All language subtitles for BBC.The.Story.of.the.Jews.2of5.Among.Believers.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.org

In the summer of 1476
in La Coruna, Spain,

the scribe Moses ibn Zabara

and the illuminator
Joseph ibn Hayyim

put the last touches
to a masterpiece.

One of the most exquisitely
beautiful books ever made.

It's a Hebrew Bible.

But not the austere black and white
kind I grew up with.

This is a kingdom
of glowing colour -

lapis lazuli blue,
gold, rose carnation,

and vermilion.

A book so enticing
you want to live inside its pages.

And you wouldn't be
short of company.

There's Jonah and his whale.

King David on his throne.

There are musical monkeys...

fire-breathing dragons...

..battling cats.

And on the last page,
a contortion of naked figures,

which make up the Hebrew characters
of the illuminator's name.

It's a Bible overflowing with life.

But just 16 years
after the Coruna Bible was finished,

the Jewish world that had made it

was brutally snuffed out
by royal decree.

In 1492, all Jews were expelled
from Christian Spain.

Isaac de Braga, the Bible's owner,

and hundreds of thousands like him
were sent packing

from a country where they had lived
for over 1,000 years.

Reduced at a royal hand clap
to destitute wanderers.

Perhaps, in his wanderings,
Don Isaac turned to this page,

for, in times of trouble,

Jews recite the affirmation
of God's uniqueness,

the Shema.

"Shema Yisrael adonai eloheinu
adonai echad."

"Hear, o Israel, the Lord our God,
the Lord is one."

It was the Jews who had first
given the idea of one God

to a pagan world
that believed in many.

The idea was taken up by others.

First, Christians...

and then Muslims.

New religions that saw Judaism
as an unwanted grandpa religion,

too old, too obstinate in its ways

to accept a new messiah
or a new prophet.

And while the followers of Christ
and Muhammad would have the force

of military empires behind them,

it was the fate of the Jews
to be exiles

in the lands of the cross
and the crescent,

struggling to find a foothold
on the narrowing ground

between grudging toleration
and murderous hostility.

It's a familiar Jewish story,
but it's not the only one.

Look at this Bible again.

Some of its most beautiful pages
come spontaneously

from Muslim patterning,

from the human drama
of Christianity,

even from the mythic bestiary
of the ancient pagan world.

Like Jewish experience itself,

it's a weave of different threads.

What this Bible says to me
is that even amidst
torture and grief,

even on the eve of destruction,

Jews took to heart
what's on this page -

a verse from
the Book of Deuteronomy,

"I have set before you life
and death, blessing and a curse.

"Therefore choose life."

This is the story of how Jews lived
amidst Muslims and Christians,

and how they tried to stay Jewish
by opting for life.

RECITES PRAYER

Every year, on the fast day
of Tisha B'Av,

Jews around the world
dim the lights,

light candles and mourn the loss
of their high temple with prayers,

tears and lamentations.

2,000 years ago, Roman soldiers
destroyed the temple in Jerusalem,

the heart of Jewish worship,
teaching and life.

In the wake of the calamity,
the Jews were banned from Jerusalem,

and displaced from Judea,

severing the link between a people
and their ancient sacred capital.

A Judaism stripped of its temple
should have withered away
and perished,

but Judaism survived.

How?

By setting down rules for living

that would allow Jews
to keep their identity intact

in the often hostile world
beyond Jerusalem.

This is Sepphoris
in the heart of Galilee,

one of the places where
the bold reinvention

of an ancient people took place.

It might look Roman but, in fact,
this was a Jewish town.

And around every corner,
you would have come across buildings

that were giving Judaism
its new lease of life

in the post-temple world.

The synagogue.

And this is what
that new Judaism looked like

in those early centuries.

The temple is still here,

but it's a poignant memory
depicted in mosaic tiles

surrounded by the objects
of temple worship.

The menorah ready to be lit.

The bull waiting for sacrifice.

The basket of fruit
about to be offered to God.

The Jews would never let go
of these memories,

but this was far more than
a place of longing and regret.

Just look at the zodiac that
dominates the centre of the floor

with its frankly pagan imagery.

Beautifully dressed calendar girls
representing the seasons.

Wintry Tevet.

Blooming, fertile Nisan for spring.

Clearly, the Jews of Sepphoris
chose to live life

in the here and now.

