The Spanish Balearic islands, located in the western Mediterranean, are
off the eastern coast of mainland Spain.
The four largest islands are Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera with Palma de Mallorca as the capital. There are some 1.116 million residents on the Balearics.
I visited Mallorca, the largest of islands, in early May. While on
Prince Edward Island, the leaves had barely come out on the trees, here a warm
sun blanketed Palma de Mallorca, the capital and largest city.
In 902, the Emirate of Cordoba, a successor to the Ummayads, invaded and incorporated the islands into their state. However, the Cordoban emirate disintegrated in civil war and partition in the early eleventh century, breaking into smaller states.
The islands were then conquered by the Almoravids, a Berber Moroccan people, followed by rule by a rival Moroccan dynasty, the Almohads.
The Balearics finally came under Christian control between 1229 and 1235, becoming a vassal state of the Kingdom of Aragon.
When the various Spanish entities were united under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469, the islands became part of the modern Spanish state.
Today Palma de Mallorca, a coastal city of about 400,000 residents, is one of Spain’s most cosmopolitan places. Mallorca now receives more than 10 million tourists annually.
Tourism changed Mallorcan society, which for centuries had been rural with strong isolationist tendencies.
The earliest evidence for the presence of Jews on the island during the Muslim period is from 1135, when Ramon Berenguer III, count of Barcelona, took some Jews of Mallorca under his protection.
In Palma a residential area eventually was set aside for Jewish settlers in the fortress of Almudaina which was later known as “the fortress of the Jews.”
They engaged in the international maritime trade and supplied goods from North Africa to the Spanish mainland.
Yet 600 years ago, the islanders were among the first in the Spanish lands to embrace persecution of Jews. Members of that minority were slaughtered here a century before the official implementation of the Inquisition in 1492.
Mallorca was one of four Spanish regions where Jews were murdered on the street in the 1391 pogroms, and the slaughter was accompanied by anti-Jewish measures that would culminate in the Inquisition. The Jewish community dwindled to almost nothing after that.
Last year, local authorities unveiled a memorial plaque at the square where 37 people were publicly burned alive in 1691 for being Jewish in what is locally known as “the bonfire of the Jews.”
Following resistance to the plaque by some residents and municipal leaders, the unveiling was the first recognition of its sort of the murders that transpired here.
In 2015, the city helped build a tiny Jewish museum in what used to be the Jewish quarter. The Jews are gone, but the buildings that once housed their three synagogues in Palma are still around and in good condition. One of them, a small space with two entrances for security reasons, used to be a bakery. Another is a church.
In March, the city for the first time sponsored a memorial ceremony for Jews who in 1688 tried to escape the island on a ship but were caught and tortured.
A large metal anchoring ring stands today outside the Bahia Mediterraneo restaurant near the marina, where many believe the ship used to stand.
“I think that in the past few years we finally and suddenly reached the point where Mallorca is ready to remember,” said Dolores Forteza Rei, a member of the Memoria de la Carrer association that is dedicated to the preservation of this heritage.
Rabbi Joseph Walles, a descendant of Rabbi Rafael Valls, the last Jew burned at the stake in Mallorca in 1691, visited Mallorca in February to meet with members of its Jewish community.
“Laced into the history of this island is the determination of its Jews to stay Jewish at the face of one of history’s most brutal attempts to eradicate Judaism,” Walles remarked.
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