The Big Redux: Goodbye Henrietta, Adeu Barcelona! Hello America, Good or Bad

I don’t like to use this blog for personal rants, but we live I interesting times at this moment, and I couldn’t resist, so here goes:

I just made my last trip to Barcelona.  My last was over half a century ago, when I was a graduate student in art history and looking at where I wanted to plant my professional feet.  That was a time when, if I wanted to study old stuff and not the contemporary world, the U.S. was definitively not an option.  Italy was being assaulted by art historians from every country, and now they were beginning to invade the other canonical countries of “Western” (i.e. Western European) Art.  All except for Spain, which, except for some 17^th-century big guns like Velázquez, Zurbarán, Murillo and Ribera, or that 18^th-19^th century powerhouse Goya, was considered an artistic wasteland until the early 20^th century, at least up until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

Contrarian that I am, I fell in love with Medieval Spain, and particularly Catalonia, even though they had kicked their Jews out in 1492, and the country was now being run by Fascists.  The Barcelona of 1964, when I first went, was still a somewhat derelict place: most of its historic buildings were very Guardia Civil with their patent leather hats everywhere.

grimy, the interior of the church of Santa Maria del Mar still bore marks of the fire it suffered in 1936, there were still a large number of elderly maimed individuals who had barely survived the civil war, and you saw

My Favorite Medieval Catalan Painting; Augustine Crowned, by Jaume Huguet; a fragment of something originally  much, much bigger.

But this apparent wasteland was good territory for what I wanted to study.  There were still prewar scholars active there, though they were ageing, at this point, little activity among young Spaniards (much less Americans) to take up studies again.  Dusty archives, dingy dark churches, and wonderful but somewhat chaotic museums beckoned--and I returned in 1966, ready to take the leap.

I stayed two years while researching my doctoral dissertation, and even discovered new documentation and works of art: the Art Historian’s dream!  On top of that, I got to know some Natives, mostly young Catalan painters, few of whom subsequently became famous.  I also learned Catalan, technically illegal during Franco’s time.  If anything, my love affair with Catalonia, Barcelona and Catalan deepened. By this time, Fascist rule was running dry, and Catalan cultural revolt was beginning to stir.  I cried when I had to go back to the U.S. to take up a real job.

But the affair kept on.  In Oregon, where I was teaching, l looked for someone to talk Catalan to, and so met my future husband.  Maybe we could eventually move back to Barcelona, and live happily ever after in my favorite city.

In the long run, it didn’t work out that way.  I may speak Catalan, but I’m an American, and no matter how distasteful I find American politics at the moment, here I stay--half a century later.

Though the marriage didn’t last, my love of Barcelona and medieval Spanish art history kept on over the years.  I went back to Barcelona a lot, and could easily slip back into speaking Catalan.  It was a real comfort zone. But it’s only now that I realize that my relationship with Barcelona was basically a professional one.  Going back now, as a jubilated art historian, I realized that this intellectual marriage has run its course.

There are lots of Catalan art historians now, many of them wonderful scholars, who live among the artworks and can study them everyday.  Archives are much better organized, and the digital age has made so much material immediately accessible with out my having to leave home.  The historic buildings are much, much cleaner, museum works are carefully and thoughtfully labeled and many are beautifully restored and well displayed and lit.  The discipline, thank you very much, has also changed, and the emphasis on context and cultural art history, in which I participated in its pioneering generation, is now one of its most respected approaches, part of a growing tool in our methodological toolbox.

So well has Barcelona organized its artistic riches, that it has become a sort of touristic theme park.  Part of this shift is probably due to the fact that it has become a regular stop for gigantic cruise ships. 

Sagrada Familia and its Tourists

Hoards of tourists, in the city for a day, pack the Gothic Quarter and swarm Gaudi’s idiosyncratic structures, led by their handlers holding aloft furled umbrellas or pinwheels.  I went up to check on the progress of the Sagrada Familia, which were just the four towers that Gaudi left behind at his death in 1926, unchanged when I first got there in the 60’s. At that point, nobody was there, and you could even climb up into the towers and on the walkway between them.  It’s now nearly finished, and will serve as the city’s co-Cathedral when it is.  There were so many tourists around it that I couldn’t even get close, unless I wanted to pay admission and wait an hour or so in line to get in.  I fell into conversation with some cruise tourists, who explained that they were embarking again in two hours, and so didn’t have time to go inside, in fact they still had three more Gaudí buildings and his park to drive by before they sailed on.

