Palma and the Mapmakers

In 1375 the most accurate picture of the known world was drawn by Jews, in a Jewish workshop, in the Jewish quarter of Palma. The Catalan Atlas - six leaves of vellum showing the Mediterranean, the caravan routes of the Sahara, the spice ports of the Indian Ocean and the king of Mali holding up a nugget of gold - was the supreme achievement of the Majorcan cartographic school, and the Majorcan cartographic school was, to a striking degree, a Jewish enterprise. Kings sent to Palma when they wanted to see the earth clearly. The men who showed it to them were Abraham Cresques and his son.

This is the part of the story to hold on to before the violence arrives. Palma was not a place where Jews were merely tolerated at the edge of useful life. They were at its centre. Mapmaking was the cutting-edge science of the age, the technology on which trade, navigation and royal ambition all depended, and on Majorca it was, in large part, a Jewish craft. A Jew who could draw the world for a king is not a guest. He is an authority.

The workshop that drew the world

Abraham Cresques, born around 1325, was described in the records of the Crown of Aragon as a master of mappae mundi and compasses - a builder of nautical instruments as well as a draughtsman. He worked under royal patronage, and the great atlas of 1375 is traditionally understood as a commission connected to the Aragonese court, later finding its way to the kings of France. His son Jafudà worked alongside him and carried the craft into the next generation.

What the Atlas shows is a confident, outward-facing mind. It does not stop at Christendom. It carries the eye across the Sahara to the gold of Mali, eastward toward Cathay, outward to islands real and rumoured, drawing on Arabic geography, Jewish sources, sailors' charts and travellers' tales alike. It is the work of people who treated the whole earth as their proper subject. That breadth was itself a Jewish habit of mind, formed in a community fluent across languages and at home along the trade routes of the Mediterranean.

Then the island cracked. In the summer of 1391, the wave of anti-Jewish violence that swept Iberia reached Palma, and the call - the Jewish quarter - was stormed. Hundreds were killed. Hundreds more were forcibly baptised. Among those compelled to convert was Jafudà Cresques himself, who took the Christian name Jaume Riba and went on, as a converso, to continue the cartographic work that had made his family famous. The craft survived. The community that produced it did not.

The break, and what it left

The violence of 1391 broke the community but did not quite end it. A remnant lived on in Palma, increasingly pressured, until a second and final round of conversion in 1435 closed the open chapter of Jewish Majorca altogether. After that there were no Jews on the island, only conversos and their descendants - the people the Majorcans would come to call the Xueta, a caste of converts' children kept at arm's length for centuries by neighbours who never quite let them forget where they came from.

That long memory is its own kind of survival, and not a sentimental one. The Xueta were marked, watched and excluded into modern times, their surnames a public record of an ancestry the island would not absolve. It is a hard inheritance. But it is also proof of how deep the Jewish presence had run: a community can be forcibly dissolved and still refuse, generation after generation, to fully disappear. Palma is remembered as both a map workshop and a site of rupture, and both halves are true at once.