The history of Jews in the 16th century begins with their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the victories of the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean world and ends after the publication of one of the great works of Jewish law: the Shulhan Arukh (1571).
Most of the world’s Jews still lived in the Middle East in the 16th century, where the Muslim Turks allowed them to maintain communities in relative safety and freedom. In Christian countries the medieval Crusades, a series of blood libels over several centuries, pogroms, and increasing ecclesiastical and secular legal restrictions contributed to the deteriorating social and economic status of the Jews. Throughout Europe Jewish numbers decreased, and intellectual life declined. The famous scholarly disputations among Christian and Jewish leaders of the 13th and 14th centuries no longer occurred; many Christian theologians and high-ranking clerics became convinced that Jews, like heretics and other infidels, were better restricted and controlled than engaged in argument. The INQUISITION, the holy office endowed with the power to search out and prosecute unbelievers, was an international police force at the disposal of any princeling who wished to harass Jews in his territory. Although the popes in Rome repeatedly issued decrees banning Christians’ unproven accusations against their Jewish neighbors (e. g., Martin V in 1418), local kings and lords did not always follow the letter of the Christian law. The constitution of the German empire granted electors (princes and bishops) the ability to maintain and tax Jewish communities in their lands in a decree called the “Golden Bull” (1356). Jews had been gradually limited to few professions in Christendom, primarily in finance and rag-collecting. Rulers in Germany and elsewhere protected their Jewish citizens when it suited them but constantly remitted the debts of Christian businessmen and businesswomen to Jewish lenders and even occasionally encouraged mob attacks on Jewish communities in order to discharge their own debts or to pacify political factions threatening their rule. Extraordinary events, such as plagues, famines, wars, or the Jubilee declared by the pope in 1450 aggravated the already tense coexistence of groups of Jews within larger Christian towns. In addition, the recent gathering of Christian leaders at the Council of Basel (1421-43) had repeated anti-Jewish measures of previous church councils and had ordered further restrictions, such as that Jews be kept out of universities and that baptized Jews be prevented from marrying among themselves to prevent “apostasy” to Judaism.
The Iberian Peninsula had long provided a haven for Sephardic Jews. But as the RECONQUISTA of territory from the Muslims (see Islam) by the Christian kings of such kingdoms as Aragon and Castile advanced during the 15th century, the great flourishing of Jewish theology, literature, politics, and fortunes waned. As elsewhere, some Jews in Spanish kingdoms submitted to Christian proselytizing and became what Christians called mara-nos. Although new Christians intermarried with old Christian families and integrated more fully into the civic life of the Spanish towns of Barcelona, Toledo, Seville, and Cordoya, political strife often implicated maranos, rightly or wrongly. In Castile, when townsfolk refused to pay taxes to supply a defending army in the 1440s, churchmen summoned a mob by ringing bells; the mob burned down marano houses. Jews in Segovia died at the stake or on the gallows after a blood libel in 1471. Legal decrees followed this kind of occurrence in many cities of the Iberian Peninsula, forbidding marano participation in city or ecclesiastical government, partially in order to prevent further reactive violence. Other laws forbade Christian and Jewish marriage or prevented Jews from having Christian servants. By the time Queen Isabella took the throne of Castile (1474) and her husband, Ferdinand, became king of Aragon (1479), uniting the kingdoms of Spain, both rulers were ready to deal decisively with Jews and former Jews. The Dominican monk Torquemada, Isabella’s confessor, headed the Inquisition for the queen in 1481 (he was inquisitor general in Spain from 1485) and held his first AUTO DA FE in the following year. By November 1481, 300 maranos had died at the stake for returning to Judaism while almost 100 more languished in
This painting, entitled The Fountain of Grace and the Triumph of the Church over the Synagogue, by Jan van Eyck (1430), displays the Catholic Church as triumphant over the Jews, owing to their unwillingness to recognize Jesus Christ as the son of God. (Museo Nacional del Prado)
Prison for life. Although many Christians, especially those married into marano families, sympathized with Jews, the Inquisition urged all Christians to watch for the signs of Judaizers: those new Christians, or conversos, who used clean linens on Friday nights for the Sabbath, refused to light fires on Saturday, or bought all their food from Jews. Finally, in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella decreed that all Jews (including maranos suspected of Judaism) were to leave their kingdoms at penalty of baptism or death. Families that had lived in Spain for centuries were to pack their belongings—except all their money—and leave. “In the same month in which their Majesties issued the edict that all Jews should be driven out of the kingdom and its territories, in the same month they gave me the order to undertake with sufficient men my expedition of discovery to the Indies,” wrote Christopher Columbus.
