by Simon Schama
This was probably not what Isaac de Braga in La Coruña, or Jews in Toledo and Cordoba, Saragossa and Girona, would have been expecting from the new monarchs. It had been during the reigns of weak kings that New Christian courtiers, financiers and bureaucrats were vulnerable to hostile arguments that they had taken over the state. With Aragon and Castile united and Ferdinand and Isabella apparently hospitable to conversos like Luis de Santangel, and the usual Jewish doctors and financiers like the rab de corte (the chief rabbi Abraham Seneor) entrusted with taxation, expectations were more optimistic than the opposite. Expulsion was the dream of fanatics. How could the kingdom do without Jewish money when it was about to launch a crusade against the obstinately unconquerable fortress kingdom of Granada? So although the views of Isabella’s confessor, Tomas de Torquemada, were well known and frighteningly in line with Espina’s Jewish solution, there was, in the 1470s, no panicky rush to exit the kingdom.
When the Pope authorised the Spanish monarchs to appoint inquisitors in 1478, this would not necessarily have caused a surge of alarm among the unconverted Jews, for its jurisdiction concerned only suspect Christians – above all the conversos – rather than Jews proper. And indeed when it began its work in Seville two years later, there was an immediate mass flight of conversos to remoter towns and villages beyond its reach. But at the beginning, the Jews themselves may have been divided. For all those who remained close to family members, friends and former neighbours who had left the faith, there were just as many, if not more, Jews who were unforgiving in their attitude to the apostates, to the point where, in the proceedings of the Inquisition, they were prepared to do its bidding and inform on them. It is unlikely that anyone, Ferdinand and Isabella included, could have foreseen the monstrous and self-perpetuating engine of destruction the Inquisition became, when they petitioned Pope Sixtus IV for its authorisation.
The Inquisition was its own dominion of judgement, a state within a state, answerable to no one other than the Pope, the Crown and its own array of imposing bureaucratic regulations.26 As well as the inquisitors and those who staffed the tribunals of interrogation, a huge army of ‘familiars’ was responsible for handling the bureaucratic work that oiled the machinery of terror. So many carefully considered regulations surrounded the application of torture, for example, that those who oversaw it constituted the first systematically organised bureaucracy of pain. The Inquisition even had its own miniature armies of protection and intimidation. The Inquisitor General Tomas de Torquemada never travelled anywhere without his own company of horsemen, especially not after an inquisitor had been murdered in Saragossa Cathedral by a desperate group of conversos. Notoriously, virtually unlimited powers of torture were granted to extract ‘full’ confessions from those suspected of relapsing or, worse, those who were impenitent, active Judaisers. Thus the snooping state made its entrance in history: servants, family members, neighbours frightened and cajoled into becoming informers and spies. Even in monasteries and convents, monks and nuns would report on brothers and sisters whom they suspected of looking down when the Host was raised, stumbling over the Paternoster or Ave Maria and saying who knew what in the solitude of their cells. Yirimiyahu Yovel is right to see in this the germ of a malevolent modern institution rather than a medieval relic.27 It was indeed something fresh in its inhumanity.
And the Inquisition also invented, to a degree unseen since the Romans, the spectacle of public punishment as mass entertainment. Days of auto-da-fé were declared feast days and holidays so the maximum number could attend the procession of the condemned, who were barefoot and dressed in the conical hat and shapeless robe of the sanbenito, the garments of those impenitently unreconciled to the Church decorated with licking tongues of flame, for as the Inquisitors sanctimoniously reminded the unfortunate, better they should be consumed by the flames of this world than be doomed to burn eternally in hell. Grandees, often including the king and queen, would attend these elaborate ceremonies, nibbling at holiday dainties, pomanders to their nose when the smell became disagreeable. When the practice began of exhuming the bones of heretics, often by the hundreds, and burning those in addition to living bodies, the air over the cities of immolation would have been thick with the sickly stench.
