Henry VIII & his Rabbis

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Henry VIII & His Rabbis"
Not Just the Tudors
Hosted by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb
Release Date: March 20, 2025

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Introduction to the Episode

[01:44]
Professor Suzannah Lipscomb opens the episode by setting the stage for an in-depth exploration of King Henry VIII's desperate quest to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Unlike typical narratives focused solely on the Tudor dynasty, this episode delves into the lesser-known strategies Henry employed, particularly his reliance on Jewish law and contemporary rabbis, to achieve his goals. The discussion is anchored around Jerry Rabo's new book, "Henry VIII and His Rabbis: How the English King Relied on Jewish Law to End His First Marriage and Why He Failed."

Understanding the Legal Impediments

[03:27]
Professor Lipscomb and Jerry Rabo discuss the complexities of Henry VIII's annulment request under canon law. Rabo explains that the core issue was rooted in Leviticus 18:16, which prohibits a man from marrying his brother's wife—a situation Henry found himself in after substituting himself for his deceased brother Arthur as Catherine’s husband. This biblical injunction made the Pope’s potential dispensation for the annulment highly contentious.

Notable Quote:
"Henry had never been married to Catherine, forget about her seven or so pregnancies; he had never been married to Catherine and he should be free to go on to marry someone else."
— Jerry Rabo [03:57]

Cardinal Wolsey’s Role and the Sack of Rome

[09:41]
The conversation shifts to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry's principal advisor, who initially led the annulment efforts. Despite his high ranking, Wolsey was unable to secure the annulment before the Sack of Rome in 1527, which severely hindered his ability to negotiate on Henry's behalf. Rabo highlights that Wolsey's adherence to proper legal procedures and his reluctance to manipulate the situation hastily ultimately stalled the annulment process.

Notable Quote:
"He was a wonderful negotiator and managed to string along Henry VIII."
— Jerry Rabo [03:57]

Henry’s Motivation: Beyond Personal Desires

[13:24]
Rabo elucidates that Henry's motivations extended beyond his infatuation with Anne Boleyn. He was deeply invested in securing a legitimate male heir to ensure the continuation of the Tudor dynasty. This political necessity drove Henry to exhaust multiple strategies over six years to dissolve his marriage to Catherine.

Notable Quote:
"Henry needed to produce an heir who would be unquestionably recognized and accepted by the people."
— Jerry Rabo [08:21]

The Failed Strategy of Consulting Rabbis

[22:34]
As traditional legal avenues failed, Henry's team turned to an unconventional approach: seeking opinions from Jewish rabbis. Rabo describes this strategy as misguided due to England's lack of a Jewish community and the profound misunderstanding of Jewish law by Henry’s advisors.

Notable Quote:
"Henry and his people were not interested in convincing anybody. They were just interested in getting people to sign on the dotted line."
— Jerry Rabo [39:06]

Navigating Jewish Law Without a Jewish Community

[29:50]
Rabo explains the irony of Henry VIII attempting to leverage Jewish law in a predominantly Catholic England with no active Jewish community for nearly 240 years. The absence of Jews in England meant that Henry's advisors had limited understanding and engagement with authentic Jewish legal interpretations, leading to ineffective and superficial consultations.

Notable Quote:
"They asked the wrong question. And this rabbi was gutsy enough to say, well, the answer is no."
— Jerry Rabo [32:42]

Rabbi Jacob Raphael’s Definitive Rejection

[38:40]
The episode highlights the critical juncture when Rabbi Jacob Raphael of Modena provided a formal responsum rejecting Henry VIII's annulment request. Despite Henry's attempts to manipulate Jewish law by de-emphasizing Deuteronomy, Rabbi Raphael affirmed that even without those provisions, Jewish law did not support the annulment.

Notable Quote:
"Without Deuteronomy, the answer would be the same."
— Jerry Rabo [39:06]

The Broader Implications of the Annulment Failure

[45:49]
Professor Lipscomb and Rabo discuss the broader consequences of the failed annulment attempts. The inability to secure an annulment through both traditional canon law and the flawed rabbinic consultations led Henry VIII to break away from the Catholic Church, establishing the Church of England. This monumental decision not only reshaped English religious and political landscapes but also set the stage for future conflicts and the eventual rise of the Protestant Reformation.

