Season 1: Episode 26 - The Storm Breaks

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The wise man, says Aristotle, does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently, but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life, knowing that under certain conditions, it is not worthwhile to live. Well, I want to live a worthwhile life, and in order to do that, I need to know my past. Not just know my past, but I want to live it in the present, so that it can carry me to the future, because I'm Rav Mike Poyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 26, The Storm Breaks. The crisis of 1391 is not just another chapter in the litany of woes of Jewish history. And the wave that's going to crash over the Jews of Spain at this point is going to leave more than just destruction in its wake.

So in order to understand the nature of the catastrophe which lies ahead and its implications for our lives to this very day, I want to briefly revisit the past. I know that may sound strange in a history podcast, but we're going to go even further back than we ought. Because I believe that the most powerful organizing principle in individual and communal life is identity. In our story, we've been working with a model of identity which in essence, hasn't changed since the time of Ezra. Remember way back when at Shivat Zion, the return to Zion, about 500 years before the Common Era, when Ezra and Nehemia were our wall builders? They created a model of identity that was based on two principles that we discussed at the time, exclusion and exclusivity.

Meaning, they wanted to define who's in and who's out, and to make sure that they became the sole masters of their story. Now, this may sound harsh, and in truth, its application often is, but nonetheless, it's critical to remember that all healthy relationship begins with separation. Because whether it's children that must differentiate from their parents, lovers that know it's unwise to lose sight of personal boundaries, or peoples seeking a model of coexistence, there is a stage of relationship in which clarity of self is the absolute necessary ingredient. So we saw how the first real challenge to this us here, them, their perspective on identity was the Greek encounter, and how the Maccabean revolt added a new depth to our appreciation of identity issues.

The Maccabees were the ones who really understood that identity is a life or death matter, and anyone looking at the world today and wondering what's going on would do well to remember it. Now, once Am Yisrael mastered their inner Hellenist, the next core identity challenge came from Christianity. And the process of differentiation here was less explosive than with the Greeks, but much more messy and far more prolonged. Because early Christianity, of course, claimed to be the new Israel in what was perhaps the first recorded case of identity theft in all history. And we've been tracing this struggle around identity between Christianity and the Jews for more than a thousand years. In particular, I've called it the hermeneutic battle, that great struggle within the text to establish claim to the proper reading of the biblical story and its prophecies in order to establish legitimacy as the people of God.

Now remember, telling the right story about the past is really all about owning the future, and the issue of the Messiah is always close at hand. Our medieval era in the last few episodes has brought this battle to a new pitch of intensity. In particular, when the monastic orders woke up to the existence of rabbinic literature and the critical role that it plays in Jewish faith and continuity, well, first it led to its condemnation. recall those 24 wagon loads of Gemaras burnt in the heart of Paris in 1242, and then, ultimately, to an attempt at its co-option, recall the Barcelona Disputation, where that apostate Pablo Christianity claimed to be able to prove the truth of Christian doctrine from the Gemara itself.

Notice, these are the two tools we know from Ezra. Exclusivity, in this case, the destruction of the Jews as the old Israel, And though at Paris, in the end, only books were burned, there's quite a bit of blood to be spilled in the decades to come, and people to be burned. Also, entirety. The claim that Christianity so owns the story that even rabbinic literature proves its claims. But the power of these tools of identity construction is really only effective if there is a clearly identifiable other. Don't forget, it all starts with that wall. And in the coming chapter, this is exactly what starts to crumble. So last week, we spoke about the decline in the status of the Jews of the 14th century, both in Aragon and in Castile.

But in truth, Jewish power had a sunset effect in Castile, meaning a bright spot right at the end. And we're going to pick up there with the rise of Pedro I, also known as the Cruel. So Pedro, son and excessor of Alfonso XI, by the way, according to his enemies, his real name was Pedro Gil, and he was the substituted child of a Jewess, which kind of tells it all about his story. He was quite personally favorably disposed to the Jews. And under him, Am Yisrael actually reached new heights of influence they hadn't seen since really the height of the Reconquista, back in the 13th century. For this reason, Pedro was also called the heretic, as often as he was called the cruel. Now, he had been not quite 16 years old when he ascended the throne of Castile in 1350.

