Tracing Marginalized Histories in Palma de Mallorca’s Urban Fabric

The Wall on Carrer del Vent

On a small side street in Palma de Mallorca’s medieval quarter a groove is carved into an ancient wall at hand height. Some residents of Palma repeat local lore that this groove was carved by the memorializing act of passing one’s hand over the stones while traversing the forty-six-meter-long street. 

Since the sixteenth century, this wall has served as the western enclosure of the Jesuit church in Palma, but it was originally the facade of the main synagogue of the Jewish quarter. In 1392, the synagogue was confiscated and converted into a church, leaving only this wall intact. However, this site was not eclipsed from Jewish memory. For six centuries, the Jewish and converso (Jewish-Christian converts) communities continuously engaged with the wall, using it as a tactile memorial to a lost past and an uncertain future.

The wall retains the evidence of various building campaigns reflecting the changing functions of this building as it oscillated between the Jewish and Christian communities of Palma. This wall, hidden down a narrow side street and mostly a fragment of a tangled building history between religious groups on the island, reveals how architecture and urban space play pivotal roles in shaping cultural identity and heritage. 

It is representative of a type of structure that has long been ignored by architectural historians in favor of more monumental buildings. This paper proposes an analysis of this wall as a trace of a marginalized group. This study, a part of a larger project on Jewish spaces on Mallorca, draws on Swati Chattopadhyay’s theory of small spaces, which illuminate the unseen spaces used by the unseen people in colonial India. By applying theories of memorialization in architecture and culture to the pre-modern world, this study underscores how the haptic engagement with the wall transformed urban space into an active memorial. 

The wall’s significance extends beyond its local and temporal contexts. It connects a repressed history with its contemporary inheritors - descendants of Jewish converts living in Mallorca, who are still grappling with the ramifications of marginalization. By focusing on small, overlooked spaces and geographies like this wall and Mallorca, we can pose new questions to the monumental buildings and dominant narratives that have traditionally shaped our understanding of early modern cities. This study calls for the re-examination of architectural history through the lens of marginalized spaces. It offers new perspectives on how architecture reflected and constructed social identity and collective memory in the pre-modern world.

In a narrow street in Palma de Mallorca’s Jewish quarter, a hand-height groove is etched into a centuries-old wall (fig. 1). Frequently overlooked by passersby, oral history claims that this indentation was formed over generations by hands brushing against the stone in an embodied act of remembrance¹. The wall, now part of the Jesuit Colegio Nuestra Señora de Montesión (fig. 2), once formed the western facade of Palma’s main synagogue². Although the Jewish community was extinguished on the island and the synagogue confiscated and permanently converted into a church in the 1390s, this wall on Carrer del Vent remains³. Since the 14th century, it has become a site of silent, tactile memorialization for conversos – Jewish to Christian converts – and Xuetes (pl.; sg. Xueta) – the descendants of a small group of conversos tried by the Inquisition in the 1670s⁴. These groups’ identities remained entangled with this urban space long after official Jewish worship was prohibited⁵.

The wall, which runs the length of Carrer del Vent, is a palimpsest of collective memory and cultural identity, serving as a microcosm of the tensions between hegemony and resilience, marginalization and survival. By examining its physical traces – layered stonework, haptic wear, and urban positioning – alongside the social practices it shaped, this wall reveals how modest urban spaces can mediate memory and identity in contexts of persecution.

Architectural history has long privileged monumental forms, sacred typologies, and elite patronage, yet recent work redirects attention toward ephemeral, everyday marginal spaces⁶. Swati Chattopadhyay’s theory of “small spaces” foregrounds the significance of ordinary environments in shaping social relations, particularly under colonial or oppressive regimes⁷. While this study of the wall shares affinities with microhistorical approaches, it moves beyond narrative scale to engage the spatial and architectural dimensions of marginality⁸. By focusing on urban form, material traces, and embodied spatial practices, it offers a model for rethinking how small spaces structure collective memory. As a “small space” with a lasting cultural presence, the wall on Carrer del Vent resists official narratives of urban and religious change, which frame post-1391 conversions as evidence of Jewish disappearance and integration, marginalizing the persistence of Jewish memory within urban space.

