Beyond Convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain

Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies

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Beyond convivencia: critical reflections on the historiography of interfaith relations in Christian Spain

Maya Soifer

To cite this article: Maya Soifer (2009) Beyond convivencia: critical reflections on the historiography of interfaith relations in Christian Spain, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 1:1, 19-35, DOI: 10.1080/17546550802700335 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17546550802700335

Published online: 27 Feb 2009.

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Beyond convivencia: critical reflections on the historiography of interfaith relations in Christian Spain Maya Soifer*

Introduction to the Humanities, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA TaylorRIBS_A_370203.sgm10.1080/17546550802700335Journal1754-6559Original20091000000JanuaryMayaSoifermsoifer@stanford.edu and& of Article Francis Medieval (print)/1754-6567Francis 2009 Ltd Iberian Studies (online) While Américo Castro’s convivencia remains an influential concept in medieval Iberian studies, its sway over the field has been lessening in recent years. Despite scholars’ best efforts to rethink and redefine the concept, it has resisted all attempts to transform it into a workable analytical tool. The article explores the malaise affecting convivencia, and suggests that the idea has become more of an impediment than a help to medieval Iberian studies. It argues that convivencia retains some of its former influence because scholars insist on understanding it as a distinctly Ibero-Islamic phenomenon. However, this article suggests that the evidence for Islamic influence on interfaith coexistence in Christian Spain is scarce. Instead of continuing to embrace the nationalist myth of Spain’s unique status in medieval Europe, scholars need to acknowledge the basic similarities in the Christian treatment of religious minorities north and south of the Pyrenees. The article also explores other aspects of convivencia’s problematic legacy: polarization of the field between “tolerance” and “persecution,” and the inattention to the nuances of social and political power relations that affected Jewish–Christian–Muslim coexistence in Christian Iberia. Keywords: convivencia; toleration; Américo Castro; Jews; interfaith relations; Islamic influence on medieval Europe

As Robert I. Burns once remarked, the frontier – “a heroic place to take one’s stand” – is to any progressively minded person a Good Thing.1 So, one might presume, is medieval convivencia, the putative “living together” of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Ever since Américo Castro put the concept into wide circulation in 1948, it has been exerting steady influence on the field of medieval Iberian studies.2 It is easy to see why. Like S.D. Goitein, who felt “quite at home” in the free-trade Mediterranean world of the Geniza collection, professional and lay historians alike were often capti- vated by the notion of medieval Spain’s religious toleration, which they often painted in broad strokes as a prefiguration of the modern western ideal of inter-religious

*Email: [email protected] 1Burns, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 307. 2Originally published as España en su historia. Cristianos, moros y judíos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1948), it has been revised and reprinted numerous times. I use the 1971 English edition, The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History, translated by W. King and S. Margaretten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), as well as a 2001 reprint of the 1983 Spanish edition published by Editorial Crítica (Barcelona).

ISSN 1754-6559 print/ISSN 1754-6567 online © 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17546550802700335 http://www.informaworld.com 20 M. Soifer harmony.3 Convivencia has frequently seemed an attractive prospect – to medievalists caught in the perennial battle against the libelous label of the “Dark Ages;” to Hispan- ists who could administer it as an antidote for the scourge of Spain’s “Black Legend;” and to some Jewish historians who visualized a “Golden Age” of Jewish culture in medieval Sepharad.4 In addition to these redemptive uses, convivencia was of unques- tionable utility in counteracting the historiographic approach critically described by some historians as the “Castilianist” perspective on Spanish history. In this somber and minimalist vision, most often associated with the towering figure of Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Castile, uncontaminated by the Islamic invasion and by centuries of interaction with the Jews, led Spain through the centuries-long Reconquista toward the fulfillment of its manifest destiny of “reunification.” By postulating the existence of a cultural symbiosis in medieval Iberia, convivencia problematized the pristine image of homo hispanus and provided a much-needed corrective to the mythological construct of “eternal Spain.”5 With convivencia appearing like a Good Thing to so many, why, in recent years, did the concept become the source of growing unease among the historians of medieval Spain? This article will explore the malaise affecting convivencia and suggest that the idea has become more of an impediment than a help to the field of medieval Iberian studies. Indeed, convivencia’s continued popularity with some historians and the general public notwithstanding, many scholars today treat it like a once sought- after guest who has overstayed her welcome. David Nirenberg’s assertion, still cutting edge in the early 1990s, that “convivencia is a central issue in the historiography of religious minorities in the Iberian Peninsula” no longer holds true.6 Much more in tune with the current trends in historiography is Robert I. Burns’ observation that “Américo Castro’s convivencia … is not so often heard in the land.”7 As Thomas F. Glick has pointed out in his insightful attempt to breathe new life into the concept, some of the blame lay with the original definition. Castro’s convivencia was an idealist construct that aspired to describe mental processes taking place in the collective consciousness of the three cultures, but was never meant to be tested against the social and political realities of Jewish–Christian–Muslim interaction.8 Paradoxically, the quotidian experience of living was missing from the concept usually translated into English as “living together.” Detached from the conflict-prone affairs of the real