Although Jewish money helped finance the explorer’s expedition and some Spaniards of Jewish descent went with him to the New World, most Jews left Spain and Portugal (1496) for other parts of Europe, especially Navarre, the Lowlands, and Italy. They were followed by a migration of maranos in the 1550s and 1560s. Although Jews landing in Genoa were required to convert to Christianity and expulsions of Jewish communities occurred sporadically throughout the early 16th century, some Italian cities accepted immigrants more or less willingly. In Italy, birthplace of the Renaissance, Hebrew learning still flourished, and even Christian scholars had begun to study the language and its literature. The first printed Hebrew appeared in Venice before 1500, although the first gated Jewish ghetto was also introduced there in 1516. (The word ghetto probably comes from the Venetian getar, “to smelt,” because the 700 or so Jews of Venice lived where iron foundries had once stood.) Soon presses existed in Reggio di Calabria, Naples, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Rome, and wherever else humanism flowered. Jews and Christians could buy copies of the Torah, midrash, Mishnah, and parts of the Talmud as well as prayer books, dictionaries, and philosophy. The first complete edition of both Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud appeared in Venice, printed by Daniel Bomber, known as Aldo Manuzio (1449-1515), the first Italian printer. Together with interested Christians such as Pico della Mirandola, Jews of the Italian Renaissance pursued the study of kabbalah. Although the discrimination of the later 16th century brought Venetians to burn the Talmud in 1553, and Hebrew works were banned for 13 years, Jewish publishing revived in Venice and continued until the 1800s.
Jewish communities throughout Italy gained immigrants from persecuted communities in Germanic territories and Iberia who contributed to both the religious and economic life of their new homes. Dona Gracia Nasi, for instance, born a new Christian in Portugal had been born Beatriz de Luna in 1510; after marrying a wealthy man from the Benveniste family in 1528 and becoming a widow in 1536, Gracia left Portugal with her daughter and her fortune for Antwerp and then the cities of Italy. She supported scholars and rabbis in Italy, paid for the publication of Jewish books, helped other Jews and conversos escape Iberia, and planned a Jewish resettlement in Israel. She ended her days a rich woman in Constantinople. Dona Gracia was both typical of Jewish women in the age of maranos and the Inquisition and extraordinary for her wealth, mobility, political contacts, and support of scholarship. At a time when the open practice of Judaism gained the attention of the Inquisition, especially for “crypto-Jews” who rejected recent baptism for their original faith, maintenance of Judaism at home was crucial for embattled communities. Without rabbis, schools, and texts, women’s rituals at home, especially the keeping of Sabbath and dietary laws, the lifeline through which Judaism passed from one generation to the next in Spain, Portugal, and the Iberian colonies of Mexico and South America. When these women escaped to new lives, as did Gracia Nasi, they carried Judaism with them.
The relatively peaceful interlude of Italian Jews came to end in the mid-16th century, when the Inquisition gained power in Italy. Whereas previous popes had stood fairly firm against the determination of political leaders who wished to expel Jews, Paul IV (1555-59) enacted restrictions on Jews in the papal states and supported Christian rulers elsewhere who wished the Jews harm. Jews could not own land, take up professions, leave the ghettos at night, or go into public without yellow hats or veils. They were taxed, forcibly converted, and forced to watch the Talmud burn. Rome, which had the most ancient Jewish community in Europe, escaped the most severe persecutions only because of the economic interests of the papacy there.
