"In the summer of 1476 in La Coruna, Spain, the scribe Moses ibn Zabara and the illuminator Joseph ibn Hayyim put the last touches to a masterpiece." "One of the most exquisitely beautiful books ever made." "It's a Hebrew Bible." "But not the austere black and white kind I grew up with." "This is a kingdom of glowing colour - lapis lazuli blue, gold, rose carnation, and vermilion." "A book so enticing you want to live inside its pages." "And you wouldn't be short of company." "There's Jonah and his whale." "King David on his throne." "There are musical monkeys... fire-breathing dragons..." "..battling cats." "And on the last page, a contortion of naked figures, which make up the Hebrew characters of the illuminator's name." "It's a Bible overflowing with life." "But just 16 years after the Coruna Bible was finished, the Jewish world that had made it was brutally snuffed out by royal decree." "In 1492, all Jews were expelled from Christian Spain." "Isaac de Braga, the Bible's owner, and hundreds of thousands like him were sent packing from a country where they had lived for over 1,000 years." "Reduced at a royal hand clap to destitute wanderers." "Perhaps, in his wanderings, Don Isaac turned to this page, for, in times of trouble," "Jews recite the affirmation of God's uniqueness, the Shema." ""Shema Yisrael adonai eloheinu adonai echad."" ""Hear, o Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one."" "It was the Jews who had first given the idea of one God to a pagan world that believed in many." "The idea was taken up by others." "First, Christians... and then Muslims." "New religions that saw Judaism as an unwanted grandpa religion, too old, too obstinate in its ways to accept a new messiah or a new prophet." "And while the followers of Christ and Muhammad would have the force of military empires behind them, it was the fate of the Jews to be exiles in the lands of the cross and the crescent, struggling to find a foothold on the narrowing ground" "between grudging toleration and murderous hostility." "It's a familiar Jewish story, but it's not the only one." "Look at this Bible again." "Some of its most beautiful pages come spontaneously from Muslim patterning, from the human drama of Christianity, even from the mythic bestiary of the ancient pagan world." "Like Jewish experience itself, it's a weave of different threads." "What this Bible says to me is that even amidst torture and grief, even on the eve of destruction," "Jews took to heart what's on this page - a verse from the Book of Deuteronomy," ""I have set before you life and death, blessing and a curse." ""Therefore choose life."" "This is the story of how Jews lived amidst Muslims and Christians, and how they tried to stay Jewish by opting for life." "RECITES PRAYER" "Every year, on the fast day of Tisha B'Av," "Jews around the world dim the lights, light candles and mourn the loss of their high temple with prayers, tears and lamentations." "2,000 years ago, Roman soldiers destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, the heart of Jewish worship, teaching and life." "In the wake of the calamity, the Jews were banned from Jerusalem, and displaced from Judea, severing the link between a people and their ancient sacred capital." "A Judaism stripped of its temple should have withered away and perished, but Judaism survived." "How?" "By setting down rules for living that would allow Jews to keep their identity intact in the often hostile world beyond Jerusalem." "This is Sepphoris in the heart of Galilee, one of the places where the bold reinvention of an ancient people took place." "It might look Roman but, in fact, this was a Jewish town." "And around every corner, you would have come across buildings that were giving Judaism its new lease of life in the post-temple world." "The synagogue." "And this is what that new Judaism looked like in those early centuries." "The temple is still here, but it's a poignant memory depicted in mosaic tiles surrounded by the objects of temple worship." "The menorah ready to be lit." "The bull waiting for sacrifice." "The basket of fruit about to be offered to God." "The Jews would never let go of these memories, but this was far more than a place of longing and regret." "Just look at the zodiac that dominates the centre of the floor with its frankly pagan imagery." "Beautifully dressed calendar girls representing the seasons." "Wintry Tevet." "Blooming, fertile Nisan for spring." "Clearly, the Jews of Sepphoris chose to live life in the here and now." "But if you're thinking, well, this must have been a pretty relaxed place where liberal laid-back rabbis would wink at a picture or two, you'd be absolutely wrong, because Sepphoris was a place of intense devotion and study," "where every religious discussion came back to the critical issue of how to be Jewish and how to stay