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BETWEEN TOLERANCE AND INTOLERANCE IN
MEDIEVAL SPAIN: AN HISTORIOGRAPHIC ENIGMA*
ALEX NOVIKOFF
University of Pennsylvania
ABSTRACT
The nature of what has been termed “tolerance” and “intolerance” in the historiography of medieval Iberia has, while rarely defined, continued to provide muchemployed organizing categories for the field. This paper reviews one focus of that
historiography from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century: the relations among
Muslims, Jews, and Christians, with respect to tolerance/intolerance and related
categories (notably, convivencia). It analyzes, among other factors, the impact on this
historiography of the intellectual, cultural, and political movements which have
affected historians of medieval Iberia. It makes a case for the importance for specialists in the field to be keenly aware of these aspects of historiography at a time
when medieval Spain is seen as offering a unique opportunity for testing theories
of interfaith relations and social interaction
The study of medieval Spain has, in recent years, experienced something of a welcome renaissance. A once marginalized clique of medieval
Hispanists now lays claim to an interdisciplinary field blossoming like
very few others in medieval studies. A noticeable focus of this Iberianoriented renaissance is the relation among Muslims, Jews, and Christians,
the study of which frequently turns on the so-called “tolerance” or “intolerance” displayed during their many centuries of coexistence. In a modern world made increasingly sensitive to the fraught relations of a
multiethnic global community, this inter-religious focus has brought forth
some of the most provocative and alluring (some will argue relevant)
studies in medieval scholarship.
A very recent addition to this aspect of medieval studies is María
Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World (2002), a book that makes no
* An earlier version of this paper was delivered at a conference at Saint Louis University,
Madrid Campus: Los Conversos y la Historia de España de 1248 a 1700, 21-22 Mayo, 2004.
I would like to thank the organizers of and participants in that conference. I also record
my gratitude to Nancy Farriss, Edward Peters, Antonio Feros, Paul Freedman, and
Jonathan Steinberg, for reading and commenting on an earlier draft.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005
Also available online – www.brill.nl
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scholarly claims other than to open up to the general audience the
largely forgotten story of how Muslims, Jews, and Christians cohabited
the Iberian peninsula for nearly seven hundred and fifty years, creating, as the subtitle of the book explains, a “culture of tolerance.”1
Menocal, a scholar of Arabic poetry and medieval literature, draws
mainly from the literary works of the period in order to paint her portrait of “the vibrant civilization of medieval Spain . . . where tolerance
was often the rule, and literature, science, and art flourished in a climate of cultural openness.”2 Among Menocal’s sources are Paul Alvarus,
the ninth-century Christian from Cordoba who wrote an eyewitness
account of the spread of Arabic culture; Moses Ibn Hazm, the eleventhcentury Hebrew poet who served at the Cordovan court; and Petrus
Alfonsi, the twelfth-century Jewish convert who first rendered into Latin
and made accessible to a Christian audience many moralistic tales of
the Hebrew and Arabic traditions. Interspersed among this remarkable
cast of characters are various glimpses into the historical setting, from
the prosperous Caliphate of Abd-al-Rahman III in the ninth century to
the last generation of Muslim rulers in Granada, with particular attention paid to Cordoba and its surrounding lands; for Cordoba was both
the intellectual and political center of Muslim Spain. Menocal’s story,
in sum, is that of the social and artistic achievements of populations of
three religions living predominantly under Muslim rule for seven centuries.
If recalling the achievements of a bygone age is one thing, explaining the social dynamic of three religious groups over a seven-hundred
year period is quite another. Menocal succinctly describes multi-ethnic
relations in medieval Spain as a “culture of tolerance.” For the historian, at any rate, this phrase raises some important questions: What
exactly does “cultural tolerance” mean? Is there a difference between
cultural tolerance and, say, social tolerance? Indeed, how do we define
tolerance tout court? Explaining such nuances, however, is not central to
Menocal’s book, which is, to be sure, an overview for the general reader
of medieval Spain’s important contribution and relevance to western
society and culture. What is in question is how this culture of tolerance
came about and, at least equally important, why it disappeared. The
answers Menocal gives to these questions are relatively straightforward.
It was the Cordoban Caliphate’s “rich web of attitudes about culture,
and the intellectual opulence that it symbolized” which was largely
1 María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians
Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little Brown & Company, 2002).
2 Here I cite from the front flap of the book.
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responsible for the arrival of learning and tolerance on the Iberian
peninsula, while it was the spread and ultimate clash between the “determinedly crusading forces from Latin Chistendom and the equally fanatic
Berber Almohads” that spelled the end for medieval Spain’s culture of
tolerance.3 Framing the literary, social and artistic achievements of
medieval Spain’s multi-religious society, Menocal concludes, was the
arrival of the tolerant attitude of the Ummayads on the one end and
Christian and Muslim fanaticism from abroad on the other.
Not all scholars have been as committed to describing medieval Spain
in terms of relative peace and tolerance. James Powers (1988), in his
analysis of the Iberian municipal militias from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, has described the social and political culture of medieval
Spain as “a society organized for war.”4 In his study Powers does not,
as Menocal does, invoke the literary, scientific, or artistic works of
medieval Iberia, but instead focuses on a very careful analysis of royal
documents, Christian and Muslim narrative chronicles, local charters
and, above all, municipal codes, or fueros. Consequently, Powers examines law as much as war and the interaction between the two that
helped shape the continuing military hostilities between Christian and
Muslim forces on the “frontier” of the Christian Reconquest of Spain.
Far from Menocal’s world of cultural openness and inter-religious tolerance, the medieval Spain that Powers describes is characterized by
military buildup, inter-faith hostilities, and outright aggression. Nor was
this phenomenon confined to the soldiers in arms. “During the twelfth
century,” Powers writes, “evidence pointed clearly to the growing
significance of warfare in the life of towns, especially in Portugal, Leon,
Castile, and Aragon.”5 The result was a behavioral model that was sustained throughout the later Middle Ages and that these townsmen eventually carried into their conquests of the New World.6
The Ornament of the World, 33, 267.
James F. Powers, A Society Organized for War: The Iberian Municipal Militias in the Central
Middle Ages, 1000-1284 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). The phrase is
borrowed from an earlier article by Elena Lourie, “A Society Organized for War:
Medieval Spain,” Past and Present 35 (1966), 54-76.
5 A Society Organized for War, 163.
6 For an alternative explanation of how the Spanish Reconquista affected the colonization of the New World, see Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “The Inter-Atlantic Paradigm:
The failure of Spanish medieval colonization of the Canary and Caribbean Islands,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, 3 (1993), 515-543. Following the lead of Angus
McKay, Stevens-Arroyo argues that throughout the medieval Reconquista, the Spanish
used repopulation, not military force, as their principal weapon of domination. The colonial experience on the islands, he concludes, provided a major stimulus to modify and
3
4
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Taking a more nuanced approach to medieval Iberian society than
Menocal but with less of a military focus than Powers is David Nirenberg’s
Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996).7
To be sure, Nirenberg is specifically interested in the forms of violence
that existed towards Jewish and Muslim minorities in the Christian
crown of Aragon and in southern France in the first half of the fourteenth century. These parameters are complemented with comparative
analyses of the treatment of lepers and prostitutes as examples of other
“minorities.” Basing his analysis on the rich archival evidence from
Aragon and Valencia, and supported by a wide range of anthropological and sociological studies, Nirenberg concludes that the violence that
was enacted against Jews and Muslims was not, as some historians suggest, part of a “pan-European persecuting mentality.” For him, it is
intelligible only within the context of specific and localized historical situations.8 Thus, the attacks on Jews during the Shepherd’s Crusade of
1320 must be understood in relation to the ways royal fiscality and
power were legitimated in southwestern France, and the massacre of
several hundred Jews at Montclus in Aragon that same year must be
understood in the context of local credit activity and the judicial and
fiscal transactions between Jews and the state.9 What links the two examples is not a larger blanket of anti-Jewish resentment but a delicate fabric of fiscal relationships which, when torn, almost inevitably resulted
in some form of violence. Or, as Nirenberg succinctly puts it, “Violence
and fiscality marched hand in hand.”10 Nirenberg also takes issue with
the “lachrymose” view of Spanish Jewish history, which sees the subjection of the Jewish community in Spain as a “vale of tears” leading
directly up to their eventual expulsion and forced conversion in the late
fifteenth century.11 Violence against Jews, like violence against other
change policies which had characterized the earlier encounters with Muslims and Jews,
thus boosting the development of a new imperial mode for later subjugating Mexico,
Peru, and much of the American continents. See also Angus McKay, Spain in the Middle
Ages; From Frontier to Empire, 1000-1500 (London: Macmillan, 1977), especially 67-78.
7 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
8 The historian with whom Nirenberg is specifically taking issue is R. I. Moore, who
made a forceful case for the medieval origins of widespread persecution in his The
Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1987).
