Hakham Jacob Sasportas and the Former Conversos

STUDIA ROSENTHALIANA 44 (2012), 149-172 doi: 10.2143/SR.44.0.2189614

MATT GOLDISH

AKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS (1610-1698) is best known for his battle H against the followers of the messiah Shabbatai Zvi in 1665-66, but he was an important figure for many other reasons as well. Sasportas was, for example, the only rabbi to serve (or at least live) in all the major centers of the Western Sephardi diaspora: Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, and Livorno. Before he ever arrived in Europe he had a distinguished rabbinic career in North Africa. He left behind important responsa and letters which throw light on a number of historical topics. One of these is the encounter between the traditional rabbinate and the cadre of former conversos who escaped the Iberian Peninsula to create new lives as Jews in Western Europe. Yosef Kaplan has made the exploration of these communities the center of his scholarly endeavors for four decades. He has demonstrated that the communities of Western Sephardim looked like other Sephardic communities but operated very differently under the surface. Sasportas was a thoroughly traditional rabbi who took the respect of the rabbinate and rabbinic tradition with the utmost serious- ness. What happened when such a figure encountered communities of people who had grown up as Christians and subsequently created their own version of a Jewish community as they saw fit?

Life

Sasportas’s biography is an important key to many aspects of his activities and attitudes. He came from one of the most respected and influen- tial Jewish families in North Africa. He was, as he never tires of recalling, a direct descendent of the medieval kabbalist Moses Nahmanides in the 150 MATT GOLDISH eleventh generation.1 The Sasportas family had emigrated from Aragon around 1395-96, apparently as a result of the anti-Jewish disturbances there. They moved to Morocco, where many family members occupied important political and leadership positions. Their diplomatic and intel- ligence services for the government can be traced back to at least 1531. They produced outstanding scholars as well.2 Jacob Sasportas was born at Oran in 1610. Little is known of his education, but he must have been something of a wunderkind as he was a member of the Tlemcen rabbinical court already in 1629 at the age of eighteen. In 1634 he was promoted to chief judge of that court, whose jurisdiction extended to six other major cities of Jewish settlement in the vicinity. Sasportas’s fortunes waned when, around 1647, he was jailed by the king of Tlemcen. He was apparently implicated in an embezzlement scandal, indicating that he worked for the government as a diplomat or financier, as had many members of his family. He states that his incarceration resulted from some sort of conspiracy, that he was tortured, and that what was wanted of him was money he did not have in his possession.3

1. The historian and poet Daniel Levi de Barrios, a contemporary and friend of Sasportas, whose background in Jewish tradition was not strong, erroneously traces Sasportas’s lineage in one passage to Maimonides rather than Nahmanides (Rambam rather than Ramban), an error that was copied in the next century by the historian David Franco Mendes. See Daniel Levi de Barrios, Triumpho del govierno popular (Amsterdam 1683), ‘Historia Universal Iudayca’, p. 98; Franco Mendes, Memorias do Estabelecimento e progresso dos judeus portuguezes e espanhoes nesta famosa cidade de Amsterdam, eds L. Fuks, R.G. Fuks-Mansfeld and B.N. Teensma, in Os Judeus Portugueses em Amesterdão, ed. M. Cadafaz de Matos and H.P. Salomon (Lisbon 1990; = Monumenta Iudaica Portucalensia I; = Studia Rosenthaliana 9:2 [July 1975]), p. 58 and note c. there. 2. Modern historians appear to have derived their knowledge of the Sasportas family background largely from De Barrios, Triumpho, p. 14-26 and 98-99. See, e.g. Isaiah Tishby, ‘Intro- duction to Jacob Sasportas’, in Zizat novel Zvi (Jerusalem 1954), p. 24-26 (Hebrew pagination); H.Z. Hirschberg, A History of the Jews in North Africa, vol. 2 (Leiden 1981), p. 56, 74. For excellent background see Jean Frédéric Schaub, Les juifs du roi d’Espagne: Oran 1509-1669 (Paris 1999), ch. 2. Thanks to Prof. Yaacob Dweck for this reference. For the fate of another famous rabbinic family whose history looks very similar to that of the Sasportas family, see Jaume Riera, ‘On the Fate of Rabbi Isaac bar Sheshet (Rivash) during the Persecutions of 1391’, Sefunot 17 (1983), p. 11-20 (in Hebrew). Two Hebrew works on Sasportas from the Orthodox world contain some interesting references but also numerous errors, and should be used with great caution: Elie Moyal, Rabbi Yaacob Sasportas (Jerusalem 1992); and Isaac Sasportas, Moshi’an shel Yisra’el: ha-ro’eh me-Hamburg (Tifrah 2005). 3. Jacob Sasportas, She’elot u-teshuvot ohel Ya‘akov (Amsterdam 1737; reprint Jerusalem 1976), fol. 34r, 45r; idem, Zizat novel Zvi, p. 246; idem, Closing Remarks in Menasseh ben Israel, Nishmat Hayyim (Amsterdam 1652), n/p; Abraham Sasportas, Preface to Ohel Ya’akov, p. vi; Hirschberg, History, p. 67. HAKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS AND THE FORMER CONVERSOS 151

Having managed to secure his freedom, Sasportas came for the first time to Amsterdam, where he arrived in 1650-51 and was well received.4 He began teaching there and also took up work as a proofreader for his new and esteemed friend, Hakham Menasseh ben Israel. Over the next three years he proofread Menasseh’s Nishmat hayyim (1652; to which he appended a personal note and poem) among other works. He also published several items himself: Eleh divrei R. Ya’akov Sasportas…(1652), a eulogy for his young student who had died;5 Toledot Ya’akov, an index to the Palestinian Talmud (1652); and Heichal ha-kodesh of Hakham Moshe Elbaz, a mystical commentary on the prayers, to which Sasportas added his own lengthy preface entitled Penei heichal (1653).6 Sasportas also performed political tasks in Amsterdam. He helped Joseph Toledano translate diplomatic notes from Arabic into Spanish, and was referred to by Thomas Coenen, the Dutch Protestant clergyman in Smyrna, as the ‘resident minister of the Emperor of Morocco in Holland.’7 Many historians have mistakenly asserted that in this period Saspor- tas accompanied his friend, Menasseh ben Israel, on Menasseh’s famous mission to Oliver Cromwell in London. Cecil Roth has demonstrated that this never occurred and has located the source of the error.8