But if you're thinking, well,

this must have been
a pretty relaxed place

where liberal laid-back rabbis
would wink at a picture or two,

you'd be absolutely wrong,

because Sepphoris was a place
of intense devotion and study,

where every religious discussion
came back to the critical issue

of how to be Jewish
and how to stay Jewish.

Leading the discussion
were the Rabbis,

the teachers with
one eye on the past

with its pious veneration
of the laws

contained within the Hebrew Bible.

And one eye on the present day,

where those laws had somehow
to be honoured

without the institution
that once supported them.

When the vast and magnificent temple
in Jerusalem went,

it was replaced by
an equally vast edifice of words.

In a breathtaking decision,
the Rabbis decided

that the words of the Torah,
the Bible law,

were not enough to fill the void,

and that they needed supplementing
with the oral tradition

which would henceforth have
the status of law.

This work was called the Mishna
and it was begun here at Sepphoris.

The Mishna attempted
to catalogue systematically

the commandments that are scattered
throughout the Torah,

and to record the many
oral interpretations

that had clustered around them.

The authors of the Mishna aimed
to cover everything in Jewish life,

from circumcision to funerals.

And unlike the Torah, their work
was helpfully arranged in subjects.

If you wanted to know about divorce,

you went to the book called
Women - Nashim.

If you wanted to know which crops
to sow and harvest,

you went to Zaraim - Seeds.

And if you wanted to know
what not to do on the Sabbath,

they offered 39 varieties
of prohibition

in the chapter on the Sabbath.

Thinking of tearing something?
Don't do it.

Thinking of curing a hide?
Absolutely don't do it.

Thinking of lighting a fire?
Don't even think about that.

And the Mishna was just the start of
what, over the next four centuries,

would expand into the Talmud.

That endless hypertext made up of
the voices of hundreds of rabbis...

..all circling obsessively
around the central dilemma
of post-temple Judaism -

how to stay Jewish
in a non-Jewish world.

Ever wonder why Jews
are so argumentative?

Because it is in fact
part of our religion.

This is my old friend
Leon Wieseltier,

someone with whom I've had my fair
share of arguments over the years.

But we both agree that the Talmud
would become the foundation stone

for the rebuilding
of Jewish life in exile.

The fact is that this became the
durable, stable, tenacious tradition

of people who lived in many places
and were often on the move.

It's suitcase-ready.
That's right, it's suitcase-ready.

You see rabbis sometimes who don't
even share the same century

arguing among themselves.
Absolutely.

Here you have the commentaries

that surround the text of the Mishna
and the Talmud - 11th-century France,

12th- and 13th-century France,

11th-century Tunisia.

The interpretation never ends.

Nothing ever gets fixed,
I mean, that's, you know...

And it never gets frozen.

Remember, this civilisation
that was based on the law
that was established in Talmud

would have disappeared long ago
if it had not learned
to adapt to circumstances.

So it has a kind of organic quality.

It is deeply organic.
Enduring, adapting...

But it adapted in ways that would
not damage its own integrity.

It was written for an endless future.
It was created for an endless future.

One of the places where that future
unfolded was in ancient Rome,

the capital city of the empire

that had torn the heart
out of Jewish life.

But like the Jews of Sapphoris,
the Jews of Rome chose life.

How do we know?

Well, to answer that question, you
have to come to a place of death.

'This is an underground cemetery

'dating from around
the 3rd century AD.

'When it was discovered,

'it was assumed that these were
early Christian catacombs.

'Until this was found.

'A Jewish menorah.'

And that is a powerful
eternal symbol.

And unmistakable, very simple.

'With my guide, Elsa Laurenzi,
I explored this maze of tunnel tombs

'where all kinds of Jews
were buried.

'Rich, poor, young and old.'

Multicoloured stripe,

that's beautiful,
like representations of the temple.

'The deeper we went,
the further from the daylight,

'the more startling
the catacombs became.

'We found date palms -
a Jewish symbol of resurrection.

'Peacocks - symbols of creation.

'Flying horses,

'and what looked to me
very much like Cupids.'

There's an old tradition in Judaism
of describing the afterlife

as a Gan Eden -
a Garden of Eden, a paradise garden,

and this place teems with nature.

My mother used to say, "I'm going to
the paradise garden one day."

And so the Jews
in this subterranean world

dwelt in that paradise garden.

They had no sense at all that
there was any danger any time soon,

that they were going to be
kicked out of a common paradise.

Above ground, Rome was changing.

