The Last Jew Read Online Free PDF Page A

young apprentice physician seeking to alleviate human suffering he responded to the suffering of Christ, his initial interest gradually ripening into burning faith and conviction, and finally into a desire for personal Christian purity, a state of grace.
    Once committed, he fell in love with a godhead. He thought it a much stronger love than that of a person simply born into Christianity. The Jesus-passion of Saul of Tarsus couldn't have been more powerful than his own, unshakable and certain, more consuming than any yearning of man for woman.
    He had sought and received conversion into Catholicism in his twenty-second year, one year after he had become a full-fledged physician. His family had gone into mourning, saying the Kaddish for him as though he had died. His father, Jacob Espina, who had been so full of pride and love, had passed him in the plaza without acknowledging his greeting, without a sign of recognition. At that time Jacob Espina already was in his last year of life. He had been buried for a week before Bernardo learned he was gone. Espina had offered a novena for his soul but could not resist the urge to say Kaddish for him as well, weeping alone in his bedchamber as he recited the memorial blessing without the comforting presence of the minyan.
    Wealthy or successful converts were accepted by the nobility and the middle class, and many married Old Christians. Bernardo Espina himself married Estrella de Aranda, daughter of a noble family. In the first flush of family acceptance and new religious rapture he had hoped against all reason that his patients would accept him as a coreligionist, a 'completed Jew' who had accepted their Messiah, but he wasn't surprised when they continued to scorn him as a Hebrew.
    The magistrates of Toledo, when Espina's father was a young man, had passed a statute: 'We declare that the so-called conversos, offspring of perverse Jewish ancestors, must be held by law to be infamous and ignominious, unfit and unworthy to hold any public office or benefice within the city of Toledo or land within its jurisdiction, or to be commissioners for oaths or notaries, or to have any authority over true Christians of the Holy Catholic Church.'
    Bernardo rode past other religious communities, some scarcely larger than the Priory of the Assumption, several the size of small villages. Under the Catholic monarchy, service in the Church had become popular. Segundones, the younger sons of noble families, excluded from inheritance by the law of majorat, turned to the religious life, where their family connections assured swift advancement. The younger daughters of the same families, because of the excessive dowries demanded to marry off firstborn females, often were sent to become nuns. Churchly vocations also attracted the poorest peasants, to whom holy orders with a prebend or a benefice offered the only chance to escape the grinding poverty of serfdom.
    The growing number of religious communities had led to fierce and ugly competition for financial support. The relic of Santa Ana could be the making of the Priory of the Assumption, but the prior had told Bernardo there was scheming and planning among the powerful Benedictines, the wily Franciscans, and the energetic Geronomites -- who knew how many others, all eager to wrest away ownership of the relic of the Sacred Family. Espina was uneasy lest he be caught between powerful factions and crushed as easily as Meir Toledano had been slain.
     
    Bernardo began by attempting to recreate the youth's movements before he was killed.
    The home of Helkias the silversmith was one of a group of houses built between two synagogues. The chief synagogue long since had been taken over by Holy Mother Church, and the Jews now held religious services in the Samuel ha-Levi Synagogue whose magnificence reflected a time when things had been easier for them.
    The Jewish community was small enough for everyone to know who had left the faith, who pretended to have done so,