9 Communities of Violence, chapters 2 and 3.
10 Communities of Violence, 89.
11 On the “neo-lachrymose” conception of Jewish-Arab history, and the alternative
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minorities, Nirenberg insists, must not be seen through the prism of
later (i.e. 1492) and more recent ceatastrophes (i.e. the tragedy of the
Holocaust), but as a stabilizing force in a social world very much different
from our own. But while the violence that was enacted against Jews
and other minorities may have been more “ritualized” and “symbolically driven” than the forms of violence that would appear in later centuries, Nirenberg reminds us that the realities of fourteenth-century life
on the Iberian Peninsula clearly did entail regular clashes between social
groups, not infrequently terminating in violence.
Menocal, Powers, and Nirenberg each present a very different picture of what life was like in medieval Spain, and central to each study
is the relation among Muslims, Jews, and Christians.12 Why, then, are
we presented with such contrasting assessments? How does one resolve
the discrepancies between a historical period variously described as a
“culture of tolerance,” a “society organized for war,” and “communities of violence?” Certainly, the selectivity of the historical evidence goes
a long way toward answering the question, as does the more specific
period and region being examined. It is in some sense inevitable to
arrive at different interpretive conclusions depending on whether one
privileges the literature and artistic achievements of Andalucia, the municipal codes of Castile pertaining to military endeavors, or the Aragonese
archival evidence for specific outbreaks of religious violence. But in point
of fact, the discrepancy is not new, and neither are some of the concepts and categories employed for describing relations among Muslims,
Jews, and Christians. An examination of the vexed historiography of
medieval Spain and the interaction of its three cultures will, it is hoped,
give greater context and meaning to the modern debate.
The historiography of medieval Spain is as old as medieval Spain itself.
As early as the Visigothic period, Isidore of Seville (ca. 570-636) proposed a “vision of history” in which the Visigoths who conquered
Hispania were selected by God as the people chosen to succeed Rome.13
Although the acceptance of this view of history was neither immediate
nor universal, the providential vision ultimately influenced a long series
“myth of interfaith utopia,” see also Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews
in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3-14.
12 Note, however, that Powers does not consider the role of Jews during the Reconquest.
13 See J. N. Hillgarth, “Historiography in Visigothic Spain,” La Storiografia altomedievale.
Settimane di Studio (Spoleto, 1970), 17, 295-299.
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of chronicles written after the Islamic invasion of 711. Rodrigo Jiménez
de Rada, historian of the thirteenth-century Castilian Reconquest of
most of al-Andalus, was perhaps the most influential medieval historian
to propagate this view, and in the fifteenth century the poet Juan de
Mena, members of the Santa María family (who were descended from
converted Jews), and many others also endorsed the messianic version
of Spanish history, adding to it the notion that all the kings of Spain
descend from the House of Castile.14 This “Gothic model” of Spanish
history continued in the seventeenth century with the writings of Don
Franzisco de Quevedo, who, in La España Defendida (1609) and other
later writings, defended the Roman origins of Spanish tradition and
looked to outside sources (mainly France and Germany) for the roots
of Spain’s vices and heresies.15
For the first “modern” historical assessments of Muslims, Jews, and
Christians in medieval Spain, one needs to look to the nineteenth century, when the study of history became an established social science.16
It was in the nineteenth century that the first histories of “Islamic Spain”
were written from Arabic, as well as Latin, sources. José Antonio Conde
(1765-1820) and Pascual de Gayangos (1809-1897), a political exile in
England, were among the first to introduce into historical scholarship
the Arabic writings of medieval Spain, findings that quickly captured
the imagination of writers like Washington Irving as well as the more
professional crowd of historians.17 Conde’s work in particular had a
14 Robert B. Tate, Ensayos sobre la historiografía peninsular del siglo XV (Madrid: Editorial
Gredos, 1970), 66-72. The medieval Spanish view of history is treated in an exhaustive
study by Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993).
15 There is a substantial literature on the writings of Quevedo. For his view of Spanish
history and tradition, see especially R. Seldon Rose, “The España defendida by Don
Francisco de Quevedo,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 68 (1916), 515-639;
R. Lida, “Quevedo y su España antigua,” Romance Philology 17 (1963), 253-271; J. N. Hillgarth,
“Spanish Historiography and Iberian Reality,” History and Theory 24, 1 (1985), 30-31.
16 I am less concerned here with the “national” histories of Spain that made their
appearance in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since they have been the
object of considerable historiographical analysis. Emphasis is given to the works that, in
some form or another, pay particular attention to interfaith relations during the “coexistence” of Muslims, Jews, and Christians on the Iberian Peninsula.
17 José Antonio Conde, Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España, 3 vols. (Madrid:
Imprenta que fue de Garcia, 1820-21); Pascual de Gayangos, Escritores en prosa anteriores
al siglo XV, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 51 (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1884);
and idem, “Language and Literature of the Moriscos,” British and Foreign Review 8 (1839),
63-95; Washington Irving, The Alhambra: A Series of Tales and Sketches of the Moors and
Spaniards (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1832).
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significant impact on the study of medieval Spain. His History of the
Dominion of the Arabs in Spain (translated into English in 1854) was the
first to set the Islamic invasion of 711 and the conquest of Granada in
1492 as the basic framework which has been accepted by scholars of
Islamic Spain ever since.18 Inspired, no doubt, by the nascent positivism
of his contemporaries Auguste Comte and Leopold von Ranke, Conde
made plain his desire to give an objective view of the past: “I desire
only to establish the truth, and . . . [seek] earnestly to be rigidly impartial.” Yet his comments on Arab culture suggest a rather polemical view
of the evolution of Muslim history. In the prologue to the first volume
of his History, Conde expressed, on the one hand, his desire to vindicate Spanish Muslim culture before the eyes of his European contemporaries while, on the other, stating his firm belief that Arab literature
had constantly degenerated since the expulsion of the Arabs from Spain,
“until they have at length arrived at the deplorable ignorance into which
they are now sunk, not those of Africa only, but of the Orient also.”19
Conde may have preferred to see himself as laboring to recover the
memory of an important era in Spanish history, but in doing so, he
could not help but make the comparison between what he saw as the
golden age of the (Spanish) Muslim past and the deplorable state of the
(non-Spanish) Muslim present. Or, as he said of Arab literature, “Their
only good and valuable works are those of old times” (ibid., 4).
Also writing in the mid-nineteenth century was Richard Ford, one
of the first English historians to explore the history and culture of Islamic
Spain. His enormously popular Hand-Book for Travelers in Spain (1845)
was the first scholarly work to make a documented case for the vast
influence of Islamic culture upon Christian Spain. In his Hand-Book,
Ford gave detailed descriptions of the Spanish countryside, the architecture, and the local customs. For Ford, the architecture left by the
Islamic presence in Spain was every bit as Spanish as the cathedrals of
the Castilian bishops. Indeed, for Ford, the Spain of the mid-nineteenth
century was the product of centuries of both Islamic and Christian cultures. The book would prove an invaluable guide for generations of
amateur historians and travelers in Spain, but the collateral view of
18 José Antonio Conde, History of the Dominion of the Arabs in Spain, trans. Mrs. Jonathan
Foster, 3 vols. (London: H. G. Bohn, 1854-5). The historiographic context of the writings of Conde and Gayangos is provided in James T. Monroe, Islam and the Arabs in
Spanish Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 50-83.
19 Conde, History, 4.
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Spanish history and culture did not have universal appeal. In his history of Spanish Mozarabs (or Christians living under Muslim rule),
Francisco Javier Simonet strongly rejected any Islamic influence on the
medieval Christian culture of Spain, instead placing heavy emphasis (no
doubt too much emphasis) on the role that Christians played in Andalusian
society and culture.20 Simonet even went so far as to deny the Andalusian
Arab historians any legitimacy in the representation of Islamic or Arab
culture, claiming that most of them, including such authors as Ibn
Hayyan and Ibn Hazm, were racially “Spaniards” (though Islamized)
and descended from Hispano-Romans.21 In Simonet’s account, the
Mozarabs were heroes who underwent persecution and martyrdom at
the hands of Muslim rulers and ultimately contributed to the “restoration” of a “new Spain” (ibid., vii). Simonet, it would seem, was giving
the “Gothic” view of Spanish history fresh wind, making use of his linguistic and archival skills to endorse the belief in an unbroken Spanish
history extending back through the entire Middle Ages.
If the history of Islamic Spain first garnered wide recognition among
nineteenth-century historians, so did the history of Spanish Jewry. In
1847 Adolfo de Castro published a short history of the Jews in Spain,
covering the period from the time of their settlement to the beginning
of the nineteenth century, devoting a considerable portion of the book
to comparing the Jews under Christian rulers to the Jews under Muslim
rulers. Like Conde, de Castro was also inspired by positivist ambitions:
“I write this history dispassionately and impartially—passion and partiality belong not to me. I neither am a Jew, nor a descendent from
Judaizers [sic]. My sole aim is to stand up for the truth—a rule by
which every historian ought to be guided.”22 De Castro proceeded from
this declaration to offer a chronologically ambitious portrait of Spanish
Jewry, examining how Jews were successively treated (or mistreated)
under Roman, Visigothic, Muslim, and Catholic rulers. He unequivocally placed the hardest times for the Jews within the periods when they
were under Catholic law. “While the Goths continued in the Arian faith,
the Jews lived free from oppression; but as soon as the former were
converted to Christianity, the unhappy Hebrews were cruelly persecuted
Although completed in the late 1860s, the history was first published only in 1897.
