2023-10-07 00:05:20
They closed the door and kept the key, tore from the façade the mezuzah, the parchment with two verses from the Torah that identified their faith, and left for exile in the short period of four months. They did not carry with them gold or silver, prohibited by law, and the painful path to the ports of Barcelona, Cartagena or Seville was punctuated by robberies and temptations to make them abandon their creed, just as many of their brothers had done. The expulsion of the Jews who inhabited the lands of the Crown of Castile and Aragon was the last measure in a long process of harassment. The exhibition ‘The lost mirror. Jews and converts in Medieval Spain’, which opens on Tuesday at the Prado Museum, talks about images and scenery, propaganda and accusations surrounding the community that went into exile in 1492.
The rabbi, blindfolded, does not contemplate the wafers that flow from the spout and cannot calm his followers, who tremble, possibly wrapped in religious disorientation. The scene, located in the lower and right plane of the canvas ‘The Fountain of Grace’, from Jan van Eyck’s Workshop and dated between 1430-1440, synthesizes that anti-Jewish ideology, a growing animosity towards faith and race that recurred to theological arguments. It is one of the 71 paintings, sculptures, engravings, miniatures and other pieces that can be seen in the exhibition. A good part of them belong to the iconography displayed by religious art in its desire to discredit the minority, resident in the peninsula since, at least, Roman colonization.
‘Auto de fe presided over by Saint Dominic’ by Berruguete. Prado Museum
The blindness of the priest, unable to recognize the Messiah, is added to other accusations, from alleged ritual crimes to the collective charge of deicide. The art and literature of the 15th century were impregnated with that warlike spirit. The departure was only the culmination of a climate of repression that reached extreme violence in the wave of assaults, looting and massacres of 1391. Nothing was the same since then. The creation of the Inquisition in 1478 is related to pressure, encouraged by the elites, that generated voluntary and forced conversions.
The alleged existence of crypto-Jews, converts who kept their previous creed secret, gave rise to this institution in charge of systematic repression. Power turned to the most renowned creators of their time. Pedro Berruguete, master of the transition between Gothic and Renaissance, decorated the altarpieces of the church of Santo Tomás de Ávila and, among his works, we find an ‘Auto de Fe’, in which the condemned abjured their sins before being suffer capital punishment.
The expulsion order, contained in the Edict of Granada, was not an original initiative. It had already been applied previously by England in 1290, France in 1394 and the Italian kingdoms. The agreement is explained by the similarity of interests. Jews are also an instrument to create political consciousness at the dawn of the modern State. The construction of an entire imaginary of the Hebrew as the other, so foreign, provides citizens with the awareness of unity in the face of the enemy, which anticipates belonging to a common political project.
Portraits of Maimonides, doctor, astronomer, rabbi and philosopher, and Antonio de Nebrija, author of the first Castilian grammar and son of converts.
The streets of the Jewish quarter
They go. The aljama or community disintegrates, but the Jewish quarter remains, the neighborhood they inhabited. They were not ghettos, although the measures on their inhabitants progressively curtailed their mobility, and they also housed Christian families. “From an architectural point of view, the material culture is exactly the same as that of the societies in which they are integrated,” says Laura Martín Riesco, curator of the Sephardic Museum of Toledo.
The strict regulations, however, conditioned its development. “It is characteristic of the Jewish quarters that, as they are strictly delimited territories, the population density increased over time, giving rise to an extreme use of space that is manifested in those narrow and winding streets,” he indicates. Likewise, there was a unique architectural and ornamental wealth, such as the Tránsito and Santa María la Blanca synagogues in Toledo. «It is not a differentiated current. It fits within the great trends of the time, as shown by the work of the plasterworks of clear Andalusian affiliation.
The Hervás Jewish quarter is the best preserved. E.C.
The identification and delimitation of these urban territories constitutes one of the challenges of Spanish-Jewish archaeology. The preserved remains are pale testimony of a phenomenon encouraged by the privileges granted by the Castilian kingdoms. It is estimated that, in the middle of the 13th century, there were half a thousand Jewish quarters in towns of all conditions. Toledo occupied 10% of the walled surface and was inhabited by between 1,000 and 4,000 people. It had 10 synagogues and five study houses, stately mansions and souks, schools, shops and butcher shops that sold according to the ‘kosher’ rule.
