On Jewish Mallorca
by Samuel Hux (May 2018)
Vendador de Neranjas, Joaquim Mir, 1901
r. and Mrs. Jacob Geissler (an approximation of their name) moved to Mallorca perhaps 25 to 30 years ago from the English Midlands. I saw them not long after that. “Yes, yes. Pleasant to see you. How are you?” the doctor said, clearly not recognizing me. “He’s not been well for months,” his wife whispered as he turned to others present; “his memory fades; it’s very difficult for him.” But I had the impression she could not place me, exactly, either, but was too proud or delicate to admit it. And also, since we were in a synagogue, I suppose the question “Who are you?” would not have been appropriate and warm. We had met the Geisslers a year or two before: retired general practitioner, stock-English in manner, vague plummy voice, somewhat fussy, and his wife, round, diminutive, and kindly, Slavic accent for all that she had been in Britain since a girl. My fiancé had wished to attend services and we had asked about, which led us to a boutique in Palma and its proprietor, a British national, president of the English-speaking (and in effect the foreign, and the only) congregation on Mallorca. That Friday we were at the synagogue and, as newcomers, were warmly welcomed. “Have you by chance moved here permanently? There are a respectable number of us, you’ll find. Ah, you return to New York. But when you’re here you must . . .” The Geisslers briefly adopted us: Such a nice “younger” couple. We saw them home, saw them a couple more times during the next few days: shopping trip, tea in their flat. “I hope you don’t mind the question—we know few Americans,” said the doctor, “but my wife and I have wondered if you are Jewish.” “Well, not really,” I said, which is the way you say “No” in North Carolina. Mrs. Geissler touched my knee; I caught the only twinkle I’ve ever been sure I’ve seen in an eye: “Ah, you shouldn’t let it worry you my dear.”
Actually, the Mallorca “synagogue” was a fair-sized room off the lobby of a modern seaside hotel in the Palma suburb Cala Mayor, the proper Christian name of Hotel Santa Ana. One can let the irony overwhelm, given the history of the Jews of Mallorca, and given the fact that in the middle of the oldest part of Palma near the ancient walls stands a church whose name, Montesión, is oddly suggestive. Spain in miniature.
¿Limpieza de Sangre? (A common historical Spanish concern.) Purity of blood? What blood exactly would that be? The Spanish are no more uni-ethnic than that other proud race, the French—indeed less so. Observe the faces in Spain and you’ll see some that strike you as oh-so Spanish. But if one looks and discriminates more closely one begins to refine the observations. One cannot see an ancient Iberian face, for who were they? It may be possible to see a Cro-Magnon face (as odd as that sounds), since some scholars think the Basques are direct descendants. But certainly, one can see a Celtic face reminiscent of a hôtelier in Cardiff, Dublin, or Brest. A Roman face reminding us of where Castilian, Catalan, and Portuguese come from. A Greek face reminding us of one of the more precious archaeological finds of modern Spain: La Dama de Elche, near Valencia. A Germanic face that could be found on any street in Berlin, legacy of the Visigothic kingdom that succeeded the Romans and preceded the Moorish invasion. A Moorish face, of course, for not all of the converted Arabs, moriscos, could have been expelled in 1609, many of them disappearing before that into the Spanish-speaking population. And Jewish faces from . . . Spain.
Spain’s self-imposed tragedy gave a richness to the rest of the world: those Jews who left before the Inquisition, especially after the pogroms of 1391, and those who left with the expulsion decree enforced in 1492. One can provide one’s own favored examples of the close or distant offspring of this long exodus. Baruch Spinoza, for instance: Spanish or Portuguese Jew? —it hardly matters, Portugal being now a county, now a kingdom, and not fully independent of Spain until the 17th century. Or, had not a Sephardic López left Spain to become a French de Louppe, Montaigne would have had no mother, and I would be without one hero. Or one can choose one’s own examples of the conversos, or of the close or distant offspring of those Jews who accepted conversion, and they are legion: from Luis de Santángel, chancellor to King Fernando and champion of Columbus, to Tomás de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor himself, or to the rumored because of name, Generalissimo Francisco Franco y Bahamonde. But if one went by the names of the Sephardim, half of Spain would be ethnically Jewish to some degree.
