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Music, Identity and the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain
Author(s): Eleazar Gutwirth
Source: Early Music History, Vol. 17 (1998), pp. 161-181
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/853882
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Early
Music
History
(1998)
Volume 17.
?
1998
Cambridge University
Press
Printed in the United
Kingdom
ELEAZAR GUTWIRTH
MUSIC,
IDENTITY AND THE
INQUISITION
IN
FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN*
'Citola,
odrecillo non amar
cagmil
hallaco.'
(The
citola and the
bagpipes
do not suit an Arab
man)'
Sometime between the
years
1330 and
1343,Juan
Ruiz,
Archpriest
of Hita in
Castile,
included this maxim in his
literary masterpiece,
the Libro de buen amor. This
verse,
like others in the
poem,
attrib-
utes an ethnic
identity
both to
objects
and to vocal
music,
a form
of ethnic
marking
that has been
preserved
in
Spanish
culture
by
linguistic usage:
the Arabic
particle a[1]
in the
prefix
to words for
musical instruments such as
adufe (square tambourine), ajabeba
(transverse flute)
or
anafil (a straight trumpet
four feet or more
in
length)
is a
possible
reminder of this
phenomenon.2
About a
century
later,
the chronicler Alonso de Palencia
(d. 1492) applied
similar ethnic
markings
when
speaking
of the music of a
young
Castilian converso who was to become one of the most
powerful
courtiers of
King Enrique
IV,
Diego
Arias
Daivila:
'per
rura
sego-
biensia...
cantibusque
arabicis advocabat sibi coetu rusticorum'.3
When,
some
forty years ago,
Menendez Pidal
attempted
to
reconstruct the historical context of the Libro de buen amor
(includ-
ing
its verses on music and musical
instruments)
in a
way
that
would both
explain
its historical
background
and confirm its his-
torical
validity
and
accuracy,
he considered the
particular
case of
* This article is a revised version of a
paper presented
to the
Hispanic
Cultures Research
Group
directed
by
Dr
Inger
Enkvist at the Romanska Institution of the
University
of
Lund, Sweden,
in
September
1996.
I
should like to
express my gratitude
to Dr Enkvist
and all the other
participants
for their comments and
encouragement.
Libro de buen amor. The Book
of
True
Love,
trans. S. R.
Daly,
ed. A. N. Zahareas
(Philadelphia,
1973),
lines 1516-17.
2 R.
Stevenson, Spanish
Music in the
Age of
Columbus
(The Hague, 1960), pp.
22-3.
3 Palencia,
Cr6nica de
Enrique IV,
ed. A. Paz
y
Melia
(Madrid, 1973),
D6cada I
(lib. iii, cap.
5),
and Men6ndez Pidal
(see
note
4).
161
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Eleazar Gutwirth
this
fifteenth-century Jewish
converso.4
There is some
significance
in the fact
that,
on the one
hand,
the
fourteenth-century
Christian
Castilian
masterpiece appears
to show such
familiarity
with Arabic
music and
that,
on the
other,
Men6ndez
Pidal should have
used,
as historical embodiment of the
poet's
views,
the case of a musi-
cian of
Jewish
birth and cultural
background
who became a
courtier. Of
course,
the texts used
by
Men6ndez
Pidal now
appear
to be far more
problematic
and
ambiguous
than
they
did at the
time5 (he claimed,
for
example,
that in the
songs
of the
Sephardi
women of North
Africa,
as
sung
in the
early
twentieth
century,
could be heard 'the sounds of the Castile of the Catholic
Monarchs').' Nevertheless,
his
emphasis
on the
significance
of
fifteenth-century Hispano-Jewish
musical
practice
has now become
an
accepted part
of
scholarly
concern. Whether or not
they accept
the
fifteenth-century dating
for the
origin
of the musical traditions
that have been collected and studied
only
in the nineteenth and
twentieth
centuries,
historians of music have
repeatedly
returned,
for more than a
century,
to the
problem
of the musical
practices
of
fifteenth-century hispanic Jewry,
that is to
say
to the music
which the
Jews
exiled from
Spain
in 1492
may
have taken with
them to their various
destinations.7 Paradoxically, despite
the rich-
4
R. Menandez
Pidal, Poesiajuglarescayjuglares (Madrid, 1957), p.
229.
5
On
the Latin and French sources or
analogues
of some of the references to musical
instruments in the Libro de buen
amor,
see F.
Lecoy,
Recherches sur le Libro de buen
amor,
ed.
A. D.
Deyermond (Farnborough, 1974), p. 260,
who discusses the list of instruments
which
greet
Love and its
dependence
on
previous
models even in
apparently
local details
such as Moorish instruments. See also D.
Devoto,
'La
enumeraci6n
de instrumentos
musicales en la
poesia
medieval castellana' in
Misceldnea
en
Homenage
a
H.
Anglis
(Barcelona, 1958-61), pp.
211-22.
Similarly problematic
is the other
source, though
for
different reasons. The
problems
of
using
Palencia's chronicle for
anyone
connected with
Enrique
IV
are well
known,
and in the case of
Diego
Arias
they may
be
compounded by
his
Jewish origins.
On the
problem
of the
representation
of
Jews
and
judaisers
in
Castilian chronicles of the
period,
see E.
Gutwirth,
'The
Jews
in
15th-Century
Castilian
Chronicles',Jewish Quarterly Review, 84,
no. 4
(1984), pp.
379-96. There is little evidence
to show that Palencia knew either Arabic or
Hebrew,
or that he could
distinguish
between
these
differing
musical traditions.
6
R. Menendez
Pidal,
Poesia
populary poesia
tradicional en
la
literatura
espahiola.
Conferencia
leida
en All Souls'
College 26/6/1922 (Oxford, 1922).
7
See for
example
E. Gerson
Kiwi,
'On the Musical Sources of the
Judeo-Spanish
Romance',
Musical
Quarterly,
50
(1964), pp. 31-43;
H.
Avenary,
'Old Melodies to
Sephardic
pizmonim' (in Hebrew),
in Tesoro de
losjudios sefardies,
3
(1960), pp. 149-53; idem,
'Cantos
espafioles
antiguos
mencionados en la literatura
hebrea',
Anuario
Musical,
25
(1971), pp.
67-79; J.
Etzion and S.
Weich-Shahak,
'The
Spanish
and the
Sephardic
Romances:
Musical
Links', Ethnomusicology,
32
(1988), pp. 1-37; idem,
'The
Spanish
"Romances
viejos"
and the
Sephardic
Romances: Musical Links across Five
Centuries',
Atti del XVI
Congreso
della Societac Internazionale
di
Musicologia (1989), pp.
7-16.
162
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Music, Identity
and the
Inquisition
in
Fifteenth-Century Spain
ness of the
repertory,
and the evident
importance
and the
frequent
use made of the
songs
that have been collected in our own cen-
tury (in disciplines
such as the
literary history
of
fifteenth-century
Spain),
the
fifteenth-century
sources mentioned in the
scholarly
literature on the
subject
are both scant and
problematic.
