By aurele tobelem

Every Yom Kippur, there comes an inevitable lull in the prayer services, somewhere between the most extensive Musaf and the most exhausting Minḥa in Jewish liturgy. It is the accepted practice for communities to take a short break from services at this point to engage in Jewish learning or some other appropriate activity. 

This year’s Yom Kippur, which I attended at the Spanish & Portuguese Sephardi community in Maida Vale, was no different. Dressed in white from head to toe, and with unbearable pain in my feet from standing all day, I made the arduous trudge up the stairway to the synagogue’s library, usually frequented on this day by the more elderly members of the community. Scanning the room for a book to read, I fell upon an immense volume that had been placed on the windowsill, presumably by a prior reader. 

I picked it up and examined the title: The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain. Looking at the abstract, I discovered that it was written by none other than Benzion Netanyahu, the father of our very own Benjamin. My Inquisition-era ancestors were forced to flee Toledo and Granada for Morocco in the 1400s; the work certainly piqued my interest. Reading further, I understood that Netanyahu had aimed to challenge traditional narratives of the Spanish Inquisition as either a triumph of the Catholic Reconquista or a heroic struggle of Marranos (Sp. “pigs”, a pejorative used to describe Iberian Jewish compelled converts to Christianity)[1] against antisemitic persecution. History is often far more nuanced than we expect. Sometimes, the evil-doers remain engraved upon its pages, whereas comparatively heroic figures fade into obscurity. In the context of the Inquisition, no individual encapsulates this paradox more than Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi, whose immense contributions to the Jewish world are matched only by her near-total anonymity in modern culture.

On 31 March 1492, the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, an edict which gave the Jews of Spain the option between conversion to Christianity or expulsion. Those who chose the latter were given a measly four months to liquidate all their assets, pack their belongings, and leave the country. By July 1492, the last openly practising Jews in Spain, numbering approximately 150,000 people, had fled to safer shores across the Mediterranean.[2] Many succumbed to the perilous journey. Those who were fortunate enough to survive arrived at their new homes exhausted, weakened, and anguished. The Genoese historian Bartolomeo Senarega, who witnessed Jewish refugees arriving at the transit port of Genoa that year, was astounded at the depths of their despair: 

It was miserable to witness their calamities. Many perished from hunger, especially nursing infants and children. Mothers, half-dead, carried their dying children in their arms, and they themselves perished along with them. Many succumbed to cold, filth, and thirst. The turbulence of the sea and the unfamiliarity of navigation claimed an incredible multitude. I say nothing of how cruelly and greedily they were treated by their transporters; many were drowned due to the avarice of the sailors, and those who could not pay the fare sold their children. […] You would have thought them phantoms: they were emaciated, pale, with sunken eyes, and barely moving - they could have been mistaken for the dead.[3]

Knowing the disastrous fate of their brethren overseas, a large number of conversos chose to remain in the Iberian Peninsula, maintaining a thin veil of Christianity while living a double life as crypto-Jews. The German historian Carl Gebhardt defined the individual who fell within this subculture as ‘a Catholic without belief and a Jew without knowledge, but in will a Jew.’[4] Yet, few historical characters have captured this specific strand of Jewish resistance quite like our protagonist, Doña Gracia Mendes Nasi, known in Hispanised Sephardi circles only as La Señora (Sp. “The Lady”). 

Born in 1510 in Portugal and originally known as Beatriz de Luna, Doña Gracia hailed from a family of Portuguese conversos from the Aragonese Benveniste clan, who had likely changed their family name to stifle accusations of reversion to Jewish identity.[5] Aged eighteen, she married another crypto-Jew and close relative, Francisco Mendes (born Semah Benveniste), a man of unimaginable wealth who had leveraged Iberian seafaring and imperial enterprise to earn a reputation as the richest merchant in Lisbon. In 1512, his younger brother Diogo had emigrated to metropolitan Antwerp, building a fortune equivalent to between US$500M-$1B in today’s currency. The Mendes enterprise was one of the first truly multinational corporations, with profitable mercantile routes throughout Western Europe.[6] 

However, there was an incredible spirit of philanthropy beneath the mask of mercantile profit. The Mendes Bank crucially functioned as the primary benefactor of the Sephardi underground railroad, a support network for those fleeing the relentless Inquisitors. The escape route enabled conversos to flee Portugal for the Ottoman Empire via more liberal transit routes like Antwerp and Venice. Lobbying and bribery functioned as necessary instruments of protection, and the Mendes family had no shortage of funds to sustain this racket. 

