The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

If one picture of that relationship was the companionship of cardinal and rabbi, the other would be Jews, some of them aged, forced to run naked through the muddy streets of Rome at carnival time while pelted with rotten oranges.

Perhaps taking a look at the Jew Reuveni might give them an answer. If he stirred up the New Christians, then the friars were right: a Jew was always a Jew, however many paternosters they could parrot.

In this whole astonishing chronicle whereby two Jews – one a self-deluded adventurer, the other in the grip of his messianic identity – came from nowhere to move from court to court, received by cardinals, a pope and kings, the most unlikely scene of all was for them both to appear in their robes sewn with the magically rearranged letters of God’s name, before the imperial sovereign of Catholic Christendom, embattled with both Turks and Protestants, trying to persuade Charles that the way to repair his fortunes would lie with him becoming a Jew. The chutzpah makes no sense unless David and Solomon had been led to believe that the course of Jewish history had arrived at a moment when its persecutors would become the instruments of redemption. Though they were absurdly deceived in everything else, it was true that there were indeed some among the rulers and councillors of Christendom who did think that the long epic of the Jewish story was somehow ravelled up with the fate of Christianity. It would not be the last time that this was the case.

The princes of the pepper trade who made up the rescue committee had turned their commercial intelligence into a transcontinental highway of escape: a chain of ships, river ferries, lodgings, wagons, drivers and riders extending from the Portuguese Atlantic coast to the English ports, then on across the Channel to Flanders, down through France and the Rhineland, over the Alpine passes, into the Po Valley. If they then eluded the guards posted in Lombardy expressly to detect, arrest and deal violently with them, they might be able to reach the safety of Ferrara. Some might stop there; others move on through the Apennines to Pesaro and Ancona, then over the Adriatic to Ragusa (now Dubrovnik), and finally into the realm of Suleyman the Magnificent

There was no Inquisition in Flanders, and the men of the local margrave and the burgomaster turned a blind eye to the affairs of the ‘Portuguese’, for without them Antwerp would be just another Flemish port. But the regent, the sister of Charles V, was eager to sniff out heresy and extort money from the Jews. As far as brother and sister were concerned, that’s what the New Christians were: Jews once, Jews now, Jews till they burned and the soot of their bones had been taken by the wind.

we know that the travellers from Antwerp made their way south to Cologne where they looked for ‘the Inn of the Vier Escara’.2 There they were to make contact with the conductor, Pero Tonnellero. His posting was the Rhine journey upriver to Mainz (Basel was another much-used transit point) in rented boats. They would sleep aboard to save money and limit the possibility of exposure and arrest. Again, the instruction was given not to raise voices (which suggests how often it was disobeyed), though having been cooped up together for so long and over such distances, it was hard to avoid outbursts. ‘Under all circumstances you are to behave like respectable people avoiding all quarrels and arguments that may occur.’ At Mainz in the ‘Inn with the sign of the Fish’, another conductor would help them find the wagons they would need for the onward and upward route south-east along the Swiss lakes. Beyond Mainz or Basel, where the Swiss lakeland rose into hills, they would see from across the pasture and water the towering peaks of the Alps,

Once down into the Po Valley, yet more ordeals awaited, this time human and thus even more terrifying. Paranoid about the escape of those of ‘the Judaic fallacy’ to the Turks, along with their capital, merchandise and commercial knowledge, Charles V had established an office of ‘Marrano affairs’ at Antwerp, armed with exceptional powers of arrest, detention and interrogation, which in practice invariably meant torture and robbery. Its chief officer was Cornelis Schepperus but its most enthusiastic enforcer was his deputy Johannes Vuysting, who at Pavia and Milan (both in the Habsburg Duchy of Milan) posted roadblocks on the descents from the passes. Families would be dragged from their wagons, screamed at and told they were ‘Jewish dogs’, beaten up, hauled off to prison, tortured to reveal the identity of conductors and fugitives and their connections in Antwerp and Lisbon, and robbed of all their possessions. Captains, contacts and escort riders found guilty of abetting the escape would be sentenced to death.

