FROM CALATAYUD - VOICES OF SEPHARAD
Special Monograph: Josef ha-Cohen Alconstantini, the Memory of Exile
Narrator: Rabbi Yehudá ben Shlomó Albilbilí
Shalom.
I am Rabbi Yehudá ben Shlomó Albilbilí, he of Bilbilis, and my voice, like the Jalón River that bathes our land, travels today through time. Not to tell you stories of keys and walls, but to follow the trail of a pen that, from exile, reconstructed the world we lost. Today, from Calatayud, I bring you the voice of a man who, without ever having walked its streets, was the most Bilbilitan of all: Josef ben Yehoshua ha-Cohen, the great historian of the diaspora, the chronicler of weeping and hope.
To understand Josef, the man who would become the greatest Jewish historian of the sixteenth century, we must not seek his cradle in the valleys of Italy where he lived, but here, in the heart of Aragon, in the aljama of Calatayud. His story is the story of his blood, that of the Alconstantini, a lineage whose greatness and fall would mark his destiny and his work forever.
Imagine for a moment the Calatayud of the late fifteenth century. Our aljama was not a dark corner, but a city within a city, an engine of the Kingdom's economy. The legends, which we so love to tell, say that we were founded by exiles from Jerusalem after the destruction of the First Temple. We were weavers, shoemakers, artisans... but our elite, the aristocracy to which the Alconstantini belonged, touched the strings of power. They were physicians, royal tax farmers, and above all, bayles: the King's administrators, the bridge between the crown and the people.
The Alconstantini were the embodiment of that nobility. Their very surname, resonating with echoes of ancient Constantina, spoke of a deep lineage. Figures such as Moshé Alconstantini served as bayle general, a position of immense prestige and danger. The archives tell us of his tribulations: how court intrigues led him to prison, how he had to auction properties in our Calatayud to pay exorbitant bail imposed by the crown. But even after the storm, Moshé returned, not as an administrator, but as a rabbi, as a spiritual leader, demonstrating that his family's power resided not only in gold, but in the Torah.
The grandfather of our protagonist, Tradoz Alconstantini, was a renowned physician, a man of science. The great synagogue, imposing and proud, was the symbol of a community that felt secure, rooted, eternal. But eternity, my friends, is a luxury that our people have rarely been granted.
The air of the fifteenth century had become unbreathable. The Disputation of Tortosa, the poisonous preaching of Vicente Ferrer... everything had left a festering wound. The pressure to abandon the faith of our fathers was a constant hammer. And then, in March 1492, from Granada, came the final blow. The Edict. The impossible choice: the water of baptism or the dust of the road. Conversion or exile.
For the Alconstantini, as for so many others who carried Sepharad in their souls, conversion was a living death. They rejected baptism. They chose exile. And at that moment, the family, like a mirror thrown against the floor, shattered, and each fragment reflected a different destiny.
Mosse Alconstantini, the son of Tradoz's first marriage, departed with the great rabbi Isaac Arama and the bulk of the community toward Naples, seeking refuge in Italy. But Preciosa Santel, Tradoz's second wife, and her children, Bonafos and the young Dolsa Alconstantini, the future mother of our Josef, took a different path. A path that seemed shorter, but that would lead them to what Josef, years later, would call the "Iron Furnace." They headed north, to the Kingdom of Navarre.
On July 15, 1492, in Cascante, Navarre, we find a document that reveals the anguish of the exile. Bonafos Alconstantini signs a rental contract. He pays in advance, with a clause stipulating that if he leaves before a year, he will lose all the money. They did not plan to stay. Navarre was only a pause, a breath before continuing to flee. But destiny, in its infinite irony, had woven another plan.
In that temporary refuge, two lineages of exiles met. Dolsa Alconstantini, the young woman from Calatayud, bearer of the memory of Aragon, met Yehoshua ha-Cohen. He was from Cuenca, from a Castilian priestly family that had also known persecution and exile, having taken refuge in the castle of Huete. In 1495, already in Avignon, they married. From that union, from the sum of two nostalgias, that of Aragon and that of Castile, would be born on December 20, 1496, in Avignon, the child who would give them voice: Josef ha-Cohen.
Josef was born on Provençal soil, but he himself would always sign as "the Spaniard." His childhood was an echo of that of his people: a constant pilgrimage. In 1501, barely five years old, the family crosses the Alps toward Italy. Genoa, Novi, Voltaggio... a wandering life, marked by intolerance. In 1516, they are expelled from Genoa. In 1550, again. Again and again, the same decree, the same suitcase, the same pain. It is in this crucible of suffering that the historian is forged.
Following in the footsteps of his grandfather Tradoz, Josef studied medicine. But his true vocation was not to heal bodies, but to heal memory. He wanted to understand the why of the catastrophe. And for that, he immersed himself in history. His first great work, "Divrei ha-Yamim le-malkhei Tsarfat u-malkhei beit Otoman ha-Tugrâ" (Chronicles of the Kings of France and the Ottoman Sultans), is an intellectual feat. A universal history that parallels Christendom and Islam, France and the Ottoman Empire, seeking in the great geopolitical movements a sign, an explanation for the destiny of Israel. It is the work of a Renaissance scholar, written in the purest Hebrew.
But it is his second work that would become his testament, the beating of his wounded heart: "Emeq ha-Bakha", the "Valley of Weeping."
Here, Josef abandons the objectivity of the chronicler and dons the mantle of the prophet. The book is a martyrology, a lament that crosses the centuries. It compiles every persecution, every massacre, every expulsion, every humiliation suffered by the Jewish people. From the Crusades to the fires of the Inquisition that burned in his own time. He writes in a biblical, poetic, heartbreaking style. The "Valley of Weeping" is not a history book; it is the memory of a people made into a funeral prayer. A text so powerful that it will be read on the fast of Tisha be-Av, the day we commemorate the destruction of our Temple.
But do not think that Josef was only a man of books and laments. He was a man of action. A complete humanist. He translated into Hebrew the "General History of the Indies" by López de Gómara, fascinated by that New World opening on the other side of the ocean. He adapted treatises on geography and medicine. And above all, he became involved in the life of his community. In the decades of 1530 and 1540, we find him actively collaborating in the rescue of Jewish captives captured by pirates in the Mediterranean, a plague of those times.
His personal letters show us a passionate, vehement man, even combative in family disputes over inheritances. He felt every injustice in his own flesh. He lived to see new expulsions, new pains, but never lost faith.
He died around 1578, at eighty years of age, in Genoa, the city that so many times welcomed him and expelled him. He died without ever having seen the land of his parents, without having walked through the Jewish quarters of Calatayud or Cuenca. But thanks to him, the history of the Alconstantini, the history of the Jews of Sepharad, did not turn into ash and oblivion.
Josef ha-Cohen, the son of Dolsa of Calatayud, fulfilled the most sacred mandate of our tradition: Zakhor, to remember. And in doing so, he bequeathed us much more than a chronicle of sufferings. He bequeathed us a monument to resistance. The proof that, even in the darkest exile, memory can be a homeland. And writing, the most profound act of faith.
From Calatayud, from the heart of Sepharad, Rabbi Yehudá ben Shlomó Albilbilí has spoken to you. May the memory of our ancestors, like the pen of Josef ha-Cohen, always illuminate our path.
Direction and production: Ignacio Javier Bona López
Shalom.