Charting Memory

Recalling Medieval Spain

Stacy N. Beckwith, Stacy N. Beckwith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781135682576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain elaborates an interdiscursive picture of how Medieval Spain has been remembered by various Arab, Jewish, and Hispanic peoples from well before 1492 to the present. The collection breaks with traditional foci on the legacies of separate Iberian communities and their descendants, and on limited, largely textual sets of their related cultural practices. In distinct ways, this collection takes a multi-ethnic and multi-modal approach, departing from sociologist Maurice Halbwachs' premise that collective memories form not within individuals alone, but through the inner and inter-workings of actual and conceptual social milieux. The volume hereby foregrounds the constitutive roles of communities created through prayer, literary resonances, architecture, musical performance, and name giving, in shaping memories of medieval Spanish contexts as well as complex identities in the Balkans, the Near and Middle East, North Africa, Latin American, and the United States. The ten original essays in this collection, by international specialists in anthropology, ethnomusicology, literary criticism, folklore, and onomastics, are not arranged according to Arab, Jewish, and Hispanic cultural memories of medieval Spain. Instead, the collection's unique comparative emphasis illuminates ways in which various peoples have re-articulated memories relating to medieval Spain in and across physical, temporal, and social locations, with different types and degrees of impact.

♦ Chapter 1

“We’ve Always Sung It That Way”: Re/Appropriation of Medieval Spanish Jewish Culture in a Galician Town

Judith R. Cohen

“You know, if you want to see the real Jews, the real ones from the Inquisition, they’re right near here, in Ribadavia.” I was told this several times during research in Spain and Portugal, in 1995-97: in a tiny mountain hamlet in Galicia; on the midnight train out of Vigo; at a Jewish New Year dinner in a private home in Madrid. None of these people knew of my personal and professional involvement with Ribadavia, a small town in Galicia; rather, the remarks were spontaneous reactions to my explanation of my presence in that part of the Peninsula: research on the musical ethnography of Crypto-Jewish regions of the Spanish-Portuguese border areas.¹

The most obvious question arising from this encounter is: “Well, are there ‘real’ Jews in Ribadavia?” Is this really an exotic, out-of-the-way remnant of circa-Expulsion Peninsular Jewish life? If not—then what is it? In order to answer this question, several levels of investigation are involved. On an immediate level, there is the town’s annual Festa da Istoria, the event which has highlighted the historical Jewish presence in Ribadavia, while helping turn it into a complex mixture of history, memory, image-making, fantasy, and tourism. The Festa in turn must be situated within the context of the Spanish Quincentennial of 1992, marking both Columbus’s voyage and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. This year and its related and generated activities, are tied to a Spanish preoccupation with repossessing their pre-Expulsion past, sometimes adjusting their memories of it in the process. This in turn leads to the examination of such issues as cultural appropriation, insider-outsider status, folklorization, and the anthropological study of tourism.

Reclaiming the Past and Its Memories: Ribadavia and Its Festa da Istoria

The main focus of this essay is the annual Festa da Istoria, which takes place in Ribadavia (Orense Province), a small inland town of some three thousand residents, not far from the Portuguese border, on the Avia River which gave it its name. I have commented elsewhere on certain aspects of the Festa da Istoria and particularly on its appropriation of Moroccan and eastern Mediterranean Judeo-Spanish songs as part of local repertoire (Cohen 1996). Here I will update the discussion of the use of music and folklore in the Festa da Istoria, and briefly relate it to some other events in Spain and Portugal, in an attempt to examine how memory and recall work together with invention and reinvention to rework an image of medieval Spain. The data presented below were obtained largely through ethnographic participant observation: my roles in Ribadavia have included musical performer, consultant, academic researcher, workshop leader, and friend, from late 1993 through to the present. These simultaneous, overlapping roles have provided a multifaceted perspective. As well, during the same period, my ongoing research projects in Judeo-Spanish music, and in musical traditions of historically Crypto-Jewish areas along the Spanish/Portuguese border, have enabled me to view Ribadavia and its Festa within a broader context.

