“Muslim-Jewish Relations in the Fourteenth-Century Crown Of

MUSLIM-JEWISHRELAllONS IN THE FOURTEENTH-CENTURY CROWN OF ARAGON by David Nirenberg Much is written! about the relations betweenthe Christian majority of the Iberian Peninsulaand its two minorities, Muslims and Jews. Yet it is also true that the two minority groupsinteracted along many different fronts, and (in someareas) defined themselvesas much againsteach other as againstthe dominant Christians.Jews and Muslims strove to reinforce the boundariesbetween their communities physically, legally, ritually, and violently, and they constantlyjockeyed for prestigeand advan- tage overthe other in their relationswith the Christianpolity. They alsocrossed these boundariesthrough commerce,conversion, shared physical space, and other typesof intercourse.What emergesis a lateralprocess of boundarydefinition and redefinition at the bottom of what is in effect a constantlyshifting triangle of community interaction, a processwhich forms the subjectof this study. The study of minority interactionis undertakenin a historiographicvacuum. Vir- tually no work has beendone on Muslim-Jewishrelations under Christianrule in the Iberian peninsula,so that we know little of the materialinfrastructure of theserela- tions.2For this reason,a large pan of this anicle is spentdescribing the sphereswithin which Muslims andJews interacted. Without suchcontext no meaningful discussion of relations betweenthe two groupsis possible.The approachis scattershot,more a mapping of critical areasfor future study than a coherentsynthesis of accumulated knowledge. Finally, the documentspresented here are chosenbecause they cluster around issueswhich seemto have beenof greatimportance to contemporaries.They are representativeof the settings in which tensionsarose, though not necessarilyof everydaylife. It is not easyto know what Jews thought of Muslims or Muslims of Jews in the medievalCrown of Aragon. Both groupsare mostaccessible in the documentationof I)ohn Boswell and William Jordan have encouraged and supported this project for many years. I would like to thank them both for their generosity and criticism, as well as Peter Brown, Natalie Zemon Davis, Maria Teresa Ferrer, Elena Lourie, Jaume Riera, Te6filo Ruiz, and the Dissertation Writers Study Group. Earlier versions of this paper wete presented at the Fordham Medieval Conference, the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientfficas, Instituci6n Mila y Fontanals, Barcelona. 2John Boswell, The Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities under the Crown of Aragon in the Fourteenth Century (New Haven 1977), and Elena Lourie, ..Anatomy of Ambivalence: Muslims under the Crown of Aragon in the late Thirteenth Century," in her Crusade and Colonisation: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Aragon (Aldershot 1990) 72, have both dedicated valuable pages to the subject, as has, of course, Robert Ignatius Burns. 250 DAVID NIRENBERG their Christian kings, a documentation concerned with taxes, privileges, and criminal and jurisdictional complaints. Not surprisingly, Christian-Muslim and Christian-Jewish relations feature most prominently in the evidence. As for Muslim records, the emi- gration of elites from much of the kingdom (Valencia excepted), later attempts to suppress the use of Arabic, and finally the expulsion of the Moriscos all ensured that little Arabic material survives from the period. Jewish sources, too, suffered in the expulsions of 1492, and in any casewere never rich in material concering their "Ish- maelite"-Muslim-neighbors. This lack of sourcesis mentioned, not by way of excuse for what follows, but as a partial explanation for the near total disinterest historians have shown for the subject of Muslim-Jewish relations in Spain. One area of minority interaction, that of high culture, has receiveda limited amount of attention. In a recent article entitled .'Hispano-Jewish Artitudes to the Moors in the Fifteenth Century,"3 for example, Eli GutWirth argues that Jews felt a cultural affin- ity for Muslims and Islam in Spain. Some Jews, he points out, spoke Arabic and admired its qualities as a language. They respectedthe great Muslim thinkers and par- took of a culture permeated by Muslim cuisine, music, and poetry. "All this," he claims, ., is hardly compatible with a view of SpanishJewry as antipathetic and distant to Arabic culture. "4 GutWirth is probably correct in saying that Arabic high culture enjoyed prestige among learned Jews, but his model leaves much unsaid. First, the respect for Arabic culture which he eulogizes was scarcelya universal or uncontested position, even among the learned. In the mid-fourteenth century, the erudite Catalan Jew Joseph ben Sha- lom Ashkenazi attacked the Muslims as idolaters, ridiculed their pilgrimage to Mecca