Two developments turned Christian mentalities toward anti-Judaism and antisemitism in the 16th century: the advance of the Turks and the success of the Protestant Reformation. Only the pressing requests of the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman II, brought about the release of the maranos of Ancona in 1558, when papal officials took them prisoner. Beginning in 1453, when they took Constantinople, and continuing with the triumphs of Suleiman I, “the Magnificent” (1520-66), the sultans of the empire invaded northern Africa, Greece, Venice’s islands, and the Balkans. They threatened the very heart of the Habsburg Empire and controlled the Mediterranean. Only after their defeat by combined European forces in the Battle of Lepanto (1571) did they relinquish their gains and withdraw from Europe. However, during the Turkish threat Jewish refugees constantly found their way to Turkish territory, making the Jewish community in Constantinople the largest in Europe, at about 30,000 by 1500; the synagogue there still carries the name of Gracia Nasi. Jews continued to move back and forth between the Ottoman state and the kingdoms of Europe. As a result, Christians in Venice and elsewhere blamed the Jews as agents of the Turks.
It was in Turkey that Joseph Karo spent his childhood after the expulsion from Spain, where his family had once lived. From 1422 to 1542 Karo worked to collect and annotate every legal statement in Talmud. He researched and interpreted the opinions of all the earlier experts, from the rabbis of ancient Palestine to Rashi and beyond. He spent more years revising his work until in 1567 he published the great “Prepared Table” or Shulhan Arukh. Even today this work remains the basis of legal training for orthodox rabbis. The code appealed to both Sephardic and Ashkenazic
Jews at a time when their differences in custom and belief were becoming ever more pronounced, primarily because Karo’s work was annotated and expanded by an Ashkenaz named Rabbi Moses Isserles of Poland (the Rama. ) The Shulkhan Arukh contains four volumes, divided as follows: Orakh Hayyim, dealing with prayer and holidays; Yoreh Deah, laws concerning charity (tzedaka), the study of Torah, dietary, and other laws; Even ha-Ezer regarding marriage and divorce; and Khoshen Mishpat, civil law. The great code immediately went through many editions and, thanks to the effects of printing, spread throughout the Jewish communities of the world.
Although the dispute among Christians that came to be known as the Reformation brought tolerance for the Jews in some Protestant states, such as the Netherlands and England, elsewhere it brought reinvigorated persecutions. By the early 17th century the English reopened their island to Jews as companion devotees of the (Old Testament) Bible, while the Dutch Calvinists became the most hospitable of Christian nations, allowing Jews almost total integration into Dutch society. There in the 17th century, Sephardic Jews built beautiful synagogues in the spare Dutch style, Uriel da Costa and Baruch Spinoza theorized, and Rembrandt painted members of the Jewish community. But in Catholic and Lutheran states the era of Martin Luther brought more trouble for the well-established communities of Jews and their new Iberian immigrants. Luther, who began by embracing Jews as people of the Old Book, began to revile them in the 1540s, when he realized that Jews were not susceptible to his revisions of Christianity and were not likely to convert en masse. “What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?” Luther demanded in print. “Since they live among us, we dare not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of their lying and reviling and blaspheming.” His solutions were multiple: “First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn.
. . . Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed. . . . Third, I advise that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them. . . . Fourth, I advise that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb. . . . Fifth, I advise that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews. For they have no business in the countryside, since they are not lords, officials, tradesmen.
. . . Sixth, I advise that usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and treasure of silver and gold be taken from them. . . . Seventh, I commend putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a distaff, or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and Jewesses and letting them earn their bread in the sweat of their brow.”
Luther provided material for later antisemites, but communities of German Jews survived his accusations and recommendations. At the end of the 16th century, after the religious wars that tore apart the Christian states of the Habsburg Empire, France, and England, Jews were on the move again to the frontiers of eastern Germany, Poland, and Russia. At the beginning of the 16th century 50,000 Jews had lived in Poland and Lithuania; by 1660 the number was 500,000. Jews found that they could engage with freedom in professions denied them in western Europe, once again protected by the local lords of dukedoms and principalities, as in the Middle Ages. Kings and gentry once again competed to borrow from or exploit the Jews at will. Rabbinic Judaism, regulated by Karo’s Sh-ulhan Arukh, flourished in the towns of Lublin, Krakow, Vilna, and in many smaller villages of the region. Synagogues and yeshivas appeared across the towns east of the Danube, and Jewish learning began yet another great revival that would produce scholars such as Solomon Luria and Moses Isserles. With printing and relative freedom, even women had access to books, if not much Hebrew literacy, and could offer up their own Yiddish prayers (tkhines) and exchange them in printed pamphlets: “Send an angel to guard the baking,” prayed one central European woman, “as you blessed the dough of Sarah and Rebecca our mothers.”
