The Jews of Spain

Gerber

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9781439107836
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

The history of the Jews of Spain is a remarkable story that begins in the remote past and continues today. For more than a thousand years, Sepharad (the Hebrew word for Spain) was home to a large Jewish community noted for its richness and virtuosity. Summarily expelled in 1492 and forced into exile, their tragedy of expulsion marked the end of one critical phase of their history and the beginning of another. Indeed, in defiance of all logic and expectation, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain became an occasion for renewed creativity. Nor have five hundred years of wandering extinguished the identity of the Sephardic Jews, or diminished the proud memory of the dazzling civilization, which they created on Spanish soil. This book is intended to serve as an introduction and scholarly guide to that history.

1
Volatile Origins
The Early History of Jewish Life in Spain

The exiles of Jerusalem who are in Sepharad will inherit the cities of the Negev.

—Obadiah 1:20

The beginnings of Jewish life in Spain are cloaked in myth and legend. According to medieval Sephardic traditions, Jews reached the Iberian peninsula in biblical times. Thus the city of Tarshish toward which Jonah sailed in hopes of evading God’s command was thought to be Tartessus, originally a Phoenician and later Carthaginian seaport on the Mediterranean coast. The tombstone of Adoniram, King Solomon’s general, supposedly was unearthed in Murviedro. As early as the first century of the common era, the designation “Sepharad” mentioned in the biblical book of Obadiah was considered by Jewish teachers to be identical with Ispamia or Spain. One particular folk tradition has lasted virtually to the present day: the legend that some of ancient Jerusalem’s aristocratic families, deported first by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and then again by the Roman conqueror Titus in 70 CE, resettled on the Spanish shore.

These and similar traditions attesting to the Sephardic community’s biblical origins were probably a form of self-defense, for most of them emerged when anti-Semitism was intensified during the Christian re-conquest of Muslim Spain. It was as if Spanish Jews were proclaiming that they could not be charged (as indeed they were) with “killing Christ,” because they were nowhere near Palestine at the time of the crucifixion.

Still, these legends do not entirely violate historic truth. Migration of Jews throughout the Roman diaspora (c. 200 BCE-200 CE) was so widespread that the ancient Greek geographer Strabo reportedly exclaimed, “This people has already made its way into every city, and it is not easy to find any place in the habitable world which has not received this nation and in which it has not made its power felt” (Josephus, Antiquities, XIV, 115). More specifically, it is known that Jewish merchants and travelers followed the expansion of Phoenician and Syrian trading colonies all along the shores of the Mediterranean, certainly including the Iberian peninsula. Ships that brought wares from the East also invariably left Jewish settlers in their wake.

Somewhat contrary to popular belief, perhaps, Jews in the Roman diaspora flourished in some measure because the Empire recognized Judaism as a legal religion (religio licita). It was in Imperial Roman interests to permit a combination of religious toleration and measured ethnic, cultural self-government to the Jews since they constituted an important economic and cultural force throughout the Empire. Accordingly, Jews were treated as an autonomous, self-governing people and exempted from the obligation of recognizing the cult of the emperor. But this exemption also had a negative side since pagan Rome did not understand the exclusivist claims of a monotheistic faith and therefore assumed that the Jews were unpatriotic.

Rome also continued to recognize the Jewish cultural ties to their national homeland in Palestine even after the great Jewish revolts there in the first and second centuries. Thus, Jews from throughout the diaspora were permitted to send contributions to their political and cultural institutions in the Holy Land. This gesture had considerable symbolic and practical implications for such a far-flung dispersion, because deference to Palestinian religious leadership provided a sense of unity. At the same time, Jews ran their practical affairs on a day-to-day basis at the local level, each community being sovereign even though they all shared the same organizational patterns, adjusting them to meet local requirements. Congregations were typically autonomous even in the many cities in the Empire that had more than one. Throughout these early centuries, the Jewish population increased rapidly (in no small part, as a result of vigorous proselytizing). Ultimately, Jews would constitute 25 percent of the Roman population in the Eastern Mediterranean and ten percent in the Empire as a whole. According to some estimates, the total Jewish population at the beginning of the common era may have been eight million.

The movement westward began after Titus’s destruction of Judea and was spurred on by Rome’s brutal suppression of a revolt in Palestine in 135. As Jews fanned out to the further corners of the Mediterranean, Italy and Spain to the north, the African coast to the south, they built settlements that have left us such archaeological traces as ruins of synagogues, the underground burial caverns known as catacombs, and trilingual (Hebrew, Latin, Greek) tombstone inscriptions. One such tombstone dating from sixth-century Mérida confirms the proud claims of later Spanish Jews that they were descended from the “founding fathers” of the nation.

