Closed Doors in Italy
Where could the exiles turn? Sardinia and Sicily, home to Jews for a thousand years, had been joined to Spain and fell among the lands that, by Ferdinand's order, were to drive their Jews out. In 1493 the last Jews left Palermo. At Naples thousands of fugitives had been sheltered by King Ferdinand I with the help of the Dominican friars and the local Jewish community, but in 1540 Charles V ordered all Jews expelled from Naples.
Genoa long had a law limiting the entry of Jews beyond a set number. When "New Christians" arrived from Spain they were allowed to stay only a few days. A Genoese historian described them as "ghosts with sunken eyes who differed from the dead of the cemetery only in that they moved." Many died of hunger, pregnant women bore stillborn infants, and some parents sold their children to pay for their passage from Genoa. A few exiles were accepted at Ferrara, but they always had to wear a yellow badge on their clothing, perhaps as a precaution against the spread of disease.
Venice and the First Ghetto
Venice was long a good refuge for Jews. Several attempts to expel the Jews from the city were made (1395-1487), but the Venetian Senate defended them as effective servants of the country's trade and finance. Much of Venice's export trade was in the hands of Jewish merchants, who also played a large part in importing wool and silk from Spain and spices and pearls from India. The Jews of Venice had voluntarily occupied a quarter called the "Judecca" after them.
In 1516 the Venetian Senate, after consulting the Jewish leaders, ruled that all Jews, apart from a few with special permission, should live in a part of the city called the "ghetto." The name apparently comes from the Italian word for a foundry, since such a foundry stood in that quarter. The Senate ordered all the Marranos (converted Jews) to leave Venice. Many Christian rivals of the Jewish merchants backed the move, but other Christian merchants opposed it, for they thought the Jews' departure would cost them some markets, especially in trade with the Muslim world. Charles V threw his influence onto one of the scales, and the expulsion order was carried out. Yet before long Jewish merchants crept back into Venice, and fugitives from Portugal took the place of the banished baptized Marranos, in such numbers that for a while Portuguese became the language of the Jews of Venice.
Rome and Ancona: From Welcome to Restriction
A group of Iberian fugitives was received kindly in Rome by Pope Alexander VI, and under Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII and Paul III their lives flourished. Clement allowed the Marranos to practice Judaism freely, since in his view, having been baptized by force, they were not bound to regard Christianity as their true faith. At Ancona, the main Adriatic port of the Papal States, the Jews were a vital part of international trade. Clement made that city a refuge for Jewish merchants and gave them security of life and property.
Of Paul III, Cardinal Sadoleto said: "No pope has ever shown so much respect, exemption and privilege to Christians as Paul III has shown to the Jews. Not only are the Jews helped and supported, they enjoy every kind of privilege." One bishop protested that after reaching Italy the Marranos returned to Judaism and circumcised their baptized children almost before the eyes of the pope and the public. Under the pressure of such protests Paul restored the Inquisition in Rome (1542), but "throughout his life he never abandoned the cause of the Marranos."
The successors of Paul III faced a reaction against the easy, prosperous life of the Renaissance and adopted a new policy to make life harder for the Jews. The strict religious laws of earlier times were enforced again. Paul IV (1555-1559) ruled that every synagogue in the Papal States must pay ten ducats for the upkeep of a "House of Catechumens" founded to teach Christian doctrine to Jews. He forbade the Jews to employ Christian servants and nurses, to consult Christian physicians, to sell Christians anything but old clothes and to keep any avoidable contact with Christians. Jews could use no calendar but the Christian one. In Rome all synagogues but one were destroyed. No Jew could own real property, and any who did had to sell it within six months. By this plan Christians were able to buy up Jewish property worth 500,000 crowns at a fifth of its true price.
The ten thousand Jews of Rome were now (1555) compelled to live in the Jewish quarter, which covered one square kilometer. Several families lived in a single room, and the low ground of the quarter was ready prey to the seasonal floods of the Tiber, each time turning the area into a muddy marsh. The quarter was enclosed by gloomy walls whose gates closed at midnight and opened at dawn and stayed shut entirely on Sundays and Christian holidays. Outside the quarter Jews had to wear distinctive dress: men a yellow hat, women a yellow veil or badge. Such quarters were set up in Florence and Siena, and then by papal order in Ancona and Bologna, where the Jewish quarter was called the "Inferno."
Paul IV also issued a secret order to throw all the Marranos at Ancona into the prisons of the Inquisition and seize their property. In that city twenty-four men and one woman were executed for returning to Judaism. In 1556 twenty-seven Jews were sentenced to hard labor for life. These conditions were for the Jews of Italy the frightening sunset of their golden age.
