A TALE OF TWO PASSOVERS: CELEBRATING FREEDOM UNDER CAPTIVITY c. 1500

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 fifty 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.

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........

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