Jewish." "Leading the discussion were the Rabbis, the teachers with one eye on the past with its pious veneration of the laws contained within the Hebrew Bible." "And one eye on the present day, where those laws had somehow to be honoured without the institution that once supported them." "When the vast and magnificent temple in Jerusalem went, it was replaced by an equally vast edifice of words." "In a breathtaking decision, the Rabbis decided that the words of the Torah, the Bible law, were not enough to fill the void, and that they needed supplementing with the oral tradition which would henceforth have the status of law." "This work was called the Mishna and it was begun here at Sepphoris." "The Mishna attempted to catalogue systematically the commandments that are scattered throughout the Torah, and to record the many oral interpretations that had clustered around them." "The authors of the Mishna aimed to cover everything in Jewish life, from circumcision to funerals." "And unlike the Torah, their work was helpfully arranged in subjects." "If you wanted to know about divorce, you went to the book called Women" " Nashim." "If you wanted to know which crops to sow and harvest, you went to Zaraim" " Seeds." "And if you wanted to know what not to do on the Sabbath, they offered 39 varieties of prohibition in the chapter on the Sabbath." "Thinking of tearing something?" "Don't do it." "Thinking of curing a hide?" "Absolutely don't do it." "Thinking of lighting a fire?" "Don't even think about that." "And the Mishna was just the start of what, over the next four centuries, would expand into the Talmud." "That endless hypertext made up of the voices of hundreds of rabbis... ..all circling obsessively around the central dilemma of post-temple Judaism - how to stay Jewish in a non-Jewish world." "Ever wonder why Jews are so argumentative?" "Because it is in fact part of our religion." "This is my old friend Leon Wieseltier, someone with whom I've had my fair share of arguments over the years." "But we both agree that the Talmud would become the foundation stone for the rebuilding of Jewish life in exile." "The fact is that this became the durable, stable, tenacious tradition of people who lived in many places and were often on the move." "It's suitcase-ready." "That's right, it's suitcase-ready." "You see rabbis sometimes who don't even share the same century arguing among themselves." "Absolutely." "Here you have the commentaries that surround the text of the Mishna and the Talmud - 11th-century France," "12th- and 13th-century France, 11th-century Tunisia." "The interpretation never ends." "Nothing ever gets fixed, I mean, that's, you know..." "And it never gets frozen." "Remember, this civilisation that was based on the law that was established in Talmud would have disappeared long ago if it had not learned to adapt to circumstances." "So it has a kind of organic quality." "It is deeply organic." "Enduring, adapting..." "But it adapted in ways that would not damage its own integrity." "It was written for an endless future." "It was created for an endless future." "One of the places where that future unfolded was in ancient Rome, the capital city of the empire that had torn the heart out of Jewish life." "But like the Jews of Sapphoris, the Jews of Rome chose life." "How do we know?" "Well, to answer that question, you have to come to a place of death." "'This is an underground cemetery 'dating from around the 3rd century AD." "'When it was discovered, 'it was assumed that these were early Christian catacombs." "'Until this was found." "'A Jewish menorah.'" "And that is a powerful eternal symbol." "And unmistakable, very simple." "'With my guide, Elsa Laurenzi, I explored this maze of tunnel tombs 'where all kinds of Jews were buried." "'Rich, poor, young and old.'" "Multicoloured stripe, that's beautiful, like representations of the temple." "'The deeper we went, the further from the daylight, 'the more startling the catacombs became." "'We found date palms - a Jewish symbol of resurrection." "'Peacocks - symbols of creation." "'Flying horses, 'and what looked to me very much like Cupids.'" "There's an old tradition in Judaism of describing the afterlife as a Gan Eden - a Garden of Eden, a paradise garden, and this place teems with nature." "My mother used to say, "I'm going to the paradise garden one day."" "And so the Jews in this subterranean world dwelt in that paradise garden." "They had no sense at all that there was any danger any time soon, that they were going to be kicked out of a common paradise." "Above ground, Rome was changing." "A pagan empire with its belief in many gods was transformed into a Christian one..." "..with the conversion of an emperor, Constantine, in the fourth century AD." "For the Jews under Roman rule, life was about to change." "This is one of the oldest Christian