3“We do not wear turbans here; but, while reading many a Geniza document, one feels quite at home” (Goitein, Mediterranean Society, ix). Recent attempts to draw moral and political lessons from the medieval Spanish experience include Menocal, Ornament of the World, and Lowney, Vanished World. See also Doubleday and Coleman, In the Light of Medieval Spain. 4On la leyenda negra, see, for example, Peters, Inquisition. A good example of a Jewish historian embracing convivencia is Norman Roth. See his Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims. 5Sánchez-Albornoz, España: un enigma histórico; Pastor, “Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz,” 121–7. For a penetrating analysis of the competing visions of Spanish history, see Hillgarth, “Spanish Historiography;” on the role of Reconquista in shaping Spanish historiography see Tolan, “Using the Middle Ages.” Historians of Aragon-Catalonia are particularly irked by Castilian-centered interpretations of Spanish history. Like J.N. Hillgarth, who takes issue with Joseph O’Callaghan’s characterization of medieval Hispanic history as a “quest for unity,” David Abulafia decries “modern Castilian triumphalism.” See his “‘Nam iudei servi regis sunt,’” 99. 6David Nirenberg argued this in 1994, but his article “Religious and Sexual Boundaries in the Medieval Crown of Aragon,” originally a conference paper presented at the University of Notre Dame, did not appear until 2000. 7Burns, “Mudejar Parallel Societies,” 108. 8Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and Christian Spain, 347; “Convivencia,” 2. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 21 world, convivencia’s transition from an idealist to an idealizing notion was only too logical. Whether it could ever be a useful category of scholarly analysis is another question. Thomas F. Glick has answered in the affirmative. All that convivencia needs to acquire a new lease on life, he argues, is to be stripped of Castro’s obscurantist, idealist language and be placed in the framework of modern anthropological theory. Castro’s findings on the existence of cultural symbiosis in medieval Spain are essen- tially correct, he argues, but have to be re-moored to the study of mechanisms that regulate cultural contact and acculturation. In Glick’s view, historians need to turn their attention to investigating the factors – social, demographic, political, ecological – that facilitated and, conversely, impeded the diffusion and adoption of ideas and customs among Spain’s three religious groups, all the while retaining the concept of Castro’s convivencia as the fundamental principle behind this complex social and cultural dynamic.9 “Castro’s convivencia survives,” Glick asserts in his most recent assessment of the legendary scholar’s legacy.10 Judging from historians’ mixed reaction to Glick’s resuscitation efforts, convivencia survives, but it remains on life support. Some have declared themselves unable to move past convivencia’s romantic baggage and the picture of interfaith harmony that it invari- ably conjures. Teofilo Ruiz, for instance, questions whether the concept can ever account for the atmosphere of animosity and mistrust that characterized Jewish–Christian relations in the kingdom of Castile.11 Even as the study of Jewish–Christian–Muslim cross-cultural interactions in the mold envisioned by Glick has blossomed, few scholars have found a meaningful place in it for convivencia. Indeed, why use a term weighed down by ideological contentiousness and corrupted by generalizations and unprovable assumptions, when one can employ neutral terms like acculturation or symbiosis, and discuss diffusion, borrowing, infiltration, and adaptation without having to navigate a historiographic minefield?12 While some historians have ditched the term altogether, others have scaled it down to a very narrow, technical definition of mundane social interaction between members of different religious groups.13 If convivencia survives, it is not because Glick has succeeded at giving it specific or meaningful content. Rather the opposite is true. By tying it to the existing anthropological concepts of acculturation and diffusion, he has once again proved convivencia’s seemingly limitless susceptibility to manipulation and reinvention. Perhaps it is this very quality of malleability that guarantees its phantom-like presence in Iberian historiography. Having appeared under the guises of “peaceful coexistence,” “acculturation,” and “daily interaction,” convivencia has become a byword that one can employ in any number of ways. Convivencia can be anything and everything: a rhetor- ical flourish, a nostalgic nod to a rich historiographic tradition, as well as an ambitiously

9Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and Christian Spain, xix, 345; Glick and Pi-Sunyer, “Acculturation,” 151–2. 10Glick and Pi-Sunyer, “Convivencia,” 7. 11Ruiz, “Trading with the ‘Other,’” 64. 12See, for example, Burns, Muslims, Christians, and Jews. 13This is the sense in which the term “convivencia” is employed by Jonathan Ray in his recent book The Sephardic Frontier, 174; see also Catlos, The Victors and the Vanquished, 261, 295. Mary Halavais understands “convivencia” as a “shared experience of individuals from three different religious traditions,” and extends it – rather uncritically – to the relations between Old and New Christians. See her Like Wheat to the Miller, chap. II. 22 M. Soifer construed notion that aspires to summarize the entire range of religious minorities’ experiences in medieval Spain. It is in this latter sense that the concept is enjoying its most recent revival. Expertly employed in David Nirenberg’s original and penetrating study of Jews and Muslims under the Crown of Aragon, this approach to convivencia might be called “dialectic,” for it rests upon the notion that toleration was predicated on intolerance: that is, not only were ritualized outbursts of inter-communal violence a normal and expected part of coexistence, but also they made the continued toleration for non-Christian minorities possible by delineating their place within the majority society.14 Nirenberg is not the first scholar to apply anthropological theory to historical research in asserting that violence could play a vital social function, but his argument puts convivencia into a sharp new relief.15 At the very least, it has scraped the varnish of romanticism off the old concept by showing that tension, violence, and conflict did not automatically exclude the possibility of coexistence and could be its integral part without perma- nently upsetting the overall equilibrium in interfaith relations. There are other historians besides Nirenberg who in recent years have rejected the notion that violence and exclusion are necessarily antithetic to peaceful coexistence. In its most general form, the argument goes something like this: the dominant society in medieval Iberia had a mostly tolerant attitude toward religious minorities, allowing them a degree of social, cultural, and economic interaction with each other and with the ruling majority; however, the ever-present tensions could explode into violence that threatened to tear apart the delicate fabric of interfaith relations. Benjamin Gampel follows this line of thought in dismissing a simplistic understanding of convivencia as a “total harmony” between religious groups, but envisioning a plural- istic society, in which communities lived and worked side by side, while also facing competition from each other that “occasionally turned to hatred.”16 Similarly, the Spanish scholars María José Cano and Beatriz Molina have argued that in Muslim Spain, the existence of conflicts and violence did not preclude the efflorescence of an intercultural society that tolerated expressions of mutual respect, solidarity, and even love.17 At first glance, there does not seem to be anything inherently problematic with claiming that the coexistence of different religious groups in Spain involved a delicate balancing act between cooperation and antagonism, interdependence and separation, toleration and persecution. The popularity of this approach makes one wonder: has convivencia been rehabilitated?18 It seems to me that it would be premature to answer in the affirmative. While only time can test the durability of this particular reincarna- tion of convivencia, at present its prospects do not look promising. In reality, scholars remain locked within the parameters of the debate originated by Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz. Indeed, John Tolan has questioned the applicability of the categories of “tolerance, acceptance” and “exclusion, violence” to Iberian realities, arguing that their modern connotations mistakenly suggest that medieval Christians had contradictory attitudes toward religious minorities. In fact, to a Christian mind, tolerance and intolerance were inseparable: the minorities’ religious inferiority

14Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 9. 15See Geary, “Living with Conflicts in Stateless France: A Typology of Conflict Management Mechanisms, 1050–1200” in his Living with the Dead, 125–60. 16Gampel, “Jews, Christians, and Muslims,” 11. 17Cano and Molina, “Judaísmo, Cristanismo e Islam en Sefarad.” 18Pick, Conflict and Coexistence, 1–3; Melechen, “Jews of Medieval Toledo,” 309. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 23 justified both repression and acceptance.19 Glenn Olsen has suggested that modern historians have difficulty appreciating the subtlety of the medieval understanding of tolerance, which was close to a grudging acceptance: “bearing with someone or some thing that one cannot reasonably do much about.”20 The difficulty of disengaging from the modern categories of thought is not the only reason scholars have not yet found a workable alternative to this dualistic paradigm. They are heirs to a long historiographic tradition that made the dueling visions of Spain’s supposed “tolerance” or “intolerance” into the central problem of Iberian studies.21 As Nirenberg’s work demonstrates, this shrill dichotomy dictates the terms of engagement even when a scholar consciously tries to escape either extreme position.22 One cannot help but wonder why historians are content to operate within the binary categories of a long- outdated debate, even as they argue that these categories are too crude to capture the intricacies of interfaith relations in medieval Iberia. There are other reasons to challenge the viability of the “balancing act” approach. From this perspective, the mechanism that enabled convivencia was largely self- correcting: even as everyday activities created a common sphere of interaction, violence and symbolic statements of difference maintained the lines of separation. To assert that it involved a balance between the positive and the negative aspects of minority–majority relations sounds suspiciously like a statement of an obvious fact. If there was no balance, historians would not be studying inter-religious coexistence in the first place. While the unveiling of convivencia’s “dark side” was unquestionably a constructive development in Iberian historiography, it has not made the concept into a workable analytical tool. In a certain sense, the neo-convivencia is almost as imprac- ticable and metaphysical as the original formulation. Castro’s convivencia at least aspired to be present in the mental world of the medieval communities; the new version is unequivocally a social scientist’s construct, which presumes the existence of an indeterminate mechanism that infuses social reality with just the right amount of antagonism and toleration, somehow keeping the whole system in check.23 What it does not even attempt to answer is where the hostility and the need for cooperation come from, and how the desirable balance is achieved. It is for good reason, then, that a growing number of historians try to modify the concept of convivencia or replace it with analytical categories that seem better equipped for describing the untidy realities of Jewish–Christian–Muslim coexistence in medieval Iberia. Some Spanish scholars prefer to speak of coexistencia in place of convivencia, defining it as a physical coexistence of the three communities in the same cities and neighborhoods, a coexistence, which, in their opinion, did not necessarily lead to a social integration between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. This is the view of H. Salvador Martínez, who argues that acculturation (he calls it “cultural convivencia”) was a prerogative of a small minority of non-Christians able to frequent the royal

