1492. For Americans, this date is common knowledge, we know it from a school rhyme. In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Funded by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, Columbus sailed to the West Indies. A chain of exploration and exploitation followed, and the colonization of the Americas. What’s less common knowledge is that 1492 is also the year of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
Girona, a beautiful walled city in Catalonia, has a pretty little Jewish museum. It’s home to some recovered stone coffin lids, engraved markers pillaged from the Jewish cemetery nearby and used in building projects and, in one case, as a goldfish pond. There are some books and religious items and a few precious odds and ends. The museum holds the deed for the sale of Girona’s two synagogues, the interpretive materials say “The community was no longer using them, and so they were sold.” The signage neglects to say why the synagogues were no longer in use.
The objects on display are accompanied with descriptions of Jewish life in the middle ages. Jews were forbidden to leave their ghetto without wearing a marker that indicated their faith, a circular badge, yellow on one side, red on the other. God forbid during your daily business about town you should interact with a human without knowing they are (gasp) Jewish.
On the upper floor of the museum, there was a display of gorgeous manuscripts accompanied by text that explained how the Jews of this region were not just butchers and money lenders and tailors, but also, astronomers and doctors, some of them women, some of them in service to the Spanish court. In 1492, that all ended, but there had been a creeping ghettoization of the city’s Jewish population. First, Jewish families were not allowed to have windows that opened into public streets. Then, neighborhood streets were walled off into narrow interior alleys going nowhere. Finally, cornered and prohibited by law from leading normal lives, Jewish families were offered a choice — flee, convert, or die.
There’s a translation of the government edict expelling the Jews here; it includes the florid and somewhat confusing language you’d expect in a government document from 1492, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of interpretation to understand the part about how this displaced population can take their things with them, but not “gold or silver or coined money or other things prohibited by the laws of our kingdoms, excepting merchandise and things that are not prohibited.” Oh, sure, you can take your stuff, but not your money, and that stuff you’re taking, hmmm, maybe you can’t take that, either.
The grounds of the museum include a courtyard that looks up to the sky. To one side there was an arched alcove, I wandered over to have a look. The light disappeared in very little distance. “The Dark Ages,” I thought, “were literally dark. It was not a figurative term.” My imagination gets away with me. I stood in the little archway and pictured the weight of an increasing claustrophobia forced upon the local Jewish population, lives ruined by racism and ignorance and hate and greed. And darkness.
In the gallery that describes the expulsion, the English placard — you can carry it around with you while you view the displays — says that the Jews “decided to leave.” The original edict orders the Jews to “depart and never return” and “if they do not perform and comply with this command and should be found in our said kingdom and lordships and should in any manner live in them, they incur the penalty of death and the confiscation of all their possessions.” In that order. If we find you living on our turf, first we’ll kill you, then we’ll take all your stuff. I don’t recall seeing a copy of the edict in the museum, but I might have been cloudy with anger and missed it.
Over five centuries have passed since this event, more than five hundred years are gone. I can, with nothing more than an internet connection, find an image of the expulsion edict and a translation — I can find multiple versions, even. The story is well documented. The Jews did not “decide to leave” Spain. They did not wake up one morning with a craving for Turkish or Moroccan food and say to their families, “Hey, who wants cous cous! Pack a sweater, we’re going to Istanbul!” The story of the expulsion at this little museum in Girona seemed secondary, almost. “Oh, yeah, then, they left. Here’s the face plate from a breathtaking edition of the Sarajevo haggadah, the book used for Passover. Nice, no?”
In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Some time ago, after reading a piece of complicated historical fiction (The Cartographer: 1492) that included the premise that the reason Columbus headed west was in search of a homeland for the Jews, I rewrote the rhyme. In 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella kicked out all the Jews.
There was a guest book in the last gallery. Someone had written, in English, “I would like to see Girona rebuild its Jewish community.” There were a lot of other languages, Hebrew, German, Spanish, more. I turned the pages and then, on an empty one I wrote, “We are still here.”
I am, wordless, and yet I wanted to comment. I love your writing.
That’s more than enough. Thank you.
Ditto.
Thank you for bearing witness Pam. Not sure I can find any other words right now.
But you don’t live there. Only visiting. History entails more than just one version of truth.
I don’t understand your comment. The museum targets visitors as the interpretive information is offered up in four languages. Are you saying my experience is invalid because I don’t live there?
