The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon

Thanks must first go to Abraham Vital, who generously offered me his home and, subsequently, his permission to work on Berekiah Zarco’s texts. I wish to express my appreciation, too, to his wife, Miriam Rosencrantz-Vital, who got me through many a late night with her Port wine and home-cooked couscous.

Thanks, too, to Isaac Silva Rosa, for encouraging me to take time off from my dissertation to work on this manuscript; Ruth Pinhel for her help with historical references; Ari Diaz-Lev and Carl Konstein for helping with Hebrew translations; and Joseph Amaro Marcus, an expert in Spanish and Portuguese kabbalah, for deciphering the undecipherable.

This book is published in the memory of Berekiah Zarco, his family and friends.

Preface

Grief was pressing hard at the tip of my reed pen when I first began recording our story. It was the Hebrew year of fifty-two sixty-seven, the Christian year of fifteen and seven.

Selfishly, I abandoned my narrative when God would not grace my soul with relief.

Today, twenty-three years after this feeble attempt to record my search for vengeance, I have again caressed open the pages of my manuscript. Why have I broken the bonds of silence?

Yesterday, around midday, there was a knock at the front door to our home here in Constantinople. I was the lone member of my family in the house and went to see who it was. A short young man with long black hair and dark, tired eyes, swathed in a handsome Iberian cloak of scarlet and green stripes, stood on our stoop. In clipped, hesitant tones, he asked in Portuguese, “Do I have the honor of addressing Master Berekiah Zarco?”

“Yes, my boy,” I answered. “Pray tell whom you might be.”

Bowing humbly, he replied, “Lourenco Paiva. I have just come from Lisbon and was hoping to find you.”

As I whispered his name to myself, I remembered him as the youngest son of an old friend, the Christian laundress to whom we’d given our house in Lisbon just before our flight from that benighted city more than two decades before. I waved away his continuing introduction as unnecessary and shepherded him into our kitchen. We sat at benches by a window giving out on a circle of lavender and myrtle bushes in our garden. When I enquired about his mother, I was saddened to hear that she had recently been called to God. In somber but proud tones, he eulogized her for a time. Afterward, it was a delight to share a small carafe of Anatolian wine, to talk of his sea voyage from Portugal and his first, astonished impressions of the Turkish capital. My ease left me unprepared for what was to follow, however; when I asked him why I’d been granted the pleasure of his visit, he pulled from his cloak two iron keys dangling from a silver chain. Immediately, a shiver of dread snaked up my spine. Before I could speak, he showed me the eager smile of a youth presenting a gift to an elder and pressed the keys into my hand. He said, “Should you desire to return, Master Berekiah, your house in Lisbon awaits you.”

I reached out to his arm to steady myself; my heart was drumming the single word homeland. As the teeth of the keys began biting into the fist I had formed around them, I caressed open my fingers and leaned down to sniff the old-coin scent of the metal. Memories of serpentine streets and olive trees swept me to my feet. The hairs of my arms and neck stood on end. A door opened inside me, and a vision entered: I was standing just outside the iron gate to the courtyard at the back of our old home in the Alfama district of Lisbon. Framed inside the gate’s arch and standing at the center of the courtyard was Uncle Abraham, my spiritual master. Draped in his vermilion travel robe of English wool, he was picking lemons from our tree, humming contentedly to himself. His dark skin, the color of cinnamon, was lit gold, as if by the light which heralds sunset, and his wild crest of silver hair and tufted eyebrows shimmered with magical potential. Sensing my presence, he ceased his melody, turned with a smile of welcome and shuffled closer to me with the duck-like walk he normally only adopted in synagogues. His warm green eyes, opened wide, seemed to embrace me. With an amused twist to his lips, he began undoing the purple sash to his robe as he walked, let the garment slip away onto the slate paving stones of the courtyard. Underneath, he was naked except for a prayer shawl over his shoulders. As he continued to approach me, rays of light began issuing forth from his body. So bright became his form that my eyes began to tear. When a first drop slipped salty into the corner of my mouth, he stopped and called to me using my older brother’s name: “Mordecai! So you have finally heeded my prayers!” His face was framed now by an aura of white flame. With a solemn nod, as if he were passing on a verse of ancient wisdom, he tossed me a lemon. I caught it. Yet when I looked down upon the fruit, I found instead tarnished Portuguese letters knotted  into a chain. They read: as nossas andorinhas ainda estao nas maos do farao—our swallows are still abandoned to Pharaoh. As my gaze passed over these words of New Christian code a second time, they lifted into the air, then broke with a tinkling sound.

