Girona Jewish history

KAREN GINSBERG

At the conclusion of the High Holiday services this year, our rabbi’s invitation to say Kaddish for the martyrs of Israel for whom there is no one left to say Kaddish resonated especially powerfully for me. My thoughts were of the Jews of Girona, Spain,

a small city north of Barcelona I had visited earlier this year with my youngest daughter. Girona was home to a flourishing Jewish community from the ninth to the 15th centuries. Today, there are no Jews in Girona. However, the community’s heritage is preserved within the collection of artifacts on display in the city’s Jewish museum, built on the site of the first synagogue in Girona’s Jewish Quarter.

The museum’s collection is organized to reflect community life prior to and during the 14th and 15th centuries: it shows how festivals and various traditions were observed, how the Jews lived amid their Christian neighbors, as well as various other aspects of Jewish cultural life, from the synagogue and cemetery to the contributions made by Jews to the arts and sciences. The collection concludes with displays on the impact of the Inquisition and Decree of Expulsion. Without anyone to speak with about Jewish life in Girona, the museum’s collection is, in every sense, the “voice” of what was once one of the most flourishing of European Jewish communities.

The history of the Girona Jews started in 898, when 25 Jewish families settled in the city. One hundred years later, the first synagogue was built. From the 11th to the 13th centuries, Girona was home to the most important kabbalistic school in medieval Europe.

Although a part of the museum is devoted to the theme of co-existence, it is clear that the situation was always fragile. The displays explore in some depth a very common and extended practice among Christian society from the 13th century onwards known in Spanish as disputeas, in which experts in Jewish law were confronted in public debates by Christian theologians on a range of theological questions. These debates often enflamed attitudes towards the Jews and resulted in considerable violence. The museum concludes its discussion of the disputeas with a panel that acknowledges: “Always organized by Christians, Jews were forced to be present and put forward publicly different theological questions about the Law of Moses. The atmosphere was not respectful towards the Jews.”

In fact, a fierce attack on the Jewish community took place in 1331, in which the public authorities intervened on the Jews’ behalf. A more vitriolic attack took place in 1391, when groups of armed people entered the Call, a Catalan term referring to the Jewish Quarter, where about 150 Jewish families then lived, and caused 40 deaths. Since the Jews were under royal protection, the hostile municipal authorities complied with the royal mandate to protect the Jews by locking them up in the Gironella Tower, where they remained in terrible conditions for 17 weeks. After that, many Jews converted to Christianity in the face of threats of more violence. Other Jews decided to leave the city and never returned.

In 14th century, Jews lived under a system of self-government, which was respected by Christians. They paid their taxes directly to the royal treasury and were considered to be the property of kings. The takanot were internal laws drawn up to rule Jewish community life: they offered protection, social aid, help for the ill and rules for burying the dead.

These ways of life changed for the Jewish community in 1445, when laws came into effect that no longer permitted Jews to establish themselves to the west of the Call and when all their windows and doors that opened to the street had to be closed up. In 1448, further restrictive measures were widely applied: Jews could not live outside the Call, could not touch certain foods and had to have a round half-red, half-yellow emblem sewn onto their clothes.

In 1492, the first expulsion of Jews took place and most of the Girona community moved to Roussillon, in southern France, leaving their goods and property at the disposal of the king. In 1493, the French king gave Roussillon to the king of Castile and Aragon, and the Girona Jews living in Roussillon were once again in peril. The Spanish king, Fernando, extended the expulsion edict and more Jews from Girona left for Naples, Rome, the Balkan coast, Salonica or the Turkish Empire.

The Girona museum’s collection points to craftsmanship, commerce and money-lending as main occupations of the city’s Jews. The scientific production of the Catalan Jews was held in the highest esteem by the rulers of the time, apparently, and the science of astronomy was particularly highly developed. Jews also excelled in the development of navigational compasses and cartographic maps, clocks and astrolabes.

The fame of Jewish doctors is well documented and many are known to have worked in the royal court. Some women even practised medicine in the service of princesses and queens. Pre-Expulsion, most cures and remedies were in the hands of women, and medical texts have been conserved in which women are recognized as the main bearers of the knowledge and the art of healing.

While it would have been wonderful to be able to speak with someone knowledgeable about or from the Jewish community, Girona’s museum is to be highly recommended for its efforts to record the circumstances of Jewish life before the Expulsion. Its displays are informative, varied in design and, metaphorically, open a window for visitors onto what life was like for Jews in this part of the world in the 14th and 15th centuries.

A scant 90 kilometres away from Barcelona by train, Girona’s large Jewish Quarter itself transports the visitor to another time in history. By happy coincidence, our visit corresponded with the city’s annual Festival of Flowers, or Temps de Flors, a 50-year-old festival during which many public buildings are decorated with spectacular floral arrangements and spaces to which the public are not normally invited within the Jewish Quarter open their doors to visitors. But not even the memory of these floral embellishments could lighten my mood this year as I said Kaddish holding dear the martyrs of this particular Jewish community in my heart and mind.

Karen Ginsberg is a travel writer based in Ottawa. For more information about Girona’s Jewish museum, visit girona.cat/call/eng.

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