And perhaps it was the weakness of his position that made him immediately turn and surround himself with Jews, so much so that his enemies called it a Jewish court. Remember the principle of the Reconquista. The Jews are the ultimate servants of power, diligent, loyal, talented, and easily discarded. On the recommendation of his all-powerful minister, the hated Juan Alfonso de Albuquerque, the king appointed a Jew, Samuel Levy, as his chief treasurer, and Samuel quickly became his confidant and companion. Now, soon after his rise to the throne, the young king was married against his wishes to the Bourbon princess Blanca. She was the essence of a medieval monarch, and as such, hated Samuel Levy, and would have banished he and all the Jews from the country she had her way.

But Pedro wasn't interested in listening to her. He wasn't even interested in being around her. Within two days of his forced marriage, he left his new bride and ran back to his mistress in Toledo. This sparked a civil war that had actually been brewing for a generation. There's too many details to go into the troubles of a Castilian monarchy, but you just know that the whole kingdom began to choose upside. And the war really began. It raged for more than a decade, involving every major kingdom of Western Europe at one point or another, and bringing disaster on all of Castile, and especially upon the Jews. In 1360, Samuel Levy was seized and taken to Seville, where he died on the wreck. His entire fortune was confiscated by the state in order to fund the war.

and in 1369, after killing his own brother with his hands, Henry, the brother of Pedro, ascended the throne as Henry II, king of Castile and Leon. And thus ended the last gas of Jewish power in Castile because Henry's rule ushered in an era of suffering and persecution which wouldn't let up until the ultimate expulsion at the end of the 15th century. you know as much as Pedro loved the Jews Henry hated them more first in order to pay the mercenaries who brought him to the throne he demanded 20 golden doubloons from the devastated community of Toledo and in order to get it he held the entire community captive without food or drink until they paid up And then, echoing the demands of the Cortes, the Cortes was the aristocratic nominally parliament, even though they had a recommendation power and not an actual legislative power, made up of like I said, aristocracy and the clergy, and had been demanding for quite some time that the Jews be curtailed.

They'd always been opposed to the power of the Jews. So echoing their sentiments, Henry ordered the Jews to finally wear the humiliating badge that marked them off as other, and even forbid them to use Christian names. Right before his death, he actually declared that Jews could no longer be permitted to hold public office. In spite all of this, he still was hard up for cash, and as every other monarch in the Iberian Peninsula, he couldn't do without his Jewish financiers. He made Don Yosef Pinchon his chief tax collector, and even appointed many Jews to be the tax farmers. And so his hatred of the Jews had a really bitter taste. Meanwhile, at the same time period in Aragon, just a bit over to the east in the peninsula, life for the Jews was similarly rocky.

The Jewish communities of Aragon hadn't been particularly devastated by the Black Plague which raged through all of Europe from 1348 to 1351. Now this disaster of epic proportions we'll actually look at in depth when we return to Ashkenazi Jewry in the next series of the Jewish story. Stay tuned, by the way. We're only one episode away from the end of this series, and the next one is already in the works. But for now, you just need to know that it almost broke the back of the Jews as well as the Spanish. Nevertheless, Aragon continued to produce a class of scholars that we will not see anymore in Castile from this point onwards. And in 1367, a wave of persecution broke out in Barcelona in particular, which was the heart and soul of the Jewish community, when the Jews were once again accused in classic medieval fashion of desecrating the articles of the church.

Pedro IV was king of Aragon at that point, and he ordered the arrest of the religious leaders of Barcelona, who are unquestionably amongst the leaders of Am Yisrael in their day. They included the Ran, Rabbi Nisim of Jorona. He's the author of a classic commentary on the riff. If you remember, Rav Alfasi was one of the most important halachic developments in the Gemara. If you're not familiar, you should just know a pillar of Jewish learning. He also included the Rivash, Rabbi Yitzchak ben Sheshit, an extremely important legal authority of his day, whose responses are still quoted in the Beit Midrash, and Rabbi Chazdai Kreskas, arguably the most important philosopher of his generation. These three, amongst others, were jailed.

