When a World Vanishes

The Captivating Story of the Exiles on Rhodes

Archaeologists in Utrera, a city to the south-east of Seville in Spain, announced this week that they had uncovered the remains of a medieval synagogue. It lay beneath a former bar in the city centre. The building would have last been used as a synagogue before the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Since then it has variously been used as a hospital, a children’s home, a restaurant and most recently the bar beneath which it was found.

The city authorities knew that there had once been a synagogue in Utrera. In 1604 Rodrigo Caro, a local priest, had written about an area of the town as being a place where only foreigners and Jews lived. He said that the synagogue had once been “where the Hospital de la Misericordia now stands.” His 400 year old remark gave the authorities a clue as to where to start looking.

In recent years many towns in Spain have been looking for evidence of the large and vibrant Jewish community which lived there for well over a thousand years. In Utrera they had been combing through ancient documents and archives since 2105, to see if they could locate the synagogue site. Two years ago they announced that they thought they had found it beneath the disused bar. They commissioned archaeologists to investigate further, hoping that they would manage to discover the old synagogue’s foundations.

As it turned out, they found far more than just foundations. They found the recess where the ark holding the Torah scrolls was sited and they were able to make out the shape of the original prayer hall. They are now hoping to identify women’s areas, the ritual bath and to discover whether there was also a rabbinical school on the site. If you understand Spanish, you can watch a video tour of the site.

Before the Holocaust, the 1492 expulsion from Spain and from Portugal four years later was one of the two great catastrophes to engulf European Jewry. (The other was the 17^th century Khmelnytsky massacres in Ukraine). I quoted a passage a few months ago in which Don Isaac Abarbanel described the ordeal of his flight from Spain after the expulsion. His son Judah Abarbanel, or Leone Ebreo as he is better known, had an even more traumatic time. He had been the personal physician to the king and queen of Spain. They thought so highly of him that when they expelled the Jews they asked him to stay behind. Judah refused. His loyalty to his family and people was more important to him than the luxury of the royal court. So the king and queen  ordered their servants to kidnap his one year old son, thinking this would force him to remain in the country.

Judah got wind of the plot to kidnap the baby and had him smuggled him over the border to Portugal. He planned to travel there himself. We don’t know what his wife thought of the plan and Judah himself must have ignored the fact that the Portuguese king was no friend of the Abarbanel family; some years earlier he had imposed a death sentence upon Judah’s father, Don Isaac Abarbanel. Don Isaac had fled and the death sentence was never carried out, but the King of Portugal had not forgotten. When he heard that Don Isaac’s grandson was in the country he had the boy seized and baptised as a Christian. As far as we know Judah and his wife never saw their son again.

The Jewish exiles from Spain clambered aboard boats and settled in ports and cities across the Mediterranean. Some landed on the island of Rhodes and established a community there. Michael Frank’s recent book One Hundred Saturdays is a wonderful account, both stimulating and tragic, of life in pre-war Rhodes; told to him by Stella Levi, who grew up and lived there until she was 21.

Michael Frank first met Stella Levi in New York when she was in her nineties. For the next six years he visited her on Saturdays to hear the story of her life in pre-war Rhodes. The book he wrote about their conversations is remarkable, both for the way in which it is written and for the story that Stella tells.

The Rhodes community was unique because of its island location. Unlike communities on the continent few people came and went; its population remained stable and it preserved many of the traditions and memories that the exiles brought with them when they left Spain. Stella Levi, who was born in 1923, grew up during the most eventful period in the community’s existence, when it was starting to catch up with the modern world.

The life of the Jews on Rhodes sounds almost idyllic. They had lived in the Juderia, the ancient Jewish area, for over 400 years. They all belonged to large families that had been intermarrying for generations, their houses were always open to each other, they all knew each other’s business and they shared their joys and tragedies intimately. They had been eating the same dishes and cooking the same recipes for generations. They used the same folk remedies they had used in Spain to cure sickness. They even had their own, unique method of treating those suffering from depression or distress.

I’m sure it wasn’t that simple. Like any community they would have had their share of disputes and fallings out. But seen through Stella Levi’s young eyes the Rhodes Jewish community was a perfect place to live, so ideal that she could not imagine that anywhere else might be different. She had never yet left the island.

In 1923, the year that Stella was born, the Italians arrived,  taking administrative control of Rhodes. They installed electricity and running water, paved the roads and introduced modern methods of medical care. They built theatres, hotels, schools, drained the swamps and introduced advanced methods of agriculture. Under Italian administration the quality of life in Rhodes advanced by several centuries in the course of a couple of decades. The Italian presence in Rhodes was benign. Until the rise of Mussolini’s fascist government and the introduction of racial laws in 1938.

Overnight Jews were banned from all public employment, from owning businesses, from performing in the arts, from working as doctors and lawyers. Children were not allowed to go to school. We can barely imagine the upheaval to their lives.

Then the Nazis came. On July 19^th 1944 they rounded up all 1,700 Jews on Rhodes, Stella Levi and her family among them. One of the remarkable qualities about Michael Frank’s writing is that he spares no detail about the horrific journey to Auschwitz and about Stella’s experiences in the camps, yet the book remains easy to read. Largely, I guess, because of the way that Stella tells the story and Michael’s empathy.

Stella survived the camps and moved to the USA. The book ends with her as an energetic and erudite old lady in her nineties in New York. After years of hesitation she was persuaded to return to Rhodes, to visit. She went again, several more times. All that remains of her community are the buildings and the memories.

The Rhodes Jewish community that she grew up in, the community which had lived there continuously since leaving Spain at the end of the 15^th century, has gone. There are still Jews in Rhodes, some returned after the Shoah, others have moved there who had no previous connection with the island. But they are no longer the same community. Any more than the Jews who now live in Spain belong to the community that was expelled in 1492.

One Hundred Saturdays is a remarkable book. Not just because it tells the story of a woman who overcame tragedy and loss to rebuild her life. Nor because it reminds us of how people used to live in a vanished world. But because it inspires us. It reminds us that although communities disappear they need not be forgotten. Their memory helps to shape the future. The vanished world of 15^th century Spanish Jewry was refashioned in Rhodes. And over the decades and centuries to come the vanished world of Rhodes Jewry will have its own impact. Partly through books like One Hundred Saturdays.