A pagan empire
with its belief in many gods

was transformed
into a Christian one...

..with the conversion of an emperor,
Constantine,

in the fourth century AD.

For the Jews under Roman rule,
life was about to change.

This is one of the oldest
Christian churches in Rome.

It was built as a mausoleum
for Constantine's daughter,
Constantina -

Santa Costanza as she became.

Its massive splendour is the measure
of how far Christianity had come

between Constantine's conversion
and Constantina's death.

From tolerated sect
on the periphery of empire...

..to state religion
at its very heart.

The fourth-century mosaics revel
in the power of that transformation.

Christ appears as a youthful god
emperor with lustrous golden tresses

and silken robes.

But to his right is the man who,

for the Jewish story at least,
really matters -

St Paul.

Born a Jew, like his saviour,
was Paul, who within a few years
of Jesus's death

began the process
of liberating Christianity

from the chains of Jewish ritual.

Christianity was either universal
or it was nothing.

So Paul aggressively de-Judaises
the Christian message

and there was no surer way
of doing that

than insisting on
the divinity of Jesus.

That violated the first supreme
principle of Judaism,

which was the indivisible
oneness of God - echad.

Two, Father and Son,
had Jews scratching their beards.

Three, the Holy Spirit.

Why not five?

And it was Paul who repeated
the sinister notes

sounded in the early
Christian gospels.

The Jews as Christ killers,

crying out before
Jesus's crucifixion,

"His blood be on us
and on our children."

And where Paul went, cruder,
fiercer Church fathers followed.

Like the Syrian Bishop of Antioch,
John Chrysostom,

aka Golden Mouth.

Chrysostom was bent on
making it impossible

for Jews and Christians
to live together.

So in his sermons, the Jews became
people who consorted with devils,

demons dancing in the synagogue.

And they themselves
were inhuman monsters

who - in his words - sacrificed
their sons and daughters to devils,

outraging nature,
worse than wild beasts.

There was a reason
for Chrysostom's hostility.

His flock was in the infuriating
habit of visiting synagogues

to be enthralled by Jewish sermons,

seeking out Jews to cure their ills
and bless their crops.

Obviously, coexistence
with these Christ-killing,

child-killing devil people
was out of the question.

For Chrysostom,
only one conclusion was possible -

physically avoid these people
as you would a leper,

shun them like a walking sickness.

Within a generation
of Golden Mouth's death,

his fulminations had become
official imperial policy.

Jews were excluded
from all public employment.

It became illegal
to build new synagogues,

and they were ultimately forbidden
from assembling in public at all.

The Mishna even became
a banned book.

The Christian empire was pushing
the Jews into the shadows.

But there were places
in the medieval world

where Jews could live in the light.

In our own age of bitter hatreds,
it's not so easy to believe,

but over 1,000 years ago,
Cairo was home

to one of the most thriving
Jewish communities in the world.

And that story was repeated
across the Eastern Mediterranean

and in Arabia itself.

The birthplace of a powerful
new monotheistic faith -

Islam.

MAN: Allahu Akhbar...

With no accusation of Christ-killing
to contend with,

Jews under Islam were spared

the demonisation they suffered
in Christendom.

According to later Islamic sources,

there seems to have been
an early moment

when Jews and Muslims
might have been

part of a common
community of believers.

In the document of the Ummah,

it was said that Jews
have their religious law

and Muslims have
their religious law.

And many of the practices
of the new religion

drew on those of the old.

In one of the first mosques
ever built, in the city of Medina,

the direction of prayer indicated
by the qibla, or the prayer niche,

was towards the holy city
of Jerusalem.

CHANTING

The Jews had been in Medina
for centuries

before the arrival of Islam.

They ran the city's main market
as they did in many Arabian towns.

They spoke Arabic

and appeared to have used
the Arabic name for God - Allah.

But the Jews in Medina
simply could not accept Muhammad

as a new prophet of God.

Their religion insisted that
the age of prophets was over,

that God no longer spoke
directly to man.

The Jews turned bitterly
and publicly critical,

and were accused of treason.

Two Jewish tribes
were exiled from Medina

and hundreds
of Jewish men massacred,

their women and children enslaved.

But the breathtaking success
of the Arab conquest

in the decades following
the death of Muhammad

transformed the antagonism
of a rival

into the lofty stance of a victor.

The dominion of the faithful
would soon spread all the way

from Spain to Afghanistan.

