In Spain, a Family Reunion, Centuries Later
At
twilight, I roamed a honey-colored labyrinth of brick houses in
Segovia’s medieval Jewish quarter, walking a cobblestone path in the
footsteps of my distant ancestor from 16 generations ago.
In
the shadows, I reminded myself that every element in his story is true:
a Vatican power struggle; an Inquisition trial that confused our
family’s religious identity for generations; and a neighborhood infested
with spies, from the queen’s minions to the leather maker and butcher.
I
was hunting for documents, landmarks and even medieval recipes that
could bring to life the family history of Diego Arias Dávila, a wealthy
15th-century royal treasurer to King Enrique IV who was loved and
loathed for the taxes he extracted. Call it ancestral tourism, a quest
for roots, branches and a family reunion across centuries.
My
quest was inspired, in part, by the ancient Spanish custom of Holy Week
religious processions: brotherhoods of penitents in robes and peaked
hoods that for centuries marched through the narrow lanes in different
regions in cities like Seville, Málaga and Segovia. The first time I
saw them was in the south of Spain,
passing an old Jewish quarter of whitewashed houses where the images
plunged me into a medieval era when inquisitors in anonymous hoods
confronted suspected heretics, including my own ancestors.
During
Easter week, the brotherhoods in Segovia, in central northern Spain,
parade with lifelike wooden sculptures of Jesus and Mary past the Gothic
cathedral in the center of town and the illuminated Alcázar, the
towering castle of the kings of Castile and León.
I
feel shivers of the past each time I walk the path along the limestone
ramparts — facing the dusky blue Guadarrama mountain range. Perhaps in
some ways I know the Arias Dávila family better than my own generation.
When I learned their fate, I felt my own identity shatter and shift,
changing who I am.
Their
dramas are preserved in Inquisition folder 1,413, No. 7, in handwritten
script and housed in the Madrid national archives. Almost 200 pages are
devoted to their daily habits, gleaned from neighbors turned spies —
wedding rituals, burial clothes, prayers and frequently the adafina lamb
stew of chick peas and cinnamon they savored, slow cooked on hot embers
overnight and served on the Sabbath.
For
these rituals, Diego Arias Dávila — and other Jewish ancestors who were
Christian converts — were investigated by the Spanish Inquisition in
1486 for heresy. Their religious crime: maintaining a double Jewish life
in secret.
On
this journey to Segovia, perhaps I could find their missing tomb —
their remains whisked away to evade the reach of inquisitors looking for
telltale signs of Jewish burial rituals. Or maybe I could reclaim the
shards of the identity of my family who converted to Christianity
centuries ago to survive but guarded a Jewish legacy in secret for
generations from Spain to Costa Rica to California.
Not
many people come to explore the roots of a family tree in this rocky
crag of about 55,000 people, nestled between two river valleys 55 miles
north of Madrid. But there are plenty of tourists who arrive in Segovia
by bus and train, bound for the granite Roman aqueducts that loom over
the entrance to the historic quarter and the taverns serving the
Segovian specialty of baby suckling pig. Most vanish before sunset.
Then
the rhythm of the city shifts to a meditative, unhurried one. For me,
it’s a contemplative time to savor Segovia’s historical charm by its
Gothic 16th-century cathedral and a leafy plaza of outdoor cafes where
Queen Isabella was crowned — power used in 1492 to expel thousands of
Jews who faced the choice of fleeing, converting to Christianity or
preserving their religion in secret.
Ana
Sundri Herrero, of the city’s tourism center, told me during one of my
visits last spring and summer that there isn’t much demand for genealogy
information although Spain has a vast diaspora of emigrants that dates
back centuries.
Other
countries with a more recent history of mass migration, such as Ireland
and Scotland, are aggressively promoting genealogical records on
government-sponsored websites to increase tourism. And Irish and
Scottish businesses have seized it as an attraction. The Shelbourne
Hotel in Dublin offers a special genealogy butler to guide guests. The
Four Seasons hotel in Prague also offers a genealogy service to fashion
tours to track the neighborhoods of grandparents.
For
my own quest, I cobbled together a strategy with a right and left-brain
approach that started with an emotional immersion in Andalusia and then
a methodical genealogical search to track family lines that led north
to Segovia.
