A tour that revealed so much by showing us so little

It was a curious guided tour we went on through the old city centre of Valencia. In two ways.

The first curious thing was the reception we twice received from locals, as we stood listening to our guide, Marisa, talking to us through her loudspeaker. In English.

“Welcome back, tourists!” the first cried.

The second even went so far as to applaud us for returning to the city.

Valencia is as beautiful as ever, of course. But it is strangely quiet. Despite the hot weather, and the profusion of tables outside cafés and restaurants, they had few clients.

We heard one frustrated restaurant manager swearing, “this is complete shit”. A glance inside showed food ready for ordering, and no one ordering it. The main problem isn’t that locals are afraid to eat out, though there may be some of that. It’s that the influx of tourists we would expect at this time of year has simply not turned up.

The Coronavirus restrictions are gradually being lifted, but there’s still only a trickle of visitors from abroad. That’s throttling a lot of the business the city depends on.

Hence the applause on seeing us.

We hadn’t the heart to tell them that we all lived here. We might be on a tour, but we weren’t tourists. We didn’t want to spoil their celebration, brief as it was likely to be.

The other thing that made the tour strange was what we were visiting. It was the ‘Judería’, the Jewish quarter of the old city. What made it strange was that it is, physically, all but non-existent.

There was once a thriving Jewish community in Valencia. Many of its administrators and financiers were Jews. When James I took the Kingdom of Valencia from the previous Moorish rulers, he used Jews to help him run the place. In return, he gave them a large chunk of the city to be their own. They prospered so much that before long the Jewish quarter had to be extended still further.

It wasn’t just in administration and finance that the Jews distinguished themselves. In the course of our tour yesterday, we stopped to admire the (modern) bust of Luis Vives, one of Valencia’s most significant scholars, a contemporary and friend of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Luis Vives, descendant of Jews, 
not honoured in his own land

His major contribution was to the foundation of what we now know as psychology. However, he did that work not in Valencia, but in the Netherlands. An inscription behind the bust explains that the honour he couldn’t receive in his own land was afforded to him in another. Why? He was from a family of converted Jews, most of whom fell to persecution by the Inquisition. He was wise to get out.

A fine building in its own right
But it rather disguises the Jewish cemetery underneath it

Most of the tour was like that. We saw the rather fine palace built on part of the site of the main Jewish graveyard, but we saw no graves. We looked at where the principal Synagogue once stood, but not a trace of it remains. The closest we came to any physical sign of the previous Jewish presence was at the site of a major restoration project on the Valeriola Palace in the centre of the city. An old street runs through the site to the remains of a wall that marks the limits of the Jewish neighbourhood. A recently discovered oven too probably belonged to it.

Shoemaker Street in Valencia
A restoration project revealing a rare trace of the Jewish quarter

It’s extraordinary to see how utterly the community, and even any trace of its previous existence, has been wiped out.

It’s not just the Jews. Valencia was Arab for five centuries. There are more remains of that time than there are of the Jews, but still they’re rare and in ruins – odd stretches of wall, for instance, mostly underground.

And yet Jews offered some of the most important intellectual skills that Spain enjoyed, in administration, finance and even, as we’ve seen, philosophy, science and medicine. Meanwhile, the Muslims provided equally powerful intellectual contributions (one of the key figures leading to the European Renaissance was Averroes, a Moor from the Spanish city of Cordoba) and also some of the most sophisticated agricultural techniques the country possessed. Getting rid of these communities might indeed have made Spain more religiously homogeneous, but what was the price?

Judge for yourselves. In 1492, with the Columbus expedition to the Americas, Spain was launched on an adventure that would make it Europe’s, possibly the world’s, most powerful and wealthiest Empire. In that same year, it expelled its Jews. Twenty years later it was the turn of the Moors.

Within little more than a century, it was being challenged by France and the upstart Protestant powers of northern Europe, the English and the Dutch, the latter of whom won their independence from Spain in a long and bitter series of revolutionary wars.

By the early eighteenth century, Spain’s fate was being dictated to it by fighting between other countries to decide who would be its King, in the so-called War of Spanish Succession. By the start of the next century, it lost its dominance at sea at the Battle of Trafalgar. And by end of that same century, another upstart nation, the United States, had relieved it of its last major colonial possessions.

Perhaps it would have been the same even if it had kept its Jews and its Arabs. But I think they could have held their position a lot longer by drawing on those talents and applying them wisely, rather than driving them out. Accepting a little religious diversity might have done them a lot of good.

And that was the object lesson we drew, from the very fact that our tour showed us how little remained that we could actually look at...