Its decline began during the pogroms of 1391 and continued throughout the following century. The community of Cuenca brought together about 100 families before that calamitous episode. Many of its neighbors perished in the assault of the hordes inflamed by hatred, the rest were forcibly converted and the synagogue became the church of Saint Mary the New. In 1441, when the Crown of Castile attempted to collect the head tax that fell on the Hebrews, the local council replied that there were no Jews left in the town.
Amulet molded in gold-plated bronze and inscriptions in Hebrew (15th-16th century).
The danger drove many of its inhabitants to the countryside, away from the excited crowds. The Jewish quarter of Hervás (Cáceres) constitutes the best example of this rural aspect with an exceptional group made up of houses squeezed into narrow streets that abound in overhangs and balconies, built with local materials such as chestnut wood, adobe and granite.
Intolerance broke the contribution of a group that was never abundant, but was multifaceted. It is estimated that the irreducibles, those who opted to abandon Sefarad, did not exceed 50,000 and other estimates are even lower. In any case, there were happier times that demonstrated the cultural stature of a community in which royal advisors, international merchants, renters, artisans and men of science and letters attended. “They contributed a great intellectuality through the cultural centers that flourish in contexts of coexistence such as the School of Translators,” says Martín Riesco. “On the other hand, they are channels for the transmission of Arab scientific knowledge.”
Blown glass lamp from the 15th century, one of those that hung from the ceiling of synagogues.
His successors maintained that spirit. «It is important to take into account the survival of the Sephardic spirit in the populations of converts. The mystical feeling of fundamental figures such as Saint John of the Cross or Saint Teresa of Jesus connects intimately with the Jewish sensitivity of his predecessors. “The brilliance of the Golden Age could not be understood without the contribution of the Jewish legacy,” he defends.
The figure of Jewish thought is R. Moisés ben Maimón, known as Maimonides, doctor and astronomer, rabbi and humanist philosopher. This exile from Córdoba living in Egypt tried to establish bridges between reason and faith in periods of disasters. The ‘Misneh Torah’, his great work, is a legal code of reference in the interpretation of the Judaic legislative corpus.
In addition, other researchers stand out such as Antonio de Nebrija from Seville, author of the first Castilian grammar and son of converts, according to the thesis of Américo Castro, and Selomó ibn Gabirol from Malaga, known to Christians as Avicebron and one of the summits of medieval poetry. , or the Salamanca astronomer and historian Abraham Zacut. The latter fled to Portugal after the expulsion order and, later, after the Portuguese decree of the same sign, he settled in Tunisia and taught. He also had to abandon the North African market due to the possibility of Spanish conquest. Sepharad, his land, had become the great enemy.
Shared lighting
Publishing is one of those areas where art establishes an exceptional connection between the Christian and Jewish traditions. The illumination or ornamentation of each other’s books and manuscripts encouraged the exchange of artisans. Images filled with hatred and contempt gave way to a practice derived from the demand of the most cultivated classes, connected by similar practices and tastes regardless of their faith.
The Jewish elite demanded ‘haggadas’, a narrative of the Exodus that is read during the ritual meal of the Jewish Passover. These works resembled Christian codices in their ornate workmanship. The artists used their knowledge of the Hebrew imagery, so close, to illustrate them with images of a traditional nature and they have become an exceptional source to learn about the ways of life of the community. For their part, some of the most beautiful Bibles, such as that of Burgos from the 13th century or that of Soria, from the 14th, show oriental influences in their floral and geometric motifs, which refer to Hebrew authors.
The expulsion caused the dispersion of this library throughout Europe, mainly the Netherlands, one of the favorite destinations of exiles, North Africa, Turkey and Yemen. The influence of Spanish-Jewish culture spread throughout the places of the diaspora, as happened with Ladino, the language of the Sephardim, heir to medieval Spanish.
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