Admission is charged everywhere, including all of the old Gothic churches and the Cathedral itself.  I know I must sound elitist, but there’s the fun and the thrill of discovery if you are herded through in fifteen minutes? 

Maybe it’s because I’m officially an Old Fogey, which puts me squarely in the category of one who feels that “it’ll never be the same again.”  There was a lot not to love about the city in in the waning days of Francoism in the 60’s, but I was so much younger then, and seeing its good points through the screen of youthful callowness.

Demonstration: Passeig de Gràcia

On the other hand, the Catalans themselves are terrific.  The day after I got there, there was a  remarkable demonstration: people of many different groups protesting the neglect of their country by the European Union “Pooh-Bahs.”There were hundreds of people who formed an unbroken line along the Passeig de Gràcia, from the Plaça de Catalunya to the Diagonal, organized by affiliations, from Anarchists (they’re back) to feminists to Greenpeace, from the very young to the very old.  Such a demonstration would, of course, have been unthinkable half a century ago.

The Infamous #29

I can even update the Vampire of Barcelona for you a bit.  The infamous Carrer Ponent, where she lived at number 29, has long been renamed the Career Joaquim Costa--and this way before I ever got to Barcelona.  But when I first came in the 1960’s it was still the Infamous Raval, or as we called it then, the top portion of the Barrio Chino.  I used to go there to study at the Biblioteca de Catalunya,  which has always been located there, but I would kind of slink in and out, keeping my eyes out for who knew what.Now Carrer Joaquim Costa, though not exactly gentrified (and, of course, downed by graffiti), is far less menacing.  It appears to be an Asian neighborhood now; the north Africans live a little further east, towards the harbor.  Number 29 is still there, and looks pretty unchanged and not particularly inviting, but trees line the street, and just around the corner is MACBA, Barcelona’s contemporary art museum.  But I guess the cruise-ship Barcelona itinerary does not include the infamous Enriqueta Martí, because most of the people on the street seem to be locals.

MACBA, Barcelona's Contemporary Art Museum: Right Around the Corner

So now I’ve seen all the art Barcelona has to offer me for the umpteenth time, and its cleaner now.  Everything is publicly written in Catalan.  Most of the Catalans I knew, including my late ex-husband, are long gone, and so it’s time to look at other places, up to now unseen, with new eyes.

And maybe with all the turmoil here, it’s right to be right here, right now.  We may not agree with our recent political outcomes, but we are free to speak out and to organize our own objectives, objections and outcomes---and hopefully these very American values will continue……..as we soldier on.

Suffering Sappho! Wonder Women, By Hera!

The First Wonder Woman (in a skirt)

Wonder Woman and I entered the world in the same year: 1941.  She has aged a lot better than I have. Her personality, appearance and origins have been reinvented and rejuvenated over the years by various artists and writers, while I just have my own story and ageing appearance.  But then again, she’s an Amazon and I’m merely human.

In spite of this, Wonder Woman, the fictional Amazon had a significant influence over my childhood, and even afterwards.  She came into my life when I was seven years old, and immobilized over the summer by rheumatic fever.  I recovered fine, but for the three months I had it, I couldn’t go out or do very much.  In consequence, we had the first television set  (ten inches) in the neighborhood to keep visiting friends and myself occupied, and that’s how I discovered baseball and the circus.  But as a   Both my mother and aunt, who was a kindergarten teacher, were not thrilled at this.  They thought that anything other than Little Lulu was bad for my naïve and developing brain.  Nevertheless, friends smuggled in the likes of Superman and various other superheroes, and I gobbled them up (and they never prevented me from getting a Ph.D. later).

recently minted reader, I also discovered comic books.

Wonder Woman's First Very Own Comic Book

The later 1940’s were a time when women were being rammed back into their place after the independence they gained by necessity keeping up the home front during World War II.  So being rescued by Superman, even if he and Batman did wear colored long johns under swim trunks and capes to do their action work, seemed to be the logical role for a girl.  In adventure movies, the guys got to do swordfights, while the girls just stood around, the eventual outcome being that the winner would get her--and thank goodness the good guy always won. But why didn’t the heroine at least throw something at the villain while this was going on?  Even at seven, I thought this was unfair, even though this was pretty much the way it was in my world: Mom stayed home with us, and Dad worked.  She didn’t throw anything either, not that there was much reason to.  We were content.

