From Portugal to Here

Sermon Parshat Pinchas 5783

As many of you know, I’ve just returned from a visit to Portugal, a country that was new to me.  At last count, I’ve traveled to some 50 different countries over the years, a small number compared to some people but still, that’s a lot of places.  But until now I’ve never been to Portugal before. A close friend got married last weekend on the island of Madeira, in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast, and since it was necessary to fly to Lisbon to get to Madeira it provided a good excuse to explore an interesting new country.

While it may have been new to me, Portugal is not a new country for my family, or at least not for some of my long-ago ancestors.  You see, one branch of my dad’s side of the family lived in Portugal, and probably Spain before that.  Their name was del Banco.  In the year 1496, under pressure from the King and Queen of Spain, who had expelled all Spanish Jews in 1492, King Manuel I expelled all Jews from Portugal.  The new law of 1496 required all Jews either to convert to Christianity or leave the country, and so my ancestors the del Bancos emigrated from Lisbon, going first to the Italian peninsula.  They later moved from there to the Rhineland area of Germany where they married into a German Jewish family, the Reinharts.  Both the Reinharts and the del Bancos eventually immigrated to America in the 1840s, the Reinharts settling first in Portland, Oregon, and later mostly moving to Cincinnati, Ohio, while the del Bancos went first to Ohio.  Three del Bancos, my distant cousins, served in the Union Army during the Civil War; one of them, one of the first Jewish chaplains permitted in the US military, died when the steamship he was on was torpedoed returning from occupied Vicksburg, where he had led High Holy Day services in 1864.  And then, like so many other immigrant Jewish families, our family spread out all over the United States.

All of that personal history means that when I explored Portugal it was in fact returning to a country in which some of my ancestors lived over 500 years ago. Admittedly, I am probably only about 1/64th Sephardic Jew—the Portugese Jews were Sephardim of course—but that small part of me originated in Portugal.  So while it was not exactly a homecoming as such, it was interesting to see just how it felt to wander around Lisbon and Porto that corner of the Iberian Peninsula.

You know, I once did one of those commercial genetic DNA tests that are supposed to tell you your biological origins, where your ancestors came from in great detail.  It was the kind of test that tells you that you are 43% Irish, 12% Scottish, 28% from Ghana, 4% Neanderthal and so on.  I was hoping for some detailed conclusions about exactly where my people came from originally.  But when my DNA test came back it gave only the conclusion that I am “100% European Jewish.”  Great.  As if that was something we didn’t already know... 

Still, it was interesting to see just where some of my antecedents lived over five centuries ago, before again becoming wandering Jews.

In any event, Portugal in 2023 is a lovely country, and Lisbon a particularly attractive and enjoyable city.  They tell you often that it is the second oldest European capital city, after only Athens, and was founded centuries before Rome.  Portugal has been Phoenician, Carthaginian, Roman, Goth, Muslim, and Catholic, controlled by dukes, emperors, caliphs, kings, dictators, and presidents. 

While there were likely Jews present in the urban landscape occupied today by Lisbon, and elsewhere in what later became Portugal, the most significant Jewish community in Portugal’s history arrived with, or shortly after the Muslim conquest of el-Andalus in the Middle Ages.  From the 8th century until the Christian Reconquista forced out the last Muslims in the late 15th century Jews mostly flourished in the area of Portugal.  In particular, during the great age of Portugese exploration that resulted in the first global colonial empire, Jews were actively engaged in the commerce that made Portugal incredibly successful and wealthy, particularly the spice trade with Africa, India and the Far East.  Jews were active in the textile industry of the day—we might call it the shmattah business—and helped finance and insure the voyages of the great Portugese navigators and explorers, who sailed with commerce on their minds.

