The Last Jew (3 page)

In the year of the Lord 1488 Padre Sebastián was excited -- and the religious community of Castille was invigorated -- by a visitor from Rome. Rodrigo Cardinal Lancol had Spanish roots, having been born Rodrigo Borgia near Seville. As a youth he had been adopted by his uncle, Pope Calixtus III, and he had grown to be a man to fear, a man of tremendous churchly power.

The Alvarez family had long ago proven itself friends and allies of the Borgias, and the close ties between the families had been strengthened by the marriage of Elienor Borgia to Juan Antonio. Already, because of the Borgia connection, Juan Antonio had become a popular figure at court functions and was said to be a favorite of the queen.

Elienor was first cousin to Cardinal Lancol.

'A relic,' Sebastián had said to Elienor.

He hated to plead to his sister-in-law, whom he could not abide for her vanity, insincerity, and spitefulness when irked. 'A relic of a martyr, perhaps of a minor saint. If His Eminence could help the priory obtain such a relic, it would be the making of us. I am certain he will come to our aid if you but ask it of him.'

'Oh, I could not,' Elienor protested.

Nevertheless, Sebastián became more abject and more insistent as the time of Lancol's visit approached, and she softened. Finally, to rid herself of a nuisance and for the sake of her husband only, she promised Juan Antonio's brother she would do whatever was humanly possible to benefit his cause. It was known that the cardinal would be entertained in Cuenca, at the estate of her father's brother, Garci Borgia Junez.

'I shall talk to Uncle and ask that he do it,' she promised Sebastián.

Before Cardinal Lancol departed from Spain, in the cathedral of Toledo he officiated at a Mass attended by every friar, priest, and prelate in the region. After the service Lancol stood surrounded by well-wishers, the cardinal's miter on his head, his great shepherd's crook of a crosier in his hand, and about his neck the pallium given him by the pope. Sebastián saw him from afar, as if experiencing another vision. He made no attempt to approach Lancol. Elienor had reported that Garci Borgia Junez had indeed made the request. Uncle had pointed out that knights and soldiers from every country in Europe had passed through Spain after each of the great Crusades. Before they returned home they had stripped the country of its holy relics, digging up the bones of martyr and saint, and pillaging relics almost at will from any church or cathedral along their route. Uncle had told Lancol ever so gently that if he could but send a relic to the Spanish priest who was their relative by marriage, it would earn the cardinal the adulation of all of Castille.

Sebastián knew that now the matter would be decided by God and by his appointed servants in Rome.

The days passed slowly for him. At first he dared to imagine receiving a relic that would have the power to answer Christian prayer and the tender mercy to heal the afflicted. Such a relic would draw worshipers and donations from afar. The small priory would become a great and thriving monastery, and the prior would become...

As the days turned to weeks and months, he forced himself to put the dream aside. He had almost given up all hope when he was summoned to the offices of the Toledo See. The pouch from Rome, which was sent to Toledo twice a year, had just arrived. Among other things it contained a sealed message for Padre Sebastián Alvarez of the Priory of the Assumption.

It was very unusual for a humble priest to receive a sealed packet from the Holy See. Auxiliary Bishop Guillermo Ramero, who handed it to Sebastián, felt the itch of curiosity and waited expectantly for the prior to open the packet and disclose its contents, as any obedient priest should have done. He was furious when Padre Alvarez merely accepted the packet and hurried away.

It was not until Sebastián was alone within the priory that he broke the wax seal with trembling fingers.

The packet contained a document entitled Translatio Sanctae Annae, and as Padre Sebastián sank into a chair and started to read numbly, he began to understand that it was a history of the remains of the Blessed Virgin's mother.

