eSefarad Noticias del Mundo Sefaradi
Last week we explained that in 1558 Doña Gracia Mendes offered to the Turkish Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent to rebuild the city of Tiberias, which was practically in ruins. The Christians did not live there nor pretend it, and the Muslims had no claim for it. Beyond the occasional presence of certain Bedouin nomads, Tiberias was a ghost town, in a total state of neglect, where chaos and vandalism reigned.
Doña Gracia, her nephew Yosef Nasí and Rabbi Yosef Ben Adrete, began to revitalize the city, to beautify it, to develop industries and to bring investors, to make Tiberias an autonomous city where Jews dispersed throughout the world could come and live in peace.
However, in 1564, when the wall was erected and the Yehudim began to return to Israel, suddenly the city of Tiberias, began to be claimed by Christians and Muslims.
As André Aelion Brooks explains in hor book on Doña Gracia Mendes, “The Woman Who Defied Kings”, the problem was not that Muslims and Christians suddenly fell in love with Tiberias. The problem was that “the Jews” were rebuilding it and planning to have an autonomous city-state there. As is the case today with Medinat Israel, the grievances of Israel’s neighbors are not political but religious in nature. Both Christianity and Islam consider themselves as the heirs of the Jewish People who should have disappeared long ago…. In the 1560’s a Muslim sheik began to spread the word that he had found an ancient prophecy where it was stated that if the Jews rebuilt Tiberias “our faith (the Muslim faith YB) will be lost and we will be found wanting” . And although the Sultan Suleiman, who was a great defender of the Muslim faith, had given his blessing for the establishment of the Jews to Tiberias, these malicious rumors were enough to inflame the mood of the local Muslim population and things began to become more difficult for the Jews who arrived there.
The Christian world saw with even less approval that the Jews planned to establish an independent city-state, much less in the “Holy Land”. For Christianity, which failed to explain theologically the stubborn survival of the Jewish people despite having done everything possible to avoid it, the exile of the Jewish people, and its status as a pariah and wandering nation, was the eternal divine punishment for the crime of “deicide” (killing of a god. sic!) committed by the Jews (sic!) in the times of Yeshu. Therefore, the idea of the return of the Jews to Israel and the establishment of their own state represent a theological nightmare that would shake the fundamental dogma of Christianity: the replacement theory. That is why in 1563, when the French consul of Constantinople learned of the plan to re-establish a Jewish State, he wrote to his superiors in alarm, saying (falsely) that Tiberias would be established as a city “exclusively” for Jews. This argument was false, and more importantly, incredibly cynical, since in the middle ages the Jews who did not convert were expelled from all the countries of Europe because “only Christians were allowed to live there.” Andrée Aelion writes that: “The idea that the Jews would regrouping as a nation, even an embryonic one, seemed to horrify the Christian world”..
Although Sultan Suleiman continued to support this project, the Jewish colony in Tiberias did not prosper in the long term. In 1565 Suleiman had too many problems related to his succession and in 1566 he passed away while in a military expedition to Hungary. Without the support of Suleiman and with the battle of the succession in full, the project of Tiberias was debilitated politically. And the political chaos in Constantinople was reflected quickly in Tiberias, where in spite of the walls, the vandalism of the Bedouin tribes and local Arabs was becoming more and more violent.
Dona Gracia, as we explained yesterday, had begun to build her house in Tiberias, but never reached Erets Israel. Perhaps because she was ill or perhaps because she thought that from Constantinople she could exert a greater influence to continue maintaining and reinforcing the incipient Jewish colony in Tiberias.
In 1569 Dona Gracia Mendes, now called by her original Jewish surname: “Nasí”, left this world at the age of 59.
I think it is a great historical injustice that the name, life and work of this incredible ESHET HAIL is so little known. Knowing her history, in my opinion, is not only important to honor her memory but mainly to learn from this virtuous woman how we should do our best efforts and use all our means and resources to help Am Israel in the best way possible. YEHI ZIKHRAH BARUKH May her memory be for us a model and inspiration!
Fuente: halakhaoftheday.org
