The Journey Begins

I look out at cactus and scrub, whitewashed houses clinging to the side of a hill, ancient stones fortifying terraced vegetable plots. Only the olive trees remind me that I’m in Spain. I’m in the least-visited part of the Iberian Peninsula, the southeastern tip of Almeria province that was the last hold-out of the Moors over 500 years ago, the place where women still covered their faces to strangers as late as the 1950s.

Here empires come and go; only the harsh land remains. There are no political protests here in Mojacar Peublo and Playa; I rely on the internet for news of the mass demonstrations raging across Spain on this weekend before local elections. Here there are only the half-finished condo developments with “Se Vende”  signs plastered across their empty fronts – with the collapse of the Spanish construction bubble, and the downturn in the European economies, the wave of English and German expats and vacationers has dwindled to a trickle.

Here the illegal Africans travel by local bus to wander the empty beaches, hoping someone will buy their knock-off designer sunglasses. Here the Arab workers disappear under the stifling tarps of the ‘plasticulture’ fields, producing most of the fruits and vegetables eaten farther north; they emerge only to give their wages to the women wearing embroidered djellabahs, the women who are stared at by the local Spanish.

I am in southwestern Europe to find traces of Isaac the Blind, father of kabbalah, possible ancestor. I’m starting in the heartland of Sepharad, the Andalucian core of Mediterranean Jewry. Under the 500-year Moorish caliphate of the beginning of the first millennium, Jews lived across the entire peninsula. Farther north, as the Reconquista spread, Jews filled the Christian towns of Castile, Aragon, and Catalonia. Now, apart from small discreet new communities in Barcelona, Madrid, and Malaga, traces of the Jews of Spain are present only in government-tourism-motivated reconstructions, buildings without people, virtual Jewish life.

Here in Mojacar, there are not enough tourists to warrant such reconstruction; the ancient Jewish quarter is unmarked, and unreconstructed. Locals will tell you that Calle Arrabal was ‘the old Jewish street’, outside the medieval city walls that were torn down long ago. The Moors and their Jewish partners disappeared over 500 years ago; now the artists and the English expats stake their claim.

just published

http://www.thecommononline.org/dispatches/lost-histories

Once Upon a Time

I don’t know when books and stories became my preferred reality. It seemed so normal for so many years, that I never even questioned it – books seemed more real than life. Even stories that others told me seemed more real than the life I was living. Only recently has it occurred to me that this is strange; only lately have I begun to wonder why reading a book is more compelling for me than the world around me.

My recent trip to Vauvert brought it all into focus.  I grew up with stories of the Holocaust, and more importantly with stories of the life before the destruction, a life that existed only in the stories told by my parents and their friends, and over the years in a book or two.  Then as an adult I became interested in kabbalah, and as I searched for the roots of the Jewish mystical and esoteric tradition I found myself on the trail of yet another  destroyed Jewish world, this one half a millennium older than the ones my parents had described.  Yet in my mothers’ stories there was still a link – her family name was descended, so a family tradition related, to the father of kabbalah.

As I searched back beyond the Hassidim of Eastern Europe, past the 17^th-century kabbalists of Safed, back before the Zohar of 14^th-century Castile, I slowly learned about the kabbalists of Gerona, the first in the Iberian peninsula.  But even before them, there was the early circle of Provencal kabbalists, headed by Isaac the Blind of Posquieres. Who knew there was a tradition that was neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi? Who knew that Provence was the cradle of kabbalah?

It took me a long time to find Posquieres on a map. Unlike the other important Provencal/Occitan/Catalan  Jewish centers  of the early Middle Ages  (this is complicated, and requires a separate post — stay tuned), unlike Lunel and Beziers and Montpellier, unlike Narbonne and Perpignan, all of which still appear on contemporary maps, Posquieres is nowhere to be seen. It took me months to discover that Posquieres underwent a name change, and is now known as Vauvert.

The Jewish history of Posquieres is now marked by a couple of street names – rue des Juifs, rues des Bonnets Carres – and by a small plaque commemorating Isaac’s  father Abraham, known as the Rabad, famous Talmudic commentator, across from what may have been the site of the synagogue. There is a housefront, now boarded up, that may have been the site of the communal bakery; there is talk among members of the local historical society of some tombstones with Hebrew inscriptions, but none have yet been found.