A recent
study
has
gone
so far as to affirm that
'existing
data
concerning
the music of the
Jews
in
Spain prior
to the
expulsion
is almost
nil'.8
The
question
would
appear
to be
why
such a rich tradition
seems to have left so
very
few traces in the
pre-expulsion
evidence.
It is
against
this
background
of the
paucity
of sources mentioned
in the
scholarly
literature and their
problematic
nature that it
may
be
suggested
that there
does,
in
fact,
exist a
type
of fifteenth-
century
evidence
which,
though neglected, may
nevertheless be
used to reconstruct some
aspects
of
Hispano-Jewish
musical
prac-
tice and their
meaning: namely,
the records of the
Spanish
Inquisition.
Here attention
may
be focused on
Diego
Arias
Daivila
himself,
because of the
importance
attributed to his music
by
his
contemporaries (Palencia
is
only
one of
them)
and
by
later his-
torians
(such
as
Men6ndez
Pidal)
on the one
hand,
and because
of the relative wealth of material
provided by
the
Inquisition
records themselves on the other.
Diego
Arias
(d. 1466)
was a civil servant of some social and
polit-
ical
importance, being,
at various
times,
contador
mayor (an
office
akin to chief treasurer of the
kingdom
of
Castile), secretary
to the
king,
chief
notary
of the
king's privileges throughout
his
royal
and
seigneurial
lands,
notary public
in the
king's
court,
and a member
of the
royal
council. His name
appears
in the
marriage
contract
drawn
up
in 1455 between
Enrique
IV and
Juana,
the sister of the
King
of
Portugal,
thus
showing
his active involvement in the
dynas-
tic affairs of the crown. Arias was also
part
of the alliance between
Enrique
IV and the most
powerful
men of the realm: Alfonso de
Fonseca,
Archbishop
of
Seville;
Don Pedro
Gir6n,
Master of
Calatrava;
Alvaro de
Est(iniga,
Count of
Plasencia;
Juan Pacheco,
Marquess
of
Villena;
and Alfonso
Pimentel,
Count of Benavente.
He was in turn the founder of a
dynasty
which included the
Bishop
of
Segovia;
a
prothonotary
of the
kingdom;
an
early conquistador
8 See E.
Seroussi,
'Between Eastern and Western Mediterranean:
Sephardic
Music after
the
Expulsion
from
Spain
and
Portugal',
Mediterranean Historical
Review,
6
(1991), pp.
198-206.
163
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Eleazar Gutwirth
who founded Panama and was the first
governor
of
Nicaragua;
and
the counts of
Pufionostro.9
For
us,
it is his cultural and artistic
activities that are of
greater
interest. His
opulent
mansion in
Segovia
excited the
envy
even of noble families such as the
Mendozas because of features of its
design
and
furnishings
such
as the
golden ceilings,
the
cups
and vases encrusted with
precious
jewels,
and the bedsheets of fine holland linen. Ostentation on this
scale
naturally
evoked
comparisons
with the
magnificence
of
emperors, popes
and
cardinals,
and the
reports
of
contemporaries
mention the numerous seekers for his favour who would wait on
him laden with
presents.
It is
probable
that Arias was a
patron
of
poets
and of the
manuscript
illuminators and
painters
who
stayed
in his house. His wife's
reading
habits were considered remark-
able
by
her
Segovian neighbours,
who recalled in detail the
splen-
did
bindings
of her books. His
son,
the
bishop
of
Segovia,
and his
book-collecting
activities are
famous
and are a source of
pride
to
Segovians
to this
day.
The
bishop
has been credited with the
early
introduction of features of Renaissance architecture into
Spain,
particularly
in the
design
of the
bishop's palace
at
Tur6gano.'o
From the
fifteenth-century Inquisition
evidence on
Arias
one
may
reconstruct
aspects
of musical
practice
which are
usually ignored:
information about
repertory,
the
places
in which musical
perfor-
mance took
place,
the nature of the audience and its critical
responses,
and,
most
importantly
for us
here,
the
significance
of
this music in its social and historical context.
9
On the conversos in
fifteenth-century
Castile in
general,
see Y.
Baer,
A
History of
the
Jews
in Christian
Spain,
vol.
II (Philadelphia, 1978).
On
Diego
Arias's
Inquisition
file and its
historical
interpretation,
see E.
Gutwirth, 'Jewish-Converso
Relations in XVth c.
Segovia', Proceedings of
the
Eighth
World
Congress
ofJewish
Studies,
B
(Jerusalem, 1982), pp.
49-53; idem,
'Elementos
6tnicos
e hist6ricos en las relaciones
judeo-conversas
en
Segovia',
Jews
and
Conversos,
ed. Y.
Kaplan (Jerusalem, 1985), pp.
83-102; idem,
'On the
Background
to Cota's
Epitalamio
Burlesco',
Romanische
Forschungen,
97,
1
(1985), pp.
1-14; idem,
'Abraham Seneor: Social Tensions and the
Court-Jew', Michael,
11
(1999), pp.
169-229;
idem,
'From
Jewish
to Converso Humour in Fifteenth
Century Spain',
Bulletin
ofHispanic
Studies,
67
(1990), pp.
223-33. All references are to the excellent
transcriptions by
C.
Carrete Parrondo in Fontes
Iudaeorum Regni
Castellae,
vol.
III
(Salamanca, 1986),
hereafter
cited as 'FIRC'.
10
On
Diego
Arias see the notes to the studies of his
Inquisition
file mentioned
above;
also
J. Rodriguez
Pu6rtolas,
Poesia
criticay
satirica del
siglo
xv
(Madrid, 1984), andJ.
M.
Azceta,
El Cancionero dejuan Ferndndez
de Ixar
(Madrid, 1956) pp.
447ff.
164
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Music,
Identity
and the
Inquisition
in
Fifteenth-Century Spain
THE SPACES OF
JEWISH
MUSIC
The
Inquisitors'
records
relating
to the Arias D
ivila
family
show
the extent to which his
contemporaries
felt the
places
where his
music was
performed
to be
important.
A number of
descriptions
of his
singing
have been
preserved
in these
documents,
and of
course there
may
have been other
depositions given
before the
Inquisition
tribunal which have not survived. The file itself
repre-
sents
only
a selection from the books of the
Segovian
and other
Inquisition tribunals,
and the
depositions
were
given
at least
twenty years
after the events which
they
describe. This is in itself
an
eloquent testimony
to the memorable nature of his
perfor-
mances.
Moreover,
some of these accounts were
given
at second
hand
by
witnesses who remembered
hearing
about his
perfor-
mances but had not
experienced
them
personally; evidently they
were also the
subject
of
private
conversations
amongst Diego
Arias's
contemporaries. Specifications
of the
place
of
performance,
usually
included in these
accounts,
differ somewhat from the
better-documented ones of Christian secular music or
Jewish
and
Christian
liturgical
music in
fifteenth-century Spain:
the
syna-
gogue,
the
church,
the
private chapel
and the streets
during pro-
cessions." In
May 1489,
Rabbi
Simoel,
doctor to the Duke of
Albuquerque,
testified under oath that he had heard maestre
Josep,
his
father,
speak
about
Diego
Arias's
music,
and that it had
been
performed
'while
walking
one
day
...
