I wondered why it had taken so long for her to fly to Portugal and take the three-hour ride to Belmonte, but my question got lost on the tidal wave of emotion.
‘These people, they hid their Jewishness for FIVE HUNDRED YEARS. I mean, like, wow! How d’you do that? How d’you keep your faith secret for so long? While everywhere they’re burning people at the stake just because they look Jewish. It’s mind-blowing. I’m just like, wow. I knew I had to come here. I’ve been waiting for this for so long, and it’s just like, yeah, this is it. This is home. This is my home.’
Eighty-five years had passed since the crypto-Jewish community of Belmonte had first been discovered by the outside world, when Samuel Schwartz, a visiting Polish mining engineer, had spoken to them the only Hebrew word they had retained after four centuries in hiding: A-donai, ‘Lord’. Until that moment they had thought they were the only Jews left in the world; while the world thought not a single Jew remained from the time when the Iberian Peninsula was once regarded as a second Jerusalem. Viewed as perhaps an eccentric group within the village, the Belmonte marranos had made a show of Catholicism in the relative safety of the border region, far from the centre of the Inquisition in Lisbon, hiding their true religion and as much of their culture as they possibly could from the murderous authorities. Out of a population of hundreds of thousands, a people that produced philosophers, poets, ministers and craftsmen, this group of some two hundred people were all that remained of the Jews who had once lived throughout Spain and Portugal.
The first Jews had arrived on the peninsula in the first century AD – perhaps even before – and they called this land at the far western end of the Mediterranean Sefarad, from which came the word Sephardic. Persecuted by the Visigoths, they had welcomed the Muslim invaders of the eighth century as liberators, and went on to play a vital role in the cultural and political life of Al-Andalus. Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher and author of the Guide for the Perplexed, one of the most important works in Judaism after the Talmud and the Torah, had been born in Cordoba; and Jewish culture underwent a renaissance during the Moorish period: Ibrahim bar Hiyya, a Barcelona-based mathematician, wrote the first Hebrew encyclopaedia in the twelfth century – the Yesod ha-Tebunah u-Migdal ha-Emunah; the Catalan city of Gerona had been a major centre of Cabbalah mysticism and had even been known as the ‘Mother City of Israel’; while Tarragona had been almost entirely Jewish in Moorish times – when the Christian Ramón Berenguer IV conquered it in the mid twelfth century, he had a new cathedral built almost entirely by Jewish architects, using ‘Islamic’ designs.
As the Christian areas of Spain had grown, so the position of the Jews had changed. Generally tolerated as they were by Muslims at first, there was an eventual order for their expulsion in 1492, just months after Isabel and Ferdinand had conquered Granada. Many left for North Africa and other parts of the Mediterranean, forever exiled and speaking a fifteenth-century form of Spanish – Ladino – that has survived to this day. But many others chose to stay, forced to convert to Catholicism in order to remain in what had been their people’s homeland for some fifteen hundred years.
Converts often suffered as much as those who chose to go into exile. Perhaps more. Suspected of practising Judaism in secret, they were commonly referred to as marranos, ‘dirty swine’. It was this community, and the ‘problem’ it represented – heresy, a ‘secret’ group within society – which became the first target of the Spanish Inquisition. The Holy Office began operating in 1481 with the main intention of policing the beliefs of this new, rapidly growing section of the population.
The odds were against you if Inquisitors came knocking on your door: people were never told who their accuser was, and torture to extract a ‘confession’ was common: hanging prisoners upside down, forcing them to drink vast amounts of water, or stretching them on the rack. Too often the process ended at the stake – the infamous autos-da-fé.
The Inquisition burnt people fairly systematically for some three hundred years, doing its best to obliterate Jewish and later Moorish culture from Spanish life. For a long time the worst insult in Spain was to accuse somebody of having ‘mixed’ blood. The seventeenth-century play Fuente Ovejuna by Lope de Vega includes a scene where a country peasant makes fun of a nobleman, saying that as he comes from the city, he is far more likely to have Jewish or Moorish ancestors.