I thought the following story was a common apocryphal anecdote, until a trusted and traveled Spanish friend told me of his experience of meeting a Salonikan Jew. After almost five centuries in Greece, the key to the lost family house in Toledo still passed between generations, that story told to my friend in Renaissance Castilian. (There is a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, “Una llave en Salonica.” Had my friend read it? No. Perhaps the Salonikan had, I thought. But why be so suspicious when life rhymes with art?) The Castilian: “Older than Cervantes would have spoken! Wouldn’t you feel a newcomer if you heard someone speaking, naturally, Shakespearean?”
The easiest explanation is that Franco had such a De Gaulle-like notion of Spanish honor that he could not bear to see it tampered with by any stretch of the historical imagination. But, if Franco had not noticed, would the world have noticed that he hadn’t? I am not speaking of Franco the rumored descendent of conversos, but a Franco with a Spanish sense that someone in the national family was missing. One thing one learns about Spain—is to trust the ironic and avoid the super-clear.
I don’t wish to exaggerate: perhaps “obsession” with things Jewish is too strong. But I am certainly not the only one to observe an intense concern—which sometimes takes the form of an odd mixture of philo- and anti-Semitic notions. Read José Yglesias’s The Franco Years for instance, his somewhat ambiguously entitled chapter “The Anti-Semite,” whose protagonist is absolutely delighted with the thought that Saint John of the Cross might have been Jewish. (San Juan de la Cruz was in fact descended from conversos.)
Does it matter that the conversations with the patriarch took place on Mallorca? (By the way, I insist, as the patriarch surely would, on the Castilian and Catalan spelling, the English-language habit of “Majorca” an absurdity, with the J pronounced as a Y, as J definitely is not in English, and as LL definitely is by Mallorcans.) Mallorca: “Spain in miniature” I called it earlier. But that’s not quite true, for the history of the Jews of Mallorca is an exceptional story. Yet in its exceptionality it dramatizes some of the ironies of Spanish history. Mainland Spain is in some way Mallorca writ large.
Unlike the case of the mainland, the Jewish stock arrived on Mallorca even before the Hispanic stock. (The sense of my diction will become apparent shortly.) And unlike the case of the mainland, the Jewish identity of the conversos never quite became obscured: but that gets us ahead of the story.
marranos, Judaizers (judaizantes), secret Jews.
That is, after the infamous autos of 1691 punishing the “relapsed” from the autos of 1679, and in which—as multitudes watched from the surrounding slopes—four were burned in effigy, having fled, four were burned “in their bones” (en sus huesos), having died in prison, 34 were burned after garroting, and three were burned alive (Catalina Tarongí, Rafael Benito Tarongí, and Rafael Valls “the rabbi”—their names should last), Mallorca Jewry was a matter of history. But, then, it became a most curious matter of heroic cultural persistence. I speak of the xuetes: Mallorcan Catalan word, often rendered in Castilian orthography as chuetas, which approximates the Catalan pronunciation.
The scholarly authority in English on the xuetes is Notre Dame sociologist Kenneth Moore, whose Those of the Street: The Catholic Jews of Mallorca (1976) simply must be read by anyone seriously interested in the subject. (There is also Baruch Braunstein’s 1936 Columbia University monograph The Chuetas of Majorca: Conversos and the Inquisition of Majorca, and, in Spanish, Angela Selke’s Los Chuetas y la Inquisición, Madrid, 1972.)
The xuetes lived and worked, partly by choice and mostly by social enforcement, in a kind of ghetto around the Calle de Platería (street of the silver trade), keeping more or less to themselves over the centuries, and more than less having to, worshipping in a church recognized as “theirs,” Santa Eulalia (not Montesión), and although usually social pariahs, practicing an adamant Catholicism, their somewhat ostentatious faith thought for decades to be a protective coloration of secret Judaic practices, while the ostentation was more probably a socially acute protective exaggeration of what they had indeed come to believe in, the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church. Until recent decades in the last century they seldom married outside the fold (hard to do unless one married a mainlander) or moved away from the vicinity of Calle de Platería, where they were “those of the street,” los de la calle (which has a further auditory suggestion since the mallorquín word for ghetto is call).
The coherence of all this has relaxed in recent decades, as people have moved and have intermarried and, of course , . . time passes. But it’s not disappeared altogether: the “street” remains the center of the largely xueta silver and gold jewelry trade, many still live there, and many return regularly to visit the old neighborhood, to chat, or to pray at Santa Eulalia. I invite one to read Moore. Or I recommend one visit the Calle de Platería.
