A number of people have asked how I came up with the idea of writing a sequel to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, the story of a knight in medieval England who saves a beautiful Jewish healer from being burned alive as a witch. I often concoct stories as a way to get to sleep at night, and sometime in early 2020, Rebecca, the healer in Ivanhoe, kept bursting into my mind during these evening daydreams. I had read Ivanhoe years ago as a teenager and didn’t remember much of her story, so I went back and reread it. Near the end of his book, Walter Scott mentions that after Rebecca is rescued by Ivanhoe, she and her father flee to Córdoba, Spain, where he has relatives. And that’s when the lightning bolt hit me: why not write about Rebecca’s life in Spain? I have visited Spain several times and was somewhat familiar with its sordid history of antisemitism and the centuries-long battle between the Moors in Andalusia and the Christians in northern Spain for control of the country. I had always thought that the Muslims were much more tolerant of the Jews living in southern Spain, and while that was indeed true for a number of centuries (during their heyday in Spain), I was surprised to discover that a more militant sect of Muslims (the Almohads) had assumed power by the mid-12th century and were persecuting Jews in Córdoba and Seville. I was also stunned to learn from my research that King Alfonso VIII, who reigned over much of northern Spain had a Jewish mistress, Rachel of Esra, who lived in Toledo in the late 12th century. So I decided to bring Rebecca and her extended family (who would be anxious to escape the persecution in Córdoba) to Toledo, where she would have occasion to treat Rachel (known as La Fermosa) and become friends with her.
In my novel, Rebecca of Ivanhoe, Rachel introduces Rebecca to the man with whom she will fall in love, but other events (based on real historical incidents) conspire to keep them apart. Rebecca and most of her family manage to survive an attack on the Jewish quarter by anti-semitic mobs egged on by Church officials (another historically accurate occurrence), but they are forced to flee Toledo when warned of another attack. If you’d like to find out more, Rebecca of Ivanhoe is now on preorder at Amazon, Bookshop and Barnes & Noble. It will be released Nov. 19.
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