Pepe Serra, the director of the MNAC, admits that when he curated the exhibition The Lost Mirror. Jews and converts in Medieval Spain, Joan Molina, told him that he was going to display the trunk of a vine inside a display case, he thought it was a joke. But there is the Christ of the vine, a trunk roughly hewn by a Jew from Toledo in the 15th century. He met him by chance while he was pruning his vineyard, and he, who until then mocked the Christian religion, was ipso facto converted. Not only was it his Christian identity passport (a good protection after the progroms of 1391), but, three centuries later, that image would go out in a procession to pray for the drought.
Less luck arose for a three or four year old boy from Tàrrega whose precious amulet, which was supposed to protect him (a hand of Fátima, there are pendants of jet, coral, bone…), was found in 2007 in a common grave next to the remains of another 69 people, victims of the massacre of the local Jewish community in 1384. It was one of the many massacres that occurred in the Iberian Peninsula as a result of the outbreak of the plague (they were blamed for the epidemic). “But this is not an exhibition of history, but of the history of images and how they were used in the Middle Ages to look at others in a certain way to confirm ourselves,” says Molina, professor at the University of Girona and curator of Spanish Gothic painting at the Prado, the museum where the fabulous exhibition co-organized with the MNAC comes from and whose rooms were visited by 100,000 people.
The lost mirror. Jews and converts in Medieval Spain (from this Friday until May 26) is a thesis exhibition: “Difference exists, but otherness is constructed. And what it shows is how the stigmatization of the Jews was a reflection of the Christian mirror, of their beliefs and anxieties, a powerful instrument of identity identification,” emphasizes Molina, who acknowledges that at the beginning, when he explained the project to directors of large museums British and American, ran into a wall of skepticism. Quite the opposite of what happened with the international media, which landed in Madrid and highlighted it as one of the most relevant of the year.
“There are very beautiful exhibitions and this one is, but it is also important and necessary. “It enters into a larger caliber,” says Miguel Falomir, who confesses that he had never seen so many people reading the signs (there are many, each word measured with precision: the subject is delicate), because “it enters through the eyes but also You read the explanations next to the pieces, the experience is extraordinary.”
Nor is it an exhibition about Jewish life on the Peninsula. In fact, there are only three haggadahs, illuminated manuscripts with a format similar to that of Christian codices, testimony to a time when coexistence was possible despite religious differences. But little by little the story acquires darker and more belligerent overtones, when from the 12th century onwards they begin to represent the Jews as blind and deaf (due to their inability to accept the divine nature of Jesus). On a platform, there are two polychrome wood carvings from the years 1250-1300. One represents the Church, a crowned young woman; the other, to the Synagogue, with a blindfold over his eyes and his head bowed in a gesture of sorrow. “This form of representation contributed to their stigmatization and made the possibility of reconciliation difficult,” Molina argues.
But the worst is yet to come. In a context of systemic violence, a mechanism of anti-Jewish propaganda is launched through art of enormous popular significance. The Jew as a monster, proof of his lack of morals, who desecrates hosts and flagellates Christ. Caricatured by the notaries themselves in the books where the loans of Catalan Jews are recorded. Or the images of the Cantigas de Santa María by Alfonso Despite this, the board remains intact and also exudes a sweet fragrance. They are the bad guys, cruel and monstrous beings, in the representations of the Passion, showing cruelty in the face of Christ’s pain.
Up to this point, Moreno points out, the images have many similarities with those produced in other European territories, but the last area, the one dedicated to the converts, “is very particular, because it speaks of an issue that affects our history, the of Spain and Catalonia, due to the stigmatization that the converts, the new Christians of Jewish descent, suffered after the terrible pogroms of 1391, and many were forcibly baptized, or embraced Catholicism to save their skin or out of interest. The suspicions that arose around them led to images that served both to accuse them of being false Christians and to save themselves, such as the aforementioned Cristo de la Cepa. And the converts, as Bartolomé Bermejo surely was, encrypted in their paintings beliefs typical of Judaism (it represents Christ showing sex under a transparent veil (a symbol of his humanity).
But it is after the Spanish Inquisition of 1478 when “we went from anti-Judaism to racism, because we are talking about blood, about the descendants of Jews who are considered impure because their blood was contaminated.” The iconography is now filled with converts prosecuted and burned as heretics, as in the inquisitorial auto-da-fé presided over by Santo Domingo, by Guzmán Pedro Berruguete, in which two Jews will be burned while three others will be dressed in sambenitos, in which they It reads: “condemned erotic.” Some “infamous” signs that later, the commissioner concludes, hung in the churches and remained there for centuries to stigmatize their descendants “until four days ago.”