I found myself looking once again upon the keys. Warm tears were clouding my eyesight. The door upon my vision had closed.

Lourenco was gripping my shoulders, his face pale and panicked. Reassuring words somehow found their way to my lips.

To understand the revelation which then came to me, the Hebrew words mesirat nefesh must be explained. They mean, of course, the willingness to sacrifice oneself. And their occult power resides in the tradition among some kabbalists to risk even a journey to hell for a goal which will not only help to heal our ailing world but also effect reparations inside God’s Upper Realms.

With the keys throbbing in my hand, I began to understand for the first time the sacrifice Uncle Abraham had made, how the concept of mesirat nefesh had given his heartbeat its passionate but fragile rhythm. And for reasons that will become clear in the telling of our tale, I saw, too, that my vision had been a summons from him to return to Portugal in order to fulfill the destiny he’d prepared for me long ago—a destiny I’d not followed, never before even understood.

I began to see, as well, that in returning to Lisbon I would have the chance to make up for my deviation from destiny, to live up to my pledge of mesirat nefesh. For the journey back will surely put my life at risk. With Spain in the grip of the Inquisition and Portugal drawing ever closer to its flames, my return may well mean that my time with my wife, Letica, and children, Zuli and Ari, has come to an end.

So it is with them in mind that I have again picked up my pen. I would like for each member of my family to read of my reasons for leaving; and of the events of twenty-four years ago which forced these reasons into my heart. The story of the murder which darkened our lives forever and my hunt for the mysterious killer is too long and complex to be heard from my lips. And I would not wish to risk leaving anything unsaid.

I write, too, in order to clear the cold air of secrecy from our home, so that Zuli and Ari may finally understand my vague responses when, as children and adolescents, they asked of the events which preceded my escape from Lisbon. It has not been easy for them having a father with a past clothed in sordid speculation by many in our immigrant Jewish community. With tears in their eyes and their hands balled into white-knuckled fists, they have heard me called a murderer and heretic. How many times, too, has my wife suffered rumors that I was seduced in Lisbon by Lilith in the guise of a Castilian noblewoman, that even today this demoness owns my heart?

A murderer, yes. I admit to having slain one man and contracted to end the life of another. My children will read of the circumstances and form their own judgments. They are old enough now to know everything. A heretic, I think not. But if I am, then it was the events which I will shortly describe that forced the arrows of heresy into my flesh. As for my heart, I leave it for my loved ones to name its governess. May truth emerge from these pages without fear, like the trumpeting call of a shofar welcoming Rosh Hashanah. And may I, too, finally free myself of my last delusions and from the vestiges of the mask I donned to hide my Judaism as a boy. Yes, I expect to learn much about myself as my pen follows my remembrances; when memory is allowed free reign to probe the past, does it not always gift us with self-knowledge?

Of course, guilt for my ignorance and failings—and for my more terrible sins—has accompanied me into exile in Constantinople, clings to me even now. Some would say it is even the deepest of my motivations. Yet as I gift Hebrew letters onto this polished sheepskin, I realize that I am most inspired by the chance to speak across a span of decades to still others as yet unnamed—my unborn grandchildren and those of my sister, Cinfa. To all our descendents, I say: read this story and you will know why your ancestors left Portugal; the great sacrifice my master made for you; what happened to the Jews of Lisbon when this century possessed but six Christian years. To