By Fire, By Water by Mitchell James Kaplan
He asked himself whether he was supposed to feel no responsibility for the child Judith carried; whether this world of impermanence, where the condition of an entire people could be reversed in a moment, was all there was; how he could return to the court of Zaragoza, and life as it had been, after all he had endured.
The ship of exiles vanished into the rain. Sea and sky merged into a solid sheet of gray. The gray darkened. Long after all the ships had sailed away, he remained standing on the shore, watching, steeling himself for his return.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A WEEK AFTER JUDITH’S DEPARTURE, the chancellor met Cristóbal Colón at the gates of the Alhambra. His intent was to support the mariner’s project of exploration, but he secretly feared he no longer possessed the influence necessary to bring about a royal assent.
“Look,” burbled Colón, peering out over the city. “The rains, they’re ceasing. The clouds, they’re clearing. This day could not be more auspicious, Señor de Santángel. At long last, we’re about to witness the fulfillment of my destiny.”
“Perhaps,” said the chancellor. “But the king and queen don’t care about your destiny. What they care about is Christianizing millions of pagan souls. This will justify the massive theft they’ll authorize you to undertake on their behalf.”
Colón smiled. The courtier’s bitterness amused and saddened him.
The two waited more than an hour before meeting with the queen and Hernando de Talavera. The king was attending to other business, visibly keeping his distance from his chancellor.
Cristóbal Colón knelt before Queen Ysabel. He reminded her of her promise to reconsider his project following the conclusion of the war against Granada. She turned to the recently installed archbishop of Granada. “Father Talavera, have you had the opportunity to study Señor Colón’s proposal?”
“We have, Your Highness. And we have conferred with several of the greatest minds known to us—Diego de Deza, Rodrigo Maldonado, and others.”
Both Santángel and Colón knew of these men. They were luminaries of the ecclesiastical and political world the archbishop inhabited, but not the intellectual equals of the greatest living astronomers and cartographers, Abraham Zacuto, Joseph Vizinho, and Paolo Toscanelli—with all of whom Colón had consulted.
“We commend Señor Colón,” continued Talavera, “on his diligent work, assembling bits and pieces from sources as diverse as the pseudo-prophet Esdras, the itinerant merchant Marco Polo, whose writings have largely been discredited, and even certain ancient philosophers. What an exhaustive undertaking this must have been for a self-taught sailor.”
Luis de Santángel glanced at Colón. The Genoese refused to show any reaction. He was watching the monk’s lips, absorbing his every syllable as attentively as a bloodhound stalking its prey.
“However,” the archbishop continued, “all of us, without exception, have found Señor Colón’s calculations to be wanting in several respects, the most egregious of which concern his estimation of the circumference of our terrestrial globe. In this matter, we have inherited figures from Eratosthenes, Posidonius, and the Arab El-Ma’mun, who agree on a number several times larger than the one put forth in Señor Colón’s proposal.”
Colón could no longer contain himself. “Father, if I may, Posidonius, according to Strabo, estimates 180,000 stadia—70,000 to the east, in the form of land, and 70,000 to the west, mostly water. Such a distance, it would certainly be navigable.”
Queen Ysabel held up her hand. “Please, señor, allow the archbishop to finish.”
For the first time, Talavera turned to face the captain. “Strabo, Señor Colón, is wrong. And by the way, 70,000 plus 70,000 do not add up to 180,000.”
Colón looked down, pursing his lips.
“But these are mere details.” Talavera turned back to the queen. “There is also the matter of Señor Colón’s compensation. He wishes to be named Admiral of the Ocean Sea and viceroy of all the islands and mainlands he might discover, titles that would make him and his heirs members of the noble class. He wishes to retain one-tenth of all wealth produced in any such lands—again, for him and his heirs, through all future generations. He makes other requests as well that we deem excessive, to say the least.”