Francisco Javier Simonet, Historia de los Mozárabes de España deducida de los mejores y
más auténticos testimonios de los escritores Cristianos y Arabes (Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1967
[1897]), vii, xxiv-xxv.
22 Alfonso de Castro, The History of the Jews in Spain, trans. Edward D. G. M. Kirwan
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1851 [1847]), 3.
20
21
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by them.”23 The same language is used to separate the treatment of
Jews under Arab versus Catholic monarchs:
As the Hebrews were not persecuted by the Arabs, the Christians
suffered the former to live in peace in their territories. In those times
flourished many learned Jews, particularly at Córdova. The Christians
as soon as they began to conquer cities began also to oppress the
Hebrews, and in proportion to the number of the cities they acquired,
did they increase their oppression of that race (ibid., 241).
De Castro’s overall impression of the history of Spanish Jews was not
a bright one. Seemingly any religious conviction other than Catholicism
would yield a less oppressive treatment of the Jews. The history of the
relation between Jews and their rulers in Iberia, de Castro concluded,
was one of intermittent oppression and persecution, but nothing that
would merit being called acceptance, or even tolerance.
De Castro’s history of the Jews in Spain was one of the more widely
read histories, translated into English by a Cambridge don just three
years after its publication, but it was by no means the only nineteenthcentury work to focus specifically on Spanish Jewry. The next Spanish
author to embark on the history of Spanish Jews was José Amador de
los Rios, one of the most prolific historians of the nineteenth century.
He published his first findings on the political and literary history of
the Jews in 1848, noting the shift from the “tolerance” of Alfonso VIII,
Ferdinand III and the stipulations of the siete partidas to the “persecutions of minorities” under Ferdinand IV and Alfonso XI.24 Further
research on the subject led him to publish in 1875-1876 his monumental Historia social, política y religiosa de los Judíos de España y Portugal in
three volumes.25 This study, which surpassed in length Meyer Kayserling’s
1861 treatment of the same subject,26 purposed to tell the story of the
Jewish “contribution to the glory and growth of the intellectual culture
of Iberia.”27 But Rios was keenly aware of how fragile relations were
between Christians and Jews. He also criticized historians of the preceding
Castro, History of the Jews, 241.
José Amador de los Rios, Estudios históricos, políticos y literarios sobre los Judíos de España
(Madrid: M. Diaz, 1848), 160-161, 255-260.
25 José Amador de los Rios, Historia social, política y religiosa de los Judíos de España y
Portugal, 3 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de T. Fortanet, 1875-6).
26 Meyer Kayserling, Geschichte der Juden in Spanien und Portugal, 2 vols. (Berlin: Julius
Springer, 1861-7).
27 José Amador de los Rios, Historia, I, xv.
23
24
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century for exaggerating the “tolerance” and prosperity Jews received
under Cordovan caliphates, favoring a more mitigated evaluation of
Spanish Jewish history. In the many forms of works that have come
down to us, Rios wrote,
That hard-working and intelligent [Hebrew] flock always appears possessed of a surprising energy. This makes them worthy of being studied seriously, especially when it is considered that, either rising out of
some antiquated notion of prosperity, or involved in bloody persecutions, their love for work and their zeal for science never dies. These
highly legitimate virtues have for a long time provided them with the
tolerance, if not the respect, of their rulers.28
But this tolerance, Rios also pointed out, did not last, for the growing
success of the Christian Reconquest ushered in “an age of hatred and
intolerance,” during which the Jewish people received “a similar fate as
that suffered by the conquered Saracens” (ibid., 165). Indeed, persecution and eventual expulsion would befall both the Jews and the Muslims
of Iberia.
The last great historian of the nineteenth century to write on the
social relations between Christians and Jews was also the first great
American medievalist: Henry Charles Lea. His three-volume History of
the Inquisition in the Middle Ages (1888) and his four-volume History of the
Inquisition of Spain (1906-7) still stand as landmark achievements in the
field and have secured his reputation as “the greatest historian of nineteenth-century America and the most accomplished American medievalist before Charles Homer Haskins.”29 Throughout his life, and in much
of his writings, Lea was concerned, seemingly obsessed, with the rise of
the Inquisition and the changing face of Christian-Jewish relations in
late medieval Spain. A short essay of his in the American Historical Review
(1896) captured the essence of what Rios had argued before him and
set the tone for a debate that has not yet subsided:
The terrible massacres of the Jews, in 1391, form a turning point in
Spanish history. They mark the end of the ages of toleration, during
which the peninsula afforded a refuge to the unfortunate children of
Israel, and the commencement of the fierce spirit of persecution which
Ibid., 2. For Rios’s criticism of eighteenth-century historians, see 165, n. 1.
Edward Peters, “Henry Charles Lea (1825-1909),” in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical
Studies on the Formation of a Discipline, eds. Helen Damico and Joseph B. Zavadil (New
York: Garland, 1995), I, 89.
28
29
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rendered the Inquisition inevitable, which expelled the Jews and Moors,
and which, by insisting on the absolute uniformity of belief, condemned
Spain to the intellectual and material lethargy that marked its period
of decadence.30
Although Lea was attempting to shed light on a previously neglected
document by the inquisitor Ferrand Martinez (he mentioned that Rios
was apparently unaware of it), his interpretation of late medieval Spain
was clearly not new, although it may have been to his American audience.31 What Lea did contribute, however, was an explicit division of
Spanish history into an early age of toleration (i.e. before 1391) and a
later period of persecution (i.e. the rise of the Inquisition after 1478).
Not surprisingly, this thesis was taken up in greater detail in his multivolume History of the Inquisition of Spain, where he traced, among other
things, “the conversion of the Spaniards from the most tolerant to the
most intolerant nation in Europe.”32 In the first volume of his history
of the Spanish Inquisition, Lea was, above all, concerned with Christian
Spain and the motives that led to the expulsion of the Jews and the
Moors (or Muslims) in the late fifteenth century, but he also offered
some remarks on the relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews
in Islamic Spain:
During the long struggle of the Reconquest, the social and religious
condition of Spain was strangely anomalous, presenting a mixture of
races and faiths whose relations, however antagonistic they might be
in principle, were, for the most part, dominated by temporal interests
exclusively. Mutual attrition, so far from inflaming prejudices, led to
mutual toleration, so that fanaticism became reduced to a minimum
precisely in that corner of Christendom [al-Andalus] where a priori
reasoners have been tempted to regard it as especially violent (ibid., 45).
Like Rios, with whom he corresponded, Lea seemed willing to accept
an early stage of tolerance in Spain. It was the transition from tolerance to intolerance that was, from his historical perspective, so critical
to understanding the origins of the medieval and later Spanish Inquisitions.
30 Henry Charles Lea, “Ferrand Martinez and the Massacres of 1391,” American Historical
Review 1, 2 (1896), 209.
31 Rios, Estudios, 78-79. Amador de los Rios describes the bloody event, but stresses
that the “times of intolerance passed, and it would be truly incorrect for the present
generation to look at the truly unequal facts in the same way.”
32 Henry Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York: Macmillan, 19067), I, 35.
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The early twentieth century saw a great proliferation in medieval
Hispanic studies. Julián Ribera (1858-1934) examined the impact of
Arabic on medieval Spanish culture and institutions, drawing attention
to the Christian assimilation of Muslim juridical institutions, system of
education, and music. Miguel Asín Palacios (1871-1944) studied the
impact of Islam on medieval Christian theology and literature, and
Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1856-1912) pioneered the field of comparative philology and literary history. But the greatest student of medieval
Spanish history was Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869-1968), a pupil of
Menéndez y Pelayo. Although most of Pidal’s work concentrated on the
medieval origins of the Spanish language and the literary history of the
country (for, like his teacher, he was a philologist by training), he also
made profound contributions to the Spanish ethnic sense of self, a development he understood as having its origins in the high Middle Ages.