The Virgin's mother, Chana the Jewess, wife of Joachim, had died in Nazareth and was interred there in a sepulcher. She was venerated by Christians from their earliest history. Soon after her death two of her cousins, both named Mary, and a more distant relative named Maximin, set out from the Holy Land to spread the Gospel of Jesus in foreign places. Their ministry was solemnized by a gift of a wooden coffer containing a number of the relics of the Blessed Mary's mother. The three crossed the Mediterranean and landed at Marseilles, both women settling in a neighboring fishing village to seek converts. Because the coastal region was subject to frequent invasion, Maximin was entrusted to bring the holy bones to a safe place, and he continued on to the town of Apt, where he enshrined them.

The bones rested in Apt for hundreds of years. Then, in the eighth century, they were visited by the man his soldiers called Carolus Magnus -- Charles the Great, King of the Franks, who was stunned to read the inscription on the shrine: 'Here Lie the Remains of Saint Anne, Mother of the Glorious Virgin Mary.'

The warrior king lifted the bones out of their moldered winding sheet, feeling the very presence of God, amazed to hold in his hands a physical link to the Christus.

He presented several of the relics to his closest friends and took a few for himself, sending his own to Aix-la-Chapelle. He ordered an inventory of the bones and forwarded a copy to the pope, leaving the remainder of the relics in the stewardship of the Bishop of Apt and his successors. In A.D. 800, when decades of his military genius had conquered Western Europe and Carolus Magnus was crowned Charlemagne, emperor of the Romans, the embroidered figure of Saint Anne was conspicuous on his coronation robes.

The rest of the saint's relics had been removed from the sepulcher in Nazareth. Some had been enshrined at churches in several countries. The remaining three bones had been given into the care of the Holy Father and for more than a century had been stored in the Roman catacombs. In the year 830 a relic thief named Duesdona, a deacon of the Roman Church, conducted a wholesale theft of the catacombs in order to supply two German monasteries, at Fulda and at Mulheim. He sold the remains of Saints Sebastian, Fabian, Alexander, Emmerentina, Felicity, Felicissimus, and Urban, among others, but in his plundering somehow he overlooked the few bones of Santa Ana. When Church authorities realized the depredation that had occurred, they moved Santa Ana's bones into a storeroom, where for centuries they gathered dust in security.

Padre Sebastián was now notified that one of these three precious relics would be sent to him.

He spent twenty-four hours giving thanks on his knees in the chapel, from Matins to Matins without food or drink. When he attempted to rise he had no feeling in his legs and he was carried to his cell by anxious friars. But eventually God sent him strength, and he brought the Translatio to Juan Antonio and Garci Borgia. Suitably awed, they agreed to underwrite the cost of a reliquary in which the fragment of Santa Ana might be kept until a suitable shrine could be achieved. They mulled over the names of prominent craftsmen to whom such a task might be given, and it was Juan Antonio who suggested that to fashion the reliquary Sebastián commission Helkias Toledano, a Jew silversmith who had captured attention because of his creative designs and graceful execution.

The silversmith and Sebastián had conferred regarding the composition of the reliquary and had negotiated a price, and they had achieved a rapport. Indeed, it occurred to the priest how pleasing it would be if he could win this Jew's soul for Christ as a result of this work which the Lord had made necessary.

The design sketches Helkias had rendered revealed that he was an artist as well as a craftsman. The inner cup, the square base and the cover were to be made of both smooth and massy silver. Helkias proposed to fashion the figures of two women out of spun silver filigree. Only their backs would be seen, graceful and clearly female, the mother on the left, the daughter not quite a woman grown, but identified by an aura about her head. All over the ciborium Helkias would place a profusion of the plants with which Chana would have been familiar: grapes and olives, pomegranates and dates, figs and wheat, barley and spelt. On the opposite side of the grail -- figment of things to come, as far from the women as future time -- in massy silver Helkias would fashion the cross that would become a symbol of a new religion well after Chana's life. The infant would be set at the foot of the cross in gold.

Padre Sebastián had feared that the two donors would delay approval of the design, demanding that their own conceptions be heeded, but to his delight both Juan Antonio and Garci Borgia appeared highly impressed by the drawings Helkias submitted.