Sometimes when the victims of the Inquisition are generically characterised as ‘heretics’, it is forgotten that these atrocious proceedings – from the interrogations and the torture to the final mass killings when victims were, as the appalling euphemism has it, ‘relaxed’ to the punishing arm of the lay state – were overwhelmingly directed at those who had once been and were suspected of still being Jews. There were no Spanish Lollards or Cathars brought to the stakes of the autos-da-fé. This was centrally, intensively and catastrophically integral to the drama of Jewish history in Spain. And as well as the rolling wall of tragedy designed to exploit and nourish cruelty and betrayal, it also brought forth qualities of astonishing courage and disinterested self-sacrifice. For all the informers there were also those conversos like Diego Marchana who, while remaining Christian, put themselves at risk to help the belatedly ‘reconciled’ (whose lives and families were permanently ruined) and marked men and women to elude the Inquisitors’ trap and who would, inevitably, end up themselves delivered to the fire.
The production line of the purge was powered by formidable energy, starting of course with Torquemada himself. The numbers of those who fell victim to the rolling wave of terror, torture, lies and judicial murder, given the relatively primitive means at their disposal, would do credit to any twentieth-century autocrat of degradation and death: seven hundred in Seville alone by the end of the first year; an auto-da-fé every month, and this before the death machine moved north through Ciudad Real and on to Toledo where it proudly consumed record numbers of live bodies, forty in a single day in 1488, along with the bones of a hundred exhumed corpses (together with the effigies of those who had somehow escaped).
And yet it remained conceivable that the Jews themselves might have looked on and some of them supposed it was none of their business, that, once locked away in their urban segregation, with one gate admitting access and exit, ostensibly sealed off from ‘Judaising’ their former kin, they might be left alone. Such illusions may even have extended all the way up to the very greatest who were still working hard to secure victory at Granada and who, like Abraham Seneor, were received at least with politeness and sometimes with deceptive cordiality by the king and queen. He had been confident enough to approach the king and ask him to forbid the most violent sermons preached against the Jews, and rescind the prohibition against baking matzo for Passover. Seneor was even on good personal terms with Torquemada and had, at his request, secured a tax allowance on his native village! As an advocate as well as rabbi and financial potentate, he seemed to be so indispensable to the monarchs that he could not credit they would embark on so self-destructive an act as the expulsion. Such are the delusions of familiarity.
In 1485, Seneor was joined by another eminence, Rabbi Isaac Abravanel, who had held similar status and office with the king of Portugal before being implicated in an aristocratic plot to replace him. Abravanel was obliged to run for his life, and having crossed the border sought and was granted an interview with the king and queen.28 He seems to have come away from the meeting reassured that active help in financing the war would be repaid by forgoing anything so drastic as an extension of the Andalusian expulsion to the entire kingdom. And it may well be that at that time Ferdinand and Isabella had not themselves made up their minds.
But the queen’s confessor had. For Torquemada, one arm of Espina’s doctrine – the absolute purification of the converts and their irreversible unification with the body of the Church – was pointless without the second arm: the complete removal of the Jews. It was, in its perverted way, a backhand compliment to the tenacity and persuasiveness of Judaism – its capacity to survive everything that states and powers, mobs and preachers, could throw at it, the forced removals, the burning of books and th
e cremation of bodies. You could destroy all of this, and somehow the thing still escaped extinction; its words floated free from bodies and parchment, into the air itself like particles of fatal miasma.29
And even Torquemada, impatient as he was for this second step, understood that it might have to wait for the fall of Granada. For although the Spanish monarchy was discovering alternative sources of financing for its war – from the Genoese in particular – the army was so large and so ruinously expensive that doing without the convenience of Jewish tax farming, in which money was provided in advance, seemed imprudent. By the winter of 1491, however, the besieging army (which now included English soldiers commanded by Henry VII’s brother-in-law Earl Rivers, and French troops in a pan-Christian crusading camp) had swollen to some 12,000, overwhelming enough for King Boabdil to acknowledge, in deep mortification, the inevitability of capitulation and the end of Islam in Spain. Inside Granada, of course, were thousands of Jews and conversos who had fled the Inquisition and had reverted to their ancestral faith within the safety of the Muslim refuge. Boabdil made arrangements for the safety of his Muslim subjects but the same accommodation, it need hardly be said, was not made for these now deeply frightened Jews.