In Orígenes del español (1926), Pidal laid out the cultural and ethnic history of Castile and León through the eleventh century, stressed the
influence of Mozarabic culture brought there by Christians fleeing alAndalus, and traced the linguistic origins of Romance dialects from
Latin. It was also in this work that Pidal developed the notion of convivencia (coexistence), or norms struggling with each other, a term he
had introduced some years earlier in a discussion of the linguistic and
cultural differences between Iberian Spanish and Latin American Spanish.33
Using a historical-linguistic approach, Pidal compared Mozarabic Spain,
the kingdoms of Asturias and León, the Navarro-Aragonese regions, and
the county and kingdom of Castile, tracing the story of the political
events that determined the spread of each of the dialects through conquest and colonization. Here he also applied the neo-Lamarckian evolutionism of August Schleicher to his research and concluded that the
Castilian language stabilized early by defeating competing dialectical
norms. These ideas, like so many others articulated in Pidal’s work,
would play a major role in the Castilian regionalism/nationalism of
Franco’s regime (1936-1975).34
Pidal’s participation in the historiography of Spain’s multi-ethnic
medieval past can be seen in two principal endeavors: first, his long-
33 Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes del español; estado lingüístico de la Península ibérica hasta
el siglo XI (Madrid: Imprenta de la Libreria y casa editorial Hernando, 1929); Idem, “La
Lengua Española,” Hispania, 1, 1 (1918), 13.
34 María Eugenia Lacarra, “La utilización del Cid de Menéndez Pidal en la ideología
militar franquista,” Ideologies and Literature 3 (1980), 95-127.
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standing fascination with the poem and the figure of the Cid, culminating in his immensely popular La España del Cid (1929; abridged in
English as The Cid and His Spain, 1934), and second, his reaction to the
polemical debate between Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz,
discussed below, in which he sided with the latter. In The Cid and His
Spain, Pidal set out to restore the historical figure of Rodrigo Diaz (El
Cid) to Spanish history by offering a broad account of Spanish society
in eleventh-century Castile. He attacked the nineteenth-century Dutch
Arabist Reinhart Dozy for his portrayal of the Cid as a kind of noble
brigand and, instead, presented him as embodying the spirit of Castilian
and Leonese imperialism, a hero in the long struggle against Islam and
a model of feudal virtue. In the concluding remarks to the book (nearly
500 pages in its English abridgment), Pidal drew on his profound knowledge of medieval Spain and engaged directly the existing perception of
Spain’s intolerant past: “It has been said the religious feeling of medieval
Spain was exacerbated by the struggle against Islam. But far from finding
in religion a spirit scorched by the hot winds of the African desert, we
see that it is precisely in the Middle Ages that it shed most of its racial
intolerance. . . . War was waged upon the Moors for the harm they did
and not for any religious motives.”35 And yet, just pages later, Pidal
highlights the importance of the religious nature of Reconquest, stressing that it “should be considered, not from the peninsular point of view
alone, but in relation to the world struggle between Christendom and
Islam (ibid., 462).” Pidal may have wished to show the Middle Ages in
as sympathetic a light as possible, but a patriotic, Castilian-centered,
and ultimately Catholic vision of Spain’s medieval past was as strongly
embedded in his sense of Castilian history as it was in Simonet’s history of the Mozarabs. Nor would it diminish following the Spanish revolution of 1937-39. Pidal’s historically-based political views, and particularly
his assertion of the existence of a popular nationalism in medieval Castile,
were repeated between 1944 and 1950 in a series of articles in the
Revista de Estudios Politicos, the ideological voice of the Franco regime,
where his vision of Castilian hegemony over other Spanish kingdoms
was quickly raised to the level of nationalist dogma.
The most heated, and now celebrated, debate over Spain’s multi-religious past erupted in mid-century between two Spanish exiles: Américo
Castro, active in the United States, and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz,
Ramón Menéndez Pidal, The Cid and His Spain, trans. Harold Sunderland (London:
J. Murray, 1934), 456.
35
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active in Argentina. Both historians were formally associated with Madrid’s
Center for Historical Studies, the renowned center for the study of
Hispanic language and literature directed for many years by Pidal until
it was abolished by the Franco regime in 1939. Castro first provoked
the debate with the publication of España en su historia: cristianos, moros,
y judíos in 1948 (translated and revised into English as The Structure of
Spanish History [1954] and revised again as The Spaniards: An Introduction
to their History [1971]).36 This thoroughly revisionist, and indeed monumental, account of Spanish history proposed a new interpretation of
“Spanish” society in the Middle Ages, one characterized not by the
fixed and eternal entity of Spanish culture, a fallacy Castro labeled
“pan-Hispanism,”37 but by the Spanish influence and interaction with
its Muslim enemies and Jewish minorities. In describing this influence
and interaction Castro avoided words like culture, but instead proposed
the term morada vital (which he himself translated as “the dwelling place
of life”). Castro also borrowed Pidal’s notion of convivencia, and included
it within a series of anthropologically-driven neologisms meant to explicate the unique nature of medieval Spain’s multi-religious, multi-ethnic
society. Thus, for Castro, the origins of Spanishness (Hispanidad) can
only be found in the centuries after the Muslim invasion of 711, where
the functional context (vivedura) and conscious experience (vivencia ) of
three castes living together (convivencia) produced a Christian assimilation
of Muslim and, to a lesser extent, Jewish society. This, Castro would
later emphasize, formed the basis of the reality (realidad) of the Spanish
past and present.38 Understanding this past involved overcoming the
prevalent insecurity (inseguridad) among Spanish historians, and Spaniards
in general, and the long-established tendency to affirm and reject the
Spanish self simultaneously (vivir desviviéndiose).39 Indeed, for Castro, “Spain”
36 The revised 1971 title included “Spaniards” rather than “Spanish” in order to
emphasize the personal, rather than national, aspect of this cultural interaction.
37 Castro did not single out the specific authors whose views he was criticizing. Some
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians who were influenced by the eternal and unchangeable definition of Spanishness (i.e., the Spaniard as a stoic, sober,
courageous, individualistic man) include Ángel Ganivet, Miguel Unamuno, M. Criado
de Val and, to a lesser degree, R. Menéndez Pidal. This view, as we mentioned earlier, harks back to the writings of medieval and early modern writers such as Jimenez
de Rada and Franzisco de Quevedo.
38 Castro’s notion of the “realities” of Spanish history was emphasized in the title to
the revised Spanish version of España en su historia, which was published as La realidad
histórica de España (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1954).
39 Castro, España en su historia: cristianos, moros y judíos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada,
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and “Spaniards” are terms which, in their cultural sense, only acquire
meaning after the thirteenth century, when the political supremacy of
the Reconquest succeeded in uniting, if ultimately eliminating, the three
religious castes.
Castro’s search was for the origins of the Spanish people, which he
located amidst the convivencia of Christians, Muslims and Jews. But he
did not ignore the more familiar concept of tolerance. In fact, Castro
credited Islam with having introduced the “horizon of tolerance” to the
Spanish peninsula, its origins being in the character of the Koran, which
was, by virtue of its syncretism of Islamic beliefs with those of the JudeoChristian tradition, a monument of tolerance in itself.40 This had practical benefits too, for “religious tolerance and the harmonious life together
with Mohammedanism and other faiths facilitated the exploitation of
the conquered countries, and offered the Moslem the possibility of
expanding his interests in the changing aspects of life from the Euphrates
to the Ebro.” This benefit was compounded, Castro believed, by the
fact that “Moslem asceticism and mysticism (Sufism) were bound to
make tolerance (or indifference to dogma) the very center of their religious experience, and were based on the love of God, on the rapture
of the soul, and not on knowledge.”41 It was from this Islamic precedent that a “medieval Spanish tolerance” emerged, “a connection that
must not be forgotten.” And if this tolerance persisted, it was not on
theological grounds, for one does not observe the same tolerance elsewhere in the Middle Ages, but only as the result of a modus vivendi
specific to the Spanish experience. This paradigm of tolerance ceased,
Castro also explained, when the “totalitarianism” of belief (that is, the
absence of the distinction between the religious and the secular) eventually forced the Moors and the Jews to become fanatically intolerant.
Thus, “the Spaniards, molded in their structure by the historical impulse
of three beliefs, were tolerant because of the exigencies of politics, and
intolerant because of the totalitarianism, omnipresent character of their
belief.”42
1948), 17-45; Idem, The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1954), vii-ix, 3-59; Idem, The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971), 136-173.
40 España, 207; Structure, 221-2; Spaniards, 498-499.
41 España, 207; Structure, 222.
42 Structure, 229; Spaniards, 499-500. This passage was added to the later editions of
his work.
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Castro’s reinterpretation of Spanish history as a fusion of cultures
provoked a number of critical responses,43 but none as detailed and
polemical as Claudio Sánchez-Albonoz’s two-volume España: un enigma
histórico (1956; translated into English as Spain: A Historical Enigma, 2
vols., 1975). Sánchez-Albornoz, then the leading authority on medieval
Spanish institutional history, challenged Castro’s account of Spanish history and culture as being the product of influence and interaction with
other cultures. He insisted that it was an essential Hispanidad that transformed most of the alien cultural elements that entered the Iberian
Peninsula, including Muslims and Jews. Thus, the Muslims of al-Andalus
were not really Arab Muslims at all, but Spanish “Islamites” who had
“pure” Spanish lineage and “were unable to transmit a functional Arabian
structure which they lacked.”44 And the Jews, he explained, were likewise independent, and indeed antithetical, to the collective spirit of the
Spaniards.45 Also central to Sánchez-Albornoz’s conception of what was
so Spanish about Spanish history was the centuries-long Reconquest of
the Iberian Peninsula, his interpretation of which derived in no small
measure from Pidal’s affirmation of the religio-nationalistic nature of
that epoch-making struggle. For centuries, Sánchez-Albronoz wrote,
The struggle against Spanish Islamites was not the undertaking of lordly
minorities as was, at the time, the majority of the wars in Western
Europe, but it was a national task in which the masses participated.
