Sefardí

“What’s that?” my mom asked our tour guide Carmen as she spotted a small square-shaped tile embedded into the stone pathway. The once-pearly white stone had a dark-blue circle in its center, and the Hebrew word ‘Chai’ could be made out within the circle. After noticing this first tile, many more were soon spotted—found in random spots on the sidewalk, seen where buildings’ walls met the ground.

Last week, I had the pleasure of touring Toledo, Spain with my mother, where we learned from our guide Carmen Gomez, considered a thought-leader in the field of Toledo’s Jewish history who had given tours to influential Jewish community leaders on various mission trips. Both a high-speed train traveling over 80mph and my relationships in the Madrid Jewish community brought my mother and me to Toledo and, more importantly, Carmen.

A story, however, that I read many summers ago during a road trip in the western United States that kept my eyes glued to my Kindle and not the surrounding summertime mountains, also brought me to Toledo. Joel Gross’s novel “The Books of Rachel” painted a picture of life as a young Jewish woman in Spain during the Inquisition at a time when the Sefardí history was still foreign and new to me. In Toledo, I walked through the synagogues the heroine characters I admired walked through in the novel. Little did I know at the time, his writing would serve as a prologue to the experiences I would gain and stories I would learn during this semester as I live in Spain and travel throughout Europe.

We began our visit on a bus ride up the main winding road that connects the train station to the city poised on top of the hill. During our five-plus hours with Carmen, we visited various synagogues, plazas, and a stunning cathedral too. With each step along the curvy, stone-paved streets of Toledo, I felt my Spanish history class come to life. Queen Isabella or King Philip II were no longer just names of royalty thrown around in lecture; rather, these were names intertwined with the history of the Toledo—for both the bad and the good.

As we left the main plaza and made our way to our first site, I found a window of moment to ask Carmen a question that left me pondering since first e-connecting with her a month earlier: how did you find yourself studying the history of the Sefardi in Toledo? After a slight pause and small chuckle, she admitted that the story was not necessarily the most admirable nor special nor enlightening. It was a boy. A boy who she had a crush on and who she noticed always studied in the same spot in the library. So, as anyone would have done when falling for a crush, she tried to be noticed by him by finding books in the section of the library where he studied. Needing a book to grab, she randomly grabbed a book on the Jewish women of Toledo. She read the book cover-to-cover that night. The more she learned about the Jewish women of Toledo, the more she yearned to learn. Page by page, she learned about los conversos, and word after word, she deciphered her family’s roots. The very roots of my people I am discovering in Europe. She always wondered why her father’s family had traditions of cleaning the house before Easter or why her great grandmother lit two candles every Friday evening. Growing up, she supposed it was just a part of her family’s relationship with Catholicism—never before had she connected her family’s rich traditions to that of conversos.

As Carmen shared this with my mother and me, passion sung from her voice, love filled her eyes, and joy overcame her smile. She found her calling in pouring over ancient government documents in the Toledo archives to discover more of a once lost people. Carmen is an inspiration to me and my future: she embodies what it means to find the quasi-intersection of passion, mission, vocation, and profession. She is an inspiration because one never knows where life will take him or her and what magic will come from this unforeseen path.

Strategy defined the decisions of the Sefardí, as many patterns emerge as one studies this history. Jewish communities from this time period are nearly always found close and near to the Spanish King and Queen, as prior to the Inquisition, the Jews played a critical role in the country's economy. Under Spanish law, it was illegal to kill a Jew, which would economically disadvantage the King. Before overtaken by his paranoia, King Philip II had a very strong relationship with a particular Jewish businessman who fulfilled the important task of dealing with the Spanish financials and thus serving a position unheard of at the time for a Jew. If a threat to the Jewish community was learned, the Jews sought protection in their neighboring castles. When possible, relationships were built and connection to the crown were sought, both crucial for survival and both a theme also noticed in Copenhagen when the Jews would present a lavish gift to whenever a new King began his reign.

Indeed good can come from bad. I admit that it was a bit disappointing to learn the synagogues I toured with my mother and Carmen bore remnantsof Catholicism and Islam, as these religions would worship in the space after the Inquisition. The many synagogues that once proudly stood in Toledo, marked by their two windows high up on the front-wall, are now plazas or awkwardly-sized large empty plots of land scattered throughout the city, as this property was forever under the Spanish crown and never again developed. The only two remaining synagogues, built by the Muslims (Moors), in Toledo exist because they were not just synagogues—the spaces were converted to places of worship for Catholics. It was the Catholics and Muslims that stripped the Sefardí of their Jewish identity, and yet it is the Catholics and Muslims that give us surviving synagogues today.

The DNA of the story of the Sefardí is a defining moment in the history of Spain and a chapter in the history of the Jewish people … fleeing one home to build another. Home may be temporary but community is permanent. Los conversos buried hidden aspects of their Jewish identity into that of their new outwardly Catholic lives and homes, still owning their sense of community. Community is not only a fiber for that of the Sefardí community of Toledo in the 1400s but also that of the Jewish genetic makeup as a whole. Whether it be seeking community in Toledo amidst the Inquisition or in a campus Hillel amidst a student government’s BDS vote, to be Jewish is to be community.