Season 2: Episode 2 - Hope Eternal

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We believe and affirm that the Messiah will come, says the Rambam in the 12th of his 13 principles. One should not think he is detained. Rather, imit mamea hakelo. If he delays, wait for him. Ki vo ya vo, he will surely come. And he goes on and says, one is not to assign him a specific time of arrival, nor should one use scripture to deduce when he is coming. for as the sages have said, blessed be the bones of those who calculate the end. Now, I wouldn't presume to know how this story ends, but I've been telling it since what I see to be the beginning. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 2, Hope Eternal. Now, you've got to hold on, because our story in early modernity is going to be a bit jumpy.

It's highly mobile, which is part of what early modernity is about. I'm going to have to ask you to just roll with it. Because we're entering into an age of parallel processes, of Jewish life that's going to thrive in many, very different contexts. And this was true in the Middle Ages as well. But everything was slower then. The pace of change and the degree of what I call cultural interpenetration between Am Yisrael and the host cultures that they find wherever they go is going to make the parallel processes diverge in a way which the Middle Ages couldn't imagine. And in particular, at this early phase of the second half of our story, we're going to have to follow the exiles from Spain as they scatter across the globe.

And wherever they land, the Ottoman Empire, Northern Europe, Italy, the New World, they're going to bring their story with them. They'll bring the story and the crucial question of how they tell it and what it means for their identity going forward. Of course, no identity exists in a vacuum. Inevitably, the places that the exiles find refuge will also become the context that helps them to shape their understanding of what it is that has just happened and where they want to go. And at this stage, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Italy. Because in Europe in general, culture is shifting. We are sitting on the verge of two cultural revolutions that are going to make up much of the driving force for the early modern age.

I'm talking about the Renaissance and the Reformation. Now, we're going to leave the Reformation for coming episodes, but the Renaissance has particularly strong roots in Italy. And believe it or not, it will involve the Jews. So, how does our story get to Italy? Now, remember, in all fairness, there's been a strong Jewish community in Rome and elsewhere in the Italian Peninsula since even before the destruction of the Second Temple. But we're following the exiles in the linear part of this narrative. So I hope you recall Don Yitzchak Abarvanel, right? Rav Yitzchak Abarvanel, Rabbi, biblical commentator and finance minister to kings of Spain and Portugal in particular. and in our story, we last saw him pleading with Ferdinand and Isabella in the last-ditch attempt to prevent the expulsion, which, of course, failed.

And he and his family sought refuge in the Italian city-states, where he soon found a role in service to the king of Napal as, you guessed it, his financial advisor. So the Abavanel is known, really, as the last great biblical commentator of the Middle Ages, and he's also known as the carrier of the torch of messianic hope out of the medieval into the early modern age. And we heard a bit of his messianic expectation in the prologue to the series, which you didn't listen to, I encourage you to go back and do so. This was an expectation that was so strong, he dared to predict specific dates for the arrival of the Redeemer. 1503, 1531, it doesn't really matter. What matters to us is that Barbanel surely knew the words of the Rambam that I quoted in the introduction.

So how could he do such a thing? Well, in his own work, he justifies his predictions of the date of the coming of the Messiah with the argument that the people needed to know when the Messiah was going to come because that knowledge was the only thing which could carry them through their present crisis. Now, on some level, it's easy to understand how a crisis like the expulsion from Spain would not only evoke but would require the expectation of imminent redemption. Part of it is just the need for comfort in the face of such devastation. But there's another critical element, and I think it's more important for the long-term understanding of how Jewish consciousness is evolving at this point. It's the need, whether you want to call it psychological or theological, to incorporate this disaster and any disaster into a consistent narrative that can maintain a healthy, empowered identity in the present world, that can help us understand ourselves and God and the world in a coherent fashion.

And we've been working on such a theory for quite some time. But the rabbinic understanding of exile was, Mipnei chateenu galina me'artzenu, because of our sins, we were exiled from our land. And we've spoken at length about how this is a posture of historical agency, that it wasn't the Romans or the Babylonians that took away our homes and destroyed our temple and burned our city to the ground. But rather it was us, through our actions, who provoked God's anger and broke the covenant with him. Now, that doesn't mean that we're going to beat our chests and weep in guilt. It means that if it was our actions that caused us to be driven from our lands, then it will be our actions that will bring us home.