Notable Quote:
"Henry's people were just interested in getting people to sign on the dotted line."
— Jerry Rabo [39:06]

Conclusion

[46:07]
The episode concludes with Professor Lipscomb thanking Jerry Rabo for his insights and highlighting the importance of understanding the intricate legal and cultural factors that influenced Henry VIII's reign. The discussion illuminates how Henry's reliance on misinterpreted Jewish law was both a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to secure his political and personal objectives.

Notable Quote:
"Henry can't find his solution from the rabbis either."
— Professor Suzannah Lipscomb [45:49]

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Key Takeaways

1. Complex Legal Battle: Henry VIII's quest for annulment was deeply entangled in canon law, particularly issues of affinity outlined in Leviticus.
2. Ineffectiveness of Traditional Channels: Cardinal Wolsey's inability to secure the annulment before the Sack of Rome highlighted the limitations of relying solely on traditional church authorities.
3. Misguided Consultations with Rabbis: Henry's attempt to leverage Jewish law was fundamentally flawed due to England's lack of a Jewish community and a deep misunderstanding of Jewish theological frameworks.
4. Definitive Rejection by Jewish Authorities: Rabbi Jacob Raphael’s response underscored the irreconcilable conflict between Henry’s desires and authentic Jewish law, leading to the annulment's failure.
5. Long-term Consequences: The failure to annul his marriage propelled Henry VIII to establish the Church of England, a move that had profound and lasting impacts on English society and religion.

Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Jerry Rabo [03:57]: "Henry had never been married to Catherine, forget about her seven or so pregnancies; he had never been married to Catherine and he should be free to go on to marry someone else."
• Jerry Rabo [08:21]: "Henry needed to produce an heir who would be unquestionably recognized and accepted by the people."
• Jerry Rabo [32:42]: "They asked the wrong question. And this rabbi was gutsy enough to say, well, the answer is no."
• Jerry Rabo [39:06]: "Without Deuteronomy, the answer would be the same."
• Professor Suzannah Lipscomb [45:49]: "Henry can't find his solution from the rabbis either."

Final Thoughts

This episode of "Not Just the Tudors" provides a nuanced exploration of Henry VIII's annulment attempts, shedding light on the intricate interplay between religious law, personal ambition, and political maneuvering. Jerry Rabo's expertise offers listeners a fresh perspective on a pivotal moment in Tudor history, emphasizing the lengths to which Henry went to secure his legacy and the eventual repercussions that reshaped England's religious landscape.

Transcript

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.

[Jerry Rabo]

Welcome ladies and gentlemen, to Mario's Bistro.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

The special tonight is the Beef Carpaccio. With the Venmo Debit card. You can turn the basketball game tickets.

[Holly Fry]

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

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[Holly Fry]

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

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[Holly Fry]

Visit Venmo Me Debit to learn more.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A.

[Holly Fry]

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Henry VIII sought an annulment of his marriage to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, from 1527, but did not receive it until six years later, and then only after creating his own Church of England and appointing his own Archbishop of Canterbury to grant it. Along the way, Henry and his team adopted a range of strategies in the hope of achieving their desired goal. But one of the most surprising and little known is that in a Catholic England that had no Jews, Henry's final attempt to convince the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine relied upon Jewish law and its interpretation by contemporary rabbis. This is the revelation of Jerry Rabo's new book, Henry VIII and His how the English King Relied on Jewish Law to End His First Marriage and why He Failed. A graduate of Harvard Law School and former lawyer Jerry Rabo has the ideal expertise to explore the complex civil and religious law underpinning Henry VIII's search for an annulment. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this is not just the Tudors from History Hill. Gerry, welcome to the show.

[Jerry Rabo]

Thank you. It's a real privilege to be here.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Oh, it's such a joy to speak to you about this. We're going to get really deep into the weeds of this issue, which we're both fascinated by. I mean, most people will know that to marry Catherine, the Pope had had to issue a dispensation for Henry because Catherine had previously been married to Henry's elder brother, Arthur. But can we get into some of the detail here? Under canon law, what impediments were required to be dispensed and what could have been dispensed but was not?