[and] they
were left
alone
separated
from the other
people
who were with them'.'2
In
April 1486,
Rabbi David Gome testified that he had heard one
Jacob
talk about
Diego
Arias's
singing;
this time the
performance
11
For the
places
where music was
performed
in
fifteenth-century Spain
and their
analy-
sis,
see
e.g.
K.
Kreitner,
'Music in the
Corpus
Christi Procession of
Fifteenth-Century
Barcelona', Early
Music
History,
14
(1995), pp. 153-204;
see also T.
Knighton,
'Ritual and
Regulations:
The
Organization
of the Castilian
Royal Chapel during
the
Reign
of the
Catholic
Monarchs',
Misceldnea ...
Jose Ldpez-Calo
S.
J.,
coord. E. Casares and C.
Villanueva,
vol. I
(Santiago
de
Compostela, 1990), pp. 291-320,
which
emphasises
that
the
royal chapel
was not so much a
space
as a
body
of
clergy.
There are
images
of
per-
formance
spaces in,
for
example,
the
breviary
illuminated in Flanders
during
the last
decade of the fifteenth
century
for
Queen
Isabella
(now London,
British
Library
Add.
MS
18851)
on fol.
164,
where
King
David is shown surrounded
by
the
singers
of the 'old
song'
of the Old Testament. See
J. Backhouse,
The Isabella
Breviary
(London, 1993), pl.
24. For the
performance
of Christian secular music in
Spain
see also
M.
C.
G6mez
Muntane,
La muzsica en
la
casa real
catalano-aragonesa (1336-1442),
vol. I
(Barcelona, 1979).
12 FIRC No.
104, p.
62.
165
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Eleazar Gutwirth
had taken
place
in an inn where
Diego
Arias had been
lodged
while
in Medina del
Campo,
in a room which had a table laid out with
tablecloth.'3 Jacob Castellano,
a
Jewish
vecino of Medina del
Campo, referring
to the
event,
recalled that 'it
happened twenty-
six
years ago [that
is to
say,
around
1460],
when this witness was
about twelve
years
old ...
Diego
Arias came to the said
city
of
Medina
[del Campo];
he
lodged
in the house of Francisco Ruiz
and the late
G6mez
Gongilez
and don
Ynge [i.e. Yuge
=
Joseph]
Abeata and don
Qulema
... and while
being
there in the said
lodg-
ing
...
[in] Diego
Arias's
retraymiento
where he was with the said
Jews.'14
Rabbi Mosse aben
Mayor
testified that he had heard
[Ynge] Yuge
aben
Mayor
talk about
Diego
Arias's
singing
in
Villalpando,
where
Diego
Arias
lodged
in the house of the wit-
nesses' mother. 'Some
nights
after he came from the
palace [...]
after he had dined he would ask for the said
Yuge
to be sent to
him,
and he would
go
down to a
great
kitchen where he was and
he would order
everybody
out and would order the said
Yuge
to
shut the door and would tell him to
sing.'5
Later,
in
May
1487,
Don
Juda
(Qaragoza
testified how
Diego
Arias had
sung
to him 'one
day going
on the
way
to
Chinch6n'.'6
So
Diego
Arias
sang Jewish songs
on the
road,
in
Jewish
house-
holds,
in the
privacy
of his own
house,
in a kitchen and in his room
at an inn in Medina del
Campo.
These were not the
public spaces
implied by
Palencia's account
but,
on the
contrary, places
where
intimacy
and
privacy
were of the essence of the occasion. Alonso
Henriquez
testified in October of the same
year
that
Diego
Arias
had told him that 'if there was
anything
after this world for the
soul ... it was the voices of the
prayers
of the
Jews
which would
do for him because behind the said
monastery
of La Merced there
was a
synagogue'."7
The
places
where music was
performed
were
evidently present
in these
memories,
but
Diego's reported
com-
'3 FIRC No.
179, p.
102.
'4
FIRC No.
187, p.
106. On the
significance
of the
retraymiento,
see E.
Gutwirth,
'Habitat
and
Ideology:
The
Organization
of Private
Space
in Late
Medievaljuderias',
Mediterranean
Historical
Review,
9
(1994), pp.
205-34. For
yet
another
place
where music was
possibly
performed (it
was
certainly
a
place
for
prayer),
the huerta of
Diego
Arias near the
gate
of San
Martin,
see FIRC No. 82.
'5
FIRC No.
111, p.
203.
16 FIRC No.
219, p.
115.
'7
FIRC No.
66,
p.
43.
166
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Music,
Identity
and the
Inquisition
in
Fifteenth-Century Spain
ment is an observation on the intersection between
space,
musi-
cal
meaning
and the conflict between Church and
Synagogue.
What Arias was
affirming,
in
fact,
was that near his tomb two kinds
of music would be voiced: the Christian music of the
monastery
of La Merced and the
Jewish
music of the
nearby synagogue.
Music
was not seen as divorced from the
spaces
of
religious identity.
The
idea has wider
implications,
some of which are
expressed
in liter-
ary
texts;
for
example,
a
poem by
Pero Ferrus in the Cancionero de
Baena is based
precisely
on the contrast between two musical tra-
ditions which
represent, metonymically,
the two
religions.
This
poem
also
appeals
to
stereotypes
of what was
thought
in medieval
Spain
to be a distinctive
'Jewish
voice'. What
may
need
emphasis
is that such
ideas,
despite
first
impressions,
were not mere liter-
ary topoi
that existed
exclusively
within the bounds of written
literary
texts,
but formed
part
of a wider
spectrum
of social men-
talities;
the archival records of the
Inquisition provide
us with
evidence of their oral
currency.18
AUDIENCE
We
may
also
partly
reconstruct the audience for
Diego
Arias's
singing
from the
Inquisition
records. Most of the witnesses who
testified to
Diego
Arias's
singing
were neither conversos nor
Christians,
but
Jews.
This has a certain
significance.
Previous
neglect
of this kind of archival material
may
have been based on
preconceptions
about its exclusive concern with conversos. But the
file,
it
may
be
argued,
has left evidence not
only
about the activ-
ities of the
Inquisition
and of the conversos but also about the men-
tality
of the
Jews and,
in
particular,
of a
relatively
well-defined
group
within
Jewish society
that
may
be
loosely
described as the
leaders of the
community
and their
associates,
people
who moved
within a concrete
geographic
area
(central Castile)
and who had
relations with
Segovia.
Abraham
Seneor,
for
example,
was a resi-
dent of
Segovia
and a chief tax collector as well as
being
Chief
Judge
and Chief Rabbi of the
Jews; Jacob
Castellano,
the
Jewish
18 This
topos
will be studied in detail elsewhere. Pero Ferrus's
Cantiga
has been
frequently
cited in the
literature; see,
for
example,
the Cancionero de Baena
(Leipzig, 1860), p.
319.
In the usual
interpretation,
the reverse of
my own,
it is seen as an
unproblematic
model
of 'convivencia'.
167
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Eleazar Gutwirth
vecino of Medina del
Campo,
was an official of the
Jewish
commu-
nity;
Rabbi David Gome is described as someone who was resident
in Medina del
Campo;
Rabbi Samuel was the doctor of the Duke
of
Albuquerque,
while the
Segovian
Alonso
Henrfquez
was also a
Jew
in
Diego
Arias's lifetime.