Often overlooked in broader studies of Spanish Jewish history and early modern urbanism⁹, Mallorca’s Jewish and converso histories reveal how architecture functioned as both infrastructure and a site of negotiation and remembrance. The Jewish quarter, the Call, was both a legally segregated and socially charged zone (fig. 3)¹⁰. Its physical reconfigurations mirrored the political and religious pressures exerted upon its inhabitants. This study centers on a minor structure in a peripheral geography to challenge assumptions about where and how architectural meaning is constructed. By tracing the architectural evolution and afterlives of the wall on Carrer del Vent, this study contributes to ongoing discussions on architectural memory, urban liminality, and the material legacies of marginalized communities in early modern cities.

The Call served as a vibrant node in the city’s social, economic, and religious networks. Imprinted on the urban fabric of Palma is a complex history of coexistence and rupture between its Jewish and Christian inhabitants. First formally organized by the Crown of Aragon in the late 13th century, the Call was shaped by royal charters that simultaneously protected and constrained the Jewish population¹¹. The Crown of Aragon’s shifting attitude towards the Jewish community reflected the desire to protect the Christian population in an urban context. Jews were viewed as social and spiritual pollution that endangered the purity of the Corpus Christianorum¹². Initially located between the Almudaina Palace (fig. 4) and the port, the Call was strategically embedded in a district where it was encircled by Christian institutions that asserted surveillance and control over Jewish life (fig. 5). Delimiting Jewish urban space enforced the subjugation of the Jewish population that was a necessary facet of Christian hegemony and reminded the Jews that their survival depended on royal favor.

The Sinagoga major (Main Synagogue), a central institution for religious worship, education, and communal justice and administration, stood at the heart of the Call. This synagogue was the symbolic and functional core of Palma’s Jewish community. Its confiscation and conversion following the anti-Jewish uprisings in 1391 represented a violent rupture in the continuity of Jewish urban life. The attacks of 1391, part of a wave of violence that swept across the Iberian Peninsula¹³, culminated in the forced baptism of hundreds of Jews in Mallorca, creating a new social group of conversos¹⁴.

Though Christian by name, conversos in Mallorca remained physically and culturally tied to the Call. The 1391 uprising and its aftermath marked a profound reconfiguration of Palma’s urban and social landscape. The Jewish aljama – the legally recognized, semi-autonomous governing body of the Jewish community – was effectively dismantled¹⁵. The Crown issued edicts to integrate the newly baptized conversos into Christian society, but the mass scale and coercive nature of the conversions generated widespread suspicion within Old Christian society¹⁶. This spatial continuity destabilized the Christian desire for clear social boundaries, as former Jews continued to inhabit, walk, and touch the same spaces they had before baptism¹⁷. While forced conversions occurred throughout the Iberian Peninsula in the 14th and 15th centuries, the case of Mallorca is distinct¹⁸. Nowhere else did an endogamous community like the Xuetes develop – descendants of Jewish converts who maintained internal cohesion and were externally marked for exclusion well into the modern era¹⁹. This outcome reflects some of the standard forms of Iberian religious persecution but adds the distinct dimensions of a deep entwinement of spatial segregation, social memory, and urban visibility²⁰.

Carrer del Vent bordered the western wall of the Sinagoga major and became a focal point for this uneasy continuity. The building itself, repurposed into a Christian chapel before becoming the Jesuit church, bore the architectural scars of its layered past²¹. The wall on Carrer del Vent retained elements of the original synagogue’s stonework – subtle, but enduring markers of the space’s Jewish identity. Even after Christian authorities sought to erase Jewish presence from the city, these architectural remnants provided a tangible link to a disappeared community.

The act of touching the synagogue wall – a gesture that may have originated in patterns of Jewish ritual–became a haptic form of memory, allowing conversos to assert an embodied connection to their past. The converso community, caught between two religious and cultural worlds, engaged with these spaces in ways that re-inscribed meaning onto the urban environment²². As time passed from the initial rupture of the building’s Jewish functions, these informal practices took on heightened symbolic significance. They transformed marginal urban sites into loci of memory and identity, resisting the attempted erasure of Jewish presence from Palma’s built environment.