After Franco’s death and the end of the Spanish dictatorship, Spain became preoccupied with presenting itself as an open, modern country and culture. An ongoing problem has been the persistence of the “España Negra” image, and one of the “blackest” aspects of Spanish history is, not surprisingly, the Catholic Inquisition, accompanied by the expulsion of the Jews, and, later, the Muslims. One way to make the history of the Jewish presence in Spain seem less negra has been to promote the concept of convivencia, a rather rosy vision of the three monotheistic religions convivially sharing the Peninsula. One way to awaken and then reinforce or even “correct” memories of this supposedly convivial tricultural past is to offer concrete remnants of it in the form of “authenticated” barrios judíos, “Jewish quarters,” in cities, towns, and villages all over the country. As 1992, the quincentennial of the main expulsion date (in Portugal, the expulsion/mass forced conversion date was 1497) approached, and after Spain established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1986, a plethora of activities began, many of which, in 1998, are still going on, or have paved the way for new ones. These have included academic conferences and publications, festivals, recordings, broadcasts, tourist office brochures, and tours of “Jewish Spain.”

Memory, Tourism, and the Social Scientists

Before going on to the details of the Festa and its role, let us take a brief look at recent developments in scholarly approaches to tourism’s impact on both traditional arts and perceptions of authenticity and of history; many of these studies were inspired by British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal collection The Invention of Tradition—or by the title itself. In the past couple of decades, scholarly interest in tourism has gathered considerable momentum: as Davydd Greenwood puts it, “… now, like the tourists themselves, social researchers are flocking to tourist centers” (quoted in Bendix 1989, 133). One scholarly trend exemplifies the past two decades’ aversion to any anthropological statement which resembles a value judgment: changes, even outright inventions are not negative, they are transformations, or new cultural expressions. A different approach, much less apparent in anthropology and its related disciplines, deplores anything identifiable as a falsification of known facts, refusing it any new creative status. Thus, harnessing and reshaping memory may be seen in neutral, implicitly positive, terms by one group of scholars, and as reprehensible by another.

Folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is one of the scholars who discusses the problem of appropriating and marketing the past in fairly neutral terms. Using the term “transvaluation,” she defines “heritage” as “a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past” (1995, 369). Jules-Rosette found (quoted in Bendix 1989, 133) that artisans involved in producing tourist arts developed their own aesthetic within this new “genre” and in fact “eventually appropriated an externally imposed notion of authenticity.” For Marti, a “folklorized version” of a given song, dance, ritual, or fiesta is a “faithful and authentic manifestation of its real sociocultural context” (quoted in Bendix 1989, 226). “Staged authenticity” may not be a travesty, for “folklorists have also begun to deconstruct the scholarly; the concept of tradition … what was previously categorized as ‘impure’ and ‘anomalous’ can suddenly belong to the realm of expressive culture” (132), or be related to “working in the present” (see essays in Fox 1991). Ironically, the very scholars who spurn nineteenth-century romanticism seem to have developed a late-twentieth-century version of it in their “I’m-okay-you’re-okay” vision.

Ethnomusicology, while it often reflects this “nonjudgmental” approach, at other times may be less romantically oriented. Ethnomusicologists Malm and Wallis (1988) express some ambivalence: on the one hand “commercial revitalization” generated by tourism may have positive results for them; on the other, traditional music and dance are altered and repackaged for tourists who “seem to want what they believe is authentic traditional culture,” leading to the threat of increasing “cultural domination and exploitation” (187).

Ethnomusicologist René Lysloff takes Malm and Willis’s almost cautious reservations further, speaking of “plunderphonics” in the following manner: “history itself is the object of economic exploitation and expansion, offering a virtually limitless supply of natural and cultural resources while also providing an abundance of cheap industrial labor as well as a vast market for inexpensive and disposable manufactured goods. In a nutshell, the past becomes the future’s third world” (Lysloff 1997, 206). This reflection provides a thought-provoking gloss on the studied neutrality of Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s reflection that “the attribution of pastness creates a distance that can be travelled” (1995, 370), or James Clifford’s extended and perhaps rather forced use of travel as an academic metaphor (1997).