They
were all
part
of
Diego
Arias's
circle,
that is to
say people
who were in contact with
well-placed
officials in
Enrique
IV's administration,
and as such can
hardly
be
described as a
popular
audience.
Nevertheless,
according
to one
testimony given
in
1486,
those 'who lived with
Diego
Arias' would
talk about his Hebrew
songs: 'que oyo
decir a muchos
que
vivian
con
Diego
Arias';
'people
who lived with him' is a
frequent phrase
in the romance literature of the
period
to describe 'his
servants',
i.e. the servants who lived in his house. This
reported
remark
may
be used to reconstruct
Diego
Arias's behaviour in the
privacy
of
his
home.'19
Some of the testimonies
given
before the
Inquisition
show that Arias's audience also included a number of conversos. On
19
April
1489 a
description
of one of his
performances
was
given
by
the uncle of Fernando
Albarez, who,
after
describing Diego
Arias's
singing,
added,
'y
estale escuchando e
oyendo
Alonso
Gon?alez
de la Oz e otros
biejos' ('and
Alonso
Gon?alez
de la Oz
was
listening
and
hearing
him,
with other old
men').20
These fam-
ilies
(de
la
Oz,
del
Rio, etc.)
also
belong
to a well-defined
group
within
Segovian society
in the second half of the fifteenth
century.
Their names
appear frequently
in
Segovian
business and admin-
istration
records;
they belonged
to the
city
council and were
part
of the
upper
echelons of the urban
oligarchy.
REPERTORY
The
Inquisition
records
repeatedly
refer to
specific
items of
music,
in contrast to other texts
(theoretical
texts in this or other
Inquisition
files with less detailed
testimonies)
where the music is
not described.
Nevertheless,
some of these testimonies refer to
Jewish songs
not
sung by Diego
Arias,
while others refer to
songs
19
On these
individuals,
see the studies mentioned in note 9 above. Other recorded lis-
teners are the
Jew
Abraham
Saragossi, Diego
Arias's
majordomo
in
Segovia;
Qulema
aben
Shushan,
a
Jewish
tax-collector;
and
Judah Saragossa,
a
Segovian Jewish
commu-
nity
official c. 1482. See FIRC
p. 74; p. 73; p. 115
and
p.
102.
20
FIRC No. 111.
168
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Music,
Identity
and the
Inquisition
in
Fifteenth-Century Spain
without
giving
their titles
(e.g.
'las bozes de las oraciones de los
judios').
For the sake of convenience we
may try
to itemise them
as
they appear
in the documents:
1
un
pismoni que
dicen los
judios
Col meuacer
2 la hararu
3 vendiciones cantadas
4 canta el berso
que
dize el
capellan judio quando
saca la
Tora en
hebrayco
5 Mismad
y cohay
etc
6 cadis
7
Vay
hod
lo
asamay
8 el
pizmo
9
algun
salmo
cantado
10 el sediente
The
highly corrupt
character of the
transcriptions
from the
Hebrew in the records tells us a
good
deal about the lack of
sig-
nificance of the individual musical items for Christian notaries. It
must be added that while it is true that these documents are later
copies
of
fifteenth-century originals,
the
mis-transcription
of
Hebrew words or
Jewish
names
by Spanish
notaries is
very
com-
mon
indeed,
even in
fifteenth-century
texts.
Nevertheless,
most of
these references
may
be
identified,
either
by
emendation or
through
their
contexts,
as follows:
1
A
pizmon [see below]
which the
Jews
call
'Qol
Mevaser'
2 the Haftarah
3 the
blessings sung
for the Haftarah
4 Atah Horetah and other verses
5 Nishmat Kol
Hay
6 Kaddish
7 Va-Yekhulu
Ha-Shamayim [i.e.
Kiddush
-
the
Sanctification over the
wine]
8 the
pizmon
9 a
sung psalm
10 'el sediente'2'
21 For this
transcription
of a
prayer's name,
see E.
Gutwirth,
'Fragmentos
de Siddurim
espafioles
de la
Geniza',
Sefarad,
40
(1980), pp.
389-401. The evidence for the musical
character of 'Barukh She-'Amar' and the
practice
of
'prolonging
its tune' is from the
thirteenth
century
and from the Franco-German
region,
and therefore is not
directly
relevant here. Kiddush is transcribed as hedi
(cf.
No.
182)
and also as
beraha. Ata Horetah
is mentioned in Yuda Pillos's
testimony.
Fernan Alvarez's
testimony
refers to the verses
after
removing
the Scroll.
169
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Eleazar Gutwirth
TALKING ABOUT MUSIC
These references to music in the records of the
Inquisition
reveal
a field which
previously
has not been
developed by
students of late-
medieval
Hispano-Jewish
music,
by articulating,
in
Castilian,
a
specifically Jewish
discourse about music. This
orally
transmitted
and
everyday
material contrasts
sharply
in character from the cor-
pus
of theoretical and learned texts about music in Hebrew from
the
period.
These
generally
refer to music from a
perspective
grounded
in natural
philosophy,
medicine,
cosmology, magic
and
mysticism;
as such
they
are well defined and delimited
by
the con-
ventions of their
respective genres
and textual
sources,
rather than
being spontaneous appreciations
of musical
experience.22
The
Inquisition
records
help
to reconstruct
something
which is not a
staid
repetition
of ancient ideas about music:
rather,
it is a dis-
course -
possibly
more
original
and
certainly
more
spontaneous
-
of
appreciation
and evaluation of musical
experience.
On one
occasion,
for
example,
we are told that
Diego
Arias asked
a
Jew
'whether he knew how to
sing something
in his
Hebrew,
and
he answered that he
did'.23
Music is here not
only
a
question
of
knowledge,
'si
sabia',
but also of
ethnicity,
'su
hebrayco',
where the
possessive pronoun
indicates the converso's
perception
of the
Jews'
'possession'
of Hebrew
language, poetic
texts and
songs. Diego
Arias uses the
termpizmon (transcribed by
the
notary
as
'pismoni'),
and it is of some interest that he does not use other terms.
'Qol
Mevaser' is indeed a
pizmon (the
term was defined
by
medieval
Jews
such as Tanhum Yerushalmi in his
dictionary (s.v. pazzem)
as
the
unchanging
refrain to be
performed
in chorus
by
the audi-
ence),24
but it seems that
by
this time the Hebrew term had
entered the romance vernacular in use in the
daily speech
of
Jews
and conversos as a
generic designation
for
Jewish songs
from the
22
Cf.
e.g.
M.
Idel,
'Music and
Prophetic Kabbalah', Yuval,
4
(1982), pp. 150-69;
N.
Allony,
'The Term
musiqah
in Medieval
Jewish
Literature'
(in Hebrew), Yuval, 1 (1968); I. Adler,
ed.,
Hebrew
Writings Concerning
Music
(Munich, 1975).
23 FIRC No
104, p.
62. Another witness described an occasion when
Diego
Arias was
singing
'a
una sola voz'
(solo)
in Hebrew and all the others
responded.