Within only a few weeks it became apparent to him that the priory's impending good fortune was not a secret. Someone -- Juan Antonio, Garci Borgia, or the Jew -- had boasted of the relic. Or perhaps someone in Rome had spoken unwisely; sometimes the Church was a village.

People in Toledo's religious community who had never noticed him now stared, but he noted that their glances contained hostility. Auxiliary Bishop Guillermo Ramero came to the priory and inspected its chapel, its kitchen, and the friars' cells.

'The Eucharist is the body of Christ,' he told Sebastián. 'What relic is more powerful than that?'

'None, Your Excellency,' Sebastián said meekly.

'If a relic of the Sacred Family is given to Toledo, it should be owned by the see and not by one of its subject institutions,' the bishop said.

This time Sebastián didn't reply but he met Ramero's glance squarely, all meekness gone, and the bishop snorted and led his retinue away.

Before Padre Sebastián could bring himself to share the momentous news with Fray Julio, the sacristan of the chapel learned of it from a cousin who was a priest in the diocesan Office of Worship. Soon it became obvious to Sebastián that everyone knew, including his own friars and novices.

Fray Julio's cousin said that the various orders were responding to the intelligence with preparations for drastic action. The Franciscans and the Benedictines each had forwarded strong messages of protest to Rome. The Cistercians, built upon worship of the Virgin, were furious that a relic of Her mother was to go to a priory of the Hieronymites, and had arranged for an advocate to plead their case in Rome.

Even within the Hieronymite order, it was hinted that so important a relic should not go to so humble a priory.

It was clear to Padre Sebastián and Fray Julio that if something should occur to halt delivery of the relic, the priory would be placed in an extremely precarious position, and the prior and the sacristan spent many hours kneeling together in prayer.

Yet finally, on a warm summer's day, a large, bearded man dressed in the poor clothing of a peón came to the Priory of the Assumption. He arrived at the serving of the sopa boba, which he accepted as eagerly as any of the other hungry indigents. When he had swallowed the last drop of the thin broth, he asked for Padre Sebastián by name, and when they were alone he identified himself as Padre Tullio Brea of the Holy See of Rome and extended the blessings of His Eminence Rodrigo Cardinal Lancol. From his ragged bag he took a small wooden box. When it was opened, Padre Sebastián found a highly scented wrapping of silk the color of blood, and within that was the piece of bone that had traveled so very far.

The Italian priest stayed with them only through the most exultant and grateful Vespers ever celebrated in the Priory of the Assumption. Evensong was scarcely over when, as unobtrusively as he had arrived, Padre Tullio took his departure into the night.

In the time that followed, Padre Sebastián thought wistfully of how carefree it must be to serve God by wandering the world in disguise. He admired the cleverness of sending so precious a prize with a solitary and humble messenger, and he sent word to the Jew Helkias, suggesting that when the reliquary was finished, it should be delivered by a single bearer, after darkness had fallen.

Helkias had concurred, sending forth his son as once God had done, and with the same result. The boy Meir was a Jew and thus could never enter Paradise, but Padre Sebastián prayed for his soul. The slaying and the theft revealed to him how beleaguered were the protectors of the relic, and he prayed, too, for the success of the physician he had sent out on God's errand.

3

A Christian Jew

The padre prior was the most dangerous of human beings, a wise man who also was a fool, Bernardo told himself moodily as he rode away. Bernardo Espina knew he was the least likely of men to learn anything from either Jews or Christians, because he was despised by the members of both religions.

Bernardo knew the history of the Espina family. It was legend that their first ancestor to settle on the Iberian Peninsula had been a priest in the Temple of Solomon. The Espinas and others had survived under the Visigothic kings and alternate Moorish and Christian conquerors. Always they had scrupulously followed the laws of the monarchy and the nation, as their rabbis directed.

Jews had risen to the highest stations of Spanish society. They had served the kings as viziers and they had thrived as physicians and diplomats, moneylenders and financiers, tax gatherers and merchants, farmers and artisans. At the same time, in almost every generation they had been slaughtered by mobs passively or actively encouraged by the Church.