4. Franco Mendes makes a series of errors about Sasportas’s age at the time of his arrival and his death, as well as the date of his arrival. He does, however, give us the important information that in March of 1653 Sasportas borrowed money from the Amsterdam community’s fund for redeeming captives in order to free his wife and children who were still in the sultan’s prison. See Franco Mendes, Memorias, p. 54-55, 58-59, 160 n. 22. 5. Mercado was also eulogized by Hakham Saul Levi Morera, and his eulogy was also published, presumably by a wealthy relative of the deceased student. See Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus Libro- rum Hebraeorum (Berolini 1852-1860), column 2509, entry 7100 no. 2. That eulogy is now available in a full English translation based on Morteira’s autograph manuscript in Marc Saperstein, Exile in Amsterdam: Saul Levi Morteira’s Sermons to a Congregation of ‘New Jews’ (Cincinnati 2005), p. 536-543. 6. Gershom Scholem points out that Sasportas’s commentary is deeply kabbalistic, but it shows Sasportas to have been a Cordoverian rather than a Lurianic kabbalist. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, the Mystical Messiah (Princeton 1973), p. 570-71. 7. See Hirschberg, History, p. 67, 263-264 and note 32 there. The translations may in fact refer to Isaac rather than Jacob Sasportas but this is unclear. See also Sasportas, ‘Closing Remarks’; Abraham Sasportas, ‘Preface’, p. vi; Franco Mendes, Memorias, p. 58; Alfredo Toaff, ‘The Contro- versy Between R. Sasportas and the Jewish Community in Leghorn (1681)’, Sefunot 9 (1965), p. 180 (in Hebrew). Heikhal ha-kodesh (t/p and fol. 6v) and Eleh divrei (fol. 1r) both contain references to community members who financed their respective publications. In a letter from Sasportas to Livorno published by Toaff (‘Controversy’, p. 180) he claims that he was able to live off the royalties from the books he published in Amsterdam for many years. 8. Cecil Roth, A Life of Menasseh ben Israel (Philadelphia 1945), p. 81, 337, 339; idem, ‘New Light on the Resettlement’, Jewish Historical Society of England Transactions 11 (1924-1927), p. 119 152 MATT GOLDISH

It appears that Sasportas remained in Amsterdam for several years. He also spent some time in Rotterdam, where he directed the branch campus of the Pinto yeshivah together with his friend, Hakham Josiah (Iosiahu) Pardo.9 Sasportas returned to Morocco in 1659, where he was called upon to perform a diplomatic mission for the Moroccan government. The nature of this assignment is somewhat unclear. De Barrios claims that Sasportas was sent by Marabout Ben Bakr of Salé to obtain relief from the queen regent against an Arab siege of the city. Abraham Sasportas, on the other hand, states that his father was sent by the king of Marrakesh to the king of Spain on unspecified business. Either way, they agree that Sasportas undertook an important mission at this time and that it was successful. The length of the mission is also unclear, but after it was completed Sasportas was prevailed upon to remain for some time in Morocco as a member of the rabbinical court, until war and famine in the region drove him to return to Amsterdam. This must have been in the early 1660s.10 Soon after his return to Europe, in 1664, Sasportas was invited by the nascent London Portuguese Jewish community to serve as their first rabbi. His son, Samuel, worked with him as a teacher and ritual slaugh- terer (shohet u-bodek). In spring 1664, when the new community drew up its communal protocols (haskamot), it also dispatched the offer to Sasportas in Amsterdam and he arrived in June of the same year. This was a critical period for the rebirth of English Jewry, both politically and religiously: the community was still fighting anti-Jewish forces in Lon- don without the security of a charter, while its own internal composition and note 8 there. Roth traces this error back to Franco Mendes’s Memorias, and from there to J.S. da Silva Rosa, Iets over Chagam Jacob Sasportas (1610-1698) en zijn tijd (Amsterdam 1915) and others. 9. De Barrios states that this was in 1659, which would have meant that Sasportas was there for only a few months before he returned to Morocco. So, either it was indeed a short tenure in Rotterdam or De Barrios’s dates are incorrect and Sasportas went there earlier. In any case, this is a period of Sasportas’s life to which I have seen no other recent historian refer. It explains why Sas- portas’s manuscript letters (MS. New York – Yeshiva University Gottesman Library #374) include an extensive and very friendly exchange with Pardo. De Barrios, Triumpho, ‘Tora Hor, academia segunda’, p. 54. 10. Hirschberg, History, p. 67; Abraham Sasportas, ‘Preface’, p. vi; Tishby, ‘Introduction’, p. 136 and note 9 there; Da Silva Rosa, Iets, p. 5; Franco Mendes, Memorias, p. 58-59. On 160 n. 22 of the Memorias the editors say Sasportas went not to Amsterdam but to Hamburg in 1659, then to Livorno in 1670, and to Amsterdam again only in 1672 to 1678, as head of the Pinto yeshivah. I believe some of this information comes from scattered references in De Barrios, but I am not sure if that is the source of all these statements, some of which may be incorrect. HAKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS AND THE FORMER CONVERSOS 153 and goals remained nebulous. After struggling with these problems for about fourteen months, Sasportas fled before the great plague which struck London in 1665. He escaped to Hamburg by way of Amsterdam.11 The Sasportas family arrived in Hamburg completely destitute and had to depend upon charitable assistance. Shortly after their arrival, in the fall of 1665, the first news of the messianic movement surrounding the Izmir kabbalist Shabbatai Zvi began to circulate. Despite his already poor standing in the Hamburg community, Sasportas took up the exceedingly unpopular fight against the Sabbateans. After Shabbatai’s apostasy Sasportas composed his work, Zizat novel Zvi, a compilation of letters about the movement, most of which he assembled in Hamburg. He remained there after the messiah’s apostasy (perhaps with a bit more honor than before) until 1673.12 In that year Sasportas was invited by the de Pinto brothers to return to Amsterdam and head their private yeshivah where twelve outstanding students learned. While there, Sasportas also belonged to the Talmud Torah Society and acted as rabbinical decisor.13 In 1678 Sasportas made a long-contemplated move to the Italian port city of Livorno, where he had been invited to officiate. He was still extremely poor upon his arrival. Despite the fact that he had an income from the community and later also from a wealthy householder who sponsored his learning, Sasportas apparently had difficulty making ends meet. His decision to leave in 1680 may have been based on financial difficulty, but it probably also involved dissatisfaction with certain religious standards. Conveniently, an offer had been made for him to return to Amsterdam as a teacher in the Ets Haim yeshivah.14

11. Isaiah Tishby, ‘New Information on the “Converso” Community in London According to the Letters of Sasportas from 1664/5’, in Galut ahar golah (Exile and Diaspora) (Jerusalem 1988), p. 471-472, 484 n. 67 (in Hebrew); Abraham Sasportas, ‘Preface’, p. vi; Lionel D. Barnett (ed. and trans.), El Libro de los Acuerdos, Being the Records and Accompts of the Spanish and Portuguese Synago- gue of London from 1663 to 1681 (Oxford 1931), p. 14-17. On the situation of London’s Jewish community at this time see most recently David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485-1850 (Oxford 1994), ch. 3. 12. Abraham Sasportas, ‘Preface’, p. vi; Tishby, ‘Introduction’, p. 27. 13. Abraham Sasportas, ‘Preface’, p. vi-vii; Toaff, ‘Controversy’, p. 180. 14. Toaff, ‘Controversy,’ passim; Abraham Sasportas, ‘Preface’, p. vii; Livro dos acordos da Nação e ascamot (Portuguese Community of Amsterdam MS. PA 334B; = Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem HM2/1519), vol. B, item 2 (invitation to Sasportas to return to Amsterdam as the de facto head of the ‘Midras Grande’ from 26 Adar II [spring] of 1680). 154 MATT GOLDISH

