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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. 161-181Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/853882Accessed: 10-08-2014 15:06 UTC

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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 historical 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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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


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 century (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 practice 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 historians (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 political 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.

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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 performance 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.

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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 performances. Moreover, some of these accounts were given at second hand by witnesses who remembered hearing about his performances 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 synagogue, 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 analysis, 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 performance 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.

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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 witnesses' 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.

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ment is an observation on the intersection between space, musical 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 literary texts; for example, a poem by Pero Ferrus in the Cancionero de Baena is based precisely on the contrast between two musical traditions 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 literary 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 activities of the Inquisition and of the conversos but also about the mentality 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 resident 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'.

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vecino of Medina del Campo, was an official of the Jewish community; 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 families (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 administration 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 community official c. 1482. See FIRC p. 74; p. 73; p. 115 and p. 102.

20 FIRC No. 111.

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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 significance 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 common 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.

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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 corpus 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 conventions 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 discourse - 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 audience),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.

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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 musical 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 musical 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 repeatedly 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.

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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 usually termed the 'ritos y costumbres' (rites and customs) of the conversos.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 customs'. 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.

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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 productivity 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 contradict 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.

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liturgy. Here much recent writing has expressed a certain dissatisfaction 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 specific 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 addition 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 commandment 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 commandment. The phrase 'a forma de taler' indicates that it was not a talit proper.5" Diego Arias was not fulfilling a religious commandment 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 capellan 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 liturgical season.

36 FIRC No. 179, p. 102. 37 FIRC No. 111.

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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 morning 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 liturgical 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 cultural identity. The equivalent in the field of music to the liturgists' 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.

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Inquisition notaries. The search for such 'shapes', forms or structures is, however, an integral part of the work in the field of liturgical history; liturgists themselves speak of 'introductory' prayers and 'final' prayers, of prayers as 'the form of communal expression', 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 instruments'.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 composition 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.

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liturgical or religious muwashahat or paramuwashahat are classic examples. But even in the fifteenth century a poem could be written 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

Eleazar Gutwirth

sensibility did not change overnight. These are by no means identical with Diego Arias's case. He was certainly not turning anything '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 currency 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 precisely 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.

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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 memory. 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 experience 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,

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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 conversos. 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 mentioned 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 conversos 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 writers such as Penso de la Vega, one should also bear in mind the impact of baroque culture 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.

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that music had a character, or that he would have seen the various different songs only as interchangeable, homogeneous expres- sions of one religion or heresy, as did the Inquisitors and some modern readers.

Tel Aviv University

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Article Contentsp. 161p. 162p. 163p. 164p. 165p. 166p. 167p. 168p. 169p. 170p. 171p. 172p. 173p. 174p. 175p. 176p. 177p. 178p. 179p. 180p. 181

Issue Table of ContentsEarly Music History, Vol. 17 (1998), pp. i-iv+1-264Front Matter [pp. i-iv]'Tropis semper variantibus': Compositional Strategies in the Offertories of Old Roman Chant [pp. 1-60]Modal Discourse and Fourteenth-Century French Song: A 'Medieval' Perspective Recovered? [pp. 61-108]The Sforza Restoration and the Founding of the Ducal Chapels at Santa Maria della Scala in Milan and Sant' Ambrogio in Vigevano [pp. 109-159]Music, Identity and the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain [pp. 161-181]'O rex mundi triumphator': Hohenstaufen Politics in a Sequence for Saint Charlemagne [pp. 183-219]Musical Aspects of Old Testament Canticles in Their Biblical Setting [pp. 221-264]Back Matter

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