Farewell Espana by Howard M. Sachar

Author:Howard M. Sachar [Sachar, Howard Morley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5053-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER X

THE JEWS OF RENAISSANCE

An Evolving Peninsular Oasis

Don Isaac Abravanel, a renowned casualty of the Spanish Exodus, sailed off from Valencia in July of 1492. The journey was a nightmare of overcrowding, avaricious crewmen, racking illness, uncertainty of destination. For nearly six weeks, Abravanel’s refugee flotilla of nine caravels was denied entrance at one Mediterranean port after another. The passengers were turned back, wrote one eyewitness, “as if they were plague-ridden animals.” Not until reaching the Bay of Naples, on August 24, were the fugitives permitted at last to disembark. By October, nine thousand other Jews would find asylum here. Local Neapolitans were shocked at their condition. “You would have thought they were masks,” wrote one observer. “They were bony, pallid, their eyes sunk in the sockets, and had they not made slight movements, it would have been imagined that they were dead.” Abravanel shared that enervation. At the age of fifty-six, he looked and felt himself an old man. Only a decade earlier he had fled for his life from Portugal to Castile. Now in exile again, his wealth and power gone, he was all but shattered in spirit.

Rescue was at hand. King Ferrante I of Naples had long been aware of the Jews’ mercantile acumen. He was prepared to admit them, even to allow them the fullest measure of residency and trading privileges. The Jews were overwhelmed by this godsend. Within the year, therefore, some twenty thousand of their people arrived in Naples and its dependencies of Calabria and the Dodecanese islands. It seemed at first that the neighboring Kingdom of Sicily would accept nearly as many. Yet this island-nation was an Aragonian principality, and King Fernando the Catholic was not prepared to countenance Jews in his overseas territories. In late 1492, they were forced to move on. It was accordingly the Kingdom of Naples, augmented by refugees from west and south, that soon encompassed the largest Jewish population in Western Europe, numbering at least forty thousand by the early 1500s. As Ferrante had anticipated, moreover, the immigrants proved to be a vibrant community, displaying all their traditional commercial skills, from shopkeeping to merchant banking.

Isaac Abravanel was among those sharing in this congenial haven. Indeed, he was tendered a personal reception by King Ferrante himself, who offered the distinguished financier appointment as supervisor of tax and customs collections. Grateful and relieved, his spirits almost manically soaring, Don Isaac promptly characterized Ferrante and the latter’s son, the future Alfonso II, as veritable “princes of mercy and righteousness.” Both men in fact were notorious Renaissance despots—“bloody, wicked, inhuman, lascivious,” in the words of the French ambassador. Nevertheless, finding Abravanel an able and trustworthy courtier, they compensated him well for his efforts. His personal fortune revived immediately and immensely. Soon he was joined by his brothers, Jacob and Joseph. With his help, they built impressive estates of their own as grain brokers. And Isaac’s own three sons similarly did not fail to make their mark: Judah became a physician, an eminent

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