Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

Rigor, rigor inflexibly holds. Toledo’s streets are stone veins imbedded. The Alcázar is a higher rock above the rocky huddle of the town: its rectangular loom is a peak of the mountain, polished by the sun. At the summit bristles the Cathedral. Towers, turrets, crested pediments, flying buttresses and chapel roofs are pressed aloft by the Toledan wave, and rise from it like foam. All of the sharp volutions of the streets, even the sheer Alcázar, converge and aspire into this jet of granite. And over the Cathedral is the sky—God’s empty answer to this blast of icy aspiration.

. . . . . .

This is one Theme of Toledo: the word of traditional Castile and of its castle towns. The mountain is refuge of friend, menace to foe. The face of the Christian warrior is set. Moor and Jew are driven out. And all the Toledan world becomes a symbol of the mood that drove them. The soul of the Spaniard becomes a castled mountain; masters its chaos by turning it to stone. And what will not ply to immobility, it shuts without the drawbridge.... One theme of Toledo. But a typical Castilian town—no more—is not Toledo. Castile surpasses itself. Spain grows universal.

Color, flame, live too in the shut town. They are everywhere. And in their protean form, they are one. Halfway up from the Puerta Visagra stands Cristo de la Luz in a rough field of rocks. In 1085, the conquering Castilians passed through the Arabs’ gate. Their titular head was Alfonso VI. But Ruy Díaz de Vivar, the Cid, rode first. The streets then were not different from now. Crude stone paved the steep, and the gray houses hid their eyes about the inner verdure of their courts. The Cid came to a little mosque. His horse fell to his knees and the Campeador could not avail to budge him. At last, he dismounted from the rapt steed and strode into the mosque. He beat away the gold-encrusted Mihrab and disclosed a Visigothic chapel. In the altar place, before the Christ, was a brass lamp; and it was burning even as it had burned three and a half centuries before, when Musa walled it up to make his mosque.[13]

The mosque stands first in the unkempt garden. Its entrance is double-arched. Through the three columns topped by a lyric arabesque, lies the round depth of the altar. Upon the walls are paintings of ascetic Christians, lean with the Byzantine projection of their color into the life of their forms. These paintings were recent when the Arab came to Toledo in 711. They are recent today—in the Toledo of El Greco.

Cristo de la Luz is delicate. Its counterpoint of German, Byzantine and Arab themes makes it a song wavering flute-like from the stiff music of the Castilian town. On the other slope, in the Judería that leaned so fatefully over the gorge of the Tagus, are other dissident jewels. Two synagogues have survived. One of them consecrated as a church under the tutelage of Santa María la Blanca, later became the asylum for penitent prostitutes, later a barrack for cavalry and a stable. The other was made over by the Catholic Kings to that most unjewish of cults—the death (Tránsito) of the Virgin Mother. Builded by the Jews, the houses speak across the stormy ages of the Jews, their builders. The sultry masquerades to which they have submitted fade away. This is Toledo indeed. The Toledo of Abraham Ibn Ezra, descendant of Gabírol and forefather of Spinoza; of the munificent and tragic Samuel, treasurer to Spain’s most cruel king; of Ibn Daud, Talmudist, and of his great foe, Jehudah Ha Levi.

At the time of Paul, there were already Jews in Spain. Like the Phœnicians and the Greeks before them, they became protagonists of Spanish urban culture. The Visigoths who inherited the land upon the Roman death, were an agricultural folk. Their will to control this peninsula of cities failed, because they lacked the spirit of the city. At the end, when disaster neared they oppressed the Jews—masters of urbanity—for economic reasons. It was natural, that the oppressed should welcome the Arabs: and that the Moslem captains, aware of the possible ally in a hostile land, should overlook the chief hate of their Prophet by welcoming the Jews. Jews were placed in control of Seville, Málaga, Córdoba, Granada, Toledo. Under the Córdoban Caliphate, they throve and Spain became their land. Jewish Wisdom crossed the sea from Babylon and founded the first Academies of Europe.

During four centuries, the Jew was a master in Spain. But it is doubtful if his number ever equaled half a million. He was a leaven and an enzyme in the land. He was artisan, tradesman. No guild of the cities failed to count him in. He was physician and teacher. He became scientist and philosopher. The majority of Jews lived, of course, in the humble circumstance of a farmer or a weaver. But a few grew great. Jews became diplomats and statesmen for Moslem and for Christian princes. As the modern economy gradually evolved, they became ministers of finance; they waxed wealthy. And with their power they builded in the towns of Spain centers of liberal, luxuriant culture whose like was not then in Europe. They were masters of many tongues, masters of many illuminations. When Arab Córdoba had rotted and the courts of Italy were yet swarming knots of bandits, the Jews of Spain dwelt in a world which embraced Asia, Africa, Europe. Indeed, they were among the eyes of Portugal and Spain, yearning across the seas. They were cartographers; they were promoters of trade. And from Gabírol who was born in Málaga in 1021 to Hasdai ben Crescas who died in Barcelona in 1410—a period of time nearly as great as that which separates the Discovery of America from our day—they traced an incessant thought in Spain.

The modern State sounded once again a Jewish doom. With the birth of its fanatical will came persecution. The Jews’ internationalism was a subtle, psychologic poison. The servants of royal unity became aware of an enemy in their household—of an enemy in their blood. In 1391, Spain—the liberal theater of ideas whose like had not been known since Alexandria (for here argued men who believed, not in abstract gods, but in flaming Prophets and in Incarnations)—lurched to one modern way of progress. Massacre rose from Seville to Toledo. A century later, the Jews were ordered to give up either their faith or their home. They had been in Spain for centuries; their urban genius had helped build Spain’s cities. They had kindled a fire to warm the world and to illumine heaven. They were artisans in the body and in the mind of their land. They were ordered to die. For to leave the home of Spain or the home of Bible and Talmud was no mere uprooting. Probably not much more than a hundred thousand left. The moiety stayed and were lost in the great Catholic amalgam. Their organizations for action and for thought were reft from them. They had no halls or synagogues. They had no language. Worst of all, they had to abandon—those who stayed—the immemorial forms of feeling which were Jewish and in which they were beginning to mold (witness Crescas and Leon Hebreo) a new Enlightenment, a new Naturalistic religion! An end ... not the first, not the last ... came to Jewish Wisdom. And while Europe whose spirit they had nourished rose in Renascence to the bloody dawn of our “liberal” age, the Jews sank down into the very night of mumbled ritual and superstition from which they had upraised their oppressors.

As they pass from the stern city or are lost within its rigorous stones, the Jews give to it a color and a theme without which it would not be Toledo. By their acceptance of death, they have won life unceasing: and here in Toledo which once gave them death, they have bestowed a spirit which has not died.