PANTALEÃO DE AVEIRO. Itinerario da Terra Sancta, e Suas Particularidades [“Itinerary of the Holy Land and Its Peculiarities.”].

<<Invaluable Sixteenth-Century Travelogue With Some Emphasis on the Portuguese-Jewish Diaspora.>> This travelogue of a Portuguese Franciscan friar's journey to the Holy Land in the years 1562-1564 contains much invaluable reportage. Though the optic is most certainly Christian, one may also glean information concerning the presence of Jews in the Holy Land. Thus, for instance, on f. 223v. we read how "a Portuguese Jewess who fled the Kingdom of Portugal with great riches, and having become very powerful and having achieved international renown, purchased this city of Tiberias from the Grand Turk [i. e. the Sultan] for a great sum of money and perpetual tribute of a thousand cruzados per annum. The following summer she arrived with her entire family to live and die. " The allusion is to Doña Gracia Nasi (alias Beatrice de Luna), who purchased Tiberias from the Turkish sultan in order to establish there a self-sufficient Jewish colony. On the following leaf (f. 224), Pantaleão proceeds to tell the saga of "Luna, " the fabulously wealthy Portuguese Jewess who took up residence in Constantinople after a most harrowing experience with the Inquisition in Venice. See C. Roth, The House of Nasi: Dona Gracia (1947); idem, House of Nasi: The Duke of Naxos (1948). Wherever Pantaleão journeyed, he invariably visited the local Jewish (generally Spanish-Portuguese) communities. In Corfu, he attended a circumcision (f. 8v). In Nicosia, Cyprus, he made the acquaintance of a Portuguese Jewish couple, the husband being a medical doctor (f. 31v). Of course, there may very well have been a vested interest in all of this, namely, the conversion of the Jews to Christianity. But beyond that, Buckingham, who analyzed the work in some depth, was convinced that the author himself was a New Christian. Buckingham marshals as proof the warm reception given the voyager by Portuguese Jews in Safed (f. 228v). Jewish communities visited by Fr. Pantaleão on the way to the Holy Land include Venice and Alexandria. On the way back from the Holy Land, Jewish communities he encountered included Damascus, Tripoli and Aleppo in Syria and Beirut and Sidon in Lebanon. "It is obvious that the Itinerario contains much of value to historians of the Levant, of the oriental Christian churches, and of the Sephardic diaspora. " See C. F. Buckingham, "The Itinerário of Fr. Pantaleão de Aveiro, " Revista de Universidad de Coimbra, Vol. XXVII (1979) pp. 161-69.