Initially, King Manuel, an effective and enlightened monarch for his day, tried to shield the Jews of Portugal from the forced conversions and expulsions his Spanish big brother neighbors were brutally enforcing on their own Jews.  In fact, in 1495 he liberalized many of the laws the restricted and limited Jewish participation in society.  But then he wanted to marry a Castilian princess and cement an alliance with Spain—and part of the price of the arrangement was that he had to expel or convert all of Portugal’s Jews.  He had no desire to lose the productive, literate, and loyal Jewish community that formed perhaps 20% of his population.  And so, in a blanket move, he decreed that all Jews in Portugal were officially converted to Catholicism, whether they liked it or not.  Many Jews went along with this superficial conversion.  Others could not stomach the hypocrisy, and left for other lands: the Ottoman Empire, Italy, even the New World.

But while my distant ancestors fled conversion in 1496, many Jews remained behind and publicly pretended to be Catholics while practicing their Judaism in secret.  The Inquisition sought to expose, torture, and execute these “New Christians,” but the persecution was not universally successful.  That meant that even more brutal methods were tried.  In April 1506, during a period of drought and famine and following a horrifying anti-Jewish sermon on a Sunday in the Church of Sao Domingos, someone said they had seen a miraculous light shining from a statue of Jesus.  The crowd began to agitate against the New Christians, a few were caught and horribly killed, and then mobs began to search for, locate, torture and murder New Christians, who were widely suspected of being secret Jews.  No doubt many were. 

In the end, thousands of New Christians were murdered. 

King Manuel was furious at the breakdown in public order, perhaps more so than the destruction of the New Christians and secret Jews.  He enforced extreme punishment on the rioters, closed the church for a while, and executed the Dominican friars who had encouraged the massacre.

But the damage was done, and many more New Christians—conversos, Marranos, choose your term—fled Portugal.  Essentially, within a decade or two, the great Jewish community of Portugal was gone, reinvented in places like Amsterdam, Curacao, Recife, and North America, where Portugese Sephardic synagogues flourished, and some still remain.

Today there is a monument outside that church in Lisbon, Sao Domingos, remembering the great sin of the Massacre of Lisbon.  Locals say that the later disasters that afflicted that church—its collapse during Sunday services in the great earthquake of 1755, killing most of its worshippers, a terrible fire again on a Sunday in 1959—were punishment for the Massacre of Lisbon.

You can still see signs of Jewish life in the past in Lisbon—a Rua Judiaria, a Jew street next to what used to be the major synagogue of the Jewish Quarter which was taken over and turned into another Catholic Church after 1496. 

There are remarkable stories about prominent Portugese Jews who managed their way around the persecutions of the Inquisition and expulsions, including the exceptional Dona Gracia Mendes in the 1500s.  A wealthy New Christian widow protected many Jews from persecution and lived regally, but peripatetically in Lisbon, Antwerp, Venice, Ferrara and finally Constantinople, always a step ahead of the Inquisition.   Truly a wandering Jew.  And the success of the Portugese age of exploration, the so-called Golden Age of a small country on the farthest western edge of the European continent conquering an enormous empire and becoming fabulously wealthy doing so, was do in no small part to its energetic and supremely competent Jewish minority.

But those intriguing signs of Jewish influence from a distant past, while evocative, do not testify to a vibrant Jewish life today.  Yes, there are many Jewish expats living in Portugal now, and enjoying it.  I met some from England and Israel and America.  But this is not a recapturing of the great Sephardic heritage of the past, nor is it an affirmation of a vital Jewish community there today.  Rather, it is a small taste of what was once a great part of the Jewish world.

The truth is that the Jewish communities that matter today are those that offer warm congregations of Jewish prayer and learning, where children are educated and reach maturity, where new and exciting learning and growth are taking place right now.  You can travel around the world and find fascinating and wonderful aspects of Jewish life nearly anywhere.  But what you discover, over time and distance, is that the most compelling Jewish stories are being written now, in the ways in which we build our own communities of prayer, study, social justice and practice.

Just so our portion of Pinchas reminds us to observe our Shabbatot and holidays with meaning and beauty, in the places where we are not persecuted, and where we have the freedom to be Jews openly and with devotion today.

May we always remember to do so.