Stand where you can see the main door of Santa Eulàlia. It's one of the first churches the new rulers put up after they took this city, and one of the oldest parishes in Palma — and I want you looking at that door, because of what walked through it.
Mallorca had a Jewish community for centuries before any of this. They were merchants, doctors, silversmiths, and — famously — mapmakers: the finest chartmakers in medieval Europe worked a few streets from where you're standing, and their maps went to kings.
In thirteen ninety-one, a mob came through the Jewish quarter and the community never recovered from it. Then, some forty years later, the chief rabbi was accused of a crime he did not commit — a fabricated charge, of the kind that was made across Europe in those years, and the sentence was death.
To save him, the entire remaining community offered to convert. And they did it here. Several hundred people walked in through that door as Jews and came out baptised as Christians, and Jud
aism on this island formally ended that day.
The people who came out are known as the Xuetes — shoo-EH-tes. They stayed in these streets. They were Catholic, generation after generation, for centuries. It did not help. The Inquisition tried their descendants anyway, and in sixteen ninety-one, thirty-seven people were executed in this city, three of them burned alive, for practising in secret the
