{"id":6847,"date":"2012-09-30T18:58:33","date_gmt":"2012-10-01T01:58:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/?p=6847"},"modified":"2014-02-25T19:00:38","modified_gmt":"2014-02-26T03:00:38","slug":"revising-1492","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/30\/revising-1492\/","title":{"rendered":"Revising 1492"},"content":{"rendered":"

1492. For Americans, this date is common knowledge, we know it from a school rhyme.\u00a0 In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue<\/em>. 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\u2019s less common knowledge is that 1492 is also the year of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.<\/p>\n

Girona, a beautiful walled city in Catalonia, has a pretty little Jewish museum. It\u2019s 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.\u00a0 There are some books and religious items and a few precious odds and ends. The museum holds the deed for the sale of Girona\u2019s two synagogues, the interpretive materials say \u201cThe community was no longer using them, and so they were sold.\u201d The signage neglects to say why<\/em> the synagogues were no longer in use.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"Kabbalah<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There’s a translation of the government edict expelling the Jews here<\/a>; 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\u00a0 “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.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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?”<\/p>\n

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Some time ago, after reading a piece of complicated historical fiction (The Cartographer: 1492<\/a>) 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u00a0 and then, on an empty one I wrote, “We are still here.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1492. For Americans, this date is common knowledge, we know it from a school rhyme.\u00a0 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\u2019s less common … <\/p>\n


…read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-elsewhere","masonry-post","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6847"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6856,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6847\/revisions\/6856"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nerdseyeview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}