CHAPTER FIVE
YONAH BEN HELKIAS
“I will take Eleazar down to the river, perhaps to catch our supper. Eh, Abba?”
“The polishing is finished?”
“Much of it is finished.”
“Work is not finished until it is finished. You must polish it all,” Helkias said in the bleak tone that always wounded Yonah. Sometimes he wanted to stare into his father’s distant eyes and tell him: Meir is dead but Eleazar and I are still here. We are alive.
Yonah hated to polish the silver. There were half a dozen large pieces still to do, and he dipped his rag into the stinking mess, a thick mixture of powdered bird dung and urine, and rubbed and rubbed.
He had learned the taste of bitterness early, with the death of his mother, and it had been very hard for him when Meir was killed, because by that time he had been older, past thirteen years, and had better understood the finality of loss.
Only a few months after Meir’s death, Yonah had been called to the Torah to recite the law and become a formal member of the minyan. Adversity had matured him beyond his age. His father, who had always seemed so tall and strong, was diminished, and Yonah didn’t know how to fill the space emptied by Helkias’s grief.
They knew nothing of the identity of his brother’s murderers. Some weeks after Meir had been killed, word had reached Helkias Toledano that the physician Espina was about the town, asking questions regarding the event that had taken his son’s life. Helkias had brought Yonah with him to call upon Espina and speak with him, but when they had reached his house they saw it was abandoned, and Joan Pablo, the Espinas’ former servant, was taking away for his own use all that remained of the furnishings, a table and some chairs. Joan Pablo had told them the physician and his family had gone away.
“Where have they gone?”
The man had shaken his head. “I know not.”
Helkias had gone to the Priory of the Assumption to talk with Padre Sebastián Alvarez, but on his arrival he had thought for a confused moment that he had made a wrong turn in the road. Within the gate was a row of wagons and tumbrels. Nearby, three women were treading purple grapes in a large vat. Through the open door of what had been the chapel Helkias could see baskets of olives, and more grapes.
When he had asked the women where the priory had been moved, one of them told him the Priory of the Assumption had been closed and the Hieronymite order had rented the property to their farmer.
“And what of Padre Sebastián? Where is the prior?” he had asked. The woman had smiled at him and shook her head and shrugged, without stopping her treading.
* * *
Yonah had tried very hard to assume the duties of the eldest son, but it was obvious to him that he would never be able to take his brother’s place. Not as an apprentice worker of silver, not as a son, not as a brother, not in any way. The dullness in his father’s eyes compounded his own sorrow. Although three Passovers had come and gone since Meir died, the house and workshop of Helkias still were places of mourning.
Some of the pieces before him, wine flagons, were especially dark with tarnish, but there was no reason for him to hurry, because his father seemed suddenly to remember their conversation of half an hour ago. “You will not go to the river. Find Eleazar and make certain both of you stay close to the house.
“This isn’t a time for Jewish boys to take chances,” Helkias said.
* * *
It had been necessary for Yonah to assume Meir’s responsibility for Eleazar, who was tender and apple-cheeked, seven years old. He told the younger boy stories about their older brother so Eleazar would never forget, and sometime he picked out tunes on the small Moorish guitar that had been Meir’s, and they sang songs. He had promised to teach Eleazar to play the guitar, as Meir had taught him. That’s what Eleazar wanted to do when Yonah found him playing at war with stones and twigs in the shade of the house, but Yonah shook his head.
“Are you going to the river?” Eleazar said. “Am I to go with you?”
“There is work to be done,” Yonah said, unconsciously mimicking his father’s tone, and brought the smaller boy back into the atelier with him. The two of them were sitting in a corner polishing silver when David Mendoza and Rabbi Jose Ortega came into the workshop.
“What news?” Helkias asked, and Señor Mendoza shook his head. He was a strong, middle-aged man with a number of missing teeth and a bad complexion, a house builder.
“Not good, Helkias. It is no longer safe to walk in the town.”
Three months before, the Inquisition had executed five Jews and six conversos. They had been charged with conjuring a magic spell eleven years before, in which allegedly they had used a stolen communion wafer and the heart of a crucified Christian boy in an attempt to turn all good Christians raving mad. Although the boy was never identified—no Christian child had been reported missing—details of the alleged charge had been confessed by several of the accused after severe torture, and all had been burned at the stake, including the effegies of three of the condemned who died before the auto-de-fé.