Jews in the following decades would also move westward across the Atlantic, following in the wake of Columbus, and settling with other Europeans in marano and Jewish communities in Brazil, Suriname, and throughout the far side of the Atlantic world where they found both new freedoms and old prejudices.
Further reading: Judith R. Baskin, Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); Nicholas De Lange, ed., The Illustrated History of the Jewish People (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997); Benjamin R. Gampel, ed., Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391-1648 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Max Margolis and Alexander Marx, A History of the Jewish People (New York: Atheneum, 1969); Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 3rd ed. (Oxford, U. K.: Clarendon
Press of Oxford University Press, 1964);-, The Jews
In the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
—Lisa M. Bitel
John III (Joao) (1502-1557) king of Portugal
John III was king of Portugal during neighboring Spain’s
“Golden Age,” a period in which his own country was pushing the frontiers of exploration abroad but was foundering at home in a sea of debt.
Born in 1502, son of King Manuel of Portugal and his Spanish queen Maria, John III ascended to the throne in 1521. King Manuel had worked to expand Portugal’s empire, including incursions into Morocco and the construction of forts in East Africa. John opposed many of his father’s expansionist policies, and their relationship must have worsened even further when King Manuel, upon the death of his second wife, married the Spanish princess Leonor, daughter of Charles V, even though Leonor had originally been promised to John. John was eventually married to Leonor’s sister Catarina in 1526, but the negotiation of a second Spanish match came at great expense to the Portuguese.
One of John III’s most important contributions to the history of the Atlantic world was the initiation of large-scale colonization in Brazil. Brazil was important not only as a military base to protect trade between Portugal and Asia but also as a source of trade goods. The profitability of trade in goods like brazilwood, which was used in cloth dyeing, aroused the interest of rival countries like France, who tried to institute their own trade with Brazil. The Portuguese attempted to mount a coast guard, but the crenellated topography of Brazil’s coastline made this unworkable.
Faced with the possible loss of a profitable trade monopoly, John III made the decision to promote colonization, sending Martim Afonso De Sousa and a large group of colonists to establish a settlement at Sao Vicente and a second settlement at Sao Paulo in 1532. To secure the new colonies, John divided Brazil into 15 captaincies, each about 150 miles wide and extending all the way to the line demarcated by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The captaincy system was similar to the classic model of feudalism: Captaincies were distributed as grants of land that could not be sold or given to anyone except an oldest son. The owners could impose taxes, dispense justice, and distribute land within their territories. In exchange they were expected to render military service, holding and defending their territories in the name of the monarch. Unfortunately, although some captaincies were run efficiently and profitably, most became mired in warfare and corruption. Mindful of this situation, John eliminated all but the best-run of the captaincies and instituted a system of governors general and viceroys that would allow more centralized control of the colonies.
Historians have generally regarded John as an incompetent ruler. His nobles were able to wrest power from him, and he spent much of the Crown’s commercial income on luxuries rather than investing in some of the commercial activities that were enriching so many other countries at the time. He adopted a nonconfrontational foreign policy, attempting to buy his way out of problems. One example of the spectacular failure of this policy was his attempt to pay off the organizers of French pirates, who happily took John’s payments while continuing to plunder his shipping interests. Existing Portuguese colonies were the only matter in which he attempted to act more assertively, authorizing Jesuit missions to Portuguese colonies and employing Vasco DA Gama as viceroy in India in an attempt to reassert royal control.
John’s private affairs were nearly as troubled as his public life: Of his nine children, only one, sickly Prince John, survived long enough to marry at age 15. The prince lived only two more years, but his widow was pregnant at the time of his death and gave birth to a son named Sebastiao who was slated to continue the dynasty. King John died a few years later in 1557, leaving his three-year-old grandson as heir and his widow Catarina as regent.
Further reading: James M. Anderson, The History of Portugal (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000); David Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); E. Bradford Burns, A History of Brazil, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
—Marie A. Kelleher
World History
