Antonio Molina - Sepharad

THE BARRIO OF THE ALCÁZAR, bounded on the south and west by the road that circles the ruined wall and terraced gardens, has narrow cobbled streets and small plazas on which it is not unusual to see a large house with a great stone arch and a few mulberry or poplar trees. The oldest houses date from the fifteenth century. The exteriors are whitewashed, except for the door frames, which have the yellow tint of the sandstone from which they were hewn, the same stone that was used for the palaces and churches. The white of the lime and the gold and blond of the stone create a delicate harmony that has the luminous elegance of the Renaissance and the austere beauty of vernacular architecture. High, narrow windows with heavy iron grilles thick as shutters, and gardens enclosed in tall adobe walls, recall the impenetrable look of Muslim dwellings that was adopted for the cloistered convents. There are large mansions with windows narrow as embrasures, in which we children sometimes hid, and great iron rings in the facades, so heavy that we weren’t strong enough to lift them; to these rings, we were told, the former lords of the houses tied their horses. The mansions were inhabited by the nobles who ruled the city and who during their feudal uprisings against the power of the kings dug in behind the walls of the Alcázar. In the shelter of those walls was the Jewish quarter; the nobles needed the Jews’ money, their administrative abilities, the skills of their artisans, so they had an interest in protecting them against the periodic explosions of fury from devout and brutal mobs stirred up by fanatic priests, by legends about profanations of the host and the bloody rituals Jews celebrated to dishonor the Christian religion: that they stole consecrated hosts and spit them out and ground them beneath their feet, and pierced them with nails and crushed them with pincers to repeat on them the tortures inflicted upon the mortal flesh of Jesus Christ, and kidnapped Christian children and slit their throats in the cellars of the synagogues, and drank their blood or with it sullied the sacred white flour of the hosts.

Someone told me about a specific Jewish house, and I wandered around the barrio until I found it. It sits on a narrow street, as if huddled there, and I remember it as lived in, with sounds of people and television flooding out to the street through the open windows, which were filled with pots of geraniums. It has a low door, and on the two extremes of the large stone lintel are engraved two Stars of David, inscribed in a circle, and not so worn by time that you can’t make out the design clearly. It’s a small but solid house that must have belonged to a scribe or minor merchant, not a wealthy family, or possibly to the teacher of a rabbinical school, to some family that in the years prior to the expulsion would have lived divided between fear and an attempt at normality, hoping that the excesses of Christian fanaticism would die down, just as it had so many times, and that in this small city, and behind the protection of the walls of the Alcázar, the terrible slaughter of a few years earlier in Córdoba would not be repeated, or the pogrom at the end of the preceding century. The house on this little street has an air of watchfulness and self-effacement, like someone who lowers his head and walks close to the wall in order not to attract attention.

What do you do if you know that from one day to the next you can be driven from your home, that all it takes is a signature and a lacquer seal at the bottom of a decree for the work of your entire life to be demolished, for you to lose everything, house and goods, for you to find yourself out on the street exposed to shame, forced to part with everything you considered yours and to board a ship that will take you to a country where you will also be pointed at and rejected, or not even that far, to a disaster at sea, the frightening sea you have never seen? The two Stars of David testify to the existence of a large community, like the fossilized impression of an exquisite leaf that fell in the immensity of a forest erased by a cataclysm thousands of years ago. They couldn’t believe that they would actually be driven out, that within a few months they would have to abandon the land they had been born in and where their ancestors had lived. The house has a door with rusted studs and an iron knocker, and small Gothic moldings in the angles of the lintel. Maybe the people who have gone carried with them the key that fit this large keyhole, maybe they handed it down from father to son through generations of exile, just as the language and sonorous Spanish names were perpetuated, and the poems and children’s songs that the Jews of Salonica and Rhodes would carry with them on the long, hellish journey to Auschwitz. It was a house like this that the family of Baruch Spinoza or Primo Levi would leave behind forever.

I walked through the cobbled alleys of the Jewish quarter in Ubeda, imagining the silence that must have fallen during the days following the expulsion, like the silence that would linger in the streets of the Sephardic barrio of Salonica after the Germans evacuated it in 1941, where the voices of children jumping rope and singing the ballads I learned in my childhood would never be heard again, ballads about women who disguised themselves as men in order to do battle in the wars against the Moors, ballads about enchanted queens. The Franciscans and Dominicans preaching to the illiterate from the pulpits of their churches, the bells tolling in triumph as exiles left the Alcázar barrio in the spring and summer of 1492, another of the dates we memorized in school because it marked the moment of the greatest glory in the history of Spain, our teacher told us, when Granada was reconquered and America discovered, and when our newly unified country became an empire. Of Isabel and Fernando the spirit prevails, we sang as our martial footsteps marked time with the hymn, we will die kissing the sacred flag. A feat by the Catholic king and queen as important as the victory over the Moors in Granada, and a decision as wise as that of sponsoring Columbus, had been the expulsion of the Jews, who in the drawings in our school encyclopedia had hooked noses, goatees, and who stood accused of the same dark perfidy as other sworn enemies of Spain of whom we knew nothing but their terrifying names: Freemasons and communists. When we were fighting with other children in the street and one of them spit on us, we always yelled at him: Jew, you spit on the Lord. On the floats during Holy Week, the soldiers and the Pharisees were depicted with the same gross features as the Jews in the school encyclopedia. On the Last Supper float, Judas was as scary to us as Dracula in the movies, with his hooked nose and pointed beard and the green face of betrayal and greed that turned to sneak looks at the bag that held the thirty pieces of silver.

IN ROME’S HOTEL EXCELSIOR, many years and several lives later, I met the Sephardic writer Emile Roman, a Romanian who spoke fluent Italian and French, but also a rare and ceremonious Spanish he had learned in childhood and which must have been very similar to the Spanish spoken in 1492 by the people who lived in that house in the Alcázar barrio. “But we didn’t call ourselves Sephardim,” he told me. “We were Spanish.” In Bucharest in 1944, a passport expedited by the Spanish embassy saved his life. With the same passport that liberated him from the Nazis he escaped the Communist dictatorship years later and never returned to Romania, not even after the death of Ceauşescu. Now he was writing in French and living in Paris, and as he was retired, he spent his evenings at a club of elderly Sephardim called the Vida Larga, the long life. He was a tall, erect man who moved deliberately; he had olive skin and large ritual hands. In the bar of the hotel, an individual with a red bow tie and silver dinner jacket was playing international hits on an electric organ. Sitting across from me, beside the windows that looked out on the traffic of Via Veneto, Roman took sips of an espresso and spoke passionately of injustices committed five centuries before, never forgotten, never corrected, not even softened by the passing of time and succession of generations: the incontrovertible decree of expulsion, the goods and homes hastily sold to meet the time period of two months granted the expelled, two months to depart from a country in which your people lived for more than a thousand years, almost since the beginning of that other diaspora, said Roman. The deserted synagogues, the scattered libraries, the empty stores and closed workshops, one or two hundred thousand people forced to leave a country of barely eight million inhabitants.