Next Year in Jerusalem: A Call for the Marranos to Come Home

Introduction

When I briefly studied the subject of the Inquisition in school, it was to me a very distant subject, like ancient and irrelevant history. And that’s how we, most of the Israeli public, feel about the Marranos of Spain and Portugal.

Many years ago, I participated in a tour of Portugal, a tour of the Marranos, that opened up my eyes to the pain and suffering of the Portuguese Jews. And by the way, it's not over yet!

Imagine that you live in a world where you must not be Jewish. A world in which it's forbidden to celebrate Passover, to be circumcised, or to eat kosher. A world without synagogues, Shabbat, or the Hebrew language. A world in which you believe that you are the last remaining Jews on Earth.

The Lives of the Portuguese Jews

This is exactly how Portuguese Jews lived from the 16th century to the 20th century! They kept the tradition of the elders for about 400 years. Only a hundred years ago did a Jew from Poland discover them, and he went and told others that they could stop dressing up as Christians.

This was the way of life of the Jews. At home they observed a few Jewish customs, a few unique prayers, and outside of the home they disguised themselves as Christians, for fear of the Inquisition.

The expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal was a traumatic event in the lives of the Jewish people. We can see its impact to this day. Many of the deportees from Spain emigrated to Portugal.

At the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the population of Portugal numbered about one million inhabitants, about 30,000 of whom were Jews. After the expulsion, the Jewish community in Portugal grew to about 10% of the Portuguese population.

A few years after they were absorbed in Portugal, the situation of the Jews in Portugal worsened following the marriage of King Manuel I of Spain to Isabel, the daughter of the king and queen of Spain. The marriage between the king and queen was conditional upon the expulsion of all the Jews from Portugal, and the King of Portugal had fulfilled the condition, and issued an order for the expulsion of the Jews of his kingdom that year.

Despite the deportation order, the King of Portugal understood the value of the Jews and desired their abilities, connections, and money. And he did his best to ensure that the Jews did not leave Portugal.

Instead of deportation, he tried to force them to be baptised into Christianity. The Jews were invited to the city centers, while being promised that ships were waiting for them in the ports to take them out of Portugal, but instead they were forcibly baptized there.

They were sprayed with drops of water, and then the Jews of Portugal were recognized by the state as Christians. The forced baptisms caused a formality that essentially said that there were no Jews left in Portugal, all of them were assimilated into the Christian population and were legally bound by all Christian obligations.

And therefore many of the Jews disguised themselves as “New Christians” and lived as Marranos, or Crypto-Jews (Jews in secret). They observed the customs, celebrated Christmas, baptized their children, and dressed as good Catholics, although within themselves they maintained their affinity for the Jewish faith.

It was the woman of the house who secretly passed on the Jewish tradition to the children and the next generations. She kept the laws and customs passed down to her orally by her mother and grandmother before her.

The Jewish Museum in Belmonte

In 2005, the Jewish Museum opened in Belmonte. In the museum, you can find items and paintings from the life of Marranos in the town, for example, a secret installation made up of a pair of tiles on which matzos were baked, pocket mezuzahs, and other objects from Jewish tradition.

When you walk through the alleys of Belmonte, Trancoso, and Castelo de Vide, as you pass between the little houses and the tiny shops, a thought comes to mind: Is it possible that Jews once lived here?

Here and there one of the door frames is visible, and on the upper right you notice a niche for a mezuzah that no longer exists. Instead of mezuzahs, the Marranos carved crosses to mark the “new religion,” so that the Inquisition would move on to its next target.

The Inquisition stood against the continuation of the Jewish tradition that the Marranos maintained. Under the direction of the Church in Portugal, it was active between 1536 and 1821. The Inquisition functioned as judge, jury, and executioner.

The main target of the Inquisition was the “New Christians”, who were perceived as a dangerous group that undermined the foundations of the Catholic church, and corrupted the loyalty of the faithful. Those suspected of not being good Christians were immediately interrogated, tortured, and of course their “sinful souls” were “purged,” so the Jews were forced to adopt a way of life in which they tried to deceive the inquisitors who ambushed and visited their homes.

For example, they baked matzos in the basement of the house on the third day of Passover, and not before Passover, they gathered for Yom Kippur service under the guise of playing cards, and they lit Shabbat candles in a cupboard or a small tub, or they lit one candle in front of a mirror. However, it was difficult to hold the reins for years, and many of those interrogated admitted, under torture, that the traditions were being kept in secret.

It is estimated that the number of victims of the Inquisition during its 300 years of rule in Portugal exceeded 40,000, of whom 1,175 were burnt alive at the stake.

After generations of life as Marranos, when there are no holy books, or a rabbi who guides and teaches, in a world where there is no Judaism, over time, tradition was forgotten. With the end of the Inquisition, on May 31, 1821, the Christian customs and ways of life almost completely took root in the Crypto-Jews.

The Discovery of the Portuguese Jews

There was a Jew who discovered Portuguese Jewry. This was Samuel Schwartz (1880-1953), a Polish-Jewish mining engineer who came with a delegation of engineers to Belmonte for work, and by chance discovered the town's Jews. A Christian merchant who wanted to provide food for the delegation warned Schwarz and his friends not to go to his rival, Balthazar Pereira de Sosa, “because he is a Jew.”

Until then, it was not known in the world that a remnant of Portuguese Jewry remained. But Schwartz was intrigued and decided to locate those Jews hidden in Belmonte. He asked, inquired, and found the community of some 200 families, but they refused to admit their Jewishness.

With time, Schwartz acquired the trust of some of these Marranos and began to collect information. Finally, the elder woman of the community was brought and said that if he was a Jew, he was to quote a Jewish prayer or blessing. When Schwartz began to say Shema Yisrael and reached the word “Adonai”, the old woman recognized the word, since it was one of the few words preserved in the community. She said to those around him, “He said ‘Adonai’, he is one of us.”

Later (1925) Schwartz wrote his book “New Christians in Portugal in the 20th century,” in which he recounted the story of the existence of the lost Jews of Portugal, and in doing so exposed their history to public consciousness. But the Jews of Portugal continued to live in secret and emerged from the religious closet only in 1970. However, to this day fear is deeply rooted in the DNA of the descendants of the Marranos.  

These Marranos, who lived through such a difficult period of the Jewish people, who kept the tradition of our ancestors in secret, they actually kept the Jewish spark throughout history. A spark which refuses to fade.  

And here we are now, we live in a very special period in history, the time in which God re-established the State of Israel and brought the people of Israel back home from the four corners of the earth. Now is the time, now is the opportunity to bring our brothers home. Perhaps the greatest expectation among every Jew is the desire to return home, to the land of his forefathers, to the Land of Israel.  

Returning Home

Every Passover, which is the holiday of freedom, and every Yom Kippur, which is the most solemn day in Judaism, we end by saying “next year in Jerusalem.” This saying is to show that every Jew wants to immigrate to Israel, and to go up to Jerusalem, and if he still has not made it, he hopes to reach it in the next year.

And as for myself, someone who lives in Jerusalem? As the son of a father who was also born in Jerusalem? This saying requires me to find and encourage my brothers who have not tasted Israel, the Land of Promise, and allow them to go up.

These Marranos and B’nei Anusim, have for 400 years lived in fear, behind a mask, and after many years, this mask has become part of their face. Our duty is to find these people, and to show them that you can live without the mask. To bring these lost people back home. This has always been the hope. This is the right and just thing to do.  

We can and we need to fix this terrible wrong done to our brothers, we need to find them, under all their masks, and lead them home.