14
The European Renaissance and
the New WorldIn autumn 1523 a Jew calling himself David Reuveni turned up in Ven-
ice. Aged about forty, he claimed to be commander- in- chief of the army
of the ten lost tribes of Israel, and the brother of Joseph, king of the
tribes of Reuben and Gad and the half- tribe of Manasseh. According to
what purports to be his diary, Reuveni had travelled in the east before
he came to Europe, visiting Alexandria in Egypt, Jerusalem and Safed in
the land of Israel, and Damascus before sailing for Italy. On arrival in
Venice he persuaded some of the local Jews to help him on a mission to
Pope Clement VII in Rome in which he proposed a treaty between the
lost tribes of Israel and the Christians against the Muslims. Despite sup-
port from the humanist Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo and some wealthy
Jews in Rome, Reuveni obtained from the pope only one letter to the
king of Portugal and another to the king of Ethiopia, but that was
enough for him to be received by the king of Portugal in 1525– 7 with
all the solemnity of an official ambassador. Success brought suspicion,
for Jews in Portugal who had been compelled to adopt Christianity
took his arrival as evidence of the imminent arrival of the Messiah, a
notion that Reuveni did nothing to try to dispel. When a young Portu-
guese man of crypto- Jewish parentage named Diego Pires circumcised
himself, taking the Hebrew name Solomon Molcho, Reuveni was expelled
from the country. Arrested off the Spanish coast, he was imprisoned for
two years by the lord of Claremont until a ransom was paid by the Jews
of Avignon and Carpentras. Back in Venice in November 1530, he encour-
aged further messianic hopes, but his notoriety had also aroused enmity
among some of the Jews and this was to lead to his downfall.
When Reuveni appeared before the emperor Charles V in the sum-
mer of 1532, it was in the company of the Portuguese convert Solomon
Molcho, who had spent the intervening seven years in extensive travels
in the eastern Mediterranean and in Italy, studying kabbalah in Salonica
and seeking signs of the coming redemption. Molcho had become