19Tolan, “Une ‘convivencia’ bien précaire,” 385, 386. 20Olsen, “Middle Ages in the History of Toleration,” 11. 21Novikoff, “Between Tolerance and Intolerance,” 7–36. 22“The present work argues against both these positions, against a rose-tinted haven of tolerance and a darkening valley of tears, but it also borrows from both” (Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 9). 23One may also call it an “etic construct” in the sense it is usually understood by cultural anthropologists, i.e. as an analysis of human behavior from the perspective of an outside observer, using epistemological categories of social science (as opposed to an “emic,” native informant’s perspective). 24 M. Soifer court and participate in the king’s financial and artistic endeavors.24 Francisco García Fitz differentiates between “political,” “cultural,” and “social” convivencia and analyzes each of them in turn, only to conclude that convivencia is a modern myth that finds no corroboration in medieval records.25 A Canadian scholar, Brian Catlos, cuts through the Gordian knot of issues surrounding convivencia by rejecting it altogether. In his view, acculturation and endemic violence were not what characterized the position of religious minorities in the kingdom of Aragon. Instead, the fabric of interfaith relations was held together by a system of overlapping reciprocal interests and nego- tiated, utilitarian arrangement – conveniencia. In other words, religious coexistence was not a romantic affair but a marriage of convenience predicated on the minorities’ utility to Christians, which could be (and was, eventually) torn asunder under the double pressure of economic and social insecurity and growing competition.26 Convivencia is commonly understood as a distinctively Ibero-Islamic phenomenon. This view dates back to Castro, the godfather of convivencia, who remarked succinctly: “Spanish toleration was Islamic, and not Christian.”27 However, the evidence for the influence of the Islamic model on inter-religious coexistence in Christian Spain is not clear. The proponents of this paradigm usually cite the role of the dhimma system, which regulated the Muslim community’s relations with religious minorities, in providing a model, or even more loosely, an “insistent example” for the Christians to follow in their treatment of Jews and Muslims.28 However, the Islamic model of toleration was not the only “example” available to the conquering Christian armies in Spain. As Cary Nederman correctly points out, Christendom had its own tradition of accepting at least one religious minority – the Jews – whose presence among Christians was not only permissible but theologically required.29 According to St Augustine, the Jews had to be preserved as witnesses to the truth of Christian faith and a living testament to the antiquity of the Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, being essen- tial for the fulfillment of the divine plan of salvation, the Jews were to be present at the end of times.30 There is no reason why the expanding Iberian states could not have devised their own model of toleration, inspired, in part, by the Augustinian principle and the example of the Christian states to the north, and in part by the practical exigen- cies that necessitated the extension of this toleration to the large Muslim population in the newly conquered territories. The Christian and Muslim traditions of toleration had many points of intersection, probably owing to their common origin in late Roman and Byzantine legal practices.31 In northern Europe, as in Muslim Spain, the Jews were

24Salvador Martínez, La convivencia en la España del siglo XIII, 11–24. 25García Fitz, “Las minorías religiosas,” 13–56. Cf. Blasco Martínez, “A mi entender, la convivencia idílica de las tres culturas que se nos ha querido vender, no es más que un mito” (“Judíos de la España medieval,” 101). 26Catlos, “Contexto y conveniencia en la corona de Aragón;” The Victors and the Vanquished, 407. The neologism has received a positive response from some scholars: see Robinson and Rouhi, Under the Influence, 4–5. 27“La tolerancia española fue islámica y no cristiana” (Castro, España en su historia, 202). 28Burns, “Introduction to the Seventh Partida,” xxviii; Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and Christian Spain, 187–8. Mark Meyerson asserts that “Christian rulers borrowed the dhimmah model and adapted it to Christian norms,” although he also notes a “crucial difference” between the two systems. See Meyerson, Muslims of Valencia, 3. 29Nederman, “Discourses and Contexts of Tolerance,” 20–1. 30On St Augustine’s doctrine of “witness” and especially on its place in medieval scholastic theology, see Hood, Aquinas and the Jews, 10–15. 31Simon, “Jews in the Legal Corpus,” 89. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 25 allowed communal autonomy and freedom of worship, but faced discriminatory prescriptions intended to ensure separation between them and the majority society. For example, just as the so-called “Ordinances of ‘Umar” required non-Muslims living under Islamic rule to maintain an outside appearance (in clothing and dress accessories, footwear and hairstyle) that would distinguish them from the Muslim conquerors,32 the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) stipulated that the Jews were to wear distinctive clothing in order to minimize their social intercourse with Christians.33 Thus, when scholars try to pinpoint the source of this requirement in Alfonso X’s of Castile legislative masterpiece – Las Siete Partidas – it proves difficult for them to determine whether the monarch was bringing his kingdom into line with the papal legislation, or adopting the dhimma arrangements for Christian use.34 In reality, the distinguishing dress requirement was often disregarded by Jews and Christians living under Islamic rule, and remained a dead letter in most of Western Christendom, where secular rulers resisted papal interference in the affairs of their kingdoms.35 While the gap between theory and practice was a prominent feature of life for religious minorities under both Christian and Muslim rule, in Western Christendom this disparity was further accentuated by the separation between secular and religious powers. In an Islamic state, a ruler was expected to uphold the precepts of the Holy Law – the sharia – and to honor the terms of the dhimma contract enshrined in Scripture. This close entwining of religion and law made the Islamic model of toleration fundamentally unsuitable for Christian imitation.36 A Christian monarch may have been revered as a ruler anointed by God, but his exercise of power, including his authority over religious minorities, was rooted not in the Christian precepts, but in the king’s role as a lord of his territorial domain.37 He had no obliga- tion to give Jews (or Muslims, for that matter) protection under the laws of his kingdom; in fact, he could, and often did, expel them at will.38 In tying the Jews’ and Muslims’ fortunes to the decisions of individual monarchs and subjecting religious minorities to the shifting realities of secular laws, the Christian states in Iberia were no different from their northern European counterparts. Indeed, the royal charters (fueros) given to Jews and Muslims, which defined their legal status in the kingdom and regulated their relationship with other groups of settlers, had to be renewed by each successive ruler in order to retain their legal power and applicability.39 The status these fueros accorded to Jews and Muslims flowed