churches in Rome." "It was built as a mausoleum for Constantine's daughter, Constantina " "Santa Costanza as she became." "Its massive splendour is the measure of how far Christianity had come between Constantine's conversion and Constantina's death." "From tolerated sect on the periphery of empire... ..to state religion at its very heart." "The fourth-century mosaics revel in the power of that transformation." "Christ appears as a youthful god emperor with lustrous golden tresses and silken robes." "But to his right is the man who, for the Jewish story at least, really matters " "St Paul." "Born a Jew, like his saviour, was Paul, who within a few years of Jesus's death began the process of liberating Christianity from the chains of Jewish ritual." "Christianity was either universal or it was nothing." "So Paul aggressively de-Judaises the Christian message and there was no surer way of doing that than insisting on the divinity of Jesus." "That violated the first supreme principle of Judaism, which was the indivisible oneness of God - echad." "Two, Father and Son, had Jews scratching their beards." "Three, the Holy Spirit." "Why not five?" "And it was Paul who repeated the sinister notes sounded in the early Christian gospels." "The Jews as Christ killers, crying out before Jesus's crucifixion," ""His blood be on us and on our children."" "And where Paul went, cruder, fiercer Church fathers followed." "Like the Syrian Bishop of Antioch, John Chrysostom, aka Golden Mouth." "Chrysostom was bent on making it impossible for Jews and Christians to live together." "So in his sermons, the Jews became people who consorted with devils, demons dancing in the synagogue." "And they themselves were inhuman monsters who - in his words - sacrificed their sons and daughters to devils, outraging nature, worse than wild beasts." "There was a reason for Chrysostom's hostility." "His flock was in the infuriating habit of visiting synagogues to be enthralled by Jewish sermons, seeking out Jews to cure their ills and bless their crops." "Obviously, coexistence with these Christ-killing, child-killing devil people was out of the question." "For Chrysostom, only one conclusion was possible - physically avoid these people as you would a leper, shun them like a walking sickness." "Within a generation of Golden Mouth's death, his fulminations had become official imperial policy." "Jews were excluded from all public employment." "It became illegal to build new synagogues, and they were ultimately forbidden from assembling in public at all." "The Mishna even became a banned book." "The Christian empire was pushing the Jews into the shadows." "But there were places in the medieval world where Jews could live in the light." "In our own age of bitter hatreds, it's not so easy to believe, but over 1,000 years ago, Cairo was home to one of the most thriving Jewish communities in the world." "And that story was repeated across the Eastern Mediterranean and in Arabia itself." "The birthplace of a powerful new monotheistic faith " "Islam." "MAN:" "Allahu Akhbar..." "With no accusation of Christ-killing to contend with," "Jews under Islam were spared the demonisation they suffered in Christendom." "According to later Islamic sources, there seems to have been an early moment when Jews and Muslims might have been part of a common community of believers." "In the document of the Ummah, it was said that Jews have their religious law and Muslims have their religious law." "And many of the practices of the new religion drew on those of the old." "In one of the first mosques ever built, in the city of Medina, the direction of prayer indicated by the qibla, or the prayer niche, was towards the holy city of Jerusalem." "CHANTING" "The Jews had been in Medina for centuries before the arrival of Islam." "They ran the city's main market as they did in many Arabian towns." "They spoke Arabic and appeared to have used the Arabic name for God" " Allah." "But the Jews in Medina simply could not accept Muhammad as a new prophet of God." "Their religion insisted that the age of prophets was over, that God no longer spoke directly to man." "The Jews turned bitterly and publicly critical, and were accused of treason." "Two Jewish tribes were exiled from Medina and hundreds of Jewish men massacred, their women and children enslaved." "But the breathtaking success of the Arab conquest in the decades following the death of Muhammad transformed the antagonism of a rival into the lofty stance of a victor." "The dominion of the faithful would soon spread all the way from Spain to Afghanistan." "Secure within the borders of their empire," "Muslims treated Jews and Christians as dhimmis - tolerated inferiors." "Jews and Christians couldn't build synagogues or churches higher than mosques." "They couldn't ride horses - very important matter of dignity