This building was more than a vestige of Jewish life from before 1391; it was a silent participant in the unfolding drama of converso identity, persecution, and survival. The historical evolution of the Call and the spatial politics surrounding the synagogue’s confiscation help to understand the significance of the wall on Carrer del Vent to eight centuries of converso descendants living in Palma. As a site where memory was enacted through everyday gestures, the wall demonstrates how the Jewish past of Mallorca endured – not in official records or grand monuments, but in the margins, carved into stone and carried in the touch of a hand.

The wall along Carrer del Vent appears at first glance to be an unremarkable architectural element in the city, overshadowed by the baroque portal on the north facade of the Jesuit church (fig. 6). Through a combination of morphological features, historical layering, and embedded memory practices, this micro-space functions as both a remnant of a lost communal center and a living site of memorialization.

The eastern wall of Carrer del Vent reveals four distinct visible construction seams – vertical divisions that mark changes in masonry technique, stone size, and finish (fig. 7). These seams are not zones in a zoning sense, but architectural markers of successive building phases. Having a religious edifice that was expanded through successive building campaigns is not unusual, but the expansions to this building were significant because they marked out, in stone, the metamorphosis of this site and its attendant community.

At approximately 75 centimetres above ground level, a horizontal groove runs across portions of the wall. It is particularly visible in the older masonry of zones two and three and becomes less distinct in the later construction of zones one and four (fig. 8). This groove, located at the height of a passing hand, is not the result of vehicular erosion or environmental wear – no such marks exist on similar streets in Palma’s Gothic quarter. Instead, its location and uniformity suggest that it is the product of repeated tactile engagement. The Xuetes' oral tradition holds that this indentation was made by hands passing over the stones of the original synagogue portions of the wall. Over centuries, hands traced this wall in silent gestures of remembrance, embedding identity into the stone itself.

In the aftermath of the 1391 uprisings, the loss of this building to the remnants of the Jewish community had various ramifications, including unhinging the community from this central node for the performance of Jewish religious and cultural identity in Palma as well as amplifying the sense of threat to Jewish life on the island²³. The decentralization of communal identity that resulted from the confiscation of the Sinagoga major would not force this site to be eclipsed from the identity of the inhabitants of the Call. The Jews and their converso descendants in Palma would continue exploring the importance of this site to their cultural heritage as a memorial to the destabilization of a vibrant history.

This groove may be understood as a haptic memorial practice. Its very location – at the height of a passing hand – echoes Jewish tactile ritual traditions of remembrance, particularly the mezuzah (fig. 9). These historic, tactile forms of commemoration provided a model for the tactile form of commemoration that would occur at the site of the Sinagoga major from the end of the 14th century. The mezuzah, a small case containing sacred text placed on Jewish doorposts, functions as both a physical and spiritual threshold, linking faith and physical space. The positive obligation (mitzvah) of placing a mezuzah on the door posts of a Jewish home is explicitly stated in Deuteronomy²⁴. The mezuzah refers both to the container and to the parchment on which a scribe records the words of the first two paragraphs of the Shema, the most famous and powerful Jewish prayer, which includes the commandment of the mezuzah. The symbolism of the mezuzah, however, extends further back in time to the Exodus from Egypt, and serves as a reminder of the covenant between God and the Jewish people as well as a marker of God’s promised protection over Jewish homes²⁵.

Touching the mezuzah when passing through a doorway is a gesture of continuity, memory, and divine protection²⁶. When the synagogue was violently taken from its community, the wall remained, and it became, in a sense, a secularized mezuzah – a site of ritualized touch, where memory was enacted in passing rather than proclaimed in stone or liturgy. While the practice of touching the mezuzah was codified in Jewish law and ritual, the touch of the wall was improvised, unsanctioned, and anonymous, creating a tacit micro-memory embedded in the body and activated through repeated action²⁷.

The wall functioned as a living threshold between a Jewish past and Christian present. Early modern Mediterranean cities were navigated as sensorial environments where belonging was shaped as much by touch, smell, and sound as by law and social ritual²⁸. As a form of tacit memory, the silent, habitual, and generational commemorative gesture performed on Carrer del Vent preserved meaning in this space too marginal for official recognition²⁹. Here, memory is preserved as erosion instead of inscription forming a tactile archive that transmits a history of perseverance rendered too dangerous to articulate in words.