Secure within the borders
of their empire,

Muslims treated Jews
and Christians as dhimmis -

tolerated inferiors.

Jews and Christians couldn't
build synagogues or churches

higher than mosques.
They couldn't ride horses -

very important matter of dignity
in the Middle Ages.

They could ride donkeys,
but only side-saddle, like women.

And it was under Islam

that distinctions of religion
were defined by dress.

The yellow badge, the yellow hat,
the yellow coat

first happened under Islam.

And given the kind of conditions
in the Middle Ages,

most dangerously of all,

they were not allowed to carry
any sort of weapons,

which meant that Jews and Christians

were open and vulnerable
to harassment and assault.

All the same, this was
a whole lot better for the Jews

than being treated
as a demon in human guise,

a kind of walking infection,
by Christendom.

Which is why,
during the Islamic Middle Ages,

over 90% of all Jews lived,
and often flourished and prospered,

in the Islamic world.

We might never have known the truth

about the lives of Jews
under medieval Islam

had it not been for Scottish twins
Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson,

who were swept up in the Victorian
craze for the Middle East.

Nosing around the markets
of Cairo one day,

these amateur historians came across
some decrepit-looking documents

which aroused their curiosity.

Their friend, the Cambridge scholar
Solomon Schechter,

identified one of their finds

as a fragment of the Hebrew
Book of Ecclesiasticus.

Hearing that the source
of those documents

was the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo,

Schechter came here eager for more.

And he got far more
than he bargained for.

Over 300,000 documents found
in the synagogue's genizah,

or store room,
which revealed in rich detail

the story of everyday Jewish life
at the heart of medieval Islam.

This is the place
more than any other I know

that testifies to the Jewish
compulsion to preserve the word.

By Jewish law and tradition,
any document bearing the name of God

could not be shredded or burnt
or destroyed in any way.

It had to be allowed
to decompose slowly,

so up there in the genizah it went.

But the Jews of Cairo were
even more compulsive than that,

because they seemed to feel the need

to save anything that was written
in Hebrew characters.

Up in the genizah are first drafts
of philosophical essays,

items of private correspondence,
shopping lists, recipes -

anything that Jews did was set down,
recorded and stored in the genizah.

Which makes it the single most
complete archive of a society

anywhere in the whole
medieval world.

Whatever the official rules had
to say about their inferior status,

the genizah makes clear that
the Jews of Cairo lived and worked

and traded with Muslims, if not as
equals then certainly as neighbours.

The documents reveal more than
450 different ways for Jews
to make a living -

from cheese-maker to carp-pickler,
from policeman to spice merchant.

And with cousins around the world,

the Jews turned their far-flung
connections to commercial advantage,

becoming the shippers,
importers and suppliers

to a world hungry for new things -

from North Africa, from Sicily,
Spain and the coast of India.

And they pioneered
some of the financial instruments

we all still need
for doing global business.

As Ben Outhwaite of
the Genizah Research Unit explained.

This particular merchant,
Abu Zichri Cohen,

he trades with India. Right.
So he might be in India

or he might be back in Egypt,

and he will have to exchange goods
for money. But he can't carry...

All that cash.
Well, he's not allowed

to carry gold across borders
on pain of death.

That's an Islamic restriction?
Yes. Ah.

So they have to use paper currency.

So it's a 12th-century cheque.

'Some of the most touching documents
in the genizah

'are also the most sweetly mundane,

'including exercise books
of children learning the alphabet.'

I was doing a cheder, not as well,
you know, at five and six,

really practising
my vav, and my he, and my heth.

And here, what I wasn't doing,
because I was much too scared,

are pictures, actually little
animal doodles. How cute is that?

And there's a little menorah
there as well,

that's a candlestick. Yeah.

But interaction between Jews
and Muslims wasn't confined

to the business of daily life.

In certain places, at certain times,

the Judeo-Muslim rhythm broke into
a kind of joyous cultural music.

This is the place the Arabs
called El Andalus,

and we now know as Andalucia.

The deep south of Spain,

the country the Jews
called Sepharad.

At its heart is the city of Cordoba.

From the eighth century,

this was the capital
of the Islamic Umayyad dynasty.

But also under their protection,
one of the great centres

of Sephardic Jewish life
in Muslim Spain.

Cordoba was a city of gardens,
fountains, canals

and post delivered
by carrier pigeon.

