he Vale of Cedars, or the Martyr: A Story of Spain in the Fifteenth Century has always been Grace Aguilar’s most popular fiction with specifically Jewish themes. This historical romance concentrates on a single overriding issue, responding to the Jewish theme developed in Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820). Begun in 1816, when the author was aged fifteen, it was completed by 1835 and published in 1850, three years after the young writer’s early death. The novel, which has twice been translated into German and twice into Hebrew, is set in the Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella. Aiguilar organize The Vale of Cedars around a series of trials that test the capacity of Marie, the Jewish heroine, to withstand attempts to undermine her Jewish identity. According to Michael Ragussis’s outstanding “The Jewish question” & English National History (142-45), the plot falls into three major movements: first, a proposal of marriage to Marie by Arthur Stanley, a handsome and generous English Catholic exile living in Spain. His courage and military skill in the service of the Spanish monarchs have earned him widespread respect and recognition andwon the heart of Marie; second, Marie’s public revelation that she is Jewish and her subsequent torture under the Inquisition with the aim of getting her to renounce her faith; and finally, Queen Isabella’s attempt to win her over to Christianity with her love and compassion.
The title-page and frontispiece of an 1870 edition of The Vale of Cedars and a frontispiece from an 1896 edition. Courtesy of the Hathi Trust Digital Library and the Harvard University Library. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
The novel opens with Stanley’s proposal of marriage to Marie in the Vale of Cedars, the location that gives the novel its title. This hidden, almost inaccessible mountain valley houses a handsome small synagogue built by Marie’s secretly Jewish family. Spain’s longstanding, prosperous, and productive Jewish community has responded to persecution by going into hiding as Jews and passing themselves off as Christians in public — a strategy that the narrator defends against the degrading charge of deceit and hypocrisy. Stanley, a double character himself in his dual loyalty to his native England and his adopted Spain, proclaims his undying love of Marie. He does so despite her Jewishness, which she had had the courage to confess to him in order to explain why, reciprocating his love, she could not join him in marriage. “Tempt me no more, Arthur; it cannot be; I dare not be thy bride,” she pleads. Stanley, unable to understand her attachment to a religion for which he has no less contempt than the Spaniards, remains unconvinced and responds,
‘And yet thou speakest of love. ‘Tis false, thou canst not love me,’ and Stanley sprung to his feet, disappointed, wounded, till he scarce knew what he said. ‘I would give up Spain and her monarch’s love for thee. I would live in slavery beneath a tyrant’s rule to give thee a home of love. I would forget, trample on, annihilate the prejudices of a life, unite the pure blood of Stanley with the darkened torrent running through thy veins, forget thy race, descent, all but thine own sweet self. I would do this, all this for love of thee. And for me, what wilt thou do? — reject me, bid me leave thee — and yet thou speakest of love; ‘tis false, thou lovest another better.
Marie then concedes that there is indeed “a love, a duty stronger than that I bear to thee. I would resign all else, but not my father’s God.” Stanley finally acknowledges the depth of Marie’s feeling and the agony of her choice, but sees it as related solely to her love of and loyalty to her earthly father: “I will obey thee, Marie . . . I will leave thee now, but not — not for ever. No, no; if indeed thou lovest me time will not change thee, if thou hast one sacred tie, when nature severs that, and thou art alone on earth, thou shalt be mine whatever be thy race” (21-22).
Frontispiece from another edition of The Vale of Cedars. Courtesy of the Hathi Trust.
Marie then accedes to the wish of her father, her people, and her God that she marry a Jewish suitor, her cousin Don Ferdinand Morales. She thus devotes herself, as her faith demands, to the survival of God’s chosen people, but she does so with agonising misgivings, asking herself, is it not deceitful to wed a man when she has given her heart to another? These doubts are resolved when, over time, Marie’s loving nature allows a deep relationship to develop between the two spouses, who continue to practise their shared religion in secret. In his guise as a dedicated, courageous Christian military commander, Morales has won the admiration and affection of the Spanish people and of their sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, who embraced the couple with particular warmth and affection. Aguilar presents Ferdinand and Isabella favourably as having inherited, not initiated the Inquisition. Nevertheless, even Ferdinand, decent as he is, is seen as sharing the common contempt for Jews, “base and grovelling wretches, . . . accursed unbelievers, who taint our fair realm with their abhorred rites — think of nothing but gold and usury, and how best to cheat their fellows; hating us almost as intensely as we hate them” (154).