See FIRC No. 71. Another
description
of his
singing
was 'a
voces',
i.e.
loudly.
See FIRC No.81.
24
H.
Shay's
critical edition of the
dictionary
on the basis of the St
Petersburg
and other
Geniza
fragments
is imminent. In the
meantime,
see the
quotation
and comments of
Y.
Ratzhavi,
'Form and
Melody
in the
Jewish Song
of Yemen'
(in Hebrew), Tazlil,
8
(1968), p.
16.
170
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Music,
Identity
and the
Inquisition
in
Fifteenth-Century Spain
liturgy.
Another witness tells us how 'the said
Diego
Arias
helped
him and said that he did not
get
the
melody right
but that it was
the
way
he started to
sing,
and then
they
both
sang':25 'ajudo' may
have little
meaning beyond 'helping'
but it
may
also be a term
with resonances from
synagogal
institutions where a
'helper'
of
the
precentor (hazzan)
acted as a one-man
choir.26
Another
Jewish
witness described
Diego
Arias's
performance
as follows: 'cantalo
muy
bien
y
bienelo cantando
paso
a
paso',27 using Spanish
musi-
cal
terminology;
even
today
the
expression 'paso
a
paso'
retains
the
meaning
of 'cada una de las mudanzas
que
se hacen en un
baile',
although
it also denotes the
precision
and deliberate
pace
of an
activity.
In another case a witness described the
Jewish liturgy
using
the term
responso
taken from the Christian
liturgy:
'he
began
to
sing
a
responso
which the rabbi
sings
at the
beginning
of the
prayer
"Mismad
y cohay"
.. .'28 or, elsewhere,
'to
say
the said
respon-
sos'.
In modern
Castilian,
responso
has a
relatively
wide
range
of
associations;
not
only 'responsorio que separado
del rezo se dice
por
los
difuntos',
but also 'ciertas
preces y
versiculos
que
se dicen
en el rezo
despues
de las lecciones en los maitines
y despues
de
las
capitulas
de otras horas'. In another
testimony
made before
the tribunal we read that 'he
began
to
sing according
to his voice
a
responso
which he
sang very tunefully
as the
Jews
do and with as
much
grace
or even better ... for about a
quarter
of an
hour'.29
(Note
that this witness used the
phrase
'mucho a son'
-
'in
tune'.)
So the
impression
left on this
Jewish listener,
Jacob Castellano,
more than two decades after the
performance
was not
only
musi-
cal but was also
inseparable
from
ethnicity: Diego
Arias
sang
'en
la forma
que
los
judios
lo dicen
y
con tan buena
gracia
o
mejor':
'as
the
Jews
do and with as much
grace
or even
better'.30
25 FIRC No.
104, p.
62.
26
R. Solomon ben
Adret, She'elot W-Teshuvot,
vol. I
(Bne Beraq, 1982), p. 300,
refers
repeat-
edly
to 'the
helper'
of the Huescan
community's precentor.
I
interpret
the references
to
'helper
as
replacement'
of the cantor as
only
one
aspect
of the
'helper's'
functions.
27 FIRC No. 111.
28 FIRC No.
179, p.
102.
29
FIRC No.
187, p.
166.
30 Ibid.
171
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Eleazar Gutwirth
MUSIC AND SOCIETY
These considerations
bring
us to the more
general question
of the
significance
of
Diego
Arias's
performance
of Hebrew
songs.
While
on the one hand the music of the
Jews
and the conversos has not
been a
subject
of much interest to students of the records of the
Inquisition,
on the other the
study
of conversos' activities in
general
is a field with a
long history.
Some
attention,
albeit
brief,
to the
positions expressed
in the
historiography
of the
subject
is neces-
sary
to
clarify
some of the
ways
in which it contrasts with our own.
As is well
known,
there are a number of studies of what are usu-
ally
termed the 'ritos
y
costumbres'
(rites
and
customs)
of the con-
versos.3'
These
bring together reports
from the
Inquisition's
records
from the 1480s
onwards,
in which witnesses describe what
they
believe to be the
'judaising' practices
of
neighbours
or
acquain-
tances,
such testimonies
usually being
used
by
the
prosecution.
Students of
Spanish history
in the
period
of the
Inquisition
have often used these accounts as evidence of the
'judaising'
or
'Judaism'
of the conversos. The reader of such studies cannot
help
forming
the
impression
that there is a certain
homogeneity
about
their
description
of these
practices,
that is to
say
that
they
func-
tion
through
a
general category
of
'judaising'
or
'Judaism' (depend-
ing
on the
writer)
and that all the 'rites and customs' are more
or less similar and
equally placed examples
or
exponents
of this
general category.
Our
particular
case,
that of music
performances
as recorded in
the file of
Diego
Arias,
is related to
(though
not identical with -
see
below)
a defined and
particular
field,
namely liturgy.
Within
the conventions of the
study
of the conversos based on
Inquisition
records,
these cases of
singing Jewish prayers belong
to a
general
homogeneous
and somewhat
shapeless category
of 'rites and cus-
toms'. If we cannot follow these
historiographic
traditions,
it is in
part
because the
apparent shapelessness
and
homogeneity
of the
resulting image
thus constructed trivialises the
importance
of the
evidence and is belied
by
the methods
adopted
in related and
neighbouring
areas of recent
research,
such as the
history
of
Christian
andJewish liturgy.
Indeed,
historians of
liturgy
know full
31 R. Santa
Marfa,
'Ritos
y
costumbres de los hebreos
espafioles',
Boletin de
la
Real Academia
de
la Historia,
22
(1893), pp.
181-8,
is an
early exponent
of this
long
tradition.
172
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Music, Identity
and the
Inquisition
in
Fifteenth-Century Spain
well that not all
prayers
are identical or
interchangeable,
and that
there are
categories
of
prayers,
functions, placement
and devel-
opments
within
liturgy.
It is
only
too
easy
to ascribe these con-
tradictions to a technical
explanation, namely
that students of
Spanish paleography,
medieval documents and
fifteenth-century
Romance - i.e. the
general
historians of the conversos' 'rites' - have
been unaware of the
corpus
of
scholarship dealing
with
Jewish
liturgy
in Hebrew in
general
and of the intense late-medieval
pro-
ductivity
of codification of
Hispano-Jewish liturgy
in
particular.
Conversely,
students
ofJewish liturgy
have had little contact with
these medieval documents or with detailed studies of the conversos
of
fifteenth-century Spain.
Yet such an
explanation,
while it is
partly
true,
does little
justice
to the more
profound problem
touched on
by
such students of
liturgy
as,
for
example,
Hoffman.32
He has
recently
written on the difficulties of
describing religious
experience
and
appropriately
cites
Wittgenstein,
who observed
that it is
impossible
for the
non-religious person
to contradict
the
religious. Putting
himself in the
position
of the
former,
Wittgenstein
writes:
I think
differently...
I have different
pictures
...
[In attempting
to con-
tradict a
religious person]
I
give
an
explanation:
'I don't believe in
...
but the
religious person
never believes what I describe. I can't
say.
