Review Article
Anthology on Lluis de Santàngel
Converso Official In Ferdinand’s Court
No Longer A Footnote In History
By Dolores Sloan
from HaLapid, Winter 2009
Kathleen E. Lemieux, Comisaria. Lluís de Santàngel: Primer Financiero
in América (America’s First Financier), Actas del Simposio International
SANTANGEL 98, 23-26 de agosto de 1998. Valencia, Spain: Generalitat
Valenciana, 2008
In her “Preface” to the newly published Lluís de Santàngel:
Primer Financiero in América (America’s First Financier), Editor
(or Comisaria) Kathleen Lemieux introduces readers to
the significance of the New Christian from Valencia, who ranked high
among the influential people of Jewish background in the court of Los
Reyes Católicos. She is quick to point out the lack of attention to Santàngel
as a significant figure in Spanish and New World history.
Into a city bustling with commerce and intellectual vitality and
open to the world and into a prosperous, talented, prominent family,
Lluis de Santàngel was born [between 1435 and 1440]. History has tended
to overlook him. In his lifetime, however, this remarkable Valencian
would become the most influential and the most respected of all the
Santángels. (XXIV)
This reviewer can certainly agree that Santàngel is indeed reduced
to a footnote, if not missing, from most print accounts we’ve
seen in English of events around Columbus’ receipt of support from
Los Reyes Católicos. He is rarely mentioned, as well, in writings about
this period in Spanish history. LeMieux’s anthology of proceedings of
the International Symposium Santàngel ’98 in Chicago, which she organized
and coordinated, is an attempt to correct that and a needed
addition to sources on the subject.
I “discovered” Santàngel in 1996 on visits to Spanish museums and
monuments. His name appeared in informational data accompanying exhibits
and public art about those who had supported the first Columbus
expedition. There was background about the particular role he had played
as respected adviser in convincing the haughty queen that her country and
her reputation would suffer if she allowed Columbus to continue on his way
to France after many refusals. Santàngel loan of his own funds to outfit the
ships, supplemented later by converso court Treasurer Gabriel Sanchez,
was what sealed the deal. No, the queen did not offer to pay for the journey
with her jewels; they were already collateral to the city of Valencia for loans
made to the monarchs during the battle of Granada.
Information on Santàngel was indeed hard to come by in research
for a book I was preparing. Except for brief accou nts in encyclopedias,
and references to him in works of history such as Yitzhak Baer’s
A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, the only solid source uncovered
in early research days was a 1907 edition of M. Kayserling’s Christopher
Columbus and the Participation of the Jews in the Spanish and Portuguese
Discoveries, translated from the German.
Kayserling, incidentally, did not hold back from a favorable description
of Santángel as statesman, adapting Disraeli’s title to the Spanish
converso and referring to him as “the Beaconsfield of Spain.” (71)
With Santàngel, then, as a Sephardic notable selected with four others
to be highlighted in my work, I was pleased to learn of an international
symposium on the quincentennial of his death, to be held in the Chicago
area in August of 1998. With the dearth of research materials on
this subject, surely I could augment what I had found by attending.
My hopes were realized. Presentations of papers and follow up
interviews by researchers, scholars and persons of interest in the subject
area provided a wealth of material, as well as resources and contacts
for future exchanges. In addition, the material fueled a presentation,“Lluís de Santàngel: A Converso Bridge to the New World,” at the 2000
SCJS Annual Conference in Albuquerque.
Lemieux’s Preface to the proceedings describes the genesis
of her involvement with Santàngel history and lore, when her work
in documentary filmmaking, historical research and public speaking
took her and husband Charles Lemieux increasingly to Valencia on
Spain’s Mediterranean Coast. The city has been a vibrant center of
commerce and culture since the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, and the couple found themselves immersed in research on one of
its favorite sons. Eventually, they were addressing interested groups in
Spain and the United States about Santángel and related topics. Their
concentration on the subject even resulted in official permission for
them to head an archeological excavation of the Santàngel family crypt
under the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, which Lemieux reports on in
the Preface.
The 1998 symposium was a cooperative effort, initiated by the
Lemieux, in partnership with the Generalitat Valenciana, the city’s municipal
government, to observe the quincentenniel of Santángel’s death.
Speakers represented twenty-three universities and various organizations
and came from the United States, Canada, Spain and Israel. Also
presenting were independent researchers, writers and journalists, filmmakers
and publishers, rabbis and theologians.
The Table of Contents reveals this diversity and the variety of subtopics.
Papers are in English and Spanish with a few inclusions in Valenciano.
Also included are excerpts from previously published works, such as Howard
Sachar’s Farewell España: The World of the Sephardim Remembered.
The symposium was expanded from focus on Santángel, as man
and as symbol, to include presentations on the Sephardic Jews and their
culture, in Spain and in diaspora, then and now. The published anthology
contains papers on these subjects as well as on the relationship with
Columbus and regional history. Contributors include scholars known
for primary research on the subjects and period. Some are or have been
members of SCJS, such as Stanley M. Hordes, Seth D. Kunin and the
late Victor Perera, and Society members are familiar with the material
presented in their papers through presentations at the annual conferences,
articles in HaLapid, or publications on the SCJS website, http://
www.cryptojews.com. HaLapid is referred to as a source for additional
reading in footnotes to the Hordes and Kunin papers.
Other scholars in Lluís de Santàngel recognizable to students of
the era are Martin A. Cohen, Diane Matza and Thomas F. Glick. Cohen’s
provocative paper, “Converso Identity,” was keynote for the 98 symposium.
He describes the causes and results of the “Marrano Myth,” or the
belief that predilection to Judaism is hereditary in persons of Jewish
heritage, and that reversion to Judaic practices is to be expected among
all converts to Christianity. Then he demonstrates how this belief was
utilized by the Inquisition and the power elite of the era, which he calls
the Old Guard, to put all New Christians under suspicion, and set a
model for the Holocaust process of the future.
Scholars from Spain represented in the anthology include
Miguel Angel Motis Dolader, Ramón Robres Lluch, Román Piña Homs,
Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois and Roberto Fernando Perez, and from Israel,
Aldina Quintana Rodríguez, Abraham Haim, Schulamith C. Halevy
and Yitzchak Kerem.
There are plans to make the book available through Amazon
and other U. S. sources in the near future. Updates and inquiries are
directed to lluisdesantangel@gmail.com, on how to order directly from
the publisher in Valencia.
Lluís de Santàngel: Primer Financiero de América is a worthy
addition to the libraries of researchers and those with interest in subject
and era, providing articles on Sephardic history and culture and on
crypto Jews, and helping to fill the information gap on the life and times
of Santángel, about whom Kayserling concluded:
Like that English statesman [Disraeli]—who was of Jewish stock
and whose ancestors were also persecuted by the Inquisition and
driven from Spain—Luís was characterized at once by particularism
and universalism, enthusiasm and sagacity, subjective patriotism
and objective devotion to other nationalities. He was a good
Aragonese, and yet he worked for the unity of Spain; he was ardently
devoted to his country and he carefully considered the advantages
which it would derive from maritime discoveries. (71).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baer, Yitzhak. Louis Schoffman, Trans. A History of the Jews in Christian
Spain, Vol 1 and 2. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992
Kayserling, M. Christopher Columbus and the Participation of the Jews
in the Spanish and Portuguese Discoveries. Charles Gross, Trans. New
York: Trow Press, 1907.
Sachar, Howard M. Farewell España: The World of the Sephardim Remembered.
New York: Vintage Books, 1994.