LIVING

Small numbers of Jews may have arrived in Barcelona soon after 70 CE, as part of the wave of migrants arriving in Europe fleeing Roman repression in Palestine, so the city was probably Jewish before it was Christian. They settled, first through custom, then by obligation, in what became known as El Call, the labyrinth of narrow streets in the heart of the Gothic quarter.

The community prospered and reached its period of splendour in the 13th century when between four and five thousand people lived in the neighbourhood, perhaps accounting for some 15 percent of the city’s population. This was the centre of intellectual life in medieval Catalunya and provided the city with its doctors, lawyers, financiers and translators.

Many Jews spoke a slew of languages (Catalan, Castilian, Hebrew, Arabic and Latin)—uniquely, in addition to Catalan, the Jews of Catalunya also still used Hebrew in everyday life, whereas elsewhere it had been relegated to ceremonial and literary functions. Their knowledge of Arabic aided their good relations with the Islamic south, allowing them to work as traders and ambassadors for the Catalan count-kings; officially at least, Jews were property of the crown who greatly valued their servants’ work.

But not all was rosy in relations with their Christian neighbours. Papal instructions in 1215 called for Jews throughout Christendom to wear hoods and a red button sewn on their clothes to identify them. The rise of the Dominican order, the intellectual precursors of the Inquisition, was also an increasing threat as they had developed the doctrine of the Jews being responsible for the death of Jesus. Dominicans were also allowed to preach inside synagogues, which often led to conflict.

This situation worsened in the 14th century, when Europe was engulfed by a series of cataclysms that savaged the economy. Barcelona was no exception. The city was hit by a run of famines beginning in 1333 and in 1348, the Black Death struck. Possibly a fifth of the city’s population—then less than 40,000—died, including a large number of the ruling elite. Desperate people looked around, as they sadly still do today, for someone to blame. Rumours were rife. It seemed everybody knew of a Jew who had poisoned a well, leading to an attack on the Call in 1349. The plague periodically reappeared sowing terror and mistrust in the city for the next hundred or so years, and as the economic woes continued, it seemed only a matter of time before violence broke out.