[Jerry Rabo]

Well, what is so perplexing is that the rules that they were struggling with for six years of dispute between Pope Clement. Clement VII and Henry viii. So the Pope and one of the three major Christian kings, that dispute boiled down to a simple, simple question. It was simply the question of the peculiarity and the. I find Tudor history is lined with peculiarities. The peculiarity that although it was Henry's first marriage, it was not Catherine of Aragon's first marriage. She had come to England pursuant to a marriage contract to marry the then Prince of Wales, Henry's older brother, Arthur. And that wedding did happen to the great celebration of the people in England. And unfortunately, approximately five months later, Arthur died. And then if you look at the history, it was evident that King Henry VIII's father and the rulers of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, were focusing on the money. It was a complex marriage contract. Half of what Spain was supposed to have paid as a dowry, half of that had been paid. Henry VII didn't think he could afford to pay it back if a refund was required under the agreement. And Ferdinand did not apparently feel that he could pay the second half. And so both of them seized upon the perhaps obvious to them, plan of avoiding all of that difficulty by simply substituting young Prince Henry Tudor as the bridegroom. He was only 10, so it could not happen immediately, but there had to be at least a four year wait. And. And that's what they did. And they did it with full knowledge. I believe the documents are clear. They did it with full knowledge. Of the fact that there was a little problem. That little problem was the book of Leviticus, because this is a book of the Catholic Old Testament, originally the Hebrew Bible. And that provision makes it very clear in Leviticus 18:16 makes it very clear that it is not permitted for a man to marry his brother's wife. And it was interpreted, including his brother's widow. So here it is. You'd think that the Pope would have a ready answer to this. He had all of his. It's unclear, I should say, whether Clement VII was wise or just crafty. He was a wonderful negotiator and managed to string along Henry viii. As Henry made his six years of demand for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine, the marriage had gone about 20 years already, and they simply danced around the issues, sort of at the end, the issue was exactly the same as the issue at the beginning, the core issue, which is, wait a minute. If this violates, if this second marriage of Catherine violates the book of Leviticus, then Henry had never been married to Catherine, forget about her seven or so pregnancies, he had never been married to Catherine and he should be free to go on to marry someone else. And that someone else was Anne Boleyn.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Unless, of course, you believe, as the Roman Catholic Church did, that the Pope was able to issue a dispensation in the case of affinity. So if you're marrying someone to whom you're considered to be related, in this case as siblings, because she's been married to his brother before, then the Pope, it was thought, could issue, could dispense with that impediment. And that has been what had been done. And I suppose I ought to just quickly clarify, because whilst contemporaries talked of the king's great matter, we often call it a divorce, as we've been hearing when we're talking about this. Actually, what we really need to be calling it is an annulment, as you've said, that the marriage between Henry and Catherine, he's seeking to have declared null and void. They'd never been married at all. But that was what his team, led at first by Thomas Wolsey, was seeking to have pronounced in 1527. How did the sack of Rome stop Wolsey just doing that for Henry as the Pope's man in England as a Cardinal? Why in 1527, when Henry says, well, actually, I don't think I'm married to Catherine and I want to marry this other person, why can't his premier man just pronounce the marriage void? What does that have to do with the sack of room?

[Jerry Rabo]

Well, it's hard for us, I think, in modern governments to appreciate that at that time there was no question that there was a division between what we would now perhaps call civil law and church law, canon law. There was a total division. And there was simply literally no secular jurisdiction even for a king to obtain a dispensation, an excuse that would enable him to avoid a rule that would apply to others. He may be the king, but he had no ability to grant himself a divorce or anything like that and still be a Roman Catholic nation. So the sack of Rome occurred just when Henry's first strategy. He ended up with a series of almost half dozen strategies over these six years. And his first strategy was to say, well, my principal advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, is the highest ranking prelate in England. After all, the distance meant that even the pope could not keep a close watch on anything in the widespread Catholic world. So the pope would grant an authority, they would delegate powers to a legate. And Cardinal Wolsey was that person for England. How wonderful. Except that Cardinal Wolsey, I think, never forgot that he was a cardinal. And he had only one way to view the situation, which is, how can this be done properly, appropriately. Now we look back and say, I mean, he was a strong person, strong leader, very smart. Wouldn't it occur to him to just go ahead and do it? But that's another problem for King Henry, and that is he didn't just want to have a title given to Anne Boleyn as queen. He also. That may be a personal issue because that's what she demanded as the price of full intimacy. But he also desperately wanted to extend the Tudor dynasty. It began with his father, Henry vii, and that was through force of arms, a battlefield coronation, as they call it. And Henry needed to produce an heir who would be unquestionably recognized and accepted by the people, which is sort of amazing for someone who thought he was ruling by divine right. And yes, the Magna Carta had established a parliament, but Henry had practical control and always did over the parliament. So that was not such a problem for him. But what the problem was was that he recognized that he needed a totally acceptable heir, which in his mind, that's the one thing that Catherine of Aragon had not been able to produce.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Certainly not one that lived beyond a couple of months anyway.