The fight was not for dynastic interests, desires or regional ambitions
or the familiar hatreds or furies as occurred on the other side of the
Pyrenees, but for the freedom of the kingdom of the Church.46
It was this struggle for religious unity, from the first victory at Covadonga
(722) to the final one at Granada (1492), which defined the Spanish Middle
Ages and likewise embodied the true character of the Spanish people.
43 Among the many critical responses aroused by Castro’s book, see especially Eugenio
Asenio, “La realidad histórico de España,” Modern Language Notes 81 (1966), 595-637; and
Idem, “La peculiaridad literaria de los conversos,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 4 (1967),
327-351. For a defense of Castro’s views against Asenio’s criticisms, see A. A. Sicroff,
“Americo Castro and His Critics: Eugenio Asenio,” Hispanic Review 40, 1 (1972), 1-30.
44 Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Spain, A Historical Enigma, trans. C. J. Dees and D. S.
Reher (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1975), I, 20. This is from the translated preface to the second edition.
45 For a detailed critique of Sánchez-Albornoz’s view of medieval Spanish Jewry, see
Benzion Netanyahu, “Sánchez-Albornoz’ View of Jewish History in Spain,” in his Toward
the Inquisition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 126-155.
46 Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, España: un enigma histórico (Buenos Aires: Editorial
Sudamericana, 1956), 310; Spain, A Historical Enigma, 304.
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Among the many aspects of Castro’s interpretation of Spanish history that invited attack from Sánchez-Albornoz was the language and
terminology used to describe the relations among Christians, Muslims,
and Jews during the Middle Ages. Perhaps not surprisingly, given its
long historiography and its centrality in Castro’s discussion of Spanish
history, the question of tolerance and convivencia proved an especially
contentious point. In one of the more polemical passages of his book,
Sánchez-Albornoz offered his own interpretation of what tolerance does
and does not mean for the Spanish Middle Ages:
Medieval Hispano-Christian tolerance? Yes, tolerance interested or generous, suspicious or warm, vigorous or limited, but tolerance of the
princes and of the lay and ecclesiastical aristocracy. Tolerance of the
minority that had the historical responsibility of the government of
the kingdom and understood the goods and evils that peaceful coexistence (convivencia) with Jews and Moors or their fierce persecution
could bring for the wealth and the culture of the society which they
ruled. Tolerance of the leading classes that were taking advantage of
the services of the Hebrew and Muslim peoples and did not suffer
from their rivalry. Tolerance of the group that, because of the particular direction of the weathercock of its destiny, sacrificed its loyalty
to national ideals to its desire for power and wealth or which, for its
greater culture, overcame in itself the exalted passions that moved
the masses. . . . Well then, the exalted vital passion and the ardent
religious enthusiasm do not go well with the practice of tolerance. To
triumph over the foolish inclination of man to suppress the adversary,
tolerance requires a singular temperamental coldness, coolness in faith,
or a great reasoning capacity and an integral culture. . . . Medieval
Hispano-Christian tolerance? Yes, but tolerance of the minorities, not
of the people, moved by passion and inflamed with fervor for the
divine war. Popular intolerance grew as the people, not finding bellicose or colonizing channels for the venting of their impetus for action,
looked to domestic life and clashed both with the aristocracy, who
indulged in the political power from the Trastamaras, and with the
Jews who, protected by the kings and the two nobilities, possessed
wealth and the most lucrative professions.47
Notions of a medieval convivencia among cultures and the “tolerance” of
minorities were not simply among the issues of contention between the
Castrian and Albornozan interpretations of the “real” nature of Spanish
history and the true origins of the Spanish people; they were at the
47
España, 297-9; Spain, A Historical Enigma, 293-5. Translation modified.
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very heart of the debate. But if Sánchez-Albornoz was the most polemical defender of a pure Spanish history and one in a long line of such
historians to do so, he was also the first to seriously question the meaning and appropriateness of such terms as convivencia and tolerance.
Regrettably, his critique was born of a very nationalistic view of Spanish
history and a very polemical approach to writing history.
At the same time that the controversy between Castro and SánchezAlbornoz was playing out, two leading Jewish historians were at work
on multivolume histories of Spanish Jewry: Yitzak Baer (1888-1980) and
Eliyahu Ashtor (1914-1984).48 Baer devoted his life to studying the Jews
of Spain, a career that spanned two world wars and the first thirty-five
years of the state of Israel, where he lived and taught after his home
community of Halberstadt in Germany was destroyed during the Second
World War. Exhaustive research in the archives of Spain in the 1920’s
resulted in a two-volume compendium of documents relating to the Jews
in Christian Spain.49 It was mainly on the basis of this research, and
on the summation of documents compiled by Jean Régné and Ernesto
Martinez Ferrando,50 that Baer wrote his masterpiece, Toledot ha Yehudim
biSefarad ha Natzrit (1945, translated into English from the 1959 Hebrew
edition as A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols., 1961 and 1966).
Covering the period from “the age of the Reconquest” to the expulsion in 1492, Baer offered far more than a mere narrative of the history of the Jews in Spain. His purpose was to provide a didactic account
of Jewish history and culture, drawn from the richest and most tragic
period in this history. Written in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s (a
first draft was already completed in 1938), Baer’s study might seem odd
in its turn toward the Iberian peninsula in order to capture and reveal
the essence of the Jewish people, but it was precisely because of the
long centuries of Jewish-Christian interaction in medieval Iberia that
Spain provided Baer with the ideal society to study. What was to be
48 A recent and penetrating essay by Patricia Skinner addresses the topic of medieval
Jewish historiography and offers another context in which to understand Baer, Ashtor
and Jewish historians’ handling of medieval Jewish-Christian relations. See Patricia Skinner,
“Viewpoint: Confronting the ‘Medieval’ in Medieval History: The Jewish Example,” Past
and Present 181 (2003): 219-247.
49 Fritz Baer, Die Juden im Christlich Spanien, 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie-verlag, 1929 and
1936).
50 Jean Régné, Catalogue des actes de Jaime I, Pedro III et Alfonso III, rois d’Aragon concernant les Juifs (12-13-1291) (Paris: Durlacher, 1911); Ernesto Martinez Ferrando, Catálogo
de la documentación relativa al antiguo reino de Valencia, 2 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta Góngora,
1934).
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found in Iberia was “not simply a history of the Jews in a specific country but a laboratory wherein Baer believed one could view the way in
which Jews faced the greatest challenge of their existence: the struggle
of Judaism vs. Christianity.”51 The result was an historical study that
has yet to be surpassed.
Tightly woven into the History of the Jews in Christian Spain are Baer’s
personal philosophy of Judaism and his perception of what medieval
Spain reveals about the Jewish people. For Baer, Judaism is mythical,
mystical and non-rational, its greatest enemy being rational scientific
thought. Messianism is the force that sets the Jews apart and is a vestige of the glorious period of the Jews’ religio-national independence.
Judaism does possess an inner core that guides its fate, but this does
not prevent Jews from being distracted from their faith and corrupted
by outside influences. The Jews of medieval Spain provide the perfect
example. Under Muslim rule the Jews were indeed granted a relative
amount of social mobility, but this, Baer argued, ultimately exerted a
negative influence. “Political ambitions, the passions for erotic experience, the desire for rational understanding penetrated the Jewish community,” and this was contrary to the teachings of the Mishnah, even
though it refined Judaism’s religious and political ideologies.52 The Jewish
contact with the exotic tendencies of the courts of al-Andalus would
have a deep effect on the Jews of the later period. It was thus that “the
patterns of life developed in the small Moslem states laid the foundations of Jewish existence in Spain under Christian rule” (ibid., 38).
Nevertheless, the transfer of Jewish culture from the princely courts of
the Muslim south to the more decentralized regions of the Christian
north (prompted by the invading armies of the Almohads and the
Almoravids) provided a change of environment that would in some ways
benefit the Jewish community. “No longer was the ideology of a small
aristocratic upper stratum to dominate” the Jewish community, for in
the Christian north the “unscrupulous politician [Baer’s image of the
Golden Age courtier] now met with the simple, sober townsman and
the superstitious villager as well as the pious ascetic and the rapt mystic” (ibid., 187-189). Within the Christian orbit, because of less control
and fewer temptations, Jews were able to be true to their traditions.
Baer may have preferred Jewish life under Christianity to that under
51 Benjamin R. Gampel, “Introduction” in Yitzhak Baer, A History of the Jews of Christian
Spain, trans. Louis Schoffman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992), I, xxiii.