in the Middle Ages." "They could ride donkeys, but only side-saddle, like women." "And it was under Islam that distinctions of religion were defined by dress." "The yellow badge, the yellow hat, the yellow coat first happened under Islam." "And given the kind of conditions in the Middle Ages, most dangerously of all, they were not allowed to carry any sort of weapons, which meant that Jews and Christians were open and vulnerable to harassment and assault." "All the same, this was a whole lot better for the Jews than being treated as a demon in human guise, a kind of walking infection, by Christendom." "Which is why, during the Islamic Middle Ages, over 90% of all Jews lived, and often flourished and prospered, in the Islamic world." "We might never have known the truth about the lives of Jews under medieval Islam had it not been for Scottish twins Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, who were swept up in the Victorian craze for the Middle East." "Nosing around the markets of Cairo one day, these amateur historians came across some decrepit-looking documents which aroused their curiosity." "Their friend, the Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter, identified one of their finds as a fragment of the Hebrew Book of Ecclesiasticus." "Hearing that the source of those documents was the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo," "Schechter came here eager for more." "And he got far more than he bargained for." "Over 300,000 documents found in the synagogue's genizah, or store room, which revealed in rich detail the story of everyday Jewish life at the heart of medieval Islam." "This is the place more than any other I know that testifies to the Jewish compulsion to preserve the word." "By Jewish law and tradition, any document bearing the name of God could not be shredded or burnt or destroyed in any way." "It had to be allowed to decompose slowly, so up there in the genizah it went." "But the Jews of Cairo were even more compulsive than that, because they seemed to feel the need to save anything that was written in Hebrew characters." "Up in the genizah are first drafts of philosophical essays, items of private correspondence, shopping lists, recipes - anything that Jews did was set down, recorded and stored in the genizah." "Which makes it the single most complete archive of a society anywhere in the whole medieval world." "Whatever the official rules had to say about their inferior status, the genizah makes clear that the Jews of Cairo lived and worked and traded with Muslims, if not as equals then certainly as neighbours." "The documents reveal more than 450 different ways for Jews to make a living - from cheese-maker to carp-pickler, from policeman to spice merchant." "And with cousins around the world, the Jews turned their far-flung connections to commercial advantage, becoming the shippers, importers and suppliers to a world hungry for new things - from North Africa, from Sicily, Spain and the coast of India." "And they pioneered some of the financial instruments we all still need for doing global business." "As Ben Outhwaite of the Genizah Research Unit explained." "This particular merchant, Abu Zichri Cohen, he trades with India." "Right." "So he might be in India or he might be back in Egypt, and he will have to exchange goods for money." "But he can't carry..." "All that cash." "Well, he's not allowed to carry gold across borders on pain of death." "That's an Islamic restriction?" "Yes." "Ah." "So they have to use paper currency." "So it's a 12th-century cheque." "'Some of the most touching documents in the genizah 'are also the most sweetly mundane, 'including exercise books of children learning the alphabet.'" "I was doing a cheder, not as well, you know, at five and six, really practising my vav, and my he, and my heth." "And here, what I wasn't doing, because I was much too scared, are pictures, actually little animal doodles." "How cute is that?" "And there's a little menorah there as well, that's a candlestick." "Yeah." "But interaction between Jews and Muslims wasn't confined to the business of daily life." "In certain places, at certain times, the Judeo-Muslim rhythm broke into a kind of joyous cultural music." "This is the place the Arabs called El Andalus, and we now know as Andalucia." "The deep south of Spain, the country the Jews called Sepharad." "At its heart is the city of Cordoba." "From the eighth century, this was the capital of the Islamic Umayyad dynasty." "But also under their protection, one of the great centres of Sephardic Jewish life in Muslim Spain." "Cordoba was a city of gardens, fountains, canals and post delivered by carrier pigeon." "The Mezquita, the great mosque, built by the Umayyad, stands as the architectural consummation of their ambition." "But in the shadow of the mosques were the synagogues, and they