Girona preserves from its Jewish past legends as evocative and terrible as that of the Torana. It is situated in the context of the riots of 1391, a well-documented episode of anti-Semitic violence that led to the destruction of part of the call, the Jewish quarter. The victims of the attack, which took place on August 10, the night of San Lorenzo, took refuge in the Gironella tower, a fortification located at the highest point of the old Roman wall, in the place now occupied by the so-called Gardens of the Germans. There they endured a preventive detention of 17 weeks under the protection, not always complicit, of the royal soldiers. More than a hundred people crammed one day after another into a tiny space while their houses burned at the bottom of the hill. During the confinement, local friars accompanied by parishioners would come to the tower to encourage Jews to convert to Christianity. In those exceptional circumstances, exhausted, frightened, and perhaps starving, faced with the intransigence of official discourse and the hostility of their former neighbors, many of the heirs of the Jewish families that had settled in the city four centuries earlier ended up dying. yielding to ideological harassment and agreed to receive baptism.
The Torana or Tolrana, a Jewish woman who is described as educated and with solid convictions, did not follow the example of her relatives. She preferred to immolate herself. Her throat was cut or (here the versions differ) she was beheaded by the mob of fundamentalists of the cross. The legend assures that the soul of the Hebrew martyr was trapped between the wall and the gardens, turned into a dim glow that is barely perceived on summer nights. According to Carles Vivó, author of the book Llegendes i misteris de Girona, her ghost goes for a walk with some frequency through the corners of the old town "not in a visible way, but as a woman's voice that, between tears, hums in an unintelligible but overwhelming way ”. Vivó also speaks of a bronze bust dedicated to her that was kept for years "in a shady corner" of the courtyard of the Rabbis, today belonging to the Museum of the History of the Jews.
Everything is in the legend. The memory of the proud Jewish quarter at the foot of the mountain, very close to the cathedral. The stone mansions with splendid courtyards where the Jews lived until the expulsion decree of 1492. The pogroms, the forced conversions, the acts of dignity and resistance. The crowd inflamed by the incendiary speeches of the friars and the certainty or consolation that the rabbis could provide as an antidote. The royal protection, often reluctant. The difficult coexistence between different cultures in an era determined by exclusive religious worldviews. And, especially, the profound impact that the centuries of Jewish presence left in Girona, in its urban landscape, its history and its folklore.
The reasons for coming to the capital of Gironès are multiple. The cathedral, the Arab baths, the old town (Barri Vell), the hanging houses on the banks of the Onyar river, the magnificent bridges of the Fishmongers and the Princess, the Cinema Museum, the Devesa park with its hundred-year-old plane trees, the house-museum of the architect Rafael Masó, the local gastronomy, the bicycle routes, the proximity of the Pyrenees, the volcanic area of La Garrotxa or the splendor of the Costa Brava coastline.
Two alleys with history
Add to all this a visit to one of the most attractive and best preserved Jewish quarters on the Iberian Peninsula. We are accompanied by Assumpció Hosta, director of the Patronat Call de Girona, and one of the members of her team, Neus Casellas. Starting from the essential Museu d'Història dels Jueus, at number 8 Carrer de la Força, we walk through Manuel Cúndaro and Sant Llorenç, the pair of exquisite alleys perpendicular to the cathedral that climb towards the gardens of the wall. At the top of the second street, we stop for a moment on the threshold of the house of Lleó Avinay, rector of the Aljama, the council of scholars and semi-autonomous governing body of the Jewish community.
A courtyard designed according to the cabalistic symbology of the tree of life now houses Gothic windows, a Romanesque column and a well in the shade of an orange tree. “It is documented that the aljama met here since the 12th century”, Casellas tells us, “after the edict of expulsion and the expropriation of the properties of the Sephardic Jews, the current Renaissance mansion was built, but the courtyard preserves the plant and many details of its medieval past, when it was one of the nerve centers of the call in its period of maximum splendor”.
The first Jews settled in the city at the end of the 9th century. A document from the year 888 mentions the presence of 25 families from the community of Juïgues, near La Seu d'Urgell, who had been invited by the Count of Besalú when Girona was little more than a transit point on the northern Iberian margin. of the Via Augusta. Here they put down very solid roots, they built their first synagogue next to the eastern portico of the cathedral and acquired a nearby mound, today known as Montjuïc, to establish their own cemetery on it. “In their prime,” Casellas explains, “the Jews of Girona came to form a prosperous and very active community of between 1,000 and 1,400 people. They practiced all kinds of trades and lived in relative harmony with their Christian neighbours, especially in good times, such as the 12th and 13th centuries. The call, like the whole of Catalan society, went into decline with the great political and demographic disasters that occurred from the first third of the fourteenth century. It is estimated that at the time of the expulsion there were just over 200 Jews left here in a city in decline that at that time had barely 2,500 inhabitants.