However, this approach is really based on the ability to understand cause and effect in an intellectual sense, and in an emotional sense, to accept the fact that whatever it is that we or our ancestors have done merits the degree of punishment that we're suffering. And both those things are starting to wear thin. The scale of the breakdown in Spain is on the level of the temple's destruction in the mind of the exiles, and it's not simple to understand or own responsibility for that. We'll see in a coming episode how there's a flowering of Jewish historiography, of an attempt to use the tools of history to understand cause and effect in order to explain the exile, which is part of the response to its disaster.

We'll speak about that later with three historians. But today I want to focus on the inability to simply own the responsibility. What sins were they that merited the destruction of Spain? but however the idea that disaster is the birth pangs of Messiah that what precedes the coming of a new age takes that disaster out of the realm of the human historical religious agency and places it in the hands of God in other words it's a call not to understand and through this understanding to take action but rather a call to believe in the face of the incomprehensible that the very catastrophe you are facing is itself a sign that it's time to hold tight and ride the Messianic wave on home. We're going to have to speak about the limitations of this outlook when we come to the Holocaust and the rise of the State of Israel.

But for now, while the elder Avraov Renel represents the Messianic response to the expulsion, and he is only one in the line of many ahead, his son actually took a very different tack. Rabbi Yehuda Leon Abbaavanel was truly his father's son. He was at his side when they served the King of Portugal in the 1480s. They fled together to Spain, where they served Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs. And they left together on the wings of the storm with the exiles in 1492. And while his father and the rest of the family settled in Naples and pursued their classic rabbinic approaches, Rabbi Yehuda traveled throughout Italy and eventually settled in Genoa. In his wanderings, the younger Ravenel discovered that a very different spirit than what he'd left behind in Spain was moving Italian Catholic culture.

It was the spirit of Renaissance humanism. Now, to give a full address to the Renaissance is beyond the scope of our story, but the humanist part of it is of particular interest to us. And what it was is that basically the intellectual life of Italy and of Europe as a whole was getting tired of the Middle Ages. I know it's not hard to believe, but in particular, medieval scholasticism, this spiritual, intellectual, religious approach that had given birth not only to the mental acumen of the Catholic Church, but also to the university system and the educational curricula within which all of the cultural and financial elite were raised. That scholasticism had dominated since the 12th century and it was increasingly seen as narrow and overly focused on irrelevancies.

So in essence, humanism was about reviving the cultural legacy of the Greco-Roman antiquity in order to just simply broaden the topic of what we would learn. Now, however, there was perhaps an unintended consequence of going back to Greco-Roman antiquity, and that was that the rationalism which these humanists found in the classical works became particularly important in their shaking off the narrow horizons of the medieval world. I'll let the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy say it because it says it best. Here, in these classic works, one felt no weight of the supernatural pressing on the human mind, as it did so heavy in the Middle Ages, demanding homage and allegiance. Humanity, with all its distinct capabilities, talents, worries, problems, possibilities, was the center of interest.

That's what humanism is, humanity at the center, and not some idea of what God wants It been said that the medieval thinkers philosophize on their knees and began to be human and take a more honest look at themselves and the worlds around them lo and behold they saw the Jews in a somewhat new light So wherever he lived, Rav Yehuda al-Ravanel sought out the humanist circles, and he soon came to be known amongst them as Leon Hebreu, Leon the Jew, or the Hebrew, more accurately. But Rav Yehuda wasn't simply a cultural voyeur dipping into this new cultural context, or even just the token Jew in the progressive circles of his day. because these new horizons of thought that the humanists were exploring attracted him as well.

And he, of course, brilliant son of his father, had a well-trained mind that was quick to absorb and synthesize these intellectual structures in a way in which no one else could do. And he ended up forging a fresh path in this sea of knowledge and culture. Ultimately, the name of Leon Ibreu will become famous, even though he won't be alive to see it. he used his time amongst the humanists, or perhaps his time amongst the humanists, led him to develop a philosophy of love, which he set down in a work called Dialogues d'Amour, the Dialogues of Love. Now, it was first published posturously in 1535, and that's why I said he never really knew the impact he had. But it went into numerous editions. And I can tell you as an author, when your book gets translated into more one language, you've made it.