The duke of Medina-Celi had encouraged Colón to demand these emoluments. “The more outrageous your request,” he had insisted, “the more seriously they’ll take you.” Now, in the light of Talavera’s withering critique, Colón wished he could forfeit them.
The queen looked at Talavera for another moment, as if digesting the full weight of his devastating judgment. She was about to turn to Colón, but he spoke first. Behind her shoulder, through a wide entranceway framed by ornate columns, what he saw took his breath away.
“Your Highness, my lady, please.” He pronounced these words in such a mellifluous voice, just the opposite of the tone she expected, that she took notice. Clawing the air, his palm facing upward, he waved her toward him.
“What on earth is the matter, Señor Colón?”
“Come.”
The queen glanced at Talavera, then at Luis de Santángel, and rose from her throne. She allowed the sailor to lead her out of the room, to a vantage point where they could see the city of Granada, wet with rain, shining in the bright sunlight, which streamed through holes between the dark clouds.
“Look.”
As Santángel and Talavera joined them on this portico, the queen’s eyes followed Cristóbal Colón’s fingertips all the way to the horizon. Rising out of the earth, far to the east, stretched the brightest, most color-saturated rainbow any of them had ever seen—climbing to the clouds, then falling toward the land, to the west.
“The struggles of our Mother Church, in Rome,” Colón muttered. “The war against the Jews. The sign of the covenant.”
Of those assembled, only Luis de Santángel understood.
“It is lovely,” Queen Ysabel replied in an equally calm, low voice. Something at once ingenuous and manic in this sailor’s deportment charmed her. “But the most beautiful rainbow in the world wouldn’t prove, as far as we can discern, that the Ocean Sea is smaller than Father Talavera says it is.”
“It is time.” Cristóbal Colón sighed.
Luis de Santángel, no less moved than his Genoese protégé, finally spoke up. He did not know exactly why he spoke up, but he knew it had something to do with the last words Colón had uttered, with paradise, with the fate of the Jews, with the destiny of the world, with the Book he had studied while detained. He felt as if a gaping hole had opened in the walls of his office in the royal palace of Zaragoza. He could see beyond the immediate interests of the king and the queen, beyond even his own life. He appreciated the zealous fantasies of a Colón or an Isaiah. The only hope, if there was any hope at all, lay beyond the known world. Its roots stretched deep into the soil of an ancient faith.
“Your Highness,” he began, still looking toward the horizon. “All this talk of distances and titles is academic.”
The queen turned to him, puzzled. “What on earth are you trying to say, Señor Santángel?”
“Someone will go there, Your Highness.”
“Are we deliberately being obscure?”
He continued looking out over the darkening landscape. “If I were to underwrite Señor Colón’s voyage, with all the benefits accruing to the Crowns, would you then consider supporting such an expedition?”
The queen’s voice betrayed her astonishment. “If you were, in effect, to pay for it, while offering us all profits?”
The chancellor turned to her. “Yes, my lady.”
The queen looked at him. This man could not be the ambitious, skeptical, cautious courtier she had known. He had changed. “Why would any man of sound mind contemplate doing such a thing?”
Santángel turned back to the landscape. The rainbow had vanished. So had the rain. The sun was declining. Dusk was falling on Iberia. On the horizon, far to the west, the land shone in hues of gold-streaked oc
“Because it is time, Your Highness,” muttered the chancellor of Aragon. “Because it must be.”
EPILOGUE
The Scattering
I. The Ocean Sea
TWO MONTHS AFTER the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María set forth from the port of Palos, two merciless months into a farfetched maritime adventure he had never envisioned, Judith’s nephew Levi Migdal trudged up to the Santa María’s main deck to fill his eyes with the endless, dark waters, to ask questions of God, to seek solace in the vastness of the world beyond himself, his people, his time, his home. The moon shone brighter and colder than any fire, casting a tapering ray of light over the sea, a ribbon of hope floating upon an immeasurable pool of sadness. A weak, salt-infused breeze wafted over the still waters. The ship creaked with a soft lament. Although the Niña and the Pinta stood upright less than a mile behind, they looked as desolate and spindly as skeletons.