too wove worldliness with holiness to create patterns of intoxicating beauty." "An impulse that endured for centuries." "And inspired by Arabic models, that same note was sounded in the poetry of the Sephardim." "A literature which gave the Hebrew language a startling new life." "Just listen to this." ""Last night, a gazelle of a girl showed me the sun of her cheek," ""and the veil of her auburn hair" ""was like a ruby falling over a dampened crystal brow." ""She was like the fires of dawns rising," ""reddening the clouds with its flames."" "You don't find words like that coming out of the ultra orthodox of either Judaism or Islam today, but they were the words of Yehuda Halevi, a poet of sensual love, but also a deeply devout Jew," "for whom there was no distinction at all between the physical and the spiritual." "His notion of the nefesh, the traditional Jewish idea of soul, was indivisibly part of the physical as well as the spiritual world, so that when he came to write poems addressed to God, they sound startlingly as though he was talking to a lover." "This one is called Lord Adonai." ""All my desire is here before you," ""whether I speak it or not." ""I'd seek your favour for an instant and then die." ""If only you would grant my wish, I would place my soul in your hands" ""and then sleep, and in that sleep find such sweetness."" "Halevi's poetry lives and breathes the atmosphere of Judeo-Islamic culture." "But at its heart is the aching void of exile, and a yearning for a return to Zion." "He'd once written that the peculiar glory of Judaism was that it was a religion of deeds, of action, not faith, like Christianity, or obedience, like Islam." "You thought about it every day because you had to live it every day." "So at some point, Zion stopped being simply a poetic metaphor and became an obligation, a destination." ""My heart is in the East but I am on the edge of the West." ""How can I taste my food?" ""How can it please me?" ""How can I keep my promise?" "How can I fulfil my vow?" ""I will gladly leave behind me all the treasures of Spain" ""to see the dust and ruin of your shrine."" "Halevi was as good as his word." "At the age of 65, he turned his back on all of Spain's treasures and embarked on a perilous journey to Jerusalem." "We'll never know whether this passionate pilgrim made it." "The last we hear of him is riding the storm-wracked Mediterranean." ""As the sea rages," he writes, "my soul is jubilant," ""for my ship draws near to the sanctuary of her God."" "But man-made storms were about to sweep away the world" "Halevi had left behind." "The reconquest of Spain by Christian kings gathered pace from the north." "While from the south, fundamentalist Islamic warrior tribes from Morocco supplanted the worldly Islamic rulers of El Andalus." "Caught between militant cross and fundamentalist crescent, the Jews suffered from the intolerance of both." "In the 13th century, Muslim rule in Andalucia collapsed." "The Mezquita in Cordoba was turned from mosque to cathedral." "The future for the Jews of Europe now lay under the shadow of the cross." "BELL TOLLS" "For lessons in how to survive in Christendom, the Sephardim would have been well advised to consult their cousins, the Ashkenazi Jews of northern Europe." "CHATTERING" "The Jews of medieval Christendom could have told them that while living among people who believed you to be devils was never going to be easy, it was possible." "This is Lincoln, home to one of the most thriving Jewish communities in medieval England." "The Jews had been first invited to England by William the Conqueror in 1066, and some had made a pretty successful life for themselves." "This is where one of the wealthiest money men lived " "Aaron of Lincoln." "Aaron was rich, and the proof of that can be found in the most unlikely of places " "Lincoln Cathedral." "A long tradition has it that construction of this spectacular church was underwritten by loans made by Aaron." "The facts of his life are few and far between." "What we do know for sure is that Aaron's dizzy rise to fortune began with a loan to King Henry II, that his money built 16 abbeys and that the Bishop of Lincoln here, Robert Chesney, built his fancy palace just down the road with an Aaron mortgage," "secured with the cathedral treasury." "Naughty, naughty bishop!" "For the mitred, the robed, and the crown," "Aaron's was the bank that liked to say yes." "Yes to bankrolling new cathedrals, yes to abbeys, yes to palaces." "And the reason Aaron said yes was because Christian theology said no." "No to usury - the sin of lending money at interest." "Which is why the Jews were so convenient." "They were willing to dispense the cash and take the sin on themselves." "A theological sweetheart deal." "That's how Aaron got started." "By the time he'd finished, in terms of liquid assets, which is to