Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email. Like Canaan, Provence is eloquent with sunlight. The landscape, harsh, dry, and brilliant, with white vestiges of antique civilizations, recalls Biblical Palestine: olive trees spring from the rocky hillsides, and the vines, like those in the Old Testament, are heavy with grapes.
Irrigation canals, branching from the Rhone and its tributaries, filter through fields and orchards which yield melons, asparagus, apricots, and berries that are the primeurs of France. Yet much of Provence remains desert, a land swept by sun and wind, and alive with color. But the mistral rarely blows in summer, when the hot countryside undulates as in a Van Gogh; and then the mountain looks down on the cities of the plain with the same austere kindness as when, from the 14th to the 18th centuries, this corner of southern France provided refuge for the children of Israel.
Its boundaries, marked by great gilded crucifixes, were opened by the Holy See to the harassed; and the Jew, exiled from England in , from the crown territories of France in , from Spain in , and Portugal in , found that he could live here on terms which, for the times, were relatively humane. In spite of intermittent persecutions and vigorous—sometimes violent—proselytism by the surrounding Christian population, these communities clung to their religious and cultural heritage during four hundred years of isolation from the rest of world Jewry.
On occasion, when they received permission, they also constructed synagogues; and the temples of Carpentras and Cavaillon, which are all that remain of their creations, stand as the most handsome examples of monumental Jewish art in France. Jewish history in Provence, however, goes back further even than the medieval foundations of these 18th-century synagogues.
They probably did their share, as commissary agents to the legions, merchants, and slave dealers, in making the colony the opulent Provincia described by Strabo. The Roman impression upon Provence has never completely faded. Descending the Rhone, as the first cypress and ilex appear along shore, the traveler feels that he is on the threshold of Italy. Under Imperial rule—especially after Caracalla in conferred citizenship on all freeborn males—Jews lived in relative calm and, very likely, affluence in the rich southern province.
