El Call: four streets, a stone that is a copy, and an argument about one building

The Barcelona History Museum opens its own route through El Call by warning you that practically nothing of the old Jewish quarter has survived.

That is an unusual thing for a museum to lead with, and it is the right way in. This is not a place you go to look at buildings. It is four narrow streets where you find out what was here, and what was done about it.

Where it was

The Call occupied the north-western quarter of the old Roman street grid — the ground between what are now Carrer del Bisbe, Plaça de Sant Jaume, Carrer del Call, Carrer dels Banys Nous and Baixada de Santa Eulàlia, with the Roman wall along one side.

The museum adds a caveat worth carrying around: in the outer streets the boundaries were never entirely precise, and Jews and Christians lived alongside each other there. A wall around a community is a tidy image and the reality was blurrier.

Jewish presence in Barcelona is documented from the 870s. The quarter as such forms at the end of the eleventh century, and a planned extension — the Call Menor, five blocks with its own synagogue and square — was added in the thirteenth. By the middle of that century the king had authorised gates and windows to be opened through the Roman wall, and the quarter grew past its own edge.

The stone on Carrer de Marlet

The single most-photographed object in these streets is a slab of Hebrew inscription set into the wall at Marlet 1.

It is a copy. The museum says so directly and holds the original.

The medieval text is short: it records the pious foundation of Rabbi Samuel ha-Sardí, a leading figure of the quarter in the mid-thirteenth century, and a lamp that burns permanently.

There are in fact three plaques on that façade — the ancient one, a nineteenth-century one and a modern one — and the museum specifically warns that the nineteenth-century plaque carries an incorrect translation. Which means that a good proportion of what visitors read aloud to each other on that corner, and what gets repeated on tours, is a Victorian mistake.

It is free, it is visible from the street at any hour, and it is worth two minutes precisely because of all that.

The street that changed its name in 2018

The main street of the quarter was Carrer de Sant Domènec del Call for centuries — named after St Dominic’s day.

St Dominic’s day is 5 August. The assault on the Call began on 5 August 1391.

In 2018 the Ciutat Vella district approved renaming it Carrer de Salomó ben Adret, after the rabbi and jurist. The signs say the new name; a lot of maps, guidebooks and tour scripts still say the old one. If you are looking for one and finding the other, that is why.

August 1391

The Call was assaulted on 5 and 7 August 1391. The Barcelona History Museum’s own figure is that around three hundred people were killed. Others were forcibly baptised and others fled. Property was attacked, and not only Jewish property — the bailiff’s house was assaulted too.

We give that number the way the museum gives it: an approximation, in an institution’s own words, without a source attached. It is not a count and nobody should present it as one.

There had been an earlier attack during the Black Death, on 17 May 1348. And in 1263 the Barcelona Disputation was held before the king, between Nahmanides and the friar Pau Cristià; its consequences were censorship, the burning of Hebrew books and Nahmanides’ exile.

After 1391 the king tried to restore a quarter in the area of the Call Menor and failed. In 1401 he issued a privilege by which Barcelona would not come to have a Jewish quarter again.

That is the end of it, and it is why there is so little to look at. The absence is not neglect. It was a decision, written down.

What happened to the buildings, and to the cemetery

The eastern part of the ground was built over from the early fifteenth century onwards by the Palau de la Generalitat. In the mid-nineteenth century the cutting of Carrer de Ferran went through the heart of the former Call Menor.

And the cemetery — the Jewish burial ground on the slope of Montjuïc, documented from 1091 and in use for centuries — passed to the crown in 1391 and was sold in 1393 to a company of creditors, who began breaking it up and using the gravestones as building material for new buildings in the city.

You will be told you can see those stones embedded in named palaces and in the city walls. We could not find an institution that says so, so we are not going to repeat it. Where you can see them, documented, is on the staircase of the museum’s own site in the Call, which displays tombstones from the Montjuïc burial ground.

That hill is named after that cemetery. We used to write that the question was open between mount of the Jews and the Latin Mons Iovis; the Generalitat’s listing decree says the burial ground dóna nom a la muntanya, and the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana points out that the documents preserved from 878 call the hill invariably Mons Judaicus. The correction, the two excavation campaigns and where the gravestones ended up are in the Jewish necropolis of Montjuïc.

The building people argue about

There is a site in these streets presented to visitors as the Great Synagogue of Barcelona, and described as one of the oldest synagogues in Europe.

Here is the state of the evidence, which is more interesting than either a yes or a no.

The city history museum places the Great Synagogue in the block bounded by Marlet, the street now called Salomó ben Adret, the Arc de Sant Ramon del Call and the Placeta de Manuel Ribé. It does not identify a visitable building, and it does not use the phrase oldest in Europe anywhere.

A documentary study commissioned by the museum and published in 2002 states that its findings contradict the hypothesis locating the synagogue on that particular plot, and concludes that the question can only be settled by extending the research to the neighbouring numbers. The historian who wrote the museum’s own guide to the Call has argued in the press that the building in question was a private house.

The scholar who originally proposed the identification has defended it in print and has not withdrawn it.

So: an open question among historians, with the museum declining to endorse the popular version. We are not telling you where to go or what to buy. We are telling you that if a guide states this one flatly, in either direction, they have decided something the specialists have not — and on this subject, of all subjects, that is worth knowing.

What is actually there to see, free

Fifteen minutes, no tickets:

• Carrer del Call — traces of the Roman wall, including at the corner with the renamed street.
• Carrer de Marlet — the copied inscription and its three plaques.
• Carrer de l’Arc de Sant Ramon del Call — it follows the inner line of the Roman wall, which is why it zigzags; the houses are built against it.
• Placeta de Manuel Ribé — a modern square, and on its corner the museum’s own site in the Call, in a building whose owner immediately before 1391 is documented: Jucef Bonhiac, apparently a weaver of veils.
• Els Quatre Cantons del Call — the crossing where the Banys Nous stood, founded in 1160 by a Jew, Abraham Bonastruc, in association with the count, and in use until the sixteenth century. The street register dates the contract to the same year and says the baths subsisted until 1716 — one of the few names in this quarter that is not a trade.
• The church of Sant Jaume on Carrer de Ferran, which is a former synagogue.

How to be here

It is a residential street the width of a corridor with people living above it, and it is where three hundred people were killed in two days in 1391.

Quiet voices, no blocking of doorways, and if you photograph the stone at Marlet, photograph the stone.

Where this sits in a visit

It is stop four on what to see in the Gothic Quarter, and it is genuinely better after dark, when the streets are empty and there is nothing to look at but the shape of them — see the Gothic Quarter at night.

Our Gothic Quarter walk and its night version both go through here. They tell it the way this page does: what is documented, who documents it, and where the argument is still open. That is a slower way of guiding and it is the only one that survives a reader who checks.

The wider question of how much of this neighbourhood is what it appears to be runs through the buildings that were moved and the Roman city underneath.

The square at the eastern edge of the Call, where the sacramental wills of Barcelona are still sworn on one specific altar, is in the squares of the Gothic Quarter.