[Jerry Rabo]

So exactly.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

If Woolsey's was considered unable just to pronounce on it, then let's move to the next strategy that Henry's legal team, as it were, adopted, which was A kind of harebrained scheme, in fact, to send William Knight to Rome. In what ways did this rather rashly undermine the king's cause?

[Jerry Rabo]

Well, I don't think it did any inevitable damage because I think there would be that damage would surface in any event. And that is William Knight, who was a secretary empowered to do the negotiation and obtain the dispensation and annulment. He apparently charmed by his Italian counterparts, perhaps, but he apparently gave away what Henry and Woolsey were always planning to keep as secret as they could. The king's great matter. It wasn't even named in a way that an outsider could understand what they were talking about. This is almost a spy fantasy that we wonder why grown men would think that anything like that would work, but that was their belief. And so Henry took this very pious position. Not clear whether it was Wolsey forming, instructing and sharpening the presentation for the Pope. But at any rate, Henry took this pious position that his conscience had been deeply troubled by coming across because he was well read and instructed theology. Coming across this provision and realizing, oh, my goodness, this applies to Catherine and me and we must do something about it immediately because every day that I continue, that we continue, is another day of violation and that can't be allowed. Well, that's a very nice asserted motivation. But of course, that wasn't all that was there. I've already referred to the fact that Henry held it as a major issue that he wanted to have a secure, peaceful transition to a continuing Tudor dynasty. He was only the second Tudor on the throne and he didn't want to be the last. That was certainly an important issue. But for much of the time, I believe even that was overpowered by Henry's other primary motivation, which was he had become infatuated with Anne Boleyn and he saw in her everything that he thought he should have. Number one, he was very conscious of his image. He ran a splendid court. It was like a giant salon of intellectuals from his own Oxford and Cambridge universities and brilliant minds from the continent. He was the image of masculinity. And we know that then and perhaps now some element of that image of masculinity is often the fact that he was supposed to be a sexually powerful individual who had mistresses who had all of the skills in that department that he had on the jousting field. So here is Henry with a unique problem as well as a unique opportunity. The opportunity was that Anne Boleyn was young and presumably fertile and therefore a good chance to seek a legitimate male heir if he could just plain marry her somehow in a legal sort of way. But he didn't want to appear that he was being driven by lust. But William Knight, the secretary who went to Italy with documents that he didn't frankly, fully understand, I see him in my mind's eye waving this piece of folded parchment and say, I did it. You sent me for this and I brought it to you. But in fact, he had been outsmarted by Clement vii, who was a wily sharp negotiator, and the cardinals, the various cardinals who did the support work for the pope. And so William Knight did two things wrong. Number one, he didn't understand what he was getting as compared with what he was sent for because he didn't get the full ticket that would permit what Henry required. And number two, he, for some inexplicable reason, revealed that. Well, and this isn't a mere matter of paperwork, because Henry wanted to marry a particular person, Anne Boleyn, he blew his cover. He inserted into the. I won't call it a public record because these were private conversations and negotiations, but he inserted into the reality recognized by the pope and his cardinals that Henry was being driven. And from time to time, maybe that was his primary goal for his lust for this young woman who had taken control of their relationship by doing something quite audacious. And that was to say no, to say, I won't be your mistress. Her older sister had been Henry's mistress, and that didn't turn out ideally. So perhaps she learned from that. Or she had gotten, if you will, training in the French court, where she was sent by her father to make connections, which she apparently did in lots of ways with the French court, which was the entire court was. Henry had the intellectual court and France had the sexual activities court. It's Holy Week in Jerusalem.

[Holly Fry]

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[Jerry Rabo]

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[Holly Fry]

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It's always funny, isn't it, how we suggest that Amberlynn both holds out on him and also is sort of sexually trained. I think there's a sort of sense in which perhaps it's, you know, it's possible that as a couple, they decide to wait, but either way, the point is they want to get married, and that's not now possible. And you're absolutely right in that the material that Knight comes back brandishing is very much this omission for Henry to marry again within degrees of affinity, but only if his existing marriage to Catherine is declared void, which the Pope is reluctant to do. So it means absolutely nothing. So we have a series of strategies after this point where Woolsey's trying to push things forward and they're trying to get a commission, and we get Campeggio coming to try the marriage, and people will probably be familiar with the steps and how it falls apart, but when they can't get any further, they can't get the Pope to give them an annulment. When the next cardinal that comes, Campeggio, in 1529, says, well, I'm not going to make a decision. Where do they go from there? What's the next step?