Even now Spanish people recognize, if not use, the phrase hacer una judiada – literally ‘to do a Jewish-type thing’, meaning something bad or nasty. Traditional proverbs used to go even further: El judío cuando al cristiano no puede engañarle más, escupe en la sombra por detrás – When a Jew can’t cheat a Christian any more, he spits on his shadow when his back is turned.
For centuries the Jews of Belmonte had survived in their mountain hideaway, escaping detection by eating alheira sausages made from smoked chicken instead of pork – no-one could taste the difference; they celebrated Jewish feasts such as Passover a day or so after the official date, so as to confuse the Inquisitors; they hid their Shabbat lamps in clay pots, making sure all the doors and windows were closed so no-one could look in; and they had women lead their services. On entering a church they would utter a secret phrase affirming they ‘only adored the God of Israel’. They refused to light fires or work on Saturdays, and at Yom Kippur women from the community would continue the practice of gathering to braid oil wicks while reciting seventy-three blessings. Schwartz once saw a marrano merchant arguing with a client from out of town over the price of something. It was Friday night, and they didn’t reach a deal. After dinner, the buyer had second thoughts and decided to accept the merchant’s price, but the merchant refused to do any business with him. They next day he tried again, but still the answer, no. ‘Come back tonight!’ the Jewish merchant said. Despite his growing doubts about the man, the buyer returned later and the merchant sold him the goods – at a lower price. As Schwartz later explained to the confused buyer, the merchant was behaving according to Sabbath practices, even if he wasn’t completely aware why.
‘Are you Jewish too?’ Esther asked me. Blond and blue-eyed as I was, I had once thought I was about as physically unJewish as one could possibly be. But on a trip to Jerusalem I’d been asked the same question several times, so had begun to revise my ideas.
‘It’s just so wonderful to know these people are here,’ Esther went on. ‘To know they survived. That’s … that’s really powerful. I mean, the Portuguese treated them awful.’
Esther explained that Jews had arrived in Portugal from Spain to escape the Inquisition, but that three years later the Portuguese had begun their own persecution and thrown them out too. Her family had eventually ended up in Thessalonika, but centuries later had left for the United States, just before the war.
A good job, too, I thought. The Nazis had almost obliterated the Sephardic community in northern Greece. The Portuguese treatment of the Jews, as in Spain at the same time, had been appalling, perhaps one of the worst disasters to befall the Jewish community before the Final Solution. On the face of it, the Inquisition had succeeded – Spain and Portugal were avowedly Catholic countries, where for centuries anything like free thought had been all but wiped out. Only places like Belmonte hinted at the fact that not everything was as it seemed.
‘Where’re you from, Jason?’ Esther asked.
I explained: born in the US; English parents; years living in Germany, Italy and Spain; a spell or two in the Middle East. Sometimes I felt different parts of me belonged to every one of these places.
‘Oh, I know how complicated a question it can be. I’m American, sure. Jewish. But Greek? Portuguese? Spanish? There’s some Lithuanian in me somewhere too.’ She laughed and looked down at herself, as though searching for the answer in some part of her anatomy. Then she breathed in deeply. ‘You know, I think perhaps I’m just Belmontese.’
Across from where we were sitting the rest of the tour group were talking in twos and threes, almost everyone dressed in the uniform of jea
ns, white running shoes and sunglasses. The tour leader – a Portuguese-looking woman in her forties with dark skin and wide-open eyes – was explaining something about the hotel they were staying at that night.
I asked how the Jewish people in the village seemed to her.
‘Still shy and secretive,’ she said. ‘We came on an organized trip. We’ve got historians and all kinds of people with us – they’ve been studying them for years!’ She raised a finger up in my face to accentuate the point. ‘But, hey! So would you be careful if they’d been burning your relatives at the stake for centuries.’
