4227 E

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Today, Girona is hom

e to one of the best

preserved Jewish Q

uarters in Spain, and all

of Europe. Yet it w

as only thirty years ago that

the neighborhood where the R

amban learned

and taught was forgotten and forlorn. H

ow

did this transformation take place, and are

there any more treasures w

aiting to be

discovered? To find out, we take a deeper look

inside Girona’s Jew

ish Call.

by L

ibi A

sta

ire

When I m

entioned to my friends that I w

as going toG

irona this summ

er, I was m

et with a blank stare.

Unlike E

astern European cities such as Prague or

Warsaw

, Girona doesn’t have instant nam

e recognition, noteven w

ithin Jerusalem’s yeshivah w

orld.“It’s in Spain,” I tried to explain. “A

h, Spain,” theyreplied, but by the half-hearted sound of their voices I knewthey still didn’t understand.

“It was the hom

e of the Ram

ban and Rabbeinu Y

onah, asw

ell as an important center of K

abbalah,” I continued, hopingthat m

y friends would finally get it.

Located in C

atalonia, the region that sits in the northeast-ern corner of the Iberian Peninsula, G

irona was once called a

“Mother C

ity in Israel.” Today, it has one of the best preservedJew

ish Quarters in E

urope, making it the jew

el in the crown

of Jewish C

atalonia. T

he entire Jewish Q

uarter, called El C

all, consists of justsix narrow

streets that form a rectangle in the heart of

Girona’s historic district. For the visitor on the run, the w

holething can be view

ed in less than an hour. I, however, w

as notin a rush. W

hile doing research before the trip, I had come

across several claims that had piqued m

y curiosity and I want-

ed to determine the veracity of these reports.

More than one account had said that the place of the R

am-

ban’s yeshivah had been located and was now

the site of a

AV

isit to Jewish C

atalonia, Part Tw

o

4427 E

lul 5767 9.10.0745

Jewish m

useum. O

thers talked about a treasure trove of medieval H

ebrew docu-

ments that had been discovered w

ithin the bindings of old books dating from the

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. W

hat was true and w

hat was false? To find out, I m

ade my w

ay to the Centre

Bonastruc ca Porta, the organization that operates the M

useu d’Hist?ria dels Jueus

(Jewish H

istory Museum

), as well as the N

ahmanides Institute for Jew

ish Studies. T

he center’s large Magen D

avid embedded w

ithin the tiles of an outdoor court-yard is one of the few

overtly Jewish sym

bols that can be seen in Girona, even in the

Jewish Q

uarter. It was in an office overlooking this courtyard that I m

et with M

rs.A

ssumpcio H

osta i Rebes, the director of the center, as w

ell as the secretary-generalof the R

ed de Juderias de Espana (the N

etwork of Spanish Jew

ish Quarters), w

hohad graciously agreed to answ

er my questions.

RE

CLA

IMIN

G T

HE

PA

ST

Mrs. H

osta has been with the project to reclaim

Girona’s C

all since it began inthe 1970s. In those days, G

irona’s historic district was a rundow

n area where only

poor people lived. But as happened in m

any cities throughout the world, a few

artists decided to leave Girona’s new

er and more expensive neighborhoods and set

up their studios in the old part of town. R

estaurateurs and shopkeepers followed,

and one of them, Jose Tarres, becam

e convinced that the group of buildings he hadpurchased had form

ally been the site of Girona’s Jew

ish Call.

At first, the G

irona municipality w

as unconvinced, since no one had any solidproof about w

here the Call had been located. Som

e believe that when the Jew

s leftG

irona, they boarded up the window

s and doors of their homes, hoping that one day

they would be able to return and reclaim

their property. It’s also been suggested thatthe A

nusim, Jew

s who w

ere forcibly converted to Christianity, m

oved to otherneighborhoods, afraid that if they rem

ained in the Call they w

ould be accused of se-cretly practicing Judaism

, a crime that carried a penalty of violent death during the

dark days of the Inquisition. For w

hatever reason, as the city changed and expanded, the mem

ory of the Call

grew dim

. But once the idea of finding the lost C

all was in the air, archaeologists and

historians began to search through the documents stored in G

irona’s archives. When

solid evidence was found, the skepticism

turned to belief and belief turned to com-

mitm

ent. Girona’s m

ayor at the time, a history professor nam

ed Joaqim N

adal,asked a form

er student of his - Mrs. H

osta - to take charge of the project to rehabili-tate the Jew

ish Quarter. T

he city couldn’t afford to purchase all the property in theC

all, which w

as, and still is, owned by private citizens, and so they concentrated

their efforts on acquiring one central building. “W

e started the project very slowly,” M

rs. Hosta explains. “T

he houses in theC

all go inside and out, meaning that our building has som

e little spaces that go un-derneath the houses belonging to our neighbors, and som

