The eyes of the Jew

It was a little sad to leave a glorious place where we’d just spent five excellent days on holiday. 

Holiday is, of course, a strange notion when you’re retired, as we both are. But I suppose it just means a major break in day-to-day routine and, as in this case, travel to somewhere very different. Which the Aran Valley certainly is.

It’s the only part of Spain on the northern side of the Pyrenees, which means it opens northwards, towards France. That, I’m told, gives it an Atlantic climate, explaining why the place abounds in greenery. Unsurprisingly, the great constant for centuries in the Aranese economy was agriculture, and above all cattle rearing.

One of the things that means is that roasting is a core part of Aranese cooking. Traditionally, that’s over wood fires. And what’s mostly roasted is red meat. With a lot of vegetarians in my life and having moved decidedly away from red meat in recent years, it was oddly fun, in a taboo-breaking kind of way, to rediscover a taste for it in a place where it’s more or less expected of you.

We did go to a vegetarian restaurant one evening and had some delicious vegetarian dishes. But we noticed that the place had a beef-based hamburger on the menu. We asked the proprietor how he explained that.

“Around here?” he exclaimed. “The place would be burned to the ground if I didn’t offer at least one beef dish.”

Technically, the valley’s part of Catalonia, and there’s a lot of Catalan spoken there. But its own specific language, Aranese, isn’t a branch of Catalan, but of the Occitan languages of southern France. Which is hardly surprising, given that until the tunnel opened in the mid-twentieth century, the only way into the Valley from Spain was across high passes, often closed by snow in winter, whereas France was – and is – accessible by easy road. It follows the course of what becomes one of the great French rivers, the Garonne, which flows into the Atlantic near the iconic wine-growing area around Bordeaux.

Grey slate roofs under a mountain sunset in Aran

Aran is full of grey-slated houses and Romanesque churches (the style we’d call Norman in England). And a huge majority of the houses are stone-built, so the villages look prosperous from below, and distinctive from above – in a mountain valley, a lot of the views are from above – with their glittering grey roofs.

The air of prosperity is by no means illusory, though the wealth of the place no longer comes exclusively from cattle rearing. These days, what makes the Valley rich is tourism, especially in the winter, with its ski slopes.

Wealthy, mountainous, lush with greenery, with cattle wandering high pastures, it’s hardly surprising that people like to call the Valley ‘Little Switzerland’. It certainly has a distinctly Swiss feel to it. That can even take the form of a degree of self-satisfaction, not entirely unjustified since, like the Swiss, the Aranese have quite a lot to be satisfied about. 

In common with the Swiss, they pride themselves on their track record of helping refugees. During the Second World War, when official Spanish policy under the dictator Franco, was to hand back escaping Jews, resistance fighters or Allied prisoners of war to the tender care of the Nazi occupation authorities in France, it seems that many individual Aranese, if they could get hold of those escapees before the authorities caught them, helped pass them on to safe escape networks. 

As the descendant of a family that lost a lot of people in the Holocaust, I warmed to those stories. And that made it all the more pleasurable to visit a splendid place where water bursts out of the ground, in a series of waterfalls, to flow down into the river Joeu, which later joins the Garonne on its way to France.

The waterfalls at Uelhs deth Joeu
The water surging to the surface after 4 km underground

That water comes from the melting snows of the Aneto, the highest mountain in the Pyrenees, still snow-capped in the summer. The water then seeps into the ground, and flows through dark channels for four kilometres, before it breaks out to the surface again. 

In this July with its record-breaking temperatures, walking up there was hard work, but it was worth it. It’s spectacular to see the water forcing its way out of the ground and falling, white-crested, into the river below.

And what was the icing on the cake of this splendid sight? The name of the river, the Joeu, means the Jew, in Aranese. And the place of the falls? Uelhs deth Joeu. The eyes of the Jew.

Boringly, some authorities – in my view, the less authoritative kind – like to claim that the name means ‘the eyes of Jupiter’ or even ‘the eyes of the Devil’. That only reminds me of one of my favourite Jewish stories.

It’s about a Jew, Shlomo, who attends a Catholic Mass with his Irish friend, Seamus. 

A few minutes in, a little bell rings, and a collecting plate comes around. Seamus puts in a five euro note and Shlomo does the same. A little while later, there’s another ring on the bell and another collecting plate. Seamus puts in a second five euro note, but Shlomo doesn’t have another, so he puts in a twenty. When the bell rings a third time, he doesn’t have a twenty left and has to put in a fifty.

At the end of the Mass, Seamus asks Shlomo, now 75 Euros lighter, what he thinks.

“Very interesting,” he says, “but I’d like to ask your priest a few questions, if that’s OK with him.”

“I’m sure it is.”

Seamus explains to the priest that Shlomo’s not of their faith but would like to ask some questions.

“By all means,” Father Donnelly replies.

“That Jesus,” says Shlomo, “wasn’t he a Jew?”

“Why, yes, a good God-fearing Jew all his life.”

“And those disciples, weren’t they Jews too?”

“Why, to be sure they were.”

Shlomo shakes his head and smiles wryly. 

“We started a business like that, and let it get out of our control?”

Well, we’re not letting our Aranese falls out of our control. Eyes of Jupiter? Eyes of the Devil? Forget it.

Eyes of the Jew they are, and eyes of the Jew they’ll remain.