[Jerry Rabo]

Well, they had been looking at the matter as a legal matter, as not a civil legal matter, but a canon law legal matter. And they were frankly handling it the way a lawyer would handle it. And it didn't work. It didn't work because they were talking to somebody who had a totally different position, which is the Pope must have said to himself, I can't do anything that would infuriate the Holy Roman Emperor. That could be the end of the Vatican, the end of the Catholic Church, because this was already in a period where the Protestant Reformation was active and growing. It hadn't quite formed exactly, but it was there as a powerful force and a real threat. So that even I don't know if you would call Pope Clement a weak Pope. I'm not an expert in all of that. But regardless of his level of intelligence, the ratio of self interest and a calling to service by the religion, whatever that was, it was all overshadowed by the military threat of the Holy Roman Emperor. And that was non negotiable because Charles V, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, was the nephew of Catherine of Aragon. One thing the Habsburgs did is they stuck with their families. His aunt would not be receiving an annulment that she didn't want, and she didn't want it. If this were a historical novel, no one would believe it. No one would regard it as good writing. So the coincidence here, this ironic coincidence that dogged poor Henry viii, not my favorite character in history, but it's hard not to have some sympathy for him, happened because of the annual sweating sickness, the annual influenza type of disease that came seasonally. Everybody got away from London because it wasn't. Even without modern statistics, they could figure out London was not safe. It was not safe to live in those compact cities because everybody was getting sick and dying. So they went to the countryside and the court would go as well. Henry's two major negotiators were just back from another failure and they went to Waltham, not having been previously arranged to be there. They got assigned to a particular residence and there was a Cambridge professor. The two legatees of Henry were Cambridge men. They invite them for dinner and what are they going to talk about? Where have you been? Oh, Italy. Oh, you all know what we went through, and they talk. And this professor, who ended up being Thomas Cranmer, who ended up being a functionary in the whole process, made a simple observation. You're approaching this like lawyers. Don't approach this like lawyers. This is a matter of theology. And England, that is to say, Oxford and Cambridge and the Continent are filled with faculties of theology. The Pope can't resist all of them. All you have to do is get a bunch of opinions. And that simple pragmatic approach was so endearing to Henry, who had these repeated failures that became what was supposed to be the final strategy. And they did just that. They sent people all over looking for ancient documents of the early church fathers and current opinions of the faculties. Henry was desperate. We're blessed with all of this correspondence, which I try to cite from Henry's sort of managing envoy, says to all of these agents who are scurrying around, essentially, the king is not interested in the best opinions. He's interested in lots of opinions. That's all he wants. He wants to do this by volume, not by quality. So get your opinions any way you can from these faculties. Or individual people. I was so sort of personally disappointed that it wasn't quite clear enough to say exactly how it happened. But we do know it didn't happen initially. But some subsequent time somebody, perhaps Cranmer or perhaps one of the other advisors to Henry working on the matter came to the conclusion that, well, wait a minute, we're talking about Leviticus, that's a Jewish law. There are no Jews in England and hadn't been for 240 years. So we don't know much about Jews. In fact we don't know anything about Jews. But they're all over the place. In Italy. Every major community has a Jewish segment and they have some institutions of learning and they have some interaction with people and as well as their own religion. So someone came up with that and that was this major final turning point. So they weren't writing a journal article, they were writing a petition and they would provide the Pope with this one sided, often inaccurate and sometimes just plain mis citing and misattributing. And the Pope and his cardinals were smart enough not to be fooled by that and understood that there was bribery and lying about what these opinions were.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So this was fundamentally a problem of Jewish law because as you pointed out in Leviticus there are prohibitions against what's technically known as affinity, incest, so you know, having sexual relations with someone to whom you're related now under sort of divine law. But that idea against marrying your brother's wife seemed to be in contradiction to the obligation in Deuteronomy to marry your deceased brother's wife. So either the first is divine law and Deuteronomy is wrong, or these things or actually Leviticus stands and that's divine law and therefore the Pope couldn't dispense with it. And that's the fundamental problem. So as you said, there are no Jews in England. Henry's team are now seeking rabbinic opinions. How did they go about doing this and what were the sort of different positions taken up by the rabbis in response?