It was translated twice into Spanish, twice into French, Latin, Hebrew, it actually became a main source for the later 16th century's understanding of Neoplatonism and is today recognized as a key work of Renaissance thought. Now, what is the book? Fitting to the humanist outlook, its approach is universalist. It attempts to understand all experience as a harmonious framework stitched together by love. And furthermore, it explains Greek myths, it engages biblical verses, it brings Elijah, Moshe, Enoch, John the Baptist, Aristotle, Plato, Maimonides, and Ibn Magabiro, all under one roof. Essentially, what he's teaching us is nothing new to the Jew, that the intellect's duty is to contemplate God. And through this contemplation, it becomes a part of the essence of God, rather than merely a human form.

The intellect, he says, is nothing but a tiny beam of the infinite splendor of God, assigned to man to make him rational, deathless, and happy. There's a lot more than that, and trust me that it's beautiful. But for our story, what we really want to know is, was he just another successful Renaissance humanist who happened to be Jewish, Leon the Hebrew? Or was he Rabbi Yehuda Leon Abarvanel, and something new in the Jewish consciousness was emerging? You can see how this is not simply a local question. Because as I said in the beginning, there's going to be an ever-increasing engagement, a depth of engagement, a series of engagement between the Jews and the non-Jewish culture around them. You know, there's a saying, the Jews are just like everybody else, only more so.

So was Leon Hebreu just using the Jewish brain to excel in an Italian game and not contributing anything to the Jewish story per se, to a new face of Jewish consciousness? or is there something within his Jewish soul which could have only come out in the context of Italian humanism? Now that's not a question that we're going to be able to answer right now but it's one we need to keep in mind as what we define as Jewish is going to begin to shatter under the pressures of modernity. So I do want to actually note that there were significant rumors to this day that Rabbi Yehuda X'd himself out of the Jewish story by converting to Christianity as part of his journey into Renanad culture. And those rumors are really based in the fact that the title page on the second and third editions of the dialogues actually gives the title as Dialogues of Love, composed by Dr.

Leon of Hebrew heritage who later became Christian. But South Korean scholarship has proven that this, as well as the content of the work, which is so deeply Jewish, put the question to rest. So, there's an incredible beauty, as I said, in his description of a cosmos that's infused with love. And I wish we had the time to dwell on it. But I don't want to look at the dialogues purely as a literary product of Renaissance Italy. Because really, they weren't written by Leon Ebreu, the Italian humanist. That's how he became known to the world after his death. They were written by Rabbi Yehuda Abravanel, exiled from Spain. An exiled from Spain who had suffered tremendously and seen horrible acts. How could it be?

that he of all people would make an argument that the governing force in the world was the love. So, in one passage, in the second dialogue, there's a significant deviation where he recognizes that any theory of love cannot totally encompass human behavior. And I think it's quite revealing. Men, says Rabbi Huda, naturally love one another as do beasts of the same species. But this love is not in men as sure and steadfast as it is in animals. For the fiercest and most savage beasts do not turn their savagery against others of their own kind. But men suffer more evils and deaths at the hands of their fellows than through all other animals. So, this recognition of the evils of man placed in the midst of a treatise on love, I think could be our clue to how Rav Yehuda of Rabbanel is present in the dialogues and not just Leon Hebreu.

Because we can actually see this work as a particularly different response to the catastrophe of the expulsion. We know many, including his father, Rav Yitzchak, found their solution in Messianism and mysticism and were going to follow their footsteps for many episodes to come. But the danger in the Messianic response to crisis is in its very urgency. Meaning it must happen now. The elder of Rabanel predicted the arrival of the Messiah in 1503, but he didn't come. And we will speak at some length about the consequences of failed messianic hope as we go forward. But for now, just know the different path which the son took from the father. He attempted to deal with his reality by reaching into the neoplatonic idealism.

This is the notion that the world operates on two levels. The world that we live in is a world of illusions, shadows. The real world, the world of being, is not here. And his philosophy of love allows him to transcend the mundane details of human existence and to look and embrace the wholeness of the cosmos. And in the light of the big picture, the ugliness of human social realities can fade off into the corner where they belong. Now this could seem like avoidance. After all, Mubaravanel surely knew that the world was an ugly place. But he chose to free himself from the pain of his particular experience and to live in an idealistic, love-infused world. And that choice is an important choice that we should all be able to relate to.