The fact that we know all this from the Inquisition archives means that many failed to reach Ferrara or the Adriatic. The miracle, one wrought by the Antwerp Rescuers, is that many did survive and moved on towards the Adriatic ships.

In the medieval centuries, the trading routes lay across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and then on by land to Egypt and the Mediterranean. But once the Portuguese fleets showed up, the mercantile wiring became global, and the most globally dispersed but culturally tight community was perfectly placed to take maximum advantage. Once again for the Jews and their convert descendants, the misfortune of dispersion was turned into a trading opportunity.

in 1537, Charles and his sister Marie, formerly the regent of Hungary and now governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, in one of their periodic swings between hard and soft lines of approach to the Marrano business, allowed resumed emigration from Portugal to Flanders. But the leaders of the New Christian community were not so naive as to suppose this rediscovered pragmatism would last.

if the pepper merchants really were heretic Jews on the loose. Every so often, the sword held above their notoriously stiff necks would be lowered until a tidy sum was offered to take it away again. It was extortion, but it was royal racketeering for God.

A sausage made from pale chicken meat would pass itself off as pork (and is still known today in Lisbon as ‘marrano’ sausage).

When the screws tightened in Flanders, people and capital moved back to the Thames; when there was trouble in England, as there would be in 1542, the flow was reversed. When the de Luna sisters arrived in London, they found the double life they would already have known in Lisbon.9 By day and in business dealings with merchants, courtiers and impecunious nobles, the tiny community of about seventy were publicly and necessarily ‘Portuguese’ since a statute dating from the reign of Henry IV, De haeretico comburendo, specified the death sentence for any Christian practising Judaism.10 So as in Lisbon, while they married strictly within their community, they had an initial ceremony in a parish church. In the spirit of this double life Gonsalvo Anes, who became Dunstan Anes or ‘Ames’, had a surname which commonly meant ‘son of John’ in Portuguese but to those in the know also alluded to the ‘anusim’, as forced converts were known in Judaism. Under Elizabeth I the family name became Amis; Dunstan, a high-class grocer, had a coat of arms registered with the College of Heralds and was described as ‘Purveyor and Merchant’ to the queen’s household.11 But their position was always precarious. In 1542, a number of ‘Portuguese’ merchants were arrested on suspicion of being secret Jews, and although none were executed, their property was confiscated. And yet, despite the precautions, on Friday nights caped figures knocked on the door of Luis Lopes’s house near the Tower of London. In the...

Who actually paid for the Field of the Cloth of Gold where Henry VIII outdid even the Valois François I in chivalric ostentation and wrestling? Not the burghers of Norwich or the gentry of Devon, that’s for sure. The same was true of the infant Royal Navy, the beginnings of a merchant fleet, the forts and the parade armour. And in the end, Jewish money, which had paid for the building of so many of the greatest abbeys and monasteries of England, became available to the government commanding their destruction. The ‘Portuguese’ link was needed in ways theological as well as financial, so it helped that some of those men of business and medicine in Bristol, Southampton and London were apparently also rabbis with learned connections abroad. The case Henry VIII was building for his divorce from Catherine of Aragon was based on his reading of the Torah’s prohibition on marrying a brother’s widow. There was indeed such a ban to be found in Leviticus 18:16; but, as is the way of the Torah, the king, his chancellor Thomas More and Cromwell discovered that there was also an apparently contradictory injunction in Deuteronomy 25:5 actually requiring marriage to the widow of a dead brother when that union had produced no children. And this, exasperatingly, had been the case with Catherine and Arthur, Henry’s older brother. Converted New Christians seemed just the people to be helpful in such perplexing circumstances, and through them, rabbis were mobilised to deliver the judgements whi...

