I don’t know when books and stories became my preferred reality. It seemed so normal for so many years, that I never even questioned it – books seemed more real than life. Even stories that others told me seemed more real than the life I was living. Only recently has it occurred to me that this is strange; only lately have I begun to wonder why reading a book is more compelling for me than the world around me.

My recent trip to Vauvert brought it all into focus.  I grew up with stories of the Holocaust, and more importantly with stories of the life before the destruction, a life that existed only in the stories told by my parents and their friends, and over the years in a book or two.  Then as an adult I became interested in kabbalah, and as I searched for the roots of the Jewish mystical and esoteric tradition I found myself on the trail of yet another  destroyed Jewish world, this one half a millennium older than the ones my parents had described.  Yet in my mothers’ stories there was still a link – her family name was descended, so a family tradition related, to the father of kabbalah.

As I searched back beyond the Hassidim of Eastern Europe, past the 17^th-century kabbalists of Safed, back before the Zohar of 14^th-century Castile, I slowly learned about the kabbalists of Gerona, the first in the Iberian peninsula.  But even before them, there was the early circle of Provencal kabbalists, headed by Isaac the Blind of Posquieres. Who knew there was a tradition that was neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi? Who knew that Provence was the cradle of kabbalah?

It took me a long time to find Posquieres on a map. Unlike the other important Provencal/Occitan/Catalan  Jewish centers  of the early Middle Ages  (this is complicated, and requires a separate post — stay tuned), unlike Lunel and Beziers and Montpellier, unlike Narbonne and Perpignan, all of which still appear on contemporary maps, Posquieres is nowhere to be seen. It took me months to discover that Posquieres underwent a name change, and is now known as Vauvert.

The Jewish history of Posquieres is now marked by a couple of street names – rue des Juifs, rues des Bonnets Carres – and by a small plaque commemorating Isaac’s  father Abraham, known as the Rabad, famous Talmudic commentator, across from what may have been the site of the synagogue. There is a housefront, now boarded up, that may have been the site of the communal bakery; there is talk among members of the local historical society of some tombstones with Hebrew inscriptions, but none have yet been found.

Archives only started to be maintained in France in the late 13th century, after Isaac was already gone, although the Chief Archivist in Vauvert’s mairie, or town hall, knows about Rabad and Isaac, wishes there were more money in her budget to do further research. The expulsions of the Jews from France in the 14^th century obliterated all physical traces of the community.  The later religious wars between the Catholics and the ‘Reformers’ or Huguenots even destroyed whatever records might have resided in the local church, although M. le Cure, in his late 80s but still the center of a certain kind of social life in Vauvert, remembers that other researchers have come seeking traces of the origins of kabbalah.

“Go to the Mediatheque,” everyone said, and so I did – France has updated its name for public libraries, in keeping with the new reality that more is stored in various non-print media than in books these days. There is indeed a small collection related to the Rabad, and to Isaac and kabbalah – mostly books translated from Hebrew and English, books available in any reasonable university collection.

I would learn more about Posquiere’s Jewish past, and find documentation of that history, in Montpellier — but that, as they say, is a story for another day.

Vauvert’s history as Posquieres, home of a great medieval Jewish academy, birthplace of kabbalah, can only be found in books, in stories, in the oral tradition of the teachings. That reality of books and stories, more real in some ways than the physical reality around us.