Archives only started to be maintained in France in the late 13th century, after Isaac was already gone, although the Chief Archivist in Vauvert’s mairie, or town hall, knows about Rabad and Isaac, wishes there were more money in her budget to do further research. The expulsions of the Jews from France in the 14^th century obliterated all physical traces of the community.  The later religious wars between the Catholics and the ‘Reformers’ or Huguenots even destroyed whatever records might have resided in the local church, although M. le Cure, in his late 80s but still the center of a certain kind of social life in Vauvert, remembers that other researchers have come seeking traces of the origins of kabbalah.

“Go to the Mediatheque,” everyone said, and so I did – France has updated its name for public libraries, in keeping with the new reality that more is stored in various non-print media than in books these days. There is indeed a small collection related to the Rabad, and to Isaac and kabbalah – mostly books translated from Hebrew and English, books available in any reasonable university collection.

I would learn more about Posquiere’s Jewish past, and find documentation of that history, in Montpellier — but that, as they say, is a story for another day.

Vauvert’s history as Posquieres, home of a great medieval Jewish academy, birthplace of kabbalah, can only be found in books, in stories, in the oral tradition of the teachings. That reality of books and stories, more real in some ways than the physical reality around us.

more lost Jewish worlds

 

just published:

http://www.thecommononline.org/dispatches/locations/

a day on the quest

ok, first it was impossible to find a room in Montpellier, then it was impossible to find a room in Vauvert (in Vauvert??), now I can’t find public transportation between the two (something about different French Departements)…Isaac, stop being coy!

***

I learned today that they run the bulls in Vauvert, just like Pamplona…Isaac, you have got to be kidding…

“Follow, follow…”

When I was in public school in Montreal, we learned an old hymn that began “Follow follow, follow the gleam, Banners unfurled, for all the world…” It had a wonderful melody, and I still sometimes find myself humming it mindlessly. I had no idea, then, that I was singing a hymn to the legend of the Grail, one of the mythic objects of Christian Europe. Even less did I know that this symbol inspired the early romances, precursors of the modern novel, not  to mention Wagner’s triumphal Ring cycle, or that it formed a shadowy backdrop to the troubadours’ lyrics about courtly love that would inspire modern poetry and the invention of romance. Back then I certainly could never imagine that decades later I’d be on a quest of my own, entering the territory of the Grail, the troubadours, and courtly love.

In a few days I’ll be in what’s now called Languedoc, in the southwest corner of modern France. I’m on the trail of Isaac the Blind, father of kabbalah, who lived in Posquieres, not far from Montpellier. Travelling from Barcelona, I’ll be moving through a cultural tradition that defies modern national borders – France and Spain may be two separate countries in present-day Europe, but the Catalan identity precludes them both, and is enjoying contemporary cultural resurgence. Perpignan and Narbonne may fly the French flag and lie north of the Pyrenees, that natural demarcation between two modern nation states, but back in Isaac’s day, in the 12^th and 13^th century, they were one continuous cultural zone, and usually under the control of the counts of Barcelona or even the Crown of Aragon.

Mostly, though, and especially in the towns around Montpellier, the feudal lords were relatively self-governing. Even the influence of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy was weak here, and many local bishops joined their local lords in unusually tolerant, liberal, even free-thinking, virtually autonomous enclaves. Something went on here in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, something that was separate from the conventional hegemony of the Holy Roman Empire; and it was something that had a divergent view of the feminine, that even to a certain extent glorified it.

