RABBI WHO HELPED HENRY VIII DIVORCE
IFIRST HEARD about Dom Marco Raphael from my friend, the novelist Naomi Alderman. He was a Talmud scholar, she said, who came to England in 1531 to help out Henry VIII with his divorce. As Jews had been barred from England since the expulsion of 1290, Raphael was the only Jew in England. It was an irresistible title for a play.
As we tucked into our breakfast, Naomi and I wondered what Raphael ate when he was in London. It’s a cliché to assume that all Tudor meals involved a pig with an apple in its mouth but it would have been tricky to keep kosher at court.
And how did it feel to be the only Jew in a country where many believed that Jews stank, had tails, and baked bread with the blood of Christian children?
When director Matthew Lloyd asked me to write a play for East 15 Acting School, I got my chance to find out. From David Katz’s epic history of Anglo Jewry, I learned that Raphael was summoned to help Henry VIII win an argument with the Pope. Was his marriage to Katherine of Aragon valid? According to Deuteronomy it was, but according to Leviticus a man who married his brother’s widow was doomed to be childless. Conveniently ignoring his daughter, Henry raged that he was cursed. After various Christian theologians failed to persuade the Pope to annul the marriage, Henry had the bright idea of trying a rabbi.
He must have been desperate. Why would the Pope listen to a rabbi? Raphael wasn’t even an eminent rabbi. He wasn’t Henry’s first choice, or his second. In fact, he sounded a bit of a chancer; he traded wine and woad, he was a spy, and he had invented his own invisible ink. He claimed he’d converted to Christianity but given he was employed as a rabbi, this was surely just a way to get past the ban on Jews. And his solution to Henry’s problem was not entirely straightforward. Sidestepping the Torah, he advised Henry to invoke a loophole in Jewish law: a Jew could take a second wife if a hundred rabbis approved. Henry had barely managed to find one rabbi to help, so he wasn’t wildly keen on trying to find another ninety-nine. But he kept Raphael in London, and even took him to Calais in October 1532, where he decided to ignore the Pope and marry Anne Boleyn.
I was more interested in what happened to Raphael because, after Calais, he vanished. Just like the ink on his secret letters. If I was going to write a period drama, I wanted to write about an outsider, a stranger. I didn’t want to whitewash history, but to go some way to reflect the surprising diversity of Tudor England, which I learned more about over lunch with historian Miranda Kaufmann, whose book
Black Tudors comes out this autumn. Even so, a Jew was still an exotic, alarming proposition.
Of course, my title is a bit of a swizz. There were Jews in England, but they lived their lives in secret. There was the Domus Conversorum, a rather depressing-sounding house of Jewish converts to Christianity, supported by charity. There were secret synagogues in Bristol and London. And — this is where I really got excited — I read about the theory of Shakespeare scholar Roger Prior. He argued that some of Henry’s favourite musicians — the ones pressed into service as his backing band— might have been secret Jews. Some of these musicians had escaped the Spanish Inquisition. They would have lost friends and family. They might have experienced many perils in many countries before deciding to make their homes in England. Meanwhile, Raphael was from Venice where, in 1516, 15 years before he came to London, the Jews had suddenly been forced into the Ghetto. They could leave during the days but every night, the gates were locked. And they had to identify themselves by wearing yellow badges or hats. If Raphael talked to the musicians, did they feel that they were lucky to be safe in England? Perhaps pretending to be Christian felt like a small price to pay for that safety.
But England didn’t stay safe. As Henry VIII broke with Rome, pursuing his very own Brexit, he forged a new English identity built on shunning and stigmatising strangers.
Maybe that’s why Raphael vanished. It is almost certainly why some of the Jewish musicians were imprisoned in the Tower, while the deeply antisemitic ambassador to the Holy Roman Emperor crowed that, “however well they may sing, they will not be able to fly away from their cages without leaving some of their feathers behind.” He was right. Not all the musicians came out of the Tower alive.
Now, nearly 500 years later, with hatred and bigotry returning, Jews in England face some of the same questions Raphael and the musicians faced: should we hide? Should we assimilate? Should we keep our heads down? Or should we (can we) live out loud and proud?
He traded woad and invented invisible ink