Conversos, Inquisition, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

AuthorNirenberg, David

Two extremes attract those who write about minorities, and particularly about Jews, in any of the reigns which now constitute Spain. On the one hand there is the lachrymose view, first voiced in the historical writings of refugees from the expulsion of 1492, that life in Sefarad, as elsewhere in the Diaspora, was, for all intents and purposes, a relentless series of persecutions. Yitzhak Baer and some of his followers in the so-called Jerusalem school can be thought of as modern exponents of this view. Baer, writing in the decades surrounding the Holocaust, treated the history of the Jews in Spain as an allegory for what he took to be the predestined tragic failure of all Jewish attempts at integration. At the other extreme are the proponents of convivencia, "living together." There is no reason why the term, coined to describe the coexistence of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Iberian Peninsula, should designate only harmonious coexistence, but it has in fact acquired this meaning among certain scholars. These scholars present the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula as uniquely tolerant of religious minorities, until the expulsion of 1492. They minimize periods of violence and persecution, stress cultural cooperation, and talk frequently of a "golden age" of Jewish culture.

Norman Roth, the author of the two books under review, is the most optimistic adherent of this latter school. Elsewhere he has written that he does "not like to talk about a particular 'golden age' of Jewish culture in medieval Spain, for the whole history of that civilization was a golden age for the Jews."(1) In the introduction to the first of these books (henceforth JVM) he adopts a more tabloid style: "In truth, the real extent of convivencia in medieval Christian Spain has not yet been fully revealed. The true story is nothing short of amazing" (p. 2). Because R. has dedicated his career to piecing together that story, the appearance of these two stout volumes could have marked a defining moment in our understanding of the history of Jews and Muslims in Iberia. Instead, they provide a graphic illustration of the disabling effect this polarity has had on the study of Iberian Jewish history.

Though the two books differ in chronological emphasis, they overlap a good deal: both are attacks on Baer and the "Jerusalem school," and both begin with the premise that relations between Jews, Muslims, and Christians were extremely cordial, with moments of persecution rare if not unknown. The stated goal of JVM is to demonstrate these cordial relations, primarily between Jews and Muslims, but also between Jews and Visigoths (p. 2). CIE, on the other hand, takes these positive relations as axiomatic, leaving the evidence to a promised future manuscript (see, e.g., CIE, 10). The latter book is instead concerned with demonstrating three related theses: 1) late medieval Iberian Jews converted to Christianity of their own free will, primarily because their communities were leaderless and their culture moribund; 2) these conversos were sincere Christians who hated Jews and were hated by them; and 3) the expulsion of the Jews and the establishment of the Inquisition in Castile had nothing to do with anti-semitism either of the Catholic monarchs or of the Spanish people, but was rather the product of a small number of fanatics. These are highly provocative and potentially important theses, even if they are not entirely as novel as the author insists.(2)

JVM, the earlier of the two volumes, is also the least clear as to its argument. A certain confusion is already evident in the introduction, which announces that the book is about the Jews in Muslim (and Visigothic) Spain but then devotes itself entirely to Christian Spain and the Expulsion. The heterogeneous chapters that follow invert this curious narrative strategy, focusing primarily on Arabic and Hebrew material, but frequently (and often inaccurately) grafting on evidence from the later Christian kingdoms. Confusing as it is, however, the introduction to JVM does faithfully foreshadow R.'s most persistent concerns throughout both volumes: correcting what he perceives to be the philological mistakes of others; attacking Yitzhak Baer (and a great many others as well); and most important, stressing interfaith "cooperation" while minimizing if not ignoring incidents of conflict. R.'s explanation of the causes of the expulsion of 1492 in this introduction makes clear just how uninterested the author is in such incidents: "As is often the...

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