girona, spain | Hidden among the maze of alleyways east of the Onyar River, the Museum of Jewish History stands as testament — if an inadvertent one — to the completeness of Spain’s destruction of its once-thriving Jewish population.
Inside the museum, set in what is said to be Girona’s last known synagogue, designers have layered the ancient architecture with all the flourishes of a contemporary museum, complete with glass-lit cases, multimedia displays and an audio tour in several languages.
In one case sits the signet ring belonging to Girona’s most famous Jewish son, Rabbi Moses Ben Nahman Girondi, the legendary Judaic scholar known as the Ramban or Nahmanides.
The sight of the ring inspires the kind of spine-tingling intimacy with history that museums like this aim to evoke — that is, until the voice on the audio guide announces that the ring is a fake, a copy of the original that sits in a museum in Jerusalem.
In fact, most of the artifacts in Girona are copies. Virtually nothing is left from the community that once lived here, save for the tombstones excavated from the nearby Jewish cemetery. The few artifacts from the period that have survived are generally beyond the museum’s financial ability to acquire.
“Once in a while we can buy something, but it’s not as often as we would like,” said Assumpcio Hosta, the director of a municipal body responsible for the preservation of Girona’s Jewish heritage. “It costs a lot of money.”
That difficulty hasn’t stopped nearly two dozen cities and towns throughout Spain from trying to capitalize on their Jewish history, building monuments and hosting concerts, lectures and other cultural activities inspired by one of the most productive and accomplished Jewish communities in history.
The effort has left some Jews feeling that Spain is exploiting a history that rightfully belongs to contemporary Spanish Jews, and in the process is relegating a living culture to a museum piece by portraying Judaism as little more than a historic curiosity.
The primary purpose of establishing the Spanish Jewish heritage sites is to attract tourism to areas that otherwise have little to recommend them as holiday destinations.
“The government is using the Jewish patrimony for a purpose, and the only real purpose is to bring tourism to Spain,” said Rabbi Dovid Libersohn, the Argentina-born Chabad rabbi in Barcelona. “Some politicians, they like Judaism without Jews.”
But Spanish officials involved in the effort to highlight Jewish heritage say it’s not a fair or apt analysis. They note that the Spanish government has devoted resources to rebuilding its ties with Israel and with Jewish communities, in Spain and beyond. In 2006, Spain established Casa Sefarad-Israel, an agency of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs charged with promoting good relations with Spanish Jewry, the global Jewish diaspora and Israel.
Within Spain there is Red de Juderias, a network of nearly two dozen Spanish cities and towns whose official purpose is to preserve the cultural legacy of Jewish Spain but whose main aim is to promote tourist sites.
The development of Jewish heritage sites in Spain is part of a wider explosion of interest in the culture of Europe’s lost Jewish communities.
There are annual events (such as the European Day of Jewish Culture and the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow) and institutions (such as the European Association for the Preservation and Promotion of Jewish Culture and Heritage, and Warsaw’s Museum of the History of the Polish Jews). Most of these efforts are intended mostly for non-Jews, who often are the organizers.
Red de Juderias and B’nai B’rith Europe co-organize the European Day of Jewish Culture.
“That heritage belongs to every citizen,” said Hosta, who also is the general secretary of Red de Juderias. “It doesn’t belong to a single part of the community. That’s our common heritage.”
But some segments of Spain’s small Jewish community say Jewish heritage doesn’t belong to the descendants of those who expelled the Jews 500 years ago, but to the Spanish Jewish community of today — relatively recent arrivals from elsewhere, principally Argentina and North Africa.
The museums and conferences and concerts and cooking demonstrations collectively present Judaism as a kind of ersatz culture divorced from a living faith, some contend.
“The way they represent Judaism is very poor,” said Dominique Tomasov Blinder, a Barcelona-based architect and founder of Urban Cultours, a tour company focused on the Jewish heritage of Catalonia.
“It’s a sterile collection of objects, displayed like little trophies, that were rescued from the flood of the expulsion,” Blinder said. “If we had not been kicked out, all these objects would be in our synagogues, in our yeshivot, in our study centers, in our schools, our homes. And they would have a life, a purpose to be.”
Meanwhile, surveys show that Spain ranks among the European countries with the highest anti-Semitic metrics. A 2002 study by the Anti-Defamation League asked residents of five European countries questions about their perceptions of Jews, including whether Jews have too much power and are more loyal to Israel. Spain topped in every category.
More recently, a 2008 Pew study found that 46 percent of Spaniards viewed Jews unfavorably — the highest number in Europe and 10 percentage points higher than Poland, the next highest European country.
Diego de Ojeda, the director of Casa Sefarad-Israel, chalks this up to basic ignorance: Because there are so few Spanish Jews today, most Spaniards have never encountered a Jew in their lives.
“There’s not a conspiracy in Spain to say let’s dig out our Jewish past so we can milk Jewish tourists,” de Ojeda said. “That’s also a part of it. But it’s the right thing to do. We do it with our Arab culture. We do it with our Roman remains. We do it with any archaeological remains.”