52 A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, I, 37.
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Islam, but he was no less convinced that a venomous hatred pervaded
Christian attitudes toward the Jews, a hatred that would ultimately prevail within the ruling echelons of society. What led Baer to give a more
favorable appraisal of Jewish life in Christian Spain was therefore not
the better relations they enjoyed with their Christian neighbors, but the
socio-economic situation brought about by the centuries-long Christian
Reconquest of the peninsula. So long as the Christian kings were occupied with fighting the Muslims, Baer suggested, Jews were allowed to
assume “the functions of a virtually autonomous political body” (ibid.,
212). In a certain sense, then, the glories of Castilian and Aragonese
Jewry were accidents of history, the side effects of an episode in Spanish
history in which the Jewish community had no real control. The success of the Reconquest would, in the end, usher in the demise of Jewish
religious and political autonomy, and indeed residency, in Spain. Once
Granada was conquered and the Muslims were defeated, “the political
foundation of the Spanish Jewish community was undermined[,]” and
expulsion was only a step away.
Baer’s retelling of the history of Spanish Jewry from the eleventh to
the fifteenth centuries inevitably leaves one with a deep sense of historical paradox. The Jews living under Christian dominion were best
able to perform their religious and communal activities despite the ongoing hostilities between Christians and Muslims and despite the inevitability of their expulsion. Baer was quick to note this paradox:
History brought one of the most creative Jewish communities of the
Diaspora into collaboration with one of the most gifted peoples of
Christian Europe, the Spaniards. Far-reaching historical developments,
affecting both groups, carried this association to dramatic heights and
brought it to a tragic end. The war against their Moslem neighbors
caused the Spaniards to become at once the most tolerant and the
most fanatical people in medieval Christendom. The political objectives of the Reconquest opened up to the Jews broad opportunities for
outwardly directed growth, but its religious motivation aroused the zeal
of the Christians and subjected the internal religio-ethnic existence of
the Jews to a severe trial (ibid., 2-30).
Baer asserted the centrality of the Reconquest in late medieval Spain,
but gave special attention to Jewish communities. His archival work
with Hebrew manuscripts allowed him to portray Jewish history from
within, giving a voice to the social and spiritual life of Spain’s Jewish
community in a way that had been largely neglected by the medievalists who were writing mainly about the treatment of the Jews at the
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hands of their Christian rulers. It is perhaps not so surprising, then,
that when the English translation of his masterpiece was complete, Baer
had it sent to some of the best recognized Spanish medievalists of the
time. Topping that list was none other than Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz,
still exiled in Argentina. Baer’s intent, of course, was to offer a major
corrective to the assertions made in España, un enigma histórico, even
though the Hebrew edition had been written years before the publication of Sanchez-Albornoz’s work. Baer was deeply troubled by the recent
writings of Sánchez-Albornoz, particularly the latter’s contention, following Castro, that the origins of the Spanish Inquisition derived from
Jewish practices.53 He expressed his feelings in a letter to his editor
Solomon Grayzel in which he deplored Sanchez-Albornoz’s book for
its “hateful words against the Jewish people, words that are close to
Nazi perspectives.”54 The English translation of volume two of Baer’s
work, published in 1969, therefore contained additional material directly
targeting the contentions made by both Sánchez-Albornoz and Américo
Castro.55 Baer could not let stand what he saw as fallacious interpretations of the Jewish past by historians largely ignorant of Jewish traditions. It did not much matter to Baer whether this meant the inclusion
of Spain’s Jews as part of the “Spanish” past or the exclusion of any
Jewish influence from medieval Christian Spain. For Baer, Jewish history needed to be understood in its own terms and separate from anything having to do with the growing “intolerance” and eventual expulsion
of the remaining Jewish and Muslim communities.56
Eliyahu Ashtor wrote Jewish history from an approach that was less
ambitious, less mystical, and less personal than Baer’s. His The Jews of
Moslem Spain traced the history of the Jewish community from the period
of the Muslim invasion of 711 to the twelfth century, ending several
centuries short of the Muslim expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella.
Ashtor was also less cynical than Baer of Jewish-Muslim relations, and
he aimed in part to demonstrate the successes, rather than the failures,
53 The “Spanish Inquisition” has been one of the most discussed topics in European
history, garnering no doubt as much diversity in opinion as the question of tolerance in
medieval Spain. A lucid appraisal of the complexity of the Inquisition and its equally
complex historiography is offered in Edward Peters, Inquisition (New York: The Free
Press, 1988). On the “myth” of the Inquisition see especially chapter 9.
54 Cited in Gampel’s introduction, l.
55 History of the Jews in Christian Spain II, 444-456.
56 For the relevant passages in Castro, see España en su historia, 547-8; for SánchezAlbornoz see España: un enigma histórico, 255, 288, 292.
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of the Jewish communities living under Islam. Thus, in contrast to Baer,
who saw the Muslim rulers as a forbidding and oppressive force, Ashtor
pointed out with pride the many moments during which the Jews of
Muslim Spain thrived in ways unparalleled by any other Jewish community in Europe. The tenth century was a particularly bright moment
in Spanish Jewish history. It marked, as Ashtor put it, a “decisive change”
in the cultural relations between Jews and Muslims, and by this he
meant a positive change. During the tenth century, he explained, “the
Jews of Moslem Spain emerged from their cultural seclusion; they ceased
being one-sided in their cultural interests and began to take part energetically in the flourishing culture of the Omayyed [sic] kingdom of
Spain.”57 Ashtor viewed with a favorable eye the Jewish culture of
Muslim al-Andalus, and if he avoided the socio-anthropological terminology of a writer like Castro, he did share a certain Castrian philosophy regarding the acculturation of practices. The Arabs of medieval
Spain took pride in their culture and language and this, Ashtor insisted,
“influenced the Jewish state of mind,” prompting several Jewish writers
and poets to delve deep into the study of the Hebrew language (ibid.,
243). The career of Hasdai ibn Shaprut, the tenth-century Jewish
“courtier,” and his circle of poets and writers were solid evidence of
the flourishing of culture among Jews living in Muslim Spain. Ashtor
stopped short of calling anything in Muslim Spain “tolerant,” but he
was not so pessimistic (or dismissive) about the cultural successes that
the Jewish communities enjoyed when they were subject to Islamic rule.
The demise of the Franco regime in 1975 marked a new beginning in
the historiography of Spain. Since the 1970s, many archives previously
inaccessible to international scholars have opened up, and the once
Castilian-centered view of Spanish history, long endorsed by the regime,
has given way to more regional studies, focusing on Catalonia, Navarre,
and Galicia. And even if at the dawn of the twenty-first century the
regional archives of Spain remain, by most accounts, a largely un-chartered territory, the last twenty-five years have seen a steady and growing stream of medievalists pouring into these archives in search of new
clues relating to the seven hundred and fifty years of interfaith relations
in medieval Spain.
Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain, trans. A. Klein and J. M. Klein (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1992), I, 241.
57
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The most wide-ranging, methodologically sophisticated, and nonpolemical treatment of the subject to follow the fall of the Franco regime
was the work of Thomas Glick, whose approach can best be described
as blending historical, linguistic, and socio-anthropological methods of
investigation. In his comparative analysis of Islamic and Christian Spain in
the Early Middle Ages (1979), Glick set as his task the examination of “the
central issues and phenomena that contributed to the formation of
Islamic and Spanish cultures in the Iberian Peninsula and that guided
the interaction among both peoples.”58 And unlike other students of
medieval Spain, Glick looked at the demographic, agricultural, urban,
commercial, cultural, social, and ethnic structures in both the Muslim
society of the south and the Christian communities of the north. For
these reasons his study may justifiably be described as the first to focus
exclusively upon the interaction of these two societies from the seventh
to the thirteenth centuries.59 Not surprisingly, Glick found inadequacy
in much of the previous scholarship that dealt with the history of Muslim
and Christian interaction in medieval Spain. He noted that there were
two basic misapprehensions in the historiography of medieval intercultural relations: “The first is that ethnic conflict and cultural diffusion
are mutually exclusive phenomena. . . . The second fallacy is to equate
acculturation (a cultural process) with assimilation (a social one) and to
assume that the lessening of cultural distance must perforce result in
the diminution of social distance.”60 Thus Glick proposed a new model
for interpreting the interactions between Muslims and Christians, one
that understands Christian acculturation of Islamic traditions to be inextricably linked to the larger structural fabric of cultural change.61 According
to this model, which is in some ways an extension of Castro’s philosophy of convivencia, it is perfectly conceivable that hostilities between
Muslims and Christians over the centuries were accompanied by the
eventual Christian adoption of Muslim diet, agricultural techniques, technology, urban institutions, economic life, and even language. Indeed,
58 Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages: Comparative
Perspectives on Social and Cultural Formation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 4.
59 James F. Powers, review of Islamic and Christian Spain . . . in Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 12, 3 (Winter, 1982), 558.
