ABSTRACT
These words of Ytzhak ’Aqedat in the book Devarim Ki Tavo have been cited many times by investigators of Jewish history. The long and often tormented history of the Jews forcibly converted to Christianity seems to convey a special prophetic value on these words; and it is known that Judaism understands more about prophecies than practically any other religion. However, I have begun with this quotation to propose a slightly different reading. In my opinion, these words were anything but prophetic, at least from the point of view of their immediate historical context. In fact, they were written in Venice, one of the few cities in the West which offered a haven for Sephardim who had refused to convert to Christianity and had abandoned their territory of Sepharad, the Iberian peninsula; on the other hand, these words were written around 1573, after the experience of several generations of Sephardic men and women who, after converting to Christianity, had tried to become integrated into gentile society, and when many of them had suffered the consequences of this attempt, while others had attained their objective. Thus, on the one hand, we can consider that, without a doubt, Ytzhak wanted to warn his co-religionists that it would be of no use to ‘change their way of life’, that they would always continue to be stigmatized and maltreated by the gentiles, that integration was a chimera, and that the
1 Ytzhak ’Aqedat, Devarim Ki Tavo (Venice, 1573), p. 262a; cited by H. Graetz, (Berling: Arani-Verlag, 1998), vol. 8, p. 317; also in Haim Beinart,
persecutions of the Inquisition seemed to be an excellent argument in its favour; but, on the other hand, that insistent warning, both by him and by other Jewish writers of his day, was perhaps because it was exactly during those years in the last third of the sixteenth century that integration into Christian society had taken place irreversibly in many cases, the inquisitorial persecutions – after decades of terrible repression – had been considerably decreasing for years, and that relative success was the real cause for concern on the part of Jewish thinkers who feared that it might have destructive effects on the clusters of crypto-Jews who managed to stay on within the frontier of the kingdoms of the Iberian peninsula, and even on the members of the Sephardic communities in exile.
