Speculation

“Diyanu!” shouted the little man. “Enough already. Pack your bags, we’re leaving this hellhole.”

That was my great, great...grandfather, many centuries ago, admonishing his life with his little Jewish family in what is now Syria. As soon as the clan heard him, they began gathering their belongings, mounted a few donkeys and slowly meandered their way to the west. Their homeland had been dominated by Sumerians, Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Persians, the Macedonian Greek, Alexander the Great took a turn, and then the Romans stayed for a few hundred years. All the while the old man’s family had remained in place, tending their sheep, saying their prayers and studying their Torah. It was the expansion of the Ottoman Empire that ultimately pissed the old man off and provoked him to move his family; as if the Turks were any worse than their predecessors.

They traveled across Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt; all the way to the Moroccan coast before they jumped across the Strait of Gibraltar and entered Spain. They continued their travels north and were finally stopped by the Pyrénées Mountains, as their exhausted donkeys wouldn’t go one step further. There they banded together with a group of Jews and began a new life; with a new batch of sheep, saying their prayers every night, and studying their Torah.  

            In the year 1492, Christopher Columbus took off from Spain seeking new routes to the Far East. He was funded by Queen Isabella who is generally described as, “a real bitch.” That same year, this austere lady had listened to her confessor and spiritual advisor, Tomás de Torquemada, and issued an edict of general expulsion, which drove any lingering Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. The Jewish locals were given a chance to convert to Catholicism before being lashed to a fiery stake. Those who did eschew the fire and convert were branded as conversos or new Christians.

            One of the families who converted from Judaism to Catholicism was my ancestors, the Abadie clan. The new clan-master began hanging out with a group calling themselves Basques, who had their own language and customs and accepted the Abadies’ into their group, as if they belonged there. Everything went along swimmingly until Torquemada ran out of recalcitrant Jews and began burning even those timid souls who had previously converted to the Roman church.

            My great, great…grandfather gathered together his brood of freshly minted Catholics and sped across the Pyrénées Mountains with Torquemada’s fires nipping at their heels. They settled in a small town known as Lourdes, where a group of French-speaking Basques had already planted their flag. After a few hundred years, and some serious inbreeding, you couldn’t tell an Abadie from any other original Basque. Therefore, my heritage dictates that I am a Jewish-Catholic – actually, I was raised Episcopalian – with Syrian-Basque-French-Spanish blood coursing through my veins and causing great confusion throughout my body and mind.

            It is here my story begins.