My life... well its a little complicated. The world I was born into was nothing like this world, it was an age of discovery, an age when the arts and literature came to the for front of everyday life. But it was also an age of pain and suffering, especially for those who did not see eye to eye with those who ran the country or those who had a differing religious view.
I was born out of wedlock to a young Moorish knight at the Court of the Count of Toledo, and a fourteen year old courtier Mirriam bin Abram, the daughter of a Converso Jewish proffesor at the University of Toledo. She was unable to care for me so I was brought up by my grandmother in a fairly large house just outside the city walls. My grandmother was the biggest influence on my life... it was she who taught me to always question, to always search for the truth in every story.. how to tend and care for my garden... And most of all it was she who taught me the was of that our people the Jew hid from the eyes of the gentiles... then like now it has been more the place of the men to be the keepers of knowledge, the Rabbinical laws, and of the mystical was of the Quabbala, my grandmother knew these things, her dying father taught them to her. She was considered somewhat of a wise woman.. even some would mutter the word witch.
My life her was mostly uneventful, I grew to be a inqusitive child, if not somewhat precosious. I was educated in the basics of life, in ettiquette and courtly ways, in math and Latin, hebrew and myticism. My mother would come to see me occasionally which eventually became never and my father and his friend would visit on nights when they where in or near the city. Singor Lorenz always brought me gifts, I always felt that he was in love with me, but I was a child and he a man of the world.
It was in 1491 that everything changed for me, the situation in Spain was becoming difficult for the Jews, Queen Isabella was about to order us to convert and renounce our faith, my grandfather had already done this, but my grandmother was very much set in her ways. Our alternative was to leave Spain for portugal, or Genoa but if we could not leave my family would have to sell me to slavers. |