say, hard cash, he was the richest man in England." "And as you bankers out there know, a source of fortune can also be a source of great misfortune, because it makes you a big fat target." "Especially so when religion straps on its armour to wage holy war." "The coronation of England's crusader king," "Richard the Lionheart, in 1189, was the perfect pretext for mobs to carry out their own murderous crusade against Jewish communities all over England." "And if the paperwork recording the debts that everyone owed to these demon moneybags went up in smoke, well, all the more reason to join in the carnage." "Some Jews were offered the choice of conversion or death." "Horrifyingly, many chose suicide and the death of their own children rather than submitting to the mob." "The authorities" " Church and Crown - were supposed to protect the Jews, but that rarely prevented the poisonous spread of popular anti-Jewish hatred." "In Lincoln Cathedral, you can still see today the remnants of that medieval anti-Jewish folklore." "A stained-glass window shows a Jew, identifiable by his red pointed hat, putting his own son in an oven for taking Christian communion." "And around the corner are the chilling remains of a 13th-century shrine dedicated to Hugh, an eight-year-old Christian boy who in 1255 was, according to popular report, obscenely tortured and murdered by Lincoln's Jews in a black re-enactment of the Crucifixion." "The Chronicle of Mathew Paris is still considered one of our best sources for the history of medieval England." "And he gives some of the poisonous flavour of the fictions that fed into this gruesome tale, playing with devilish virtuosity on the suspicions generated by Jewish separateness from the rest of Christian society." "MAN'S VOICE: "A great number of Jews assembled in Lincoln," ""and with the concurrence of all," ""the boy was subjected to various tortures." ""They scourged him until the blood flowed." ""They crowned him with thorns." ""Each of them also pierced him with a knife," ""calling him 'Jesus, the false prophet.'" ""And after tormenting him in diverse ways," ""they crucified him and pierced him to the heart with a spear."" "This libel received royal endorsement when King Henry III visited Lincoln and personally ordered the execution of the supposed ringleader." "91 of Lincoln's Jews were sent to the Tower." "18 were hanged." "Though never officially canonised," "Hugh became known as Little Saint Hugh, and his elaborate shrine in the cathedral a place of popular pilgrimage." "It wasn't until 2009 that the shrine was re-dedicated and it was explicitly stated that the story was a "shameful libel and a fiction"." "An evil corner had been turned." "Not only were the Jews held hostage to the demonology that portrayed them as Christ-killers, but the institutions that should have protected them from harm and which profited from their presence - the Church and the Crown - now endorsed the libel when it suited their purpose." "On July 18th, 1290," "King Edward I expelled the Jews from England, relieving everyone of the inconvenience of paying back their debts." "It took 700 years for the Jewish community to return to Lincoln." "Today, they worship in what is believed to have been the medieval synagogue." "PRAYING" "Still reading from the same books, perhaps singing the same songs as their medieval counterparts whose presence was no longer welcome in Christian society." "# Shabbat shalom. #" "It was a story that was soon to spread across Europe." "To be in Seville during semana santa, the holy week before Easter, is to enter the world of medieval Christendom." "Hooded figures move through clouds of incense." "And thousands of penitents, some barefoot, others carrying heavy crosses, walk through the night in emulation of the suffering of Christ." "This procession dates back to the time when the medieval Church became increasingly concerned with conformity of belief and ritual." "It's easy to imagine how uncomfortable this changing mood must have been for the Jews of medieval Christian Spain." "As the pursuit of Christian orthodoxy gathered pace," "Jews were seen as a malevolent fifth column inside Christian society." "Their obstinacy was standing in the way of the Second Coming, and the universal victory of Christ." "In the eyes of the Church, that longed-for moment could only happen with the mass conversion of the Jews." "But rather than forcing the Jews to convert at sword-point, the Church engaged in a theological battle designed to show the truth of Christianity and the folly of the Jews." "In towns like Girona in northern Spain, home to one of the most learned Jewish communities in medieval Christendom, new orders of friars, the Dominicans and Franciscans, launched an attack on the Jews and on the sacred books" "that had preserved their identity for 1,000 years." "The Church