One of the more agreeable events in modern Jewish history is due to unfold on March 31 of this year when the King of Spain joins a special service in the synagogue of Madrid in order to rescind the Edict of Expulsion signed by his ancestors King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella exactly 500 years earlier. “Agreeable” seems a better word than “momentous” or “symbolic.” For while the successive disasters and triumphs of our era in Jewish history have been of a dimension which defies ordinary description, the Madrid ceremony and the extended celebrations and conferences that will follow throughout Spain suggest simple, unalloyed happiness. In such a mood one is free to savor the host of ironies that this Jewish quincentennial—Sepharad ’92, as it has been dubbed—generates in our consciousness.
In the forefront, of course, there is the oddity of celebrating in the same breath two related but disparate anniversaries: the expulsion of the Jews and the voyage of Christopher Columbus. In actuality, the contrast they make is a grim one. For four months after the promulgation of the Edict of Expulsion, a ramshackle flow of ill-equipped small boats, crammed with Jews, their hearts full of desolation, was putting to sea from Spanish ports. The last Jew left Spain on July 31, 1492, two days before the fast of Tisha B’Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. It was three days later, on August 3, 1492, that Columbus set sail in a very different spirit, braced by the expectation of bringing back from “the Indies” a prize of gold, diamonds, and spices, and of establishing at the same time a vastly expanded base for Christianity.
But if this was the original story, Sepharad ’92 surrounds it with irony. Who could have foreseen that the pitiful and derelict refugees would emerge within a few years as sophisticated and fully settled Sephardi communities all around the Mediterranean, linked in migration and trade with kin in northern Europe—and across the Atlantic? In the longer range, who could have foreseen, centuries after the heartless destruction of the great Spanish-Jewish community at the moment of Columbus’s voyage, the emergence in his New-Found-Land of what has become the greatest Jewish community of the world? The great 12th-century Spanish-Jewish poet, Judah Halevi, was ready to give up all the bounty of Spain to be at one with Zion, the passion of his life. Who could have foreseen that, as a high point of the quincentennial, a sovereign Jewish state in Zion would be joining Spain in celebration of its national day with a gala concert in Toledo by its own Philharmonic Orchestra?
_____________
It is no distraction from the joy of the quincentennial to note that in Spain, as elsewhere in Europe today, anti-Zionist agitation remains an unpleasant and worrisome fact of political life. Nor, moving back again in time, is it inappropriate to remind ourselves of the scene in Spain that led up to the expulsion of 1492. A hundred years earlier, in 1391, what had been nearly a seven-century-long period of social and cultural coexistence, however uneasy at times, had ended, almost abruptly, in a series of murderous “pogroms.” This was, for the Jews, a unique bouleversement; for though they had been until then very distinctive in Spain, they were not alien to society as a whole, having constituted, indeed, one of the three elements—Muslim, Christian, and Jewish—out of which the Spanish character had evolved.
But now the Christian element, led by the Church, was undertaking to put Spanish consciousness on an exclusive course. At first the Church thought the Jewish presence could be suppressed by wholesale conversion; and in the century following the murders of 1391, conversions were indeed numerous. The results, however, were a cause of the greatest alarm. For one thing, far from being peacefully absorbed, thousands of converted Jews clung secretly to what they remembered of their ancient faith; these became known by the slang term “Marranos.” For another thing, despite the massive seepage from formal Jewish life, business and even scholarly contacts between Marranos and those still openly professing Judaism continued to be upheld. To the Church, it seemed that nothing short of a removal of the Jewish element would do. This led to the full gearing-up of the Inquisition, dedicated to rooting out real or imagined heresy among the “New Christians,” and finally to the expulsion of all who had remained Jews.
Thus did centuries of vitality and cultural brilliance end in trauma and tragedy. Yet even in tragedy there were moments of unexpected irony. It is perhaps not entirely surprising that when expulsion was finally imminent, the very rich Jews of Spain attempted to secure an amnesty by offering huge loans to Ferdinand and Isabella to relieve their permanent shortage of cash. The most famous of these leaders, Don Isaac Abrabanel, had been successively financial adviser to the king of Portugal and to the kingdom of Castile; and though he possessed untold resources and power, it is typical of the unusual character of Spain’s very rich Jews that he is remembered above all as an outstanding Bible scholar and classical humanist. Somehow or other, he was able, when expulsion finally struck, to muster what he could and transfer to Italy, where he became adviser to the king of Naples and then a central figure in Venice, organizing international trade treaties.