But of course, upon investigation and the payment of a significant chunk of non-refundable bail, these sages were found innocent and released. But this pattern of accusation, persecution, punishment was symptomatic of the times and it was tearing apart the Jews of Spain from within. What do I mean? Well, despite the fact that rabbinic law essentially limits the authority of the religious courts to impose corporal or capital punishment to a time long past, when there were courts that actually sat in the land of Israel and had an authority which had been inherited all the way from the masters of the Mishnahh, nevertheless, the Jewish communities of Spain, with the Beit Din, the religious court at their heart, had held special authority from the king to impose both corporal and capital punishment for many generations.

Now, if you look into the response, you can see that the religious leaders were loath to exercise this power, except in one circumstance, because it was considered critical for combating the plague of Malchinin, of traitors, the Jews who made dangerous accusations against their brothers to the Christian authorities. This was considered to be a matter of life and death in Jewish legal precedent, going all the way back to the time of the Roman Empire. Because I actually didn't mention that when the Ran, the Rivash, and Chazdei Kreskas were in prison, many authorities believe it was actually a Jew whose accusation put them in prison. But the truth is, the potential for disaster that these intra-Jewish struggles held is really best told through the story of Joseph Pinchon.

As I mentioned, Joseph was appointed in 1369 by Henry II of Castile to the position of chief tax collector, which may not sound like much fun, but sure involved a whole lot of money. And at some point, due to the intrigues that swirled in court at all times, he was imprisoned by the command of the king himself and sentenced to pay 40,000 doubloons. Remember, that's double what the entire community of Toledo was accused of and paid up. And due to these charges, he indeed went to jail and paid. Now, you should know, he was incredibly unpopular amongst the Jews and was loved by the Christians. Many of the Jews actually held him responsible for Henry's extraordinary taxation of the community of Toledo, which had helped fund his reconquest of the crown.

But as I said, being incredibly wealthy, Joseph paid up and was released within 20 days and restored to his office. However, in revenge, he in turn brought a serious accusation against his enemies, and thus the cycle began. Meanwhile, before things could get too serious, King Henry died, and everything came to a brief halt. His son John I succeeded to his throne in the year 1379, and he was crowned, or coronated I should say, in the city of Burgos, a very important city in Castile, where wealthy and powerful Jews flocked, not only for the celebration, but also to gain a portion of the tax farming that was being auctioned off at the very same time, and for one more reason, to plot against the hated Joseph Pinchon.

In the midst of the coronation, on the very day of his crowning, some prominent Jews went to the king and explained to them that there was amongst them a mal-shin, an informer, who, according to the law of the Torah and the special patents that they held from the previous king, deserved death. Of course, they failed to mention to the king who it was, but they did request him to empower the royal officers to execute the offender. And, through the agency of certain non-Jewish courtiers who may have been bribed, they succeeded indeed in getting a letter to that effect. and early on August 21, 1379, Fernand Martin, the king's executioner accompanied Don Solomon and Don Isaac to the house of Joseph Pinchon, who was still sound asleep.

He was awakened by the pretext that some of his mules were to be seized for death, and as soon as he appeared at the door, the executioner grabbed him and without saying a word, chopped off his head. now when word got out of what had actually happened the new king was furious that he'd been fooled into signing the death warrant of a respected and popular man who had actually served his father loyally for many years and his response was quite typical the people responsible were seized and beheaded themselves the Jewish courts were actually deprived from this point forward of the right to execute any more criminal cases and riots nearly broke out in Seville, where Pinchon had been enormously popular amongst the Christian population.