I can't
contradict the
person
.. .' We work with different
pictures
that we take
for
granted
and with which we order
experience.33
Perhaps unwittingly,
students of the conversos'
practices
seem to
have
adopted
the
Inquisitors' point
of
view,
in as much as all these
practices
have been considered to be
equally
indicative of the
'heresy'
of
'judaising'.
But for the
twentieth-century
historian who
wishes to come to terms
seriously
with the
understanding
of the
significance
of the
songs
ofconversos such as
Diego Arias,
mere
para-
phrase
of the
Inquisition
records is not
sufficient,
despite
the ven-
erable
historiographic
tradition that lies behind it. Historians who
search for some coherence in these
apparently incongruous
lists
(which
include both
morning
and
evening liturgies,
festivals and
the
Sabbath),
rather than
adopting
the
Inquisitor's perspective,
might
turn instead to recent
scholarly
research in the field of
32 L. A.
Hoffman, Beyond
the Text: A Holistic
Approach
to
Liturgy (Bloomington, Indiana, 1987),
p.
36.
33
Hoffman,
Beyond
the
Text, p.
37.
173
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Eleazar Gutwirth
liturgy.
Here much recent
writing
has
expressed
a certain dissat-
isfaction with exclusive concentration on the texts of the
liturgy,
and has tried to create a more inclusive
approach
which takes the
worshipper's experience
into account. This
trend,
it
might
be
argued,
is not
entirely
dissimilar to the historians' dissatisfaction
with the incoherent and
heterotopic
lists of 'rites and customs'.
Hoffman34
speaks
of the
process
of
discovering
some
underlying
message
that a
prayer
communicates
despite
variations in its
spe-
cific
wording.
That is to
say
that a first
step
in
moving away
from
traditional studies of the
Inquisition
records would be to
pay
some
attention to the
liturgical
status of converso music.
The 'Col meuacer' of the
Inquisition
file is a
liturgical poem by
the
seventh-century poet
Eleazar
Ha-Qalir;
as such it is an addi-
tion to the
original
older
liturgy
which
belongs
to the
prayers
for
rain on Hoshana
Rabba,
the
penultimate day
of the Feast of
Tabernacles. There is no evidence in the text that the occasion on
which Samuel and
Diego
were
walking
with other
people
was that
particular
feast. Neither of them was
fulfilling
a
religious
com-
mandment
by singing
in a
duo,
separated
from a
quorum.
Another
example
would be the
testimony
about the
prayer
shawl:
'Diego
Arias
quando
esta de
gorja
o
de
placer
... toma una
gran
toca
y
ponesela
sobre los hombros e cabeza a forma de taler.' To
put
on
'a
great
shawl' is not
fulfilling
the commandment of sisit or tas-
sels. In
fact,
if the cloth has four
corners,
has a certain measure
and has no
sisit,
a
Jew wearing
it
might
be
transgressing
the com-
mandment.
The
phrase
'a forma de taler' indicates that it was not
a talit
proper.5"
Diego
Arias was not
fulfilling
a
religious
com-
mandment
by putting
a tablecloth over his head in an inn in
Medina del
Campo.36
Another witness tells us that
Diego
'canta
el berso
que
dize el
capellan judio quando
saca la Tora en
hebrayco
y
cantalo
muy
bien
y
bienelo cantando
paso
a
paso
como el
capel-
lan
faze
quando
saca la
Tora'.37 Diego
Arias,
who was not
taking
34 Hoffman, Beyond
the
Text, pp.
36ff.
35
FIRC No. 111.
Another version which circulated in
Segovia
was that it was a bedsheet
- 'sabana'
- rather than a tablecloth. See FIRC No. 77. David Gome's
testimony
is that
'en
aquellos
mesmos dias
los
decia
el
dicho
Diego
Arias'
('he
said it on those
very days'),
p.
102. This seems to be the
exception
to the
general
rule
of not
specifying
the
liturgi-
cal season.
36 FIRC No.
179, p.
102.
37
FIRC No. 111.
174
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Music,
Identity
and the
Inquisition
in
Fifteenth-Century Spain
out a Torah scroll from the
Ark,
was not
engaging
in a
liturgical
act. But for the readers of these records it
might
be
helpful
to
bear in mind that some of the verses to be recited on the occasion
of the
taking
out of the Torah from the Ark on the Sabbath morn-
ing
and festival
morning prayers
are
relatively
late
additions,
which some medieval
congregations thought
to be tiresome
[tiruhah].
They
have
recently
been discussed
by
historians of the
liturgy.
For
Reif,38
the addition of these verses to the
liturgy
is a
manifestation of an
important
trend related to the
history
of
SpanishJewry
in this
period and,
more
precisely, according
to
Reif,
to the search for
grandeur
and institutionalisation. Such a devel-
opment
is
expressed in,
amongst
other
fields,
that of late-medieval
Hispano-Jewish architecture,
where 'the
styles
of the
synagogues
became more elaborate and absorbed at least some limited amount
of the
grandeur
of their
neighbours'
houses of
worship'."
It
may
be concluded that this
example
- like various other acts which
neighbours
or
inquisitors,
or even certain modern students of
Inquisition records,
might
have
thought
to be 'rites and customs'
of the
Jews
- turns
out, upon
an
inspection
which does not
ignore
Jewish liturgical
codification,
to be
something
else
entirely.
Diego
Arias's musical tastes were not restricted to the Arabic
songs
with
which,
according
to Palencia's account and Menendez
Pidal's
analysis,
he
captivated
audiences in the
countryside
around
Segovia during
his
youth.
Nor does an awareness of
Jewish
litur-
gical practice permit
us to describe his
performance
of
Jewish
songs
as
merely
the fulfilment
ofJewish liturgical
duties. It seems
quite
clear that we are confronted with a case of what
may
be
called 'cultural
identification',
in which the converso
perceives
music
that was
originally liturgical
as an
expression
of ethnic and cul-
tural
identity.
The
equivalent
in the field of music to the litur-
gists' attempt
to reconstruct the
liturgical experience
as a whole
(rather
than
just
its
texts,
isolated from
any
human
experience)
would be to take into account the
experience
of
performance,
something
that could be done
by considering
the late-medieval
Hispano-Hebraic
evidence. This also involves
searching
for a
'shape'
to the musical
experience,
however difficult such a search
may
be and however distanced from the
shapeless
list
provided by
38
S.
C.
Reif,Judaism
and Hebrew
Prayer (Cambridge, 1993), p.
210.
39
Ibid.
175
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Eleazar Gutwirth
Inquisition
notaries. The search for such
'shapes',
forms or struc-
tures
is, however,
an
integral part
of the work in the field of litur-
gical history; liturgists
themselves
speak
of
'introductory' prayers
and 'final'
prayers,
of
prayers
as 'the form of communal
expres-
sion',
and so forth.40
These are not the
approaches
of the 'Ritos
y
Costumbres' school.
Rather,
they attempt
to understand the
worshipper's
different
experiences
of different
prayers.
A careful
reading
of the evidence
suggests
that Arias's
fifteenth-century contemporaries
were aware
of the
particular
character of
any given
musical
performance.
Thus,
one witness remarked that
Diego's singing
was done when
he was 'de
gorja
o
de
plazer',41
and however
simplistic
that
opin-
ion,
it does show that
contemporaries
were well aware of some
particular
state of mind or attitude related to
singing.