The power of the wall lies in its material continuity and in its capacity to act as a palimpsest of identities. The wall does not erase its past lives, it overlays them. Each successive expansion altered the physical structure of the wall and transformed its interaction with the immediate urban fabric, reconfiguring its relationship to neighboring structures, pathways, and public spaces. These changes impacted how the wall shaped patterns of movement, visibility, and access within its vicinity. As a palimpsest, the wall reveals the intertwined histories of architectural adaptation and urban development while offering a lens to study how spaces are continually redefined in response to social, economic, and cultural shifts.

The wall’s endurance as a site of informal remembrance reveals the cultural strategies by which marginalized groups reclaim space. This wall is a testament to the shifting dynamics of power and control over urban space. The exterior of the building remained a complex and contested space, as its visibility and interaction with the surrounding urban environment could not be as easily controlled. Passersby would have continued to engage with the wall in ways that were shaped by their own experiences and memories of the site, creating layers of meaning that resisted hegemonic control. The wall’s presence in the public realm meant that it remained a site of visual and tactile interaction, with its materiality and form carrying symbolic weight that extended beyond its intended function. The wall became a microcosm of the tensions between authority and agency in urban life, encapsulating the interplay between imposed structures of power and the resilient, often subtle acts of individual and communal engagement with public spaces. The wall, unadorned and uncelebrated, stands as a rare example of architectural memory sedimented across political and spiritual orders.

The wall demands that we read urban space through the persistent, embodied practices of those whom the official record attempts to forget. What was once a vibrant hub became a subversive site of remembrance activated by gesture, presence, and oral transmission instead of by monuments or plaques. The oral history told by descendants of the converso community recounts how their ancestors taught them to engage with the space of the wall as a way of maintaining a tactile connection to the suppressed communal identity of Mallorca’s Jews.

Oral history provides a critical methodological approach to historical inquiry by centering lived experiences, foregrounding personal narratives, and challenging dominant historiographical paradigms. These stories are shaped by the contexts in which they are collected and disseminated, revealing individual memories and the broader structures that frame them³⁰, functioning as a form of civic engagement through the active participation of lay people in the construction and transmission of historical narratives³¹. Oral history is not a transparent window into the past but a layered and subjective form of memory, revealing what people remember and how individuals and communities make meaning from those memories³². Testimony, one form of oral history, is not simply the recounting of events but a process through which traumatic memories are first constituted. In the absence of formal recognition or public mourning, oral narratives often serve as the only possible site of witnessing³³. This study treats oral narratives not as empirical evidence to be verified, but as expressions of cultural memory shaped by silences, repetitions, and emotional investment. This reinforces the idea that history is not merely an academic discipline, but a practice embedded in communal identity formation and dissemination³⁴.

For architectural history, oral histories play a crucial role in uncovering how individuals navigate spaces shaped by loss, marginalization, and displacement³⁵. Oral accounts can illuminate the social meanings of spaces, particularly in contexts where official records are sparse or deliberately silencing³⁶. Testimony is about giving form – however fragmentary – to historical trauma³⁷. By integrating oral histories, architectural historians can more fully account for the ways spaces are inhabited, contested, and remembered, enriching understandings of the built environment beyond its material form.

The oral traditions surrounding the wall on Carrer del Vent emerge from a long history of Jewish presence on Mallorca, carrying with them layers of memory that continue to shape historical understanding. In this study, oral traditions surrounding the wall on Carrer del Vent are understood as cultural memory practices – selective, emotionally charged, and shaped by the needs of the present as much as by the past. Converso oral history reveals that the past is not static; it is continuously reinterpreted through the lens of the present, shaped by contemporary concerns, identities, and absences. The physical remnants of the wall hold within them traces of past lives, yet these traces are activated in different ways depending on who engages with the wall and under what circumstances. The very act of storytelling – whether through oral tradition, communal memory, or scholarly inquiry – mediates how this architectural fragment is understood, reinforcing the idea that spaces of displacement are imbued with histories that are actively imagined and reshaped³⁸. Oral histories reveal the dynamic relationship between built space and the evolving narratives that sustain it.

