Is it Art or Is It Oppression?
Trip Start
Aug 17, 2008
1
7
9
Trip End
Aug 25, 2008
Seville,
Andalusia,
Spain and Canary Islands
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Our group had just come from Granada's Alhambra, the Spanish Muslim's empire's greatest surviving architectural wonder. Its lush gardens and intricate wall mosaics inspired awe and fear in any official delegation arriving at Alhambra, and today it is such a popular tourist site that visitors visit the complex into the wee hours of the night. The Seville church's size and grandeur, the sheer money, power, and time that went into its construction, dwarfs that of the Alhambra. Although the Alhambra's intricate wall decorations of Arabic script proclaim the Muslim testament of faith, "There is no God but Allah," it is a seat of secular, political power. The cathedral in Seville projects a political power of a different order, one meant to impress its worshippers through the grandeur of its architecture and bring them closer to God. Going from the Muslim political seat of Granada to the church that was one of the headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition reminded our group that Christianity in Spain had a different relationship to power and domination than Islam did, even if Islam demanded subjection from its Jews and Christians and if certain Muslim conquerors like the Almohades sacked cities and deported populations. It was the first time our group felt the bravado of medieval Spanish Christian power.
We spent nearly two hours in the structure, examining its fine stained glass windows, climbing to the top of its turret that looks out over the city, and hearing from our guide about the minute details of its inspiring sculpture. We heard about the 500 year old paintings that adorn the church walls, glorifying saints and edifying those in the church with stories of the Gospels. It is breathtakingly beautiful (literally, the climb to the top of the spire caused some in our group to vow to hit the gym) and at the same time, this group of Russian Jews finally started to understand why the Rabbis told Jews that they were not allowed to enter churches.
"Where are the Jews?": In Santa Cruz
Traditionally Jews are not supposed to enter a church, but are allowed to enter a mosque. In fact in Cordoba at the Mezquita, our guide, who clearly had experience with Jewish groups, asked us as we entered the edifice if we wanted to go as far as the altar area of the church or if we wanted to remain just in the inactive part of the building that had been the mosque. Some of our group had found the idea that Jews could go into a church, but not a mosque, unequal or unfair. Neither medieval religion treated its Jewish population especially well, after all. But the differential relationships Jews have to a church and a mosque is not, at it core, about politics, but about theology. In the Seville cathedral, our group saw what it meant for a Jew to be tempted and awed by "avodah zara," foreign or idol worship, and shamed by the grandeur of the church in comparison to the modesty, simplicity and lack of adornment of medieval synagogues. Like Jews, Muslims shun human representations in their religious iconography. The art and beauty in a Mosque comes not as much from iconography as from arabesque design, micrography-when the writing of letters becomes an aesthetic design-carvings, geometry, symmetry and simplicity. In Seville, the pictures, the crucifixes, the gold, glitter, and ceilings higher than any other in the city left our group in awe. And this awe made many of them uncomfortable.
After leaving the church, several participants accosted me to complain about how long we had stayed in the church (mind you, less time than in the Alhambra), to challenge things the guide said about Christianity and Judaism, and to reflect that they hadn't felt more Jewish than in that church. A Christian visitor, one hopes, would have a very different reaction to the beauty and wonder of the art and architecture of the cathedral-one of awe, respect, spirituality, and a sense of being in the presence of the divine. And one of our participants talked to me about feeling spiritually elevated in any house of worship. But those who enjoyed the church did so despite the fact that it was a church, not because of it. They talked about being able to separate the beautiful art on the walls from the divine inspiration that put that art there in the first place. And most of our group was emotionally overwhelmed.
So it didn't help that we left the church for the former Jewish quarter, called "Barrio de Santa Cruz," or Holy Cross Neighborhood. Whispers ran through the group-why is the Jewish quarter called "holy cross"? In every other city we had visited so far, the Jewish quarter had an old synagogue in it, a Jewish street, and other signs marking the space as having been Jewish. The site of the main medieval synagogue of Seville, located at the center of Plaza de Santa Cruz, Holy Cross Square, has no such markings. Our guide, in fact, wondered why we were so obsessed with seeing the former Jewish quarter, which he correctly noted, had little to offer the tourist. He gave a brief speech on the site of the old synagogue that went something like this, "The old synagogue was here, then the Christians tore it down and put up Holy Cross church, and so the square is called Holy Cross church. Let's move on." As he left, I decided it was time to intervene, so we began a discussion in that square about history and memory, about how we mark our landscapes, about how any place is defined by the tensions between what happened there in the past and what went on in the present. Gregg Drinkwater -- my husband who traveled on the trip as 'rebbetsin' -- expressed an angrier sentiment. "For me, the renaming of the site of the old synagogue as Holy Cross square is Christianity's ultimate act of violent domination. It says, 'We drive our cross through the heart of your synagogue and community just like we drove a spear through the pomegranate that represents Islam,' an image we had seen in the church as part of a statue dedicated to Christopher Columbus.
Over lunch
It is moments like this in teaching, when a sensitive educator recognizes that one needs to intervene. So as our tour guide left us in the square and we started running after him, I decided that we would have a conversation on the bus about the emotions the church and square elicited and ask how we can turn those toward positive change, rather than letting the anti-Christian sentiment that had built up fester. But I didn't have to wait that long.
About 30 minutes later as we were boarding a bus for a brief tour of the whole city, a participant pulled me aside. "David, you know that square back there where the synagogue used to be. Well, we were just thinking that maybe as a Davai group, we could work with the city of Seville to put up some kind of memorial in the square to the medieval Jewish community of Seville." It's one of the teaching moments when the students act in inspiring ways, doing those things that you are deeply wishing will happen, but don't want to push too hard in a classroom. It is that student who challenges another student who said something problematic, so you don't have to, or the one who's paper topic comes out of left field and ends up changing how you teach a concept. Later in the trip, the same participant and I had a longer conversation about how the group would actually go about putting up such a memorial. How does one finance such a project? What are the politics of memory on a city's landscape? How would the few Jews of Seville feel about a group of global Jews coming in and building something that they may feel ambivalently about? Is putting up a memorial the best thing or should it be something more contemporarily engaged, like sponsoring a library, school, or something like that?
No matter the actual outcome, our visit to the Seville cathedral and the former Jewish quarter left the group profoundly changed. During our closing circle that took place the Saturday night before we left, one participant boldly proclaimed that the climax of the trip for her had been the visit to the cathedral, because, in her words,
For me, it was as powerful as leaving Yad Vashem [Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial museum] and left me thinking never again. And this means, guys, that we have an obligation to build our Jewish community, to be proud, strong, and visible, so that 500 years from now, a visitor to Chicago will not come to our neighborhood and hear from a local tour guide, 'once there was a Jewish community here.'.
1-Over lunch
