So one day my daughter comes home from school and says she's a little upset and
she says "mom I when I told my friends I was Jewish they reacted
with surprise and they said 'what but I thought you were Spanish?'" So I could
understand why she would be upset. I had to spend--because I study the Spanish
middle-age especially the 15th century--I had seen that question asked over and
over again from the 15th century and from also earlier centuries. The
Spanish state decided early on for us, but later in the fifteenth century, that
the answer was really no, you cannot be Jewish and Spanish and this is the Edict
of expulsion 1492 ordering the Jews to leave Spain. However things were really
not as clear-cut. How did we get there? The beginning of
the end really came about a century earlier in 1391 when
really the pogroms, the mass killings of jewish communities, had started in
Spanish cities. They continued through the 15th century and they
spread like wildfire sometimes. One of the outcomes of these pogroms, of these
mass killings, was mass conversions. The mass conversions were intended to solve
the problem to eradicate the Jews from Spain, but it actually had the
opposite effect it pushed Jews further, deeper into Spanish society
because what happened is that by making Jews try to assimilate
they made sure that Jewishness stayed in Spain. The group of the conversos
were seen as a weird group. They were unprecedented as a social group
and they were seen as anomalies. This is probably best seen in a book a little
treatise called the Albora Yque. It was a pamphlet written in the
second half of the 15th century. It was copied and recopied and also had
some printed versions of it through the 16th century. The Albora Yque presented
the conversos as a monstrous hybrid; monsters. The converses were were a
hybrid and being a hybrid was a bad thing. The Albora Yque was a chimerical
animal. It's taken from Islamic sources and in the Islamic sources the Albora Yque is the
beautiful steed that takes Muhammad to the seventh heaven. In the Islamic
sources it's white. It's beautiful. It's a winged animal half donkey, half mule.
However in the 15th century this animal is taken as the embodiment
of hybridity and is mapped to the all the characteristics that were wrong or
that we're monstrous about the conversos. There are several, the Albora Yque as
you can see here is an animal composed of many parts of different animals. It
also has a human foot and human eyes. It has the body of an ox.
It has a tail like a snake and it has the different feet from different
animals. The conversos were not only seen our stereotype by their
tainted nature, both ethically or morally or in physically, they were also
stereotyped by what they ate. For example they ate dafinas which is the
Sephardic counterpart of the cholent or the hamin, the stew pot that you put in
the hearth Friday before sundown so that you can have something warm to eat on
the day of rest, on Saturday. And that's a plated version of the hamin.
A lot of Spanish people will recognize this as the cocido and olla
and other such dishes. How was Jewish portrayed before we got to the Albora Yque?
Let's look at a thirteenth century manuscript King Alfonso. These
are the Cantigas, it's a book of versified miracles. They are set to music
and they talk about all sorts of situations in daily life. Of course Jews
appear here and they are often represented with certain stereotypes,
physical stereotypes so that you could identify them in the
manuscript's illustrations. They wear pointed hats
they have large distorted noses and they don't really look evil, especially around
the eyes. These are some Jews engaging in money lending and this is a
Jew who's an apothecary. An apothecary is kind of a cross between a pharmacist and
a spice seller. Some other Jews, for example biblical Jews: this is from an
altarpiece in 14th century northern Spain in Tarragona biblical Jews fared a
little bit better because Christianity had appropriated them and even though
they're stereotyped somehow, for example by the shape of their beards. They're, I
think, treated more kindly. How did jews represent themselves though?
This is a 14th century Hagaddah from Spain in Catalonia it's called the 'Golden
Haggadah' and these scenes represents the preparation for
passover. Oftentimes Jews did not choose to represent themselves as looking any
different than their Christian neighbors because they really did not look any different
from their neighbors. They chose to represent themselves
following the same set of artistic conventions and the same kind of beauty
ideals, the same attire as everybody else in society. Do you see for example a
group of Miriam with her friends and some musical instruments?
There are also books where there were collaboration between Jewish and
Christian artists. This is the 15th century Bible of Alba. It's also known as
the Bible of Moses Arragel. Moses Arragel was a rabbi in the 15th century. He
wrote a translation into Spanish, a translation of the Jewish Bible, and he
also wrote some commentary and glossary in old Spanish. He wrote this for
a Spanish novel and it's interesting to look at how Moses Arragel, Rabbi Arragel
was represented here. This is one of the pages in the manuscript and this is one
attempt, because here's a Jew who is actually identified with an
individual that was a known individual and he is the author of the book. This is
an attempt to portray him as real in real life as possible. He's really--I
don't think he's stereotyped. He is the figure kneeling in front of
the king presenting his work and the only reason why you can tell that that is
Rabbi Arragel in terms of, you know, any physical features is because he's
wearing the Jewish mark on his cloak. The Jewish mark in medieval Spain was the
red circle. This is another illustration of Rabbi Arragel collaborating with his
with his Christian colleagues, the friars with whom he worked on his project. Now
how do we know beyond visual sources? How do we know about Jews and about
conversos in in Spain? Well, we know about them through the same kind of documents
that let us know about other Spaniards. We know about them through municipal
records, through legal records, court proceedings. We also know about them
through inquisitorial records. This is a inquisitorial bundle housed at
the University of California-Berkeley at the Bancroft library. This is just an
example. The Inquisition compiled piles and piles and piles, reams and reams and
reams of paper telling the story of the conversos. They wanted a lot of evidence
about what they were doing. They would call them and have them testify and
really what's happening is that that allowed us to know a
lot about their daily lives and when one reads those records one feels like one
is really enter into a written conversation with real people.
We also know about the conversos through literature the conversos wrote a vast
amount of literature. In particular what I've spent a lot of time reading has
been their poetry. There's about over a thousand poems in
15th century Spain many of them written by conversos. This is the manuscript
page of a poem written by one of my favorite authors. His name is Anton de
Montoro. Antonio Montero is a Jew living in southern Spain in Cordoba. He was
a tailor. He converted later in life. His wife was--we know that his
wife was burnt at the stake and his life was what really was a
successful life, but it was also a bitter life. He was successful because
he was successful as a tailor as a professional. He was also
really successful as a poet. His poetry was read, was copied, was imitated. He
entered into poetic dialogues with many of the great poets of the time. He wrote
for kings and queens and this is a manuscript page. It's where we find one of
my favorite poems. It's a wrenching poem, it's a really gutsy poem. He writes
to Queen Isabel in the wake of the establishment of the
Inquisition telling her about himself, his life as a converso and the fact that
he was never able to blend in. He has been, no matter how much he prayed, I mean,
no matter how much work he put in. He was always treated as a
Jew because Spanish society considered that what you can never stop being a Jew.
For those of you who read Spanish this will be available for you to read this.
It's a transcription of the poem. But what did the conversos do for me after
spending so much time talking and reading them? Well they--really they
did--I would say I would summarize it in two main things. One, they introduced me
to Judaism. Through them I learned about Judaism, those inquisitorial
records probably had the opposite effect
for which they had been intended. For me it was really eye-opening. Second, it
really introduced me to a community that as Spanish national I didn't really
know I had. When I read about the conversos and when I now meet members of
the Sephardic community, I really feel like I'm seeing myself in the mirror. I
feel like the gap--there's a huge gap that has been that has been closed.
There's no longer a void and I feel that with them we can answer positively to
the question can you be Jewish and Spanish? And I think the answer is a
yes! Thank you.