For
one summer, my husband, Omer, and daughter, Claire, and I moved to the
south of Spain, to Arcos de la Frontera. We settled in one of the white
houses, an ex-bordello clinging on the side of a limestone cliff and a
short walk from the remains of a Jewish quarter and a synagogue
transformed into an orphanage during the Inquisition.
I
moved there to learn the history and geography of the country and to
understand why ancestors left or stayed and submerged their identity. I
traveled to Arcos frequently, fascinated that food, art, music and
culture could help me travel back in time — especially the brotherhoods
that in some cases played historic roles as enforcers during the
Inquisition.
I
felt chills at the sharp notes of saeta music — distinctive to the
region and sung a cappella in the streets during Holy Week. The music
echoes the rising and falling chant of the Jewish Kol Nidre, a Yom
Kippur prayer. And some flamenco experts believe that converts sang the
saetas to passing Holy Week images of Jesus and Mary to demonstrate
loyalty, but with a double meaning for insiders.
For
the left brain side of my hunt, I started researching all the family
branches. My search dated back to 2001, after a move from New York to
Europe, a moment in middle age that strikes most of us when we think
about roots and what we can pass on to our children.
In
my work as a journalist, people had long inquired about my byline,
Carvajal, a Sephardic Jewish name that in some spelling variations means
lost place, rejected. But I knew nothing about the past. My father,
Arnoldo Carvajal, had grown up in Costa Rica and emigrated to San
Francisco with his mother and sister while a teenager. He married, and
with my mother raised six children. We were Catholic, attended weekly
Sunday Mass, ate fish on Fridays and wore it all: Catholic school
uniforms of green plaid skirts and medieval-style scapulars tucked
around our necks.
After
I started my search, I found many clues to our submerged Jewish
identity from relatives, but I hit brick walls on the Carvajal line. A
19th-century Costa Rican ancestor had not registered a husband, giving
her Carvajal name to a newborn, registered as a "natural son," the
polite Spanish term for illegitimate.
I
had made a critical error by not looking at other family lines,
ignoring an ancestral habit of intermarriage among Costa Rican cousins. I
realized later it was a sign that they were marrying one another to
protect secrets and preserve rituals like the menorah that my cousin
said he found in my great-aunt’s bedroom after she died in 1998.
My
grandmother’s line on the Chacón side led to Spaniards who abandoned
prosperous lives in Andalusia in the 16th century. One was a judge who
died of a heart attack on the way to the Spanish colony of Costa Rica,
and another, his young son, who drowned on the same journey in the Río
Negro in Honduras. Each new generation fit together in a crossword
puzzle of wives and husbands — a search for birth and death certificates
that emerged in fits and starts, aided by sites like familysearch.org or ancestry.com.
Segovia
startled me when it surfaced in my puzzle. I knew of no family tie to
the city. But my grandmother’s line leapt a new generation in the 16th
century, to Isabel Arias Dávila, the wife of the first governor of Costa
Rica, who emigrated from Segovia during the Inquisition.
With
that name, I rapidly learned about the Inquisition trial that tangled
the family’s identity for generations and forced others to lead new
lives as conquistadores in Spanish colonies. The patriarch was Diego
Arias Dávila, whose family converted when he was a boy and whose son
Juan was the bishop of Segovia for 30 years.
The
bishop’s internal political struggle with the inquisitor Tomás de
Torquemada turned into an epic legal clash that reached all the way to
the Vatican. The Grand Inquisitor battled the bishop by probing his
family for evidence of their double life. His parents and grandmother
were investigated posthumously, among them Diego Arias Dávila.
I
knew the contours of their story the first time I arrived last spring
in Segovia’s Jewish quarter, which dates back to the 13th century. Today
it still gives the eerie sense at some moments that little has changed
among the three-story houses where inhabitants once worshiped at one of
five synagogues, some still intact.
The
mansion of Abraham Seneor — a contemporary of Diego Arias Dávila and a
royal financial adviser who converted in 1492 — has been meticulously
restored by the city and was transformed into a museum for the Jewish
quarter in 2004. There conversos like the Arias Dávila family worshiped
in secret in a private synagogue, according to accounts of the time.