in scatological terms, and then continued: Considerattentively the stupidity of those of our coreligionistswho praiseand exaltthe religion of the Muslims,thus transgressingthe preceptof the law: "you must not accord them any grace" [Deuteronomy7 .2J. Not content with this, when the Muslimsprofess their faith at the hour of their assembly,those poor Jewswho haveno part of religion associatethemselves with them, recitingbeside them the "Hear 0 Israel." Then theymake the mostvivid praiseof the nation of that contemptible individual [MuhammadJ.This attitude hasthe result that they attachthemselves, they and their children, to the Mus- lims, that they vilify the blessedreligion of Israel,renege the law of the Lord of hosts, and follow the nothingnessand vanity of a despicablepeople. I am not astonishedthat the simple folk of our people allowthemselves to go praise[MuhammadJ, [but byJthose who pretend to be of the religion of Israel,I meancenain notables of our communities, proclaiming the praiseof the Muslims and testifying to their unitary faith.' Joseph ben Shalom was a Cabalist, writing against a rationalist philosophical ttadition saturated by Arabic influence. His attack against an "Islamicizing" philosophical elite 'Eli GutWinh, "Hispano-Jewish Atti£udes ...," Selarad 49.2 (1989) 237-261. 'Ibid. 242. Compare the wotk of Berpard Septimus, " 'Better Under Edom than under Ishmael,' the History of a Saying," Zion 47 (1982) 103-111 [in Hebrew]; and his "Hispano-)ewish Views of Christen- dom and Islam," fonhcoming in the proceedings of the conference BetWeen Two Worlds (University of Maryland, April 1991), to be edited by B. Cooperman. 'I translate here from the text given by G. Vajda, "Un chapitre de l'his£oire du conflit en£re la kabbale et la philosophie: La pol~mique anti-intellectualiste de Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi de Catalogne," Archives d'histoire doctnnlJie et litteraire du Moyen Age (1957) 135. I do not follow some of his interpretive inser- tions, such as "in spirit" after' 'poor," since the text could easily be implying some distinctions betWeen rich and poor, vulgar and educated. MUSliM-JEWISH RELATIONS 251 is part of a long tradition of antirationalist polemic which should not be minimized when assessingthe extent of Jewish ~nities for Muslim culture.6 Second, we really know very little about the attitudes of Muslim and Jewish cultural elites toward each other, as distinguished from their attitudes toward eachother's ideas. Here we should heed the sane words of Elena Lourie. As she points out in a different context, the notables whom Shalom Ashkenazi excoriates and Gutwirth celebratesare scholars and philosophers praising famous, but long dead, Muslim intellectuals. They formed part of an interfaith' 'Republic of Letters" whose adherents (in all three religious groups) borrowed ideas from one another in a great variety of fields, including medicine and philosophy. But cultural borrowing does not equal tolerance: Aquinas could praise Maimonides while at the same time advocating discrimination against the Jews.7 For this reason I focus here on social relations, rather than elite cultural interaction. Because of the scarcity of sources, these relations cluster around familiar settings: polemics, conversion, sexuality, moneylending, civic processions,butchershops. To historians of Christian relations with Jews or Christian relations with Muslims, this is well-trodden ground. The novelty comes not from the questions, but from the focus on minority relations. Let me begin with the words of one Muslim, admittedly of some education, about his Jewish neighbors and contemporaries. Here is how Muhammad al-RaqilI, an Ara- gonese Muslim from the city of Huesca, introduced the Arabic polemic againsttheJews he wrote in 1360:8 When I sawthat. ..the parties of the Jews grewstrong in their homesand congrega- tions, looseningtheir tonguesin lies and calumniesand insulting our Prophet, Muham- mad, upon him the blessingand peaceof Allah, denying his revelationand prophetic role, and claiming that Allah, praisedbe He, did not revealto any otherpeople but them the religious lawand scripture,and maintaining that Hagar,Ishmael's mother, peacebe upon her, had not beenAbraham's wife, peacebe upon him, but his concubine,... I then studied the Torah and the Psalmsand the Booksof the Prophets,peace be upon them, and extractedfrom them proofsand testimoniesto refute them [theJews),and an accountof how God rebuked and cursedthem, and called them unbelievers.9~ 6For more on this controversy, seeS. M. Stem, "Rationalists and Kabbalists in Medieval Allegory," Jour- nal ofJewish Studies 6 (1955) 73-86; M. Kriegel, LesJuift a Ia fin du Moyen Age dans l'Europe medi- te1Taneenne (Paris 1979) 145-179. 7SeeLourie (n. 2

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