had always had a problem when it came to dealing with the Jews." "It couldn't attack their Old Testament, because the scripture contained prophesies of Christ's coming." "You couldn't have a New Testament without an Old Testament." "So the Jews had to be protected and preserved as witnesses to the miracle they were too blind, fanatical or stubborn to admit." "One day, perhaps they would." "But now, as far as the heresy hunters were concerned, things had changed." "These were no longer Bible Jews, they were Talmud Jews." "And what was this Talmud, this oral law anyway, but a load of endless arguments?" "By their own standards, the Jews had betrayed their own scripture." "And with that betrayal, their protection had gone right out of the window." "In 1263, the Church organised a public showdown between Christians and Jews." "Leading the Christian charge was Pablo Christiani, a Dominican friar and convert from Judaism." "While the man with the task of defending Judaism was Moses ben Nahman, known as Nahmanides, a deeply learned rabbi from the Jewish quarter here in Girona." "Christiani, the convert, set out to use passages about the coming of the Messiah in the Torah and the Talmud, to prove that the Jews had, in their own sacred text, predicted the coming of Jesus Christ the Messiah all along." "The theological show trial, known as the Barcelona Disputation, began on July 20th, 1263." "In front of a packed Christian audience, including the King and the leading clergy of the land." "Most dramatic..." "'Leon Wieseltier sees the debate as one of the most moving events 'in the history of medieval Judaism.'" "It's pretty clear that Nahmanides was an unbelievably courageous man in those three days, those three summer days in 1263." "Here was a man who stood up alone, he had no force of any kind to count on except his own spiritual and intellectual force." "He was helpless, quite literally helpless, before the power of the Church and before the secular power of the King." "As he tells the King of Spain," ""You think that the Messiah is the centre of Judaism." ""You're wrong, he isn't." "You are a king and he is a king." ""You are a king of flesh and blood, and he is a king of flesh and blood."" "He said, "Well, if the Messiah is your version of the Messiah," ""then two things should have happened." ""One, all my predecessors would have converted a long time ago." Right." ""And secondly, the reign of peace would have broken out."" "Right, it didn't happen." ""Forgive me, but I don't actually notice that much peace."" "This goes to the heart of the difference between the Jewish messianic temperament and the Christian messianic temperament." "Think of it this way - the problem for Jews is that we wait and wait and wait and wait and he doesn't come." "The problem for the Christians is that he came and the world did not change." "Right." "The Jews will always so arrange matters that they will never wake up on the morning after the Messiah arrives because the risk is much too great." "Because the world will still be the world, and if you've been aspiring to a transformation and it comes, and things are not transformed, then you are bereft." "And when Nahmanides says to the Christians," ""He couldn't have been the Messiah because look at the world," ""there are wars, there is suffering." "Look at the world."" "For the Christian establishment, the presence in their midst of people with such obstinately different beliefs became unbearable." "With increasing ferocity, they asked themselves," ""What place did the Jews have in Christian Spain?"" "And the answer came back, "None."" "Either they must convert or suffer the consequences." "Here in Seville, those consequences were spelt out in brutal fashion, with a massacre of 4,000 Jews on a single day in 1391." "An act that triggered horrifying violence against Jews all across Spain." "After that, a third of Sephardic Jews did convert, but even that didn't solve "the Jewish problem"." "Could the sincerity of the converts be trusted now?" "Who knew what they really thought and believed?" "This is the Iglesia de la Magdalena in Seville." "The first headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition, designed to root out the pretenders from the true believers." "But the torture and burning of thousands did nothing to ease the paranoia." "Converts could never be trusted while there were still Jews in Spain to lure them back to the old faith." "So the Jews had to go." "The date on this parchment-bound volume is 1492." "These are the records of the small town of Girona in Catalonia," "Nahmanides's town." "And like all local council proceedings, most of the stuff recorded here is very much small potatoes - property disputes, how to resolve quarrels between landlords and peasants." "And then, in the middle of it, is something which is not small at all." "The