The Inquisition had been a devastating episode of ethnic cleansing, with people arrested for all kinds of trivial things, like not eating pork, or just washing yourself – something the Church at the time didn’t look favourably upon. After working on the Jewish community, the Inquisitors turned their attention to Moors, and then ordinary Christians with a less than perfectly orthodox attitude.
‘They even charged some woman because they overheard her say, “If my husband ever gets into Heaven then so will donkeys,”’ I said.
‘Wow. Was she Jewish?’
‘Just an ordinary Christian. But they thought it was blasphemous. They had three hundred years of that kind of thing. You don’t recover from that overnight. Maybe never at all.’
One of the historians on Esther’s tour had explained that the Inquisition did make it to Belmonte. The village Jewish community often claimed the Holy Office never made it up into the mountains, but the historian said documents from the time showed that in fact it had reached this isolated spot.
‘These people must have been really brave. To live through that! I just feel so good being here: it makes me feel proud.’
A couple of men from the village, dressed in cardigans and corduroy trousers, walked past mumbling to one another, sounding, like most Portuguese I’d come across, like drunk Russians trying to speak Spanish. A friend in Lisbon had told me the Ukrainian immigrants had perfect accents. Something about the lugubriousness of the Portuguese reminded me of east Europeans sometimes.
‘I’ve heard,’ I said to Esther in a low voice, ‘that some of the Jewish people here aren’t entirely happy about being discovered. That they were all right without a synagogue or a rabbi, and that all this attention and change has caused some problems.’
She leant towards me, quickly falling into the role of fellow conspirator, the gum in her mouth awarded momentary respite.
‘You know, I’d heard the same. I didn’t like to say anything, but I think some aren’t too happy about being Orthodox. A group of them formally converted about ten years ago – some guy aged eighty had a circumcision done. Can you believe that?’
Having been snipped myself in a Californian hospital after a mere day in the world as a complete human being, I could empathize to a point. In fact, the Spanish Jew Maimonides was in part responsible, having asserted in his Guide that circumcision was generally a good thing: ‘Circumcision simply counteracts excessive lust,’ he said. ‘The organ necessarily becomes weak when it loses blood.’
During the nineteenth century conservative Christians in the US, including one John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of the cornflake, had picked up on Jewish ideas – stemming largely from Maimonides – in a puritanical attempt to prevent masturbation and fornication. ‘No foreskin, no foreplay,’ was kind of how they reasoned. Of course, it didn’t work, as I could personally testify, but the practice had been handed down to the present day under the pretext of ‘physical’ if not so much ‘moral’ hygiene. Yet the link was clear: thanks to some philosophizing Andalusi busy-body I wasn’t quite whole – living proof of how far the legacy of Moorish Spain could extend.
The women of the village had sung songs and passed them down to their daughters, Esther continued. It was a way of life, and now it was all in the open. ‘They have a new synagogue. Did you see it? Oh, you should go: it’s beautiful.’
But the new rabbi had been telling them they couldn’t sing the old songs any more, or worship amalgamated holy men they’d invented like St Moses.
‘I mean, of course: they were isolated for centuries – you forget some things, you make up some others. The church had to have an influence, no matter how hard they tried to remain Jewish at home.’
‘Do you think it’s better this way?’ I asked. ‘That Orthodox Judaism has arrived?’
‘Oh, that’s a really difficult question. You should talk to them about it.’ And she smiled.
The rest of the group were gathering their things as they started moving off for the next stop on their tour. Esther lifted herself off the granite wall and made to shake my hand.
‘It was very nice meeting you.’
I’d enjoyed our chat and was about to suggest we swap addresses, but before I had a chance she was already halfway up the square, walking quickly in her movement-restricting trousers to catch up with the other Americans finding ‘home’ here.
I was an American too, or at least I had a birth certificate that said so. Yet I felt as much an outsider here as anywhere, both in Portugal and with the American tour group. How did the Belmonte Jews feel, I wondered? Members of a wandering people who had disguised themselves to remain in a country that was both their home and a foreign land. Now other Jews were telling them they weren’t properly Jewish at all. Perhaps by staying put and not leaving with the other exiles in the fifteenth century they’d foregone some essential part of themselves. How could ‘home’ be somewhere that rejected you so? The place felt like a kind of strange, inverted prison.
