Yiddish for Pirates(47)

A book, but Columbus was vague.

Sha. What’s ever gone wrong with a book?

But he had been granted a small stipend from Isabella, perhaps only to dissuade him from seeking sponsorship from the King of France or Portugal. He offered to lighten our load with some of this silver.

Was it a good idea? Ach, ask the silver.

Our plan. First, steal a horse. Next, steal away to Lisbon.





Chapter Five



Several months later: returned from Portugal, we crept into Granada, prodigal rats skulking up a gangplank. Columbus would not be in the city until some weeks hence. He was tilting not at windmills but at moneybags, hoping that if he pricked them right, they’d plotz gold for the voyage.

Moneybags east and west:

Luis de Santángel, a converso from Aragon.

Francisco Pi?elo, a Genoese living in Castile.

And from the church: not blood from a stone, but gold from atonements: indulgences sold for profit could raise more than half the necessary millions of maravedis. Columbus also ran at full tilt toward friends who dealt not in Sunday goodness but in sundry goods, such as slaves.

So what had happened since we were away?

Gornisht. Nothing important.

Some months had passed.

So, nu. They passed. It’s a life.

In March, Ferdinand and Isabella had signed a decree. The Jews of Spain must leave by the end of July.

Or turn Christian.

As if that were as simple as converting from imperial to metric.

After their Catholicizing, Jew-spitting majesties had so decreed at the Alhambra, itself now converted, Don Isaac Abravanel, a Jew who had been both their advisor, tax farmer, money lender and treasurer, offered them more than a Shylock’s-weight in gold to rescind the law. They were considering the plenty of his plea, when the Queen’s own confessor, none other than the Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada himself, strode in, a righteous and red-caped storm, a cross in his fist.

You should know: He was descended from Jews. So, nu. We all have our cross to bear.

Torquemada was unger bluzen angry and his brain boiled with the fury of a witch’s unbaptized brew cooking over hellfire. He looked at Abravanel, bargaining before Los Reyes Católicos and shouted, “I wouldn’t piss in his traitorous mouth if his soul was on fire.” Then he hissed at the Queen, “Judas sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. Now you would sell him again?” He pitched the cross across the room. It hit Isabella in the head.

And so, the Queen bled blue, the Edict stood, and the Jews had to leave or change from Yiddishe maggots to Christ-fearing flies.

Did Abravanel change his tune when the piper refused his money?

“Don Isaac,” Isabella said, “since you have been of great service and are much loved, we would consent for you to remain in our kingdom as a Jew. We would allow nine others to remain with you to pray before your God as required by your faith.”

Bowing deeply before the Queen, Abravanel advised her of his intention to travel to Naples but, ever the wheeler-dealer schacher-macher, on the way out he bargained for two extra days for the Jews in Spain and then for lenience in what they could take with them.

The Great Expectorators, Ferdinand and Isabella. They were surprised how many Jews chose to leave. Certainly, many Jews converted, especially those who had a well-heeled leg up. Who would step down and walk away from such privilege?

Some.

Abravenel, for example.

But for most it was, “you may lead a horse to holy water but soon enough, if you need glue, he’ll be glue.”

Foreskin and seven years ago, ach, even longer than that, a hundred years maybe, many had converted after some pogroms, but now they took to the roads and fields, shaking tambourines and beating drums, struggling, falling sick, dying. When they arrived at the shore, they wailed and shrayed, men and women, the leathery and the soft. “Adonai, merciful God, surely you will again part the seas and make a road for us out of this farkakteh land.”

Nes gadol hayah poh. A great miracle happened here. The sea sloshed and sparkled, the blue crenellations of the waves were surmounted by foam. The seemingly endless sea heaved and tossed, the great ocean was a living, breathing thing, made only of water, brought to life by transcendental sighs.

A liquid Golem. A wonder.

But it did not part.

They had to take boats, wailing on the whale road, hoping for peace on the other side.

The Jews were allowed to take what they could carry: jewels, bonds, cash, children, books, their future, the old, their worries. We heard of someone whose belly was cut open because some bulvan thought he’d eaten his gold to hide it.

True, if it had been possible, many would have shouldered their houses, cows, their anvils and orchards, taken the old Spain with them. But some things are too heavy to carry, though nothing weighs as much as uncertainty.

Except, perhaps, the sea.





We crept through the streets of Granada.

“We’re lox-Jews, ”Moishe said. “Swimming against the tide. We’re sneaking back into Egypt.”

“Reverse-Moses and Aarons,” I said.

Moishe was concealed in a dark cloak. I flew over the moonlit roofs, keeping watch. So naturally, when he turned the corner of an alley, a face appeared.

“I see that unlike most, your shadow is above you,” the face said.

“Se?or,” Moishe replied. “I seek only my master’s door this night. I travel with but a regular kind of dark.”