What was the likelihood that, beyond the ever-receding horizon, they would discover the Indias, the Garden of Eden, or Jerusalem? No community of scholars had supported Colón’s proposition. No one had ever sailed west to the Indias and come back to tell of it.
Levi felt as if he were standing before, or even within, the murky chasm of death itself. As King Solomon had written long before, “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?” Like the land to the west, if such a place existed, no one had ever returned from Sheol to report of it. All that was said about the boundary of life and what came after, all that the world’s theologians had been trying to prove for centuries, was nothing but futility and a striving after wind.
The Ocean Sea: an immeasurable pool of despair, a reservoir of memories, against which Levi had to struggle every moment in order not to drown. The empty houses of Granada’s Jewish quarter, which had once been his world, staring at him like the abandoned corpses of relatives and friends. His aunt’s face stained with tears as she held him before leaving for the port, and Fez, with Isaac.
Looking out over the endless expanse of water, reflecting on all the change and death he had witnessed, Levi thought of a Hebrew piyyut, a meditation on destiny and death, recited on the most holy days of the year, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.
Who shall live and who shall die
Who at the measure of days and who before
Who by fire and who by water
Who by the sword and who by wild beasts
Who shall have rest and who shall go wandering
Who shall be brought low and who shall be raised high.
As these words flowed through Levi’s memory, he heard the clack of a boot against the deck boards and turned to see the ship’s captain, Cristóbal Colón, standing at the bow, lean and tall, with shoulder-length gray hair and a striking, bulbous nose, looking older than his forty-two years.
Although Levi was a young man and the only hand on this ship who possessed no seafaring skills, Colón treated him with respect, even admiration. Levi was a friend of the chancellor. He also reminded Colón, in some ways, of himself. Like Levi, Colón had once left behind the familiar world of his childhood for a larger world, for the unknown. Like Levi, Colón spoke several languages and had changed his name to match changed circumstances. Like Levi, he possessed a hard-to-place accent and an even harder-to-place identity. Levi kept his faith hidden from the sailors, but alone with the Genoese captain, he translated Hebrew and Aramaic texts with unmistakable reverence.
The captain approached. “Luis de Torres.” He used the Christianized form of Levi’s name. The Santa María was considered Castilian soil; no overt Jews were permitted on board. “Tell me frankly, are you one of those who say we’ll never get there, or are you with me?”
Levi looked into his eyes, reflecting the moonlight. “Didn’t you predict we’d reach land weeks ago, Captain?”
“So you are with them,” sighed the captain.
“I’m no soothsayer. Will we find India? Will we die at sea? I have no idea.”
Colón nodded and resumed looking over the moony waters.
“And you,” asked Levi. “How can you be so sure about things no one has seen?”
“I never claimed I was,” Colón admitted in a tone he usually reserved for confession.
Confused, Levi looked at him, but the Genoese continued staring out over the waters. “In my deepest heart,” he continued, “I always harbored doubts. So much so, that the outright rejection of my ideas by nearly everyone, it never surprised me.”
“In that case,” Levi wondered aloud, “why did you persevere? Why did you insist on meeting the queen? Why, after she rejected your ideas, did you insist on trying again?”
“Because,” reflected Colón, “I couldn’t tolerate life without this enterprise, this hope, this ambition. Working, eating, sleeping, and then repeating the cycle, with nothing awaiting you at the end but death …” He shook his head.
Levi wondered whether the captain was not already making excuses for his impending failure. “It wasn’t about finding the Indias?”
“It was never just that.”
They both stood silently, looking over the waters, wondering what was to become of them.
II. Fez
AFTER STRUGGLING for so many years to provide for a boy not her son and an old man not her father, after sailing to a city she had not chosen, after marrying a man she had not loved, Judith Azoulay found a serene simplicity in the new life thrust upon her by destiny.