Although European monarchs largely held the New Christians in contempt, they worked diligently to obstruct this initiative, fearing that Jewish expertise and economic acumen might strengthen the Ottoman Empire and shift the balance of power in its favour. Their concerns were not entirely unfounded. Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481 - 1512), who enabled the naval transport of 100,000 Jews to Ottoman lands, reportedly said of the Alhambra Decree: “Do they call this Ferdinand a politic prince, who can thus impoverish his own kingdom and enrich ours?”[7] 

Upon Francisco’s death from illness in 1536, Gracia was left to care for her infant daughter, Reyna. She bravely fended off the cunning trickery of greedy courtiers for nearly a year in an effort to preserve her inheritance and continue funding the infrastructure necessary to save Jews. Marriage to a Christian was not possible if she wished to retain any say in the Mendes enterprise, and a union with a Jewish man was simply out of the question as it would give away the ruse. Gracia quickly had to come to terms with the grim realisation that despite her relative youth, she could never remarry or bear children in the future. Despite the constant nuisance, it was only in May 1537, when King John of Portugal made his own attempt at Gracia’s wealth, that she wrote to Diogo to facilitate her emigration to Antwerp. The move to Antwerp marked her definitive transition from widowed heiress to equal business partner, and she would continue working alongside Diogo until his passing in 1543.[8] 

Having risen to become the principal executor of one of the greatest fortunes ever amassed in the Northern Hemisphere, Gracia’s activities as a shrewd businesswoman and vigilant philanthropist only grew more adventurous. One of her immediate moves was to bribe Habsburg monarch Charles V with an interest-free loan of 100,000 ducats – worth approximately US$21 million in today’s terms - to waive all court proceedings related to Diogo’s suspected Judaizing. She deftly avoided the various tactics the Habsburgs employed with the aim of seizing the Mendes fortune, such as attempts to compel marriage of her (now-adolescent) daughter Reyna to Habsburg nobles. In late 1544, facing mounting suspicion and possible charges of Judaizing for circumvention of Inquisition policies, Gracia and her immediate family escaped to Venice.[9] 

Though Gracia ultimately aimed for relative safety in the Ottoman Empire, she made the most of Renaissance Italy while she could. She became a patron of the arts, sojourning in the palazzos of Italy, all the while dedicating a substantial amount of her wealth to the preservation of Jewish life in Venice and elsewhere. She maintained influential relationships with countless monarchs and clerics, exploiting these connections to defy the very imperial structures which had made the Inquisition such a powerful deterrent to Jewish freedom. Throughout her tenure, she brought more family members into the fold of her business operations, and her nephew Joseph would lead the charge in a number of foreign ventures.[10] Gracia’s success was simply unprecedented, especially for a woman of her religious and marital background. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Mendes family monopolised the lucrative pepper and spice trade across the Mediterranean and Western Europe, giving them unprecedented control over multiple stock markets.[11] 

In 1554, with the help of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I, Gracia would emigrate to Istanbul with her family and fortune in tow. In line with her audacious character, she made a short yet daring stop along the way in the southern Italian harbour of Ragusa to ensure that her commercial activities in Italy would be secure.[12] Almost immediately upon their arrival, Gracia and Joseph renounced the Christian faith and returned to Judaism. While this move was incredibly unpopular among the European merchant elites who dwelled in Ottoman lands, they were powerless to do anything about it.[13] Like so many of the conversos she had rescued, Gracia was free at last, in a sprawling city where Jews made up 20% of the population. She continued to aid Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal that settled in Ottoman Turkey; her devotion to Jewish life and culture encouraged them to rebuild their faith, which had been suffocated for their entire lives.

Gracia immediately put her wealth to use in aiding the Sephardi community in the Eastern Mediterranean. For example, she and Joseph were the primary benefactors of the first modern Jewish community and learning centre in Salonika. In 1556, following a Papal edict which had prompted Christian authorities in Ancona to arrest and torture dozens of Portuguese Jews, Gracia persuaded Sultan Suleiman to send a threatening letter to Pope Paul IV insisting upon their release, which was successful to a certain extent. However, after a large contingent of Jews who refused to convert to Christianity were executed by Papal authorities, the Mendes family organised a large-scale trade boycott against Ancona, though this was rendered inactive by internal protest from underprivileged Jews of non-Portuguese origin who could not afford to suffer the economic consequences.[14] Yet, the whole affair served to demonstrate the enormous power wielded by Gracia and her family. Among Ottoman Jews, Gracia would earn herself the name HaGibora (Heb. “mighty woman”), owing to her considerable influence.