But finding Wonder Woman was a revelation.  Here was a girl with similar superpowers to Superman and Batman.  If they were hunks, she had a gorgeous fit figure.  Her costume was much better too.  It looked like a movie star’s swimsuit, with its gold stars, its eagle on the bustier, not over revealing, but trim enough to allow her to be an action heroine, and no cape!  She wore high-heeled boots, and to move around in them the way she did certainly would have taken superpowers.  She wore a tiara with a star on it, had awesome bullet-repelling bracelets, a golden truth lasso and a personal transparent plane.  She was an Amazon, from a worthy lineage of women warriors, and a princess to boot, her mother being Hippolyta the Amazons’ queen.  Even her Diana Prince disguise was much better, as a Lieutenant in Army intelligence, than wimpy Clark Kent.

I also found it, at seven years old, intriguing that she simply appeared on Paradise Island, (subsequently renamed Themyscira), but not in my time, renamed home only to females, Amazons.  How was she conceived? There would be a lot of later attempts to explain that. 

It is to Wonder Woman comics that I can also look to my initial acquaintances with the Goddesses of Greek Mythology: Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena, though somewhat mixed with their Roman counterparts: Athena is there, but one of the Amazons’ favorite oaths is “Merciful Minerva,” her Roman alter ego, and the name of our heroine itself is “Diana” rather than the Greek Artemis.  But I didn’t know then about Amazons as viewed by Greek men, I thought that the role of women in ancient times was more egalitarian, and that was just fine with a seven-year-old.

So she was my hero, and continued to be even when I graduated to real books, though I sort of lost track of her after age ten or so.  Except for the fact that she remained as a superhero--my daughter wore Wonder Woman Underoos during the Lynda Carter years--she kind of lingered in the background as a benevolent inspiration.  In this gun-toting age, I wish I had a pair of those bracelets!  But of course, then and now, the tale of our heroine was infinitely more complicated.

Recently, when I found out that we had debuted in the same year, I decided to look in on Wonder Woman, find her backstory, at least the way I remembered it, and see what she was up to.  A look at Wikipedia, for starters, brought a rich chronicle, from her debut, through fat and lean years, to the even more active and muscular Wonder Woman that she’s become.  But what an origin story--not so much the character itself, but the characters that created her--awaited! The feminist scholar, Jill Lepore, has thoroughly researched and analyzed this in her book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman (2014).  The principal writer and creator was William Moulton Marston, working under the nom de plume of Charles Moulton.  Marston was an unusual mixture of charlatan and scholar: he had advanced degrees and in his day taught at Harvard, among other things.  He invented the lie detector and made a lot of capital on this, and, most of his life, moved in progressive psychological circles.  On the other hand, he couldn’t hold a job, and lived a life of unconventional, unofficial trigamy.  He had a wife, the erudite Elizabeth Holloway, who would be the breadwinner for his ménage à quatre.  Alco cohabiting was Olive Byrne, niece of Margaret Sanger, who would play homemaker and nurturer to his four children (all fathered by Marston, Holloway being mother of two and Olive the others), and an occasional third co-habitant, Marjorie Wilkes Huntley, a sort of hippie-librarian who drifted in an out, with her crystals and incense.  There were rumors of kinky sex and bondage, but everyone concerned seemed comfortable with the arrangement, and weirdly enough, Marston proved to be a proto-feminist.

Wonder Woman Being Tied Up

Wonder Woman seems to have been his idea, but all the ladies contributed. I recommend you read Lepore, either in her book or in a shorter article that appeared in The New Yorker in the September 22, 2014 issue to untangle all the complexities.  Under Marston’s authorship (probably with a lot of input from Elizabeth and Olive), our super hero gets chained up a lot (he seems to have had a fascination   How nice for the girl to rescue the guy! She stays on in the United States as a superhero, but a nurturing one, subduing, but never killing her adversaries as she brings them to justice.

with bondage), but always triumphs, as she successfully returns intelligence officer and blond hunk Steve Trevor, who crash-landed on Paradise Island, to the U.S., though giving up the immortality, but not the superpowers she had in her homeland.

