Jewish Influence on the Toledo Cathedral

In order to examine a very visible element of Jewish influence on the Toledo Cathedral, a time-jump to the late 1300s is necessary, when the Cathedral’s stone choir screen was made. It features “fifty-six large reliefs” showing “stories from Genesis and Exodus,” including “rarely depicted Apocryphal legends and the absence of New Testament stories”. These stories include a graphic depiction of the first murder, with Cain sinking his teeth into Abel’s neck, the plagues of Egypt, the story of the Israelites wandering the desert, and many more. The context in which these were carved is of vital importance in order to understand their importance. The late 1300s in Iberia was a time of “heightened anti-Jewish rhetoric and widespread conversion,” and can be seen as “critique[s] of Jewish idolatry”, as well as an engagement between Christian and Jewish polemicists. This “anti-Jewish sentiment” culminated in the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492.

            Despite the lack of New Testament scenes, it was not uncommon that Old Testament scenes would be read typologically. However, the stories portrayed in the choir screen of the Toledo Cathedral seem to exhibit story “types for the division of Jews and Christians”. The imagery of Cain killing Abel in such a gruesome and unnerving way “has no precedent in European medieval art,” but may have been made “in response to Jewish expansions of the Genesis narrative”. Christian scholars in Iberia would have been somewhat familiar with these expansions, given that they “had borrowed extensively from Hebrew scholarship to enrich their understanding of scripture’s “literal” sense and to bolster their own arguments in staged disputes and polemical texts”.

            The choir screen also extensively features the plagues of Egypt from the book of Exodus. These can be seen as “[representing] a kind of conversion experience and… remedies against false learning and philosophers”. Some believed that “God had sent the plagues to liberate the Jews from Egypt but had received in return only ingratitude and idolatry”, and the only hope of salvation was baptism under Christ – symbolized by the crossing of the Red Sea (another scene featured on the screen!). The connection between the choir screen and conversion seems to be this: records from Iberia during the period show “a steady trickle of Jewish conversions”, most likely due to the increasingly hostile environment to Jews in Iberia. Overall, the screen was probably made with at least two functions in mind: the ability to draw typological allegories to the New Testament from the Old, and the engagement with Jewish religious thought in Iberia, which Tom Nickson calls “a testament to strategies of polemic”.