The Mezquita, the great mosque,
built by the Umayyad,

stands as the architectural
consummation of their ambition.

But in the shadow of the mosques
were the synagogues,

and they too wove worldliness
with holiness

to create patterns
of intoxicating beauty.

An impulse that endured
for centuries.

And inspired by Arabic models,

that same note was sounded
in the poetry of the Sephardim.

A literature which gave the Hebrew
language a startling new life.

Just listen to this.

"Last night, a gazelle of a girl
showed me the sun of her cheek,

"and the veil of her auburn hair

"was like a ruby falling over
a dampened crystal brow.

"She was like the fires
of dawns rising,

"reddening the clouds
with its flames."

You don't find words like that

coming out of the ultra orthodox
of either Judaism or Islam today,

but they were the words
of Yehuda Halevi,

a poet of sensual love,
but also a deeply devout Jew,

for whom there was no distinction
at all between the physical

and the spiritual.

His notion of the nefesh,
the traditional Jewish idea of soul,

was indivisibly part of the physical
as well as the spiritual world,

so that when he came to write
poems addressed to God,

they sound startlingly as though
he was talking to a lover.

This one is called Lord Adonai.

"All my desire is here before you,

"whether I speak it or not.

"I'd seek your favour
for an instant and then die.

"If only you would grant my wish,
I would place my soul in your hands

"and then sleep, and in that sleep
find such sweetness."

Halevi's poetry lives and breathes

the atmosphere
of Judeo-Islamic culture.

But at its heart
is the aching void of exile,

and a yearning for a return to Zion.

He'd once written that
the peculiar glory of Judaism

was that it was a religion
of deeds, of action,

not faith, like Christianity,
or obedience, like Islam.

You thought about it every day

because you had to live it
every day.

So at some point, Zion stopped
being simply a poetic metaphor

and became an obligation,
a destination.

"My heart is in the East
but I am on the edge of the West.

"How can I taste my food?

"How can it please me?

"How can I keep my promise?
How can I fulfil my vow?

"I will gladly leave behind me
all the treasures of Spain

"to see the dust and ruin
of your shrine."

Halevi was as good as his word.

At the age of 65, he turned his back
on all of Spain's treasures

and embarked on a perilous journey
to Jerusalem.

We'll never know whether
this passionate pilgrim made it.

The last we hear of him is riding
the storm-wracked Mediterranean.

"As the sea rages," he writes,
"my soul is jubilant,

"for my ship draws near
to the sanctuary of her God."

But man-made storms
were about to sweep away the world

Halevi had left behind.

The reconquest of Spain
by Christian kings

gathered pace from the north.

While from the south, fundamentalist
Islamic warrior tribes from Morocco

supplanted the worldly
Islamic rulers of El Andalus.

Caught between militant cross
and fundamentalist crescent,

the Jews suffered from
the intolerance of both.

In the 13th century,
Muslim rule in Andalucia collapsed.

The Mezquita in Cordoba
was turned from mosque to cathedral.

The future for the Jews of Europe

now lay under the shadow
of the cross.

BELL TOLLS

For lessons in how to survive
in Christendom,

the Sephardim would have been well
advised to consult their cousins,

the Ashkenazi Jews
of northern Europe.

CHATTERING

The Jews of medieval Christendom
could have told them

that while living among people
who believed you to be devils

was never going to be easy,
it was possible.

This is Lincoln,

home to one of the most thriving
Jewish communities

in medieval England.

The Jews had been first
invited to England

by William the Conqueror in 1066,

and some had made a pretty
successful life for themselves.

This is where one of
the wealthiest money men lived -

Aaron of Lincoln.

Aaron was rich,

and the proof of that can be found
in the most unlikely of places -

Lincoln Cathedral.

A long tradition has it
that construction
of this spectacular church

was underwritten by loans
made by Aaron.

The facts of his life
are few and far between.

What we do know for sure is that
Aaron's dizzy rise to fortune

began with a loan to King Henry II,

that his money built 16 abbeys

and that the Bishop of Lincoln here,
Robert Chesney,

built his fancy palace just down
the road with an Aaron mortgage,

secured with the cathedral
treasury. Naughty, naughty bishop!

For the mitred, the robed,
and the crown,

Aaron's was the bank
that liked to say yes.

Yes to bankrolling new cathedrals,
yes to abbeys, yes to palaces.

And the reason Aaron said yes

was because Christian theology
said no.