In the case of Spain, the archaeological record reveals clearly that Jews did not live as isolated individuals or families but as organized communities that, while cohesive and traditional, also received cultural cues from the surrounding milieu. Such acculturation is indicated, for example, in the great number of funerary inscriptions that are written only in Latin. At the same time, Spanish Jews remained connected to classic Judaism and faithful to their ancient beliefs, as shown by the occurrence of traditional Jewish symbols alongside many of these Latin inscriptions.

In fact, the Jewish concept of monotheism was spread to others with relative ease during the first centuries of the common era, setting the stage for the successful Christian evangelizing to follow. Typically, the proselytes of Judaism were strongly influenced by contact with established Jewish communities or their missionaries but did not necessarily become full-fledged converts. These so-called “God-fearers” (sebomenoi) did adopt some Jewish practices, however, making them receptive to subsequent Christian conversion. As the records of the early Church show, it was invariably true that wherever a Christian missionary appeared he found Jews already established. According to Christian tradition, Saint Paul preached in Spain. Well into the common era, Judaism remained an expansionist, proselytizing religion with a significant conversionist bent.

Hispania or Ispamia was one of the wealthiest provinces of the Empire. Its inhabitants, granted citizenship in 212 by the Emperor Caracalla, participated in a flourishing commerce: rich soil and mild climate made the province into Rome’s granary, agriculture and livestock were cultivated throughout the peninsula, while Spanish horses were coveted in the Roman circuses for their swiftness and grace. In addition, a significant portion of the country’s wealth came from minerals; its gold and silver mines, heavily dependent upon slave labor, provided a steady annual income to Rome.

At its height the Empire maintained a superb communications network that facilitated the transfer of information and interchange among such a widely dispersed people as the Jews. The great Roman highway, the Via Augusta, began in the capital and stretched 13,000 miles through Italy and Gaul to terminate at the port of Cádiz in southwestern Spain. Troops and goods moved easily along the ancillary routes that radiated out to the many towns of the peninsula.

The basic unit of administration was the municipality (civitas). The historian Pliny, who served as the procurator in Spain, describes 360 different towns in the province, all of them sharing a basically Roman appearance with their temples, arches, aqueducts, and amphitheaters. Even today, remnants of these ancient public works can still be seen, such as the aqueducts in Segovia and Tarragona, the amphitheater in Tarragona, and the bridges of Mérida and Salamanca. One measure of the tranquillity of the province is that only one Roman legion had to be stationed there to keep Spain within the Empire.

So long as Rome was tolerant and prosperous, Jewish life flourished. Archaeological remains all along the Spanish coast attest to the density of Jewish settlement in this period. Early Church councils indicate that Jews mixed freely among their neighbors and were generally regarded with favor. The works of pagan writers suggest that attitudes toward Jews varied according to social class; some admired Jews for their “temperance, wisdom, courage, and justice”¹ while others resented what they perceived as clannishness because of the Jews’ refusal to recognize the pagan gods.

Deterioration of Jewish life in Spain began in the fifth century, when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity under the Emperor Constantine. For one thing, the Jewish population declined throughout the Mediterranean region as the Empire became increasingly chaotic and lawless. The conditions that had been critical to Spain’s prosperity were breaking down. Beginning in the third century, for example, the small freeholds were progressively being absorbed by the great landed estates. The invasions of various German tribes from western Europe merely accelerated a trend to ruralization as the latifundia of Roman times continued to grow through confiscation, a symptom of the general lawlessness and breakdown in imperial rule. As the cities declined, trade diminished and industrial production was reduced to essential items. Naturally, Jews suffered along with the rest of the population as gold and silver were drained to the East, onerous tolls were introduced, the road system disintegrated, and the overall economy declined.

More importantly, of course, a confrontation between the new state religion and Judaism was inevitable: Christianity defined itself as the successor to its older (and, as is often said, rival) sibling in the divine drama. Conversion to Judaism became a capital crime. This competition for converts from among the same pagan population provides part of the background for early Spanish ecclesiastical legislation against the Jews.

Even before the Empire converted to Christianity, the vexing problem of the status of the Jews was the subject of a historic ecclesiastical council convened in Elvira in the year 306. Participants were especially concerned about the close social relations between neighboring Christians and Jews. Evidently, the Jewish community was a substantial and influential presence, and some rabbis were held in alarmingly high esteem by many Christians. In Canon 49 of the Council of Elvira, the Christian believer is given specific instructions on this issue:

It seems appropriate to warn farmers not to permit that their fruits, which they receive from God as a gift of grace, be blessed by Jews so that our blessing should not appear as worthless and despised; if anyone continues to act in such a manner despite our prohibition, he will be driven away from the Church.

