Passover 2024 articles

---

Celebrating freedom under captivity  in Portugal, c. 1500 

 R. Shlomo Pereira
Chabad of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia shlomo@chabadofva.org
Passover, the Festival of Freedom, in 1497 and 1506, was marked in Portugal by serious tragedies for the Jewish people. In 1497, Jews suffered spiritual slaughter through kidnapping and forced conversion of children. In 1506, Jews suffered physical slaughter during the Lisbon Pogrom. Where do Jews find the reserve of strength to withstand these challenges to the point of celebrating freedom even under captivity?
I. Passover - celebrating freedom
On Passover, Jews have, throughout time and space, celebrated freedom. To this effect, we retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt and the deliverance of the Jewish people from Egyptian slavery. 
More importantly, Jews were now free to follow the mission G-d was to give them 50 days later at Sinai. As such, Passover also assumes the role of the origin story for the Jewish people. It marks the formal beginning of a relationship between the Jews as a people and G-d.
It is, then, hardly surprising that Passover is arguably the most observed holiday among Jews across the whole spectrum of Jewish observance and affiliation.
Yet, we have often been confronted in Jewish history with times and places in which many of us were not free to celebrate our freedom. At the very moment we were supposed to celebrate freedom, we were confronted with spiritual or physical captivity.
We focus here on two such moments in Jewish history: Passover in Portugal, first in 1497 and then in 1506. 
For context, in Portugal in the 1490s, there were about 200,000 Jews in a population of just over a million. Furthermore,  significantly more than half of these Jews were refugees from the Expulsion from Spain in 1492. The Jews of Portugal at the time were arguably the cream of the crop, but also all that was left of Iberian Jewry.
II. Passover, 1497
Passover in 1497 would always be a difficult one for the Jews of Portugal. But they did not anticipate how heartbreaking it would be. 
The Decree of Expulsion of the Jews from Portugal had been enacted on December 5, 1496, to take effect by the end of October 1497. 
On December 15, 1496, laws were enacted meant to immediately start dismantling Jewish communal institutions, religious institutions such as synagogues and schools, and social institutions such as charities, hospitals, and even cemeteries. Communal property and its contents, including Hebrew books, were to be confiscated. Jewish life and organization at a communal level was to end immediately. 
At about the same time, and although the specifics of the legislation and its date are not known, ritual objects and Hebrew books in the private possession of individual Jews were systematically confiscated by the authorities. 
This was, therefore, a community under complete spiritual siege and plagued by a deep uncertainty about the future. But the worst was yet to come. 
Unbeknownst to the Jews of Portugal, these decrees were followed by deliberations on the best strategies to persuade them or, if need be, to force them to convert to Christianity.   
By late February, it was decreed that on March 26, 1497, Easter Sunday, all Jewish children under age 14 would be forcibly taken away from their families and given to families throughout the country for adoption to be raised as Christians. The hope was that by converting the children, the parents would decide to stay and convert to avoid expulsion. 
As it turned out, out of fear that Jews could become aware of the plan and flee, the orders were anticipated in about one week to be carried starting on Saturday, March 15, 1497. 
It was the 14th of Nissan, it was Shabbat HaGadol, and the first Seder would take place that evening after Shabbat. What was already a subdued celebration soon became a nightmare of indescribably brutal pain.
As the enforcement of these decrees came into full swing, zealotry led enforcers to raise the age of the children to be kidnapped, in some cases to 23 years old. As to the Jews, the reactions ranged from sheer impotence to dire despondency to extreme desperation as children were violently taken away from their parents. Multiple cases are recorded of families committing collective suicide in the face of a situation they could not endure.
Christian chronicles of the events, often hardly sympathetic towards the Jews, cannot avoid describing these horrors as such. Jewish chronicles of the events describe families pathetically searching for their children in convents and parents who eventually had to make the heartbreaking decision of fleeing the country, leaving their children behind, and never seeing them again.
Passover of 1497 in Portugal was a time of widespread spiritual slaughter. At this stage, however, Judaism was the target for elimination, not individual Jews. 
III. Passover, 1506
In 1506, Passover for the Jews of Portugal would always have been very dangerous and on the verge of being impossible to observe. But they did not anticipate how bloody it would be. 
As Passover 1506 approached, the situation had severely deteriorated for the Jews of Portugal, compared to Passover 1497. By the end of October, 1497, most Jews had been forcibly baptized. A small number were killed or died for the sanctification of the name. An even smaller number managed to escape.
The newly baptized Jews, now officially referred to as New Christians, found themselves in uncharted waters. They were forced to adopt a religion they were not familiar with and to abandon the faith that defined them. Leaving Portugal was not an option, either because of a lack of resources or because leaving the country was forbidden and subject to severe penalties. 
The glimmer of hope remaining came from royal decrees promising protection for a couple of decades for their lapses in their Christian observance and relapses into Jewish practices.
And this is where the situation stood in 1506. The large contingent of Jews who had been forcibly baptized less than ten years before were now New Christians struggling to either retain whatever they could of their faith or assimilate. 
Either way, they faced enormous resentment and popular resistance to integrate into the general society. They were perceived as ignorant about the basics of their new religion and as lacking a modicum of devotion in its observance. In fact, they seemed to continue observing some of their Jewish practices with impunity. 
To make matters worse, as nominal Christians, they now had unimpeded access to all activities and positions in society. The fact that they were now rising to prominence in society was just a manifestation of their opportunism and hypocrisy. They were irredeemable. 
April 19, 1506, was Easter Sunday. In addition to the typical frenzy against the Christ-killers coming with the Christian Holy Week, the New Christians were now being blamed for the rather adverse economic conditions prevalent in the country and the deadly plagues raging the land. What else could be causing these calamities but the hypocrisy of the New Christians?     
The Passover holiday had finished just a couple of days before. During Passover, a number of New Christians were accused of holding seders and otherwise trying to observe Passover. Despite the royal protections, popular indignation led to arrests, but to the chagrin of many, by Easter Sunday, they had all been released. 
And then, the situation went out of control. During the celebration in a church in downtown Lisbon, what the Old Christians considered a miraculous happening was dismissed by some New Christians as merely a natural phenomenon. 
This was the spark that ignited a pogrom. Starting in the church itself, it quickly spread to the New Christian residential areas and the rest of the city. After five days, when the crown regained control of the situation, 4,000 Jews/New Christians had been tortured and murdered by the mobs. Countless Jewish/New Christian property had been destroyed or confiscated.
Passover of 1506 in Portugal was immediately followed by widespread physical slaughter. At this stage, Judaism was no longer the target for elimination. Individual Jews were now the target. 
IV. The strength that Passover brings
One might wonder where these Jews of Portugal, as many Jews under similar circumstances in other places and times, found the strength even to attempt to celebrate Passover, the strength to celebrate freedom under captivity.
Interestingly enough, the inner source of our strength comes from Passover itself. 
Passover is not just about the events of the past, the Exodus from Egypt. Passover is not just about freedom from slavery. It is about Jews internalizing the sense of peoplehood with a shared mission and destiny. It is about internalizing freedom from human masters as an essential state of mind. 
Ultimately, Passover is about internalizing that time is not static and that there is an inexorable progression in the direction of a Final Redemption that is foreshadowed by the Redemption from Egypt. 
And this is why we conclude the Seders with a promising and hopeful utterance, a message of the inevitably of hope regardless of the present circumstances:  "Next Year in Jerusalem."
NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM!

 Rabbi Shlomo Pereira is the director of adult education at the  Chabad of Virginia, Richmond. He can be reached at shlomo@ chabadofva.org.