No to usury - the sin
of lending money at interest.

Which is why the Jews
were so convenient.

They were willing
to dispense the cash

and take the sin on themselves.

A theological sweetheart deal.

That's how Aaron got started.

By the time he'd finished,
in terms of liquid assets,

which is to say, hard cash,
he was the richest man in England.

And as you bankers out there know,

a source of fortune can also be
a source of great misfortune,

because it makes you
a big fat target.

Especially so when religion
straps on its armour

to wage holy war.

The coronation
of England's crusader king,

Richard the Lionheart, in 1189,

was the perfect pretext for mobs

to carry out their own
murderous crusade

against Jewish communities
all over England.

And if the paperwork recording
the debts that everyone owed

to these demon moneybags
went up in smoke,

well, all the more reason
to join in the carnage.

Some Jews were offered the choice
of conversion or death.

Horrifyingly, many chose suicide
and the death of their own children

rather than submitting to the mob.

The authorities - Church and Crown -
were supposed to protect the Jews,

but that rarely prevented
the poisonous spread

of popular anti-Jewish hatred.

In Lincoln Cathedral,
you can still see today

the remnants of that medieval
anti-Jewish folklore.

A stained-glass window shows a Jew,

identifiable by his red pointed hat,

putting his own son in an oven
for taking Christian communion.

And around the corner
are the chilling remains

of a 13th-century shrine

dedicated to Hugh,
an eight-year-old Christian boy

who in 1255 was,
according to popular report,

obscenely tortured and murdered
by Lincoln's Jews

in a black re-enactment
of the Crucifixion.

The Chronicle of Mathew Paris
is still considered

one of our best sources
for the history of medieval England.

And he gives some
of the poisonous flavour

of the fictions that fed
into this gruesome tale,

playing with devilish virtuosity
on the suspicions generated

by Jewish separateness from
the rest of Christian society.

MAN'S VOICE: "A great number
of Jews assembled in Lincoln,

"and with the concurrence of all,

"the boy was subjected
to various tortures.

"They scourged him
until the blood flowed.

"They crowned him with thorns.

"Each of them also
pierced him with a knife,

"calling him
'Jesus, the false prophet.'

"And after tormenting him
in diverse ways,

"they crucified him and pierced him
to the heart with a spear."

This libel
received royal endorsement

when King Henry III visited Lincoln

and personally ordered the execution
of the supposed ringleader.

91 of Lincoln's Jews
were sent to the Tower.

18 were hanged.

Though never officially canonised,

Hugh became known
as Little Saint Hugh,

and his elaborate shrine
in the cathedral

a place of popular pilgrimage.

It wasn't until 2009

that the shrine was re-dedicated
and it was explicitly stated

that the story was
a "shameful libel and a fiction".

An evil corner had been turned.

Not only were the Jews held hostage

to the demonology that portrayed
them as Christ-killers,

but the institutions that should
have protected them from harm

and which profited
from their presence -

the Church and the Crown -

now endorsed the libel
when it suited their purpose.

On July 18th, 1290,

King Edward I expelled
the Jews from England,

relieving everyone
of the inconvenience

of paying back their debts.

It took 700 years for the Jewish
community to return to Lincoln.

Today, they worship

in what is believed to have been
the medieval synagogue.

PRAYING

Still reading from the same books,

perhaps singing the same songs
as their medieval counterparts

whose presence was no longer
welcome in Christian society.

# Shabbat shalom. #

It was a story that was soon
to spread across Europe.

To be in Seville
during semana santa,

the holy week before Easter,

is to enter the world
of medieval Christendom.

Hooded figures move
through clouds of incense.

And thousands of penitents,
some barefoot,

others carrying heavy crosses,

walk through the night in emulation
of the suffering of Christ.

This procession dates back
to the time when the medieval Church

became increasingly concerned with
conformity of belief and ritual.

It's easy to imagine
how uncomfortable

this changing mood must have been

for the Jews
of medieval Christian Spain.

As the pursuit of Christian
orthodoxy gathered pace,

Jews were seen
as a malevolent fifth column

inside Christian society.

Their obstinacy was standing
in the way of the Second Coming,

and the universal victory of Christ.

In the eyes of the Church,
that longed-for moment

could only happen with
the mass conversion of the Jews.

But rather than forcing the Jews
to convert at sword-point,

the Church engaged
in a theological battle

designed to show
the truth of Christianity

and the folly of the Jews.