The issue was simple, and it is one which for another half-millennium has not gone away: whether people of Jewish descent would be lost to Judaism or whether a way could be found to welcome them back without compromising the core of texts and beliefs; to change the manner of Judaism without leaving the matter.

tzedaka: righteous care, the word conveying both charity and, from a cognate root, tzedek, justice.

Who else knew so well how to play for time, take the risks, to be ready to be off, always one step ahead of those who wished the Jews harm? And they knew all this because of necessity and upbringing. João Micas, who in Constantinople would become Joseph Nasi, councillor to the sultan, was after all a graduate of the University of Louvain, a hothouse of Catholic piety. Like all those dwelling in many worlds at once he understood the Christian universe from the inside out: its theology and philosophy, its rites and genuflections, its images and sprinklings, the lives of saints, the canon of miracles and martyrs. But when they could, Marranos like João Micas donned the habits of Jewish life as though they had never taken them off: the aggadah and the precepts of countless generations of sages and teachers, the beautiful calendar of feast and fast; the Sabbath stew and the Passover matzot; the poetry of the liturgy and the cantillation of the Torah. To live with all this gave them peerless cultural versatility even as it put them, again and again, in mortal peril. A touching passage in the Talmud requires aspiring proselytes to receive a solemn warning that were they to become Jewish they would be throwing in their lot with a people whose sufferings were legion and which were not likely to end any time soon, not until all Jews became unswerving in their observance of the Torah commandments. If, after this stern caution, they persisted, then they ought not to be denied. None co...

Usque invents a passage of inspired fantasy. The king of England erects two pavilions on the seashore. One contains a cross; the other the Scrolls of the Law. Jews are genially invited to choose. Naturally most opt for the Sefer Torah, but the entry to the pavilion is wide enough to admit only one of them at a time. On entering they are immediately beheaded by a concealed swordsman. A back curtain parts and the separated head and trunk are thrown into the sea.24

But then Usque in the voice of Numeo the comforter says something quite new in Jewish literature. The heart of our tragedy, he says, our exile, the punishment laid on us to wander the earth in terror and dismay, is actually a blessing in (admittedly heavy) disguise. For by ‘scattering you among all peoples He made it impossible for the world to destroy you, for if one kingdom rises against you in Europe to inflict death upon you, another in Asia allows you to live . . . If the Spaniards burn you in Spain and banish you the Lord wills for you to find someone in Italy who welcomes you and lets you live in freedom.’26 This too, the comfort of the diaspora, would also echo down the following centuries. And to another endlessly reiterated question, ‘When will it stop? When will deliverance and the messianic deliverer appear?’, Usque has another modern reply: it must stop soon because God has run out of countries to send you to. You have reached the ends of the earth, whether on the edge of the Iberian peninsula, in the African desert or on the Asian shores.

it became common for Christians to visit the ghetto to see springtime performances. Dramas of Jewish revenge, especially when they featured an irresistible but dangerous Jewess (probably but not certainly acted by males), often found an appreciative audience. The Gonzaga court at Mantua actually commissioned a performance of Judith and Holofernes from a Jewish troupe, even though a story featuring the beheading of a Babylonian general who has just been lulled into post-coital slumber by the seductive Jewish heroine seems an inauspicious choice for a wedding party, unless somehow the bride was being compared to the drop-dead virago. The groom may have left the candles burning that night. More often the demand was for Jewish comedy. Two ebrei istrioni, Jewish ham actors – ‘Solly and Jacob’, probably the first double act we know of – had been booked by the marquis Federico Gonzaga for an earlier wedding celebration in 1520. A year later the ebrei istrioni (and you bet they were) became a regular feature of life in Mantua, performing every year before the ducal court. There is no mystery as to where the Jewish urge to perform, especially in comedy, came from.3 For centuries Jews had been the butt of ridicule, much of it malignant. In paintings and on wooden sculptures of the Passion carried in procession, they had been represented as repellent grotesques. In the anti-Semitic farces, known as giudate, of the Roman carnival, they were made to perform humiliating parodies of the ...