Finally, Gracia Mendes Nasi was what we might call a “proto-Zionist”, whose ultimate resolution to the tribulations of the conversos was their settlement of Ottoman territory corresponding to their ancestral homeland of Israel. (Sounds rather familiar if I do say so myself). In June 1560, Gracia petitioned the sultan to grant her a lease for exclusive Jewish control over a sliver of Ottoman land in present-day Tiberias, to be administered by Joseph Nasi. In return, the Jews would provide the Ottoman treasury with taxes stemming from silk production. The concession was granted, with Sultan Suleiman writing to the pasha of Safed: ‘Whatever this man wants, do it.’[15] 

Doña Gracia died around 1569, five years after the first Jews had arrived to settle in Tiberias. Her nephew Joseph was far too concerned with more attractive political prospects to continue Gracia’s enterprise. By the time Joseph died ten years later, the Mendes fortune had dissipated, lost to embezzlement and fraud. Local animosity from Bedouin raiders and corsairs on the Levantine coast discouraged settlement. With no funds to invest in defense apparatus, many Jews simply emigrated to safer shores, leading to the collapse of the Tiberias project.[16] In modern-day Tiberias, the only remnant of Gracia’s legacy is a hotel and cultural centre dedicated to preserving her story, all while boasting air-conditioned rooms furnished with mini-fridges.[17]

Across five centuries, the remarkable figure of Doña Gracia, an emblem of Sephardi resistance, has faded into the margins of mainstream Jewish history. Nor does any engraving or artwork supposedly depicting her actually exist, for the only extant works are actually renditions of her niece, Gracia Nasi the Younger. Yet, her story demands remembrance — a life of extraordinary resolve, marked by ambition, betrayal, compassion, and defiance. Born into a converso family that concealed its Judaism to survive the brutal pressures of expulsion and oppression, Gracia never relinquished her sense of identity. Her dedication to safeguarding the Jewish people during the Inquisition was relentless, often at great personal risk. Through courage and cunning, she ensured the survival and flourishing of countless Jewish lives, securing her place as a vital symbol of perseverance in the face of persecution.

References

[1] While this terminology is useful in academia, its derogatory nature often plays into the wider designs of medieval Iberian antisemitism. Certainly, it was never used as a self-descriptor among the converts themselves. The terms “New Christians”, conversos (Sp. “converted ones”, or anusim (Heb. “forced ones”) are far more appropriate if one wishes to refer to this population in the public domain.

[2] Esther Benbassa & Aron Rodrigue, Histoire des Juifs sépharades: De Tolède á Salonique (Paris, 2002) 46-7. My translation from the original French. 

[3] Bartolomeo Senarega, Comentarii de Rebus Genuensibus, in Ludovico Antonio Muratori (ed.), Rerum Italicarum Scriptores: Vol. XXIV (Milan, 1738), cols. 531-2. My translation from the original Latin. 

[4] Carl Gebhardt, Die Schriften des Uriel da Costa (Amsterdam, 1922), xix. My translation from the original German. 

[5] Gracia’s name appears as “Gracia ibn Veniste” in documents retrieved from Italy, such as the Ferrara safe-conduct and a letter to Rabbi Gershon b. Moses Soncino (d. 1533); see Marianna D. Birnbaum, The Long Journey of Gracia Mendes (Budapest and New York, 2003), 19.

[6] Ibid., 20-2; see also Andrée Aelion Brooks, ‘A Jewish Woman Leader of the Renaissance’, European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe, 33:1 (Spring 2000), 44. 

[7] William H. Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic (London, 1892), 285.

[8] Brooks, ‘A Jewish Woman Leader’, 45-7. 

[9] Birnbaum, The Long Journey, 29-33. 

[10] Brooks, ‘A Jewish Woman Leader’, 48-50. 

[11] Birnbaum, The Long Journey, 20.

[12] Jane S. Gerber, Cities of Splendour in the Shaping of Sephardi History (Liverpool, 2020), 172-3.

[13] Ibid., 174; see also Nazmi al-Jubeh, ‘The Jews in Jerusalem and Hebron during the Ottoman Era’, in Abdelwahab Meddeb and Benjamin Stora (eds.), A History of Jewish-Muslim Relations: From the Origins to the Present Day (Princeton, 2013), 220.  

[14] Gerber, Cities of Splendour, 198, 205-11.

[15] Birnbaum, The Long Journey, 106; see also Brooks, ‘A Jewish Woman Leader’, 51.

[16] Ibid., 108.

[17] https://www.jpost.com/travel/around-israel/tiberiass-tribute-to-dona-gracia, accessed 22 December 2024.

Aurele Tobelem is an undergraduate History student at King’s College London (KCL) and Middle East editor at the King’s Geopolitics Forum. A commentator and Israel activist, Aurele is of Moroccan Sephardi heritage and is also a member of Harif UK. His work has appeared in diverse publications, including The Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Quillette, and Global Arab Network.