It was a great holiday.
That’s if you can have a ‘holiday’ when you’re retired. Perhaps what I mean is ‘break away’. And not from work, since we expended seriously more energy getting to know ten cities in central and western Spain in thirteen days than we would have done by staying at home.
That included a quick trip into Portugal for lunch, as I mentioned last time.
Anyone familiar with this blog will know that I rather like the Spanish poet, Jaime Gil de Biedma. He said that of all histories in History, the saddest is Spain’s, since it always ends badly. It’s a clever remark, and I don’t like to contradict it, but I do have to say that the elements of that sadness, the avoidable tragedies, the self-inflicted wounds, are by no means unique to Spain, but apply to most countries I know anything about.
All that came to mind when we got to the fine city of Toledo.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged across most of the Anglo world that “in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. That commemorates the so-called discovery of the New World. I say ‘so-called’ because, to the people living there, it wasn’t new and they no doubt reckoned it had been discovered by their ancestors, something that happened millennia earlier.
In any case, though Columbus’s voyage launched Spain on its road to global empire, it was only one of three key turning points in Spanish history that year.
Another was the fall of the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, Granada, to Ferdinand and Isabella, the Christian monarchs of the newly unified Spain.
The third was the decree of the same year expelling the Jews from the country.
We don’t know for sure when Jews first reached the Iberian peninsula. There are suggestions they may have got there soon after Rome conquered the territory from Carthage, at the end of the third century before our era or the beginning of the second. A wave of immigration seems also to have turned up after the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in the year 70, when Rome conquered Judaea. What’s certain, and we have archaeological evidence for it, is that Jews were there in the second century of our era.
That makes it clear that by 1492, they’d been there a long time.
As for Muslim rule, it had lasted in Spain for over seven centuries. It had been driven back, step by grim step, in what is referred to as the ‘reconquest’, the process by which Christian rulers took over again. Granada in 1492 completed the process.
As for Toledo, it fell to the Christians in 1085. Despite the defeat of the Arab rulers, many ordinary Muslims were allowed to live on in the city. They were the ‘Mudéjars’, derived from an Arabic word for ‘those permitted to stay on’.
Defeated people tend not to enjoy the same status as the victors, and the Mudéjars were no exception. For instance, only certain professions were open to them. When you restrict what people can do to just a limited range of things, they tend to get very good at those things. The Mudéjars became outstanding builders and agriculturalists in that specific form of agriculture that requires irrigation. To this day, Spanish irrigation systems are derived from those the Arabs left behind.
Something a bit similar happened to the Jews, in the era that Toledo was ‘the city of the three peoples’, when they lived mostly in harmony with Christians and Muslims. Like the Mudéjars, they were limited in what they were allowed to do. At times, they might be permitted to own land, and did some good farming, but often that was prohibited. However, there was one activity that was open to them pretty much all of the time, which was financial service. Of course, most Jews are no better at that kind of business than anyone else, but for the minority that was, it provided a good way to become seriously wealthy.
Jews are just as generous and just as mean as any other people. If they have a reputation for being tight-fisted, that’s above all precisely because it was in finance that they had the best opportunity to be highly successful. Lots of people have to borrow money at some time or another, but who on earth likes the guy that lends it, and then collects interest on the loan? The fact that the authorities have driven him into that kind of work isn’t going to make him any more popular.
As the richest Jews made their money, they decided that one thing to spend it on was beautiful buildings. In Toledo, we visited two former Synagogues. Both are glorious. But what’s most striking about them is how Arab they look. The arches with internal lobes, the brickwork, the carved wooden ceilings are just the kind that one associates with great Muslim architecture.
One of the two temples we visited was the Synagogue of Saint Mary the White, whose Christian-sounding name is only down to the fact that synagogues aren’t generally named but are simply called after the street in which they stand.
Everywhere you look inside it, there are Muslim eight-pointed stars. But then the builders decided to leave a small humorous reminder that they knew they were building for Jewish clients: they put in one six-pointed Star of David.
Just one.
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| One of many eight-pointed stars in the Synagogue of St Mary the White (l) and the only six-pointed one (r) |
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| A fine Arab-styled window in Toledo's St John of the Kings Monastery Compare the decoration with the Synagogue pictures above |
It was the best and most fashionable architecture of the time. They paid for the best. Their Muslim architects gave them the best.
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| Mudéjar carved wooden ceilings Transito Synagogue (l) and St John of the Kings monastery (r) |
That strikes me as admirable. Which is why the expulsion of 1492 feels like an astonishingly self-destructive act. Why, when the three peoples were living so well alongside each other, would you want to bring that coexistence to an end?
But bring it to an end Ferdinand and Isabella did. The Jews were given four months to convert or get out of the country. One hundred and twenty days to end a presence that had lasted nearly 1400 years and probably longer.
And here’s a poignant detail. Many of those who left carefully locked up their houses and took the keys with them. Often, those keys became heirlooms, passed on to their descendants down to today.
Spain and Portugal decided some years ago to allow anyone who could prove descent from the expelled Jews to claim automatic citizenship. Our guide in Toledo told us that, some time ago, he met an Argentinian Jewish couple who’d just been naturalised Spanish. He was anxious to congratulate them and welcome them to their new home. All they could do was cry.
They were back after half a millennium of banishment. And they had their key. Though it would open no door.
As for the Muslims, in 1609, they too were forced to convert or go, again with only a few months to choose. Many left.
Even the converts who stayed, whether from Judaism or Islam, were regarded as suspect and inferior and subject to repeated persecution by their Christian rulers. Those rulers clearly felt that ensuring the ethnic and religious homogeneity of Spain was the right thing for the country and the best way to obey the will of God. It’s an attitude that I find hard to reconcile with a gospel of love but, hey, theologians are good at some remarkable mental (and moral) acrobatics.
What the two expulsions did was make sure that Spain lost some of the best farmers, builders, administrators and financial experts in the world. It’s no surprise that the Golden Age of Spain, when it enjoyed its greatest flowering of art and literature and held its greatest power, was essentially just the sixteenth century.
The century that followed 1492.
After that, decline set in. And Spain found itself being overtaken by countries which may not have liked the culture and customs of their immigrants, but knew how to make the most of the skills they brought with them.
The lesson seems obvious, doesn’t it? Keep your doors, and above all your minds, open to other people. Learn from them. Let them build or invest or cultivate for you. That way lie riches.
And yet, many countries, in particular Brexit Britain and the previously-Trumped US, seem dedicated once more to putting up walls, making life difficult for people from other cultures, and keeping them out if possible. Like the Spanish Christians in 1492, they seem intent on impoverishing themselves, because they prefer homogeneity and poverty to tolerance and prosperity.
Which is why the saddest history of all History isn’t just Spain’s.
Curious what lessons you can learn from a brief holiday, isn’t it?
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