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October 31, 2008
Memories of a Jewish golden age
Centuries after Inquisition and expulsion, Jews once again hear "Bienvenidos a España!"
IRENA KARSHENBAUM
If you keep kosher, be warned – travelling in Spain will be difficult, as escaping eating pork is a feat only for the vegetarian. If you can sustain yourself on olives, cheese sandwiches and potato omelettes, you're lucky. Otherwise, you will be going hungry. The concept of kosher has disappeared from the Spanish collective memory – after all, the expulsion of the Jews occurred an awfully long time ago.
An example of one memorable bus tour luncheon menu was cheese sandwiches, ham and cheese sandwiches, ham sandwiches, pork sandwiches and grilled pork sandwiches. Chicken noodle soup at another roadside café, on close examination, had bits of ham.
And it's not like anyone can warn the weary traveller. The Spanish make an effort to speak English, but their English is not good enough to give detailed food descriptions. Nor do they know they should. What we take for granted in Canada, a country built on Judeo-Christian values, becomes glaringly obvious in a Catholic country. In Canada, the first thing that's offered on most menus is chicken, never pork. But we need to be confronted with the yin before we can appreciate the yang.
Don't expect Spain to go kosher, ever. They don't need niche marketing to attract more tourists. The tourists are coming in droves. Spain is the second most visited country in the world after France. Their population of 44 million almost doubles with 40 million annual visitors.
Although not of a kosher variety, other oddities that deserve mention is there is no apple juice, grapefruit juice, cranberry juice, tomato juice or, worse, ginger ale. The Spanish eat small ham sandwiches and drink coffee and a Coke for breakfast. Paradoxically, Spain has one of the world's longest life expectancy rates, 84 for women and 77 for men.
In Spain, pig legs hang everywhere, in tapas bars, cafes, grocery stores and souvenir shops. On first noticing this phenomenon, I asked a couple of our tour guides whether this was a strategy the Spanish used to keep the Jews and Muslims (who were also expelled from Spain in 1492) from returning. Both said it was a likely explanation. And yet, travelling through Spain, the story often begins with the Jews.
Seventy kilometres south of Madrid, in the ancient walled city of Toledo, the first capital of Spain, built on the Tangus River, our guide told us it was most likely first settled by Sephardi Jews who came to the area with the Phoenicians about 100 years BCE. The area was later settled by the Visigoths, who came from what is now western Germany; the Arabs arrived last. Under Moorish rule, Jews, Christians and Muslims lived there peacefully side-by-side.
At its height, Toledo had one of the country's largest Jewish populations and 11 active synagogues, two of which have survived; the others fell victim to conversion. We walked along the cobblestoned streets of what was once the Jewish quarter, a place with virtually no Jewish signs other than ceramic plates in souvenir shops with Magen Davids and chanukiyahs. It was here that we came across a boarded-up, pale yellow building in the Mudéjar architectural style. Our tour guide told us this was one of the two surviving synagogues of Toledo. It was built by the Arabs for the Jews and it's now called Synagogue of Santa Maria la Blanca (Synagogue of Saint Mary the White).
The Muslims didn't fare much better under the expulsion. Out of the 10 mosques that once served this religiously vibrant city, only one has survived: Mosque of Cristo de la Luz (Mosque of Christ of the Light).
Spain's second largest city, Barcelona, is also haunted by Jews, although today it is mostly packed with Russians. This is the most crowded of Spanish cities and the third official language after Spanish and Catalonian is Russian. On arriving in Barcelona, we were paired with a tall, blond, distinctly Slavic- looking taxi driver. My mother immediately asked him if he spoke only Spanish, to try find out whether he spoke Russian. He denied everything in Spanish. As the taxi pulled towards our hotel, around Placa de Catalunya in the heart of the city and at the end point of Las Ramblas, the city's most popular street, my mother finally extracted the truth from him, he was Russian. We encountered Russian denial everywhere; Barcelonian Russians are afflicted with an exceptionally nasty inferiority complex, it seems.
Monjuic, translated as Hill of the Jews, is Barcelona's largest park and is home to many of the city's jewels. I walked from our hotel along Gran Via de les Cortis Catalanes to Plaça d'Espanya. Turning right and walking a couple of blocks is Joan Miro Park, where you will find the phallic-looking "Dona i Ocell" sculpture covered in red, yellow and blue tile that the surrealist artist, after whom the park is named, completed a year before his death in 1982. On the opposite side of Plaça d'Espanya is the foot of Monjuic. Fortunately, climbing the mountain is not necessary anymore, as escalators take the visitors up to the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, the city's largest museum, and, once at the top, the visitor is rewarded with a spectacular view of the city. Monjuic also contains the Monjuic Castle, Joan Miro Museum and the Olympic Stadium.
Spain is spectacularly beautiful but has been off limits to Jews for 500 years. In this foreign land, the bravest of the Jewish brave are slowly returning. Barcelona now has Chabad.
Of course, these tiny steps and are a far cry from the Spain of a thousand years past, the birthplace of Maimonides, the centre of the Jewish world in the Middle Ages. There are cities in Spain that were named by Sephardi Jews in honor of cities of ancient Israel: Escalona in Spain is named after Ashkelon, Maqueda after Masada.
Many cities have a Jewish Quarter. I visited the beautiful Jewish Quarter inside the old city walls of Seville. Today, it's filled with outdoor cafés lining narrow streets and small plazas and shops selling sometimes kitschy, sometimes lovely souvenirs. As we walked through the streets of this beautiful old city, we found ourselves competing for space with another tour group. I listened carefully and heard Hebrew.
Irena Karshenbaum was born in Kharkov, formerly in the USSR, and is not embarrassed to speak Russian in public. She writes in Calgary and is the volunteer founding president of the Little Synagogue on the Prairie Project Society.
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