Download PDF | Jonathan Ray - After Expulsion_ 1492 and the Making of Sephardic Jewry- New York University Press (2013).
225 Pages
Introduction
Of the many calamities to befall the Jewish people during their arduous passage from the medieval to the modern world, none was more sharply felt or more widely chronicled by its contemporaries than the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. The last in a long line of similar expulsions in medieval Europe, it marked the end of one of the most celebrated periods of affluence and intellectual productivity in Jewish history. Together with the fall of Muslim Granada early that same year, the Expulsion of the Jews represented the ultimate failure of inter-faith coexistence for which medieval Iberia is so often praised. For its victims, 1492 was only the beginning of a lengthy and painful journey.
In its wake, the dispossessed suffered a series of hardships ranging from starvation and physical abuse to captivity and forced conversion and were driven across the Mediterranean in search of protection, prosperity, and religious freedom. There can be little argument that the Expulsion of 1492 was a disaster for those involved and a major turning point in both Jewish and Spanish history.1 And yet a true understanding of this pivotal period in Jewish and Mediterranean history also requires that we move past the usual elegies to a lost civilization. The impulse to memorialize the tragedy of the Expulsion should not obscure the larger story of how the Jews of medieval Iberia reconstituted their communities and refashioned their cultural identities as they transitioned to new lands and a new age. In truth, the aftermath of 1492 raises its own set of questions. How did the Spanish Jews view the world into which they were cast? What was life like for the refugees and their children, and how did they navigate the treacherous waters of exile?
Finally, how did these outcasts evolve into one of the most economically and culturally significant diasporas of the early modern world? This book offers a detailed exposition of these questions. It chronicles the voyage of Iberian Jewry from medieval Iberia to the wider Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century, and from a collection of relatively disconnected municipal communities to a recognizable diaspora society. It follows the peregrinations of the refugees of 1492 and their descendants, and shows how they built a distinct society and new collective identity that has endured until the present day. The result is a reassessment of the nature and development of Sephardic society and many of its central features. At the same time, recounting the evolution of the Sephardic world offers a unique opportunity to assess the political, social, and cultural interactions among the various religious communities of the early modern Mediterranean.
A “Mediterranean Society” Once More?
Although it is often seen as the sad conclusion to medieval Jewish history, the Expulsion of 1492 actually represents the reemergence of one of the great themes of medieval Jewish society, namely the full-scale integration of Iberian Jewry into the broader Mediterranean world. The close association of Iberian Jews with other Jewish communities around the Mediterranean was perhaps most famously articulated by the eminent historian S. D. Goitein. In A Mediterranean Society, his monumental study of Jewish life during the High Middle Ages, Goitein provided an unforgettable portrait of a world in which Jews drew upon a shared religious heritage to build a web of mercantile networks that flowed throughout the Mediterranean basin.2 But this panMediterranean society began to unravel long before the close of the Middle Ages. These networks and the wide-ranging communal bonds that they helped promote flourished only until the mid-thirteenth century, by which time the unity and influence of the Jewish Mediterranean had begun to wane.
The Jews’ role in long-distance trade was largely overtaken by Christian merchant communities, and Jewish society assumed an increasingly provincial character. During the later Middle Ages, contacts among the various nodes of Mediterranean Jewry remained sporadic, and Goitein’s “Mediterranean Society” gave way to distinct regional Jewish cultures. In Iberia, where Christian lords had come to dominate the peninsula, Jewish society turned away from the Mediterranean and toward the Jewish centers of northern Europe.3 The use of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic, languages that had once connected Iberian Jews to their coreligionists in North Africa and the Levant, declined sharply after the thirteenth century. By the time of their expulsion in 1492, knowledge of Arabic among Spanish Jews was limited to a handful of intellectuals and diplomats. Over the course of the fourteenth century, the social and economic fragmentation of the Jewish world slowly began to reverse itself. In contrast to the Judeo-Arabic world created by the absorption of Jews into the Pax Islamica of the ninth century, the first tentative steps toward the reintegration of Mediterranean Jewry came as a result of their exclusion from much of the Latin West.