In towns like Girona
in northern Spain,

home to one of the most learned
Jewish communities

in medieval Christendom,

new orders of friars,
the Dominicans and Franciscans,

launched an attack on the Jews
and on the sacred books

that had preserved their identity
for 1,000 years.

The Church had always had a problem

when it came to dealing with
the Jews.

It couldn't attack
their Old Testament,

because the scripture contained
prophesies of Christ's coming.

You couldn't have a New Testament
without an Old Testament.

So the Jews had to be
protected and preserved

as witnesses to the miracle
they were too blind,

fanatical or stubborn to admit.

One day, perhaps they would.

But now, as far as
the heresy hunters were concerned,

things had changed.

These were no longer Bible Jews,
they were Talmud Jews.

And what was this Talmud,
this oral law anyway,

but a load of endless arguments?

By their own standards, the Jews
had betrayed their own scripture.

And with that betrayal,

their protection had gone
right out of the window.

In 1263, the Church organised
a public showdown

between Christians and Jews.

Leading the Christian charge
was Pablo Christiani,

a Dominican friar
and convert from Judaism.

While the man with the task
of defending Judaism

was Moses ben Nahman,
known as Nahmanides,

a deeply learned rabbi from
the Jewish quarter here in Girona.

Christiani, the convert,
set out to use passages

about the coming of the Messiah
in the Torah and the Talmud,

to prove that the Jews had,
in their own sacred text,

predicted the coming of
Jesus Christ the Messiah all along.

The theological show trial,
known as the Barcelona Disputation,

began on July 20th, 1263.

In front of a packed
Christian audience,

including the King
and the leading clergy of the land.

Most dramatic...

'Leon Wieseltier sees the debate
as one of the most moving events

'in the history
of medieval Judaism.'

It's pretty clear that Nahmanides
was an unbelievably courageous man

in those three days,
those three summer days in 1263.

Here was a man who stood up alone,

he had no force of any kind
to count on

except his own spiritual
and intellectual force.

He was helpless,
quite literally helpless,

before the power of the Church

and before the secular power
of the King.

As he tells the King of Spain,

"You think that the Messiah
is the centre of Judaism.

"You're wrong, he isn't.
You are a king and he is a king.

"You are a king of flesh and blood,
and he is a king of flesh and blood."

He said, "Well, if the Messiah
is your version of the Messiah,

"then two things
should have happened.

"One, all my predecessors would have
converted a long time ago." Right.

"And secondly, the reign of peace
would have broken out."

Right, it didn't happen.
"Forgive me, but I don't actually
notice that much peace."

This goes to the heart
of the difference between

the Jewish messianic temperament and
the Christian messianic temperament.

Think of it this way -

the problem for Jews is that
we wait and wait and wait and wait

and he doesn't come.

The problem for the Christians
is that he came

and the world did not change.
Right.

The Jews will always
so arrange matters

that they will never wake up on
the morning after the Messiah arrives

because the risk is much too great.

Because the world
will still be the world,

and if you've been aspiring
to a transformation and it comes,

and things are not transformed,
then you are bereft.

And when Nahmanides says
to the Christians,

"He couldn't have been the Messiah
because look at the world,

"there are wars, there is suffering.
Look at the world."

For the Christian establishment,
the presence in their midst

of people with such obstinately
different beliefs became unbearable.

With increasing ferocity,
they asked themselves,

"What place did the Jews have
in Christian Spain?"

And the answer came back, "None."

Either they must convert
or suffer the consequences.

Here in Seville, those consequences
were spelt out in brutal fashion,

with a massacre of 4,000 Jews
on a single day in 1391.

An act that triggered
horrifying violence against Jews

all across Spain.

After that, a third
of Sephardic Jews did convert,

but even that didn't solve
"the Jewish problem".

Could the sincerity
of the converts be trusted now?

Who knew what they really
thought and believed?

This is the Iglesia de la Magdalena
in Seville.

The first headquarters
of the Spanish Inquisition,

designed to root out the pretenders
from the true believers.

But the torture
and burning of thousands

did nothing to ease the paranoia.

Converts could never be trusted

while there were still Jews in Spain
to lure them back to the old faith.

So the Jews had to go.

The date on this parchment-bound
volume is 1492.

These are the records of the small
town of Girona in Catalonia,

Nahmanides's town.