[Jerry Rabo]

They got introduced to Jewish rabbinic communities through a very fortunate find. This was the time when it wasn't just a Protestant reformation that was threatening. There was a broader intellectual concept of the humanistic approach to theology and life. The humanists took a high minded intellectual approach to that and said, well, you know, we are now come to realize that many layers, people are people, we just have to figure out how to talk with them and we can convince them and we think we're on the right track in terms of having the truth about theology. But we can't impose it with an army. We have to go about it wisely. They began to generate in Italy something that wasn't even imagined in England at exactly the same time, really, not for another hundred years. And that is, church leaders would become Hebraists. They would want to learn the language that the Hebrew Bible was written in. They would want to be able to read the commentaries and interpretations of the rabbis, and they would use that to approach the Jews. And they were sure they would be able to convince them that everything pointed to the truth of Christianity and Catholic belief.

[Holly Fry]

Our Skin tells a Story Join me, Holly Fry, and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journeys with psoriasis. Along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally pull poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So who were the rabbis that were being consulted and what were they telling Henry and his team? Did it work?

[Jerry Rabo]

Well, it did not work. And it did not work for reasons that would be apparent to people who understood Jewish history and Jewish theology. But all of England lacked that ability. And as a result, for instance, I believe the evidence shows that they approached Jews as if they were, well, they're kind of like us, but they have slightly different beliefs. But it's an organized religion. And so we just have to get to the top and get opinions and figure out what they believe. And what they didn't appreciate was that by this time Jews had been affected in the Diaspora, the period of living outside of the Holy Land, that Jews had been affected by their host countries and the cultures of the host countries. Whether it was Babylonia or in France or Germany or Italy or Spain. The first thing that anybody who understood the history would have appreciated was you can't talk about Judaism as if it is a top down authoritarian religion. Jews hadn't had a single person who is deemed to be an authority. They had several people who were deemed to be authorities, but each had their following. And beyond that, there was this whole national absorption of culture which led to basically two or three, depending on how you count it, streams of Judaism that still exists today. And one of them, the Ashkenazi, was sourced in the Jews who Lived in the Germanic lands, you know, including France, influenced by and educated in the German lands typically, and another Sephardic branch. And these were not organized categories, they were just sociological categories. Were from the Iberian Peninsula, the Jews of Spain and Portugal, who had had for hundreds of years. It was called a golden age of Jewish influence and success and cooperation and recognition and even political power in some of the individuals. So Henry was looking for the Jewish view to support what he wanted. Finding an authoritative Jewish backing for his position. That you can forget about Deuteronomy, just look at Leviticus. I'm in clear violation of that. And that requires and justifies an annulment. So as I say, Henry and his people were not interested in convincing anybody. They were just interested in getting people to sign on the dotted line. And if it was the vote of a faculty, which don't forget Italy wasn't Italy. It was a bunch of city states. They had their own universities and their own faculties, that's fine. They would just make a booklet out of everybody's favorable opinion, ignore the negative opinions. And then the layer below that layer is even more bizarre and to me, fascinating, which is that the two recognized leading rabbis in Italy at that time were totally in opposition to one another. Not because of the concepts that they were being asked about regarding Henry's annulment, but it worked exactly the other way around. They were already enemies of one another because they had totally different views of what they should be doing. One was a rabbi who was a very spiritual kabbalist. He viewed the Jewish concept of the coming of the Messiah as something very important. And that's all he wanted. That would be his greatest service to Judaism and the world was to do what he could to encourage that. And the other was a pragmatist. And his view was this isn't about Judaism. This is about Jews in exile in Italy. And we have to watch out because, yes, we've been favorably accepted at some levels and in some areas, but that could change. In answer to your question, Susanna, how did Henry's people gather their support from the Jewish rabbinical authorities? They did it any way they could. They were by this time quite committed to the concept of bribery because they didn't really care about the intellectual theological concept. They only wanted a thumbs up or thumbs down for Henry's position. And anybody who wrote negative, they would just swallow that up and it would never see the light of day. It was not like lawyers feel an obligation nowadays to present the other side, if there is an other side, because you're not Supposed to be trying to hoodwink the court. But this was very primitive 500 years ago. That wasn't at all a qualm for the English.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

That makes it all the more amazing that the one surviving formal rabbinic opinion or responsum that we have from Rabbi Jacob Raphael from 30 January 1530 does exist. Can you give me an idea of what it concluded and what finally we can derive from that as an example of why the Jewish law failed to help Henry in the end?