Isabella’s special affection for Marie and the bond between the two women serves to introduce two major themes of Aguilar’s novel — and of her work as a whole: first, the feminine capacity and inclination to relate, whether to each other or to their God, through love and admiration rather than through law, through the heart more than through shared tradition and ritual. Second, fundamental similarity of divine love and woman’s love. These two themes have been attributed to the influence on Aguilar of the very contemporary English evangelical conversionist programmes, such as that of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews. These programmes were directed especially toward Jewish women, who were considered more open, sensitive, and susceptible to the Christian message than Jewish men.and Aguilar intended her writing to counter these attempts to convert Jews to Christianity by emphasising Judaism’s affective and emotional aspects rather than its than legalistic and ritualistic ones.
At the same time, female capacity for selfless love in women and between them can produce intense agony, as Marie and Isabella discover when Isabella’s very love for Marie leads her to try to save her from certain death by converting her to Christianity. Chapters 26 to 34 of the 35-chapter novel focus on the heart-rending conflict in both women between their deep and enduring love for each other, which in Isabella’s case in particular involves concern for her friend’s salvation, and the commitment of each to her faith and to love of her God.
When Marie’s husband, Ferdinand Morales, is murdered the killer cunningly makes sure that Stanley, who discovers the body, becomes the prime suspect. Rumour had spread (or been spread by the true perpetrators of the crime) that Stanley had sought Marie’s hand in marriage, been rejected in favour of Morales, and still loved her and resented his successful rival. Marie, who is questioned under oath about her own and her husband’s relationship with Stanley, believes that her sworn testimony would almost certainly ensure that he will be found guilty and executed,— especially because Spaniards believed only “white-faced foreigner” (112) would kill the military hero. She therefore takes the drastic step of declaring publicly that she is in fact a hidden Jewess and thus unable to take a Christian oath, and she does so without disclosing that Morales is also Jewish, thereby keeping his reputation unsullied. Public consternation at this avowal is more than matched by the distress of Ferdinand and Isabella. The queen demands, however, that her entourage retain their respect and affection for the woman they too had come to love as a woman, despite Marie’s now revealed identity as a member of a hated, despised race and religion, and she scolds them when they seek, out of fear for their mistress, to prevent the queen from visiting Marie in the room to which she has been confined.
Her eye flashed [ . . . ], her lip curled, every feature – usually so mild and feminine – was so transformed by indignation into majesty and unutterable scorn as scarcely to have been recognized. Her slight and graceful form dilated till the very boldest cowered before her, even before she spoke: for never had they so encountered her reproof: — “Are ye women,” she said at length in the quiet, concentrated tone of strong emotion; “or are we deceived as to the meaning of your words? Pollution! Are we to see a young, unhappy being perish for want of sympathy and succour, because – forsooth – she is a Jewess? . . . Has every spark of woman’s nature faded from your hearts? . . . If for yourselves you fear, tend her not, approach her not – we will ourselves give her the aid she needs. And as for thee,” she continued severely, as she forced her now trembling favourite young waiting-maid Catherine to stand upright before her, “whose energy to serve Marie we loved and applauded; child as thou art, must thou too speak of pollution? but example may have done this. Follow me, minion, and then talk of pollution if thou canst.” And with a swift step Isabella led the way to the chamber of Marie. [156]
Despite the the kindness of a gentle and well-intentioned priest or Isabella’s persistent, loving entreaties (232-34) Marie’s intense love of God, the God of her and His own people, prevents her conversion to Catholicism. Moved as she might be, she “could not be in heart a Catholic; and so she dared not be in words” (222). On her side, Isabella fears for her own salvation should she give up tormenting her friend by her efforts to “save” (i.e. convert) her. Her co-religionists and her own confessor constantly remind her that she must continue to press Marie to convert and she herself is moved to do so by her own love (215). Both women are thus loving martyrs to their deeply held faith and to the God they adore. At this point the narrator intervenes in her narrative, to utter in her own voice, a plea for mutual respect and tolerance:
Oh, that in religion, as in everything else, man would judge his brother man by his own heart; and as dear, as precious as his peculiar creed may be to him, believe so it is with the faith of his brother! How much of misery, how much of contention, of cruelty and oppression, would pass away from this lovely earth, and give place for Heaven’s own unity and peace, and harmony and love. [215]
After some time spent in virtual but seemingly protected isolation in the royal palace, Marie is abducted by a hidden wing of the Inquisition that unbeknownst to Ferdinand and Isabella – though supported by the Pope – is active throughout Spain and, it later turns out, was behind the murder of Morales. Imprisoned in its dungeons, she is subjected to horrific torture and attempted rape, until she is finally rescued by her mother’s brother Julien and the two escape her prison — he in the guise of Father Ambrose, a Benedictine monk, and she disguised as a novice. She immediately learns of the imminent execution of Stanley and, in a village where she and Father Ambrose stop to rest, of the discovery by the villagers of her husband’s true murderer, now revealed to have been an agent of the hidden Inquisition. Himself accused by his superiors of disobeying their commands, this true murderer had been attacked by assassins and left for dead at the bottom of a pit, from which the villagers had rescued him, mortally wounded. Now, on the threshold of death, he is eager to confess his crime. Enfeebled and ailing from the tortures she has endured, Marie insists that she set out immediately to alert King Ferdinand and save Stanley. Still disguised as a novice, she succeeds, after a rushed, exhausting and debilitating journey on horseback with a village elder as guide – her uncle Julien remaining behind to tend medically to the dying man — in reaching King Ferdinand just in time to have him halt the execution and have agents sent to the village to question the true murderer of Morales.