Immediately upon leaving Livorno Sasportas wrote to a friend of his who had been a lay leader there to warn him that a certain communal ordinance which had recently been voted upon went contrary to Jewish law. This resolution would force all Jewish litigants of business cases to be judged by the lay leaders according to merchant law, while cases involving religious matters and those of personal status (divorces, wed- dings, wills, etc.) would go before the rabbinic court as before. Although it would appear that this amendment was never promulgated, it remained in the communal records. Sasportas’s warning was brought before the Livorno leaders and a tremendous uproar ensued, involving an ongoing exchange of letters, many of which have been preserved. Eventually Sasportas prevailed and the decision was removed from the records.15 On his way back to Amsterdam Sasportas also made a stop at The Hague, where he worked with Hakham Isaac Aboab and Jacob Israel Pereira to create an eruv, a legal boundary that would allow Jews to carry objects outside their homes on the Sabbath. This project was undertaken at the behest of the local leader, Abraham Lopez Bruchiel, and his wife, Rachel Soasso de Pinto. Sasportas exercised his diplomatic skills to acquire the necessary permissions from the government for this project. Back in Amsterdam he taught in the yeshivah, and was appointed its official head (Rosh Yeshivah) in 1681, upon the retirement of Hakham Aboab from that post.16 In 1693, when Haham Aboab passed away, Sas- portas was invited to take his place as rabbi of the city. He served at this post until his death at age eighty-eight, on Tuesday, 15 April (= 4 Adar), 1698, at 6:00 p.m.17

15. Toaff, ‘Controversy’; Isaiah Tishby, ‘Letters of R. Jacob Sasportas Against the Livorno Lay Leaders in 1681’, Kovez al yad 4 (1946), p. 143-159 (in Hebrew). 16. Livro dos acordos, II:2:6. Though Sasportas had been running the yeshivah since his return from Livorno, he now received the title and dignities of its ‘Roos’ (rosh; head), including an increase in salary and responsibility for teaching the most advanced Talmud class. Franco Mendes gets the Hebrew date, 5441, correct, but he mistakenly lists the European date as 1691 rather than 1681. See Franco Mendes, Memorias, p. 25. The error is in the original manuscript, MS. Amsterdam – Ets Haim 49 A 8 (= Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts #38676), fol. 30v. 17. Livro dos acordos, II:168. On 2 (?) Nisan 5453 (spring 1693) Sasportas was named ‘Hakham of our holy congregation’ by the Amsterdam Mahamad, in addition to his position in the yeshivah. Other documents in the Livro dos acordos indicate that Sasportas was on much more solid financial footing during these last years in Amsterdam than he had been since leaving Morocco. On pages 219 and 228 (from 1696-97) are records of his disposal or testament of investments, including shares in the Dutch East India Company. Page 164 contains a document about his family finances from 1692-93. See also Franco Mendes, Memorias, p. 27-28, 44, 59 (his dates differ slightly); Abraham Sasportas, HAKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS AND THE FORMER CONVERSOS 155

Conversos Returning to Judaism

One of the tasks faced by Sasportas and his fellow rabbis among the Western Sephardim was how to deal with conversos who had escaped the Iberian Peninsula and now wanted to join the Jewish community. There was no clear precedent in Jewish law for this situation. The Talmud teaches that a Jew remains a Jew no matter what sins he or she has committed.18 These individuals, however, had never lived as Jews, nor had their parents or grandparents. By the time Sasportas arrived in Amsterdam, a century and a half had elapsed since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and their forced conversion in Portugal. Perhaps, one would imagine, they should no longer be considered Jews at this point. At the same time, these were people who recognized their Jewish ances- try and wished to return themselves and their families to Judaism. Thus the rabbis had to decide what process a given converso needed to be admitted to the community. Did he or she need to undergo a formal conversion to Judaism? A pro-forma conversion? Did he or she require submersion in a ritual bath? Circumcision? Did the person require some set of penitential acts? Among the factors determining these decisions, which appear to have varied widely, were the date when the case arose, the attitude of the individual rabbi, the amount of power and authority he had in his particular situation, and the specific converso in question.19 For Sasportas the issue of authority becomes especially interesting as we compare his dealings with returning conversos in Amsterdam, London, and Southern France. Sasportas, following a typological tradition,20 gives a detailed description of what he perceives to be four types of conversos in Spain and Portugal. The first type consists of those who plan their escape, train their children in Jewish ways, and send them ahead. When they escape

‘Preface’, p. vii; Daniel Levi de Barrios, Monte hermoso de la Ley divina: Sermon exemplar (Amster- dam 1698), p. 1. 18. bT Sanhedrin 44r. 19. Some of these questions are dealt with in Simon Schwarzfuchs, ‘Le Retour des Marranes au Judaïsme dans la littérature rabbinique’, Xudeus e Conversos na Historía 1 (1994), p. 339-348; Yosef Kaplan, ‘Wayward New Christians and Stubborn New Jews: The Shaping of a Jewish Identity’, Jewish History 8:1-2 (1994), p. 27-41; David L. Graizbord, Souls in Dispute: Converso Identities in Iberia and the Jewish Diaspora, 1580-1700 (Philadelphia 2004), p. 71-76 and especially p. 217 n. 28. 20. See Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, vol. 2 (Philadelphia 1966; reprint 1992), p. 325. 156 MATT GOLDISH they are very vocally anti-Christian and pro-Jewish. Such people have often been forced to leave fortunes and families behind, but they pour heart and soul into their Judaism, giving generously of their money as well. A second group risks life and limb to escape the Iberian Peninsula like the first group, but they are caught by the Inquisition and sentenced to prison or even death. These people face their fate boldly and give over their souls for the sanctification of God’s name just as their brave Jewish ancestors did. They never flinch, knowing that their reward will come in the next world. We are proud of them, says Sasportas, and identify with their suffering in faith. Sadly, a third type of converso apostatizes will- fully. These, Sasportas declares, will suffer forever with no portion in God and no opportunity to atone. The fourth and perhaps most significant group consists of conversos who apostatize in order to save themselves or out of expedience. This is a grievous sin, but it by no means commits the perpetrator to eternal damnation. Although Rabbi Abra- ham ibn Daud has declared that one who believes in Jesus is called a heretic and thus has no share in the world to come, these people do not actually believe in Christianity; they have simply acted to save their lives or their money. Maimonides is relatively lenient in such situations, though he does not by any means permit apostasy to Christianity. Although a desecration of the Name has been committed, conversos in this situation are not called idolaters.21 There is an oddity in Sasportas’s approach here which is, in fact, typical of the treatment of conversos in rabbinic literature. At the time the responsum containing this typology was written, in 1650, no profess- ing Jew had lived openly in the Iberian Peninsula for over 150 years. Sasportas nevertheless still speaks of these conversos as ‘apostates’ – as if they themselves had converted to Catholicism. He writes as though he is still dealing with Iberian Jews of the expulsion period. Perhaps we might say that he was simply unaware of the extremely tenuous relationship between Spanish and Portuguese crypto-Judaism and traditional Jewish practice, believing that the New Christians were generally leading a full Torah life in secret. The attribution of such complete credulity to a worldly rabbi who worked with cases of returning conversos ‘every day,’

