The Last Jew by Noah Gordon Page A

you are with me.'
    'Nor am I afraid with you, Yonah. For the Lord will be with us.'
     
    The thought of marriage was a new element in Yonah's life. Amidst all the tumult, his mind was confused and his body had changed. At night he dreamed of females, and even in the midst of crisis he daydreamed of his longtime friend Lucía Martín. When they were curious children, on several occasions they had explored each other's nudity at length. Now it was possible to see that beneath her clothing she had taken on the first ripeness of womanhood, and there was a new awkwardness between them.
    Everything was changing, and despite his fears and misgivings, Yonah felt a thrill at the prospect of traveling to distant places at last. He imagined life in a new place, the kind of life Jews hadn't experienced in Spain for the past hundred years.
    In a book he had found mixed among the religious tracts in the study house, by an Arab author named Khordabbek, he had read about Jewish merchant-traders:
    'They take ship in the land of the Franks, on the Western Sea, and steer for Farama. There they load their goods on the backs of camels and go by land to Kolzum, which is five days' journey over a distance of twenty-five farsakhs. They embark in the Red Sea and sail from Kolzum to Eltar and Jeddah. Then they go to Sind, India, and China.'
    He would like to be a merchant-trader. If he were a Christian he would prefer to be a knight -- of course, of the sort that did not kill Jews. Such lives would be full of wonder.
    But in more realistic moments Yonah knew his father was right. It made no sense to sit and indulge in dreams. There was work to be done, because the very foundations of their world were giving way.
     
    7
    The Date of Departure
     
    Yonah knew many people who were already leaving. On the road outside of Toledo first a few travelers were seen and then a trickle, and then there was a flood of Jews night and day, a multitude of strangers from afar, going west toward Portugal or east toward the ships. The noise of their passing was heard in the city. They rode on horses and burros, they sat on sacks of their belongings in wagons pulled by cows, they walked under the hot sun bearing heavy loads, some stumbling, some falling. Sometimes women and boys sang and beat drums and tambourines as they walked, to keep their spirits up.
    Women gave birth by the side of the road, and people died. The Toledo Council of Thirty allowed travelers to bury their dead in the Jewish cemetery but often could offer no other help, not even a minyan to say the Kaddish. In other times travelers in distress would have been given aid and hospitality, but now the Jews of Toledo were themselves leaving or preparing to leave and were struggling with their own problems.
    The Dominican and Franciscan orders, pleased to see the expulsion for which they had worked and preached, set about energetically to harvest as many Jewish souls as possible. Some in Toledo who had been friends of Yonah's family for a very long time entered the city's churches and declared themselves Christians -- children, their parents and their grandparents, with whom the Toledanos had broken bread, with whom they had prayed in the synagogue, with whom they had cursed the need to wear the yellow badge of a shunned people. Almost one-third of the Jews became conversos because they feared the terrible dangers of travel, or out of love for a Christian, or because they had achieved position and comfort they couldn't bring themselves to renounce, or because they had had enough of being despised.
    Jews in high positions were pressured and coerced into conversion. One evening Yonah's uncle Aron came to Helkias with shocking news.
    'Rabbi Abraham Seneor, his son-in-law Rabbi Meir Melamed, and their families have become Catholics.'
    Queen Isabella had not been able to bear the prospect of being without the two men who had accomplished so much for her, and it was rumored that she had threatened them with reprisals