A large crowd — readers, historians, writers, and other figures of literary life —  gathered at Yale Book Store to hear author Andrée Aelion Brooks present her new book The Women Who Defied Kings (Paragon House, 2002).
The story is a rich por-trait of a Portu-guese Jew whose intelli-gence, financial acumen, generosity and loyalty to her peo-ple shook the world.

The author has been a lecturer, a journalist, and a columnist for the New York Times for 18 years. She received the American Jewish Woman Achievement award from the Consulate General of Israel for her work in Shephardic Jewish History. Among her other works on the topic are: The Strange Story of the Conversos: the first Jews in the Americas, Jungle Journey, The Jews in the Renaissance...
Brooks’ biography of Doña Gracia is the first to be based upon original material and largely unpublished 16th century documents.

With this introduction in the prologue, she starts her colossal work of 596 pages:
One wintry day early in 1535, merchant banker Francisco Mendes lay dying in his whitewashed, tile-roof home near the royal palace in Lisbon. It was a pivotal moment for his elegant wife Beatrice, later known as Doña Gracia Nasi. The death of Francisco, one of Europe’s wealthiest spice traders, offered Doña Gracia, still in her twenties, an unsettling mix of promise and peril...

So she begins the remarkable rise to power of one of the greatest Jewish women of all time; an international woman banker who used her family’s fortune and access to the royal courts of Europe to save thousands of her people from torture, ruin and death at the brutal hands of Inquisition officials."

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