These questions, put with renewed force at the beginning of modern Jewish history in the sixteenth century, have never gone away. Is Judaism a self-sufficient or an open culture? Is it heedless of time or marked by history? Were Torah, Bible, Talmud, and the myriad interpretative texts obsessively commenting on them and being in turn commented upon, enough unto themselves for leading an authentically Jewish life? Is that life necessarily diluted and compromised by immersion in Gentile culture, or deepened and enriched by it? It was in this precious but deceptive Italian dawn, before the militant Counter-Reformation restarted its persecutions, that these perennial questions developed practical implications for how Jews lived their lives: what they read, how they dressed, what they ate, to whom they spoke and in what language, what work they undertook.

Beyond Mantua, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the obstacles to a shared culture had become grimly formidable. Paul IV’s papal bull of July 1555, Cum nimis absurdum, proclaimed at the very outset of his pontificate, had begun by stating that the Jews had been condemned to ‘perpetual servitude’ on account of their collective guilt. Notwithstanding this, and exploiting the indulgence of Christians, they had had the temerity to dwell amongst them, even in the best parts of cities and in the vicinity of churches! Paul was tapping an ancient but, since the Black Death, intense paranoia about the bodily contamination of Jews. Indistinguishable from Christians, their women in particular would corrupt the bodies of youths and men, and – so it was alleged – spread syphilis, an especially foul Jewish plot. Hence the need to force them to wear the yellow hat (previously it had been red, and not all Jews had been required to wear it). Any kind of intercourse that might pollute Christians was now forbidden. So Jews were no longer allowed to sell food to Christians; nor to employ them as wet nurses (apparently mammary contamination could be a two-way process). Jewish doctors were forbidden to practise on Christian patients lest they introduce something sinister into their bodies, and nor could Jews employ Christians as house servants. Instead of accepting their subjection they had insolently attempted to dominate those same Christians, so now they needed, literally, putting...

169 bce

This Great Jew had once been the beardless twelve-year-old João Micas on the Bristol-bound caravel in 1537 with his aunts, Beatriz and Brianda de Luna. Now he was Duke of Naxos, master of an Aegean empire of castles and islands – lord of Milos, Paxos, Paros, Antiparos, Andros, Santorini (which itself produced potent wines from its volcanic soil) – and was known among his own people as Don Joseph Nasi, the prince.

Since the reign of Mehmed II, the Conqueror of Constantinople, and possibly even earlier, there had been an Ottoman tradition of Jews as physicians to the sultans, because unlike Muslims who might be in the pay of the disaffected, or Christians who would have much to revenge, they were believed to be safe as well as wise.

One of those synagogues associated with La Senyora, damaged many times by fires, earthquakes and brutal wars, can still be found in a narrow street behind the Izmir fish market. A low door opens onto a perfectly beautiful garden courtyard planted with fig and lemon trees. The interior, gracefully restored, principally by American funds, is a song of cream, blue and gold, vaulting Moorish arches and cushioned seating set around the perimeter in the Sephardi style. But it is the women’s gallery, painted with delicate pastorals – deer leaping over low hills, the statutory birds a-flutter and a-twitter – which bear the stamp of its patroness, or at least an acknowledgement of her generosity. In Istanbul in the old Jewish quarter of Balat there is another synagogue, the Ahira, which has also survived the trials of time and history. Though the present structure is eighteenth century, its reading dais, known in Sephardi communities as the tevah, is claimed as much older, a survivor from the time of the nightingales. Fashioned in the form of a collective memory, the tevah is shaped like the rounded stern of a caravel, or perhaps Noah’s ark (tevah also means ark). The lectern itself is set high, as if the reader of the Torah were a helmsman (which in many ways of course he was), sails filled with billowing hope.

