Guided visit to the exhibition by Manuel Forcano, poet, Hebraist and translator, Ph.D in Semitic  philology  from the UB, has worked as a Hebrew teacher, Aramaic and History of the Ancient Near East from the University of Barcelona.

The selection of medieval works of art shown in the exhibition The lost mirror. Jews and “Conversos” in the Middle Ages (1285-1492), shows the pejorative and insulting portrayal of Jews and converts made by Christian artists and workers, as well as some images that Jews reproduce of the "enemies of Israel" in some of their artistic works, as is the case in illuminated Passover manuscripts, the Haggadah. The medieval ecclesiastical authorities of the kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, Aragon, Navarre and Castile, between the 13th and 15th centuries always sought a triple objective regarding the Jews: to separate them from the society in which they lived immersed among Christians, to humiliate them humanely and intellectually, and ruin them economically in order to diminish them as much as possible until their practical disappearance through conversion or expulsion - something that was effective with the famous Edict of expulsion of 1492 of the Catholic Kings. The images reproduced in medieval works draw some hideous and diabolical features that made the Jews "different" people, either because of the distinctive marks on their clothes, because of the physical features that caused rejection, or because of their religious blindness that prevented them to recognise "the light of the Christian religion" which sought insistently to convert them. The hatred drawn, however, would last against them even when, between the 14th and 15th centuries, many Peninsular Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity. The images of the Jews in altarpieces and artistic works, cruel and merciless, only reflect what was, sadly, their harsh reality. (Text by M. Forcano)