32Noth, “Problems of Differentiation,” 115–18. 33Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 60–70. 34In fact, some scholars do not exclude either possibility. See Burns, “Introduction to the Seventh Partida,” xxviii, xxxi; Simon “Jews in the Legal Corpus,” 86, 89. 35England, where the “Jewish badge” was immediately enforced, was an exception. See Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 66; Lewis, Jews of Islam, 51. 36Edelby, “Legislative Autonomy of Christians,” 44. 37This is the principle behind Louis IX’s Ordinance of Melun (1230). See Jordan, French Monarchy and the Jews, 132–3. 38Stow, Alienated Minority, 281–308; Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 54. 39Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and Christian Spain, 187–8; Meyerson, Muslims of Valencia, 3. On fueros, see Suárez Bilbao, Fuero judiego. Cf. Peters, Monotheists, 275: “The dhimma concluded by the Muslims with their Christian and Jewish subjects was a religious pact, guaranteed by God and sanctioned by the practice of the Prophet himself; as such it formed part of the sharia, the canon law of Islam. The Christian statute, in contrast, was a political agreement concluded by secular authorities as an affair of state. It could be abrogated by the dictating party …”. 26 M. Soifer directly from the nature of royal power at the time, and not from any attempt to mimic the dhimma model. At the end of the twelfth century, the fueros of Teruel (Aragon) and Cuenca (Castile) proclaimed that the Jews were servi regis and a property of the royal fisc (fisco).40 In practice, this meant that the king had the right to exercise sole jurisdiction over the Jews (and, according to some fueros, Muslims as well) settled in the royal domain, and that the taxes collected from the Jewish communities went directly to the royal treasury and could not be alienated without the king’s explicit permission. It would be highly misleading to interpret these taxes as the Christian equivalent of the jizya – the poll tax imposed on the subjugated religious minorities under Islam as a sign of their redemption from military duty.41 The royal claim of possessory rights over a religious minority was a highly personalized form of lordship that also surfaced in England, France, and Germany at about the same time, but that found no parallel in the Muslim world. Indeed, Islamic law never asserted that Jews and Christians belonged to a ruler’s treasury.42 These considerations should at least give pause to scholars who are advocating the idea of a major Islamic influence on the Christian model of interfaith coexistence in Iberia. The evidence has been growing for trans-Pyrenean affinities in the Christian treatment of religious minorities. One recent study that subtly undermines the thesis of Spain’s distinctiveness from the north is Mark Meyerson’s examination of Jewish– Christian coexistence in the Valencian town of Morvedre. Even though Meyerson acknowledges that in certain ways the experience of the Jews in the Crown of Aragon was unique, he contends that the kingdom’s Jewish minority was affected by the same ideological and institutional pressures that dominated interfaith relations north of the Pyrenees. Like their co-religionists in northern Europe, the Jews of Aragon were considered royal property, or “serfs of the royal treasury,” whose condition of fiscal servitude made them vulnerable to financial exploitation and inexorably drove them to abandon other occupations and take up money lending in order to satisfy the Crown’s growing appetite for taxes and loans.43 In the kingdom of Castile, mindful of the link between the repayment of Christian debts to Jews and the financial health of the royal treasury, kings even appointed special royal agents, entregadores, entrusting them with the task of collecting outstanding loans from Christians who borrowed money from Jewish moneylenders.44 The Castilian example is significant because it resembles the situation that existed in late thirteenth-century England, where the Jewish Exchequer provided a mechanism to assist the Jews in collecting the debts owed to them by Christians.45 The comparison with England is not as far-fetched as it might first appear. While it is true that the

40Powers, Code of Cuenca, 165. See also Abulafia, “‘Nam iudei servi regis sunt’” and Catlos, “‘Secundum suam zunam.’” 41Courbage and Fargues, Christians and Jews under Islam, 22–3. Robert Ignatius Burns compares the jizya to the Aragonese besant in Medieval Colonialism, 79. 42Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 52. On the concept of servi regis in northern Europe see Langmuir’s section on “‘Tanquam Servi’: The Change in Jewish Status in French Law about 1200,” in his Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 167–94. 43Meyerson, Jews in the Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 8, 176. Meyerson argues that “the Jews of Aragon suffered marked degradation and humiliation” in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; however, their condition improved in the fifteenth century, and they experienced a “renaissance” before the expulsion of 1492. See also his Jewish Renaissance. 44See Melechen, “Loans, Land, and Jewish–Christian Relations,” 203; Soifer, “Jews of the ‘Milky Way,’” 185–6, and chap. 6. 45Stacey, “Jewish Lending,” 93–7. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 27