Antwerp and Amsterdam
Some Jewish fugitives, despite prohibiting laws, reached France and England. Nearly all the doors of Germany were closed to them. Some went to Antwerp, but only a few were allowed to stay more than a month. Diogo Mendes, a Portuguese Marrano, opened at Antwerp a branch of the bank his family had founded in Lisbon. In 1532 he prospered so much that when the Antwerp council arrested him and fifteen others for following Judaism, Henry VIII interceded and, according to the book, took Mendes on as his treasurer. The others were freed after paying a heavy fine, which was the real aim of most such persecutions. Other Jews went as far as Amsterdam and settled there, and when the Netherlands later broke free of Spain their business grew and flourished (1589).
North Africa
The fugitives who took refuge in Muslim lands outside direct Ottoman control fared no better than the Jews of Christendom. Those who tried to reach Oran, Algiers and Bougie were shot at by the Moors, and many died. Since entering those cities was strictly forbidden to them, some built huts of sticks and broken planks outside the walls and made a ghetto of their own. When one of the huts caught fire by chance, the whole place and a number of its Jewish inhabitants were reduced to ashes. Those who reached Fez found its gates shut and squatted on the ground outside, living on vegetables and roots from the fields. Mothers killed their children to spare them death by hunger, parents sold their children for a scrap of bread, plague carried off hundreds, young and old, and pirates seized their camp and kidnapped small children to sell as slaves. Murderers, believing that Jews had swallowed jewels and hidden them inside their bodies, committed atrocities against them.
After bearing all this hardship, the Jewish survivors, with incredible courage and under many restrictions, managed to build new Jewish communities in the Moorish parts of North Africa. In Algiers, Simon Duran II repeatedly risked his life to bring the exiled Jews under his protection and settle them in a safe place. In Fez, Jacob Berab became the most famous Talmudist of his age.
Egypt and the Ottoman Lands
Under the Mamluks and the Ottoman sultans in Egypt, Spanish refugees were received with kindness and tolerance in Cairo and soon rose to lead its Jewish community. Sultan Selim I abolished in Egypt the old custom by which one Jewish rabbi held the exclusive right to choose all the rabbis and oversee the affairs of all Jews. From then on each Jewish community chose its own rabbi and settled its internal matters independently. The new rabbi of Cairo, David ibn Abi Zimra, himself a Spanish emigrant, abolished the Seleucid calendar used among the Jews of Asia and Africa and made them adopt the reckoning (as European Jews had done in the eleventh century) that begins from the creation of the world, set in the year 3761 BC.
The Sephardim (Iberian Jews) wherever they arrived took over the intellectual and often the political leadership of the native Jews. In Salonika they made up the majority of the population until 1918, so that non-Spanish Jews who came to live there had to learn Spanish. In this period of Jewish ascendancy Salonika became the most prosperous trading center of the eastern Mediterranean.
Sultan Bayezid II welcomed the arrival of exiled Jews in the Ottoman state, because they had precisely the skills in crafts, trade and medicine that were least developed among the Turks and most needed. Of Ferdinand the Catholic he said: "You call Ferdinand a wise king, who by banishing the Jews has made his own country poor and ours rich." In Islam Jews, like other non-Muslim subjects, had to pay the poll tax but in return were exempt from military service. Most Ottoman Jews remained poor, but some rose to wealth and rank. Within a short time nearly all the physicians of Constantinople were Jews. Suleiman the Magnificent favored his Jewish physician so much that he exempted him and his relatives from every kind of tax. In Suleiman's reign some Jews rose to such high offices that Christian ambassadors had to win their favor to approach the sultan.
When Suleiman heard of the persecution of the Jews of Ancona under Pope Paul IV he expressed disgust, protested to the pope (9 March 1556) and demanded the release of Ottoman Jewish subjects who had been taken prisoner at Ancona, and they were freed. Gracia Mendes, of the banking family of Mendes, after years of serving others and enduring all sorts of suffering and humiliation in Antwerp, Ferrara and Venice, at last found peace and calm in Istanbul (Constantinople).
Safed and the Dream of Return
Under Ottoman rule the Holy Land once more received the people who had first made it holy. Since Jerusalem was as sacred to the Jews as to Christians and Muslims, only a few Jews were permitted to live there. But in Safed, in Upper Galilee, the Jews multiplied so fast and gained such cultural standing that Jacob Berab thought of founding a Sanhedrin there to oversee the laws and social affairs of all Jews. It was a bold step, but sadly the Jews were too widely scattered in their homes, languages and customs to be united under one law and one system. Even so, the prayers of Jews throughout the Muslim and Christian world cried out to the Lord: "Gather the scattered from the four corners of the earth," and on Yom Kippur and Passover Jews were always united in a single hope: "Next year in Jerusalem." That hope sustained them through all those historic hardships.