Here is a partial list of the cultural phenomena that arose to prominence in that time and place, before the politics of Church and state imposed cultural conformity and orthodoxy via military and spiritual suppression, through the Albigensian Crusade and the invention of the Inquisition:

• the cult of the Virgin Mary
• the cult of Mary Magdalen (and the production of innumerable ‘Black Madonnas’, like the one in the monastery at Montserrat, sometimes linked to Magdalene)
• the Cathar  ‘heresy’, with its doctrine of equality of the sexes
• the tradition of courtly love, with its knightly chaste dedication to the admired lady
• the tradition of the Holy Grail (linked by some in recent times to Mary Magdalene and a fully human Jesus)
• the appearance of kabbalah, with its doctrine of the Shechinah, or female attribute of the divine

In our time we lend credence only to ‘truth’ or facts that can be documented. Oral history is trusted only when we know the teller. Legend, like ‘old wives’ tales’, is considered mere invention. In the Jewish tradition, on the other hand, Talmudic commentary or interpretation is conducted on two main forms of text. There is the so-called ‘law’, or precepts for conduct, called Halacha; and then there is story, or narrative, called Aggada. Both form part of spiritual thought.

With kabbalah, we will enter yet another realm of ‘truth’, the highest form of spiritual commentary or interpretation, expressed as myth and poetry. Is it any surprise that it emerged in early medieval Provence?

Oral Tradition

“So the first kabbalist was European, not Middle Eastern — that’s interesting.”  Amund is a communications consultant from Oslo, and he’s trying to understand why I’m here in Catalonia.  It’s complicated, I’m thinking, as I search for a simple way to explain – at least he’s heard of kabbalah, and knows enough to link it to Jewish history.

Of course Jewish mysticism, what we now generally equate with kabbalah, is much older than medieval Europe, and did start with the Jewish people in the biblical land of Israel. But the cosmology and typology that is now associated with kabbalah, the Tree of Life – that famous diagram with its circles linked in various ways — and its ten sefirot, the idea of triadic relationship as the template of creation, the notion of the Shechinah as the feminine aspect of the divine, all these did indeed originate in the 12^th and 13^th century in what is now Languedoc, but was then part of the Crown of Aragon and under the control of Barcelona.

I’m slowly making my way to the neighborhood of Rabbi Isaac the Blind, considered to be the father of kabbalah. Known as Saginahar, which is Aramaic for “filled with great light”, Isaac lived in the small town of Posquieres, outside Montpellier, in the 12^th and 13^th century. His father, Rabbi Abraham Ben David, known by his acronym as the Rabad, was a famous Talmudic commentator who established an important academy in Posquieres. Isaac inherited the leadership of the academy, and established the first important circle of kabbalists among his students.

For almost a year I searched in vain to locate Posquieres on maps from various eras. Although I knew it was located in the western part of what was then called Provence; although I’d read the account of Benjamin of Tudela, early medieval traveler from Iberia who made it all the way to Kazakhstan and back, who described the Jewish center as larger and more important than the one in Montpellier; I never found it. Finally, almost by accident, as I was reading a tour guide, I learned that the town changed its name after it became part of the French kingdom, and is still known as Vauvert.

I’m on my way to Vauvert, by way of Montpellier, to see what remains of its illustrious Jewish past, when it was called Posquieres.  I’ve walked the stones of the medieval Jewish quarter in Girona, northwest of Barcelona, the quarter that was discovered by accident during house renovations and then meticulously restored by the Catalan and Spanish governments. There’s a museum and research institute on the site of the old synagogue, named for Girona’s most famous Jewish son, Rabbi Moses Ben Nachman, known as Nachmanides or the Ramban. In Girona he also goes by his Catalan name, Bonastruc da Porta.

It was all almost a millennium ago, and there have been no Jews in Girona since the expulsion of 1492. The kabbalistic circle in Girona, the first in the Iberian peninsula, was the precursor of the great flowering that resulted in the Zohar. Few know that the teachings of this circle came from Isaac the Blind, that the great flowering of Iberian kabbalah actually began in what is now Languedoc in southwestern France, was then known as Provence, is still called the ‘Provencal tradition’ in the Jewish world.

I’m on the trail of Isaac the Blind, known as Saginahar, the father of kabbalah.  I’m also on a  kind of personal quest, for there’s a story in my mother’s family that we are descended from Saginahar, that the family name Saginur came from ‘a famous kabbalist.’  My mother was the sole survivor of her large European family, all killed in various ‘aktions’ in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, at that time Poland. Only very distant cousins, many times removed, who’d earlier emigrated to North America or Israel, now remain to repeat this story.

