medieval Barcelona, Jewish sites, Christian control

Barcelona is a loved cultural destination by international trav­ellers – in 2017, c32 million tourists visited the city of 1.6 million residents. When I was a tour­ist there, I loved it.

From C9th until the final Spanish Expulsion in 1492, Jews flourished spiritually and intellectually. Despite Barcelona never becoming the major centre of Jewish life in Spain, it featured prominently in the country’s history as the port city at the crossroads of trade in Western Mediterranean.

Barcelona Haggadah, late C14th 

illuminated manuscript

British Museum

Catalonian Jews developed a unique identity and language, Judaeo-Catalan. Of the c4,000 Jews living in Bar­celona in the C13th, many worked as doctors, scientists, scholars, merchants or money lenders for Catalon­ia’s royals and aristocracy. The Jewish dist­rict was named El Call and was located in the middle of the Goth­ic Quarter, starting at the NW corner of Plaza St Jaume. Despite its hid­den nature, El Call was the heart of Spanish Jewish history.

Call Marlet, Wiki

ancient synagogue,  expanded in the C13th 

Walking through the Jewish Quarter’s very narrow streets, see a house which was ? where Rabbi Shlomo Ben Avraham ibn Aderet/the Rashba (1235-1310) had lived. He became a successful banker, schol­ar and rabbinical authority; then he was named the chief rabbi of Spain, serving in Barcelona’s Sinagoga Mayor for 50 years.

Near the cathedral was Palau Reial Major where the religious disputation of July 1263 took place before Span­ish King James I between Nachmanides/Rabbi Ramban & Pablo Cristiani. Nachmanides was initially Rabbi of Girona, and later became the chief rabbi of Catalonia. Cristiani was a Jew­ish convert who’d been encouraging other Jews to convert to Christ­ianity. He assured the king that he would prove the truth of Christ­ianity, from the Talmud and other rabbinical writings. The Ramban agreed and after 4 tough days of debating in front of the king and men of the chur­ch, King James dec­lared Nach­manides the victor. In fear Nachmanides fled the country, moved to Jerusalem and established the Ramban Synag­ogue.

A century before the Inquisition and expulsion across Spain, Barcelonians were subjected to pogroms. The Black Death ep­id­emic of 1348 provoked the slanderous accusation that the Jews had poisoned the water, so the call was attacked and Jews were murd­ered. But the most brutal pogrom was in 1391 - c3,000 Jews were mur­d­ered, Jewish cemet­er­­ies were vand­alised, and some of the grave­stones were embedded into the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and St Eulalia’s walls.

Barcelonians were endangered in 1391, but not all the Jews could escape. See the building where Jews were brought to be interrog­ated and tortu­red by the Inquisitors. Today this building houses the Mus­eum of the Barcelona Diocese, standing next to the Cath­edral’s Gothic walls.

Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia

Wiki

 Only when the Jews were finally expelled in 1492 did the community leave behind its historical artefacts, abandoned synagogues and un­attend­ed cem­et­­er­ies. Now that those sites were re-examined, Bar­celona’s con­cealed Jewish history and archaeology have been re-rev­ealed. And recently researchers from Barcelona gained access to thousands of documents stored in Spanish Inqu­is­ition Dungeons. Through thorough archival examin­at­ion, they pieced together Barcelona’s stories. The result was a walking trek through local Jewish history, with a great historical map.

The space of Placa del Rei/Plaza of the King is surrounded by a sinister-looking building with archways and prison cell-like struc­t­ures. That was the square where the Inquisition did its work; Jews who refused to convert, or were caught practicing their true faith, were burned at the auto-da-fé. Many families really did convert to Catholicism, to be allowed to stay in Spain, and other families became Marranos (pretend Catholics).

Forever Barcelona recommends these tourists sites:
A] The ancient synagogue was C3rd or 4th. When Sinagoga May­or’s building was first ident­if­ied as an ancient shul, it was one of the oldest in Europe. The building measured only 60 square ms, because in Medieval Spain a synagogue could never be tal­l­er or bigger than the city’s smallest church. Sinag­oga Mayor reop­ened as a museum in 2002, offering a historical and architectural tour of the old synagogue.

B] The Museum of History of Barcelona opened in a med­ieval weaver home. The museum has two floors of very good displays of Jewish life in Barcelona including a glass floor over the Roman ruins under­ground. In the Medieval Section, see family and relig­ious ceramic objects that survived. The beautiful Barcelona Haggadah was produced in the C13th, showing the Laws of Passover, liturgical poems and Torah readings for Passover according to the Sephardi custom. The copy is in this Museum.

C] The towering rocky cliffs that look down on Barcelona, still cal­led Montjuïc/Mountain of the Jews, were once the site of a major Jewish cemetery. After this cemetery was abandoned, some tombstones near the stone quarries were used for sites in the Gothic Quarter.

D] Visitors can see preserved a few columns and arches, part of the medieval Mikveh/ritual bath in the Barcelona Jewish Quarter. It is now in the back of a modern furniture shop.

E] During the demolition of a Marlet St building in 1920, workers found medieval Hebrew inscriptions regarding Rabbi Samuel Hassardí.

For 500 years there were no Jews in the city, until the early C20th when an influx of both Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews moved from Nor­th Africa and Eastern Europe. National apologies for the medieval auto-da-fés and expulsions were slow. But finally Spain’s 2015 Citizenship Law allowed Jews to reclaim their Spanish citizen­ship.

 

Major Synagogue, built C6th

ruined in the 1391 riots

renovated and reopened in the 1990s.