there is no doubt at all that they continued to exert an extraordinary spell over generation after generation of Jews for whom the scholastic interrogation of Talmudic law and the interpretation of the overt text of the Bible would never be enough. If you were young (or even old) in the Mediterranean world in the nightingale time of expectation, how could you not immerse yourself in the ten sefirot, the ten emanations, each with their numerical attributes, through which the infinite Ein Sof is revealed and from which both the heavenly and earthly universes were constituted? At the summit, Keter (the Crown), the ineffable, interminable and unformable presence, beyond conscious apprehension. Then, Hokhma, wisdom; Hesed, loving kindness; Gevurah, forceful power; Tiferet, beauty; Netzah, victory; Hod, splendour; Yesod, foundation; and the two female presences, Binah, the generative womb of understanding, and Shekhina, the divine radiance. When merely enumerated in a history like this they seem no more than the usual mystical vapours which are always the outriders of institutionalised theologies and laws; but that is to sell Kabbalistic cosmology, or at least its perennial appeal, short. It was, after all, wrestling with the same questions that had taxed the perfervid community of the yachad at Qumran – how is the origin of the universe and the persistence of disorderly evil explained? The development of a numerology that might be manipulated or endlessly reformulated has not a...

who had been born in Jerusalem and had spent years pondering such matters with the help of the Bahir and the Zohar on an island in the Nile, ended up in Safed in 1569, sitting at the feet of Moses Cordovero and eventually replacing him as the fount of a new metaphysical knowledge. According to reports by his pupil Hayim Vital (the master himself being averse to setting them down), Luria took the older idea of tzimtzum, the post-creation withdrawal of the Ein Sof (the Without End), into a zone of ever more contracting space: an entropic black hole, a primal void, into which all light and matter collapsed. And from that not-space, creative force could be generated. That process itself, however, was not a gradual evolution but a series of explosive eruptions of light and vapour, shafts which could splinter and shatter. Only through a slow process of tiqqun or repair (which we might translate as cooling) could earthly matter become constituted. Does all this make the Kabbalists of Safed Big Bangers, uncanny anticipators of modern astrophysics? No, but it certainly makes them more than simply deluded mystics, hyperventilating beneath the Galilean stars until the heavenly chariot appeared. Though historians debate the impulse given to the new Kabbalism by the traumatic expulsions from Spain and Portgual, and the persecutions of the Inquisition, Luria’s genius was to make tzimtzum into a godly exile or estrangement; to be repaired by some sort of tshuva, a return, a reconstitutio...

master of the Jewish escape, lord of trade, patriarch of Jewish learning and literature; and without anachronism he might even be called, with Gracia, the first of the Zionists. But where he had blundered he had blundered calamitously, and a counter-biography persisted in the Gentile mind: the presumptuous, hard-hearted, imperiously mercenary Jew. Christopher Marlowe, someone drawn to outlandish daring, would in due course take the history of Don Joseph and turn him into a demonic figure – Barabas, the Jew of Malta. It was Joseph’s life as caricature: the jumped-up Hebrew, provoked by scorn into a monstrous conspiracy which destroys him, the customary, banal satisfaction inflicted by a Cambridge wit on the body of the Jew.

Kaifeng Jewish artefacts in the Royal Museum of Ontario.2

In West Africa, knowing the Portuguese would bring them trouble, the Jews went on a pre-emptive counter-attack against the Christians.14 When the Portuguese targeted a group of Jews based in the town of Joal on the ‘Petite Côte’, they fought back (in an area where

some of the rulers were Muslim) by describing the Catholics as pagans. Ruefully one of the Portuguese reported that the Jews represented them as ‘people who worship sticks and stones and who seek to harm them [the Jews] because they followed the way of Musa, Moses in the language of the Blacks and further they presented themselves to the King [of Joal] as initiates circumcised like the King himself and the other Black people’.15

Echoing what had been said by generations of medieval defenders of Talmud and Torah in public disputations, Montalto asked whether the age ushered in by Jesus could possibly be the promised messianic time, since any reasoning soul could see that the world had got worse, not better. The reign of a true Messiah would bring about an end to persecutions for both Jews and Gentiles in an ecumenical wave of charity.

