A feature screenplay by Jaco Halfon
Spain, 1492. When the Crown expels the Jews, a brilliant, restless young astronomer talks his way onto Columbus’s flagship with thirty-nine Jews hidden among the crew. But the New World he helps find sends him back into the Inquisition’s Spain, to save the woman he left pregnant and a family held for ransom across the sea.
The story
Granada, 1491. Isaac De Toledo, 27, is a gifted student of the stars and a disappointment to his community. He is promised to Clara, the daughter of the richest Jew in the city, but spends his nights with Marisa, a twice-widowed Christian. When Ferdinand and Isabella sign the Edict of Expulsion, the Jews’ last hope is money: Clara’s father offers to fund Christopher Columbus’s voyage. Columbus, who secretly claims Jewish roots, agrees to a hidden deal. Thirty-nine young Jews will sail with him, disguised as ship’s boys, to find a new land for their people, and Isaac will be his navigator.
While his family flees to Morocco and survives pirates, Isaac crosses the ocean, faces a mutiny that nearly exposes the hidden Jews, and lands with Columbus in the New World. There he understands that a new world means nothing without the people he left. He sails back to an Inquisition Spain where Clara has borne his son, her father has died in Torquemada’s cells, and his own family is held for ransom in Fez. With Columbus’s gold baked into a loaf of bread, Isaac must cross Spain and the sea again before Passover, or lose everyone he loves.
Historical drama · Feature film, 99 pages · Granada, the Atlantic, the New World and Fez, 1491–1493
The screenplay is available on request. Contact me.