An Inquiry into B the Sources of the I■I History of the Jews I in Spain iiM Joseph Jacobs gfa inquiry into tlje sfourceg of tlje Ijtetorp of tfje Jetosf in ^>pain Joseph Jacobs Alpha Editions This edition published in 2019 ISBN : 9789353603137 Design and Setting By Alpha Editions email - [email protected] This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Alpha Editions uses the best technology to reproduce historical work in the same manner it was first published to preserve its original nature. Any marks or number seen are left intentionally to preserve its true form. I = ■ I LONDON• PRINTED BY WKUTHKIMKIL LEA &, CO.. y CIRCUS PLACE, LONDON WALL, E.C. i ■■ To F. D. MOCATTA, Esq. 1 Dear Mr. Mocatta, At length I am enabled to place before you tho results of the mission which you were good enough to intrust to mo more years ago than I care to remember. The array of volumes of which I have been guilty in the interim will, at least, convince you that tho cause of the delay has not boon idleness. Nor can I accuse myself of any want of diligence during the time I was working in Spain. The volume you now have before you is in the main the result of twenty-eight working days, and I can never hope to put more work into tho same space of time. For Alcahi, Barcelona, Madrid, and Pamplona I have managed to place Jewish scholars outside Spain in a better position than if they had lived in any of those cities before 1 started on my travois, and this r- was the main object you had at heart. If similar lists could be procured for Burgos, Loon, Valencia, Toledo, Seville, and Sara- L... vi Dedicatory Letter. gossa, tho bulk of the Spanish deoils relating to the Jews would be accessible. j\Iuch would remain to bo gleaned from the 1 municipal archives of towns like Lcridu, Gorona, Tudela, Hucsca, Avila, and elsewhere : but these can only come to light by chance, not research, which could rarely succeed in extricating tho Jewish 1 needles from the bundles of Spanish hay. I have not beeu able to append many documents of interest to my calendar ; my aim was to obtain a list of documents rather than ? transcripts of the documents themselves. It was only by rigidly refraining from peeping at documents of interest as I came across them in the catalogues of the archives that I was enabled to make my lists so far as possible complete. Nor could I chock or control in any way the entries of the archivists, which I have left in exactly the same form as regards spelling and punctuation as that in which I found them. This will account for tho various ways in which proper names are spelt; these I have left as I found them, merely collecting together the various forms in tho indexes at the end. To have attempted to check them by the documents at the time would have reduced my spoil to one tenth of its present extent, to have checked them by correspondence afterwards was beyond my power. I have not oven attempted to alter some eccon- tricities of spoiling which occurred in my authorities ; tho readers to whom I appeal will not be much disturbed by omissions of aspirates or confusions of g and j. If London printers have at times mado this confusion worse confounded, they may possibly bo forgiven on tho score of the general accuracy with which they have reproduced my entries. I Dedicatory Letter. vii I have added to the calendar of documents transcripts of a few which seemed to mo, for various reasons, of special interest, a report on documents at Manresa which I was not myself able personally to visit, and a general discourse in Spanish on Jewish historiography in general and on Spanish Jewish history in particular, which I contributed to the Boldin of the Royal Academy of History of Madrid on being elected a corresponding member of that body. To make this book ns useful as possible for students of Spanish Jewish history I have added a bibliography of the subject aud a list of Spanish Jewish rabbis, with their dates and places of residence, more for the use of Spanish archivists in these various localities than for the experts in Jewish literature, who could doubtless sup­ plement my list. Finally, I have drawn attention, in an introduc­ tion, which is intended to servo ns a sort of Index Rerum, to the main points of interest in the documents I have unearthed. This is reproduced, practically unchanged, from the pages of the Jewish Quarterly Review, in which it first appeared. I have to thank you for permitting me to let it appear there, and tho editors for allowing me to reproduce it here. During my stay in Spain I was received with much courtesy by various archivists, aud by the small but capable band of Spanish students of history who are interested in our subject. In particular i I have to mention among the first, Don S. Bofarul y Mascaro, the genial and erudite keeper of the Royal Records of Aragon at Barcelona, and, among the latter, Don Fidel Fita, who has himself I done so much for Spanish Jewish history, and Don F. Fernandez y ! Gonzalez, his worthy coadjutor in the same field. Lastly, I was (BNivr’asm) U ... o'......... s................................ —T I viii Dedicatory Letter. i helped throughout my researches by the advice aud eucouiagcmeut of the late M. Isidoro Loeb, who took the greatest possible interest in my researches, dealing, as they did, with a subject of which ho was complete master. My regret is poignant that he did not live to see more than the first two or three sheets of this book, which owed so much to his encouragement. It is difficult to express adequately the loss which Jewish history in general, and Spanish ! Jewish history in particular, have sustained by M. Loeb’s death. He alone among the younger men was equally master of Jewish literature and Spanish records. I remain, dear Mr. Mocatta, Yours very faithfully, JOSEPH JACOBS. 18, Lansdowne Terrace, West Hampstead, London, N.W. Avguit 1st, 1894. I tl ;i f ...1 'C IT .T V T); yy -y TABLE OF CONTENTS. el transito, Toledo, from a Drawing Frontispiece. PAGE. DEDICATORY LETTER. INTRODUCTION. xi. ALCALA. DE IIENARES (1—100) 1 BARCELONA (101—1227). 9 BRITISH MUSEUM (1232—1210) 66 EL ESCOB1AL (1211—1253) 67 MADRID (1260—1365) 69 MANRESA (1366—1373) . 81 PAMPLONA (1380—1680). 82 SIMANCAS (1681—1695) . 124 APPENDIX 126 DOCUMENTS (Nos. 101, 214,215, 289, 500, 501, 502, 501, 1240, 1281, 1291, 1294, 1296, 1301, 1321, 1690, &c.) . 129 LOS JUD1OS DE MANRESA, FOR SR. E. TAMARO . 151 LOS PERIODOS DE LA HISTOR1OGBAF1A JUDIA, POR J. J. 160 JEWISH WRITERS IN SPAIN . 169 TOWN LIST 202 BIBLIOGRAPHY OP SPANISH JEWISH HISTORY 213 INDEX LOCOBUM 215 INDEX NOM1NUM 250 . ia a i NOTE. I The seal on the title-page was first published in my Jews of i Angevin England, 1892, p. 26. It was found in Scotland, and is now preserved in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries at Edinburgh. The inscription on the seal runs as follows : .H’S) nSSx aoynSx piw na nnSsy * ♦ Except the name, this gives no sense in Hebrew. The late SI. Loeb, with the aid of M. Joseph Derenbourg, of the Institute, discovered that the inscription was Arabic in Hebrew characters, and may be interpreted Solomon btn Isaac, fuljo Ijas bonnrti tfje turban, man SHIafj guart tjitnl I have conjectured that he was a Spanish Jew of Andalusia, who had been forced to adopt Islam (“ don the turban ”) after the persecutions of 1145, and then made his escape to England. His seal may, therefore, be appropriately prefixed to an English book dealing with Spanish-Jewish history. * The letters arc represented by a single composite letter. ( > ' J N IV ■“ B 31 t Y) 'S^£a_; INTRODUCTION. In the autumn of 1888 I was entrusted with a mission to proceed to Spain in order to ascertain the extent and quality of the manuscript materials relating to the History of the Jews of that country. As the time at my disposal was not long, it did not enter into my plan of campaign to transcribe all or many of the docu­ ments I should chance to hit upon; I desired rather to bring back with me a list of the documents that existed, so far as this could be ascertained from the manuscript catalogues of the various archivists who kept charge of the documents themselves. By keeping rigidly to this self-denying ordinance, I was able to bring back with me a list of some 2,500 documents relating to the History of the Jews in Spain, and have printed a rough calendar of some 1,800 of them with their library press marks attached, so that anyone interested in the subject could, with little trouble, have any of the documents copied on the spot. I propose here drawing attention to the more interesting of these, treating of the various archives in the alphabetical order of their geographical position, and attaching in brackets the number of the item in my i calendar. AecaiA de Henares. It was not in my original plan intended to collect materials about the History o£ the Inquisition in Spain, or even with regard to that portion o£ it which related more strictly to Jews. But on paying a visit to Alcala de I Hcnares I found the only documents among those housed j xii -VS.