Illustrious women and men
Before being forced into exile, the Jewish community of Girona had a fertile history and produced a series of illustrious names. Women like Rahel, owner of vineyards in the 11th century, Ester, a disowned wife who successfully sued to recover her family heritage in the 14th century, or Blanca de Falcó, a lady from high society who converted to Christianity in the 19th century. And men like the Kabbalist and philosopher Azriel de Girona, the poet and religious thinker Mesulam ben Selomó de Piera or perhaps the most famous Judeo-Catalan, Mossé ben Nahmán, also called Nahmánides, rabbi, philosopher, poet and doctor of the thirteenth century. Nahmánides is remembered above all, according to Casellas, "for his participation in the Dispute of Barcelona, in 1263, a dialectical duel between religious denominations organized by King Jaume I in which Mossé ben Nahmán defended the Jewish cause before an audience hostile, and apparently did so with skill and eloquence."
With his defense of the Talmud and rabbinical tradition, Nahmánides aroused the ire of his interlocutors, especially the Dominican friar Ramon de Penyafort and the convert Pau Christià, and this was most likely the main reason that prompted him to emigrate after a lifetime. as a successful professional and community leader in his native Girona. He ended his days in Jerusalem, surviving a fascinating journey through the Mediterranean basin that he embarked on at a very old age.
The vestiges of this fascinating community life can be traced behind the arches and porticoes of the Pujada de la Catedral, in the nooks and crannies of the winding Cúndaro street, in the stars of David and Hebrew characters scattered here and there or in the frames of private houses that still they preserve the hole in which the mezuzah was embedded, a rolled parchment that includes the text of one of the main Jewish prayers. Also in the Romanesque Tapestry of Creation, a lavish large-scale embroidery dating from the 11th century and preserved in an adjoining room of Girona Cathedral. At the base of the tapestry, the most deteriorated, the story of Elena of Constantinople, mother of Emperor Constantine, is reproduced in vignettes. The third of the drawings in the series shows two characters identified as Jews in what represents a fascinating testimony of how the Christians of the time saw and represented their neighbors of the Mosaic religion.
The Jewish treasure of Besalú
Outside the limits of the call, Hosta brings us closer to places related to the history of the Jewish people, such as the square of the monastery of Sant Pere de Galligants, where there is a monolith dedicated to Anne Frank, the German girl of Jewish origin who was a victim of the Holocaust. Also the Jardin de l'Àngel, at the foot of the wall, a peaceful corner with colorful sculptures where we find plaques with translations into Hebrew (well-intentioned, but apparently incorrect) of the names of Biblical angels and archangels.
25 kilometers to the west, near the town of Olot, is Besalú, a resoundingly beautiful medieval town that hides one of the most valuable Jewish treasures on its banks: the square of the old synagogue with its miqvé, a bathing area ritual from the 12th century that a cistern fed with water from the Fluvià river. A 36-year-old staircase gives access to a shadowy chamber where the pool is located. The purification ritual, obligatory during the Jewish Passover or every time women finished their menstrual cycle, consisted of descending the last seven steps and submerging three times up to the head.
Paper voices
Joan Ferrer, director of the Girona Historical Archive, has just spread out the parchments and papers on the table and handles them with exquisite care. "They are documents that for centuries were not given any value, " he explains, "fragments of liturgical books, notarial acts in Hebrew, nuptial contracts, debt claims... A whole documentary treasure of incalculable value that the Jewish community of Girona left behind. back when she was forced to flee prec. They were abandoned or sold badly, mostly ending up in the hands of local bookbinders who used them to give thickness and flexibility to parchment covers. Thus, as resource and filler material, they have reached our time and have been able to be extracted from the volumes in which they were inserted. Ferrer shows us one of these incunabula rescued from oblivion, one of the jewels in his archive collection. It is a ketuba, "a very exhaustive marriage contract that dates from the 15th century and was found by a priest from the town of Castelló d'Empúries."
The preserved fragment belongs to the conclusions of the contract, just a couple of paragraphs in neat Hebrew calligraphy accompanied by what could be the signature of the spouses and a couple of showy ornamental stripes located in the margins. "We have hundreds of documents with these characteristics, but extracting them, keeping them in optimal conditions, interpreting them and making them available to scholars is a daunting task that we are assuming at the pace that circumstances allow us." Every few months there is a new finding, although Ferrer considers that the screening carried out in the last 20 years by the Arxiu has already brought to light the bulk of this documentary heritage that remained hidden. In these fragments is the voice of the Sephardic community on the banks of the Onyar River and the rest of the Girona regions.
Vestiges of an ancient tradition
The Museu d'Història dels Jueus is in a space with tradition, in the building of the Bonastruc ça Porta center, the Catalan name of the Girona Jewish scholar Mossé ben Nahmán. In this beautiful and ancient palace, with a beautiful interior patio, the last of the half dozen synagogues that Girona had during its medieval period was located since the mid-15th century. These days, the museum hosts a temporary exhibition dedicated to the history of the Diaspora and the travels of the Jewish people to which the National Library of Israel has contributed documentary funds.
The permanent exhibition is a historical tour that starts from the looting and destruction of the temple in Jerusalem to accompany the Jewish communities in their exodus through the Mediterranean to reach places like Girona. An essential part of the route is the place where the tombstones found in the Montjuïc cemetery are kept. Among them, that of the Jewish boy Josef, son of Rabbi Jacob, whose premature death, in the 14th century, was remembered in a funerary stela of singular beauty that has reached our days almost intact, bringing us echoes of the intense community life of the old call.