Jewish communities in Spain were not dependent on money lending for their liveli- hood to the extent characteristic of their counterparts in England, in both kingdoms the Jews’ security and wellbeing were contingent on the needs and demands of the royal treasury. The Ashkenazi communities of the north have generally been studied in isolation from the Sephardic communities of Christian Spain. However, one would do well not to conflate “have been” with “should.”46 Such rigid compartmentalization has more to do with the traditional divisions in Jewish historiography than with the realities of Jewish experiences in medieval Europe.47 Although culturally and linguistically distinct, a Jew in thirteenth-century Toledo and a Jew in thirteenth-century Tours lived under the dominion of Christian rulers and shared streets, neighborhoods, and markets with Christian neighbors. As a tiny religious minority living in a society that was overwhelmingly Christian, the Jewish communities of medieval France and medieval Spain had more in common with each other than is often realized. A critic might object that a denial of the Islamic roots of Christian toleration in medieval Spain is tantamount to challenging Castro’s widely accepted theory that correctly identifies Islam as a major force for cultural change in Iberia. In fact, the argument’s goals are much more modest. It does not question the importance of contacts between Christians and Muslims or dispute the lasting impact of Islamic art, architecture, literature, and thought on Spanish culture and society. Rather, it suggests that when it comes to treatment of religious minorities, one cannot regard the Christian north as a “blank slate.” Castro’s assertion that the notion of religious toleration could come only from the direction of Islam is just as insupportable as his rival Sánchez- Albornoz’s argument that cultural diffusion in Spain only flowed from the Christian north to the reconquered south.48 Both positions propagate the highly problematic claim of Spain’s uniqueness and self-sufficiency, with either Castro’s Arabs or Sánchez-Albornoz’s Visigoths cast in the roles of formidable gatekeepers who protect the unpolluted realms of the Peninsula against the “corrupting” European influences.49 Castro’s convivencia and Sánchez-Albornoz’s Castilianism are both firmly rooted in the nationalist canon. Transcending this canon and the grand narratives of national identity is a yet unfinished task that requires broad interdisciplinary participation. Not surprisingly, some of Castro’s intellectual heirs, whose gaze was steadily directed south, toward Islam and its military frontier with the Christian kingdoms, inad- vertently perpetuated the nationalist myth of Spain’s unique status in medieval Europe.50 At a time when the study of marginal and subaltern populations and their treatment by the dominant society grew in popularity among the scholars of medieval northern Europe, it was perhaps inevitable that the “multicultural society” of Iberia would become something of a foil to the “persecuting society” of the north. However, this distorted picture is being rectified by scholars who have moved beyond the

46“… this history [of Sephardic Jews] is a distinct one, as is history of medieval Spain as a whole; it should be, and traditionally has been, treated as such” (Stow, Alienated Minority, 1). 47In a welcome development, Robert Chazan, in his recent history of the Jews in medieval Europe, underplays the differences between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim. He still refers to the “the unusual Iberian Jewish experience,” but at the same time notes some trans- Pyrenean affinities, such as the introduction of Jewish specialization in money lending into Spain in the thirteenth century. See his The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 91, 98. 48Tolan, “Using the Middle Ages,” 345. 49“The confrontation of Spanish self-sufficiency and the implications of Spain’s membership of the medieval European community is a recurrent feature both of the history of these centuries and of the historians’ treatment of it” (Linehan, History and the Historians, 3). 50Hillgarth, “Spanish Historiography,” 34. 28 M. Soifer portrayals of northern European societies as seedbeds of intolerance and focused instead on examples of successful coexistence between their culturally and religiously diverse communities. Historians of the northern European Jewry, the Ashkenazim, have been experimenting with convivencia-like models for years, as part of a revisionist line of argumentation that disputed the post-Holocaust master narrative of continuous anti-Jewish persecutions in northern Europe. The challenge to the so-called lachrymose conception of medieval Jewish history came in the wake of Robert Moore’s argument, in The Formation of a Persecuting Society, that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a zeal for persecution emerged in Europe that made Jews, lepers, and heretics the targets of segregation, expulsion and violence.51 Moore’s critics have pointed out that even in England, France, and Germany Jews and Christians forged a mode of interaction that enabled northern Europe’s only licit religious minority to live in relative tranquility and prosperity despite occasional outbursts of violence. As described by some scholars, this interfaith coexistence bore strong resemblance to Spain’s model of religious toleration. The case in point is Ivan Marcus’ pathbreaking study of initiation rituals among the medieval Ashkenaz. Relying heavily on anthropological research, Marcus rejects the assump- tion that the northern European Jewry lived in virtually complete isolation from Christian society. As if taking a cue from Glick’s reformulation of Castro’s convivencia as a state of arrested fusion or incomplete assimilation, he draws a parallel between the “Muslim Sephardic” and Ashkenazi acculturation, arguing that in both cases the Jews maintained the boundaries of their cultural tradition while simultaneously adopting “reworked aspects of Christian culture, in the form of a social polemical denial, into their Judaism.” He calls this process an “inward acculturation.”52 Even though Marcus – wisely – does not make use of the concept of convivencia, his idea of medieval Jewish acculturation, with its dialectical aspects of adaptation and “polemical denial,” echoes the post-Castro view of Spanish convivencia as a coexistence characterized by mutual influence and rivalry. Marcus’ conclusions resonate beyond the immediate issue of the Ashkenazi Jews’ place in northern European society. They suggest that acculturation was not specifi- cally a Sephardic or Ashkenazic, Islamic or Christian phenomenon, but that in one form or another it had a ubiquitous presence in medieval Europe. There is little doubt that the medieval European society could and did sustain a relatively high degree of religious, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity.53 This was especially true about the so-called “frontier societies,” where a recent conquest, settlement, or proximity of a military frontier created propitious conditions for cross-cultural interaction. Undoubt- edly, medieval Spain, with its ever-shifting border with Islam and militarized Christian societies is a premier example of such a region.54 But Iberia certainly does not hold a monopoly on European frontier experience. Half a century ago, Archibald Lewis characterized the entire Western European history between the eleventh century and mid- thirteenth century as “an almost classical frontier development.”55 As described by Robert Bartlett in his study of Europe’s internal expansion, a series of conquests during these pivotal centuries created a number of postcolonial environments that often

51Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society. 52Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 1–13. 53Nederman, “Discourses and Contexts of Tolerance,” 15, 18. 54Burns, Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, and Muslims, Christians, and Jews. 55Lewis, “Closing of the Mediaeval Frontier,” 475. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 29 proved favorable to assimilation and acculturation. Everywhere from Ireland to Prussia to Andalusia to Hungary to Palestine, foreign conquerors and indigenous populations faced the difficult task of reconciling their differing cultural and social worlds.56 So many frontier zones dotted the map of medieval Europe that one is tempted to speak of multiple zones of acculturation, each unique in its own way but all characterized by a coexistence of two or more religiously, culturally, or linguistically distinct communities. Further disproving the exceptionality of the Iberian case, many of these composite societies counted Jews and Muslims among their members. Because of its position on the military frontier of Western Christendom, Hungary perhaps bore the closest resemblance to Spain. Nora Berend, who has studied the relations between Christians, Jews, Muslims, and pagan Cumans in Hungary, freely applies the model of Spanish coexistence to the kingdom’s four-partite religious structure.57 As Berend shows, the influence of the surrounding Christian culture elicited a wide range of responses from the three minority communities – from partial acculturation to complete assimilation. Like Marcus’ Ashkenazi communities, medieval Hungarian Jews seem to have taken the path of “inward acculturation,” preserving their religious identity while at the same time adopting elements from the Christian environment into their everyday life and customs. A different fate awaited the kingdom’s Muslim minority, whose numerical insignificance and isolation from the Muslim world eventually doomed them to assimilation. The pagan Cumans, on the other hand, while also facing strong pressure to abandon their tradition, did not become immediately acculturated and integrated even after their conversion to Christianity by the fifteenth century.58 The kingdoms of medieval Spain were thus part of a Christendom that for most of the Middle Ages tolerated the coexistence of distinct groups.59 Across the English Channel, another conquest generated an environment in which three communities separated by religious and linguistic lines were thrust together to create a modus vivendi. In the East Anglian town of Norwich, the effects of the Norman Conquest on its political and social life were acutely felt well into the twelfth century. The town was still divided into Anglo-Norman and English municipalities, with the French- speaking Jewish community nestled in the heart of the Norman quarter.60 As Jeffrey Cohen has argued, the gradual fusion of the two rival Christian communities of Norwich into one civic and cultural whole came at the expense of the local religious outsiders – the Jews – who in the 1140s were accused of crucifying a young Christian boy from an English borough.61 Although never attacked as a consequence of the accu- sation, Norwich’s Jews remained aloof to the surrounding Christian environment. Like the rest of England’s Jewry, they tenaciously clung to their French language and culture, even as by the middle of the thirteenth century English became the language

56Bartlett, The Making of Europe, and “Colonial Aristocracies;” Berend, At the Gate of Christendom; MacEvitt, Crusades and the Christian World of the East. 57Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 3. 58Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 224–67. 59Robinson argues that for most of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the courts of Muslim al-Andalus and Christian Provence belonged to the same “courtly love” culture that spanned the Mediterranean regions of north-eastern Spain and southern France, with the taifa courts providing literary modes for the Provencal troubadours to follow. See Robinson, In Praise of Song. 60Lipman, Jews of Medieval Norwich, 14; Jessopp and James, Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, xlvi–vii. 61Cohen, “The Flow of Blood,” 40–1. 30 M. Soifer predominantly spoken in the kingdom.62 Far from illustrating the northern Jewry’s failure to integrate more fully with the Christian society, the English Jews’ loyalty to their French heritage underscores the strength of their original acculturation in early medieval France. Sylvia Tomasch, applying the kind of postcolonial approach addressed elsewhere in this issue of JMIS by Nadia Altschul, has analyzed Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to propose that the pre-Expulsion English Jews should be viewed as “internally colonized people,” whose expulsion from England did not put an end to “England’s colonialist program,” but brought about efforts to construct a “virtual Jew,” whose “otherness” helped define English Christian identity.63 The work done by Tomasch and others prompts Altschul to suggest that medieval Iberia, with its complex cultural and religious makeup, presents an ideal case for a similar appli- cation of a postcolonial approach to the study of Jewish–Christian–Muslim interaction. Postcolonial approaches address another major weakness that underlies Castro’s original formulation of convivencia: the absence of any consideration to the uneven distribution of power among the three religious communities. According to Thomas Glick’s insightful critique of Castro’s thought, in his vision, “relationships among persons of the three castes [i.e. Christians, Muslims, and Jews] were structured on a basis of parity, as if these groups were of equal demographic weights, political and military force, or cultural potency, and in complete disregard of the institutional or legal mechanisms controlling access to power.”64 Sidestepping the issue of Christian power in Castile and Aragon-Catalonia leads, at best, to an incomplete picture of cross-cultural relations.65 Increasingly, scholars are becoming convinced that a colonizing agenda informed cultural, artistic, and legal productions that until now have been understood as clear manifestations of Christian tolerance and convivencia.66 Ana Echevarría’s remarkable study of Alfonso el Sabio’s translation program, for instance, is part of a movement that takes an aim at deconstructing the colonizing agenda of a royal court and a reign that have long been emblematic of convivencia. As John Tolan reminds us, Alfonso’s purported “tolerance” is better understood as yet another affir- mation of his monarchical powers. The claim to the mantle of the king of three faiths denied the legitimacy of Muslim rulers, while his patronage of Arabic learning high- lighted his Muslim subjects’ subordination to the Castilian monarch.67 Even more indicative of Alfonso’ colonizing ideology was his policy of castellanización (Castilianization), examined in detail by David Rojinsky. According to Rojinsky’s illuminating study, Alfonso’s policy of material castellanización – repopulation of conquered lands, distribution of estates to his followers, granting of laws and privi- leges – went hand in hand with the ideological Castilianization, which meant above all the promotion of Castilian as the official written language of the government.

