Santa Maria la Blanca, once the synagogue of the richest Jews of Toledo,
but now turned church in spite of its high authorization as a place of
Hebrew worship. It was permitted them to build it because they declared
they were of that tribe of Israel which, when Caiaphas, the High Priest,
sent round to the different tribes for their vote whether Jesus should
live or die, alone voted that He should live. Their response, as
Theophile Gautier reports from the chronicles, is preserved in the
Vatican with a Latin version of the Hebrew text. The fable, if it is a
fable, has its pathos; and I for one can only lament the religious zeal
to which the preaching of a fanatical monk roused the Christian
neighborhood in the fifteenth century, to such excess that these kind
Jews were afterward forbidden their worship in the place. It is a very
clean-looking, cold-looking white monument of the Catholic faith, with a
_retablo_ attributed to Berruguete, and much plateresque Gothic detail
mingled with Byzantine ornament, and Moorish arabesquing and the famous
stucco honeycombing which we were destined at Seville and Granada to
find almost sickeningly sweet. Where the Rabbis read the law from their
pulpit the high altar stands, and the pious populace has for three
hundred years pushed the Jews from the surrounding streets, where they
had so humbled their dwellings to the lowliest lest they should rouse
the jealousy of their sleepless enemies.



VII


When we had visited this church there remained only the house of the
painter known as El Greco, for whom we had formed such a distaste,
because of the long features of the faces in his pictures, that our