I said almost broke out, but not quite yet, because the violence which is brewing is going to need one more factor beyond money and politics, and that will be religion. Because just a year earlier in 1378 the arch deacon of Esichah Ferrant Martinez began to deliver inflammatory sermons against the Jews in Sevilla He was calling for the destruction of all 23 beautiful synagogues that lined the city and for driving the Jews out from the midst of the Christian population. The Jewish community of Sevilla, which at the time was actually the richest and most important in the entire country, appealed to King Henry II, who commanded the archdeacon not to meddle with the affairs of his most precious possession, the Jews.

Now, that order made no impression on Martinez, and for the next 12 years, he continued to rant and fan the Christian hatred of the Jews. As of now, no action was taken. But the events we spoke about with the death of Joseph Pinchon were meanwhile. And 12 years later, in October of 1390, King John I died, and he was succeeded by his 11-year-old son, which created a tremendous power vacuum. And only a month later, the Archbishop of Sevilla died, and Ferran Martinez became the administrator of the entire diocese. He was now the power. He immediately called upon the clergy under his authority to demolish all synagogues in their parishes, and to send him without delay all lamps, Hebrew books, and scrolls of the law found therein on pain of excommunication.

And this time, there was no powerful king to hold him back. Rav Chazek Kreskas actually describes the breaking of the storm in a letter. The Lord bent his bow like an enemy against the community of Sevilla. They set fire to its gates and killed many of its people, but most changed their religion, and some of the women and children were sold to the Muslims. Many died to sanctify his name, and many violated the Holy Covenant. On June 6th, the violence began. The mob attacked the Judaria in Sevilla from all sides, killing almost 4,000 Jews, while the rest submitted to baptism just to escape death. You should know at this time, Sevilla had 7,000 Jewish families, and of the three largest synagogues in the city, two became churches overnight.

The violence spread from there throughout all the towns of the Archbishopric and beyond. In Coltaba, the entire juderia was burned down. Before the authorities could even come to the aid of the defenseless people, every single one of them, children, women, old men, was murdered. They say that 2,000 corpses lay in heaps in the streets, in the shops, in the synagogues. Most of the community of Castilla were struck by the growing violence, and it soon spread to Ergon, Valencia, and the rest of the peninsula as well. When the riot began in Barcelona, in the first days, a hundred Jews were killed, and the following day, a mob invaded the Judaria there as well. It raged for five days, until the end, the Jews were either dead, baptized, or fled to the countryside.

And amongst the slain was Rav Chazai Kreska's only son. In all, the violence that was sparked at the beginning of 1391 continued for more than a year. and it was not until the summer of 1392 that the kings of Castile and Aragon could begin to assess the damage. In Aragon, some hope remained. Chazek Rezcas had survived and he immediately began to work together with the king and the queen to restore the Al-Hamas, the independent Jewish communal organizations. But in Castile, the devastation was almost complete. Aside from the dead, whole communities of forced converts sprang up overnight. The term converso quickly became common. Today, people don't use the term morano any longer. That's something we'll have to discuss in the coming episode because it's an insult.

But converso means, in Hebrew, anusim, force converts. And that term became in common use almost overnight as people discovered that their brothers, their children, sometimes even their spouses, were now part of the Catholic Church. Try to imagine the leaders of the community gathering together in the wake of the storm, hoping to somehow piece together some means of survival and discovering that half of them were now Christian. Or try to imagine the wife who refuses to divorce from her newly Christian husband until he pays her merit contract. Or the converts who continue to go to synagogue on Saturday and take communion on Sunday. It's a difficult situation to say the least. Now it's important to know that the Catholic Church unequivocally condemns forced conversion.

However, once one converts, they do not allow for the return of these victims to their native religion. And that is a problem of immense complexity, which we're going to discuss in depth in the coming final episode, and which ultimately will trigger the arrival of the Inquisition into Spain. But for now, I want to spend the rest of this episode revisiting a question that I relays in the last one. Because the scope of the death and destruction wrought by the riots of 1391 really needs no explanation, unfortunately, in the arc of Jewish history. In fact, there are even more than a handful of events that surpass it. What we need to understand now is the extent of the conversion. How is it that so many Jews of such a powerful community gave up their identity at this point after almost 1,400 years of struggle?

