Representing Hispano-Jewish and Sephardic material culture in Spain

Abstract

On occasion of the celebration of Spain’s national day, 12 October 2017, I decided to visit the exhibition The Power of the Past: 150 Years of Archaeology in Spain, at the National Archaeological Museum (MAN) in Madrid. The display of 150 pieces assembled from different regional museums, was aimed at representing the variegated material heritage emerging from archaeological excavations across Spain since the Museum was founded in 1867. One basic underlying concept in the exhibition was the centrality of the land – the peninsula and the islands – as a crossroads of divergent cultures once established therein, and the objects were chosen to represent them. At a somber and isolated corner towards the end of the exhibition, and following the item selected to represent the Canary Islands, I noticed a display glass case containing two different sets of objects aimed at representing a new research field: Jewish medieval archaeology. It seemed to me that the exhibition’s curator felt the need to include some Jewish items, but doing it as a result of a last-minute urge he/she did not accompany it with a suitable explanation. Paradoxically, and perhaps unintentionally, the location of the glass cases contributed to enhance a sensation of seclusion within the exhibition that did not at all fit with the historical narrative of Spain’s medieval Jews, dominated by some preconceived notions, buzzwords such as Convivencia – a term originated in the early twentieth century. As a historian by training for whom textual evidence provides, among other elements, the framework for an object’s interpretation, I tried to inquire about the lack of an adequate contextualization of the chosen items to represent Jewish material culture: the first was a set of four silver platters from Briviesca, a town northeast of Burgos, found during excavation work at the old Jewish quarter destroyed in 1366. This background, and the fact that a hexagram was engraved on the platters surface, had been considered enough to display them previously in temporary exhibitions as part of a Passover service (!!). A tiny inscription in Latin script engraved on the back, though, would suggest that the set had originally been made for, and owned by, Christians. We could assume, only hypothetically, that the platters found their way into Jewish hands after being pawned. It is pertinent to raise the question here of what makes an (or not so-) ordinary object Jewish? With the exception of a limited typology of Jewish ceremonial objects, a Jewish home was not substantially different from a non-Jewish