_____________
Another irony emerges in the role played by some New Christians in helping Columbus to realize his dream. According to the late historian Cecil Roth, it was in large measure due to the enthusiasm and financial influence of a group of Marranos around the Aragonese court, notably Luis de Santangel and Gabriel Sanchez, that the Catholic sovereigns were finally persuaded to give their patronage to Columbus’s expedition. To these two men Columbus wrote the report of his first journey, circulated throughout Europe after his return. Also, as historians of science well know, Columbus depended on nautical instruments perfected by Jews (such as Joseph Vecinho) and on astronomical tables drawn up by Abraham Zacuto.
Naturally, the great question in this connection is whether Columbus himself was a Marrano by descent. The most intriguing evidence lies not so much in his family background as in the date he finally chose for the start of his voyage. With regard to the former, there is some flimsy evidence that Columbus’s family had lived in Majorca before moving to Genoa; and Majorca was a favored land for Marranos. With regard to the latter, the story is that his sailing was originally planned for August 2, but, supposedly aware of the fast-day of Tisha B’Av, Columbus thought it might spell doom for someone of Jewish origin to embark on that date, and hence decided to postpone for a day.
Aside from Columbus, any number of notable Spaniards have been identified as Jews by origin, sometimes without any real evidence. Inevitably Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, has been a prime target in this not very serious game played by amateur and professional historians alike; after all, was not his father a surgeon, a frequent profession of Marranos? Even so formidable a historian as Américo Castro asserts firmly that Don Quixote could only be the work of a New Christian, someone “living on the periphery of Spanish society.”
For undisputed literary credit, however, Jewish history is secure in Fernando de Rojas, whose masterpiece, La Celestina, published in 1499, was not only the first Spanish novel but the progenitor of the European novel altogether. Rojas is known to have been a direct convert himself, and other clues lie in the character of his book, a brilliant, quick-witted, self-exploratory dialogue-novel, exhibiting qualities of expression that have signed themselves as Jewish wherever and whenever they have subsequently appeared. Rojas could be an ancestor of Saul Bellow, another “nymph-troubled man” as witty as Rojas but with his own brand of “frenzied longings.”
_____________
All this prodding for links may be small beer in itself, but it leads into what is perhaps the major issue raised by the twin quincentennials, which is how the vitality of both the Spaniards and the Sephardim has visibly ebbed and flowed over the centuries. In our own times we have witnessed a dual renascence, captured emblematically by the scheduled appearance of the immensely popular Spanish king in a Sephardi synagogue. As for the current fortunes of the Sephardim themselves, in their eastern and western diasporas, one might point, in England, to the emergence of Sir David Alliance from Iran as head of the world-famous Courtauld cotton complex, or the volcanic performance of the two Saatchi brothers from Iraq, who were the advertising geniuses associated with the rise of Margaret Thatcher. A parallel performance in France would be that of the twin Attali brothers, Jacques and Bernard, who arrived from Algeria as boys and after careers in the academic and business worlds have floated into general prominence, the former as head of the European Bank for Reconstruction, the latter as president of Air France.
In the arts, well-known Sephardi names include the French novelist Patrick Modiano, winner of the Prix Goncourt; Murray Perahia, the pianist; the late writer Primo Levi of Italy. Then there are Sir Anthony Caro, the sculptor; Edmond Safra, eminent banker of Geneva; Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize-winner for literature, who began life in Bulgaria—not to speak of such long-running families as the Mocattas, great bankers in England for over three centuries, or the huge industrial and social operations headed today by Lord Kadoorie, whose ancestors left Baghdad for India at the beginning of the 19th century.
_____________
In 1935, during that brief moment when the Spanish government was Republican, a national celebration was held in Cordoba to mark the birth there, 800 years earlier, of the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides. In a spirit of contrition and reconciliation, open invitations to the event had been circulated among all Spanish-Jewish descendants settled in refugee countries around the Mediterranean. All were welcome to return; many did. The opening address, given by the Chief Rabbi of the Sephardi community of Sarajevo, was an hour-long speech in Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish tongue whose emergence goes back in time long before the expulsion.
To me, present at those ceremonies as a representative of Oxford University, it was as if a British audience of today were to be addressed in the purest Elizabethan English. Something like the extraordinary emotion of that event will surely be generated again when Sepharad ’92 marks another new-old turn in the mysterious workings of Jewish and Spanish history.