21. Sasportas, Ohel Ya’akov, fol. 2r-v. HAKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS AND THE FORMER CONVERSOS 157 as he himself reports,22 seems untenable. A more likely explanation for the anachronistic treatment of the converso condition demonstrated by Sasportas and many other rabbis of the period is that Sasportas’s mind worked in terms of legal precedents. Most of the precedents concerning the treatment of conversos came from the fifteenth or early-sixteenth centuries, or even earlier. This anachronism has consequences in legal decisions because Sasportas and others still appear to be deciding issues based on conditions that had changed significantly since the precedent cases were adjudicated. Sasportas advised a two-step approach in the reintegration of conversos to Judaism. In the first stage, one must approach the potential proselyte with gentleness so as not to alienate him. And now, hear my voice and I will advise you. Since this generation is licentious and its impudence is turned even toward heaven, treat [the conversos] as you would a trusted and beloved comrade who performs bad actions. Love him, but reprove him according to his evil traits. Be happy with a slight understanding of his purposes and strive to avert the eyes of your discernment from seeing any evil [intent] in his actions. Rather, draw him by the rope of love and with soft words spoken gently…This is the proper thing to do with those new people recently arrived, because if you bind them with cords and reprove them hand and foot, you will cause them to become disconnected. They will throw off the rope [of love], to shirk the yoke of Torah and commandments, since the way is close and it is easy to go back [to Christianity].23 When we see how Sasportas actually dealt with returning conversos we may wonder exactly what he had in mind about averting one’s eyes ‘from seeing any evil intent in his action.’ After assigning a distinctly severe regimen of penances to the returning converso Abraham Bueno, Sasportas says without the slightest hint of irony, ‘And in order not to lock the door in the faces of those returning, we have not weighed him down with a heavy load, but rather only what he can bear.’24 In truth, the penances required of Bueno, based on Elijah de Vidas’s Reshit Hokhmah, were probably not considered excessive at

22. Ibid., fol. 65r. 23. Ibid., fol. 69v. 24. Ibid., fol. 3r. 158 MATT GOLDISH the time. Compared to those assigned by Nathan of Gaza, for example, they seem quite mild.25 Penances may have been very much to the taste of former conversos because they are a major element in Catholic life, in which they purge the sins of the transgressor. Sasportas seems to regard them as having this function as well because he says that performance of the exercises he has enumerated will make Bueno ‘a kosher Jew for every holy matter’ only at the completion of the three year course. This is to say that the returning converso cannot be a fully acceptable Jew until after he expiates transgressions against Jewish law performed in Iberia as a Catholic! All this is part of the ‘gentle persuasion’ to bring conversos to Judaism. It does indicate, however, that Sasportas fully fol- lowed the dictate of ‘a Jew remains a Jew.’ We will return to this issue shortly. The second stage of the approach to newly arrived conversos comes into play in case the first stage fails. ‘Afterwards, crushingly break his bones one by one. In his certainty of your love he will believe that the breaking of bones is [done in order] to cement them [back] together better than they were.’26 This is the procedure he himself follows in London. ‘After six months passed during which I spoke to them res- pectfully, and my chastisements accomplished nothing, I treated them with disgrace and announced their sins in public as desecrators of the heavenly Name.’27 Tishby’s phrasing is slightly misleading when he says Sasportas was ‘patient’ for six months, then ‘his patience ran out.’28 This suggests that Sasportas approached the situation unwittingly, ingenuously waited for his reproofs to take effect, then became angry at his congregants for their recalcitrance and acted in indignation. Rather, the rabbi was heeding his own advice by executing the two step process for approaching returning conversos. What is perhaps unclear is why he decided that six months was the appropriate period for implementation of his first stage. Sasportas does not, on the other hand, stint in his praise for the heroic qualities of those like Bueno who do return. Despite the monumental

25. Isaiah Tishby, ‘The Penitential Exercises of Nathan of Gaza’, in idem, Netivei emunah u-minut (Jerusalem 1982), p. 30-51 (in Hebrew). 26. Sasportas, Ohel Ya’akov, fol. 69v. 27. Tishby, ‘New Information’, p. 479. 28. Ibid. HAKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS AND THE FORMER CONVERSOS 159 efforts exerted upon them to abandon the true faith, the conversos have persevered. ‘They will return and live in His shadow; [they will have] grain and sow seed. [He] blesses the sons of greatness, the righteous con- verts who come to shelter under the wings of His presence…’29 Further in the same responsum he lauds young Abraham Bueno for surviving three years in an inquisitional prison under torture without giving up his Jewish faith, then escaping from Iberia at the first opportunity.30 As Kaplan points out, however, we should not forget that, A New Christian background was a double edged sword. From the viewpoint of the Jewish world, to which they belonged, they brought with them not only the prestige of the secret practice of Judaism, having overcome many difficulties, sometimes martyrdom, to rejoin Jewry openly; they also bore the stigma of those who had lived outside Judaism for generations and violated its Torah and commandments.31

Sasportas, despite his admiration for returning conversos, was quite capable of turning a converso background against an enemy. Here is what he says about Abraham Miguel Cardoso, whom we shall encounter again shortly. ‘He came from Spain as an adult, having filled his belly with forbidden foods. He was born unsanctified of an unhallowed mar- riage, he lived in corruption and abomination, and then he came to Judaism.’32 In the Livorno dispute, though he promises not to stir up ‘the shame of families,’33 Sasportas claims that all the trouble was caused by ‘three or four strong-arm characters, recently arrived, from the sons of strangers [i.e. Christians].’34 Sasportas’s praise for returning conversos lasted only as long as those persons maintained a legally and theologically impeccable Jewish life.

29. Sasportas, Ohel Ya’akov, fol. 2r. 30. Ibid., fol. 2v. 31. Yosef Kaplan, ‘Deviance and Punishment in the Western Sephardi Diaspora during the Seventeenth Century: The Portuguese in Amsterdam’ (typescript of a paper delivered at the conference ‘Jewish Societies in Transformation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,’ Van Leer Insti- tute, Jerusalem, January, 1986), p. 4. 32. Sasportas, Zizat novel Zvi, p. 270, following Kaplan’s translation in ‘Deviance and Punish- ment’, p. 4. This is one of several passages in which Sasportas brings up Cardoso’s converso past in the context of an attack. See also Isaiah Tishby, ‘Rabbi Jacob Sasportas’s Treatment of Abraham Cardoso’, in Kovez hotza’at Schocken le-divrei safrut (Jerusalem 1940), p. 167-179 (in Hebrew). 33. Tishby, ‘Letters’, p. 154. 34. Ibid., p. 151. 160 MATT GOLDISH

Converso Heterodoxy and Laxity

Professor Kaplan has shown us that the difference between the communities of the Western Sephardi Diaspora (Amsterdam, London, Hamburg, Livorno, Bayonne, Bordeaux, etc.) and those of the Eastern Sephardi Diaspora (Ottoman Empire, North Africa, Syria and Lebanon, Palestine), though often difficult to detect on the surface, was present everywhere from the margins to the center of society. It is relatively easy to spot the high-profile radicals among the Western Sephardim, such as David Far- rar, Uriel da Costa, Juan de Prado, Daniel Ribeira, and Baruch Spinoza. These are people who were banned and reviled by what appeared to be a very orthodox community leadership. Kaplan’s studies, however, reveal that the leadership itself, and the structures of the communities, were a far cry from the orthodoxy of older Sephardic society. The Eastern Sephardic communities’ Jewish life was transferred with no interruption from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century. The West- ern Sephardi communities, by contrast, only began to arise a century later, and were created by people whose entire lives – as well as those of their parents and grandparents – had been led as Catholics.35 A wide range of views and issues concerning Jewish tradition existed in these communities. Everyone from the newest arrival to the most fervent member of the community needed to be educated about Judaism from the ground up. Thus there was a whole system of adult education paralleling the educational institutions for children. Many ordinary householders, however, did not feel like adhering to the stringencies of rabbinic law, or simply did not know the law. Others deliberately remained at the margins of the community. A broad spectrum of theological and philosophical beliefs existed among these Jews. The wealthier and university-educated members were accustomed to cultural entertainments and easy relations with non-Jews of a style uncommon in traditional Jewish communities. Their fealty was often more to those of their own background, the ‘Nação’ or nation of former Spanish and Portuguese conversos, than it was to the Jewish people.36