Isabella immediately recognizes the exhausted boy novice as Marie, whom she continues to love dearly, and the two women embrace in tears. Marie cannot return to the village but has to stay for several months under the guardianship of Isabella, who now once again takes up her strenuous efforts of conversion, partly with the help of kindly, sympathetic priests and partly by blandishments, such as bringing Marie and Stanley together and holding out the prospect of their marrying, if only the obstinate Jewess will convert. All to no avail. Finally, thanks to the intervention of her own daughter, the Infanta, Isabella consents to Marie’s proposal that she be permitted to return to the home of her childhood, “pledging never to leave it, or mingle with her people or ours” (242). Still dressed as a novice, Marie is conducted “carefully and tenderly” to the frontier of Castile by one of the kindliest of the priests Isabella had hoped would succeed in converting her and from there finds her own difficult way over the mountains to the Vale of Cedars, where a few of her father’s former retainers still live and where she had been preceded by her uncle Julien, “weary of his wanderings and of the constant course of deception which his apparent profession of a monk demanded” (243, 244). Though she had summoned up the strength she needed to complete her journey, Marie is worn out by her trials and travails and it is soon clear that she does not have long to live. At this point, Stanley who is aware that Marie has twice risked her life to save him but who has been engaged in fighting on behalf of the Spanish monarchs, gets permission to visit her in the remote and isolated Vale of Cedars.
Marie, on her deathbed, seeks to make peace among those she loves and who love her: “‘Uncle Julien,’ she murmured, as she faintly extended her hand towards him, ‘thou wilt not refuse to clasp hands with one who has so loved thy Marie! And thou, Arthur, oh! scorn him not. Without him the invisible dungeons of the Inquisition would have been my grave, and thine that of a dishonoured knight and suspected murderer’” (248). Stanley expresses his grief: “Oh, Marie, Marie! I thought separation on earth the worst agony that could befall me; but what is it compared to the eternal one of death!” Marie responds by confessing to Stanley that her marriage to Ferdinand Morales was prescribed by their shared, hidden Jewish faith — “Arthur, dearest Arthur, it was no Christian whom I wedded. We had been betrothed from early childhood though I knew it not” (249) —and by expressing her conviction that all conflicts, whether of faith or of love, are resolved in Heaven: “No, no, not eternal, Arthur. In heaven I feel there is no distinction of creed or faith; we shall all love God and one another there, and earth’s fearful distinctions can never come between us. I know such is not the creed of thy people, nor of some of mine; but when thou standest on the verge of eternity, as I do now, then thou wilt feel this too” (248). Stanley, moved, “pressed his quivering lips to her forehead.” Moments later, Marie dies, having charged Stanley with the task of informing “Isabella, my kind, loving, generous mistress,” whose “heart loves me — aye, still, still!” — even though “her creed condemns” — “how with my last breath I loved and blessed her” (25.
In the final scene of the narrative, “Julien Morales and Arthur Stanley — the aged and the young — the Jewish recluse and the Christian warrior — knelt side by side on the cold earth, which concealed the remains of one to both so inexpressibly dear. [ . . . ] And then both arose. [ . . . ] The young Christian turned and was folded to the heart of the Jew. The blessing of the Hebrew was breathed in the ear of the Englishman, and Stanley disappeared (251).” The chapter, the last but one, in the book, ends on a hymn to love transcending all particular faiths: “Oh, love! Thou fairest, brightest, most imperishable type of heaven! What to thee are earth’s distinctions? Alone in thy pure essence thou standest, and every mere earthly feeling crouches at thy feet. And art thou but this world’s blessing? Oh! They have never loved who thus believe. Love is the voice of God, love is the rule of Heaven” (251.
Created 1 July 2020