62Stacey, “Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century England,” 343–4. 63Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer,” 243–60. 64Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and Christian Spain, 347. 65See Jonathan Ray’s argument that the Jews in medieval Spain should be studied as individuals able to get around both royal and Jewish communal control, in his “Beyond Tolerance and Persecution.” However, I believe that Ray underestimates the ability and willingness of Christian political power to delimit what he calls “the dynamism and fluidity of Spanish society” (10). 66Echevarría argues that some of the works “translated” at Alfonso X’s court were in fact re- translations of texts that originally had been written in Latin and were designed to provide Christian polemicists with material that could further their goal of converting Muslims to Christianity. See her “Eschatology or Biography,” 151. 67Tolan, “Une ‘convivencia’ bien précaire,” 390. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 31

Rojinsky sees the newly “consecrated” vernacular of the Siete Partidas as a valuable tool in the king’s project of exerting “socio-juridical control over repopulated spaces and peoples,” among them, Muslims and Jews.68 Whether as an interfaith utopia, or as a pale Christian imitation of the Islamic dhimma model, or as a sign of Spain’s supposed exceptionality, convivencia has consistently failed on empirical grounds. It is therefore ironic that the recent trend among historians of Jewish–Christian relations in northern Europe to de-emphasize persecutions and stress the peaceful aspects of interfaith coexistence has led to an embrace of the term. In his recent upbeat assessment of Jewish–Christian relations in northern Europe, Jonathan Elukin relies on the concept to describe what he calls the generally positive Jewish experiences in medieval France, England, Germany, and Italy. In Elukin’s view, occasional bouts of anti-Jewish persecutions did little to alter the fundamentally stable nature of social relations between Jews and Christians. The endurance of these relations in the face of growing anti-Judaism and impending expulsions prompts Elukin to characterize Jewish–Christian relations in northern Europe as “convivencia in a minor key.”69 One can laud Elukin’s intention to “eliminate or at least challenge the false dichotomy between the experiences of Jews in Spain … and of Jews in northern European societies,” but his appropriation of a term loaded with a cacophony of problematic associations runs the danger of ruining the very enterprise to whose success he hopes to contribute. Convivencia should not become the Trojan horse of northern European Jewish history.70 While he is right in urging a corrective to the overly bleak image of northern Europe as a persecuting society, an equally unbalanced picture of Jewish–Christian relations that misses the distinctive features of anti-Jewish violence or downplays the significance of the difficulties faced by the Jews living in Christian kingdoms from the mid-thirteenth century and on would do just as much disservice to the field. Elukin writes that “the fundamental truth or meaning of Jewish history in the Middle Ages – if we are right to apply such a term as meaning – is the continuity of relatively stable relations between Jews and Christians.”71 Perhaps the best way to eliminate artificial dichotomies in medieval studies is to end the habit of counteracting one “meaning” of history – be it Jewish, Spanish, or any other “national” history – with another, supposedly more “accurate” meaning. Scholars of medieval Spain need to press on with their nuts-and-bolts explorations of interfaith coexistence. Paradoxically, the practical arrangements that enabled the religious minorities’ existence within the host societies remain poorly understood. There is yet much to be done in order to tease out the social, political, and cultural conventions that made coexistence possible and that eventually failed to prevent its collapse. Meanwhile, Iberianists should maintain constant dialogue with historians of interfaith relations in northern Europe, even if it means giving up the notion of Spain’s exclusivity and acknowledging the basic similarities in the Christian treatment of religious minorities north and south of the Pyrenees.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of this article for their generous and constructive criticism.

68Rojinsky, “Rule of Law and the Written Word.” 69Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart, 8–9, 136–7. 70Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart, 136–7. 71Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart, 9. 32 M. Soifer

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