Don't we teach our children that lying is never the best option? That the wicked don't prosper? That cheaters never prosper? Is that really true? How many things do we teach them, not because the statistics and the details of life would prove them out, because by insisting they're true, that is a choice of what world we want to live in. Because sometimes the highest truth is found in the world that we choose to see. So as I said, Rav Euda Abravanel ran in the highest circles of the Italian humanists and was famous for his dialogues. But in those circles, he also made some very important friends. Giovanni Pico della Merondola was an Italian nobleman and Renaissance thinker. And not just any old thinker.

In 1486, at age 23, don't feel bad about yourself, he proposed to defend his 900 theses on religion, philosophy, natural philosophy, and magic against all comers. And in order to be ready for this event, he wrote what's called The Oration on the Dignity of a Man, a work that has been called the Manifesto of the Renaissance. He was patronized by the great Italian statesman and supporter of the Renaissance, Lorenzo de' Medici. And by the way, it's highly unlikely that Pico would have survived the Inquisition that was always on his heels without such powerful protection. Later in life, he became known throughout Italy and indeed throughout Europe as an important religious thinker, as a scholar, a philosopher, and ultimately, for our story, as the father of Christian Kabbalah.

Did you know such a thing existed? So as a humanist, Pico was exposed to lots of ideas, particularly about magic and astrology, which even though in our day, magic, astrology, alchemy, seemed to be the opposite of science. In his, they were the mainstream subjects in what was known as natural philosophy. And if you want to see the magical side of Judaism's ancient wisdom, where better to look than in the Kabbalah? Now, we can't do a full breakdown in the history of the Kabbalah, I encourage you to go back and listen to some of the ending episodes of the last series. But it's just important to remember that the word Kabbalah and the particular formation in texts like the Zohar and the Bahir and Sefer Yetzirah passed through the hands of medieval Spain.

And therefore, they were carried in a particularly powerful form by the exiles out through the entire world. And it appears that Pico originally became involved with the Kabbalah in order to try and prove the truth of Christianity. Not as surprising, just as the Christian church has been trying to do out of rabbinic texts throughout the late Middle Ages But as he gathered a circle of Jewish and Christian associates around him in Florence with the Dometiches he actually became increasingly interested in the idea of Prisca Theologia, or an ancient theology. He received this idea from his mentor, Marsilio Ficino, an idea that there was a common core of universal truth that could be located across all historical periods amongst every disparate culture and religious faith.

And furthermore, that this could be done by triangulating through the most esoteric texts of all of those systems. However, Pico went beyond his mentor because his encounter with Kabbalah convinced him that it held a critical place in this entire theological system. It was the source of higher knowledge and magical power and it was the tool for decoding all of the arcane texts he was engaged with. It laid bare the secrets of Judaism and ultimately would help him reconcile all the religions and cultures in order that their essential differences could be eradicated and the truth could emerge. Sounds exciting, huh? And there were Jews like Elia del Medigo and Yohanan Alemanu who actually translated the most esoteric texts for him and ultimately even taught him Hebrew.

Merindollah's impact on Christianity was through this syncretic approach this idea of combining elements of many religions because by seeking truth in all places he ended up fashioning a model for a much more open and tolerant version of Christianity he was the beginning of a movement within Christian humanist circles which ultimately would recognize the centrality of the Hebrew culture in Western civilization as a whole and in understanding their own Christian culture. These men are going to be known as the Christian Hebraeus. And we'll discuss their impact on both Christianity and the Jews in the coming few episodes. But for now, I just want to put a finger on this idea of the Christian Kabbalah that Pico de la Merondola really brought first into the world.

so mysticism Kabbalah in the current form is a powerful and difficult force in religious development Gershom Shalom, the great scholar of the history of Jewish mysticism points out that there's a dynamic tension within the mystic on one hand the mystic is a conservative small c, every law and every custom have the sanction of time but also the sanction of an existential significance that you can give to every action which can mediate between the divine and the created world, and therefore we don't change anything. On the other hand, the mystic is not satisfied with revelation as an event of the past, because the words of revelation in the text that he's looking at are in his mind and soul filled with infinite meanings, which are always accessible to the attentive ear of the mystic.

