The beginning of the exhibition causes, to say the least, silence. It is a chronology of the treatment given to the Jews in Spain since the Lateran Council of 1215, which dictated rules for the differentiation of their clothing, in 1492, the year of the expulsion of the Jews by the Catholic Kings. In between, accusations of having desecrated sacred wafers, assaults on calluses during the Black Death, anti-Jewish laws, blood cleansing laws or the birth of the Spanish Inquisition. But above all, the great pogroms of 1391, in which they attacked and destroyed the main streets of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, “starting with Seville and ending in Barcelona, ??which was one of the great ones and was left as something residual” , explains Joan Molina, head of Spanish Gothic painting at the Prado Museum and curator of the exhibition The Lost Mirror.
An exhibition produced with the National Art Museum of Catalonia, where it will be seen later, and which dares to examine the role that images played in this terrible chronology. The role of art. The look, almost always stereotypical, often fierce and full of fake news, which transmitted its images to an illiterate, illiterate society, about the Jews. And, especially, about the thousands of converts after the mass pogroms. Eternally suspicious converts.
An exhibition that has attracted the interest of the international press, from The New York Times to The Guardian, and in which perhaps the most moving piece is a simple necklace with amulets that belonged to a child murdered in 1348 in the assault on the Jewish quarter of Tàrrega – a child whose remains prove that he had a malformation in his legs and with which the amulet, in which the hand of Fátima was, was supposed to protect him – but in which undoubtedly the the most significant work is the one that closes it, the conclusion of the entire path of images seen previously. An inquisitorial act of faith presided over by Saint Domènec de Guzmán, in which five Jewish converts are tried. Two will be burned alive, while three more are dressed with labels, coroces decorated with flames and “condemnat eretico” signs. And the author of the painting that prompted Joan Molina to come up with this exhibition is Berruguete, who, he says, “is creating a work of propaganda for the Inquisition commissioned by Torquemada”. A Berruguete who, he adds, even bequeathed money when he died to the monastery of Sant Tomàs in Ávila, which was used as a tribunal for the Inquisition.
Neither the images nor their authors are innocent. They transfer concepts, anxieties. The exhibition begins with works in which the traditions of one and another mix, melt. Christians make for Jewish elites ostentatious manuscripts similar to Christian codices, the Haggadah. And there are Christian paintings that appropriate Jewish rituals, such as circumcision. But soon the images pass to stereotype and libel, especially at the end of the 13th and 14th centuries, when there is systemic violence.
The Jews, with identifying red circles, just as they would wear stars of David in the Nazi regime. The Jews represented in carvings and altarpieces as blind, blindfolded, so as not to see the truth. The Jews in deforming caricatures like those that cover the books that record financial transactions with the Crown of Aragon – especially its loans –, drawn with oversized noses and eyes and unkempt beards. The Jews scourging Christ. The Jews, in the images of Alfonso X the Wise’s Cantigues a Santa Maria, making pacts with the devil, committing infanticide or stealing a Marian icon and throwing it into a latrine. Despite everything, the table remains intact and a sweet fragrance exhales from it, which will convert the entire local Jewish community. Or the Jews, in short, trying to fiercely destroy sacred wafers… just at the moment when it is necessary to spread the worship of the Eucharist and such a complex concept for the people as the real presence of Christ in the consecrated wafer .
Molina emphasizes in this sense that “in a world with far fewer images than today, when we can see hundreds, thousands of images on television, the images are very shocking, very powerful. And, obviously, these rhetorical and propagandistic speeches have a very remarkable force, more than remarkable”. And they can, he says before the panel of the Inquisition, contribute to “creating the climate that can lead to that situation, in addition to other circumstances and other factors”.
And he points out that in this show about the look at the Jew a typically Hispanic aspect is the look at the convert, an issue that occurred in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, but not in other places in Europe, due to the mass conversions after of the pogroms of 1391. “The suspicions that spread among the old Christians is that they are Judaizing heretics, crypto-Jews, an important issue, backbone of Spanish society at the end of the Middle Ages, says Molina, especially at a time when those converts reach important positions in the Court or the Church. An art will also be created there to testify to the religiosity of the converts, some of whom even commission busts of Christ that they send to Torquemada, such as the canon of Segovia Juan López. Others commission Christs covered only with transparent cloths so that they can be seen to be circumcised.
Some paintings, such as La font de la gràcia, from Van Eyck’s workshop, still show that the conversion of the Jews is possible, some believe so, but, observes Molina, “all this breaks down in the middle of the 15th century when the first blood cleansing statutes” and it is established that converts are impure because of a matter of blood, “because this is no longer anti-Judaism, but anti-Semitism, the issue is no longer religion, and there the Inquisition will arrive. The papal one already existed and in 1478 the Spanish one was instituted, which persecuted the new Judaizing converts and for which the suspicions could be of the most peregrine kind, many times simple practices that referred to tradition and customs, but did not mean participation doctrinal”.
And there will appear both works that exalt the inquisitors and, he points out, “the creation of an iconography aimed at converts prosecuted and burned by heretics”. They are, he explains, the labels, sacks of wool used to clothe those condemned for heresy, for “Judaizing apostasy”, symbolically decorated, like the one worn by Master Juan Cirujano, resident of Coruña del Conde, Burgos, in 1490 on his way to at the bonfire A label illustrated with a large wolf’s head from which flames emanated, a symbol of heresy. Some labels that were then hung inside the churches and copied again as they degraded “so that the guilt remained for the condemned and his successors”. “This exhibition – concludes Molina – speaks of borders, segregation and intolerance, but also of coexistence. It invites you to look at our past. They were images used to construct identities and alterities, they speak of us and others, in this case of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, even though, as Benedetto Croce said, there is no history, only contemporary history”.
