RASGO - Red de Juderías de España. Caminos de Sefarad

Suda Castle

It was the Romans who founded the settlement of Dertosa in around the middle of I B.C., with the setting up of a contingent of legionnaires in this territory who obtained their deeds of ownership after Julius Caesar´s victory in Ilerda (Lleida). Tortosa, the Roman Dertosa, was always a main enclave in the lower reaches of the River Ebro and the city grew on the hillside. Its river and maritime ports, always some of the most important in the western Mediterranean, were already managed in the 6th century through negotiations by the Jews whom the pope had nominated transmarini negotiatores at that time. Self-evidently, owing to its strategic geographic situation, Tortosa was destined to be the emporium of richness and prosperity and this centre would soon attract other people. The extensive Romanisation of the city allowed the Visigoths, who arrived in the 6th century, to respect the language and organization of the former colony until the Moslem conquest.

Compared with other Catalan cities that had barely been influenced by Moslem domination, Tortosa or Turtuxa, as the Arabs called it, depended for several centuries on the Caliphate of Córdoba until, after its break up, it formed its own kingdom or taifa in 1035.The Saracens conquered the city between 713 and 718. We don´t know whether the Saracens obtained help from the Jews in the interior to ease this conquest, but this may have been the case as there was clear Jewish discontentment with the Visigoth policy. Already at that time there were Jews organised around the port, involved in overseas´ commercial ventures. This made Tortosa a strategic point of the Caliphate of Abderramán III in the 10th century. Traces of that time include the Suda Castle and the foundation headstone of the dockyards. There was no major friction: it was a time when the three religions cohabited.

The prevalence of Jews in Tortosa was later weakened for two reasons: one occurred in the short-term related with the decadence of the port of Tortosa and hence of its commercial river and maritime dominance. The other factor was in the longer term and was related with the conquest of the city by Ramón Berenguer IV in 1148. Although there is no doubt that the Christian conquest of the powerful Moslem enclave of Tortosa did initially mean the influx of Jews from elsewhere, like Tolosa, the situation and nature of their presence was no longer the same.In 1149, Ramón Berenguer IV, under the Carta de franqueses al Jueus de Tortosa, donated the Al-Andalus dockyards to the Jews for the construction of sixty dwellings.

Between the 12th and 14th centuries, the Jews of Tortosa enjoyed a period of splendour and tranquillity: the Templars had become their protectors. Jaime I made the Jew Astruc Yacob Xixóbailiff of the city in 1262 and two years later confirmed him in the post for life at a time when the call of Tortosa happened to be the most prosperous of the Crown of Aragon. This climate was propitious to the bankers Yafudà Marçii, his brother and Abraham Meir who financed the King´s ventures and used their financial knowledge to help the local Christian authority with contributions and advice. Astruc Yacob Xixó, or Xixén, belonged to an old family of Sephardis: Shushan or ben-Shusan, and he was not only the mayor of Tortosa but also its main tax collector. The King trusted him and he trusted the Jews too; the Crown had them whenever it needed them: When Jaime I needed money to conquer the county of Urgell, the economic requirements were ensured by the Jews of Tortosa along with those of Girona and Barcelona who collected the figure of one hundred and fifteen thousand pounds.When the son and successor of Jaime II, Prince Alfonso, armed a fleet in 1323 to conquer Sardinia, the Jewish community of Tortosa contributed by arming two ships at its expense, a service which led to the community being exempted from royal taxes for two years. The Jews were always there when their help was needed, but this aid was not always returned.

The corner of Jerusalén street where the Old Jewish quarter synagogue was located

The well-known Llibre de les Costums de Tortosa (Book of Customs of Tortosa) is from 1272, a body of work collecting the rules of conduct and cohabitation of a population of multiple origins. The body of provisions and legal stipulations set out in the Llibre made existence in the Jewish quarter complicated and entailed clashes with the Christian population. Basically, as in the rest of the calls of Aragon and the aljamas and Jewish quarters of Castile and Navarre, the Jews´ fate depended on the toing and froing of day-to-day life: an epidemic, a natural disaster, a famine, anything, frequently unpredictable, could trigger the ever latent hatred, frequently stirred up by external agents; in these cases there was only one thing the authority could do: move them temporarily to Tortosa Castle.

Firstly, the Black Death in 1347, then the events deriving from the slaughters of 1391, gradually cut their numbers despite the fact that the Suda Castle prevented their total slaughter. Its end was perceived in the way weaker people would convert or the ones who wanted to keep their economic assets though to this end it was necessary to abandon the masoret, the tradition and memory which are the very lifeblood of the Jewish people. The last Straw was Saint Vincent Ferrer whose sermons undoubtedly convinced Benedict XIII whose seat in Peníscola was an anti-Jewish hotbed. The convening by the Pope of the Disputation of Tortosa (1413) would deal a great blow to the erstwhile powerful Jewish quarter. Its disappearance with the edict of 1492 had already been foreshadowed at that time. Hence, in the space of a century a thousand-year presence was ended. Self-evidently, we are talking about a material presence because the spiritual presence was ever present in the souls of the Sephardis of Tortosa from Sarajevo, Salonika, Constantinople, Jerusalem, some of whom, as in the case of the Castilian and Al-Andalus Jewish quarters, kept their keys which as from the end of the 15th century would be passed on as a sentimental bequeathment. The Historic vicissitudes of the Jews of Tortosa brings to mind that verse from a novel which goes: «Por enmedio fue rompida / e ya no hay fin al dolor: / la cadena de la vida / se amustió como una flor».