On the east side a portion of the monastery has been converted into a museum. Never was a collection more insignificant than that of the Museo Provincial of Toledo. The ground floor displays a quantity of wood carvings, of Moorish azulejo, which is always a delight for the eye, of bits of ancient monuments, of inscriptions, Arabic brims of walls, with inscriptions and Moorish work, ever worth examining. Most of the pictures and statues are exceedingly mediocre. But there is a superb bust of Juanelo by Berruguete, and two portraits of El Greco, Juan de Alava and Covarrubias, as well as his famous plan of Toledo, with the slim and musing youth, his poetic-looking son, who was the charming model of his St Martin as well. There is a Holy Family by Spagnoletto, St Vicente Ferrer by Giordano, some saints by Carreño, and an original canvas of Juan de Sevilla. Here, by examination of fourteen pictures of Luis Tristan, you may test the absurdity of the statement by more than one foreign art critic, that the disciple was greater than the master. If Tristan was more sane and sound than El Greco, he was certainly less distinguished and less great. There is a crucifix of Ribalta, a St Jerome of Carducci, some fine subjects from Holy Scripture by Frank, and a remarkable Christ of Morales, and a number of Flemish imitations. The saloon above, where most of these pictures are preserved, was the cell of the great Cisneros. The most interesting relic of all the collection of inscriptions and stones is the mutilated slab taken from the roof of the church of the Capucine Friars near the Alcázar, and found among the materials used for building the patio of this palace, whose broken letters show it to be a fragment of King Wamba’s tomb:
VS Rex Wamba
LXX
LXXXIIIIIII
HUNC
EGIONIS
IV
which Antonio Ponz recomposes thus:
En tumulatus jacet inclitus Rex Wamba;
Regnum contempsit anno DCLXXX
Monachus obiit anno DCLXXXIIIIIII
A Cænobio translatus in Hunc locum
Ab Alphonsus X. Legionis Castellae autem IV. Reye.
In the now forsaken ghetto, where, in King Wamba’s days, stood a strong fortress called the Castillo de la Juderia, and which then was the centre of Toledo’s wealth and commerce, a flourishing quarter, full of the activities of business, of intelligence, of industry, where riches and science and the treasures of the King were gathered, where the money-changers clinked golden promise in the face of reckless and needy nobles, and rabbis read out the law in their beautiful temples to the prosperous and numerous descendants of the exiles of Babylon, to-day may be seen the lovely little synagogues, El Transito and Santa Maria La Blanca.
Writing several centuries ago to his fellow-Jews of Amsterdam, Hassadrin, a Jewish traveller, thus mentions El Transito, one of the marvels of Toledo: “I find in this town, with other antiquities, Roman, Gothic and Arabian, a spacious temple which, since 1355, with King Pedro’s permission, was built in this town for the Jewish people by Samuel Levi, his treasurer and private friend, which temple remains substantially intact, with all the early ornamentation seen on its four principal walls since its foundation, and thus its two atriums, its temple for women and other corresponding offices. All this I have drawn with as much care as possible, and with the expression of the smallest ornamentation, and have even copied three lines of Hebrew, which run along each of the walls, south, north, and west, without interruption; and here also four Hebrew inscriptions, the shortest in verse and rhythm, the two longest in prose; six others on the east wall.” But he bitterly complains that “they have white-washed the temple so thickly that, even though the letters were originally in relief, they are entirely obliterated, and much of the ornamentation remains hopelessly confused.” Those unwhitened above, that are left coloured and solid, he describes as “most beautiful.”[19]
When Samuel Levi built this lovely temple of semi-Moorish design, which the restorers are slowly relieving of its execrable load of whitewash that the venerable Hassadrin complained of to his fellow-townspeople of Amsterdam, the Jews were at their highest point of fortune in Toledo. They stood at the bedside of the sovereign in sickness, they counselled him in all difficulties; they filled his purse, kept his city flourishing. They might have known that they would soon pay dearly for all this power and glory. The anti-Semitic feeling has ever been the same, since the first Christian days to our own time. It breaks out in waves, like an epidemic, and always, it must be remarked, when the Jews are most prosperous and wealthy. So it has broken out in France at the end of this enlightened century, with all the virulence and spite and shameless injustice of the primitive centuries. It is no exaggeration to say, in the year 1898, that the French, if they dared, would gladly wreck—as, in the days of Samuel Levi, the Spaniards wrecked Levi’s palace and all the great Jewish houses of the Toledan ghetto—the Jewish centre, if the Jews still congregated in any particular part of Paris. It is not unjust to say that it is Jewish gold, Jewish power, Jewish subtlety and intelligence that inspire to-day, as then, this bitter and vindictive hate. For if the Jews remained poor, insignificant, ignorant, they would never have suffered persecution, which is proof sufficient that the war is rather one of race than of religion, rather one of base and brutal envy