e of our neighbors live inparts of our building. T

hat’s the way the houses w

ere in the Middle A

ges. Also,

some streets even w

ent through the house itself. We know

of a street here, within our

building, which w

as a covered street within the house so that people could w

alkthrough it to the synagogue, for exam

ple, without having to go into a m

ain street.T

hat happened often in medieval Spain.”

Tracking dow

n the owners of all these “in and out” spaces took M

rs. Hosta al-

most four years. B

ut finally the City of G

irona and the County C

ouncil were able to

purchase the property where the center now

sits and start rehabilitating it. Today the building, w

ith its beautifully landscaped courtyard, is an invitingplace that houses the Jew

ish museum

, whose exhibits and cultural activities attract

approximately 100,000 people annually. M

any of these visitors are children, andM

rs. Hosta com

ments: “A

ll of Girona’s schools com

e once a year. We also have the

schools from B

arcelona and the surrounding areas.” T

he building is also the home of a research center w

hich has a small library and

offers classes in Hebrew

and lectures on Jewish topics. H

owever, according to M

rs.H

osta, thirty years ago a very different sight would have greeted a visitor to G

irona. “W

hen we cam

e to this building at the end of the 1970s, the lower part of the site

had been abandoned,” says Mrs. H

osta. “It was a ruin. People lived on the upper

floors, in very modest apartm

ents, but the area where the patio is today w

as filledw

ith debris. The fact that the people living here didn’t have any m

oney to invest inrenovating their hom

es was actually very fortunate. It m

eant that there was no m

on-ey to destroy the m

edieval structures.”From

information gleaned from

historical documents, M

rs. Hosta can say w

ithcertainty that the building in w

hich we are now

sitting was once a com

munal build-

ing which had a synagogue, and probably a Talm

ud Torah and mikveh, as w

ell. “But

Photos: by author

46

we don’t know

where the synagogue w

as located,” she comm

ents. “There are

several areas in the building that have never been touched. When w

e’re able toexcavate under the patio, w

e’ll probably find out much m

ore.“B

ut we are talking about the last m

oments of the C

all,” she adds. “The fif-

teenth century. Acity is alw

ays changing.” M

y mouth drops open. Fifteenth century? So late? W

hat about the many ar-

ticles I had read that said that this building was located on the spot w

here theR

amban’s thirteenth-century yeshivah had once stood?

“It’s not true. We don’t know

where the R

amban’s yeshivah w

as located,”says M

rs. Hosta. “W

e hope that one day we w

ill find it, but what’s happening is

that during the last three or four years several writers have w

ritten novels aboutG

irona’s medieval history and, as is happening all over the w

orld, people arem

ixing facts with fiction. B

ut we try to be very careful about our inform

ation.A

s soon as we know

exactly where the R

amban’s yeshivah w

as located, it will

be something very special for G

irona.”D

isappointed, but not deterred, I next ask about what sort of artifacts w

erediscovered during the renovations. I w

rote an article for Mishpacha’s

Pesachedition a few

years ago in which I m

entioned a fifteenth-century ceramic Seder

plate found in Spain that had caused a sensation, since it was the oldest surviv-

ing Seder plate in the world, to date. If G

irona had uncovered something sim

ilar,this w

ould also be something “very special” for the city.

How

ever, even before I asked the question, I had a feeling it was unlikely.

During an earlier visit to the m

useum I couldn’t help but notice that, except for

some m

ezuzos and a collection of tombstones taken from

the Jewish cem

eteryon M

ontjuic, the vast majority of the item

s on display were either reproductions

or came from

places like Morocco or T

unisia. Unfortunately, M

rs. Hosta con-

firmed m

y doubts. They haven’t found a Seder plate or K

iddush cup, “but we do

have some pieces that are currently being studied by the archaeologists.”