'De
gorja',
however,
also has some further associations.
Covarrubias,
who was
closer to
Diego's language,
recalled the associations of these same
words in terms which denote a
pre-linguistic stage.
Derived from
the Latin
gurges,
it refers to the
singing
bird's throat or to the child
'who wishes to
speak
and
attempts
it without
using
other instru-
ments'.42
Similarly,
the
meaning
of
'scoffing',
a characterisation of
Diego
Arias's
singing by
another
witness,
refers to a deliberate
message
in the
singing.
Somewhat closer to the mark was the
implication
of another
witness,
Don Abraen
Seneor,
who on 21
April
1486 'said that he had heard
many
who lived with
Diego
Arias
...
that he
sang
in Hebrew in order to contrahacer the
singing
of the
Jews'.43
Here Abraham Seneor uses the verb contrahacer to
describe the character of
Diego
Arias's
music,
which is to
say
that
a
Jewish contemporary
of
Diego
Arias
may
be said to be
alluding
to a musical
phenomenon
which has
counterparts
in a number of
medieval cultures. In a related
area,
that of
literature,
it
may
be
noted first of all that Hebrew
poetry
had used the contrafacta
mode from a
very early
date,
and that in
Spain
the use of themes
or metres taken from Hebrew secular love
poetry
in the
composi-
tion of
religious
and
liturgical poetry
in Hebrew is
particularly
well
documented for the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Hebrew
40
Ibid.
41 FIRC No. 111.
42
Covarrubias,
Tesoro de la
lengua espafiola (Madrid, 1610) s.v.
gorja.
43
FIRC No.
190, p.
107.
176
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Music,
Identity
and the
Inquisition
in
Fifteenth-Century Spain
liturgical
or
religious
muwashahat
or
paramuwashahat
are classic
examples.
But even in the fifteenth
century
a
poem
could be writ-
ten in a conscious
attempt
to create a variation on an earlier
poem.
The case of Bonafed's dream
poem
or his
'muwashshah
in the form
of a
mustagib' (that
is to
say,
a love
song
in a form
usually
used in
the
composition
of
penitential liturgical hymns)
are
examples
from
Saragossa dating
from the first half of the fifteenth
century.44
In
Christian
Spain,
the
literary
textual
parody
of the canonic hours
in the Libro de buen amor or the 'vuelta a lo divino' of
popular songs,
especially
the
villancicos,
are well-known cases of what
may
be
termed a constant movement between sacred and
profane
written
texts.45
Perhaps
more relevant is the case of the
incipits
or tune
markers of
fifteenth-century
Hebrew lamentation
poems
which
inform us about the
non-Jewish
melodies used in Hebrew
prayer.
These are
similarly
relevant
examples
of the
currency
of
phe-
nomena related to musical contrafacta in
Diego
Arias's time.46
This
recognition
of the need to
study
the resonances of the
music,
rather than trivialise
it,
is
similarly
the
underlying assumption
of
Tess
Knighton's
search for and successful identification of the
tunes of the troubadours which underlie some of the
compositions
of
fifteenth-century Spain
and their cultural context.47 Romeu's
extensive discussion of the
transposition
of secular and
religious
themes and melodies in the
songs
of the Cancionero de Palacio
may
be relevant even if the dates of the
compositions
are at times some
decades later than
Diego
Arias's death.48
Such features of musical
44
E.
Gutwirth,
'A
muwashshah
by
Solomon
Bonafed',
ed. A.
Sienz
Badillos,
Actas ...
Congreso
Poesia
Estr6fica
(Madrid, 1991), pp.
137-44.
45 O0.
Green,
'On
Juan
Ruiz'
Parody
of the Canonical
Hours', Hispanic Review,
26
(1958),
pp. 12-34;
M. P. Saint
Amour,
A
Study of
the Villancico
up
to
Lope
de
Vega:
Its Evolution
from
Profane
to Sacred Themes and
Specifically
to the Christmas Carol
(Washington, 1940);
M.
Frenk,
Entrefolklorey
literatura
(Mexico, 1971), pp. 58-63;
F.
Marquez Villanueva, Investigaciones
sobreJuan
Alvarez
Gato
(Madrid, 1960); J. Rodriguez Putrtolas, Fray Ifligo
de Mendoza:
Cancionero
(Madrid, 1968) pp.
xxvi
ff.
46
E.
Gutwirth,
'Language
and
Hispano-Jewish
Studies'
(in Hebrew), Pe'amim,
41
(1989),
pp.
156-9.
47
T.
Knighton,
'New
Light
on Musical
Aspects
of the Troubadour
Revival',
Plainsong
and
Medieval
Music,
2/1
(1993), pp.
75-83.
48 La mz'sica en la corte de los
Reyes
Catdlicos
(siglos XV-XVI),
vol. iv-i: Cancionero de
Palacio,
introducci6n
y
estudios
por J.
Romeu
Figueras (Barcelona, 1965), cap.
v. For him the
songs
of the Cancionero de Palacio are like Proven<al troubadour and
goliardic poetry
in
their
hyperbolic
use of divine
metaphors
and in their
employment
of the
language
of
devotion in
speaking
of
profane
love. Thus we find a bacchic
song
which is a
parody
of
a Marian
hymn;
love
masses;
the
agony
of love
depicted
in terms taken from the litur-
gical
offices of Easter and the
dead;
and the
gospels quoted
in
profane
love
songs.
177
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Eleazar Gutwirth
sensibility
did not
change overnight.
These are
by
no means iden-
tical with
Diego
Arias's case. He was
certainly
not
turning any-
thing
'a lo
divino',
but neither was he
creating
an erotic
parody
of
the
liturgy.
However,
such
comparisons help
us to
get
closer to the
mentality
from which
sprang
his 'contrahacer'
-
to use Seneor's
term. It
may
be
argued
that the most relevant
parallels
are those
late-medieval cases where
religious
music is
performed
in secular
settings
with secular
(such
as
regional
or
political)
or at least non-
liturgical messages
or functions. The studies of
Christopher Page
are a most useful case in
point.
As he writes: 'The idea of
hymn-
melodies torn from their
liturgical setting
and set adrift in a world
of domestic and
public performance
need not
surprise us;
John
Stevens
pointed
out
long ago
that some
plainsong hymns
had cur-
rency
as
popular songs
in later-medieval
England.'49
In
his research
on the music of the Thomas of Lancaster
cult,
Page points
out
that 'When clerics familiar with the use of Hereford
sang
Lancaster's
piece
a wealth of
liturgical meaning
would be released
and channelled into the new
cult,
Thomas would be
implicitly
com-
pared
with St Ethelbert ... the
parallels
would
assuredly
not be
seen as
accidental;
he would also be assimilated to his
namesake,
Thomas of
Hereford.'50
The case of
Diego
Arias,
rather than
being
an
example
of one of the usual
literary
textual
contrafacta,
is
pre-
cisely
one of
'hymn-melodies
torn from their
liturgical setting
and
set adrift in a world of domestic and
public performance'.
