eventually reached a consensus that the assassination of a tyrant was justified in extraordinary circumstances. They decided that the Grand Inquisitor had to die so that Spain’s Jews might live.