Of fifteenth-century Jewish Seville there survives no synagogue to visit, no portrait, no private letter. What survives is a notary's paper. And in one bundle of documents from 1474, among house sales and debts of wheat, the name of a woman who made her living curing eyes appears three times.

A name in file 9098

The archival research that underpins the Casa Sefardí project examined contracts held in the Provincial Historical Archive of Seville (Oficio XV, legajo 9098). In three of them, dated 1474, there appears «Doña Leal, Jewess, maestra de sanar ojos» — mistress of the healing of eyes — a resident of the parish of San Isidoro and wife of Don Yuçef, silversmith. She is not a figure out of chronicle or legend: she is a signatory. Someone who goes to the public notary, agrees a job, sets a price and binds herself to it.

«She binds herself to cure and to give healing»

The deed drawn up with a widow of the city even preserves the wounds of time: the notary wrote, and where the paper has faded the transcriber can do no more than mark what is illegible.

(…) Doña Leal, Jewess, mistress of eyes, resident of Seville in the parish of San Isidoro, grants (…) with Isabel Gonzales, wife of Alfonso Labrador, deceased, whom God pardon (…) in such manner that she be held and obliged, and binds herself to cure and to give healing, through the grace of God our Lord, to Catalina her daughter, of the illness Catalina has in her eyes (…)

AHPS (Seville Provincial Historical Archive), Oficio XV, leg. 9098, fº 215-216 (1474)

Three patients, three religions

In another of the documents she is engaged by maestre Mohamad Sobrino, a Moor, resident of the parish of San Marcos, to heal his daughter. A third is granted by Ruy Fernández, a sailor from Sanlúcar de Barrameda, whose daughter Ynés suffered in her left eye. And the one just quoted is signed by Isabel Gonzales, a Christian widow — or at least a conversa — on behalf of her daughter Catalina. A Jewish woman of San Isidoro attending, in a single year, the daughter of a Muslim, the daughter of a sailor and the daughter of a Christian widow: here the coexistence of the three religions is not a doctrine but a list of medical appointments.

What the law forbade

From the thirteenth century onward Castilian legislation kept repeating that Jews might hold no public office and might not be physicians to Christians. The rolls of trades in late medieval Seville show that the prohibition was enforced badly or not at all: there were Jewish tax officials, accountants, treasurers, physicians and surgeons before and after the pogrom of 1391. Doña Leal's case adds an awkward nuance to that rule. Her contracts were not signed in hiding but before a public notary, with witnesses and an agreed fee. The city knew perfectly well whom it called when its eyes hurt.

With her husband's licence

The first of the documents contains a formula that leaps out today: Doña Leal contracts «with the licence of the said husband». This was the ordinary requirement for a married woman to bind herself; it says nothing about her competence and a great deal about the law of her time. The title the notary gives her — maestra de sanar ojos — is, by contrast, a recognition of craft: mistress, not assistant, not folk healer. Where she learned, from whom, from which books, the papers do not say. It is one of those questions the archive leaves open, and that no honest reconstruction should close on its own authority.

One thousand three hundred maravedís

The contract with the sailor from Sanlúcar is the most detailed. Doña Leal binds herself to begin the cure «from this day» and to continue it «continuously until the said Ynés be healed of the said illness», supplying «medicines and baths and all the other things needful for the cure», for the price of one thousand three hundred maravedís. It is worth reading slowly: what is contracted is not a consultation but the healing itself; the obligation is measured by its result. The same bundle holds silversmiths, headdress-makers, labourers and keepers of beasts, and even a Jewish couple paying rent to the nuns of Santa Clara in Carmona. This woman's trade is recorded with the same matter-of-factness as all the others.

1474

The date matters. Isabella I would be proclaimed queen of Castile a few months later. In 1478 the pope would authorise a new Inquisition answerable to the Crown, and Seville would be the first Castilian city to have a tribunal, installed in the Castle of San Jorge. In 1483 the Jews of Seville, Cádiz and Córdoba were expelled towards Extremadura, a dress rehearsal for the decree of 1492. When Doña Leal walked to the notary, none of this had yet happened. What became of her afterwards, the documents we know today do not tell.

Two women at the door

In the visit planned for the Casa Sefardí, the person who enters is met not by a king or a sage but by two neighbours: Doña Leal and Ana Gonçales, the butcher who in 1477 defended her shop with a letter from Queen Isabella in her hand and had its authenticity confirmed by the Catholic Monarchs themselves. Their deeds, copied from the archives of Seville and Simancas, wait further along the route, in Room III, inside a display case. It is almost the whole of the biography we have of them, and it is enough: two names that reached us because someone, on an ordinary day, wrote them down.

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