Inside the Tudor court, the king and queen separately seek Vives's assistance to support their opposed demands. He must betray one to help the other, knowing his decision could cost him his life. Whom will he choose? Will his wily skills allow him to manipulate them both? Not only his survival but that of his family and his entire people hang in the balance.
But first, a little background ....
The Jews In England:
There were individual Jews living in England in Roman and Anglo-Saxon times (80-1066 A.D.), but not an organized community. When William the Conqueror arrived in England in 1066, he encouraged Jewish merchants and artisans from northern France to move to England. One of the oldest Jewish communities in England was in Oxford, where Jews had begun to settle as early as 1075. Jews still faced persecution and were not fully protected by the Crown. They were still the targets of attacks on themselves, their businesses, their communities. The 13th century witness rampant anti-semitism.
By 1290 the inevitable happened when Edward I - who had found an alternative source of finance in the Italian merchants known as the "pope's usurers" - banished the Jews from England. England was the first European country to do so but in the following centuries France, Spain, Portugal and others would follow suit.
A small number remained, either by converting to Christianity or concealing their identity and religion. These converts were know as crypto-Christian or marranos. It was documented from Inquisition records that many still (secretly) practised their beliefs. The problem with the records of English Jewish converts to Christianity from the pre-Expulsion period is that their "former" Jewish names were rarely, if ever, recorded. A census of Oxford Jewish converts from the year 1247 survives and, typically, records only their new "Christian" names without any reference to their previous lifelong Jewish identity.
Small communities of Spanish and Portuguese conversos in London and Bristol were tolerated by both Henry VIII and Edward VI. Many were required to reside in the Domus Conversorum, or "House of Converts". Interestingly, Registers of the inmates of the London Domus Conversoruum from 1331 to 1608 survive, but only list forty eight Jewish individuals (38 men and 10 women) - over this entire period of 277 years.
Fast forward a couple of hundred years and we find Jews prominent at the Tudor and Elizabethan courts. Many of the foreign musicians at this time, notably the Lupos and Bassanos, were most probably also originally or covertly Jewish, brought over from Italy. Others might be found teaching Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge, or helping Bodley with the Hebrew catalogue at the University Library. In fact, Henry VIII openly welcomed Jewish Hebrew scholars who he hoped would help him find the Biblical loophole through which he could extricate himself from his marital complications. (see Henry VIII & the Oxford Hebraists by Rabbi Eli, Oxford University Chabad Society)
Years later, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a converso, Hector Nunes was celebrated for being the first to give warning of he impending Spanish Armada. And shortly after, a prominant Jew and converso, Roderigo Lopez, Elizabeth I’s personal physician, was tortured, then drawn and quartered in 1594 for allegedly conspiring to poison the Queen. As a result, many Jews fled to the Low Countries, often disguised as Catholics.
While the overwhelming majority of Elizabethans had never knowingly met a Jew, by the end of the 16th century, interactions between Jews and English were becoming more frequent, especially abroad, in Morocco and Turkey as well as in Antwerp, Amsterdam and Venice, where Jewish communities were flourishing. These encounters gradually called into question many of the stereotypes that had prevailed in an England largely free of Jews for 300 years.
So, for more than 300 years no Jew, officially, existed in the country. It was not until Charles I was beheaded that the Jews felt safe to return. In 1655, the position of Jews in England was transformed when Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel of Amsterdam delivered his famous petition to the Council of State, requesting their readmission. Oliver Cromwell supported the petition and established that no actual law forbade readmission, thus paving the way for Jews to return to the country, a gradula process which took many years.
Jews In The Low Countries (Belgium, Flanders, the Netherlands)
In the 13th and 14th centuries, Jews settled in the Low Countries after being expelled from England and France, where they were received and permitted to settle, providing services, paying taxes and under the protection of the law.
After the initial persecutions of the 14th century, another wave of immigration to Belgium came in the 15th century from Spain and Portugal, fleeing the Spanish Inquisition with Antwerp hosting the largest community. Whilst many Jews still remained in the Iberian peninsula under constant suspicion and fear of denunciation, practicing either their new religion in public and Judaism in secret, or both, the newly independent and tolerant Dutch provinces of the Low Countries provided more favourable conditions for observant Jews to establish a community, and to practice their religion openly. They also brought navigation knowledge and techniques from Portugal, which enabled the Netherlands to start competing in overseas trade with the Spanish and Portuguese colonies.
In England he attended the court of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and was tutor to their daughter, Mary. He also held a lectureship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and associated with English humanists such as Thomas Linacre and Thomas More (though to what extent this intimate familial relationship was I am unsure). In 1528 he lost the favor of Henry VIII when he supported Catherine of Aragon in the matter of the divorce. He was placed under house arrest for a time, before being allowed to return to Bruges. The last twelve years of Vives’ life were his most productive, and it was in this period that he published several of the works for which he is best known today.
Juan Luis Vives was a towering figure of the Renaissance, a man of immense learning, integrity, and originality, yet he still remains very little known, even to the scholarly world. His conception of Christianity was developed in a posthumous and influential treatise De veritate fidei Christianae. Among Vives’s last works was a handbook of private prayers intended for the laity.
This is the period we as readers are interested in - Vives time in Bruges, Louvain and England - the period in which he wrote his diaries, and of his ongoing battles with his personal and religious identities - he was the son of coversos and was born into Christianity - wherein he spent much time trying to reconcile these two facets of his identity, both privately and publicly. Vives is portrayed as a tortured soul, pouring out his religious frustrations onto the pages of his (not so secret) diary. He is a deeply flawed man, walking a political tightrope who is clearly out of his depth, and somewhat naive in his approach to the machinations of those around him. The reader is also left wondering whether Vives is mourning not only the loss of his family (at the hands of the Inquisition) but also his religious identity - is he a Jew or Christian?
This is a fascinating and well researched work into a man who I would not hesitate to say is barely known. Though a work of fiction, author Tim Darcy Ellis peppers the diary pages with real historical figures and events, giving that authenticity that readers love. I would have liked to have known more about Vives actions in England toward bringing about an open Jewish settlement, however I am guessing documentation on this aspect is few and far between. Overall, an enjoyable read on a less known figure.
read more here:
- Letters of Juan Luis Vivies at the Bodleian
- Juan Luis Vives on Poor Relief
- Church, Conversion & Religion by Kenneth Stow
- Chapter 2. A short history of the Conversos from The Long Journey of Gracia Mendes by Marianna D. Birnbaum
- Interfaith Encounters between Jews and Christians in the Early Modern Period and Beyond by Daniel Jütte
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