35. See especially Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (Oxford 1989; Hebrew original, Jerusalem 1982); idem, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden 2000). 36. See the previous footnote and also Daniel Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Oxford 2000); Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the HAKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS AND THE FORMER CONVERSOS 161

To deal with all this, the Western Sephardim in the early seventeenth century needed to bring rabbis from Italy or the Eastern Sephardi communities to lead them. By the time Sasportas arrived in Amsterdam there was a mixture of rabbis from those origins (Sasportas and Hakham Saul Levi Morteira of Venice), and rabbis trained in Amsterdam (Aboab, Menasseh, Hakham Solomon de Oliveira, Hakham Moses Raphael de Aguilar). Sasportas’s writings show him to be superior to the others in his knowledge of the Talmud and Jewish law, while most of them had wider knowledge in literature and philosophy. The Maghrebi rabbis, such as the earlier Hakham Isaac Uzziel and Sasportas, often had difficulty knowing how to reconcile their experiences in a traditional Jewish community with the complexity and free-wheeling attitudes they encountered among these former-conversos.37 Sasportas, who appears to have been a particular dogmatist and traditionalist, struggled hard with this situation. He was especially concerned with the disrespect with which he felt rabbis were treated in the West. It is sometimes difficult to distin- guish which aspects of his rhetoric and decision-making in a particular situation were driven by his extreme dedication to tradition and which by an irascible personality.38 Amsterdam, which stood at the center of the Western Sephardi Diaspora, had its share of problems with converso heterodoxy and laxity, but when Sasportas landed in London he found these problems much worse. Upon his arrival he was placated by the outward piety of the community members, and what appeared to be the desire of those on the margins to adopt full observance soon. This impression evaporated rapidly and soon Sasportas was thinking of his congregants quite differently. One character he encountered in his congregation there he describes as, ‘An apikoros [Epicurean; a heretic] who mocks the word of God.’ Of another he says that ‘A spirit of heresy and Sadducean opinion had been cast into him; he turns his eyes away from seeing the Oral Law

Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington 1997); and Y. Kaplan, H. Méchoulan, and R.H. Popkin (eds). Menasseh ben Israel and His World (Leiden 1989). 37. On Hakham Uzziel and his clashes with former-conversos see e.g. Roth, Menasseh ben Israel, p. 23; idem, ‘The Strange Case of Hector Mendes Bravo’, Hebrew Union College Annual 18 (1943-44), p. 242-243; Meyer Kayserling, ‘Un conflit dans la communaute Hispano-Portugaise d’Amsterdam – ses consequences,’ Revue des Études Juives 43 (1901), p. 275. 38. On this issue see e.g. Avraham Gross, ‘The Image of Rabbi Jacob Sasportas in his Book, She’elot u-teshuvot ohel Ya’akov’, Sinai 93:3-4 (1983), p. 132-141 (in Hebrew). 162 MATT GOLDISH and closes his ears from hearing the words of the scribes.’39 Tishby has identified the latter figure with one of the brothers Francia, who had fled Portugal to practice Judaism in London. Of the Francia brothers, Domingo (Isaac) or Jorge (Abraham), the following report was made before the Inquisition in the Canary Islands. ‘Being in synagogue, dressed in the vestments of his church, said: ‘Gentlemen, all this is suited to either very great fools or very wise men;’ saying which he took off the vestment, threw down the book, and went out.’40 Sasportas’s encounter with the Francia brothers and other London former-conversos perfectly illustrates the complexity of the situation. Sasportas’s world was one in which the Talmud and its teachers were venerated as the conduit of Godly law into the world. These conversos grew up having scarcely heard of the Talmud, and denigrating ecclesias- tical authority, represented for them by the Inquisition. An inability to reconcile with the power of the rabbis and the Talmudic tradition was a hallmark of converso thought, most famously expressed in Amsterdam by Uriel da Costa.41 Nevertheless, the Francia brothers did go to synagogue. They voluntarily joined a Jewish congregation and observed at least the general sense of the Jewish law. The witness testifying before the Canary Islands Inquisition states that, They were always with other Jews, and on Saturdays they might be seen in holiday attire, with new trousers and shoes, and white stock- ings, and that on Fridays they trimmed their beards, which is the principal sign by which Jews are known in London. Besides which they never attended the Bourse or did business on Saturdays, nor did he at any time see them at Mass on Sundays and feast days in any of the chapels and oratories which he visited…42

39. Tishby, ‘New Information’, p. 481. On the Jews of London in this period see Kaplan, Alternative Path, ch. 7; Katz, Jews in the History, ch. 3. 40. Tishby, ‘New Information’, p. 481; Lucien Wolf, Jews in the Canary Islands, Being a Calendar of Jewish Cases Extracted from the Records of the Canariote Inquisition in the Collection of the Marquess of Bute (London 1926; reprint, Renaissance Society of America 2001), p. 205; and in general see there, p. 199-213. 41. On this enormous subject see e.g. Shalom Rosenberg, ‘Emunat Hakhamim’, in. I. Twersky and B. Septimus (eds), Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA 1987), p. 285-341; Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality on the Amstel (Oxford 2001); Uriel da Costa, Examination of Pharisaic Traditions, Supplemented by Semuel da Silva’s Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul, trans. and ed. H.P. Salomon and I.S.D. Sassoon (Leiden 1993); M. Orfali (trans. and intro.), Imanuel Aboab’s Nomologia o discursos legales: The Struggle Over the Authority of the Law (Jerusalem 1997) (in Hebrew). 42. Wolf, Canary Islands, p. 201. HAKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS AND THE FORMER CONVERSOS 163

None of this was a given. Many conversos came to Western Europe and did not associate with Jews or Judaism at all. The London conversos’ difficulty in adapting to full-blown rabbinic Judaism is matched by Sasportas’s inability to see them within their own cultural context and to ease their way gently into full observance. Six months hardly seems sufficient time for someone to change his entire style of life and adopt a complex new set of rules and doctrines. Sasportas saw greed as one of the primary factors in the conversos’ ritual laxity. In the Livorno dispute he describes the leading role of economic interests in the denigration of rabbinic authority and notes that the committee of leaders is chosen by ‘wealth above all.’43 In London he refers to the leaders’ money as ‘tainted like idolatry.’44 Most poignant is his letter to the conversos of Perehorade near Bayonne in Southern France: I have seen a description of the arrangements in that place of darkness and they are not ordered by the times of Sabbaths and holy days; [rather] holy is changed to profane for a bit of silver, a few small coins. They do business and enjoy the illicit profits gained on the Sab- bath. They are selling eternal life in exchange for the life of the moment. It might almost be said of them that they know their Master and rebel against Him intentionally. Excuses are made for them and people want to exempt them from punishment by saying, ‘They are anusim [conversos]!’45 This is just a way of keeping their enemies away from their money [i.e. income]. They have no concern for the respect of their Maker, who knows what is happening deep within their hearts and consciences. What will they do on the day they must sur- render their souls and face judgment and punishment? Their very limbs will testify to their activities on the holy days [‘eidehem], though we might read it ‘their testimony’ [‘eidehem]. What exactly is the com- pulsion [ones] on them?46 It is nowhere to be seen in a land where the government (may God protect it) has with the utmost graciousness extended its right hand to receive them, granting each man sover- eignty over his own household to observe his own religion. Nobody is