There were incentives for the expulsion less edifying than completing the crusading mission of creating a uniformly pure Christian Spain. The nobility with whom the monarchs had been embattled would be delighted at the prospect of the annulment of their debts to the grasping Jews, just as had been the case in Plantagenet England on which the expulsion was modelled. And the monarchs had calculated, correctly, that the value of everything they could seize, confiscate and realise, especially property, would massively exceed what might conceivably be lost in the tax revenues supplied by the Jews. Perhaps, though, there may be timid, lowly souls who might have some anxiety about the sudden disappearance of physicians, shopkeepers, a dependable source of loans, such ignominious concerns. They had to be reminded that the mere existence of the Jews in their midst constituted not just an offence but a mortal threat.
So, naturally, a case of abduction and child murder was concocted, the absence of a body as always being no impediment to the certainty of the crime.30 An itinerant converso, a wool washer and carder, Benito Garcia – on his way back from a pilgrimage, no less – was discovered by the Inquisition at the town of La Guardia near Toledo, with a half-gnawed wafer of the consecrated Host in his bag, a sure sign of a plot of desecration. It only remained to extract from him, and a mixed bag of ten other conversos and Jews, a full confession through the usual fruitfully intensive procedures. One of the Jews, Yucef Franco, was placed in a prison cell above Garcia with a hole cut in the ceilings so that conversations between them could be overheard. A monk masquerading as a rabbi made a visit to Franco and extracted a ‘confession’ not of the crime but of having been accused of it. A lurid story was cobbled together of the child being abducted from a Toledo street, then tortured in mock crucifixion, and then taken away further to a mountain cave where his heart was cut out for use in rites of black magic. The tale had everything designed to whip up public fury, and to make conversos and Jews indistinguishably part of the same conspiracy of murderous evil. The still-missing child became quickly sanctified as ‘El Niño de La Guardia’ – and around that part of the country still is. The uproar was so general and intense that the king and queen could satisfy themselves that an expulsion order would in fact marshal the outrage in an orderly and productive fashion rather than just let it erupt in destructive mayhem.
So on 31 March 1492, in the palace first conceived and begun by Joseph ibn Naghrela over four hundred years before, and where Isabella and Ferdinand were advertising their triumph over Boabdil by holding court for several months, the deed was done. A lengthy order of expulsion explained that since it had been impossible to make the Jews desist from subverting the faith of the New Christians who, despite the best efforts of the Inquisition, continued to backslide, neither the unity nor the purity of the Church could tolerate their presence any longer. Moreover, they persisted in defaming and abusing the tenets of the Christian religion and, as the most recent atrocity inflicted on the defenceless body of the boy of La Guardia demonstrated, were capable of much worse. By 1 July, in three months, every Jew had to be gone from the realm, and the monarchs’ loyal subjects were considerately instructed not to molest or obstruct their departure in any way. No gold or silver or hard money (and there was no other kind) could be taken with them, nor any other valuables such as gems, or precious objects, including those of their religion. Thus Torah crowns, shields, the rimmonim finials of the scrolls, the yad pointers, as well of course as the synagogues of which they had been part, stood forfeit to the Crown, which would do a lot of melting down. Neither were the Jews to be allowed to take horses or even mules with them lest beasts of honour and burden be drained from the country. Donkeys would do to pull their carts or carry their old and sick. Their Hebrew books they could take with them, good riddance too to the infamous, blasphemous Talmud and all the rest. Those that remained would be burned along with the scrolls.