And therefore, the divine message itself lacks stability, because there are constantly shifting meanings which can emerge in the mind of the mystic. So Gershon Shalom points out that the mystic, on one hand, holds fast to a sacred text, which he sees as immutable, but at the very same time, subjects it to the most radical reinterpretations that could even go so far as to undermine the very permanence which it aspires to preserve. This dynamic of reinforcement and subversion is actually what allows mysticism to stir the pot of religion in a healthy way and introduce new life and ferment while claiming the authenticity of past tradition. Anybody who has ever circled the bimah in the middle of the synagogue on the intermediate days of Sukkot and done all the various things that the Rizal, the great late 16th century sage taught us to do, many of them for the first time, but felt that they were tapping into the ancient truths of their tradition knows what I'm talking about.

If not, you can come on by Shul sometime. But, interestingly enough, because of this tension between the conservatism and the radical, what we call progressive posture, Kabbalah will be the most effective mediator between medievalism and modernity and between the Jews and the non-Jews. On one hand, it's an anchor. It gives a sense of ancient authenticity that could survive the collapse of the whole medieval system that was happening around the Jews. And that's why it's so important that the Kabbalah is seen as just as ancient as the Mishnahh. At the same time, it's an agent of modernity whose new ways of looking at the world can allow us to legitimize and absorb the most radically new ideas. I'll give you an example.

When evolution hits the world, which we will speak about in early 20th centuries, many religious thinkers panic. But our master and teacher, Rav Avram Nitzchakon Cook, simply accepts it without blinking. and his reason is, he says, it's much more fit to the way in which the Kabbalah understands the story of creation. So that's an internal Jewish phenomenon, or even really a human phenomenon. But in particular, the Christian Hebraeus, as understood by Merindah on downward, saw the Kabbalah as playing a role which had belonged formerly to philosophy in the Middle Ages. It was a cultural bridge between the Jews and the non-Jews. in medieval Spain, revealed religion divided people, whereas Aristotle united them.

And in order to be united, people had to abandon their allegiance to their time-honored traditions. The Kabbalah, especially when it fuses with Renaissance occultism and different other philosophies, which are known ultimately as what's called the Hermetic Kabbalah, will allow certain aspects of particularism and certainly the power of action to maintain their significance and syncretism will replace conversion as a method for overcoming particular boundaries. Now that may sound nice, one world religion but as we'll see when you take this idea of a mix and match religion and you combine it with messianic expectations and the somewhat imbalanced power relationship between Jews and non-Jews, oy, va, voy.

so we're just placing a historical marker that Pico della Merondola really is the beginning of both the Christian Kabbalah and these Christian Hebraists but it's important not to overestimate the impact of this encounter between Judaism and Italian humanism because as I said Pico della Merondola's syncretism was much more about finding the universal roots of Christian tradition than finding a way to tolerate the Jews and as we'll see as time rolls forward and the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation come online, that by the middle of the 16th century they'll be burning the Talmud in the streets again and the Jews will be in the ghettos. Trust me that the ugliest forms of Jew hatred are alive and well in humanist Italy.

There's a lot more to say about this, but let's end with a story that I think brings it all together. Until now, we've been looking at the expulsion from Spain both its geographic dispersion that created a new mobility for Am Yisrael and its terrible suffering which makes a demand for explanation these two things together they're drivers for the adaptive strategy particularly messianism but there is actually another important driver to this story now, a bit of the back story those of you who know the Bible will know that the 10 tribes out of the 12 of Israel were exiled first from their land. I'm talking about the first temple times, when the northern kingdom of Israel was overrun by the Assyrian Empire in the 8th century before the Common Era.

And the Assyrian policy of forcible transfer of local populace meant that these Israelite tribes were scattered far away across the river Sambatian, according to tradition. and to this day there are historians, geneticists, rabbis and adventurers who claim to be seeking or even to have found these Jews, these Israelites in the strangest of places and why are they looking so hard? The answer is that already in the books of the prophets we find that the ultimate redemption of Israel and the whole world, let it be soon let it be now, is bound up with the return of the tribes to their ancient inheritance, all 12 tribes. Therefore, these 10 lost tribes must reappear in history before redemption can come.

So, in our story, while the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula or those that have been scattered are working through the trauma of expulsion and forced conversion, the rest of Iberia is focused on a much happier event, and that's the dawn of the age of the great exploration. In 1492, Columbus may have sailed the ocean blue. But for our story, the achievements of the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Dias, who rounds the tip of Africa in 1488, and Vasco da Gama, who establishes the first European conquest on the Indian subcontinent only ten years later, are far more important. Partially that's because the Great Age of Exploration will really begin to transform the world in the minds of the Europeans from a local existence bounded by the unknown.

