The beginning of the exhibition provokes, to say the least, silence. It is a chronology of the treatment of Jews in Spain from the Lateran Council of 1215, which dictated norms for the differentiation of their clothing, until 1492, the year of the expulsion of the Jews by the Catholic Monarchs. In between, accusations of having desecrated sacred hosts, assaults on Jewish quarters 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 the main Jewish quarters of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were attacked and destroyed, “starting in Seville and ending in Barcelona, which was one of the largest and remained 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 together with the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, where it will be seen later, and that dares to examine the role that images played in this terrible chronology. The role of art. The gaze, almost always stereotypical, often fierce and full of fake news, that transmitted its images to an illiterate, illiterate society about the Jews. And, especially, about the thousands of converts after the massive pogroms. Some eternally suspicious converts.
An exhibition that has aroused the interest of the international press, from The New York Times to The Guardian, and in which the perhaps 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 whom the amulet, in which Fátima's hand was contained, was supposed to protect – but in which without a doubt the most significant work is the one that closes it, the conclusion of the entire path of previously seen images. An inquisitorial auto-da-fe presided over by Santo Domingo de Guzmán in which five Jewish converts are tried. Two will be burned alive, while three others are dressed in sambenitos, corozas decorated with flames and signs of “erotic condemned.” And the author of the painting that prompted Joan Molina to devise this exhibition is Berruguete, who, he says, “is creating a propaganda work for the Inquisition commissioned by Torquemada.” A Berruguete who, he adds, even left money when he died to the monastery of Santo Tomás in Ávila, which was used as a court of the Inquisition.
Neither the images nor their authors are innocent. They transfer concepts, anxieties. The exhibition begins with works in which the traditions of each other mix and merge. Christians made ostentatious manuscripts similar to Christian codices, the haggadahs, for the Jewish elites. And there are Christian paintings that appropriate Jewish rituals such as circumcision. But soon the images turned into stereotypes and libel, especially at the end of the 13th and 14th centuries, when there was systemic violence.
The Jews with identifying red circlets, just as they would wear Stars of David in the Nazi regime. The Jews represented in carvings and altarpieces as blind, with blindfolds, for not seeing the truth. The Jews in deforming caricatures like those that cover the books that record the financial transactions in the Crown of Aragon – especially its loans –, drawn with disproportionate noses and eyes and unkempt beards. The Jews flagellating Christ. The Jews, in the images of the Cantigas a Santa María by Alfonso X the Wise, making pacts with the devil, committing infanticide or stealing a Marian icon and throwing it into a latrine. Despite this, the board remains intact and exudes a sweet fragrance on top, which will convert the entire local Jewish community. Or the Jews, in short, viciously trying to destroy sacred hosts... just at the moment when it is necessary to disseminate the cult of the Eucharist and a concept as complex for the people as the real presence of Christ in the consecrated host.
Molina emphasizes in this sense that “in a world with many fewer images than today, when we can see hundreds, thousands of images on television, the images are very impressive, very powerful. And, evidently, these rhetorical and propaganda speeches have a very notable, more than notable, force.” And they can, he says in front of the painting of the Inquisition, contribute to “creating the climate that can lead to that situation, in addition to other circumstances and other factors.”
And he emphasizes that in this exhibition about the view of the Jew, a typically Hispanic aspect is the view of the convert, an issue that occurred in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, but not in other places in Europe, due to the massive conversions after the pogroms of 1391. “The suspicions that spread among the Old Christians is that they are Judaizing heretics, crypto-Jews, an important issue, the backbone of Spanish society at the end of the Middle Ages,” says Molina, especially at a time when These converts reach important positions in the court or the Church. An art will also be generated there to witness 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 fabrics so that it can be seen that they are circumcised.
Some paintings, such as The Fountain of Grace, from Van Eyck's workshop, still show that the conversion of Jews is possible; Some believe so, but, Molina observes, all that is broken in the middle of the 15th century when the first statutes of blood purity arrive “and it is established that converts are impure due to a matter of blood, because that is no longer anti-Judaism but anti-Semitism, the issue is no longer religion, and the Inquisition will arrive there. The papal one already existed and in 1478 the Spanish one was established, which persecuted the new Judaizing converts and for which suspicions could be the most strange, often simple practices that referred to tradition and customs, but did not mean doctrinal participation. ”.
And there will appear both works that exalt the inquisitors and, he highlights, the creation "of an iconography aimed at converts processed and burned as heretics." They are, he explains, the sambenitos, woolen sacks with which those condemned for heresy, for "Judaizing apostasy", were dressed, symbolically decorated, like the one worn by Master Juan Cirujano, a resident of Coruña del Conde (Burgos) in 1490. way to the bonfire. A sambenito illustrated with a large wolf head from which flames emanated, a symbol of heresy. Some sanbenitos that were then hung inside the churches and were copied again as they degraded "so that the guilt would remain for the convicted person and his successors." “This exhibition – concludes Molina – speaks of borders, segregation and intolerance but also of coexistence. It invites us to look at our past. They were images used to construct identities and alterities, they speak about us and others, in this case from the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, although, as Benedetto Croce said, there is no history, there is only contemporary history.
