.…and won’t you please release us from our commitment of 1492 to preserve the Jewish cemetery. The city wishes to build on those grounds, which today is encircled by our growth…’ Restpectfully, The Vitoria City Council (January 1952) (paraphrased)
At Vitoria by Marcia Sue Riman Selz, Ph.D. Archway Publishing, 2016
Reviewed by Irvin H. Jacobs, MD, MPH, MFA
SAN DIEGO –The above words derive from a situation in the 1492 Spanish Inquisition, in the Basque country of the Pyrenees mountains. The full story is preserved in a historical novel by Los Angeles writer Marcia Riman Selz, published in 2016 and 2018.
The Basques, though nominally Spaniards and Catholic were then, in the 15th Century, a tribal group with retained pagan rituals, living apart in that isolated area. For centuries since, they have wished to be separate from Spain, but aren’t strong enough to secede.
During the developing terror to the Jews under Ferdinand and Isabella, the Jews of the town of Vitoria were relatively safe till 1492, when the edicts of the Spanish priest Torquemada mandated that all non-Catholics must either convert to Catholicism or leave the country.
However, even such converts were scrutinized for signs of secretly practicing their former religion. This was a time when converts from Judaism secretly practiced Shabbat rituals and dietary laws, etc. These conversos were declared to be Marannos (pigs, or dirty persons). In our times, many of their descendants have emerged. They secretly lit candles on Friday evenings, ate a strange cracker at Easter time, avoided pork, and married only within certain families, for long forgotten reasons.
The Basques of Vitoria in the late 15th Century had a special affection for the Jews who lived among them, in “The Jewish Quarter” of their town.
There had been a plague that swept through Europe in 1488. In the Basque country it claimed numerous lives. Christian doctors and barbers of Vitoria fled, leaving their countrymen unattended. The disease symptoms included high fever, weakness, pounding headaches, deep cough, hemorrhaging, and severe dysentery.
A delegation of Vitoria’s Christian leaders came to the Jewish quarter to plead for help. This was in opposition to their priest’s command not to seek help from Jesus’ killers.
It was remembered that Jewish doctors had aided in a prior epidemic a century earlier, called “the Black Death” (bubonic plague) of the mid-1300s. Also Jewish doctors aided in occasional delivery of difficult pregnancies.
The leading Jewish doctors agreed to help, and refused payments, per Tikkun Olam.
The Christian leaders took note of the appearance of the Jewish Quarter. One said, “In the saints’ name, this “street is clean. No garbage. No bodies piled up. The cobblestones are washed. The Houses are made of stone. They look sturdier than our wooden huts…These stone houses look cleaner than ours.” (p. 75)
Another: “It is probably part of their strange Hebrew rituals…Hand washing before eating and after pissing. Wiping their asses with plant leaves. Burying their dead fast, not even letting relatives visit with the dead for several days to ward off evil spirits. All very strange.” (p.75)
And:”I informed a priest…. ‘no child is missing, nor have we found any dismembered or mutilated bodies….they do not care about our children or their blood….I think they value life and would not kill any children—even Christian children.” (pp. 76-7)
Lead Jewish doctor Roffe Michah examined Christian Vitoria, and diagnosed ‘a pestilence of the throat and lungs,’ an epidemic. He ordered the nuns: “Go to the berry groves and find enough blackberries to fill four large baskets. Cook them in hot, hot water until the fruit juices bubble. Cook them some more for a short time. Let the mixture cool. Each sick person should drink several cups full. Then they should drink more. Give them many cups of berry juice so they can piss out the bad elements from their bodies. Have each patient eat walnuts and hazelnuts. This will bring about more shitting. Bring blankets to keep people warm until their bodies sweat out the illness. Put cloths soaked in cold water on their foreheads to relieve the headaches and eye pain. Give them food to build their strength. Also, heat water in a big pot until the water is very hot. Empty out that water and put new water in the pot. Heat it again until it is bubbling. Then bring a fresh pot of bubbled water with clean cloths to me and I will show you how to wash the patients to treat the heat in their bodies. Remove all the straw from this room and burn it at once. Put the sick on piles of freshly washed blankets over new sacks filled with clean wool from fields and homes where no one is sick. Wash the floor and walls with hot water. Keep washing the floors and walls until the foul smell is gone.” (p. 83)
Later, he added, “…bring… hot soup made from the meat of a chicken. Add vegetables that are green in color, and chop them very fine…” (p.84) “…remove all dead bodies and garbage near your house. Take these to a field outside the walls of the city. Dig a deep pit. Pile up the bodies and trash in the pit, cover it with lye and then cover the pit with dirt.
“…other things…If someone dies, wash the body with lye. Bury that person immediately, alone…Make a solution of animal fat and ash, and wash in hot water the tables, chairs, plates, utensils, clothes, walls, and floors. Wash your hands often–your bodies at least one time a week. In your house, burn incense of camphor, rosemary and sulfur to keep your house cleansed. Before you drink water, put it in cleaned pots and heat it until it bubbles, let it cool, and then drink it…Do not allow any animals…in any houses.” (pp. 84-85)
The epidemic gradually abated after a number of weeks. The grateful Basque community did not forget.
Later in July 1492, with the expulsion decree of Torquemada in force, a core of Jewish Vitoria moved 200 kilometers across the Pyrenees to the French town of Baiona (today Bayonne). Others disbursed to places like Amsterdam, Istanbul, Morocco, and the New World. Those who stayed ‘converted’ to Catholicism.
At the request of the core who walked across to France, the grateful Christian community of Vitoria agreed to preserve the Jewish cemetery at the outskirts of the city, to maintain the dignity of its Jewish ancestors. Two copies of the agreement were signed by the leaders, one taken by the departing Jews, the other placed in the Vitoria city archives.
For the next 460 years, the Vitorian generations that followed maintained this commitment. The cemetery, known as Judizmendi, was attended and preserved. Descendants of both communities passed down the story of the agreement to following generations.
The 20th century Bayonne community of Jewish descendants now faced the above appeal of the Vitoria council. After much debate, they sent a message to Vitoria. They agreed to release Vitoria from its long-standing agreement. The modern Vitorian municipality council anguished over the message, many of genuine conviction that the cemetery continue to be respected. They expressed that they would not have been born, but for the intervention of its Jews in 1488.
Ultimately both sides settled on the following: The bodies were exhumed, blessed, and reinterred in a common grave, according to Hebrew laws. The city council discarded its building plans. Instead a plaza was built, with a park to surround it. It is named the Plaza de Sephard–the Plaza of the Spanish Jews.
A plaque states: “In this place was the Jewish cemetery that the aljama (self-governing Jewish community) of Vitoria-Gasteiz ceded in perpetuity to the city on 27 June in 1492. The city and city council lloyally respected the conditions of the ceding for 460 years, until on 27 June 1952 Vitoria was freed of the condition by the agreement signed on that date with the Consistorio Israelita of Bayonne (France).
“In homage to the friendly coexistence of Basque-Hebrew cultures, to the religious tolerance of this city, and in remembrance of the Jewish community of Vitoria-Gasteiz.”
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Dr. Jacobs is a freelance writer with interests in religion and medicine. Another San Diego Jewish World review of At Vitoria may be accessed by clicking here.