Two Jewish stories from Priorat

600 years after Samuel Cavaller left Falset, one of his descendants, Marcos Caballero, an 80-year old Jewish engineer returns to the city. Samuel Cavaller left Catalonia, as would so many Sephardic Jews in the course of the 15th century; his son, Salomon Cavaller, living in Cervère, France eventually settled in Tessaloniki, Greece; the family later resettled in Smirna, Turkey; and from there the 20th-century descendants of Samuel Cavaller emigrated to Argentina. Marcos Caballero himself moved to Israel in 1952. Obsessed with tracing his genealogical roots, he visited archives across the world during ten years, an expedition which, in 2006, brought him first to Cervère and from there, finally, to the streets of Falset. The Cavellers of Falset, a family of physicians and rabbis, were part of a small, but well-integrated and successful local Jewish community of some 22 families. Many of the Cavaller family did not go into exile but converted to Christianity and their offspring can still be found living in and around Tarragona nowadays.

Only about a 10 minutes´ drive away from Falset is the village of Capçanes where the local cooperative, Celler Capçanes, is one of several winemakers in DO Montsant, Priorat and Tarragona producing kosher wine, in a way reconnecting with a medieval Sephardic tradition in these lands of making kosher wine that sold internationally. It all started in 1991 when the boss of the local co-op was asked by the Jewish community of Barcelona to produce a kosher wine. ´Flor de Primavera´ or ´Peraj Ha’abib´ was the result and Capçanes makes 10,000 bottles a year of it. Kosher wine - increasing in importance since the 1980s - means wine made according to Jewish dietary laws and under strict rabbinical supervision. For wine to be considered religiously pure according to the Jewish rulebook is largely to do with who handles the wine and the ingredients that are used in the winemaking process. In taste, most would say there is no difference at all between kosher and regular wine. Capçanes was the first in Spain to make kosher wine. Now others are following its example.

What is the connection between these two stories? It seems that Tarragona, Catalonia and Spain as a whole is reconnecting with its Jewish past, especially over the last two decades or so. We´re not just talking about the blockbusters like the museification of the Jewish barrio of Girona but at a more general level. The difference lies in little details like the stories of Marcos Caballero and of Capçanes´ kosher winemakers. Genealogy and wine, biography and enology,...and also the genealogy of enology: the part played by Sephardic Jews in this story is one that remains to be written.