43. Tishby, ‘Letters’, p. p. 152, 157. 44. Tishby, ‘New Information’, p. 480. 45. The term anusim carries the double meaning of ‘conversos’ and ‘ones who were compelled’. 46. I.e. why would we call them ‘compelled ones’, anusim, when they live in free lands and do not need to pretend to Catholic orthodoxy as they did in Spain and Portugal? The linguistic critique works specifically in Hebrew, in which anusim remained the standard term for all conversos, whether or not they or their ancestors were forced to convert and practice Catholicism. 164 MATT GOLDISH

forcing him to publicly desecrate the Sabbaths! It is only his own evil inclination that sells him down the wrong path for the love of mam- mon. They have voluntarily chosen Gehinnom 47 and subjugation to [foreign] governments, for our redemption and the reclamation of our souls depend on observance of the Sabbath.48 Did they not know or understand that observance of the Sabbath is as weighty as all the rest of the Torah combined? [Profanation of the Sabbath] also bears the whiff of idolatry because it is through [the Sabbath] that we know our belief about the creation of the world and about the existence of a Creator who is powerful and providential.49 [The profaner of the Sab- bath] rejects that to which it testifies about Him as well as the Torah in which God instructed to be written about His resting. He who profanes it turns the sacred into the secular; nor can his transgression be forgiven… 50 Sasportas makes no room for leniency concerning conversos who will not relinquish their business interests on the Sabbath – a biblical law, not a rabbinic one. He connects the conversos’ greed with their profanation of the Sabbath, which is tantamount to heresy and idolatry. Money, in Sasportas’s eyes, constituted a major stumbling block to the accept- ance of Torah and rabbinic authority among conversos. Monetary gain was not the only motivation for the former conversos to go astray, however. I have pointed out elsewhere that for Sasportas the crisis over the messiah Shabbatai Zvi (1626-1676), which peaked in 1665-66, was in large part another episode in the war against the rabbinic tradition and Oral Torah.51 Sasportas spotted the relationship between

47. This is something like a temporary hell in Jewish tradition. 48. Sasportas refers first to bT Berakhot 34v and bT Shabbat 63r, which say that the messianic days will be similar to our own times except that the Jews will not be subjugated to foreign governments or dispersion, a view adopted by Maimonides, Laws of Kings 12:1. He then alludes to bT Shabbat 118v, which says that if the entire Jewish people were to observe two Sabbaths properly the messiah would immediately arrive. There are other passages associating the messiah with the Sabbath as well. 49. The description of the Sabbath in the story of creation in the book of Genesis is recited by Jews as a part of their own Sabbath observance (imitatio dei), but also as confirmation of their belief that the whole story of creation is true. God created the world out of nothing and continues to exert providence over its operation. Profanation of the Sabbath represents a form of denial of the creation story and is thus, in the eyes of the Talmud and Midrash, tantamount to denying God’s role in the creation and operation of the world. It is connected with idolatry because Aristotle and other ancient pagan philosophers believed that the world is eternal and not created in time. 50. Sasportas, Ohel Ya’akov, fol. 68v. 51. Matt Goldish, ‘Toward a Reevaluation of the Relationship Between Kabbalah, Sabbate- ansim, and Heresy’, in D. Frank and M. Goldish (eds), Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics: Jewish HAKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS AND THE FORMER CONVERSOS 165

Sabbateanism and converso heterodoxy in what he perceived as the cavalier treatment of the Oral Law tradition among certain Sabbateans who were also former-conversos. The figures he singles out for attack are Abraham Miguel Cardoso, Benjamin Mussaphia, and Isaac Nahar. Sasportas not only claims that Cardoso fell foolishly into the errors of the Sabbateans, but that his failure to recognize and avoid those errors is attributable to the fact that he was a converso who still thought like a Christian. The other interesting aspect of Sasportas’s attack on these three figures is that they were all trained physicians, members of an intel- lectual elite that was little known in North Africa. We thus discover another facet of Sasportas’s encounter with the former conversos: a yoking of the converso condition both with heresy regarding the Oral Law and with Western-style intellectualism.52

Dealings With Converso Community Leaders

The Western Sephardic communities were created by former conversos, recently escaped from the Iberian Peninsula, whose ancestors had not lived as practicing Jews for at well over a century. They were neophytes at Judaism but had become (in many cases) European cultural and economic sophisticates. Kaplan emphasizes their strong tendency to identify more with their own cultural group, the Nação, or nation of Spanish and Portuguese conversos and former-conversos, than with the Jewish people and religion. These Jews, including their leaders, were often uncomfortable with the Talmudic tradition and the power held by rabbis in traditional Jewish communities. Thus, the Mahamad made essen- tially all important decisions, which were simply rubber-stamped by the rabbis. These leaders particularly avoided giving the rabbis power over business decisions, while at the same time putting a heavy emphasis on the holiness of the synagogue and religious service. This bifurcation into

Authority, Dissent, and Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Times (Detroit 2008), p. 393-407. See the critique of my position in Pawe¥ Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816 (Philadelphia 2011), p. 42-43. I will not reproduce the texts and discussions concerning Sabbateanism here because they are discussed in my book and article as well as in other literature on the topic. 52. Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, MA 2004), p. 138-139. 166 MATT GOLDISH sacred and profane realms reflects something of the Catholic approach because it is a distinction that is minimal in traditional Jewish life. Sasportas, accustomed to the autonomy and authority of rabbis rather than lay leaders, ran into trouble with the former-converso Mahamad of London very quickly. Apparently they complained to Sasportas’s friend, Hakham Josiah Pardo, who warned Sasportas to step carefully. Sasportas responded that, I tread on their arrogance in assuming authority [over the community], stepping on the heads of those appointed over the community. I spoke out sharply against them, treating them as if they were spies walking here. I did not concern myself with the meager salary that they pay me every month – they may do with it as they will… I remonstrated with some of those who insult the angels of God [the rabbis], the words of the Scribes and the Oral Torah. The entire rea- son for my coming here was for them,53 and all my rebuke was directed against them. I pointed a finger at each one of them to warn him of the judgment of God, our Light. He will not be judged as one who has been removed from the general category as a means to teach [a rule] about the general category because he mistreated me, God forbid.54 [The Mahamad] tried to propagate a baseless falsehood by coercing [others] to side against me.55 Sasportas was no respecter of persons when it came to the honor of God and the rabbinic tradition as he understood it. He knew that his job and livelihood were at stake, but he could not sit by watching the very leaders of the community make decisions that went against Jewish law. This was the case again in Livorno when the communal leaders attempted to usurp what Sasportas saw as the authority of the rabbis. He writes that the community was opposed to this empowerment of its