Remember, maps in their days were a circle around the edges which said, there be dragons. They're going to transform the world slowly but surely into a globe that will be stitched together by these adventurers as they map the unknown. And the expanding boundaries of space that these explorers map are going to contribute to the lifting of the horizons of thought that will bring after the age of exploration the scientific revolution and ultimately the enlightenment But for now you should know that these Portuguese adventurers sent out by King John II brought back more than golden spices They also brought back fantastic reports of Jewish kingdoms, kingdoms in what today we know to be Cochin, India, and the mountains of what they called Kush, modern-day Ethiopia.

powerful, independent kingdoms which of course they assumed to be the descendants of the ten lost tribes. And in fact, they'd gone that sea route to India surely in order to take the spice trade back from the Muslims who now controlled North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. But there seems to be evidence that the Portuguese crown was also especially interested in knowing what lay out there and in particular what happened to the lost tribes and even more in any information that could be found about Prester John. Now, Prester John was a legendary monarch who was said to rule over a vast Christian kingdom in India. And the reason that the Portuguese were seeking him is that he would certainly be a key ally in any attempt to push back the Turks and allow Christianity to regain the upper hand from Islam in their global battle.

Because since the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, don't forget it, it's a turning point. The Potomassianism has been bubbling not just amongst the Jews, but the Christians as well. Such a shift, the fall of a second Rome, could not but light the expectation that a new age of man was shortly to dawn. We're going to see the dates of 1490, 1503, 1531 as the imminent arrival of the Messiah, or return, depending on how you roll. They were declared by the Jews, Rabbi Yitzhak Abar Minel, who is mentioned, Rabbi Avram Zucuto, who was the astronomer to the king of Portugal before he was expelled in 1497, and Rabbi Yochan Alamano. Lesser known, but quite important for our story. Because Yochan Alamano was an Italian rabbi of the late 15th, early 16th century.

He became known in his day as a philosopher, alchemist, and magician, as well as a teacher of the Hebrew language. If you recall, I said, he taught them to many Italian humanists, including Pico della Merondola, and I'm sure they had a lot of talk about magic as well. And he, of course, shared the messianic hopes of his people, and in particular was focused on the role that the return of the ten lost tribes would play in the unfolding and imminent redemption. So starting in the year 1490, R. Alemanu began to collect letters, documents, any account he could from the adventurers who began to return from the east in a work he simply called Likutim, which was a collection notebook. A sample from a letter sent by Avraham of Siena in 1496.

We've come to know of five Jewish kings who live in impenetrable mountains in front of the land of Cush, who attack the Muslims traveling to Mecca. Some say they are called sons of Moses. They are courageous and able to steal a camel at the same time as its rider and take it to the summit of the mountains. Further, he writes, he's heard about a sage worthy of belief in the land of the Orient, who said that in the middle of the sea there's an island called Shingli, in which there are around 40,000 Jewish families, extraordinarily wealthy, schooled in the written and oral Torah governed by a Jewish king. Now this is a drop in a sea of knowledge. And in the words of Bencion Netanyahu, father of our current prime minister, and noted Jewish historian in his own right, the reports of the Portuguese sailors transformed the legend of the Ten Lost Tribes from a phantom into a factor in the messianic calculus of his day.

So is it any wonder that the appearance of David Ruvaini made such a splash? The Jewish historian Gedalia Ibn Yahya describes Ruvaini as being a man of dark complexion, of low stature, stating furthermore that he needed interpreters since he was only familiar with the Hebrew and Arabic language. He says the question of his origins was confused, but that he himself, Ruvaini says, he was born in 1490 in Khaibar in Central Arabia. And when this short and swarthy ambassador arrived in Venice in 1523, he was a sensation. he showed up claiming to be the brother of King Joseph who ruled the kingdom of Arabia with 70 elders beyond the Sambation River which of course was the legendary home of the 10 lost tribes and he was seeking an audience with the Pope now he first contacted the Jews Daniel de Pisa, a very influential banker who himself turned to a prominent Christian Hebraist it was a cardinal and eventually the cardinal helped him get an audience with Pope Clement VII.