But what
could be the 'wealth of
liturgical meaning'
that 'would be released
and channelled'
by Diego
Arias's
singing?
In this
context,
bearing
in mind the difference in the
pace
of
research in these different
fields,
it
may
be
possible
to
suggest
some
possibilities
for
understanding
the
way
in which
Enrique
IV's
courtier could have
perceived
the vocal music he
performed
and,
by implication,
how to treat such evidence in
general.
The first
possibility might
be a musical one.
Although
the music
is
lost,
we do have some
pointers
and musical traditions. It is also
evident from the context that these
prayers
were
sung,
and
nowhere is there a sense that it was the music itself that was an
49 J. Stevens,
Music and
Poetry
in the
Early
Tudor
Court,
2nd edn
(Cambridge, 1979), p. 50;
C.
Page,
'The
Rhymed
Office for St Thomas of Lancaster:
Poetry,
Politics and
Liturgy
in
Fourteenth
Century England',
Leeds Studies in
English (NS),
14
(1983), pp.
134-51.
50
Page,
'The
Rhymed Office', p.
138.
178
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Music,
Identity
and the
Inquisition
in
Fifteenth-Century Spain
innovation.
(We may
recall that 'Nishmat' is described as a
song
as
early
as the
Babylonian
Talmud,
where in BT Pes.118a it is
called a
'song',
birkat
ha-shir.)
Some of the others have
preserved
a musical character to this
day.
The second
possibility
would focus
upon
the
question
of mem-
ory.
The converso's
singing
was related to and relied on the earli-
est sources of his
identity, namely
his documented
Jewish
childhood. The
songs
were
memorable,
it
may
be
argued,
because
most of them had
something
in common.
They
were
accompanied
by
some
symbolic
action which set them
apart
in his
memory
from
the rest of the
liturgy.
In the case of
'Qol
Mevaser' the action is
the
hitting
of the branches -
hoshanot
-
although Diego
Arias was
doubtless unaware of and uninterested in its
probable early
func-
tion as a
magic
ritual which imitated the sound of the rain. But
it would doubtless
(because
of its
impacting character)
leave an
indelible trace on the
memory
of a
Jewish
child
who,
like
Diego
Arias,
attended services. The
raising
of the wine
cup
at the
Kiddush
ceremony
would be a similar
case,
and the ascent to the
Torah of
young
men at
puberty
would be
equally
memorable. The
solemn
ceremony accompanying
the removal of the Torah scroll
from the
Ark,
prior
to the
reading,
is an
equally symbolic
and dra-
matic action.
The third
explanation
would
similarly
have to do with the
expe-
rience of music
by
the
congregation
and,
more
precisely,
with the
deeper
structures of the
liturgy,
in this case the
position
of the
individual
songs
within it. Thus
'Qol
Mevaser',
which seems to be
based on a
dialogue
between
precentor
and
congregation,
occurs
at the end of a series of
prayers
for rain and before a
liturgical
act. The
song,
then,
has a
specific position
between
prayers
for
rain and the
action;
it
occupies
a transitional
space. 'Nishmat',
another
song
remembered and
sung by Diego
Arias,
is the
prayer
which marks the
change
from the
weekday morning liturgy
to the
special liturgy
of the Sabbath
morning prayers,
and so
again
delin-
eates the transition from one
liturgical stage
to another. The
verses to be recited on
taking
the Torah scroll out of the Ark have
been seen as
part
of the
process
of the formalisation of
Jewish
communities in late-medieval
Spain.
It is
quite
evident that it is
a transitional
prayer
from the recited
morning liturgy,
which
is left
behind,
to the institution of the
Reading
of the
Law,
179
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Eleazar Gutwirth
which is characteristic of the Sabbath
morning
services. Unlike the
early
havdalah,
for
example,
which for
Hoffman51
contained a clear
'message'
of a diadic nature which
separated light
from darkness
and confirmed that
opposition,
the
songs
which attract
Diego
Arias
are of a different kind. Their
'shape'
or, rather,
placement
within
the
liturgy suggests
a
contrary significance: they
disturb the clear
differentiation between two
opposites.
It is
by
now well known that in
constructing
a written
image
of
Diego
Arias's
group
- the conversos
-
fifteenth-century
writers of
various tendencies
(chroniclers, poets, theologians)
did not
always
see a clear distinction between
Jewish
conversos and
non-Jewish
con-
versos.
Rather,
they
used various means to
express
a certain dis-
quieting blurring
of these clear distinctions. Some
speak
of the
conversos as
people
who were 'neither
Jews
nor
Christians';
others
used
metaphors
of
symbolic clothing
or
space
to
suggest
that the
main trait was
change
rather than the
identity
with one
religion
or the other. A
poem
written in
fifteenth-century
Castile
expresses
this
visually, by
a
technique
in which the
meaning changed
when
the
poem
was read in one column or in two columns. The case of
the
Alborayque
is one of the better known and most
frequently
men-
tioned of these
writings.
In later centuries these
underlying images
would
develop
into a
theology
which would centre
upon
biblical
models of
indeterminacy
such as
Queen
Esther,
whose
Jewishness
was a
secret.52
Needless to
say,
I am not
arguing
that
Diego
Arias
had
analysed
his
early experiences
of
liturgical
music in this
way.
Nevertheless,
it is
quite unlikely
that he would have failed to intuit
51
Hoffman, Beyond
the Text.
52
The
royal
chronicler
Pulgar's evaluation,
'ni
guardauan
vna ni otra
ley',
is well
known,
as is the
general
tenor of the
anonymous
Libro del
Alborayque,
which
compares
the con-
versos to the
hybrid
horse of
Mohammed;
so is the
parody
of a will
by
Alfonso Ferrandes
Semuel,
who ordered the Torah to be
placed by
his
head,
the
Quran
at his breast and
the Cross at his feet. For the
representation
of the
conversos,
see the studies mentioned
in note 9
above,
and their
bibliographic
notes. For the
'popular
motif'
amongst
'the mar-
ranos in
Spain'
of
'holy Queen
Esther',
who had
changed
her
religion
to
bring
salvation
to
Israel,
see G.
Scholem,
Sabbetai Sevi
(London, 1973), p.
761. For its
currency
in the
messianic movement see
ibid., pp.
803, 804, 851,
887. There is no need to discuss here
the
theological duality
of the hidden God
amongst
some ex-conversos in the seventeenth
century.
Nevertheless,
when
analysing
the
duality
theme in discussions of Esther
by
writ-
ers such as Penso de la
Vega,
one should also bear in mind the
impact
of
baroque
cul-
ture and the conventions of rhetoric as
pointed
out
by
M.
Bnaya,
'La nausea del
manjar
ordinario.
Agudeza y
hermen utica en
J.
Penso de la
Vega',
in
Losjudaizantes
en
Europa,
ed. F. Diaz Esteban
(Madrid, 1994), pp.
55-63.
180
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Music,
Identity
and the
Inquisition
in
Fifteenth-Century Spain
that music had a
character,
or that he would have seen the vari-
ous different
songs only
as
interchangeable, homogeneous expres-
sions of one
religion
or
heresy,
as did the
Inquisitors
and some
modern readers.
Tel Aviv
University
181
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