53. I take this to mean that the very leaders who invited him to London were among those he was rebuking. 54. This refers to Number Eight of the Thirteen Hermeneutic Rules taught by Rabbi Ishmael in the Introduction to Sifra: ‘A matter that was included in a general category but then singled out from the general category in order to teach something is not intended to teach that thing only about itself but about the entire category.’ Sasportas’s intention is that any rebuke he gave to an individual member of the Mahamad should be understood to be applicable to all of them. He apparently struck out at one of these leaders in particular and wants to make clear that he is not rebuking him as revenge for the wrongs this individual perpetrated on Sasportas, but because this man and his colleagues were not acting properly. 55. Tishby, ‘New Information’, p. 478. As usual, Sasportas’s flowery Hebrew phrasing is somewhat obscure. I have tried to render the sense of it accurately. HAKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS AND THE FORMER CONVERSOS 167 twelve-man Mahamad, but ‘The hand of certain ruffians and some of the wealthy took upon themselves the power against the will [of the community].’56 Sasportas describes his battle at the time the communal authorities in Livorno adopted the decision to judge all non-ritual cases themselves, according to merchant law, rather than referring them to the rabbinical court for judgment according to Torah law. I was infuriated by this and opened my mouth [against it] without restraint, though it was to my own detriment. After about six months I left there because I had been recalled to the holy congregation of Amsterdam as the director of the Ets-Haim seminary. When I arrived at Marseilles I wrote a ‘letter to the wise’ to Gabriel Arias,57 who was one of the signatories. I spoke harshly against them to him and I completely annulled all their excommunications, bans, and agreements. I told him that I would write to all regions publicizing their stench so they would be made a disgrace.58 The letters continue in this vein and become even sharper and more strident. As I pointed out above, Sasportas did not constrain himself from dredging up the converso past of his opponents, whom he refers to derisively as recent arrivals from the children of strangers.59 Clearly Sasportas saw problematic innovations in communal leadership in the Western Sephardi Diaspora as a consequence of the converso failure to adopt traditional rabbinic Judaism. In other words, Sasportas knew in the seventeenth century what Yosef Kaplan rediscovered in the twentieth: that the deviance of the Western Sephardi communities from traditional Judaism cut to the very core of their society. Sasportas was about seventy years old when he pursued the battle with the Livorno leaders. A case he treats in his responsa, Ohel Ya’akov, from sometime after this, sheds an interesting light on Sasportas’s nego- tiation of a converso attitude whose challenge to tradition was far more subtle: the Nação identity. As I have mentioned, based on Kaplan’s studies, the Western Sephardim tended to see themselves less as part of

56. Tishby, ‘Letters’, p. 145-146. 57. Tishby points out that he was a member of one of the leading families of conversos in Livorno. 58. Tishby, ‘Letters’, p. 148. See also M. Walzer et al. (eds.), The Jewish Political Tradition, vol. 1, p. 425-429. 59. Ibid., p. 151. 168 MATT GOLDISH a Jewish people that included Ashkenazim and poor Eastern Sephardim, than as part of an ethnic group of Portuguese and Spanish conversos they called the Nação. In Ohel Ya’akov Sasportas responds to the following query. 60 A converso (Reuben) and his three sons escape Portugal and come to Amster- dam to adopt Judaism. The two younger sons remain there as Jews, but the oldest son returns to Portugal and lives as a Catholic. He has a son of his own and dies while Reuben is still alive. Reuben, meanwhile, joins the Dotar, the prestigious Society for Dowering Poor Orphans.61 This membership is hereditary, but it also has an interesting bylaw. The oldest son normally inherits the membership, and he may do so even if he is a converso still living in Spain or Portugal as a Catholic, if there is hope that he will eventually escape and join the Jewish community in the West! This rule truly exemplifies the way members of the Nação saw their group. Jewishness was not the salient quality, but rather a converso background with some minimal sense of residual Jewish feeling. Reuben dies and passes his membership along to his middle son, who is living as a Jew in Amsterdam. This son holds the membership for about fifty years then passes it along to his family when he dies. It now turns out, though, that the son of Reuben’s oldest son – the one who went back to Portugal – has been living in Amsterdam as a Jew for the past forty years. He had never known, he claims, about the inheritance rules of the Dotar society, and he now wants to claim that he is the right- ful heir of his grandfather’s membership, since he is the son of Reuben’s oldest son. Sasportas is not dealing here with a clear-cut legal transgression on the part of the Dotar’s founders. They instituted a bylaw which reflected their converso identity as members of the Nação, but there is no sin involved. Sasportas was nevertheless keenly aware of the difference between an ethnic identity being forged by his congregants and the Jewish identity of traditional communities. How does he negotiate this complex issue?

60. 64v-65r; translated into English in Matt Goldish, Jewish Questions: Responsa on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period (Princeton 2008), p. 102-105. 61. On the Dotar see Miriam Bodian, ‘The “Portuguese” Dowry Societies in Venice and Amsterdam: A Case Study in Communal Differentiation within the Marrano Diaspora’, Italia 6 (1987), p. 30-61. Bodian emphasizes how the Amsterdam Dotar expressed the Nação concept by excluding Ashkenazim and Eastern Sephardim from its lottery. HAKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS AND THE FORMER CONVERSOS 169

He blasts Reuben’s oldest son who returned to Portugal as an evildoer and absolute apostate. The middle son’s family should absolutely keep its hold on the Dotar membership. He has nothing but praise for the founders of the Dotar, but he brilliantly reframes their intentions in what may have been a delicate hint to their heirs about what it means to be a Jew. Everything done by those earlier officers was carried out properly and legally; it is obvious that they consulted the hakhamim of that time, who agreed with them… Hope for [Reuben’s oldest son] is lost, since he came here and then returned to his error. What help can it be to him to say that he ‘recognizes his Creator’ and ‘his heart was with his God’? This virtue gains nothing, even for the one who is [himself] still in his land worshiping false gods for the enjoyment of his physical being…one who came here, then filled his soul with evil and returned to ruination to destroy his soul. His words are meaningless, for words are less to be believed than actions. In addition, [Reuben’s oldest son] already died during the life- time of his father, and with the death of an evildoer all hope is lost. For the entire intention of the framers of that agreement [of the Society] was to entice him to come to the [Jewish] religion in order to gain and enjoy the money. Since he died as a gentile, his rights ceased, as did the inheritance claim of the son he left behind. It was left to the older of the two Jewish sons…62 The messages here are subtle but clear. First, Sasportas seems to imply a limit to the principle that a Jew who sins remains a Jew. The son who returned to Portugal, by deliberately going back to Catholic idolatry, appears to have lost his status as a Jew in the eyes of Sasportas. Second, Sasportas reads an intention into the inheritance rule of the Dotar that was probably not foremost in the eyes of its framers. The rule views a converso in Iberia whose heart is with Judaism as a de facto member of the community who can inherit a membership in the Dotar. Sasportas suggests that their intention was in fact to entice conversos in Spain and Portugal to leave in order to gain this benefit, and thus save their souls from idolatry (whether or not they are ‘really’ Jews.) The idea that a converso who is now practicing Catholicism but ‘recognizes his Creator’ or ‘his heart is with God’ means nothing at all. He has thus turned a

62. Sasportas, Ohel Ya’akov, fol. 64v-65r; Goldish, Jewish Questions, p. 105. 170 MATT GOLDISH cherished converso idea, that believing in the Jewish God is almost as good as living a Jewish life, on its head.63 It is not enough to love God and want to leave Portugal – ‘words are less to be believed than actions.’ By imputing this view to the founders of the Dotar society, Sasportas places himself and the community leaders on the same side of the argu- ment while sending a message that the Nação is not the equivalent of a Jewish identity. A third message implicit in Sasportas’s sharp response is his belief, which we saw above, that conversos are motivated mainly by money.

