In 1553, a community of exiled Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had found refuge and patronage in the northern Italian city of Ferrara did something that would have been unthinkable, and very possibly fatal, in their former homelands.
They printed their own Hebrew bible in Spanish.
The Ferrara bible, as the volume came to be known, was needed for reasons both practical and symbolic. A large number of the Sephardic Jews living in Ferrara had ostensibly converted to Roman Catholicism in an attempt to avoid expulsion by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. But many of the converts, or conversos, had tried to keep their ancestral faith alive by practising it in secret. Despite their best efforts, however, time, displacement and the prohibition on Judaism soon eroded their knowledge.
“The Ferrara community was formed not so much by those expelled in 1492, but primarily by Portuguese and Spanish converts who had remained crypto-Jews, that is, they had secretly maintained Jewish religious practice and preservation within their families in Spain or Portugal, passing it down from parents to children,” said Paloma Díaz-Mas, a Spanish writer and scholar who has written an introduction to a new edition of the Ferrara bible.
“But of course, they didn’t have synagogues, they didn’t have rabbis, they didn’t have Hebrew books because they were persecuted. And possessing a book in Hebrew could lead to an inquisitorial trial.”
But once under the protection of Ercole II d’Este, the duke of Ferrara – the son of Lucrezia Borgia and the grandson of Pope Alexander VI – the community could set about relearning its lost rituals. The only problem was that few of the Jews in Ferrara could speak or read Hebrew, which is how the Ferrara bible came to be the first complete, printed edition of the entire Hebrew bible in their common language: Spanish.
Others in the Sephardic Jewish diaspora were also trying to reclaim their faith, said Díaz-Mas. “They wanted to preserve Judaism, but they knew less and less about it. When these people were able to found Jewish communities in other countries – in Italy or in Amsterdam – the problem was that they didn’t know enough about Judaism and they didn’t have access to Hebrew texts because they didn’t know Hebrew. Communities like the one in Amsterdam, for example, imported rabbis from the Ottoman empire or from north Africa to serve as their spiritual guides.”
Although the creators of the Ferrara bible prided themselves on producing “a bible in the Spanish language translated, word-for-word, from the true Hebrew by excellent scholars”, they also acknowledged that the literal translation, which follows Hebrew syntax, “may seem rough and strange and very different to the polished words we employ these days”.
Regardless of its linguistic eccentricities, however, the Ferrara bible has earned its place in history as the first complete, printed edition of the Hebrew bible in Spanish to be produced at a time when the Council of Trent had just reaffirmed the Latin Vulgate as the canonical text of the Roman Catholic bible.
The Tanakh, or Hebrew Bible, comprises the Torah (the Five Books of Moses), Nevi’im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). The Roman Catholic bible, meanwhile, is made up of an Old Testament of 46 books and a New Testament of 27 books.
Díaz-Mas believes the new edition of the bible – published by José Antonio de Castro Foundation, which works to safeguard Spain’s literary heritage – will help consolidate the book’s “enduring relevance and its cultural importance”.
But, as its cover engraving of a storm-tossed, broken-masted ship alone and at the mercy of the seas shows, the Ferrara bible is much more than a mere translation: it is also a document of survival and resilience.
“The ship, despite everything, keeps moving forward, and there’s a dolphin in the water,” said Díaz-Mas. “And the dolphin is a benevolent, protective symbol because it was believed that dolphins guided ships to safe harbour. So, this has been interpreted – and I think quite accurately – as a kind of symbol of the life trajectory of many of these Jewish converts, like those who founded the community of Ferrara.”
The engraving reflects both the mercantile background of many of the Sephardic Jews whom the Duke of Ferrara was keen to welcome to his lands and the fact of their exile.
The ship, added the academic, speaks for itself: “‘We’ve been battered by storms – the storm of the expedition, of the Inquisition, of the forced conversions in Portugal. We’ve had to leave our lands; we’ve had to find our way of life elsewhere, but we keep going and we keep sailing’ … that’s a portrait of their life, of their lives, and of their future as a community.”