60 Islamic and Christian Spain, 165.
61 This model of acculturation in medieval Spain is first explored in an earlier article that also fleshes out the earlier historiography of cultural interaction. See Thomas
F. Glick and Oriol Pi-Sunyer, “Acculturation as an Explanatory Concept in Spanish
History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11, 2 (1969), 136-154.
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the two processes are not mutually exclusive at all, for they are part
and parcel of the “socio-cultural evolution” in which neighboring, and
in this case competing, societies inevitably interact with and learn from
one another. In merging traditional economic and social history with
some sociological models for cultural change, Glick’s approach can perhaps best be described as “post-Castro and post-Sánchez-Albornoz,” that
is, steering clear of the quest for national origins, avoiding much of the
simple and often static terminology favored by so many other historians, and fusing the insights of anthropology and the history of science
in order to capture the “distinguishing features of Spanish culture” during these seven hundred years of cultural contact.62 Relations between
Muslims and Christians are not considered in terms of tolerance and
intolerance (although a modified version of convivencia is endorsed),63 but
rather in terms of acculturation and socio-evolutionary change.
Beginning in the late 1960s, and especially since the 1970s, scholars
have come to recognize that Aragon, and especially Valencia, possesses
some of the richest archives for medieval, and especially Muslim, Spain.
Exploration of these sources has yielded a number of important studies pertaining to Muslims and Mudejars (Muslims living under Christian
rule)64 in the eastern and north-eastern territories of medieval Iberia, as
well as their relations with Christians and Jews.65 In this field, perhaps
no scholar has contributed as much as Robert I. Burns, S.J. His pio-
62 Islamic and Christian Spain, 299. Thomas Glick has returned once more to the longue
durée of cultural change in medieval Iberia in a more recent volume that incorporates
recent archaeological evidence as well: From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and
Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). The
term “post-Castro and post-Sánchez-Albornoz” was first suggested by Archibald R. Lewis
in a review of Islamic and Christian Spain in Speculum 55, 2 (1980), 365.
63 Cf. Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, eds. V. Mann, T. Glick,
and J. Dodds (New York: G. Braziller, 1992), 1-9. The book was produced in conjunction with an exhibition by the same title at the New York Jewish Museum.
64 There is some controversy over the use of the term Mudéjar and whether it implies
some form of marginalization, but these academic quarrels do not directly affect the
debates over interfaith contact. For a useful explication of the terminology used when
discussing the Muslim communities of medieval Spain, see L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain,
1250 to 1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1-5.
65 In chronological order these include, but are not limited to, Robert I. Burns, The
Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Reconstruction on a Thirteenth-Century Frontier, 2 vols. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1967); Ambrosio Huici Miranda, Historia musulmana de Valencia
y su región, 3 vols., (Valencia: Ayuntamiento de Valencia, 1970); Pierre Guichard, alAndalus: estructura antropológica de una sociedad islámica en occidente (Barcelona: Barral Editores,
1976); John Boswell, The Royal Treasure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Dolors
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neering efforts at uncovering, transcribing, and interpreting the Valencian
documents of the thirteenth century have done for the crusader kingdom of Valencia what Baer had done for the Jewish communities of
Christian Spain. Burns has also engaged in the topic of interfaith relations. The culmination of years of archival research, his Christians, Muslims,
and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of Valencia: Societies in Symbiosis (1984) was
an attempt to contribute a Valencian perspective to the growing historiography of cultural contact in medieval Spain. In this endeavor, Burns
followed Glick’s model for cultural diffusion and acculturation and examined the cultural exchange mainly among members of the Christian and
Muslim high cultures. In Burns’s analysis, Muslims adapted to Christian
domination not because of any desire to assimilate elements of Christian
culture, but because their social institutions were severely weakened by
the alien administrative system imposed upon them. Medieval minorities, Burns stressed, were not akin to modern minorities striving for
overall assimilation, and tolerance was hardly a concept applicable to
medieval Valencia:
Each in his community shrank from the other, despised the inseparable religio-cultural package the other represented, and actively resisted
assimilation. Tolerance, had he thought in terms of tolerance, might
well have meant to the Mudejar the retention of exclusionary factors
we most deplore: Arabic uni-language, community walls, dietary obligations, separate schools and courts, and everything that turned him
from the general Christian context and so by our standards oppressed
him.66
Burns’s Valencian paradigm of the thirteenth century squared rather
well with Glick’s model, for in the end there was acculturation and
Bramon, Contra moros i jueus: formació i estratègia d’unes discriminacions al País Valencià (Barcelona:
E. Climent, 1981); R. I. Burns, Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of
Valencia: Societies in Symbiosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Maria Teresa
Ferrer I Mallol, Els sarraïns de la Corona catalano-aragonesa en el segle XIV: segregació i discriminació (Barcelona: Consell Superior d’Investigacions Científiques, 1987); Idem, La frontera amb l’Islam en el segle XIV: cristians i sarraïns al País Valencià (Barcelona: Consell Superior
d’Investigacions Científiques, 1988); Mark Meyerson, The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of
Ferdinand and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991); Isabel O’Connor, A Forgotten Community: The Mudéjar Alejama of Xàtiva, 1240-1327
(Leiden: Brill, 2003). In addition to these major studies, several important journals devoted
to Islamic/Mudéjar/Morisco studies in Spain were founded during the 1980’s: Sharq alAndalus, al-Quantara, and Awrãq.
66 Burns, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 22.
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eventual assimilation of the Muslim communities, but not without some
deep-seated resentment towards neighboring, indeed dominating, cultures.67
Also contributing to the debate over Christian-Muslim contact and
interfaith relations was Mark Meyerson’s important volume on the Muslims
of Valencia (1991). For Meyerson, who focused largely on the later Middle
Ages, the legal structure governing the relations of the Christian majority with their Jewish and Muslim minorities was similar to the dhimmah
contract in granting freedom of worship and autonomy to each religious community; Meyerson thus suggests that Christian rulers borrowed
the dhimmah model and adapted it to Christian norms.68 Meyerson, too,
followed Glick’s model for rapid acculturation following the Christian
capture of Valencia, but went further than either Glick or Burns in
arguing for the existence of some form of interfaith tolerance: “Thus,
in both Islamic and Christian societies there existed a form of institutionalized tolerance of religious minorities.” Yet because this tolerance
was an artificial, governmental creation, Meyerson warned, it by no means
guaranteed a harmonious intermingling of religious groups. Although
this raises some questions about his definition of tolerance, Meyerson
found it best to resolve the problem much as Glick had, using a modified
concept of convivencia, one that includes “this ever-present potentiality
for religious and ethnic violence” (ibid., 2-3). But this potentiality,
Meyerson added, can best be thought of as a tension that is “usually
subliminal,” only occasionally giving rise to overt expressions of hostility towards minorities, either official (as with expulsion) or popular.69
Ultimately, Meyerson concluded that it was Mudejar participation in
the Christian legal system that was the most powerful acculturating factor, for this provided opportunities for inter-community socialization and
shared prosperity: “Above all, it was the daily interaction between Muslim
and Christian in the workplace and the marketplace that lent stability
to Muslim-Christian convivencia in Valencia . . . [and] Mudejars partook
of the relative prosperity that the kingdom of Valencia enjoyed in the
67 Although Burns was carefully avoiding the polemic of the schools of Castro and
Sánchez-Albornoz, he was also reacting to some of his critics, mainly Islamists, who contended that Islamic culture remained basically intact under Christian rule. For Burns,
the assimilation of the Mudejars and the erosion of their traditional institutions took
place with surprising rapidity.
68 Meyerson, The Muslims of Valencia, 3.
69 Within the category of popular violence, Meyerson distinguished between “systematic violence on the part of the mob directed against a specific group” and “random
violence,” the latter being committed either by “Christian hoodlums” or even, occasionally, by Muslims. See op. cit., 219.
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fifteenth century.” Outbreaks of violence did occur, such as those in
1455 and 1521, but these were expressions of economic resentment as
much as of religious hostility. And following these incidents, “order was
restored, and convivencia was able to persist, much as it always had, with
a potentiality for ethnic violence” (ibid., 272).
Not all, however, are so committed to the Castrian notion of convivencia and the varying degrees of tolerance and prosperity that it entails.