Conclusion

Much of Sasportas’s life was dedicated to dealing with the problems of the former conversos and their communities. He worked, like many other Western rabbis of the seventeenth century, to bring New Christians back into the fold, and battled the heresies – rationalist, mystical and communal – which they often carried in with them. He also combatted their general laxity in observance of the commandments. Sasportas sought to use all the sanctions at his disposal to make the communities of the Western Sephardi Diaspora into normative, traditionally observant and doctrinally orthodox enclaves. He may have been a prickly figure, but we should not imagine that the sharply traditional stances Sasportas took were simply a function of ill temper. He was genuinely shaken at the laxity he observed among the former conversos and did his best to bring them into line with standard Jewish practices. Perhaps Sasportas was not terribly patient but he was also not radically intolerant with what were indeed highly untraditional persons and practices. Sasportas had a sharp eye for root causes and consistently risked his income, career, and repu- tation in order to battle the dissolution of the former conversos at all ranks of society. In this he was far more bold and brave than many of his rabbinic colleagues.

63. See David M. Gitlitz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia 1996), ch. 4. HAKHAM JACOB SASPORTAS AND THE FORMER CONVERSOS 171

Appendix: Western Sephardi Responsa on Business Issues

Business topics are part of Jewish law and are dealt with in the standard Sephardic law code of the early modern era, the Shulhan arukh of Hakham Joseph Karo, sections Hoshen mishpat and Yorah de’ah. Issues concerning business, and especially partnerships and loans, were brought before Eastern Sephardic rabbis with great regularity in this period, and were often recorded in the rabbis’ volumes of questions and answers, called responsa. These topics were especially common in early modern Eastern Sephardic responsa collections because it was a period of rapid development for mercantilism and capitalism. New forms of credit and insurance required a constant barrage of questions to the rabbinic authorities of Istanbul, Salonika, Izmir, Fez, and other Eastern Jewish centers. The literature on the Western Sephardim often points out the fact that their communal rule books contained numerous laws of conduct for the synagogue but almost nothing about the performance of business. Nobody appears to have been banned or excommunicated over business-related transgressions of Jewish law. There is little indication that anyone asked the rabbis about these topics, nor that they would have had the authority to render judgment about them. I thought it would be useful to look in the responsa literature of some Western Sephardi rabbinic authorities to see whether there is anything there to contradict this picture. This examination would prove little in itself but it can be a meaningful part of the larger picture on Western Sephardim and Jewish business law. I examined the responsa of three seventeenth century rabbis active in the Western Sephardi Diaspora to determine whether they responded regularly to questions on the pursuit of business of various kinds: Jacob Sasportas, Samuel Aboab and Moses Zacuto. My method was simply to calculate the number of cases in each work which might deal with business matters from the relevant sections of the Shulhan Arukh dealing with interest and usury (ribit) and related topics; to compare that number with the total number of responsa in the work; then to examine whether the noted responsa actually treat trade situations among conversos, former conversos, or Sefardic Jews. Sasportas’s responsa, Ohel Ya’akov, contains 76 questions (note the confusion in numbering caused by the editor’s haste), of which 23 are from Hoshen mishpat matters, or a hefty 30% of the total, and none are on usury per se. Now, of the 23, 3 (#20, 29 and 30) do not involve Sefardim at all, but were rather decisions for the Ashkenazi rabbinical court in Altona. One (#47) is a matter of hazakah (usu- caption, usufruction or usurpation) on banking and settlement rights in Flor- ence, which means that it was not a trade case and unlikely to have involved former conversos. Two more (#56 and 57) also involve a hazakah on privileges. Though the location is Rotterdam, where former conversos were settled, the topic is not a trade dispute. Two other questions deal with an inheritance dispute in Hamburg, probably not from the Sefardi rabbinical court. I deduce this from the fact that the questioner is clearly identified as the Sefardi rabbi, Hakham 172 MATT GOLDISH

Abendana, but the identity of the actual source of the question has asked to remain nameless. This suggests that it is probably not from the Sephardi court but from that of the Ashkenazim, where the authority of arbiters had specifically been flouted. The rest of the Hoshen mishpat cases are not at all in the realm of potential trade matters. In fact, exactly one question (#58) out of the whole 76 is about a genuine intra-Jewish trade dispute involving former conversos. Samuel Aboab’s Devar Shmuel (Venice, 1702) is a much larger work, containing 377 responsa. Aboab clearly did not have Sasportas’s well-deserved reputa- tion for expertise in dayyanut (matters concerning Hoshen mishpat). 19 of his answers concern Hoshen mishpat cases, and a further 3 treat usury, for a total of slightly less than 6% of the whole. Most of the former group concern divisions of gifts and inheritances, petty claims, and general issues. Not a single one appears to involve actual business litigation between two Jews. Of the usury issues, two treat a single case involving real estate as security on a loan (#267-268). Respon- sum #179 discusses the question of whether Nihyatah (reduction of a debt against a landed security by deducting a stipulated amount every year for usufruct) is considered usury. The index of Devar Shmuel lists a question (#54) on usury in the case of a loan by two Jews to a gentile, but it is not located at that spot in the book itself, and I was unable to locate it. Thus, no single responsum of Aboab deals with trade litigation, whether among former-conversos or any other Jews. Moses Zacuto’s published Responsa (Venice 1761) contain 18 Hoshen mishpat issues, and a further 2 involving laws of usury, making a total of 20 questions, or about 32% of the work, which might concern economic situations. Of the former group, six have nothing to do with business, one (#37) deals with real estate issues where arbitration has again failed, and nine are merely approbations to this last mentioned responsum. One question (#13) is not Zacuto’s response at all, but that of Rabbi Isaac Valle, who officiated at Modena (not known as a center of former conversos), on whether the plaintiff’s charge must be made known to the defendant. Following this, #14 is just Zacuto’s approbation to Valle’s decision. The two questions of usury (#35 and #63) are again concerned with real estate issues. The conclusion once more is that this collection contains no responsa on trade litigation. I would like to stress again that this little survey is not intended to prove independently that former conversos did not consult rabbinic law when pursuing their business activities. In conjunction with other available evidence, however, the responsa provide another confirmatory stratum that this was indeed the case. Responsa compilations of Sephardi legal authorities in previous generations and other places almost always contained significant numbers of questions involving trade disputes, insurance, agency, and so on. The lack of such issues in three collections by rabbis serving congregations of former conversos, most of whom dedicated the majority of their waking hours to trade, suggest a high level of dichotomization between business and Jewish observance in the converso consciousness.