Journalists require ‘authentication’ of a story. Anthropologists extrapolate from artifacts. Historians work with documentation – but I’m told by experts in the field that French archives only started to be kept in the 13th century, and even then they were mainly Christian.  And anyway, the Jews were expelled from France in the 14^th century – anything I find in Montpellier or Vauvert, like the famous mikveh or ritual bath in Montpellier, will likely be from a later Jewish period.

It’s complicated. I’m slowly uncovering the tangled and confusing history, via tradition and scholarship. Does anything material remain; can anything be ‘documented’?  Will I find more than a few stones or, if I’m lucky, a commemorative plaque?

(second of two parts)

You Can’t Go Home Again

That’s what the American writer Thomas Wolfe said, and I’m learning that it applies to artists’ residencies as well. My first visit to Can Serrat was less than three years ago – I was charmed to be in the 300-year-old Catalan farmhouse near El Bruc, a town less than an hour’s drive from Barcelona but well off the tourist track. Sitting in the shadow of the non-monastery side of Montserrat, it was owned by a consortium of Norwegian artists, and filled with oddly-placed funky sculptures and neo-Venetian wall decorations. The communal toilets might be unpredictable, but the conversation among the international group of resident artists around the farmhouse kitchen table, where we all huddled in front of the fire to escape the damp October cold, was always intense and stimulating. I learned about cutting-edge art-photo techniques from a man from Japan; I discussed the Berlin art scene with a painter who lived there; I debated the merits of installations and documentation with a Hungarian post-modernist. The writers were from Ireland, Sweden, Norway (by way of Iran); I was the only North American, and only one of two native English-speakers.
These days El Bruc, like much of Spain a victim of the recent real estate boom-and-bust, is filled with empty condo developments, and its main street boasts a real estate office advertising still-overpriced properties. Barcelona has become unaffordable, and younger people move to El Bruc to commute to their jobs in the city. The locals in El Bruc who run the lone supermarket and small grocery stores still speak only Catalan, but it’s not the same. The regional Hispano-Igualadina bus that links El Bruc to Barcelona runs much more frequently than it used to, and feels more like a suburban commuter run, especially when it’s filled to capacity at rush hour – matrons get on at Maria Christina on the fashionable Avinguda Diagonal laden with chic bags from trendy boutiques, and the passing scenery with its industrial plants and big-box stores feels like southern California of a decade or two ago.
Collectives, like all human forms, are unstable; it’s probably amazing that things went as well as they did for over twenty years. No one’s talking; but between the discreet hints it’s possible to figure out that there was a difference of opinion about the way the whole operation should run. Nowadays the old wing, where I had stayed in a whitewashed room bearing a line drawing of Don Quixote on one of the bare walls, is off limits to residency artists; only the owners and their student groups stay there. The absent-minded and distracted artist-managers are history; things are run on a more business-like plan by Marcel and Karine, a husband-and-wife team of business grads, escapees from the corporate world.
The days of arguing post-modern aesthetics around the kitchen table are history; now the kitchen is Marcel’s domain, where he joins the legion of Catalan chefs in concocting his own creations based on the traditional cuina – new takes on the hearty sausage and pulses of a country kitchen. “Come with me to meet my other love,” he entices me one Saturday morning, and drives to a rustic hostellerie that houses Isabelle, his beloved donkey, also the symbol of Catalonia – if once-haughty imperial Spain is represented by the bull of the corrida, then the practical down-to-earth Catalans would choose the affectionate donkey as their symbol.
These days, most resident artists at Can Serrat are English-speaking, from the UK or North America. We spend our days in silent work, finding a spot in one of the scattered studios. We gather for dinner together, wondering what Marcel will introduce us to that evening – the traditional Catalan snack of chocolate dipped in olive oil and rubbed with salt, or the curd-like white cheese eaten with walnuts and honey? He leaps on the outdoor table to explain the dish, while the mosquitoes have their own feast of our legs under the table.
Like much of Barcelona and its region, Can Serrat has become tamer, more business-like, a little less quirky. The anarchic artistic heart remains; it’s just a little harder to find.

Postcards from Cadaques

Valencia — Food market and…

virtual jewish tourism — the ethical dilemma

http://www.jidaily.com/thetouristsdilemma/e