“Some already are praying to the ‘martyred’ child. Their hatred poisons the very atmosphere,” Mendoza said heavily.
“We must appeal to Their Majesties for their continued protection,” Rabbi Ortega said. The rabbi was small and skinny, with a froth of white hair. It made people smile to see him stagger about the synagogue bringing the large and heavy Torah scroll to be touched or kissed by the congregation. He was respected by most, but now Mendoza disagreed with him.
“The king is a man as well as a king, capable of friendship and sympathy, but of late Queen Isabella is turned against us. She was raised in isolation, molded by clerics who fashioned her mind. Tomás de Torquemada, the inquisitor general, may he expire, was Isabella’s confessor during her girlhood, and he greatly influences her.” Mendoza shook his head. “I fear the days ahead.”
“We must have faith, David, my friend,” Rabbi Ortego said. “We must go to the synagogue and pray together. The Lord will hear our cries.”
The two boys had stopped polishing the silver cups. Eleazar was disturbed by the tension in the faces of the adults, and the obvious fright in their voices. “What does it mean?” he whispered to Yonah.
“Later. I shall explain all to you later,” Yonah whispered back, though he wasn’t certain he really understood what was happening.
* * *
The next morning, an armed military officer appeared in Toledo’s municipal square. He was accompanied by three trumpeters, two local magistrates and two bailiff’s men who also bore arms, and he read a proclamation that informed the Jews that despite their long history in Spain, they were ordered to leave the country within three months. The queen already had expelled Jews from Andalusia in 1483. Now they were ordered to leave every part of the Spanish kingdom—Castilla, León, Aragón, Galicia, Valencia, the principality of Cataluña, the feudal estate of Vizcaya, and the islands of Cerdeña, Sicilia, Mallorca, and Menorca.
The order was nailed to a wall. Rabbi Ortega copied it in a hand that trembled so badly he had trouble making out some of the words when he read them to a hurried meeting of the Council of Thirty.
“‘All Jews and Jewesses, of whatever age they may be, that live, reside, and dwell in our said kingdoms and dominions … shall not presume to return to, or reside therein or in any part of them, either as residents, travelers, or in any manner whatever, under pain of death.… And we command and forbid any person or persons in our said kingdom [to] presume publicly or secretly to receive, shelter, protect, or defend any Jew or Jewess … under pain of losing their property, vassals, castles, and other possessions.’”
All Christians were solemnly warned against experiencing false compassion. They were forbidden “to converse and communicate … with Jews, or receive them into your homes, or befriend them, or give them nourishment of any sort for their sustenance.”
The proclamation was issued “by order of the king and queen, our sovereigns, and of the reverend prior of Santa Cruz, inquisitor general in all the kingdoms and dominions of Their Majesties.”
* * *
The Council of Thirty that governed the Jews of Toledo was made up of ten representatives from each of the three Estates—prominent urban leaders, merchants, and artisans. Helkias served because he was a maestro silversmith, and the meeting was held in his home.
The councillors were staggered.
“How can we be so coldly evicted from a land which means so much to us, and of which we are so much a part?” Rabbi Ortega said haltingly.
“The edict is yet one more royal scheme to gain fresh tax money and bribes from us,” Judah ben Solomon Avista said. “Spanish kings have always described us as their profitable milch cow.”
There was a grumble of assent. “Between the years 1482 and 1491,” said Joseph Lazara, an elderly flour merchant of Tembleque, “we contributed no less than fifty-eight million maravedíes to the war effort, and another twenty millions in ‘forced loans.’ Time after time, the Jewish community has gone steeply into debt in order to pay an exorbitant ‘tax’ or to make the throne a ‘gift’ in return for our survival. Surely this is but another such time.”
“The king must be approached and asked for his intervention,” Helkias said.
They discussed who should make the appeal, and there was a consensus that it should be Don Abraham Seneor.
“He is the Jewish courtier His Majesty most loves and admires,” Rabbi Ortega said, and many heads nodded in agreement.