Gracia Mendes Nasi - Final Years

Final Years

In 1544, she fled once again, this time to the Republic of Venice. There she had a dispute with her sister, Brianda, Diogo's wife, about his estate, and had to flee yet again to the nearby city state of Ferrara. In 1553, she moved to Istanbul, in the Ottoman domains, where she arranged for her daughter to marry her husband's nephew and business partner, Don Joseph Nasi.

In 1556, soon after Mendes arrived in Istanbul, the Pope sentenced a group of Conversos in Ancona to the stake, claiming they were still practicing Jewish rites. In response, Dona Gracia organized a trade embargo of the port of Ancona in the Papal States. In Istanbul, she built synagogues and yeshivas. One of the synagogues is named after her (La Señora). These institutions were created primarily to help the refugees to return to Judaism, their ancestral faith.

In 1558, she was granted a long-term lease on the Tiberias region in Israel, from Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, in exchange for guaranteeing a substantial increase in the yearly tax revenues. The Ottoman Empire, under the Sultan, had conquered that part of the Holy Land some years earlier, but it largely been a desolate place. As a result, she obtained the ruling authority over the Tiberias area. With the help of the Sultan, she then began to rebuild the area's abandoned towns to make them available to refugees so they could settle there if they wished. Her aim was to make Tiberias into a major new centre of Jewish settlement, trade and learning. This venture has often been called one of the earliest attempts at a modern Zionist movement. Dona Gracia (Mendes) Nasi died in Istanbul in early 1569.