When I first began visiting Mallorca, I was surprised more than once by natives with whom I became acquainted asking me if I were Jewish—judío. At first, I was suspicious: still, after all these years, these centuries? Gradually I realized that it was slight disappointment, not polite relief, that met my answer. How to explain this experience, I did not know, still don’t know exactly. At the time of these early encounters I had not heard the word xueta. When, gradually, it became a part of my cultural vocabulary and I became interested and began to read around in some of the relevant English and Spanish texts and some of the Catalan a page an hour, I realized that, except from myself and some of my non-Mallorcan friends, I had in fact never heard it. I think I was supposed to have—something like “That damned xueta has cheated me” or “So-and-So acts just like a xueta”—but I had not.
.
And what does it all mean? Whatever the world, non-xueta Mallorca included, thinks of els xuetes, those of the street are still wary. Leave it alone unless you are absolutely sure about the person you are talking to.
xuetes?” Not at all! Buena gente. Good people. And muy apprendidos—very learned. They suffered unjustly. I hope all that has passed.
The author of the Anales reports some anecdote to show the contempt mallorquines have for xuetes. One is, up to its climax, almost beautiful, an elegant castellano. He writes of the Catholic festival of San Bernardo near a monastery outside Palma, a day of “fraternal happiness” and honoring of “the simple patriarchal customs,” of the departure of the celebrants when “the sun is about to take leave of our horizon.
Then they are all occupied in arranging their coaches, covered wagons, carts,
and all class of chivalry [or cavalry] to return to their hearths, and surely
this is the most endearing sight which is offered to the view of the curious
observer. The confused bustle of the mélange of vehicles adorned with green
stalks, banners and streamers, moving to the sound of happy bells, mixed
with horsemen and a multitude of people afoot—they fill the compass
of all the expansive thoroughfare. Those who for lack of disposition
or some other hap have not been able to attend the festival of San
Bernardo line the road, or wait on the promenade for their relatives
and friends, all hailing one another with handkerchiefs, crying
[in mallorquín dialect] “Xuia, xuia marrana a dobler san cana”—
Salt pork, filthy salt pork at a doubloon the long measure.
Has all this passed, or shrunken to some “acceptable” degree of relative insignificance? Do I simply know or meet the “wrong” people? I am not given to optimistic views—they feel unnatural to me—so I find my experience in this respect hard to trust. But if it is to be trusted, what has happened? Besides, I mean, the liberalizing process of the passage of time, the effects upon Mallorca of an opening to the world through the tourist industry, and such. I would like to test a bit of amateur social-psychologizing.
I think that Mallorca has ceased to dislike itself, which is what I think it did during the centuries of decline from its medieval relevance. More people than George Sand (Un hiver à Majorque) told it over the years that it was a golden isle, yes, but a cultural backwash. (A Winter in Mallorca, adventures among the savages who left Chopin’s piano on the dock in the rain, could long be bought on the island in multiple translations, as if an insult was better than no regard at all.) Now, it doesn’t take excessive imagination to know that expressed pride and defensive island temperament can be a function of self-disregard. And what’s to dislike is precisely what makes one different. Given a Spanish culture which was insistently Catholic and which placed such priority upon the castizo (the pure-blooded), I think the Mallorcans did feel different and did not like it. I think that ultimately the xuetes were a reminder to them of what I suggested earlier: the stock. How extensive? —impossible to say. Moore wonders, but considers the question ultimately frivolous. I don’t think the mallorquínes ever have. The late xueta historian Miguel Forteza (like my friend the patriarch a scholar by avocation, not academic profession) dismissed an estimate that 35 (!) percent of Mallorcans were descendants of Jews: it couldn’t be more than 18, he said (Els Descendents dels Jueus Conversos de Mallorca, 1966).
The matter of the 15 xueta names can’t be very helpful since, as I said before, they are ordinary Castilian or Catalan names, which must have belonged to “Old Christians” as well, and since, also, there has been considerable immigration from the mainland where those names mean nothing singular. For instance, the most famous bearer of a “xueta” name was not a xueta himself: the painter Joan Miró, who kept a house on Mallorca, was born in Catalunya. Lorenzo Pérez lists 272 surnames of converso families plus four anonimos (God rest their souls) called before the Inquisition over the centuries on the island (and there must have been more who weren’t), but since with the exception of a few such as Levia, Llevia, Salmons, and Salom which suggest adaptations from the Hebrew, the names are simply Castilian and Catalan ones which belonged to Gentiles as well, the number doesn’t prove anything. Yet, given the intermarriage of Gentiles and conversos in the early years before the xueta period beginning late 17th century, nor is the opposite of that “anything” proven.
