The Expulsion from Spain and the Holocaust: the Jewish Community's Response

THE EXPULSION FROM SPAIN AND THE HOLOCAUST: THE JEWISH COMMUNITY'S RESPONSE Background Papers for Opening Session of the 25th Anniversary Meeting of the Memorial Foundation at Beit Hanassi, July 3,1990 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page THE SPANISH EXILE AND THE HOLOCAUST: A STUDY IN JEWISH SPIRITUAL RESPONSE TO CATASTROPHE, by Eliezer Schweid 1 JEWISH REACTIONS TO THE EXPULSION FROM SPAIN, by Moshe Idel 18 RELIGIOUS RESPONSES TO THE HOLOCAUST: RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT, by Lord Jakobovits 26 -iii- JEWISH REACTIONS TO THE EXPULSION FROM SPAIN Moshe Idel The uprooting of Iberian Jewry from its native soil by the Catholic kings was a dramatic event for Spanish Jewry. Totally unexpected, it provoked a feeling of despair: deprived of most of their property, Iberian Jewry had to cope with the terrible situation of exiles forced to leave a territory which, for several centuries, had become a place where the Jews developed a rich and creative culture. Also the fate of the exiles once they left Spain was only rarely better; many of the exiles died on their way to Northern Africa, and some lost their families or at least members of their family. No doubt, this dramatic expulsion was a traumatic one for most of those who underwent it. It can hardly be compared with the expulsions of the Jews earlier in the Middle Ages, from England or France for example, given the amplitude of the expelled Iberian community and its better economic situation. Though unexpected in itself, the Expulsion was, nevertheless, part of a gradual deterioration of the situation of the Jews in Spain. Following the pogroms and the riots of 1391, Spanish Jewry never returned to its former glorious past. The sense that things are turning worse seems to have been part of a growing awareness on the part of Iberian Jewry long before the Catholic kings had made their sudden decision to expel the Jews. The Expulsion itself was a definitive separation between the Spanish and the Jews, a separation which in reality had commenced long before 1492. The continuous closure of the intellectual life of Spanish Jewry in the 15th century, the demonization of philosophy-including Jewish philosophy-and of Christianity evident in some Kabbalistic sources, are conclusive evidence that a gradual break had been taking place between the Jewish culture and that of the surrounding Christian civilization in Spain. This rupture is especially apparent when we compare the attitude of Jewish and Christian scholars toward Kabbalah on the eve of the Expulsion in Italy and Spain. In the case of Italian Jews and Christian scholars, there was sufficient openness to allow the emergence of a new branch of Christian thought, the Christian Kabbalah. Though not unrelated to missionary goals, the Italian Christian Kabbalah was a result of the readiness of some Christian intellectuals to study with Jews Hebrew and Kabbalistic treatises, and even to regard Jewish Kabbalah as a very important branch of theology, amongst the most sublime examples of human thought. On the other side, nothing similar to the influence of the Jewish Kabbalah on Christians in Italy can be found in Spanish culture. Exactly during the same period when the young Italian count Pico della Mirandola was proposing his Kabbalistic theses in public debate, the Inquisition in Spain drastically prevented any similar type of religious syncretism. Christian Spain, the stronghold of the Jewish Kabbalah for more than two centuries, would not allow its intellectuals to absorb, even in a superficial manner, a Jewish lore despite the fact that it was substantially shaped in medieval Spain. In Italy, where the influence of Kabbalah was not so great even among the Jews themselves before the seventies of the 15th century, the relative openness of some Christian intellectuals permitted a new kind of relationship between Jews and Christians: some of the latter even became students of the former. In contemporary Spain this kind of relationship was hardly conceivable. Not only were Christian intellectuals indifferent, afraid, or hostile to the idea of establishing cultural contacts with contemporary Jews. The Jews themselves were also hesitant to acknowledge their debt to the influence of Christian thought even in the rare cases such an impact indeed informed Jewish thought. As the late Prof. S. Pines has remarked, among Spanish Jews there was a reticence in mentioning the names of Christian theologians; this reticence was very uncharacteristic of the much more open attitude of the Jews toward the Muslim philosophical authorities during the Muslim period and it remained unchanged in Christian Spain. Consequently, the physical uprooting of the Jewish communities from Spain and Portugal was hardly a forced dissociation from a friendly social and cultural environment; it was paralleled by a -18- spiritual and religious alienation that haunted this Jewry for many decades before their Expulsion. If 16th century