And he proposed an alliance with the Christian kings of Europe against the Turks. Now you might think that such a thing is absurd and that he'd get laughed out of the audience, but you would be wrong, because gripped by his charisma and fully absorbed in the messianic currents of his day, Pope Clement actually gave Ruvania a letter of introduction to the king of Portugal. And Ruvania indeed met with King John III in 1525. Now, the Portuguese at that point were at war with the Ottomans, who had seized Egypt in 1521, and as I said, cut off the land route to the spice trade. And this romantic figure, dressed like an Arabian prince, claiming to be the brother of a king who was offering an army in aid, appeared as if by magic or divine providence, and was certainly a potential ally.

Initially, the king actually promised him a force of eight ships and 4,000 cannon. Now, if the Portuguese were excited, imagine what news of the king of the Jews did to the converso community. And we didn't speak about it, but the exiles from Spain, tens of thousands of them, actually just crossed the border into Portugal, where at first they were welcome. At first, but by 1497, they were all forcibly converted, which means there was a large community whose story we will follow, particularly when they are reborn in Amsterdam. Well, a large community that had been converted less than 30 years ago. And one of these young, new Christians, Diego Perez, a secretary in the royal house, was so overwhelmed by the presence of David Ruveni, he immediately became his fervent follower.

Now, Ruveni was way too savvy to actually accept Perez's request that he circumcise him. So this young converso actually performed the surgery as himself and immediately adopted the name of Shlomo Molcho, King Solomon. So soon, Ruvaini's mission took him out of Portugal. And seeing as Lisbon was no longer safe for Molho, who had denied his Christianity, the two embarked on separate paths. Molho traveled to Italy in Salonika, where he immersed himself deeply in traditional Torah learning and actually absorbed the Kabbalah from none other than Rabbi Yosef Taitzak, a very important rabbi of his day. He learned so well that he even produced the Kabbalistic work which exists today, the Book of Splendor.

and we have significant evidence that while in Salonika he met Rabbi Yosef Karo known as the Beit Yosef, ultimately the author of the Shulchan Aruch, the great work of Jewish law, who was already recognized as one of the rising rabbinic minds of his generation Mohel began to wander the Jewish communities of the east Italy, Turkey, and Syria, and gained a tremendous reputation as a preacher when he announced the Messiah would come in the year 1540 and left it deeply ambiguous whether he was that person himself or not He returned to Italy with the goal of, once again, getting an audience with the Pope, even though, as a baptized Jew, he was technically a heretic. But when he predicted a flood accurately that struck Rome, he was immediately ushered into the Pope's audience and convinced him that he, too, should meet with the kings.

So at this point, Mokhul and David Reveni reunited and decided that they wanted to take the last step in their plan to forge an alliance with the Christian kings of Europe against the Turks. And in 1532, these two messianic adventurers met with the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Now what happens next is a bit unclear. It seems that Ruvaini's aim was still purely political, although it's hard to know, since it's unclear whether he actually was the brother of some king of a Jewish kingdom in the East. But what is clear is by this time, Mocho's intent was entirely, one could say, holy messianic. He came to the audience, streaming a flag emblazoned with the Hebrew word Maccabee, which is an acronym for Mi Hamocha Be'li Ma'Shem, who amongst the mighty is like unto God.

That's in front of the Holy Roman Empire. You can imagine what happened next. Both were in prison, and tried by the Inquisition in Mantua. Mocho was burned at the stake in 1532. Ruvani was sent to a Spanish prison, where he died sometime after 1535. But to this very day, many people see Shalom Ochoa as a sainted personality. And as we will well see, Messiahs come and Messiahs go, but hope springs eternal. I just want to thank a few people. I want to thank the people who give their hard-earned money to help make this show happen, make it free and widely distributed. I would love it if you want to join them. You can send me an email at robmikefoyer at gmail.com and I can send you the details. You can go to my Facebook page at robmikefoyer and you'll see them there or you can go to Patreon www.patreon and you can find my M.

Foyer page and hit that donate button. I'd also like to thank the Land of Israel Network for providing me with a platform where I can reach so many wonderful people. I want to thank the Pardes Institute pardes.org.il for giving me the chance to touch the hearts and minds of so many wonderful Jews. I want to thank Suam Yaakov both because it's my home, and I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story.