For some mysterious reason, public knowledge of the edict was delayed by a month and the breathing space was used by Seneor (whose loyalty to Isabella in her early years always won him a hearing as well as a basketful of high offices) and Abravanel to attempt to dissuade Ferdinand in particular from his chosen course. When arguments for compassion and national interest were to no avail, Abravanel tried money, 30,000 ducats of it, a huge sum. Popular legend has the king wavering, at which point Torquemada bursts in upon them hurling a crucifix to the floor and reproaching Ferdinand for being about to repeat Judas’ betrayal of Christ for thirty pieces of silver. Another legend has the implacably fanatical Isabella goading the king that his hesitations were due to the fact of Jewish blood running in his own veins (for there was indeed a converso pedigree on his mother’s side).
In fact Ferdinand was quite as determined on the expulsion as the queen and the Inquisitor General. At the end of April, as ordained, criers and royal heralds, to the sound of trumpets, assembled the people of the great cities and towns of Spain to hear the decree. No historian, certainly not this one, constrained by the niceties of prose, can recover the horror, dismay, fear and pathetic agony of the Jews who heard the implacable death sentence now imposed on communities which had indeed seemed their ‘Jerusalems in Spain’, where the language, turned into Ladino, had flowered; where rabbis had studied and written; where songs liturgical and songs loving had been composed, chanted and sung; where dough had been kneaded, confections cooked; where rejoicing had been danced on Purim and Simchat Torah; where wine had been knocked back at a circumcision, brides and grooms had stood beneath the huppah and signed the flower-decorated Aramaic nuptial contract, the ketubah; where doctors had brought potions and comfort to the sick of all religions; where scribes and illuminators had created things that testified to the infinite creative power of humanity, to Soria, Segovia, Burgos, Toledo, Salamanca, Saragossa, beloved Girona, Tudela of Halevi’s birth . . . all now to be emptied, the Jews who had made homes in exile now to be exiled from that exile. And they noted in their terrible lamentations that the date set, ineradicably, for their final removal (for the king had graciously extended the deadline to the end of July) was the 7th of Ab, two days before the great fast commemorating the destruction of both the First and Second Temples. Now the Temple of their culture was being pulled down about them as surely as if the Romans had returned to hurl down the stones.
Panic set in along with sickening despair. Frantic attempts were initiated to sell everything that was not to be confiscated: houses, shops, bodegas, gardens, cherry orchards, vineyards, olive groves. The example of the Andalusian expulsion would have forewarned the Sephardim to expect nothing but merciless exploitation and opportunism. They were lucky to get that 10 per cent of the value, and then there was the question of finding some sort of means to take it with them over the borders to Navarre and Portugal or over the sea to wherever w
ould receive them. The same edict of course applied to communities in Spanish possessions: Sicily and Sardinia, places of refuge now cut off. Facing destitution and homelessness, at least 40,000 made the decision to convert and join the 100,000 of their predecessors who had become Christians since the riots and massacres of 1391. Among them, not for the first time of course, were the very grandest of court Jews. In July 1492, the chief rabbi himself, Abraham Seneor, was baptised along with his son Melamed (the teacher!) Meir, at the monastery of Guadalupe in the presence of the king and queen who stood as the octogenarian’s godparents as he became Ferran Perez Colonel.
Abravanel took a different course, and according to Elijah Capsali – the chief rabbi of Khania in Crete, who spoke directly with many of the expelled – he wrote a reproachful letter to Isabella and even upbraided her in person, ‘standing his ground like a lion’ for the deluded presumption that this act of heartless brutality would put an end to Judaism. To her affronted response that it was not she but God who had ordained the expulsion, Abravanel asked whether she had considered the many empires stretching back deep into antiquity who imagined that by decreeing exile and dispersion they would end Jewish history and break the covenant of the people with their God. Did she not know that those empires had vanished while Judaism persisted and would survive to see the redemption brought by the Messiah? And that the sufferings of the Jews strengthened their resolve to endure; that they had the words of their Law bound forever about their heads and hearts?