record of an immense tragedy." "About four lines down is recorded the decision of the King to expel the Jews - there, expellendos - from his kingdom." "It's the death sentence of a culture which has lived in Girona for half a millennium and in the rest of Spain for even longer." "It's the death sentence on the possibility of Jews having a coexistence with Christians." "It's an appalling tragedy, and however good the intention, something recorded in the edict makes it, if anything, even worse, because the King, further down the page, orders his subjects not to harass or disturb the Jews" "in the process of packing up and selling off synagogues and lands and possessions." "Get them out of here in peace as quickly as possible, to which you want to say, "How very considerate(!" ")"" "The Jews were given just four months to liquidate what it had taken centuries to build." "So Jews did what Jews do - they packed." "And you all know those pictures of long lines of pathetic, bedraggled figures toting bags along dusty roads." "That began here, in 1492, in Spain." "And one of the most glorious, rich, sophisticated, poetically beautiful cultures there'd ever been in Europe came to an end." "But there were some things that could not be taken from the Jews - their language, their music, their poetry, their richly spiced gorgeous cooking." "I cook it myself a long way away from Spain." "And above all, of course, inside their heads, inside their hearts, inside their little books, inside all the things designed for portability and endurance, their religion." "So when those ships were loaded with Jews and their things in the harbours of Iberia..." "..you might well have heard the Shema drifting over the water." ""Hear, o Israel, the Lord our God," ""the Lord is one."" "So where did they go?" "Almost everywhere - Morocco, Italy, Egypt, and above all the Ottoman Empire, where the Turkish Sultan actively encouraged the Sephardim to resettle, taunting the Spanish king that the expulsion would impoverish Spain and enrich his empire." "Commerce also motivated the rulers of the Republic of Venice to offer a welcome of sorts to the Jews." "With family connections in the Islamic world, the Jews would be priceless to a Christian city that lived on trade." "But this didn't mean there was going to be some sort of happy mingling on the shores of the Adriatic." "The lords of the lagoon came up with a new way of isolating the Jews." "From 1516, Venice's Jews were forced to live in a small district of just a few residential blocks at the northern perimeter of the city." "The gates were locked at night." "And a new word was born." "Today, the word "ghetto"" "is synonymous with poverty, racism, families under stress." "All the above were true of here, the world's first ghetto." "And yet, there are places where you can feel the sigh of relief that was Jewish Venice." "KNOCKS ON DOOR" "A place, for all its condescension and humiliations, where you could actually make a Jewish life." "Nowhere more so than the Scuola Spagnola, the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue, where the birds in flight from Spain came to rest." "When it came to redesigning the synagogue, the Sephardim thought big and beautiful." "By now, the Jews were old hands at living under the sufferance of Christians and Muslims." "And under pressure, they went back, as always, to the core of their religion." "They followed the mitzvot - the commandments - they sung the songs, they read the books, they built the synagogue." "I have the strangest sense of having been here before, hundreds of years ago." "It's a delusion, I know, but it's..." "Jews are tied together by irrational bonds of memory very often." "But there's a sort of odd air of spice and old Jews, of which I'm one now." "This place is so beautiful." "It speaks for me of the deep pathos of Jewish longing for beauty, for grandeur." "Jews never really think it's an obligation to build gorgeous ornaments, gorgeous buildings, because you always know you're going to have to leave them behind." "You're going to have to reach for the suitcase sooner or later, and yet you want to believe that in the place you've just come to, where God has allowed you to prosper and for a few generations at least be safe." "Honour your religion by doing this - by making something stunningly beautiful." "So this whole place feels as though it reconciles the idea of refuge with beauty." "And if you can bring that off, just for a little moment, in the hard lives of Jewish history, you have performed a mitzvah, just as surely as you've looked after the poor, the sick and the dying." "That's what it says." "That's what Venice says." "And if anyone has cliches about the ghetto, you bring them here to see how beauty can also be a mitzvah." "That's what I feel." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd"