The Catalan Mind in Exile

Perpignan is now a French city near the Spanish border, and the border is the whole point. For most of its Jewish history it was not French at all. It was Catalan - a town of the Crown of Aragon, briefly the second city of an independent Kingdom of Majorca - and its Jews belonged to one of the most intellectually serious cultures in medieval Europe. When people speak of the sharpness of the Sephardi world, of Talmud studied at the highest level and Hebrew books made as objects of beauty, places like Perpignan are part of what they mean.

The community had a fixed address and a date. In 1243 King James I of Aragon authorised a Jewish quarter, the call, in Perpignan, and around it grew a community with its synagogue, its mikveh, its butcher and its mill - the full apparatus of a self-governing Jewish town within the town. At its height in the early fourteenth century it ran to perhaps a hundred families, something like a thousand people, a noticeable share of the whole city. This was not a handful of traders tolerated at the gate. It was an institution.

The Catalan mind

The figure who fixes Perpignan on the intellectual map is Menahem ben Solomon Meiri, born in the city in 1249 and dying there around 1316, who lived his whole life in the town. The Meiri was one of the great Talmudists of medieval Provence and Catalonia, the author of a vast, lucid commentary on the Talmud called the Beit ha-Behirah. He is remembered for something rarer than learning, too: a notably generous attitude toward the surrounding Christian world at a time when generosity in either direction was scarce. A town that produces a mind like that is not provincial. It is a capital of a kind.

Meiri was not an isolated peak. Perpignan sat inside the wider Catalan culture of the Hebrew book - the workshops that produced some of the most beautiful illuminated Hebrew manuscripts of the Middle Ages, with their painted micrography and gold. Scholarship, liturgy, poetry and the made book all sat close together here, as they did across Catalan-speaking Jewry. The community thought hard and made things well. Both halves of that are worth saying plainly, because the end of the story tends to swallow the rest.

The end came in stages, and it followed the border. The fourteenth century was hard on the community; numbers fell well before the final blow. Roussillon, the county Perpignan anchors, changed hands between Aragon and France more than once, and was held under French occupation from 1462. When it returned to Ferdinand of Aragon in 1493, the Spanish expulsion edict of 1492 came with it, and the Jews of Perpignan - by then a remnant of a few dozen - were expelled. The call had stood for two and a half centuries. It closed on a change of flag.

What a name carries

The community is gone, but the city did not forget it, and neither did the wider Jewish world. The streets of the old call are still walked; the excavated mikveh is studied; the Meiri's commentary is still opened in yeshivas that have no idea where Roussillon is. In 2018 Perpignan inaugurated a new synagogue and named it for the Meiri - seven hundred years after his death, the town's most famous Jew gave his name to its newest Jewish building. That is a long arc, and a confident one.

So Perpignan is not best told as a lament. The expulsion was real and it was a loss, and there is no need to soften it. But the centre of the story is the two and a half centuries of work that came before: a Catalan-Jewish community that thought at the front rank of its age and left a commentary, a quarter and a name behind it. Empires drew and redrew the border across this town. The Meiri's pages are still in print on both sides of it.