360 A History of Judaism
convinced that he was himself the Messiah, demonstrating his convic-
tion by sitting dressed as a beggar for thirty days on a bridge over the
Tiber close to the pope’s residence to fulfil one of the stories about the
Messiah found in the Babylonian Talmud:
R. Joshua b. Levi met Elijah standing by the entrance of R. Shimon b.
Yohai’s tomb. He asked him: ‘Have I a portion in the world to come?’ He
replied, ‘if this Master desires it.’ ... He then asked him, ‘When will
the Messiah come?’ – ‘Go and ask him himself,’ was his reply. ‘Where is he
sitting?’ – ‘At the entrance of Rome.’ And by what sign may I recognise
him?’ – ‘He is sitting among the poor lepers: all of them untie [their band-
ages] all at once, and rebandage them together, whereas he unties and
rebandages each separately, thinking, should I be wanted, I must not be
delayed.’Remarkably, Molcho had succeeded in gaining the protection of the
pope, who was particularly impressed when he predicted correctly a
flood in Rome and (in January 1531) an earthquake in Portugal. Even
when he was condemned by the Inquisition for Judaizing he was saved
from execution by the pope’s personal intervention. It may be that by
the time he faced the emperor in the company of Reuveni in 1532, in
Regensburg, Molcho felt he was untouchable. If so, he was wrong: later
that year, he was tried and burned at the stake in Mantua. Reuveni was
taken to Spain in chains and charged with inciting Portuguese New
Christians to convert to Judaism. He died, probably in 1538, while still
in prison.^1
The dramatic careers of Reuveni and Molcho took place against a
background of new perspectives opening up to Europeans at the begin-
ning of the sixteenth century. The notion in Christian Europe that Islam
was a threat to Christendom was as firmly entrenched as ever since the
Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453. Ottoman control spread
in the sixteenth century south to Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North
Africa, west to Hungary and east to Iraq and Yemen. At the same time
refugees from Constantinople brought Greek learning to the Latin west
and encouraged the rediscovery of lost knowledge that came to be
known loosely as the Renaissance. For humanist scholars in all walks of
life (including cardinals such as Egidio da Viterbo) there appeared to
open up limitless possibilities for new understanding of the world and
its relation to the divine. Such hopes were strengthened by the discovery
and exploitation of the astonishing resources of the New World across
the Atlantic, to which Columbus had sailed in 1492, even as the