Meanwhile, another form of travel has become available, in the form of electronic home pages and discussion lists—in a way, virtual pilgrim routes. Conferences and festivals are held in (and about) the renovated old Jewish quarters, and ever-increasing numbers of tourist buses pull up in predictable spots in both Spain and Portugal. All these voices—the scholarly and the popular, the magic and the academic or materialistic-skeptic, those of the historian and of the tourist brochure writer, can no longer be treated exclusively. For better or for worse, this new phenomenon of tourism and scholarship as fellow travelers through cyberspace, shaping collective memory along the way, is likely to grow dramatically in the near future, and it is becoming impractical to consider either aspect without the other.

Discovering and Refurbishing Sephardic Remnants

The development of the idea of touring the Iberian Jewish past exemplifies Dean MacCannell’s classic study of tourism and anthropology, partcularly in MacCannell’s notions of sight sacralization, ritualization of attitude front/back areas, and the semiotics of tourism (1976, 42 ff). While many Iberian cities, towns, and villages can be shown to have had at least some level of historical Jewish presence, eight Spanish towns were selected in the mid-1990s to form in conjunction the Caminos de Sefarad, “Routes of Sepharad”: Cáceres, Córdoba, Girona, Hervás, Ribadavia, Segovia, Toledo, and Tudela. Each of these, as well as several other places, such as Tomar and Castelo de Vide in Portugal, can boast the remnants of former Jewish or converso neighborhoods (old Jewish quarters). In many cases synagogues and old Jewish quarters have been named or identified (sacralized), then restored, framed, and/or enshrined, and given semiotic markers following a process described by MacCannell. Such semiotic markers might include decorative wall plaques, usually along the lines of Barrio Judío Medieval, “Medieval Jewish neighborhood,” and other indicators of tourist itineraries. Here the concept of tourist as not only traveler, but also as pilgrim comes into play: the very use of the word “camino” recalls not only pilgrimage in general but, more specifically, the famous Camino de Santiago, the road to the pilgrimage site of Saint James of Compostela, little more an hour’s drive from Ribadavia.

While many identifications of “sacralized sites” are accurate, such as the famous Samuel Levi synagogue, now the Jewish Museum of Toledo, others may be partly conjecture, or else they may not coincide totally with historical documentation. Hervás boasts a well-indicated and satisfyingly picturesque barrio judío, whose inhabitants are always ready to oblige awestruck tourist/pilgrims with tidbits of collective “memory,” while the entrance to the town is dominated by a huge billboard advertisement for the Hotel Sinagoga. But no consensus seems to have been reached on which of the buildings confidently and even officially promoted as the “medieval synagogue” actually was this sanctuary—if, indeed, it is any of them. In fact here in tourist-friendly Hervás, it seems that there was no actual barrio, either in documents or in oral tradition: Jews did live there, but not in a “Jewish quarter” (Cohen interviews in Hervás August 19, 1996, July 17-18, 1998; Marciano de Hervás 1997 “Los judíos,” 11).

Historian Marciano de Hervás has no patience with the “it’s a hybrid new expressive culture” viewpoint. His detailed and carefully documented analysis of “apocryphal legends about the Jews of Hervás” (1997) is replete with such unequivocable terms as “pseudomythology” (178), “pseudohistorical stories” (182), “falsifications” and “deformations” (202) which have become “the most dangerous enemies of the history of a town …” (202). One of the most fascinating aspects of the Hervás situation is the interplay of popular memory with its manipulation by institutional publications and proclamations. In one of Hervas’s tourist booklets, Miguel Gómez Andrea voices an objection to “materialist excepticysts,” articulating a wistful preference for “the magical side of life,” (“Algunos misterios hervansenses,” Ferias, Ayuntmiento de Hervás). This “magic side” of life reaches what may be its nadir in the tourist office’s comic book (Roa and Gómez Andrea 1996). In this popular sales item, superficially presented historical elements are interspersed with scenes in which a middle-aged Sephardic woman explores her Iberian roots with her son (who does the driving), and every few pages has sudden dizzying, mystical visions of her own ancestors’ past in Hervás.

