he 500th anniversary of the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1992 was, understandably, the occasion for several important exhibitions and conferences. Ten years later, two significant exhibitions were mounted in Toledo and Saragossa to showcase the results of archaeological and archival research in the intervening decade. Memoria de Sefarad, held in Toledo from October 2002 through January 2003, was created under the auspices of the national agency, Sociedad Estatal para la Accíon Cultural Exterior (SEACEX). The exhibition included a vast array of important objects connected to Jewish life in Spain, as well a treasure of illuminated Hebrew manuscripts and printed books documented in a lavish catalogue. The exhibition even included the justly famous Alba Bible, owned by the present Duke of Alba and rarely seen by scholars. Moses of Aragel, a rabbi, was commissioned by the Duke of Calatrava in 1422 to create a new translation of the Hebrew original into Castilian, and to supervise the production of miniatures accompanying the text. In the end there were 334 miniatures. The negotiations between the rabbi and the duke recorded in the preface reveal Moses' religious concerns regarding images, and the duke's offer of a Bible from Toledo Cathedral to serve as a model. This offer is explicit testimony to a medieval artistic practice generally deduced from a comparison of manuscripts.
Many of the works on view in Toledo were found in Aragon during the last decade, part of the regional government's sponsorship of archaeological investigations in large and small Jewish settlements. These same research activities formed the basis of the Saragossa exhibition, Hebraica Aragonilia, that was on view beginning the 4th of October 2002 and had to be extended beyond its published closing of December 8th. It focused on recreating the spaces of medieval Jewish life in Aragon: the home, the baths, the synagogue, and the juderia. Each spatial entity was based on the identification and research of still extant Jewish houses, baths, and synagogues in the villages and cities of Aragon. One of the most popular displays was a listing of the family names of Aragonese Jews who had converted to Christianity. Visitors were curious to confirm family traditions and explore their past.
The Toledo exhibition Memoria de Sefarad was the basis for a much smaller version consisting of sixty-one objects that was mounted in Washington National Cathedral for a month in May and June 2003. Having been asked to write this review, I regret not having seen the Washington version of Remembering Sepharad, but I was fortunate to have seen the larger exhibition from which it derived and to have both catalogues.
Memoria de Sefard, the catalogue, is 463 pages long and is replete with excellent illustrations. Essays by various contributors are organized under the following subjects: Historical Background; the Juderia; Architecture; Jews, Moors and Christians under Royal Law; Savants; the History of the Conflict [between Christians and Jews], the Inquisition; and the Sephardi Legacy. Each section is followed by full catalogue entries of related works. In contrast, Remembering Sepharad is a smaller book in many ways: page size, numbers of pages (231), and illustrations. As a result the text is very different. Two sections of the Spanish version are missing: Architecture, and the Sephardi Legacy. The remaining chapters are smaller than the originals from which they were abbreviated. The Juderia chapter, for example, occupies 82 pages in the English version and 160 pages in the Spanish original, yet is still a rich essay in its abbreviated version. Due to the smaller size of the sections, the quotations from medieval texts that enriched the essays in the Toledo catalogue are omitted from many essays of Remembering Sepharad. Some of the essays appear to have been written by someone for whom English is a foreign language, while others read fluently. Yet the entire text is credited to Isidro G. Bango Torviso, editor of the Spanish version.
Not only have the essays been abbreviated, but the catalogue entries have been replaced by a label-like list of the basic characteristics of each piece, and lack the discussions that would have contextualized the works displayed in Washington. Instead of the 261 works on view in Toledo, only 61 were show in the National Cathedral. Most of their illustrations are too red in tone, suggesting that there was no one responsible for color corrections who knew the Toledo catalogue or the works themselves. The illustration of the important synagogue rug of the fourteenth century on page ninety-five is upside-down--as it is in Memoria de Sefarad-- so that the reader is prevented from making any association with the iconography of ancient synagogue mosaics in Israel. The two objects on page 99 are problematic. The 'spice box' entered the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1855 with a cross soldered to its pyramidal roof, which was considered to be a later addition and was removed. The stem also seems to have been cut down at some point, creating an awkward transition between the support and the box. Nevertheless, the object was identified as a spice box by an Israeli scholar, despite the lack of any text from Spain describing a container for spices, nor any depiction of the form in Spanish Hebrew manuscripts. That both texts and illustrations exist in medieval Ashkenaz from the twelfth century on does not prove the form was used in contemporary Sepharad. The box, outfitted with its original, taller stem, could just as easily have been a monstrance or a reliquary. The following work, a box with a Hebrew inscription, is always designated a phylactery case, which seems impossible given its shape. It may have been a container for alms as the catalogues suggest, or more likely, an amulet container that could be affixed to its owner's belt.
Although much of the text is valuable, descriptions of Jewish religious practices suffer from a lack of first-hand knowledge of traditional Judaism and a misinterpretation of texts. Thus, the custom of Jewish women to cover their heads is ascribed to Muslim influence as is a taste for a luxurious lifestyle (64). The description of marriage customs on p. 86 is derived solely from the Talmud, without any acknowledgment of a change in rituals during the centuries that followed its redaction ca. 500 CE. The statement in the ketubbah (marriage contract) that the husband is required to fulfill his conjugal duties is misunderstood as sexist, rather than as an acknowledgement of a wife's right to sexual satisfaction within the marriage. And so forth.
Still Remembering Sefarad may serve its American audience as an introduction to the place of Jews in Spanish history and their material culture. The English reader who would like to know more, however, is sure to be stymied by a bibliography that is nearly all in Spanish, with only a few works listed in English, and a few in French and other European languages. Even works that were originally written in English are cited in translation, for example, Benjamin Gampel's The Last Jews of Navarre. The bibliographies in this catalogue and in Memoria de Sefarad ignore most of the rich scholarship on Sepharad that has been created in both Israel and the United States, however much it reveals of new finds in Sepharad.