European Jews began moving into and around the Mediterranean as they were driven out of France and Provence, with many settling in Italy and North Africa. But the decisive moment, at least with regard to Iberian Jewry, came in 1391, when a series of anti-Jewish riots swept throughout the Spanish kingdoms. In addition to marking one of the darkest moments in medieval Jewish history, the massacres and forced conversions of that fateful year also set in motion the first phase of the Sephardic Diaspora. Professing Jews and newly baptized Conversos alike fled the peninsula in search of new homes, and subsequent attacks on Iberian Conversos and their descendants prolonged this process of resettlement for much of the fifteenth century.4 The relocation of large numbers of French and Iberian Jews soon became part of a larger trend. Indeed, parallel movements of other religious groups helped to characterize the transition from the medieval to the early modern world as an age of migration. The Jews of northern Europe were drifting eastward, settling primarily in the Kingdom of Poland and its neighboring states. From the sixteenth century onward, there followed a similar set of long-distance “confessional migrations” of distinct Christian groups throughout Europe.5 This large-scale relocation of peoples and the various political, economic, and cultural changes it wrought constituted as decisive a break with the medieval past as did the new transregional connections forged by the European voyages of discovery. In Spain, the Expulsion of the Jews came amid a parallel process of Muslim emigration to North Africa.
Those who fled the Kingdom of Granada in the years leading up to its final collapse in 1492 were followed ten years later by the remaining Muslims who chose expulsion over conversion. At the same time, the movement of black Africans had begun to flow in the opposite direction. The arrival of the Portuguese in West Africa led to a steady influx of black slaves into Portugal and its new island possessions in the Atlantic. From Lisbon, the Portuguese introduced slaves from North and West Africa into Spain.6 The exodus of Iberian Jewry after 1492 can thus be placed along a continuum of migration and resettlement of large groups of people during the late medieval and early modern period.7 The prolonged nature of their migration and the political, economic, and cultural environment of the Mediterranean lands in which the majority came to settle shaped the outlines of Sephardic society just as they did for the society of the High Middle Ages described by Goitein.
The Mediterranean World in 1492
For students of modern history, especially those in the United States, 1492 signals the shift of Spain’s energies from the “Old World” of Europe and the Mediterranean to the “New World” of the Americas and the Atlantic. But this transition took decades to transpire. For many years after Columbus’s voyage, European powers continued to direct a great deal of their military, political, and economic energies toward a renewed push for dominance in the Mediterranean. Even Christopher Columbus’s royal patron, Ferdinand II of Aragon, showed greater interest in the Mediterranean than in the lands across the Atlantic. This focus on the Mediterranean was particularly notable after the death of Queen Isabella I in 1504, when the Castilian Cortes succeeded in limiting the king’s influence to the lands of the Crown of Aragon. As a result, Ferdinand turned his attention toward Naples and Sicily, with their supplies of wheat and sugar, and to the eastern Mediterranean, where he sought to revive the Crown of Aragon’s interest in the lucrative Levant trade and to direct his crusading fervor toward the Turks.8 Spain’s continued interest in the Mediterranean also led it to join Portugal in pursuit of new territories in North Africa, and to become embroiled with France in an effort to control the Italian Peninsula.
It was not until the reign of Charles V, known in Spain as Carlos I (r. 1516–1556), that the Americas began to compete for prominence with the Mediterranean in Spanish foreign policy. The ascendancy of the Ottoman Turks in the eastern Mediterranean paralleled that of the Spanish and Portuguese in the West. Following the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Empire continued to expand, encompassing an ever-widening cross-section of peoples, and vying for power with other Muslim forces in North Africa and with Christian powers in Europe. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the military clashes among the various Mediterranean powers took place on an even grander scale, fueled by increased uses of cannons and the huge fortifications they engendered, as well as an influx of gold, silver, and other raw materials. Sixteenth-century warfare also involved and consumed a seemingly endless supply of soldiers and slaves, who typically demonstrated little interest in religious ideology or any other casus belli. These went to war and died by the thousands of disease, drowning, starvation, and exhaustion in addition to wounds suffered in combat. They fought their fellow Christians and Muslims as often as they did those of foreign faiths, and they almost always did so for the promise of booty, or else under duress. Even the Janissaries, the elite troops of the Ottoman army, were not above open revolt against their sultan in demand for payment for their services and loyalty. And yet for all this great expenditure of energy, men, and materiel, the renewed push for dominance in the region produced little in the way of conclusive results.
Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of the Mediterranean world in the sixteenth century was that Spanish and Ottoman expansion generally served to preclude either power from achieving true control of the region.9 Even in their respective spheres of influence at either end of the Mediterranean, Spain and the Ottomans were forced to contend with political and economic challenges from a host of other competitors, including Portugal, Genoa, Venice, the Papal States, and the sultanate of Fez. These states, along with populist leaders of the southern Maghreb and the semi-autonomous bands of corsairs that operated throughout the Mediterranean, were pulled into the maelstrom of Mediterranean politics as potential allies and enemies of the great powers. The Portuguese, Spanish, and Ottomans drew upon the economic and navigational skills of Venetians, Genoese, Greeks, Arabs, and Armenians. Already in the fifteenth century, the decline in Genoese fortunes in the eastern Mediterranean and the simultaneous expansion of Portugal into the North Atlantic and the Maghreb led to a growing presence of Genoese in Iberia.10 When Columbus set sail under the patronage of the Spanish crown, he was following in a long line of Italian-born sea captains, merchants, and explorers who had served the Spanish and Portuguese in their maritime expansion for over a century. The Genoese explorer Antoniotto Usodimare, together with the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto, helped lead expeditions in West Africa for Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator. In 1492, most of the ships that carried the Jewish refugees away from ports of eastern Spain were owned and captained by Genoese.11
The political vicissitudes and new economic opportunities of the sixteenth century also shaped prevailing attitudes and policies with regard to religious minorities. Despite the continued use of the vocabulary of religious polemic, including calls for crusades and sweeping condemnations of heretics and infidels, medieval attitudes toward religious groups were transforming rapidly. Popes, kings, and their chroniclers still presented the struggle for supremacy in the Mediterranean in religious terms—as an effort to advance or defend the “true” faith against the “infidel.” Yet even the most ardent champions of religious homogeneity were repeatedly forced to modify their expectations. In Iberia, the nominal Catholic unity achieved by the string of conquests, expulsions, and conversions that took place between 1492 and 1502 masked widespread religious distrust and dissent. The integration of former Jews and Muslims into Spanish and Portuguese society remained a major obstacle throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as was the persistence of folk beliefs and religious doubt among the so-called “Old Christians.”12 If sixteenth-century rulers were forced to relent and suspend their policies from time to time, such behavior in turn taught a valuable lesson to the minorities at whom these policies were aimed: little in their lives was as stable, permanent, or irrevocable as it might first appear. For the exiled Jews of Spain and Portugal, the shifting sands of fortune emphasized the need to be cautious and vigilant, to dissemble or flee if necessary, and to view the prevailing situation in any given land—be it good or bad—as temporary. So too did they see the political and economic alliances they formed as vital, but provisional, relationships always contingent upon their personal and everchanging needs and opportunities. Prior to 1492, Iberian Jews had become practiced in deflecting or minimizing policies that could potentially impinge upon their hard-won privileges or status.
They exploited the system of overlapping jurisdictions that characterized medieval society, and regularly challenged the authority of their local Jewish governments. These skills that the Sephardim brought with them into exile provided them with the necessary disposition to survive the trials of Expulsion and forced conversion, and to thrive in the turbulent world of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean. Most Sephardim, including many born into Converso families, clearly felt a strong personal bond to Judaism and to the Jews of the past, present, and future. Yet however strong this sense of religious solidarity may have been, it was only one in a host of factors that determined how the Sephardim of the sixteenth century constructed and managed their communities. As they crisscrossed the Mediterranean from city to city, Jewish refugees joined a motley cast of sixteenth-century people: renegados and corsairs, merchants and mercenaries, scholars and fanatics, and adventurers of all kinds. Only by bearing in mind the full scale of the chaos, movement, and calamity that typified life in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean can we make sense of the experience of the Sephardic exiles.