Not too far from Hervás, almost at the Portuguese border, is Valencia de Alcántara, where the local historian, Señor Bejarano, commented to me that the Jews of the town did not have a separate neighbourhood; the Barrio Gótico/Judío, he quipped, “is neither barrio nor Gothic nor Jewish, just as Santillana del Mar is neither saintly nor flat nor of the sea!”² Historians, archaeologists, and tourist brochure writers have developed a veritable obsession with hunting down and counting up symbols such as crosses on doorways placed to ward off the Inquisition, or seven-branched figures representing the Jewish menorah: objects become “sacralized” and sites highlighted. These signs and sites serve several functions: emphasizing their presence fortifies the reconstructed memory of Spain’s Jewish past. The fact that the engravings may be found on actual houses rather than relegated to museums gives the tourist/pilgrim the impression of having penetrated what MacCannell terms “back” areas (1976 92, 101), or those spaces reserved for the discerning traveler who does not what to be seen as part of tourist “rabble.” Retiring for a round of drinks in Ribadavia’s Bar O Xudeu (Bar of the Jew), fulfills a similar back-area function, though from the opposite perspective of carnivalesque desacralization.

Identification of formerly Jewish or converso areas, then, has often been a combination of scholarship and popular culture: historical and archeological research, local oral tradition, and at times tourism strategies, personal interpretations, or even wishful thinking. Scholars have been asked to contribute short, accessible pieces for inclusion in tourist brochures or recording jacket notes, or to speak at Sephardic festivals whose popular aspect is very different from the atmosphere of an academic conference. The lay person also receives information from nonscholarly sources, such as tourist offices, television shows, films, newspaper articles, electronic websites, and so forth. Add local oral traditions, and sprinkle liberally with romantic notions of a medieval past and miraculous survivals, and what seems to appear is a re-remembered medieval Jewish Iberia which is acquiring its own traditional status.

Ribadavia and Its Festa da Istoria

In the late Middle Ages, Ribadavia’s Jewish population was estimated by the chronicler Froissait to stand at fifteen hundred (1871, 2:11), a figure which historians usually find exaggerated. Whatever their numbers, the medieval Ribadavia Jews played a prominent role in the unsuccessful defense of the town against the duke of Lancaster in 1386, in retaliation for which their homes were sacked by the English (see Meruéndano 1981; Onega 1981; Atienza 1986). After the expulsion of a percentage of the Jews from Portugal, Portuguese Jews took refuge in and near Ribadavia, and over the next century established and maintained contacts with Jewish communities in southern France, in Amsterdam, and in Venice (Estévez 1993, 54-55).The Inquisition arrived relatively late in Ribadavia, and it is thought that many Jews remained as conversos there and/or nearby, so that there may well be a high proportion of their descendants in the town and surrounding areas. This, of course, is the case in much of the Iberian Peninsula; in fact, there seems to be almost as much effort put into recuperating its Jewish past as there formerly was to eradicating what was its Jewish present.

Today, though there are no Jews in Ribadavia (when I first visited in 1994 there were two households, neither one of Spanish descent, and both recent arrivals), the town is an integral part of the Spanish Caminos de Sefarad, along with several others, and has been receiving increasing attention from tourists. It has played host to conferences and festivals on Sephardic themes, and a large conference on old Jewish quarters in 1997. Meanwhile, its own old Jewish quarter has been declared a cultural monument. The former synagogue and the mikveh (ritual bath) are currently privately owned; in fact, the latter is now part of the floor of a popular bar (residents advise ordering ...