Why now? And by the way, not all of it was under duress. In the wake of 1391, the hermeneutic battle burst out with a vehement, unparalleled, perhaps since the days of early Christianity. And it was once again fueled by apostates passionate for their new faith and deeply antagonistic toward their old one. In specific, one of the leaders of the large community of Burgos, one of the biggest communities in Castile, in the years before the disaster was Rav Shlomo Halevi. Rav Shlomo Halevi was a descendant of a prominent family, rabbinic family, as well as a family of tax farmers, and we have some of his correspondence. In the years before 1391, it actually includes numerous letters exchanged with the Rivas concerning the fine points of religious law.

And yet, nonetheless, on July 21st, 1391, at the height of the persecution sweeping gazdil, Shlomo Halevi went of his own accord to the baptismal font, becoming Paulus de Santa Maria. His rise within the church was rapid, and its details don't really concern us, but you should know that when he finally returned to his hometown, he was no longer as the rabbi, but as bishop of Burgos. But well before this, in fact, it seems immediately after his conversion, Paul of Burgos circulated a letter amongst the Jews, indicating that he'd come to the conclusion that the Messianic prophecies, which were such a mainstay of Jewish faith, particularly in face of the recent suffering, that these prophecies had been fulfilled in none other than Jesus of Nazareth.

This, you can imagine, came as quite a blow in the midst of such persecution. Now, when a former friend and pupil, Rav Yehoshua Halorki, read his letter, he immediately wrote a reply. And this reply still exists, and the questions which it raises and the doubts that it expressed make a key to unlocking the state of Spanish Jewry, which led to the failure of spirit in 1391 and in what lies ahead. In his opening words, Har Lorkey suggests that his teacher's conversion must be due to one of four reasons. Perhaps your appetitive soul longed to climb the rungs of wealth and honor, he says, and to satisfy its craving with all manner of food, and to gaze at the resplendent beauty of the countenance of Gentile women.

Now, being different and living apart from the pleasures of popular culture have always been a defining characteristic of the believing Jew. And one can trace the desire for a richer, easier, more integrated life back through many of the assimilation and conversion movements of history from Hellenism on down And we been speaking about this courtier class of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula since the Golden Age of Spain under Islam They've been living the good life. Go back and listen to the episode on Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi. The only thing that holds them back from that cup of wine or that wonderful smelling woman is the finer points of the law. but you should know Halorky dismisses this option out of hand perhaps for his teacher but it's critical to understand that indeed the attractions of the easy life had corroded the faith of many of the leading Jews of the day but not his teacher he recalls not only his teacher's devotion to the law but his longing for its strict simplicity even when he was unavoidably drawn into a courtier's life so that being dismissed even though I don't think he can be discounted on the large scale, next Halorki raises the possibility that his teacher's faith was undermined by philosophy.

Or, he continues, perhaps you were seduced by philosophical inquiry to overturn the bowl, and to consider the underpinnings of all faiths to be vanity and the works of delusion, and so you turned to a religion more conducive to bodily calm and to peace of mind and not accompanied by terrors and fear and dread. In this case, Holoki is not suggesting that philosophy leads to Christianity, but rather he's suggesting that it undermines religion as a whole. Remember, for Zion a Yid, it's hard to be a Jew, and if you're going to undermine the faith, well, you might as well join the winning team, which is what Christianity appears to be at this point in Spain. We've been discussing, at least since Rabbi Yehud al-Levi, and his great work, the Kuzari, the power of the skeptical stance of the philosopher and how corrosive it is to faith in revealed religion.

And furthermore, we trace through two crises, how the works of the Rambam brought Aristotelian thought into the mainstream of Jewish-Spanish philosophy to disastrous effect. And in fact, Rav Chazdaik Krezkas will write his greatest philosophical work in the wake of the disaster of 1391 with the avowed purpose of liberating Jewish thought once and for all from the bondage of Aristotle. He said that Aristotle actually threatened to reduce the contents of the Torah to a surrogate of his own thought. And this book, The Or Adonai, The Light of God, is a powerful attempt to free the Torah and return it to its roots. One that ironically had its greatest effect on Am Yisrael through its impact on Baruch Spinoza in the 17th century.