Historically, the idea of Amazons was a notion of both repulsion and fascinating to ancient Greek men.  The democratic, enlightened society of the Athenian Greeks during their “golden age,” so often lauded by scholars over the centuries, was in reality utterly devastating to their women.  The latter were kept at home, not educated and had no public life or voice at all; it all sounds a lot like modern Afghan women under Taliban rule.  The only females who had some leeway were the hetaerae, the public courtesans, but that only worked as long as they were young and attractive.  So the idea of a woman warrior was fearsome in every way (no wonder that all the sculpted narratives that survive from the time show the Greek men always the winners).  It’s not surprising then that Marston looked to them, and various Greek goddesses, who were not normal women, for his Wonder Women inspiration.  In spite of her fabulous figure, Wonder Woman is not sexy, rather gorgeous but fierce, as a modern goddess should be.

An Amazon made the perfect heroine for a prepubescent girl in the mid twentieth century, in that sex doesn’t yet enter into it, but force mixed with grace does; and when you’re a kid, that’s all you need to know.  Issues of the Amazons perhaps being gay never crossed my mind then.  Lepore maintains that once Marston died in 1947, the real Wonder Woman of that era perished too, thereafter being somewhat watered down by subsequent writers and artists, becoming rather nebulous until a revival, decades later with Feminism.  I found her in her post-Marston decline, but it didn’t seem to be one to me then.  Whatever Wonder Women’s psychological underpinnings were under Marston, the outer attributes of her character and her post-Marston adventures were enough for seven and eight year old me.  What she did do was to empower me, and gave me a positive attitude about women that has lasted all my life.  She was the equal of any man, but different.

Wonder Woman the Blessed Golem

I still don’t know how Queen Hippolytaactually conceived her, though now it’s obvious that there are many ways to achieve motherhood; I never could buy the later story that the queen modeled her my superhero is not a Golem!  On the other hand, when I was single and became a mom, I often thought that maybe my ideal was not Wonder Woman at all, but Queen Hippolyta herself, and that my own daughter could this be Wonder Woman.

initially from clay--

Since I have kept myself ignorant of Wonder Woman’s fortunes during the last 65 years or so, I am only superficially aware of the changes and amplification of her legend, including a lot more grown-up aspects of her story, her Greek divinity, and her love for Steve Trevor and how that developed.  A new consortium of writers and illustraters--some of them women, are taking her into the 21^st century, and have redefined her for a very different age, and a group of more mature readers of the Comicon generation--and next year, the movie!. 

But in the late 1940’s and very early 1950’s, that repressed decade after Rosie the Riveter was long retired, she worked for me.

The Late Rosie the Riveter

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Jill Lepore's book is The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Random House, Vintage Press, 2014.

The New Yorker article by Jill Lepore can be found at:http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/last-amazon

News about Wonder Woman's latest DC Comics incarnation can be found at:http://screenrant.com/wonder-woman-rebirth-superpowers/ 

A trailer for the upcoming 2017 film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lGoQhFb4NM

POLIN: Time Travel is Here!

 

POLIN: Museum of the History of Polish Jews

            Museums can mean and have meant many things, but I guess that the most general definition of it in contemporary terms would be, as the Encyclopedia Britannica puts it: “institutions that preserve and interpret the material evidence of the human race, human activity, and the natural world.”  Many are open to public view, and can exhibit everything from art to dinosaur bones, fire engines, famous baseball players or chocolate.  One that has recently opened in Warsaw, Poland (2013) completely blew my mind: POLIN, the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.  I made a one-day trip to Warsaw from Berlin a couple of weeks ago (it takes less time to fly between those cities than between Dallas and San Antonio), and spent my whole day there.  I should have gone for two and stayed over.

            The museum is very large and beautifully designed, and totally integrated into the digital age.  It is more than just a collection of artifacts, rather it is a journey, through digital magic, through a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland, and the core exhibition is laid out as a sort of directed maze through which you wander through time, with all kinds of mixed media evoking and explaining the historical trip, and simply gathers you in.