The council was even more exclusionary in another decree (Canon 50):

If any of the priests or believers eats his meal with a Jew, we decide that he does not participate in the communion so that he atones.²

Precisely because Jews were still an influential force in Spain, the Elvira Council deemed it necessary to insulate Christian believers from the seductions of Judaism by derogating both its tenets and its leaders. Restrictions were imposed to limit opportunities for social interaction between the two faiths; Christians were specifically warned not to ask rabbis to bless their fields. In short, the work of this council typified an emergent body of legislation designed to isolate Jews from the larger community throughout the Empire while hammering out a doctrine that defined and affirmed the lowly place of Judaism in history.

Perhaps surprisingly, the historical separation of Christianity from Judaism, with its profound consequences for Jewish communal life, was a long and complex process. After all, the Church had emerged directly out of the synagogue in the first century, and Christianity would never totally disassociate itself from its Jewish origins. On the contrary, Christian apologists argued the supremacy of their belief over Judaism by making recourse to promises and predictions in the Hebrew scriptures. In a sense, then, early Christians could be said to have defined themselves in terms of the religion they rejected.

Consequently, Church thinkers could not simply dismiss Judaism out of hand. Their most troubling challenge was the enigmatic perseverance of the Jewish people after the advent of Jesus had made their religion obsolete. A partial solution was to reinterpret selected ancient Hebraic texts, yet even then the Church had to retain many Jewish elements, unable either to abandon or acknowledge their origin. Another tactic was to regard Judaism as a perfidia, or perversion of the true faith.

Therefore, the appropriation and reinterpretation of the scriptures, a process which began with Paul’s career in the first century, was focused on working out an earthly role for Jews to play that would be consistent with the essential Christian message. Church thinkers reinterpreted the scriptures to become proof texts of the basic, two-edged doctrine: Christian election, Jewish obsolescence. Out of obstinacy and perverseness, the Jews refused to understand the shared scriptures “properly,” blind to the validations of Christianity there and the proof that their belief had been superseded. But even as Christians and Jews disagreed about the true meanings of the ancient texts, it was Scripture that linked them.

How should the bearers of the old tradition be treated so that they would not pose a “threat” to the fledgling new faith? In other words, what purpose should Jews serve in the new Christian world order?

A fateful rationale was devised from the doctrine of Christian supersession: the Jews would be preserved because their veneration of the Old Testament bore witness to the truth of Christianity. At the same time, they would be tolerated only minimally, so that their debased state itself would provide visible proof of their “rejection” by God. Their misery would also demonstrate what would befall those who did not accept Jesus as the Messiah. In addition, the maligning of Judaism would serve to enhance the self-esteem of Christians. Finally, the doctrine implied that strenuous efforts should be made so that a saving remnant of the Jewish people would “see the light,” since their conversion was to presage or accompany the Second Coming.

The paradoxes of a doctrine that simultaneously advocated toleration and discrimination, preservation and persecution, conversion and persuasion, would plague the Jews for centuries. Modern scholars have collectively labeled these contradictions “the teaching of contempt.” Its legacy was an enormous edifice, built over several centuries, that provided much of the material from which theological anti-Semitism in Western civilization evolved.³

After Constantine’s conversion, attacks against Jews were no longer solely verbal, confined to council deliberations and doctrinal disputes. Even though the status of Judaism as a lawful religion was not formally revoked, those in positions of authority in the state now shared the increasingly hostile ecclesiastical attitude. The pen of the bishops began to guide the hand of the emperors, and the currents of anti-Semitism in the early Church formed a powerful partnership with the pagan anti-Semitic legacy. Assaults upon the person and property of Jews followed as a matter of course, and their situation began a long decline toward the medieval position: the Jew as pariah and demon. It was not possible, after all, for the simple folk and lower clergy to discern the doctri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: An Enigma of 1492
• 1. Volatile Origins: The Early History of Jewish Life in Spain
• 2. The Birth of Sepharad: From the Muslim Conquest to the Caliphate of Córdoba
• 3. The Golden Era: The Emergence of Sephardic Civilization
• 4. The Reconquista: Jews and the New Realities of Christian Spain
• 5. Path to Expulsion: The Decline and Destruction of Spanish Jewry
• 6. Return to the Islamic World: The Sephardic Diaspora in Muslim Lands
• 7. The Westward Journey: Europe and the New World
• 8. Encounter with Modernity: Ottoman Decline and the Ascendance of the West
• 9. Revival and Return: Sephardic Jews in the Post-War Era
• Insert Photos
• Appendix 1 The Edict of Expulsion
• Appendix 2 Immigration Tables
• Appendix 3 Maps
• Notes
• A Note on Further Reading
• Index
• Footnote
• Copyright Page