The political volatility of the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean was a central factor in determining the contours of the early Sephardic Diaspora. It required the refugees of 1492 and their descendants to think continually about questions of communal, cultural, and religious identity. How would they present themselves to the authorities—Jewish and non-Jewish—in the towns and cities in which they sought settlement and protection? The most obvious answer to this question was, perhaps, “as Jews.” And yet the reality of the situation was more complex than that. The religious identity of Iberian refugees, unlike that of other Jewish groups expelled from western Europe during the late Middle Ages, was not a foregone conclusion.
For Christians of Jewish heritage who fled Spain and Portugal with the intention to live as practicing Jews, the relative dangers and opportunities attached to being Christian or Jewish in different locales forced them to revisit time and again the question of when and where to declare their religious identity. Even those refugees who had always been Jewish soon found themselves confronted with other decisions regarding their ethnic, social, and political affiliations. Did they consider themselves “Spanish” Jews—Sephardim, in the parlance of medieval rabbinic discourse? If so, did such a designation have political ramifications? That is to say, could the Jews from Córdoba, Valencia, and Salamanca be grouped together into “Sephardic” congregations and communities in their new societies, or did the continued relevance of their pre-Expulsion identities prevent such social and political amalgamation? These basic issues associated with the social and political formation of the Sephardic Diaspora form the heart of this book.
Formation of the Sephardic Diaspora
A key argument of this volume is that Sephardic society was more of a product of the sixteenth century than of the Middle Ages. Prior to their expulsion, Spanish Jews comprised a loosely associated collection of communities with little cohesive identity. The true legacy that the Sephardic refugees brought with them into exile was not a particular Hispano-Jewish identity, as is often assumed,13 but a series of cultural traits that proved far more important to the construction of their diaspora and to its social, political, and religious structures. These included the highly contested political life of the local Jewish community, the divergent paths of popular and elite religious expression, and the incipient mercantile and intellectual networks between Iberia and the wider Mediterranean world. If these medieval characteristics were the raw material for the Sephardic Diaspora, it was the general mutability of their new surroundings that would act as the crucible in which this transnational society was forged. Indeed, the evolution of the Jews of Spain from members of independent communities to a diaspora of Sephardic Jews obliges us to look more closely at the world of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, and to explore the way in which their experiences led to the establishment of a new set of corporate identities.
I also contend that the Expulsion of 1492 was less a singular event than a long and serpentine process followed by decades of Jewish migration throughout the Mediterranean. Many among the first generation of Jewish exiles from Spain settled in the western Mediterranean and remained tied to the Iberian Peninsula. A major reason for this continued bond with their ancestral homeland was that the exclusion of professing Jews from Spain and Portugal was immediately followed by the military expansion of these kingdoms into the North African lands where many of the Jewish exiles had sought refuge. The royal and ecclesiastical authorities that were so intent on rooting out crypto-Jewish behavior in Spain and Portugal were, in contrast, much more accepting of such activity in their colonial possessions. As had been the case during the Middle Ages, life on these distant frontier zones was always more fluid and provided an opportunity for Jewish social and economic mobility. There, on the distant boundaries of European expansion, Jews and Conversos were welcomed as merchants, translators, and political intermediaries, despite the restrictive policies being promoted in Lisbon, Madrid, and Rome. The establishment of Iberian colonies in North Africa and the Americas provided Sephardic Jews and Conversos an opportunity to reprise the roles their ancestors had played throughout the long centuries of the reconquista. Even for those who found shelter in the Ottoman Empire, the path of Sephardic resettlement was rarely a straight one.
Throughout the sixteenth century, generations of Jews of Spanish heritage passed back and forth between Christian and Muslim lands, and often between Christianity and Judaism as well. One of the greatest challenges to the survival and integrity of Jewish society during this long period of movement and communal upheaval was how to reconstruct viable communal structures at a time when so many factors seemed to conspire against them. The nearly constant migration of Jewish merchants and refugees around the Mediterranean posed a serious obstacle to this process, but so did a tendency toward factionalism and a popular disregard for communal authority. This experience of communal instability, rather than the shock of 1492, shaped the way in which Jewish communities organized themselves and related to Jew and Gentile alike. It was the second and third generations of the exiles of 1492 that began to turn the old rabbinic images of Sepharad into an actual society with identifiable social and political frameworks. As Jewish leaders struggled to establish local communal institutions, other models of social organization began to form that were, in many ways, more responsive to the new problems and potentialities of Sephardic life. These were the long-distance networks of merchants and rabbis that linked the far-flung settlements of the Sephardic Diaspora. The networks that would come to dominate Sephardic society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had already begun to form in the immediate aftermath of 1492. Their success speaks to the perspicacity of Sephardic merchants in responding to the various challenges of communal life in a time of nearly constant upheaval. And yet, as in the local community, the network model served only a limited role as a means of ordering Jewish society. Throughout this period, the continued instability of Jewish political and economic organization exacerbated the plight of those who inhabited the margins of that society. The relatively volatile and contentious nature of communal organization also manifested itself in various expressions of religious life in the Sephardic Diaspora.
