Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing Our Approach to Medieval<i>Convivencia</i> (2005)

Beyond Tolerance and Persecution:Reassessing Our Approach to Medieval Convivencia Jonathan Ray (bio) In 1992, the quincentennial marking the expulsion of the Jews from Spain brought with it a flurry of studies on medieval Jewish, or Sephardic, civilization. In the succeeding dozen years, Spain has become an increasingly "hot" subject for medievalists and Judaicists alike, and new courses on the diverse cultural legacy of the Iberian Peninsula have continued to appear at colleges and universities throughout the Europe, Israel, and North America.1 The proliferation of such curricula has been aided by the publication of sourcebooks and readers that have enabled even nonspecialists to offer courses on medieval Iberia that highlight the important contributions of Muslims, Jews, and Conversos to the broader history of the medieval Iberian world.2 The historiographic motif that runs throughout this new interest in medieval Spain is the subject of convivencia, or coexistence—a term that has been used to describe the tripartite society of medieval Iberia ever since it was introduced by the great Spanish philologist and historian Américo Castro in the 1940s.3 In recent years, this term has been embraced and distorted by an ever-widening group of academics, journalists, and politicians, a phenomenon that increasingly challenges historians of medieval Spain to return convivencia to its original context. [End Page 1] In the field of Jewish Studies, the fascination with the relative acceptance of Jews in medieval Spain and the resulting rapprochement between the Sephardim and their host societies date back to the German-Jewish Wissenschaft historians of the late nineteenth century. Frustrated by the Jews' problematic encounter with modern European culture, the founders of Jewish Studies thought they had found, with the medieval Sephardim, a paradigm of a Jewish society that could integrate into its host culture without losing its own identity.4 Over the course of the past 50 years, Hispanists and scholars of Jewish history have taken up the discourse on the nature of convivencia, using it as a lens through which medieval Iberian civilization might be understood. The debate has traditionally centered around two polarized views. Some regard medieval Iberian society as a model of tolerance and cross-cultural interaction. This, indeed, was the original stance of both Castro and the Jewish historians who preceded him. Whereas the Wissenschaft scholars sought a paradigm of Jewish- gentile symbiosis, Castro and his followers hoped to explain the unique character of Spanish civilization and believed that the answer was the contributions of Iberia's Muslim and Jewish societies. They argued that España es diferente—"Spain is different"—from the rest of Latin Christendom, its civilization the product of a unique religious and cultural frontier that brought Muslims, Christians, and Jews together in close contact with one another. Castro's vision of Spanish history as the result of cross-cultural influences was challenged by his lifelong critic and counterweight, Claudio Sánchez Albornoz, who saw Muslims and Jews as having little impact on the formation of the Spanish character, and who argued that medieval Spanish culture is best characterized by conflict, not cooperation.5 Although a somewhat altered version of Castro's thesis has generally won out among most Hispanists, the corrective offered by Sánchez Albornoz has found increasing support within Jewish Studies, especially among scholars assessing Jewish life in Muslim Iberia. Influenced, in part, by the deterioration of Arab-Israeli relations since the 1960s, a number of critics of convivencia have countered the idyllic view of an interfaith utopia in medieval Spain, pointing out the persecutions against Jewish populations under the Muslim Almoravid and Almohad dynasties of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the widespread Christian pogroms and forced conversions of Jews in 1391, and the cycle of forced conversions, expulsions, and inquisitorial harassment of Jewish and Muslim communities throughout the late medieval and early modern periods.6 [End Page 2] To be sure, recent decades have witnessed the publication of more nuanced studies of Sephardic interaction with gentile culture, many of which have wisely substituted geographically and temporally limited portraits for the broad canvases favored by the likes of Castro and Sánchez Albornoz. Nonetheless, the tendency to couch the discussion of medieval convivencia in terms of either...