Map of the Core Exhibition Space

Tower of San Martín, Teruel

            I first became aware of it through an interest in vernacular architecture, especially two regional groupings of specific types of buildings made with inexpensive materials.  In each case, the building and certainly a lot of the architectural painted decoration was done by Muslims or Jews, both of whom shunned human representation. The building techniques were those of all kinds of buildings in their respective regions. One is a group of medieval churches in Aragon, Spain, built mainly in brick and ceramics in the 14^th to 16^th centuries, mostly by Muslim workmen with local materials.  Many of these survive, and their gorgeous decorations are undergoing thoughtful restoration.  The other was a group of wooden synagogues, built mostly in the 17^th and 18^th centuries by Christian and Jewish carpenters, in present-day Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine, likewise beautiful and distinctive designs in wood, many of their interiors lavishly decorated with painted wildlife, plants and words.  None of these survive.  Many simply deteriorated over time, as Jewish populations dwindled or shifted; those that remained were destroyed during World War II—Nazi casualties along with the populations that attended them.

 

The Wooden Synagogue of Zabludow

            Fortunately, those that made it to 1939 were documented by Polish photographers, and in 1957, the Architects Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka published a wonderful book of many of the surviving ones, republished as Heaven’s Gates in English in 2003, reproducing the photographs and presenting plans and drawings too.  I was able to get the English edition a number of years ago in Krakow, and now it has been reissued as a paperback, but so far as I know, only available at the museum.  Also in 2003, an American architect, Thomas Hubka published a superb detailed study of just one of these buildings, entitled Resplendent Synagogue, dealing with the one at Gwozdziec.

Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka

            Hubka’s text was in inspiration.  It was decided to reconstruct the painted interior and exterior of the ceiling of the Gwozdziec synagogue as the centerpiece of the new Warsaw Jewish museum. The job was given to Handhouse studio in Massachusetts, under reconstruction specialists Rick and Laura Brown, who are neither Polish nor Jewish, but quite a number of the students from several  different countries participating in the project were. There were also Polish millennials who had never met real live Jews before.  They researched materials and construction methods, as well as the sort of paints used in the originals.  In 2013, their ceiling as well as the gazebo-like bimah (Torah-reading platform) was installed in the new museum as its centerpiece.

            It was to see that reconstruction that was my primary reason for making the trip, with a secondary one that my grandfather came from Poland (Brzeziny) and had spent time in Warsaw as well, before seeking better opportunities, first in England and finally the U.S.  The museum gave all my grandfather’s stories that I had heard in childhood context, and helped me understand the American Immigrant experience that shaped my parents as well. 

The Old Country, 1920's: No Thanks!

            Everything I had heard about the Old Country had sounded negative: poverty, ignorance and prejudice. The photos I had seen of impoverished Jewish towns, or shtetls, Fiddler on the Roof not withstanding, made it seem awful.  I was glad to be an American, and glad that my grandparents had come here, beyond the fact that if they had lingered behind, they would have been wiped out.  A trip  to Krakow several years back had been charming, but the pilgrimage to Auschwitz nearby pretty much convinced me to vow never to revisit Poland or anything Polish again. The discovery of the wooden synagogues book made me think that maybe there was something more, and the Museum changed everything.

Isidor Kaufman: Rabbi in Jablonow Synagogue

            To visit the core exhibition, you go downstairs and enter the labyrinth, beginning in the 14^th century, when traveling Jews in the area were asked to leave their weapons at the synagogue door before entering (so resonant now)!  Winding through tentative beginnings—life for Jews, with no homeland to go to and no military clout was always dicey, since they were allowed in at the whim of the places they meandered through—into their gradual settling down both in cities and small towns. It was a precarious journey, but they managed to survive, into a short golden age in the 17th century under the relatively permissive Council of the Five Lands (four in Poland and one in Lithuania), when they had some autonomy.  They managed reasonably well (except for a rampaging Cossack massacre in 1648), mostly under direct protection of the Aristocracy, who employed them.  They kept their distinctive dress, customs, and regional jargon (later to evolve into Yiddish), and also to the professions to which they were restricted.  The grandest of the wooden synagogues were built then, and the Gwozdziec reconstruction takes pride of place in the museum as a symbol of that era. 