The complex relationship between the Jewish migrants and the members of local Jewish communities in which they settled raised a host of questions regarding piety, honor, and correct modes of religious observance. Perhaps nowhere was this tension clearer than in the widespread suspicions over the religious motives and loyalties of those former Conversos seeking to return openly to Judaism. The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain was a major vehicle for the dissemination of philosophical, mystical, and legal writing throughout the Jewish world. Nonetheless, the religious life in the early Sephardic Diaspora was much more than the sum of its greatest intellectual products. For the Jews of the early modern Mediterranean, religious life continued to be shaped as much by popular religious notions as by rabbinic pronouncements and prohibitions. As Sephardic social and political institutions slowly took root, the outlines of a general Sephardic identity also began to emerge. These new communal features succeeded in blurring the older lines that had once separated the Jews of different Iberian regions from one another. The development of a new Sephardic identity was augmented by the recognition of cultural differences between the refugees as a group and the native Jews of the lands in which they came to live. Longstanding medieval divisions that traditionally separated Jews of different Iberian regions and cities were of little consequence to the Mustarab, Romaniot, and various Italian communities in which they began to settle. To these communities, the refugees from Spain represented a cohesive group defined by a common fate, and by the common problems they presented to native Jews as a large and foreign immigrant horde.
Rather than present Mediterranean Jewish society at this time as a Kulturkampf between Jewish émigrés from Spain and the various communities of Jews among whom they settled, I assert that Sephardic cultural identity was instead a product of such encounters, and that it was the shared experience of cultural dislocation that fostered a new unity among the previously disparate groups Iberian Jews and their descendants. The conventional theme of Hispano-Jewish migration after 1492 is its trajectory from West to East—from Christian Iberia to the Ottoman Empire, and, in a larger sense, from a medieval setting to something new. This standard description of Sephardic history has the Jews leaving Spain and then arriving en masse in the Ottoman Empire. This narrative reads past the entire sixteenth century as an ellipsis, assuming that the formation of the Sephardic Diaspora represents the relocation of an already formed community, rather than the slow and complex creation of that community over several generations. The truth is actually far more complex, and far more interesting. In recent years, a series of fine books on the Sephardic Diaspora have begun to bring the portrait of early modern Sephardic society into sharper focus. However, these regional studies concentrate on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, picking up the narrative after a recognizable Sephardic identity had already emerged. None chronicle the creation of this diaspora society and the various factors that gave it shape.14
The intellectual history of the early Sephardic Diaspora—of the way in which the Expulsion of 1492 transformed the mystical, philosophical, and legislative worldview of the refugees and their descendants—is a subject that has been taken up elsewhere.15 The complexities of these intellectual characteristics and the considerable debates they have engendered remain beyond the purview of this study. Instead, my focus here is on the social and political evolution of this society, and on the subsequent development of a new cultural consciousness. The analysis of this formative period presented here represents an important bridge between studies that trace the path leading up to the Expulsion of 1492 and the various regional studies of later Sephardic society in the early modern period. It challenges some of the popular assumptions about Hispano-Jewish society prior to 1492, as well as those about the way men and women of the Sephardic Diaspora constructed their society.
This liminal stage between what we have come to know as the traditional and the modern is characterized by the legacy of Jewish pragmatism and resourcefulness in the face of tremendous adversity, by the tenacious independence of various segments of Jewish society, and by the communal volatility this tendency produced. The story of this difficult passage from the medieval to early modern period, and from Iberian Jews to Sephardim, has much to tell us about the form and function of Jewish society.
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