Also, history that entails multiple versions of the truth is called revisionism. Kind of my point, really.
This is a great piece of writing; raw and honest and direct and other Good Things.
Genuine question (because as well as your story I’m interested/aghast at the apparent car-crash curation): Did you read the interpretive material in Spanish as well as English? Was it similarly mealy-mouthed? I spend a lot of time in Italy and often the English-language handouts are rotten. I’m always surprised that in countries like Italy and Spain stuffed with people that speak near-flawless English, they can’t find someone to cast their eye, for an hour, over their tourist handouts/websites. Being a charitable type (and Occam’s Razor and all that), I’d look for ineptitude first as an explanation… (For example, I see a copy of the Document of Expulsion on the museum’s website, I think… but I can’t read Spanish or Catalan so I may be wrong.)
I’ve visited quite a few Jewish Museums in the course of my work, and have yet to find one that pulled its punches like this. So, if it’s not ineptitude in translation… it’s way beyond just “inaccurate’: it’s totally unacceptable.
We talked about the translation issue, but my companion was having none of it. She was pretty steamed, more so than I was, and said that there was no excuse for such weak language. It was very much on my mind, but my skills in other languages are just not up to evaluating what was there. It would take a bilingual speaker of Spanish and English to answer that question. My evaluation is so not objective, not even a little bit.
I didn’t see the document at hand while I visited, as I say, but I could have missed it. I’m willing to admit that. But also, the English version of the site fails to translate the description of the document. More clunky work.
Thanks much for your kind words on my writing.
Yeah, I said at the time “this isn’t a language translation issue, it’s a history translation issue.” I don’t speak/read Spanish (or any of the other languages on offer at the museum) so I can’t say for sure what the original Spanish or Catalan versions said, but I had heard a few days before that a Girona tour guide giving a tour in English to a group of TBEX folks mentioned, in passing, “then the Jews left,” with no further explanation – like, one morning, the town woke up and found the Jews had vanished, with no warning or anything leading up to it. It just strikes me that there’s an inability (or unwillingness) to accept what some ancestors did, and that attitude is pervasive – not just a translation error on a museum placard.
Good to meet you at TBEX! Love that you are part of the world setting history straight as The Queen of Mean Isabella was cruel and self serving. If she had played the uke, she might have been nicer.
Well done as usual–and simmering with anger. I hope you’re sending a copy to the museum, because otherwise, what good does it do future visitors?
This is shocking. We learned this chapter in European history as the Expulsion. It might make a difference, contacting the museum.
Two links:
Was Columbus Secretly a Jew
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/20/opinion/garcia-columbus-jewish/index.html
and
Critics Question Motives (dateline Girona)
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/04/04/3086707/spain-building-monuments-to-its-jewish-past-critics-question-motives
Wow, I’m so glad you posted that link about the museums. SO interesting.
The translation issue is, as DonaldS said above, a pervasive problem in Italy, too. There are any number of people who could be hired to come in and sort it out – but they’re not. I don’t know. I guess I’m at fault, too, because most of the time I just giggle, take a photo and post it on Twitter, but don’t actually point it out to anyone who could be in a position to change things. That’s for restaurant menus, though, when they do stuff like translate ‘Pasta alla Norma’ to ‘Pasta to the Norm’. It’s funny. Leaving out great chunks of seriously vile historical facts is a completely different ball-game, and I agree with Barbara that it needs to be pointed out to the museum that their translation work is so far beyond unacceptable that it’s hard to comprehend how they got there.
Thank you so much for writing that article. I visited Besalu, Spain this summer where signs of ancient Jewish life were unearthed about 40 years ago, and a similar story was told. A mikvah remains almost 100% intact and pieces of the synagogue walls bear silent witness.
Powerful stuff. Just another example of selective history. Many times the more important story is the one that is overlooked. This is one of those stories.
There are many types of revisionist history….how about the type that pits Muslims against Jews throughout history when clearly the Jews of Spain were not driven out under 800 years of Muslim rule but only when the Christians ‘reconquered’.
And the type that ignores that places like Morocco and Istanbul were where the Jews went to escape the death threats that are so rightly decried here.
Very interesting and I love your writing and perspective. When I think of 1492 – I now have two stories to tell….Thanks
Thanks for this information. You write so well. Will be on the Costa Brava in May/June. Girona is a highlight. It’s so important to be educated and not stick your head in the sand.