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

by Simon Schama

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...