The many pilgrims who walk the Camino de Santiago (Way of Saint James) each year, and its French road in particular, which leads from the Pyrenees all the way to the celebrated shrine of Santiago de Compostela—nowadays a month-long journey—hardly ever think about the trail's Jewish past. Loaded with Christian symbolism, and with its medieval Juderías (Jewish quarters) long gone, clues for Jewish presence at the Camino are to be found somewhere else.
Gregory B. Kaplan's new study invites its readers to explore the cuaderna vía (fourfold way) poetry, named after its metrical form, which French monks from the order of Cluny brought to the Castilian monasteries along the Camino. There these verses were recited to pilgrims, sometimes using anti-Judaic motives to reach a diverse audience and to draw travelers coming from different parts of Europe to the monasteries. Here the story becomes even more interesting: among the listeners who fell in love with this poetry were the Jews of the Camino, about some of their communities we also learned recently from Maya Soifer Irish's excellent book: Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change (2016). They sold property to their Christian neighbors or worked as artisans in their service.
The first chapter shows how the old French norms of cuaderna vía found new home in Castilian and delve into the transmission of Alexandrine verses into this evolving language. It focuses mostly on monasteries on the road from the Cantabrian coast to the city of Burgos, where the Romanesque Route met the French one. In the second chapter, the author suggests that the poem “El Dio alto que los çielos sostene” (Lofty God who sustains the heavens) was not only written in the tradition of the cuaderna vía, but probably had Jewish authorship, for its usage of rabbinic material and for the features it shares with a much more well-known poem, on the biblical Abraham and King Nimrod (nowadays a popular Ladino, Judeo-Spanish song). Variation in style is explained by the fact the Jews mainly wrote in Hebrew, while Castilian was to some extent new for them.
Chapter 3 moves to a more mature Jewish writing of cuaderna vía, as reflected in Sem Tob de Carrión's celebrated mid-fourteenth-century Proverbios Morales, which the poet dedicated to King Pedro I. Carrión de los Condes, where the poet lived, was a popular Camino destination, and the author develops the argument that it was in the nearby Cluniac monastery of San Zoilo that Sem Tob mastered the poetic form to its perfection, after studying with the local clerics. The Camino, the monastery, and the poem were thus sites of inter-faith artistic cooperation. Additionally, this rich chapter situates Sem Tob's work within a wider context, such as the local tensions between rabbinical Jews and the Karaite community, or what seems to be the poet's response to the anti-Judaic discourse of the famous convert Abner of Burgos. This chapter is the most rewarding one for readers who do not study poetry in particular (as the author of this review), while the other chapters require more technical expertise.
The last chapter studies the Coplas de Yoçef dedicated to the Old Testament Joseph and written in the cuaderna vía tradition in Hebrew characters. It also traces its influence on post-expulsion Sephardi poetry; in a testimony brought before the Inquisition at the end of the fifteenth century, a converso recited from memory almost three hundred stanzas of Sem Tob's Proverbios Morales.
Even when speculative, the author's argument is still inspiring, as he uses the little evidence that survived to draw an appealing scenario of cultural exchange. His assertion that his findings challenge the historiographical emphasis on violence is somewhat dated, as dichotomous readings of medieval Spain—toleration or oppression, cooperation or violence—are long gone. Photos of the monastery and of other locations mentioned along the book help set the scene, but a more extensive reflection on the meaning of the author's findings could have contributed to this appealing small book. How does our reading of Sem Tob's work change once we are able to place its cultural production on the physical and cultural map of medieval Castile, at a specific site? Or what does a place add to our understanding of such cultural processes? This valuable study allows us to consider such questions and contributes to our knowledge of Jewish-Christian cultural interaction in a less-studied part of medieval Castile.