But that discussion lays way down the line. However, Halorky dismisses this philosophical challenge as the cause of his teacher's apostasy, saying that of philosophical knowledge he ate the essence and cast aside the Hux. Well, perhaps Paul Burgos was free of this problem, but we know for a fact that many, when faced with a choice between death and adopting a religion that they didn't believe in anyway, found it much easier to choose life. now the next cause that our Lord he challenges his teacher with is the seemingly unending suffering of exile or when you observe the destruction of our homeland and the many troubles that have recently befallen us consuming us and scattering us and that God has almost hidden his countenance from us and made us as food to the birds of heaven and the wild beasts of the earth it occurs to you that the name of Israel will be remembered no more he's asking did history itself including especially recent events push Halevi to convert now the suffering of exile has been a theological challenge to the Jews for 2000 years and what is voiced by the Christians without and by the Jews within and the answer that's guided us up to now it's because of our sins that we were exiled from our land at this point is finally starting to wear thin.

How long? How long can we continue to interpret disaster as either a result of our own failure or a sign of imminent redemption? And by the way, when that redemption fails to materialize, how long can we bear the heartbreak? This is a question that we're going to delve into when we discuss 16th century spot in the coming series. But for now you should just know that despite the suffering that he's just endured, Halorki does not accept this explanation. Finally, he comes the last reason. And it seems to me, as is always true, the last thing he says was really the first on his mind. Because despite the fact that a desire for the good life, the hedonistic attitude, had indeed corroded much of the faith of Spanish Jewry, and that philosophy had made huge inroads in undermining the principles and observances of the Torah, plus the disastrous wave of destruction that seemed to make exile a foregoing conclusion?

Really, this is what he's concerned about. Or perhaps there were revealed to you the secrets of prophecy and the basic principles of faith and their proof, such as were not revealed to the pillars of the world amongst our people during all the days of our long exile. And you concluded that our forefathers had inherited falsehood because of their limited understanding of the Torah and of prophecy, and therefore you choose what you chose, because it is true and certain. Can you hear it? Can you hear the great fear lurking in the heart of so many of the cultured and educated youth of this day? What if we're wrong? What if the battle actually belongs to the enemy? What if they're actually Israel, and we really are the obstinate sinners that they claim us to be?

Can you imagine the suffering which even considering that idea would cause? Like we said last episode, pain is part of life, but it becomes suffering when we lack a meaningful framework within which to integrate it. What happens to the pain of 1,300 years since the destruction of the temple? The pain of watching your whole community destroyed before your very eyes when the foundation of meaning on which it rests begins to tremble. This was the introduction. the bulk of the letter is actually devoted to a refutation of Christian truth claims and as such is actually an important document in the polemic battles of its day but it ends on a more personal note if only I were as in earlier times I would fly away and find rest in the shadow of your holes and you would teach me and tell me that which was revealed to you about these matters one by one perhaps you would quiet the throbbing of my heart and you remove the surging doubts which are my constant companions.

Paul Oberkos' reply to his former student is also in our hands. But for our story, its contents aren't critical. Because it would take more than two decades of doubt, but Yehoshua Halorchi's thoughts would eventually lead him to baptism as well. And when he re-emerges as Geronimo de Santa Fe, he will take his place as one of the most vehement and destructive enemies of his former people. But that story will have to wait until the next episode. I just want to thank a few people. I want to thank the people who give their hard-earned money to make this happen. If you want to be part of that effort, you can send me an email at robmikefoyer at gmail.com or you can find me on Facebook and I'll send you the link to Patreon.

I also want to thank the people at the Land of Israel Network for giving me the opportunity and the platform to reach such a broad audience. I want to thank the Pardes Institute at pardes.org.il for giving me the opportunity to touch the hearts and minds of so many Jews. I want to thank Suwam Yaakov, because it's my home, and I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.