[Jerry Rabo]

Well, that is fascinating and made to me more puzzling why that hadn't been the cornerstone of somebody else's analysis of this whole. Because, as you say, in 1530, one of Henry's agents, who was sort of in charge of getting some opinions, approached a rabbi in Modena and asked him a very specific question. And that is the request was trying to isolate the influence of Deuteronomy, which Henry had other bases of attack on. So the question was posed in a very particular way. Rabbi Raphael, could you opine as to the Jewish position on Leviticus, if there were no Deuteronomy provision, would the king then be able to obtain, as, by the way, almost any wealthy a nobleman would have been able to obtain from the church? Because a lot of what Martin Luther was complaining about was quite correct. The church had a very venal money making position that sometimes overwhelmed what might be proper because it was a difficult organization to keep going without money. So that was the request. And I could find no evidence how much of an insider view the rabbi had. But frankly, in those days, the rabbis managed to know everything that they had. All of them had particular followings. Those people were just business people or whatever, and they knew about political matters. And so I don't think this was an innocent rabbi who didn't know what was at stake or who it was for or anything like that. And I don't know what motivated him to provide a response. That was the document that he created because it was done in the total traditional way that rabbis would write opinions on such matters. That isn't what Henry wanted. He wanted a simple, oh, well, you know, without Deuteronomy, no question, you should get an annulment. And then Henry was going to use that as the first stepping stone to convince the Pope by dealing with Deuteronomy on other bases of attack. But instead the rabbi's response is this beautifully curated, typically rabbinic, even Talmudic style of reasoning which does not follow ordinary rules of logic, but rabbinic Talmudic rules, traditional rules of logic, which Means that you look at everything that might shed some light. And so it's a far ranging analysis. I did two things in the book. I tried to give a brief summary of some of these byways and extra arguments. But I also obtained from a professional translator specialist in that area, that era, a new English translation. Because although the document that you're talking about, Susanna, was in the exhibit from the British Museum Library was one of the 40 sort of most significant original documents that they had. So obviously they have lots of original documents, but they picked 40, and this was one of them. The bottom line is that after wide ranging analysis from a logical point of view, the Rabbi Raphael came to a firm conclusion, which often is not the case for rabbinic opinions, but came to a firm conclusion and said, you asked me. And here he was really being a very sharp legal analyst. He said, you asked me, what if there were no Deuteronomy? What would Jewish law say? He said, well, if you know Deuteronomy and Levirate marriage obligation in some circumstances for a man to marry his deceased brother's widow, if you know that rule, you know that it wasn't mere legislation in the Hebrew Bible. Deuteronomy did not come from, I don't know what single divine revelation or community views or whatever. If it is possible to read the entire Hebrew Bible and understand that there was a historical region where the people were, where the early Jews were, that surrounding cultures, many had similar kinds of rules. So even without Deuteronomy, the Jewish adaptation of those rules, of the obligation to extend a deceased brother who died childless to extend his relationship, his effect on the world, by a brother having an obligation to marry his widow so that they could have children, so at least one would be attributed to the deceased brother, keep his name alive and his memory alive. That was baked into the culture. And you can read the stories of Judah and Tamar, you can read the stories of the Book of Ruth, and both of those without reference to Deuteronomy, but both of those show that to this rabbi, and I think to Jews today would answer it the same way, show that because of the English ignorance of anything about Judaic history or religion, because of the total absence of interaction for a quarter of a millennium, they asked the wrong question. And this rabbi was gutsy enough to say, well, the answer is no. Even without Deuteronomy, the answer would be the same.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Thank you so much. It really clarifies that in the end, it's not just down to competing verses in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but a whole Jewish culture and history. That means that Henry can't find his solution from the Ravis either. Jerry Robo, thank you so much for your time.

[Jerry Rabo]

I've really enjoyed this and it was a privilege to be talking about, as I say, my favorite book, at least right now.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.

[Holly Fry]

Our Skin Tells a Story. Join me, Holly Fry, and a slate of incredible guests as we are all inspired by their journeys with psoriasis. Along with these uplifting and candid personal histories, we take a step back into the bizarre and occasionally poisonous history of our skin and how we take care of it. Whether you're looking for inspiration on your own skincare journey or are curious about the sometimes strange history of how we treat our skin, you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on our skin. Listen to our skin on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.