As I sat there I found my thoughts turning to Zine. He could only leave home and wander in the first place by going in disguise. He’d talked about Morocco sometimes as a place difficult to get out of, somewhere they always wanted to send you back to. Home. But at the same time he was as homeless as I was.
Some fighting to escape; others fighting to remain. I had the feeling of going round in circles. Perhaps it wasn’t a question of ‘fighting’ in the first place.
I decided to give Zine a call, perhaps the following day, when I’d be back over the border in Spain. At least try and get word of him from Uncle Sergio. For now, though, I thought it better to leave the Belmonte Jews in peace.
TOLEDO
Zine stood out from the others in the crowd, deep-brown eyes set wide apart and slightly protruding, with an intensity that drew your attention to them.
I saw him first, amid the elderly ladies and bony trees of the Zocodover, the site of the old Arab horse market, or souq al-dawabb, and still the heart of the modern city. A group of some two hundred people were walking haphazardly round in a circle waving colourful banners in the damp misty air, shouting a slogan to the beat of a solitary drum.
‘¡N0 A LA GUERRA! ¡N0 A LA GUERRA!’ Tum tum ti tum.
I hadn’t expected to find much anti-war sentiment in a place like Toledo, where furs, high heels and Loden coats were the norm, the typical badges of the Spanish Right. This was the centre of ‘old Spain’ – the former capital of the country in pre-Moorish days: a small, dark medieval town that had barely changed since El Greco lived and painted here in the sixteenth century, and was still the headquarters of the Catholic Church in Spain. Two hundred yards up the road stood the Alcázar (Arabic: al-qasr) – the monolithic fortress on the crest of the hill on which the city was built: the site of the rebels’ greatest hour in the Spanish Civil War, when a handful of defenders held out against the Republican siege for two months until Franco diverted his push on Madrid to relieve them, winning a propaganda victory but extending the war by another couple of years in so doing. Now, though, there was just a scent of change, with a poll in that morning’s paper showing that over ninety per cent of the population opposed the right-wing government’s decision to support the US in its build-up for war in Iraq. The Spanish, famed – wrongly – for being a bloodthirsty race, were breaking longstanding rules of behaviour over a war that no-one here wanted.
I watched him for as long
as I could before he caught sight of me. It was odd that I felt no surprise at seeing him there. His hair was shorter, no longer the ringlets circling around his ears, but it felt as though we had merely separated that morning and were now rejoining at midday for lunch and to make plans for the afternoon; not the fortnight since I’d last seen him. And now he was here it felt as if a missing order had been restored. A smile began forming at the corners of my mouth.
‘Jasie!’
‘Come on,’ I said. And I took him to sit at one of the cafés that lined the square: it would be easier to talk over hot cups of milky coffee, rather than shouting against the rattle of the march.
Heavy leaden crows were scuffling among the yellowing treetops as elderly couples pushed through the thickening fog that was filling the Zocodover. Across from our café an old government building betrayed just a glimpse of the greatness of the city’s past with a horseshoe archway tucked away inside the shadow of the entrance hall behind the standard neoclassical façade. Visitors came to the city to see El Entierro del Conde de Orgaz, and to admire the two medieval synagogues: relics from a more tolerant age. Some might even make it to the mosque, one of the oldest remaining in Spain. Today it was called the Church of Cristo de la Luz, the Christ of Light, an aptly abstract and aniconic dedication for a former Islamic place of worship. Its interlacing red-brick archways were clearly reminiscent of the Great Mosque in Cordoba, and were repeated a thousand times in the mudejar structures around us that most typified Spanish medieval architecture – buildings put up under Christian rule by Moorish builders in the Islamic style. But there was no building or monument that symbolized Toledo’s greatest gift to the Western world, perhaps the single most important jewel in the legacy of Al-Andalus: the school of translators.
Andalus Page 16