The Gwozdziec Reconstruction

The Gwozdziec original ceiling

            The museum beautifully evokes those times via models, artifacts, maps and recreated sounds (though mercifully no smells).  The visitor is channeled into ever-changing spaces, each devoted to a different aspect of daily life and larger religious and cultural events; lighting levels, spotlighting, and even the colors of the spaces evoking or explaining different topics.  Some rooms are large, such as the one with a model of 17^th century Krakow; some are almost niches or nooks.  Drawers can be opened, revealing objects of significance.  For later times, there are photographs, newspapers and film footage.  In each room or gallery niche, the visitor is encouraged to look for and read texts and examine pictures and things that suddenly bring everything to a personal level.

            As the history becomes turbulent again, through Poland’s own tragic partitions and the waxing and waning of anti-Semitism from without and sectarian conflict from within, the spaces wind in on themselves. Marking the beginning of the secularism of the “Enlightenment,” they become somewhat more rectangular.  With the Yiddish literary movement, paralleling so many of the linguistic revivals of diverse ethnic European minorities at that time, I enter into more familiar territory: this was the culture of my grandparents.  Along with it came labor movements and protests, and for the first time, prominent participation by women.  It also explains the strong Socialist and Communist leanings of many American Jewish immigrants then (and residually, Bernie Sanders, who is from my generation). Unsaid but always present is the thought of where that culture might have gone if it hadn’t been so abruptly extinguished.

Alley-courtyard, Warsaw, 1920's

The Museum's street evocation

            A very tall corridor-like passage evokes a street in a Jewish neighborhood in a city: it reminds me of a photo of one such alley in Warsaw, though it’s actually based the prewar Zamenhofa Street, by the present museum (and a strategic place during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising); the museum street has real cobblestones.  But the light is eerie and gray, with indistinct figures projected at the end of  street, which leads into the very graphic, jagged and angular spaces of the Holocaust.Poland was particularly gruesome at this time, since all the major death camps were located within its borders.  The black ceilings seem lower here and low lighting adds to a sense of claustrophobia. I’ve been to many other Holocaust museums and Auschwitz too, but coming to it from the rest of this museum world, it is particularly poignant. 

            The postwar galleries are sort of anticlimactic, since there are very few Jews in Poland now, but having this big museum in Poland is at last a tribute to what was.  Though it’s gone, there’s a fascination there now to find this culture and treasure it s remnants by the Poles themselves.  When I was there, there were not only foreign tourists (including a bunch of elderly Israelis with their Hebrew-speaking guide), but large numbers of local visitors and groups of school children.  Maybe some day real Jews might even come back.

            One postscript: the realization that up to about a century ago, women were just as repressed here as they were in most places at that time.  During the time it functioned, I would have been banned from the glorious Gwozdiec prayer hall; women had to sit upstairs in a narrow space relegated to them, where they could enjoy the view through a four-inch slit cut into the wall that excluded them.

Thomas Hubka's reconstructed view of the women's section in Resplendent Synagogue

            And another Postscript: Hitler was rumored to have actually planned his own Jewish Museum in Prague: “The Museum of an Extinct Race,” displaying confiscated Jewish artifacts from destroyed synagogues and private homes, first from Bohemia and Moravia, later from all over Europe, as evidence of the total destruction he was carrying out (it did involve the survival and preservation of many of these objects). POLIN represents a dignified and thorough tribute to what Hitler wiped out, but affirms that Jews are hardly extinct!  Ha!

____________________________________________________________

For a brief article on the diverse nature of museums see The Encyclopedia Britannica Online.

For much more information, virtual visits and links for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews:

http://www.polin.pl/en

The two best books on wooden Synagogues are: 

Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka, Heaven's Gates. Wooden Synagogues in the Territories of the Former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Krupski I S-KA, Krakow, 2003

Thomas  C. Hubka, Resplendent Synagogue.  Architecture and Worship in an eighteenth Century Polish Community, University Press of New England, Hanover, 2003. 

For a briefer treatment of wooden synagogues and links online see: 

http://www.prz.ginsburgs.org/histgeo/shuls/mainframe.html

For the ceiling reconstruction for the museum, see  http://www.handshouse.org/a-brief-history-of-polish-synagogues/  AND

http://www.polishsynagogue.com.

For the world of Aragonese Mudéjar churches: http://www.aragonmudejar.com