Italy had invented the institution of the geographical ghetto, it is in medieval Spain that the spiritual closure of the Jews had become visible as early as the 15th century. It is important to contrast the situation in Christian Spain, with the openness of Spanish Jewry in Muslim Spain to a whole variety of cultural activities, including composing poems in the vein of their Muslim neighbors, cultivating a new style of linguistics and exegesis, and especially developing the impressive trends of Jewish philosophy under the aegis of the Muslim philosophies. In general, it would be helpful to contrast the relative closure of West European Jewry since the 13th century to the intellectual developments in their environs with the greater openness not only of Italian, but also Oriental Jewry. There, the influence of Sufism, an Islamic mysticism, seems to be a dominant condition amongst the Jewish elite, and especially among the descendants of Maimonides; no similar phenomenon can be detected in the West. During the generation before the Expulsion, Spanish Kabbalists had composed a highly particularistic literature: the anti-Christian and anti-philosophical Sefer ha-Meshiv. By contrast, in Italy, a Spaniard like Yehudah Abravanel, the son of Isaac Abravanel, better known by the Christians as Leone Ebreo, wrote one of the best-sellers of the Christian Renaissance. II When discussing the repercussions of the Expulsion for Spanish Jewry we would do well to distinguish between the physical upheaval, with the terrible price paid by the Jews as individuals and as a collective, and the cultural renascence that immediately followed this event. Certainly, there can be no doubt as to the traumatic experiences that individuals underwent as the result of their uprooting, of the loss of members of their families, and of the sense that a significant part of their people preferred to convert rather than leave the Spanish soil. Nevertheless I have many doubts as to the direct contribution of such a trauma towards the creativity of the Jewish masters in the Sephardi Diaspora. The widely accepted theory that at least in the case of the new formulations of the 16th century Kabbalah there was a response, though sometimes a subtle and a covert one, to the catastrophe of the Expulsion, is indeed a very fascinating hypothesis. However, it has been too easily embraced by scholars, with very little evidence brought in its support. In the case of other flourishing genres of literature, the Halakhic, ethical, sermonic, philosophical and poetic, I am not aware of a similar claim. Though a voluminous literature was written after the Expulsion in fields other than Kabbalah, there is no similar claim-with the exception of the assumption that 16th century historiography was informed by the Expulsion-for a profound influence of the tragic events on the nature of that literature. It is in the domain of historical hypotheses, interesting but very speculative indeed, that the attempt to link the traumatic events and the peculiar formulations of elaborate brands of mystical literature is to be located. I myself am inclined to much more concrete kinds of argumentation. In lieu of assuming, as these scholars do, that a whole type of literary activity, in a great number of areas, written by different individuals who apparently had experienced the Expulsion differently yet, it is claimed, reacted (or accepted the reaction formulated by the others) in a similar manner, I would prefer to explain the literary effervescence following the Expulsion by means of other kinds of explanations. These include the following considerations: A. Post-Expulsion literature was partly composed in order to commit to writing religious traditions which were circulated in some restricted circles long before the Expulsion. Jewish authors were afraid that these traditions might be lost as part of the vicissitudes of the exile. Indeed, this seems to be the fact in cases like Rabbi Abraham ben Shelomo Adrutiel's Kabbalistic work Avnei Zikkaron (Monuments of Remembrance); to a certain extent it is also true for the lengthy Zaphnat Pa'aneah of Rabbi Joseph ben Moshe Alashqar. Interestingly enough, these two works were composed in Northern Africa, a classical Sephardi community which was, nevertheless, only very rarely represented in the Messianic propaganda and eschatological computations which had emerged in other parts of the Jewish Diaspora. This fear of loss can also be considered a possible explanation for the flourishing of halakhic -19- literature, which emerged as a major factor immediately after the Expulsion, but had been rather limited during the preceding period. B. As part of the process of rebuilding Jewish life in new centers the need to supply religious guidance induced authors to write many more treatises than had been composed earlier in Spain. The more stable forms of communities that maintained traditional forms of life had disappeared, and instead it was important to contribute to the formation of newer centers.

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