Jacob Judah Leon, whom everyone called ‘Templo’, who ushered the court and courtiers into the exhibition. Templo was the first showman of the Bible. Here he is amid the tents of Israel – how goodly they are – the staff of Moses (or possibly Aaron) itself the ancestor of Templo’s own trusty pointing stick. In his own way Templo is also a miracle worker, his inspiration powered by the breath of God. The genius of the Jewish story,

he has realised, is its portability.

committed to sympathetic, learned engagement in Judaism as an indispensable tool of their mission. The instrument of persuasion was friendship, and from working comradeship sprang mutual respect, sometimes more than the Christian side had bargained for. This alteration of tone was not a small thing, for it took as a truism the approachable humanity of the Jews. In some

of the most ardent evangelical American churches today (the linear theological descendants of conversionary Anglo-Dutch Protestantism) this is still the case.

Cf Zondervan in Grand Rapids MI heart of Dutch Reformed theologians eminent in Greek and Hebrew scholarship

Better yet for Buxtorf is the rabbinical observation that men die with their hands open to show they are done with life, while babies are born with clenched fists clasping with them the essence of life’s fullness which they do not yet want to release.

Along with Saint-Jean-de-Luz in France, Rouen and Hamburg, Emden was one of the places where crypto-Jews found homes on escaping Portugal and Spain.

conversion of the Dominican confessor to the Spanish infanta Maria, Vicente Rocamora turning into Ishack Ysrael Rocamora, marrying into the Sephardi family of the Toura, making a living as a doctor and producing two sons who inevitably followed him in the same profession.24

Rembrandt was the great dramatist of apparition, of sudden revelations divinely delivered: Lazarus raised from the dead; the talking

donkey hee-hawing Balaam to think again before cursing the Israelites; Abraham’s hand stayed from slaughtering his son by the iron grip of the angel’s intervention. But in Belshazzar’s Feast painted in 1635, the agent of the drama which interrupts the Babylonian king’s banquet – profaned by using the Temple vessels, shaking his table, his company of courtiers and courtesans, and his empire – are Hebrew letters written on the wall by a mysteriously

disembodied hand. They form an undecipherably cryptic Aramaic message – ‘Mene, mene tekel upharsin’ – and Rembrandt paints the words to be read vertically rather than right to left in the customary Hebrew manner. Even though he gets the las...

Rembrandt had made a little oil sketch of Bueno’s head so beautiful that, three centuries later, Hitler took it for his intended Führer Museum at Linz, where the catalogue lists it, correctly, as ‘Jewish doctor’.

Jeremiah grieving while the Temple burned; the naked Bathsheba at her ablutions spied on by David and thus by us; Jacob wrestling with the angel. When the artist looked at the Jews he did so less as a lay theologian than as a casting director. Rubbing shoulders with them every day, he made mental and actual

sketches, and saw beneath the ordinary Dutch high hats and capes of the Sephardim – and the less ordinary soft Polish kolpak hats, long coats and beards of the Ashkenazim – the walking descendants of the Bible whose stories he compulsively translated into painted dramas.

included the Jews within his cosmopolitan company of the human comedy. Though he never travelled anywhere beyond the republic, Rembrandt van Rijn may have been the least parochial artist Christian Europe ever produced.

No painter does pensive better than Rembrandt. No European artist for a very long time could find a way to represent the heaviness of Jewish history, alleviated by the light of thought.

Uriel’s attack on rabbinical legalism could just as easily have been drawn from sources in both Christian and Jewish traditions. The notion that a purer Judaism had been corrupted and usurped by the Talmudists had been a commonplace of Christian (and especially New Christian) polemics, but it was also the defining criterion of the Karaites.

it had long been a staple of Church arguments that the Pharisees had reinvented and distorted the original teachings of the Hebrew prophets.

the historical meaning of Uriel da Costa. His was the earliest test of the challenges of freedom: how to keep the outliers from going rogue. Other such tests would follow. For Amsterdam was first the nursery and then the laboratory of the secular Jew.