Up
until the early 1990s, Segovia did not promote this quarter, which is
set off from the rest of the walled city by brick arches that were gated
in the 15th century to separate Jews from Christians. But since then
the local government and state invested heavily to restore the quarter.
Now its streets have an air of calm: clean brick and stone facades,
rhythmic detailing of balconies and hanging plants at the windows.
To
restore my own family history, I knew I needed a very special kind of
guide. On my own, I had failed to find the missing tomb of Diego Arias
Dávila, though I had located the family coat of arms in the cathedral of
Segovia.
Typically
most cities in Spain have a cronista, a historian with a passion for
the place and its quirks. I had found one earlier in Arcos de la
Frontera, Manuel Pérez Regordán, a retired accountant who was so
obsessive that he self-published four volumes of history told through
each one of its little streets.
In
Segovia, the tourist office led me to a high school teacher named María
Eugenia Contreras, who is researching the Arias Dávila family for a
doctorate.
It
was María Eugenia who guided me through Segovia’s tranquil
neighborhoods, passing a park with nesting storks where the Mercedes
convent once stood. It was the site of the last official tomb of Diego
Arias Dávila, and his wife, Elvira, also a Christian convert. But even
Maria Eugenia did not know what happened to their remains. They had been
moved too many times. She gave me a huge gift, though, when she told me
about a Salamanca professor who had painstakingly transcribed the
handwritten Inquisition testimonies of 200 witnesses against the family.
I
found the title — in pristine condition — through an online used-book
store in Spain. It was a window into their lives — the lettuce and
unleavened bread they ate at Passover, their donations of oil to the
local synagogues and the telling anecdote that as he lay on his deathbed
at 86, Diego Arias Dávila thundered at the Franciscan friars who had
come to administer last rites to go to the devil.
He
lived in an enormous palace on the southern side of the city that is
dominated by its fortress tower and plastered in Segovia’s unique
limestone patterns. Today, a neighboring street is named for the family.
A sign also marks the landmark tower, but with no reference to the
Inquisition.
The
first time I tried to enter the palace, I was turned away because it
was closing time. The next morning, the first floor was bustling with
people waiting to pay bills. Fittingly, the Arias Dávila palace has been
transformed into government tax offices — a perfect legacy for a royal
treasurer.
In
theory, I should have felt something, but I didn’t. I studied the
palace’s coffered ceilings and the stone carvings of the coat of arms of
the Arias Dávila family, but the government office could be anywhere
with its counters, red chairs and bureaucrats.
Instead
I felt the pangs of yearning for home — añoranza in Spanish — when I
sat in a windswept little plaza at sunset near the city’s stone walls.
It was loud with birdsong. A few neighbors occupied plastic chairs, and
tables were cluttered with iced tinto de verano wine cocktails.
The
square lies near Calle Martínez Campos, where a vanished synagogue
stood that was funded by Diego’s wife, Elvira, and her presence, after
reading the Inquisition transcripts, was inescapable. I wondered, as I
sat in the square, if Segovia had absorbed some of her burdens and if
places, like people, can be scarred by history.
Elvira converted as a young girl with her family in the 15th century in the midst of spreading anti-Semitism.
Yet
it was clear from the Inquisition testimony that she yearned to
maintain family bonds: taking pleasure in Jewish weddings and holidays,
leaving explicit instructions before her death about who should be at
her bedside. Those family ties remained so strong that she managed to
share something precious with us 16 generations later. Perhaps some
things are meant to be.
I
was startled when I discovered her real name was actually Clara,
changed after her conversion. It means clear and bright. By coincidence —
or maybe not — we named our daughter the French version, Claire.
As
I sat in the little plaza in Segovia, watching the pale stone walls and
the blue night deepen, I knew that I could not change what is past. But
I can change the story we tell about ourselves, and by doing that I can
change our future.
Doreen Carvajal is a correspondent at the International New York Times in Paris and author of a memoir, “The Forgetting River.”
A version of this article appears in print on April 6, 2014, on page TR1 of the New York edition with the headline: Family Reunion, Centuries Later.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/travel/in-spain-a-family-reunion-centuries-later.html?ref=doreencarvajal&_r=0
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