PARIS — Last month, Google and the Network of Jewish Quarters in Madrid announced an online pilot project that offers an expansive street-level tour of Spain’s long-ignored medieval neighborhoods that were emptied by the Spanish Inquisition. As I explored the site, to my surprise, the photographs of ancient, sand-colored stone walls in Segovia connected me with my own ancestors: my 16th great-grandparents.
The project is designed to offer a digital stroll through 1,000 years of history that was long buried and ignored: the legacy of the expulsion of Jews in 1492 by the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. The platform offers historical timelines, maps and photographs of ancient landmarks of Jewish life. Among them are the butcher shop at the entrance to Barcelona’s Jewish quarter at Sant Domènec street and my personal favorite, the 14th-century Tower of Love, in Palma on the island of Majorca. The tower figured in a clash between two prominent Jews over the affections of a woman, allowing one of them to spy on the other in the narrow lane of the quarter until a king intervened.
It is those kinds of intangible memories that the Spanish Network of Jewish Quarters, a nonprofit association founded in 1995, is hoping to pass on to a broader global audience. Google, which financed the project, has grand ambitions to create a platform that other institutions can use to mix information and history with a mapping system, according to William Echikson, a Google spokesman in Europe.
The project’s release comes within weeks of the Spanish government’s offer of citizenship to descendants of expelled Sephardic Jews with current religious ties. In Córdoba, local officials in Andalusia have also struck an agreement with the catering industry to open up the14th-century Córdoba synagogue for weddings in a bid to boost Jewish tourism. The new site allows visitors a glimpse of its neighborhood, Calle Judío.
“Maybe this will help people to trace their family roots from around the world so that they can figure out connections,” said Assumpció Hosta, general secretary of the network. “And maybe this will also give the citizens of Spain knowledge about their own history that has been neglected for years.”
In my own case, I made the acquaintance of my 16th great-grandparents only recently, while poring through genealogy records to trace the lines of my grandmother, Ángela Chacón. Her family lived in Costa Rica for generations and intermarried with other Catholic converso families like the Carvajals, who guarded their secret Sephardic Jewish identity for centuries.
Two weeks of exploring my grandmother’s line led me to distant great-grandfathers who were conquistadors in New Spain, one who searched fruitlessly for El Dorado. Others led me to ancestors in the south of Spain and in Segovia, home of Diego Arías Dávila, my distant great-grandfather, who was the wealthy royal treasurer for Enrique IV, the king of Castile and León and the half-brother of Queen Isabella, who succeeded him.
Diego Arías Dávila and his wife and my ancestor, Elvira González, were Jews whose families converted to Christianity in the tense decades leading up to the start of the Inquisition in 1478. After their deaths, they were posthumously tried in 1486 by the Inquisition for heresy for secretly maintaining Jewish rituals despite their conversions. Their son, Juan, the Catholic bishop of Segovia, was also accused of heresy, and retreated in exile to Rome, where he died trying to clear the family’s name.
I have never been to Segovia, but the new Web site took me on a haunting stroll to a street framed by stone walls called Martínez Campos. It was the site of the Campo synagogue – built and paid for in 1456 by Elvira González, although she was then a convert. Nothing remains of the building. Another page took me on a tour of Merced Square, with a splashing fountain and towering monastery. It was there that Diego Arías Dávila
built a hospital with a chapel that existed until 1946. At one point, according to Inquisition records, Diego joked about being buried in a monastery there, prayed over by the monks and for good measure by the prayers of Jews at a neighboring synagogue.
But today, as I scroll through photos of Merced Square, I’m well aware that the remains of my ancestors have disappeared from Segovia – secretly removed from their tomb by their son, the bishop, who feared that the Inquisition would seize them and burn them in effigy as punishment for heresy.
IHT Rendezvous: And Now, via Google, Time Travel Through the Streets of Segovia
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IHT Rendezvous: And Now, via Google, Time Travel Through the Streets of Segovia