If a ceramic plate or cup w

as too fragile to survive, surely a book was m

adeof sturdier stuff. So, batting zero, I m

ade one last attempt to locate som

e tangi-ble rem

inder of Girona’s once-glorious past. W

hat about the hidden documents,

I asked? The m

edieval documents in H

ebrew that w

ere found stashed inside thebindings of som

e old books? At last, I hit a hom

e run.

TH

E H

IDD

EN

DO

CU

ME

NT

S

“We found m

ore than 1,000 documents, both in H

ebrew and L

atin,” ex-plains M

rs. Hosta, “w

hich are now stored in the A

rxiu Historic de G

irona [His-

torical Archives of G

irona]. We’ve already cleaned 368 docum

ents, but it’s avery tim

e-consuming job because m

any of the documents w

ere pressed togeth-er and had to be taken apart very carefully, one by one.

“We have translated only a few

of them. T

hey mainly pertain to daily life in

the Jewish com

munity; m

arriages, financial transactions, and things like that.T

ranslating them isn’t easy, because w

e need people who know

medieval H

e-brew

and can translate them into C

atalan.”A

lthough there are a few people at the U

niversity of Girona w

ho could dothe job, their busy schedules haven’t allow

ed them to translate m

ore than twen-

ty or thirty documents. It w

as only recently that the city found someone w

how

as able to work on the project full tim

e. While the translation of the first set of

documents begins in earnest, the city hopes to start cleaning and photographing

the next batch of 300 documents. T

he goal is to eventually place all the docu-m

ents on a website devoted to the project, w

hich is partially funded by theH

anadiv Charitable Foundation located in L

ondon, so that researchers and aca-dem

ics around the world can have easy access to them

and start analyzing theircontents. Fifteen docum

ents from the first batch have already been uploaded.

About half pertain to the daily life of the C

all, while the rest are fragm

ents ofpages from

the Talmud, com

mentaries on the Talm

ud, and prayers. “O

ur aim is to know

what is inside these docum

ents,” Mrs. H

osta continues.“W

e do all our research through using documents. T

here is no other way. T

hehistory of the city is basically in the archives. From

the documents stored in

Girona and in B

arcelona we’ve been able to learn a lot about the everyday life in

medieval G

irona that we didn’t know

before.” A

t this point it’s worth m

entioning that the archives in Barcelona and

Girona are filled w

ith documents in L

atin and Catalan from

the medieval peri-

od, including notarial documents that shed light on the day-to-day business af-

fairs of the people. Historian R

obert I. Burns, in his book Jew

s in the Notarial

Culture: Latinate W

ills in Mediterranean Spain, 1250-1350

(Berkeley: U

niver-sity of C

alifornia Press, 1996) compares the role of the m

edieval notary to thatof the law

yer so ubiquitous in today’s Am

erican society. The need for official

documentation of transfers of property, deposits, loans, bills of lading, etc., as

well as m

arriage contracts and wills, w

as a natural consequence of Catalonia’s

flourishing maritim

e trading empire. T

he proceeds of disputes which ended up

in court, including the cases brought before the court of the Inquisition, were

also painstakingly written dow

n and entered into the comm

unal records. H

istorians have been flocking to these archives for more than a century. B

ysifting through the docum

ents, a narrative begins to unfold. How

ever, it is a sto-ry that is often tangled and incom

plete, and is therefore open to interpretation. A

case in point is the identity of the person who has lent his nam

e to thenam

e of the Centre B

onastruc ca Porta. According to nineteenth-century Jew

ishhistorians H

einrich Graetz and Joseph Jacobs, B

onastruc ca Porta is actually theC

atalan name of G

irona’s most fam

ous citizen, the Ram

ban, whose full Jew

ishnam

e is Moshe ben N

achman.

Although the idea of the R

amban having a C

atalan name m

ight soundstrange at first, the practice w

as very comm

on for Catalan Jew

s during the Mid-

dle Ages, w

ho had many interactions w

ith the non-Jewish w

orld. The C

atalannam

e was used in business, etc., w

hile the Hebrew

name w

as used in the home

and synagogue. The C

atalan name w

ould often have some connection to the

person’s Hebrew

name, but not alw

ays. Therefore, even though the nam

e

4849

“Bonastruc” can be translated as “good fortune” and doesn’t seem

to have aconnection to the nam

e “Moshe,” that doesn’t disqualify the evidence.

