The stones in Barcelona do not lie where they were meant to rest.
They have been uprooted, broken, and fixed into walls that were never meant to bear them.
They remain there. Visible, exposed, and unresolved.
What are these stones?
They are not stones.
They are the last visible fragments of a world that was deliberately dismantled-piece by piece, decree by decree-until even its memory required disfigurement to be contained. They are what remains when a civilization does not merely expel a people but seeks to erase the trace of their ever having belonged.
These stones once stood upright-Jewish tombstones.
They rose from the earth of Montjuïc, the “Mountain of the Jews", as enduring witnesses to centuries of Jewish life in Barcelona. Each inscription declared: we were here.
And then came 1492. Not suddenly, but as a culmination.
The expulsion formalized what had already begun: the redefinition of the Jew from neighbor to threat. People removed not only from land, but from legitimacy.
And yet, even expulsion was not enough.
And so, the stones were taken.
Embedded into the walls of the Palau del Lloctinent. Inverted, fractured, dislocated. They became part of a new structure, one that erased the life from which they came.
But the Hebrew letters remain. The words “Lament." “My son." “Joseph “.
These are not relics; they are voices that resist the transformation imposed upon them. They refuse to become merely architectural.
“For the stone shall cry out of the wall, and the beams of the woodwork will echo it. Woe to him who builds a city with bloodshed and establishes a town by injustice!" Habakkuk 2:11-2:12
The prophet’s words are no metaphor here. They are a description.
And the stone’s cry is not confined to the fifteenth century.
It reverberates in the present.
And this is where the past begins to speak to the present.
For in our own time, Spain, once the land of expulsion, has again placed the Jew at the center of its moral discourse, now through the language of the State of Israel.
In July 2025, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described Israel’s war in Gaza as “the greatest genocide this century has witnessed."
In September 2025, he went further, accusing Israel of “exterminating a defenseless people," while he imposed a sweeping arms embargo and restricted access to ports, airspace, and entry for individuals associated with Israeli policy.
That same month, he called for Israel’s exclusion from international sporting events, arguing it should be treated as Russia was after Ukraine.
By May 2025, he had already referred to Israel as a “genocidal state" and declared that Spain “does not do business" with such a country.
And then, during the 2026 war with Iran, this posture widened.
Spain refused the United States use of joint bases at Rota and Morón, forcing American aircraft supporting operations to relocate. It closed its airspace to U.S. military flights connected to the conflict, compelling rerouting across Europe. It rebuffed U.S. pressure, even under threat of economic retaliation, declaring it would not act “out of fear." And it framed the campaign itself as “unjustified" and “dangerous," likening it to “playing Russian roulette with the destiny of millions."
And now, following Spain’s decision to boycott the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna in May because of Israel’s participation, the country has just announced that it will not broadcast the popular event.
When a single nation is described as uniquely criminal, as a singular moral aberration, the language does not remain contained.
It expands.
From state… to people.
From policy… to identity.
And this is where the stones begin to cry out again.
Because what was done to them did not begin with stones. It began with language.
With the reclassification of people from participant to exception. From neighbor to problem. Once that shift took hold, the rest followed with terrible clarity.
And eventually, even the stones could be uprooted, inverted, and built into the walls of a world that no longer recognized them.
And left there. Visible, but not restored.
Like the Egypt of Scripture, where “there arose a new king… who knew not Joseph" (Exodus 1:8), Spain too chose the sin of forgetting. It forgot the Jews who had helped build Sepharad-its trade strengthened by Jewish merchants, its rulers counseled by Jewish statesmen, its sick healed by Jewish physicians, its culture enriched by poets, sages, translators, and philosophers. The expulsion of 1492 was not only the exile of a people; it was the exile of gratitude.
Why these words? Because they were prophetically meant to survive. Lament Joseph so the ancient charge would be heard again: the benefactor forgotten, the loyal servant repaid with amnesia. Spain, like Egypt before it, forgot those who had blessed it.
The stones cry out. Not only for what was done. But for what continues.
Antisemitism does not disappear. It evolves. It adopts the moral vocabulary of its time. It learns to speak in the language of justice, even as it isolates, singularizes, and ultimately alienates.
When the stones cry out-are we hearing the past? Or are we witnessing it, once again, unfold in a different form?
And it can happen very quickly.
When Walther Rathenau, the prominent Jewish statesman and former German foreign minister, was assassinated in 1922, millions of Germans mourned, and vast crowds joined the funeral processions in a national display of grief. Yet scarcely more than a decade later, Germany descended into the systematic persecution and extermination of its Jews under the Nazi regime. From Biblical Joseph to modern times, history teaches how swiftly admiration can yield to hatred, how quickly a society can forget those who helped sustain it, and how thin the barrier may be between honor, pogroms, and extermination.
Yet the final word is not exile, but renewal. On those broken stones the promise of the Book of Isaiah still speaks: “You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice, and your bones shall flourish like the grass." We read those letters now with sober joy, for Israel stands sovereign, strong, and self-defending. The stones once testified to Jewish vulnerability; they now testify to Jewish permanence.
When my mother-in-law z"l, a Berlin-born German Jew, returned to her birthplace at the city’s invitation, she spoke only English, despite her German, still precise and unmistakable, lingering just beneath the surface. It was not inability, but refusal. Some languages, once broken, are not easily reclaimed.
As they drove through a neighborhood now marked by neglect and crime, she looked out the window for a long moment, then turned to the guide and said, almost conversationally:
“So… this is what you exchanged for Einstein?"
Itzhak David Goldberg MD is Professor Emeritus Albert Einstein College of Medicine