And like all local council
proceedings,

most of the stuff recorded here

is very much small potatoes -
property disputes,

how to resolve quarrels
between landlords and peasants.

And then, in the middle of it, is
something which is not small at all.

The record of an immense tragedy.

About four lines down is recorded
the decision of the King

to expel the Jews -
there, expellendos -

from his kingdom.

It's the death sentence of a culture

which has lived in Girona
for half a millennium

and in the rest of Spain
for even longer.

It's the death sentence
on the possibility

of Jews having a coexistence
with Christians.

It's an appalling tragedy,

and however good the intention,
something recorded in the edict

makes it, if anything, even worse,

because the King, further down
the page, orders his subjects

not to harass or disturb the Jews

in the process of packing up
and selling off

synagogues and lands
and possessions.

Get them out of here in peace
as quickly as possible,

to which you want to say,
"How very considerate(!)"

The Jews were given
just four months to liquidate

what it had taken
centuries to build.

So Jews did what Jews do -

they packed.

And you all know those pictures
of long lines

of pathetic, bedraggled figures
toting bags along dusty roads.

That began here, in 1492, in Spain.

And one of the most glorious,
rich, sophisticated,

poetically beautiful cultures
there'd ever been in Europe

came to an end.

But there were some things that
could not be taken from the Jews -

their language, their music,
their poetry,

their richly spiced
gorgeous cooking.

I cook it myself
a long way away from Spain.

And above all, of course,
inside their heads,

inside their hearts,
inside their little books,

inside all the things designed
for portability and endurance,

their religion.

So when those ships were loaded
with Jews and their things

in the harbours of Iberia...

..you might well have heard
the Shema drifting over the water.

"Hear, o Israel,
the Lord our God,

"the Lord is one."

So where did they go?

Almost everywhere -
Morocco, Italy, Egypt,

and above all the Ottoman Empire,

where the Turkish Sultan
actively encouraged

the Sephardim to resettle,
taunting the Spanish king

that the expulsion
would impoverish Spain

and enrich his empire.

Commerce also motivated the rulers
of the Republic of Venice

to offer a welcome of sorts
to the Jews.

With family connections
in the Islamic world,

the Jews would be priceless

to a Christian city
that lived on trade.

But this didn't mean
there was going to be

some sort of happy mingling
on the shores of the Adriatic.

The lords of the lagoon came up with
a new way of isolating the Jews.

From 1516, Venice's Jews were
forced to live in a small district

of just a few residential blocks

at the northern perimeter
of the city.

The gates were locked at night.

And a new word was born.

Today, the word "ghetto"

is synonymous with poverty,
racism, families under stress.

All the above were true of here,
the world's first ghetto.

And yet, there are places where
you can feel the sigh of relief

that was Jewish Venice.

KNOCKS ON DOOR

A place, for all its condescension
and humiliations,

where you could actually
make a Jewish life.

Nowhere more so
than the Scuola Spagnola,

the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue,

where the birds in flight from Spain
came to rest.

When it came
to redesigning the synagogue,

the Sephardim thought
big and beautiful.

By now, the Jews were old hands

at living under the sufferance
of Christians and Muslims.

And under pressure,
they went back, as always,

to the core of their religion.

They followed the mitzvot -
the commandments -

they sung the songs,
they read the books,

they built the synagogue.

I have the strangest sense
of having been here before,

hundreds of years ago.
It's a delusion, I know, but it's...

Jews are tied together by irrational
bonds of memory very often.

But there's a sort of odd air
of spice and old Jews,

of which I'm one now.

This place is so beautiful.

It speaks for me of the deep pathos
of Jewish longing for beauty,

for grandeur.

Jews never really think
it's an obligation to build

gorgeous ornaments,
gorgeous buildings,

because you always know you're going
to have to leave them behind.

You're going to have to reach
for the suitcase sooner or later,

and yet you want to believe that
in the place you've just come to,

where God has allowed you to prosper

and for a few generations
at least be safe.

Honour your religion
by doing this -

by making something
stunningly beautiful.

So this whole place feels as though

it reconciles the idea
of refuge with beauty.

And if you can bring that off,
just for a little moment,

in the hard lives of Jewish history,

you have performed a mitzvah,

just as surely
as you've looked after the poor,

the sick and the dying.

That's what it says.
That's what Venice says.

And if anyone has cliches
about the ghetto,

you bring them here to see
how beauty can also be a mitzvah.

That's what I feel.

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