She never received word from Levi, nor did she manage to contact Cristóbal Colón to ask for news, but like almost everyone, she learned about the discovery of vast new realms in the west. She heard that Colón left a colony of sailors there. Every night she prayed that wherever Levi was, he was safe.
The fruit of her union with Luis de Santángel, known to all as her child with Isaac Azoulay, was a fine-featured boy with the pale skin, dark hair, and elegant charisma of his Aragonese father. She named him Zion.
In the capital city of Fez, Isaac Azoulay achieved a level of respect that surpassed even his previous reputation in Granada. The sultan, who knew of him through the former vizier of Granada, allotted Azoulay and his family a comfortable residence in the center of town.
Over time, Judith came to love Isaac Azoulay not only for his erudition and wisdom, but also for his gentleness and patience. He never hinted that Zion was not his own son. From the moment he delivered the child, even before he realized he could not father a child of his own, he loved and thanked God for the boy. Nor did he ask who that gentleman was whom he had seen bidding Judith farewell at the harbor.
III. Zaragoza
LITTLE BY LITTLE, Luis de Santángel repopulated his home and office with servants and subordinates. He never came to enjoy, with them, the bond of trust and courage he had developed with Felipe de Almazón. Only with Iancu did he retain a sense of shared tragedy and bitter survival.
He would never again set eyes upon Judith Migdal or hear her voice. He would never meet their child. He did not even know whether they had survived the voyage across the Middle Sea.
Nor would he ever again set foot in a synagogue. Indeed, there were no longer any synagogues in Castile or Aragon. All the synagogues were reconsecrated as churches. Ysabel and Fernando took to boasting that they had “unified” almost all of the Iberian peninsula. At what cost? Santángel asked himself.
Unification meant all of Spain was to speak one language and pray to one God. It meant Luis de Santángel would not be buried with his grandparents, and their parents, and the parents before them. It meant that one day, the great-great grandchildren of conversos would harbor no doubts about the purity of their identities, their beliefs, their blood. Unification meant no doubt, no dissent, no debate. It meant forgetting. It meant obliteration.
It also meant that the class of people who posed questions—scholars, astronomers, cartographers, secret agnostics—would not return. The advance of knowledge, especially of knowledge antithetic
Santángel inquired about the conditions surrounding the Jews’ exile. He received terrifying reports of pirate attacks, starvation, Jews sold into slavery, foreign ports refusing entry to ragged boats packed with exiles. He heard stories of wealthy Jews reduced to the condition of beggars. Some realms, however—especially, but not only, in the Islamic world—had welcomed the Jews with open arms.
When Cristóbal Colón returned to European soil after discovering vast realms, he wrote first to the chancellor of Aragon. As the immense success of the voyage resonated through Spain, copies of his letter were printed throughout Christendom, bringing fame to both the sender and the recipient:
Chancellor:
Believing you will take pleasure in hearing of the great success that our Lord has granted me in my voyage, I write you this letter. Thirty-three days beyond the Canary Islands I reached the Indies and found very many islands thickly peopled, of all of which I took possession without resistance for their Highnesses. The lands are high, and there are many lofty mountains covered with trees of a thousand kinds, of such great height that they seemed to reach the skies. Some were in bloom, others bearing fruit. The nightingale was singing. There was one large town of which I took possession, situated in a locality well adapted for the working of gold mines and for all kinds of commerce. To that city I gave the name of Villa de la Navidad, The City of the Birth, and I fortified it with a fortress, which by now is surely completed. I have established the greatest friendship with the king of that country, so much so that he took pride in calling me his brother, and treating me as such. Our Redeemer has granted this victory to our illustrious king and queen and their kingdoms, who will acquire great fame by an event of such high importance, in which all Christendom ought to rejoice. Done on board the caravel, off the Canary Islands, on the fifteenth of February, fourteen hundred and ninety-three.