In her introduction to Minorités religieuses dans l’Espagne médiévale (1993),
one of many volumes published to commemorate the conquest of Granada
in 1492 and the expulsion of the Jews, Manuela Marín fiercely attacked
the concept of convivencia, calling it an “element of propaganda” that
proves to be both a misleading and aprioristic idea when one confronts
actual historical problems.70 Sadly, not much in the way of an alternative was provided. Also critical of the concept of convivencia is Teofilo
Ruiz, who, in his recent monograph on Spanish society in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, rearticulates his belief that “a complex set of
relations, fraught with mutual antagonisms, brightened by small rays of
conviviality and friendships, and driven by issues of power, material
interests and religious strife, characterized the interaction between three
religious groups on the peninsula.”71 Ruiz dismisses the paradigm of convivencia as a “rosy picture” view of history few people still hold. Nonetheless,
Menocal is not alone in continuing to argue otherwise.72
Historians have long been aware of the presence and interaction of
three religious groups in medieval Spain, but seldom has there been
general agreement over how to interpret the nature of their “coexistence.” The differences in interpretation that separate historians like
Simonet and Ribera, Castro and Sánchez-Albornoz, Baer and Ashtor,
70 Mañuela Marín and Joseph Pérez, eds., Minorités religieuses dans l’Espagne médiévale
(Aix-en-Provence: Editions Edisud, 1993), see introduction. For those interested in a critical revision of the idea of convivencia, it is regrettable that Marin’s very illuminating
points are not taken up in the essays presented in the volume. Rather, the majority of
the articles deal with aspects of Mudéjar and Mozarabic communities.
71 Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spanish Society, 1400-1600 (Harlow, Eng.: Longman, 2001), 95-96.
72 In her evocative “story of tolerance, tyranny, and the expulsion of the Jews from
Spain,” Erna Paris describes a “rich, multicultural stew that bubbled and simmered over
the Iberian Peninsula for more than a thousand years, producing a unique, pluralistic
society” during which centuries of tolerance prevailed. Her purpose, voiced identically
a hundred years earlier by Lea, is to explain how it is that Spain was “for centuries,
the most tolerant nation in Europe, and subsequently became the most zealously intolerant” nation in Europe. The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny, and the Expulsion
of the Jews from Spain (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995), 19.
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or, most recently, Nirenberg and Menocal, have to do partly with the
historical evidence used and partly with each scholar’s own broader
interpretations of history. Without pursuing the interminable question
of what historians can and cannot do with the historical record, one
can nonetheless safely state that the concepts of tolerance and intolerance provide historical categories employed from an early period in the
historiography of medieval Spain. It is troubling that these terms are
as frequently invoked as they are rarely defined. How exactly are we
to understand tolerance among three religions? Is tolerance the absence
of intolerance? Is intolerance the absence of tolerance? Are they to be
defined explicitly, with space between them, or is there some element
of overlap? Sánchez-Albornoz was one of the very few twentieth-century historians to seriously challenge the use of these terms for medieval
Spain.73 Unfortunately, his criticisms were heavily anchored in his nationalistic view of Spanish history and identity, a flaw that has characterized a number of historians both before and after him. Some more
recent writers have openly stressed medieval Spain’s relevance to contemporary identity and society.74 But this also runs the risk of tilting
the complex historical past in favor of a more present-minded agenda.
At least one point seems certain: the ambiguous and largely undefined
categories of tolerance and intolerance have proved to be of little help
in explaining the complexities of a historical period that has, with some
justification, received such diverse appraisals from historians and literary scholars. Indeed, the contrasting images one is presented with in
the works of scholars like Menocal, Powers, and Nirenberg are themselves evidence of a world more varied, more changing, and more complex than any overarching concept or generality can convey.
73 The term convivencia, however, has received more criticism and redefinition. See, for
example, Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 245-6; and idem, “Violencia, memoria y convivencia: los judíos en la Iberia Medieval,” Memoria y Civilización 2 (1999), 31-53.
74 In addition to the many authors and works examined above, consider, for example, the following remarks in the “afterword” to a volume of essays dealing with multiethnic reflections of medieval Spain: “Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain is an
extraordinary undertaking. It seeks to understand an enigma that has baffled historians
and critics of culture for many years—that is, the curious sense of belonging of contemporary peoples to a land that long ago rejected them. . . . The essays, taken together,
point to a solution that has as much to do with symbols of contemporary identity as
with artifacts of a distant past. Far removed from the conditions that initially gave rise
to them in the Middle Ages, memories of medieval Spain—in literary [sic], business
practices, architecture, music, and so on—respond to contemporary needs for prescriptive ideologies, for symbols, and even for propaganda.” Louise Mirrer, “Afterword” in
Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain, ed. Stacy Beckwith (New York: Garland, 2000), 323.
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But if tolerance and intolerance are terms that have long been used
for describing social relations in medieval Spain, they have not lost any
appeal over time. On the contrary, they circulate now among scholars
within a seeming obsession for locating such collective behavior in
medieval and early modern times more generally. Among some recent
studies, Michael Gervers and James Powell75 have approached social
conflict during the Crusades in terms of tolerance and intolerance; Cary
Nederman76 has examined medieval thought for some early discourses
of toleration; Gary Remer77 has focused attention on humanism’s rhetoric
of toleration, and Ole Peter Grell and Robert Scribner78 have approached
the question of tolerance and intolerance in the context of the European
Reformation. A conference in Toledo in 1997 organized by the Reineke
Society was devoted to the question of tolerance and intolerance in the
Middle Ages; in 1998 an international colloquium honoring the four
hundredth anniversary of the Edict of Nantes (1598) was devoted to the
question of tolerance in European history, and an international symposium entitled, “Inquisición y Tolerancia” was held at the Universidad
Complutense de Madrid that same year.79 Also based in Spain is the
75 Michael Gervers and James Powell, eds., Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the
Age of the Crusades (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001). Chapter 4, by James
B. Brodman, deals with medieval Iberia.
76 Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration c. 1100-1550 (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). See also the two volumes edited by Nederman
and John Christian Laursen, Difference and Dissent: Theories of Tolerance in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); and Beyond the Persecuting Society:
Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1998).
77 Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1996).
78 Ole Peter Grell and Robert W. Scribner, eds., Tolerance and Intolerance in the European
Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). The groundbreaking study
on this topic was that of Joseph Lecler, S.J., Histoire de la tolérance au siècle de la Réforme
(Paris: Aubier, 1955); English translation: Toleration and the Reformation, trans. W. L. Westow
(New York: Association Press, 1960). Despite Lecler’s rather pronounced Catholic bias,
the work was deemed sufficiently a classic, and sufficiently relevant, thirty years later to
be republished in France in 1992.
79 The papers delivered at the colloquium in Nantes are published in Guy Saupin,
Rémi Fabre, and Marcel Launay, eds., La Tolérance. Colloque international de Nantes (mai
1998) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999). Included in the volume are
papers by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala on the Christians of al-Andalus (363-370) and
John Tolan on the precarious “convivencia” of Jews and Muslims living in Christian
Spain during the Middle Ages (385-394). A summary of the Madrid conference is provided by Elena Martínez Barrios, “Tolerancia e inquisición,” Revista de la Inquisición 8
(1999), 101-111.
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newly founded Instituto de Historia de la Intolerancia, an associate division of the Spanish Open University. One could see this trend as a
reaction to (or culmination of ) some earlier studies that have focused
on the violence and persecution of the Middle Ages.80 But the subject
has also excited increasing attention among philosophers and political
theorists who have independently offered their own critiques and defenses
of tolerance.81 And one has only to peruse a current political journal
to read opinion pieces reflecting on the increasing, or renewed, “intolerance” among peoples and faiths in the wider world today.
The polarization between tolerance and intolerance has clearly become
a pressing interest for the academic community. Simultaneously, medieval
Spain offers a unique opportunity for testing theories of interfaith relations and social interaction. It should therefore come as no surprise that
contemporary historians of Spain seem ever more committed to focusing on medieval relations among Muslims, Jews, and Christians, either
seeking to explain the origins of certain episodes of violence or, just as
commonly, searching for models of tolerance and convivencia. After all,
no gift from the historian is greater than a lesson drawn from the past.
Perhaps for this reason it is especially important that all scholars fascinated by the circumstances of medieval Spain re-examine the long, frequently colorful, and certainly relevant historiography that in many ways
continues to inform current debates.
80 In an important essay, Klaus Schreiner has analyzed the relationship between ideas
of tolerance and persecution in medieval Christianity, arguing that while early Christian
thinkers such as Cyprian viewed tolerantia as the basic foundation of Christian social
ethics, by the 12th century terror and persecution had become the standard Church
policy towards heretics: “ ‘Duldsamkeit’ (tolerantia) oder ‘Schrecken’ (terror),” in Religiöse
Devianz, ed. Dieter Simon (Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1990), 159-210. The development of
heresy and persecution during this period of the Middle Ages is, of course, the subject
of several classic works by R. I. Moore: The Origins of European Dissent (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1977); and The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western
Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). I thank Christopher Close for bringing the Schreiner article to my attention.
81 For some English-language examples, see Glenn Tinder, Tolerance and Community
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995); John Horton and Peter Nicholson, eds.,
Toleration: Philosophy and Practice (Avebury, Eng.: Aldershot, 1992); Kirstie McClure,
“Difference, Diversity, and the Limits of Toleration,” Political Theory 18 (1990), 361-91;
Susan Mendus, Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press International, 1989); Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical
perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Debates over the term tolerance are, of course, not completely new. Critiques of the concept can be traced back to
Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, Critique of Pure Tolerance
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), who insisted that toleration of the wrong sorts of people
and activities means complicity in repression.