The Jewish, converso, and Xueta communities have told a story about the importance of this wall since the 14th century, demonstrating that a part of the self-proclaimed cultural identity of the conversos from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and the Xuetes from the 1670s on was tied to the memory of their Jewish ancestors. By passing their hands over the wall’s stones, the conversos created a tactile link to a Jewish past and cultural identity – an act of claiming space through memory that echoed the mezuzah tradition.

The Jewish community of the 13th and 14th centuries would have used the space of Carrer del Vent multiple times a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It was a key node within the network of Jewish spaces in the city across its multiple iterations. It was lived in through the practice of Jewish rituals, social events, educational functions, and juridical proclamations, all of which contributed to this site living within the identity of the community³⁹. When this lived space was forcibly removed from the community, the adjacent urban space maintained the lived space’s cultural functions. Andreas Huyssen describes how urban spaces can be interpreted as “lived spaces that shape collective imaginaries”⁴⁰. Carrer del Vent carried on as a lived space within the converso community, and it played a role in shaping their collective identity and memory⁴¹.

By walking down Carrer del Vent, the remaining members of the Jewish community in the 15th century, the conversos, and the Xuetes claimed this space as their own for the duration of their presence on the street, which was reinforced by the act of touching the wall. Michel de Certeau expresses how

the act of walking […] is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian⁴².

The performance of this converso act of commemoration, rather than simply walking down the street, demonstrates how memory “is not a thing but a practice”⁴³. This memory practice permitted the claiming and reclaiming of this urban space as a Jewish space throughout the centuries, in a way that would create a complex and seemingly obtuse cultural identity for the conversos as seen by the Old Christian population of Mallorca.

In its modest scale, ambiguous form, and peripheral location, the wall on Carrer del Vent epitomizes what Swati Chattopadhyay has termed a “small space” – a space defined by its role in the everyday negotiation of identity, power, and memory not by monumental presence or institutional authority. Although developed in the context of colonial South Asia, this framework offers a useful lens for reading spatial marginality in contexts where religious minorities occupied ambiguous and shifting positions within the urban order in early modern European cities. In Palma, minority communities inhabited and inscribed meaning onto marginal urban sites to navigate shifting expectations of visibility amid religious and political pressures. This study acknowledges the differences in historical and political contexts but finds in Chattopadhyay’s work a valuable method for examining how space mediates memory and power at the edges of urban life.

The groove carved into the wall through generations of touch is a form of counter-hegemonic memory. The wall’s resistance to forgetting challenges dominant historical narratives that seek closure through conversion, erasure, or silence. Generations of conversos and Xuetes marked the wall with their presence, preserving a communal link to a violently disrupted past through gestures that eluded official scrutiny but held deep cultural meaning.

While the wall’s significance emerges through the smallness of gesture and place, this work does not seek to aestheticize the ordinary for its own sake. The architectural significance of this wall lies in its sustained presence in everyday life. The aesthetics of the ordinary – when framed by ritual, memory, or repetition – can convey profound cultural meaning⁴⁴. Treating every trace of use as inherently meaningful–i.e., over-aestheticizing the everyday–risks flattening nuance, turning ordinary gestures into curated symbols and emptying them of their lived specificity⁴⁵. This study acknowledges that risk but argues that the groove on Carrer del Vent resists fetishization. Its meaning arises not from being curated, but from its entanglement with lived memory and intergenerational practice. The wall is not beautiful in any conventional sense, and it does not stand out from its surroundings–it blends into them. Its resonance comes from the accumulated gestures that have shaped it, participating in the poetics of everyday space–where memory takes root through use⁴⁶.

These practices reveal how architectural memory operates beyond the monumental. Small, often-overlooked spaces can become charged sites where collective memory is performed, adapted, and transmitted across generations – particularly for communities denied access to official modes of commemoration or the right to commemorate an excised past because it subverts the narrative of puritanical histories. As a memorial, the wall’s resonance extends beyond its local and temporal contexts. It stands as a connective thread between a repressed medieval history and its contemporary inheritors – Xueta descendants still grappling with questions of identity, belonging, and historical injustice. By centering the wall and by listening to oral histories alongside analysing material traces, different aspects of architecture’s participation in shaping the historical consciousness emerge to the forefront of urban histories.