(Before leaving the matter of Pérez’s investigations, I must note that there is something overwhelming in reading a list of 1600 individual names, some of them with moving details, to read for instance that Leonor Martí, widow of Rafael Cortés, businessman, was burned in her bones on May 6, 1691, at the age of 72, after having survived a trial in 1679. If one of the functions of historical study is to remember the dead, because not all are among the “Famous men” Ecclesiasticus counsels us to recall, then Pérez’s scholarship is a moral action.)
Now, if there is something to this hesitant surmise of mine, that there’s more than meets the eye in the traditional Mallorcan attitude toward the xuetes, one can be slightly startled by some things which literally, actually, meet the eyes. Six-pointed cookies suggesting la Estrella Davíd which are however just native pastries, that’s all, from any Mallorcan kitchen. Stained glass windows of subtle six-point design in churches which were never synagogues, and one not so subtle: cast a glance up and to the right to the cathedral as you enter Palma from the airport direction. Two rimmonim, of significantly different shape from those ear-rings, clearly not models for them, one can find on display in the cathedral, where the xuetes did not traditionally worship.
And the matter is complicated if one reads about in the native literature, both between and on the lines. Something I might call qualified admiration if I were surer of my footing. When Father Francisco Garau wrote La Fe Triunfante in 1691 he may have been simply showing the moral obstinacy of this Jewess Catalina Tarongí before she burned the sixth of May, but I’ll never see into Garau’s crippled mind. He asked her “in what she believed or in what manner she parted with the Catholic faith or what her being Jewish consisted of, and she said that she only knew that she was Jewish and that she wished to be”—and those words (italics mine) fairly ring and resonate.
And what is one to make of an old mallorquín song which the author of the Anales heard an old work-woman singing in an inn, not far from the place of burning beneath Castle Bellver?
Mallorca, golden isle,
(God help us maintain the Faith!)
Below the castle Bellver
We made a bonfire.
Vails raised the banner
And Tarongí the standard
And the xuetes behind
Formed the procession.
“Very good! I exclaimed. But this applause made mute the old woman, who in spite of my reiterated importuning did not wish to continue her poetic description.”
Can one assume the sad, majestic heroism of the second stanza was lost on everyone as easily as on our author?
At any rate, perhaps a secret admiration for the reminder of the difference that one disliked in oneself appears now in a different light now that one grows to like oneself. “I think we may all here be Jewish to some degree,” a young mallorquín says to me. Something I’ve heard before.
It may seem odd to do so much barroom research on Jews—even Catholic Jews. But two more reports:
In September the village, in the township of Andraitx, celebrates its saint’s day. Andraitx: strange to think of other celebrations. A variant verse of that old song above:
And people came from the island of Ibiza
And peasants from Arta, and from Andraitx,
For the sixth day of May
We made a bonfire,
I select the foulest bar I can find there, enter, order a brandy. “Un Soberano, por favor.” (Advertisement: Soberano es cosa de hombres—a man’s thing. Macho.) I notice two mallorquines in their early twenties, toughs unquestionably, shooting pool, speaking loudly in dialect. I can understand nothing. I observe one especially, hair skin-head style, vaguely punk-rock, cigarette pack rolled up in T-shirt sleeve. In truth I’m a little nervous. Then something about the ambience begins to frighten me, and I decide I’ll keep my words, any leading questions, to myself. But then I notice, as punk reaches out of over table for a shot and his sleeve lifts a couple of inches . . . tattooed upon the upper arms a Star of David. My god! I can’t move. It’s too incongruous. I’m looking for the nerve to say something but can’t find it. I’m afraid of him. Twenty minutes. Then . . . he finishes the game, says goodbye to his companion, struts to the bar, slaps down some change, and, as he’s turning to the exit, catches me staring and halts.
I have to say something. “Señor, perdóneme. ¿Es. . . es una estrella Davíd? “Sí.” He just stands there, staring me down. Before he speaks again his mouth twists to a half snarl which suits the apparent irony of his tone when he does speak. I trust somehow my intuition that he wasn’t a xueta or Jewish at all. I still don’t know what his words meant and can only cast about. Some new form of rebellion, is that what the star is? “Viva Mallorca,” he bites his words. “Viva la iglesia,” he hisses—long live the church. Then walks out. I look to the bartender . . . who merely shrugs his shoulders.
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Samuel Hux is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.
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