Thanks to the fact that Jacobs, w

ho spent a month in B

arcelona studyingdocum

ents, stated his theory in an article for the influential Jewish E

ncyclope-dia, published in 1906, the idea took hold and it becam

e comm

only assumed

that Bonastruc ca Porta w

as the Ram

ban’s Catalan nam

e. It should not come as

a surprise, though, that there are historians who disagree w

ith this interpreta-tion of the docum

ents. I therefore asked Mrs. H

osta for her opinion of the mat-

ter, wondering if the center had uncovered any conclusive evidence during

their research. “T

here are two theories about the nam

e,” she answers diplom

atically.“O

ne is that the Ram

ban and Bonastruc ca Porta is the sam

e person. The sec-

ond theory is that they are two separate people. B

ut we don’t know

which the-

ory is correct.”Y

et even though there is an abundance of documents in L

atin and Catalan,

documents in H

ebrew are considerably rarer. T

herefore, there was consider-

able excitement w

hen these documents w

ere first discovered. Whether or not

they will shed further light on the R

amban’s life, and other m

atters pertainingto the C

all, remains to be seen. B

ut if the goal is to spread awareness, m

y nextquestion is obvious. H

ow can I see the docum

ents?A

lthough a tourist can’t visit the archives, Mrs. H

osta agrees to take me

there. It takes just one short phone call to make the arrangem

ents, since the di-rector of the archives, M

rs. Montserrat H

osta, just happens to be her sister. Afew

minutes later, I am

holding in my hands a folder that has the year “1397”

written across the top.

Since her sister is on vacation, it is Mrs. H

osta who provides the back-

ground for how the docum

ents were found.

“Three years ago, w

hen they were m

oving the archive, the bindings ofsom

e of the books came open,” she explains. “T

hey discovered that docu-m

ents in Hebrew

and Latin had been used to pad the bindings. B

ecause paperand parchm

ent were very expensive during the M

iddle Ages, it w

as comm

onfor them

to be recycled and used for other things, such as filler for book-binders.

“It was like finding a treasure,” she adds.

They sent a sm

all batch of documents to M

adrid for cleaning. How

ever,w

hen it took two years for them

to get the documents back, they decided that

they would have to find another w

ay to do the job. An institution in Israel of-

fered to do the work for them

, but when the Israeli institution insisted on re-

taining possession of the documents afterw

ard, Girona turned dow

n the offer. “W

e didn’t want to give them

up,” says Mrs. H

osta. “It’s part of Girona’s

heritage.”

WH

OS

E H

IST

OR

Y IS

IT?

I stare at the fragment of a docum

ent that I am holding. O

n the page is writ-

ten, in large letters, the word slichah, forgive. W

hat follows appears to be a

prayer. Is it a part of medieval G

irona’s version of the Selichos service -prayers of forgiveness - that are recited before R

osh HaShanah by Jew

sthroughout the w

orld? Or is it a personal entreaty w

ritten long ago by some un-

known Jew

who needed to receive forgiveness from

a family m

ember, busi-

ness colleague, or his Creator?

Unfortunately, I don’t have tim

e to decipher the unfamiliar cursive script.

How

ever, at this mom

ent we have stum

bled upon a question that has beenbubbling beneath the surface during m

y entire stay in Catalonia: W

ho does theC

all - and its rich Jewish history - belong to? W

ho decides how its story, w

ithall its nuances and room

for interpretation, will be told?

It is not a purely academic question, I learn, w

hen I travel to Barcelona.

There, in B

arcelona’s Call, I have an appointm

ent to meet a Jew

ish man w

hoalm

ost single-handedly restored a medieval synagogue in that city’s Jew

ishQ

uarter. And it is in B

arcelona that I will hear about the other C

all. Not the C

allof the silent narrow

lanes and stone walls, but the C

all of the kahal,B

arcelona’s modern-day Jew

ish comm

unity, which of course has som

ethingto say about the future of the C

all’s past.

In Part Three: A

visit to the site of the Disputation and a restored m

edievalsynagogue in B

arcelona’s Call.