Andrée Aelion Brooks, - [St. Paul, Minnesota: Paragon Press, 2002]
A review by Steven Bowman, University of
Cincinnati
It was
somewhat symbolic that the first scholarly biography of Doña Gracia Nasi
appeared in 1948, the same year as the establishment of the State of Israel (see
below). Cecil Roth published two books that year on the House of Nasi, one on
Don Joseph, the Duke of Naxos, and the second on his more famous aunt, Doña
Gracia Nasi. Roth’s work was pione-ering in its treatment of Italian and Spanish
Jews, and for decades remained the only popular available treatments of the
subjects. Indeed his survey History of the Jews of Italy has not been
superseded, save for monographic treatments of specific periods. This curious
lack of interest in producing broad scholarly surveys for the mass market to
introduce it to Jewish History is a phenomenon that begs for an interpretation
or at least a serious examination. But there are many other lacunae in Jewish
studies, which deserve treatment. Perhaps recent studies of Cecil Roth’s career
might elucidate the mater.
Since Roth’s excursions into late Iberian history, there has been
considerable research into the phenomenon of the conversos and their
vicissitudes with particular emphasis on their 16th-century economic
activities, their religious and mys-tical interests, and their vast dispersion.
There has also been renewed interest in the Inquisition and its affects on this
schizophrenic class that lived in a dissimulated state of confusion between
public Catholicism and private Judaism. It might be useful one day to com-pare
this state of mentality to the Muslim phenomenon of takiye, which is
widespread, and reflects the privacy of true belief and practice as opposed to
public display.
Andrée Brooks has produced more than just a biography of “the
woman who defied kings” and “a Jewish leader during the Renaissance.” [Actually
she shows that she also defied queens and the Pope himself.] Rather she weaves
consi-derable new material into a wide-ranging survey of the world of the
conversos and its manifold economic and diplomatic activities. Fifty years after
Roth’s biography we can see how much scholarship has been devoted to this
fascinating transitional period and to the new breed of Jews produced by its
vicissitudes.
While the author indulges (occasionally excessively) in the dark
corners of human nature sullied by secularism and persecution (as recorded in
the Inquisitional and other Italian archives), she is careful to focus her main
theme on the woman. Andrée Brooks is a feminist activist of long experience and
an educator of children as well as college students. Hence her goal is to
reclaim Doña Gracia Nasi for the collective Jewish memory, and for the Sephardim
in particular, as a woman of valor, who had no Jewish peer in an era that
witnessed many powerful and influential women in the seats of power or in the
harems that influenced them. She was unique as an exceedingly wealthy converso
business-woman and banker, as a figure who frequented the Catholic courts of
Europe, and later as a Jew who enhanced the position of the Sephardim as a
leader of the former conversos in the Ottoman
Empire.
Her accomplishments were manifold, aside from her economic
success. She promoted publication of Jewish texts, including the Ferrara Bible
and the Constantinople Pentateuch (both recently reprinted in California).
Among her coterie of authors in her Italian salon were Samuel Usque, whose
Consolation for the Tribulations of Israel, is still useful reading, the
physician Amatus Lusitanus, the poet and novelist Alonso Nuñez de Reinoso, the
sharp-witted and mordant Ortensio Lando, who wrote a tribute to two contemporary
famous women, and other Christian, converso, and Jewish literateurs. She was the
guiding figure, according to Brooks, behind the boycott of Ancona, and this
despite the protest of the local Jews. Rather she was, according to Brooks,
determined to punish the city and the Pope for the auto-da-fé that crippled the
converso community there and thus violated the agreements that had allowed them
to practice Judaism. She also was the prime mover behind the Tiberias Project,
an interlude that has yet to be fully explored in its own right. Brooks expands
on older scholarship that claims she intended to found an autonomous home for
conversos in Eretz Israel. The opposite end of the scale suggests that she
wanted to retire to the hot baths of Tiberias to soothe the rheumatism of her
declining years.
In any event the project failed with her
demise.
The style of the book is fast-paced, perhaps too fast for the
sources on occasion. The book too is somewhat unbalanced and gives too much
space to the Inquisitional material and the fates of her converso coterie. We
also get lost in the complexities of the legal wrangling between her and her
vexatious sister over the family financial resources. In our age of Enron,
WorldCom, and other greedy corporations however, such ancient accounting
scandals might not be without interest. The author is a skilled journalist, and
not an historian, and so has to rely on a wide range of source materials (not
easy to digest) and a variety of historical interpretations (not always
sophisticated). [The avid reader might usefully compare Brook’s scholarly
biography with the fictional novel of a contemporary upper class Jewish heroine
by Jacqueline Park, The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (N.Y., 1997). As
in the Bible, the women of Jewish history provide more interesting subjects than
the men.].These caveats aside and they can be fixed by judicial editing for
the hopeful paperback version which will be more useful for college
undergraduates Brooks has provided an eminently readable and useful
introduction to a period and a heroine who have long awaited such a
treatment.