SHELOMO HALEVI (PABLO DE SANTA MARIA)

(c. 1351–1435)

The wave of converts to Christianity at the end of the fourteenth century included, as we have seen, members of the Jewish cultural elite. While some maintained close ties with their Jewish friends and colleagues, others took to their new religion in zealous fashion. Among the latter was SHELOMO HALEVI, who was born in Burgos to a wealthy family. A respected community leader and tax collector, he was extremely learned in Jewish law, maintained strong connections to scholarly circles, and was a competent writer of verse. He was also, it seems, drawn to Christian philosophy and “the hidden treasure of Christian books . . . things not discerned by the Jewish scholars,” as his friend Yehoshu‘a Lorqi put it in a letter to him at one point. No doubt under the spell of those books, and perhaps under the influence of his townsman Avner, to whose works he was also drawn, on July 21, 1391—just several weeks after the outbreak of the disturbances that held most of Spain in their grip—Shelomo HaLevi was baptized, along with his children, taking the name Pablo de Santa Maria. Initially he went to Paris to study Christian theology, and he then served for a period in Avignon, where he became close friends with Cardinal Pedro de Luna (who would in time become Pope Benedict XIII). Shelomo/Pablo rose rapidly through the ranks of the Church to become bishop of Burgos. Like Avner, whom he often quoted, he was one of Castilian Jewry’s major oppressors, and among the instigators of the Disputation at Tortosa, which proved disastrous for what was left of Spain’s Jewish communities. (The events of 1391 alone had reduced the number of the country’s Jews by over two-thirds.) Pablo’s bishopric was inherited by his son, who is buried in a major chapel near the entrance to the Burgos cathedral. Don Sh-elomo/ Pablo himself was interred at the Convent of San Pablo, along the Río Arlanzón. While the convent has since been destroyed and the tomb has disappeared, this is the only known burial site of any of the medieval Hebrew poets of Spain, apart from the vague information we have regarding the graves of Shmu’el HaNagid and his son Yehosef in Granada.

Not long before his conversion, still a believing Jew and community leader, Shelomo was—as Schirmann tells it—imprisoned in London when he was included on a list of sixty aristocratic Jewish and Christian hostages sent by King Juan I of Castile as a pledge against a large outstanding debt owed to the English duke of Lancaster. According to historian Yitzhak Baer’s version of the story, however, HaLevi was actually part of a 1389 Castilian delegation to Aquitaine (in southern France, then controlled by England), which had been sent to help negotiate a truce between the French and British crowns, as the former was allied politically with Castile. Finding himself unable to properly celebrate the Purim holiday, and longing for companions, Shelomo HaLevi wrote the following poem, which he then sent on as part of a letter to his friend Meir Alguades, who was court physician to a series of Castilian kings and the chief rabbi and justice of the Jewish community. Traditionally, the Purim holiday is marked, among other things, by sending gifts of food to neighbors and the poor, as well as by obligatory drinking. The talmudic injunction is to imbibe until one can no longer distinguish between the hero and the villain in the Purim story, which is told in the Book of Esther. If Baer’s account is accepted, the poem was written in jest, and the “imprisonment” mentioned in the letter is figurative and refers to the serviceof the king and being surrounded by Gentiles. If Schirmann’s reading is followed, the poem is an elegiac expression of HaLevi’s longing for Spain and anticipation of his return there.

MEMORY’S WINE