This book significantly revises the conventional view that the Jewish experience in medieval Spain--over the century before the expulsion of 1492--was one of despair, persecution, and decline. Focusing on the town of Morvedre in the kingdom of Valencia, Mark Meyerson shows how and why Morvedre's Jewish community revived and flourished in the wake of the horrible violence of 1391. Drawing on a wide array of archival documentation, including Spanish Inquisition records, he argues that Morvedre saw a Jewish "renaissance."
Meyerson shows how the favorable policies of kings and of town government yielded the Jewish community's demographic expansion and prosperity. Of crucial importance were new measures that ceased the oppressive taxation of the Jews and minimized their role as moneylenders. The results included a reversal of the credit relationship between Jews and Christians, a marked amelioration of Christian attitudes toward Jews, and greater economic diversification on the part of Jews.
Representing a major contribution to debates over the Inquisition's origins and the expulsion of the Jews, the book also offers the first extended analysis of Jewish-converso relations at the local level, showing that Morvedre's Jews expressed their piety by assisting Valencia's conversos. Comparing Valencia with other regions of Spain and with the city-states of Renaissance Italy, it makes clear why this kingdom and the town of Morvedre were so ripe for a Jewish revival in the fifteenth century.
This book significantly revises the conventional view that the Jewish experience in medieval Spain--over the century before the expulsion of 1492--was one of despair, persecution, and decline. Focusing on the town of Morvedre in the kingdom of Valencia, Mark Meyerson shows how and why Morvedre's Jewish community revived and flourished in the wake of the horrible violence of 1391. Drawing on a wide array of archival documentation, including Spanish Inquisition records, he argues that Morvedre saw a Jewish "renaissance."
Meyerson shows how the favorable policies of kings and of town government yielded the Jewish community's demographic expansion and prosperity. Of crucial importance were new measures that ceased the oppressive taxation of the Jews and minimized their role as moneylenders. The results included a reversal of the credit relationship between Jews and Christians, a marked amelioration of Christian attitudes toward Jews, and greater economic diversification on the part of Jews.
Representing a major contribution to debates over the Inquisition's origins and the expulsion of the Jews, the book also offers the first extended analysis of Jewish-converso relations at the local level, showing that Morvedre's Jews expressed their piety by assisting Valencia's conversos. Comparing Valencia with other regions of Spain and with the city-states of Renaissance Italy, it makes clear why this kingdom and the town of Morvedre were so ripe for a Jewish revival in the fifteenth century.
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This book significantly revises the conventional view that the Jewish experience in medieval Spain--over the century before the expulsion of 1492--was one of despair, persecution, and decline. Focusing on the town of Morvedre in the kingdom of Valencia, Mark Meyerson shows how and why Morvedre's Jewish community revived and flourished in the wake of the horrible violence of 1391. Drawing on a wide array of archival documentation, including Spanish Inquisition records, he argues that Morvedre saw a Jewish "renaissance."
Meyerson shows how the favorable policies of kings and of town government yielded the Jewish community's demographic expansion and prosperity. Of crucial importance were new measures that ceased the oppressive taxation of the Jews and minimized their role as moneylenders. The results included a reversal of the credit relationship between Jews and Christians, a marked amelioration of Christian attitudes toward Jews, and greater economic diversification on the part of Jews.
Representing a major contribution to debates over the Inquisition's origins and the expulsion of the Jews, the book also offers the first extended analysis of Jewish-converso relations at the local level, showing that Morvedre's Jews expressed their piety by assisting Valencia's conversos. Comparing Valencia with other regions of Spain and with the city-states of Renaissance Italy, it makes clear why this kingdom and the town of Morvedre were so ripe for a Jewish revival in the fifteenth century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400832583 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/09/2021 |
| Series: | Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World , #40 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 293 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain
Introduction
LOCAL HISTORY, SPANISH HISTORY, JEWISH HISTORYThis book focuses on the final century of the history of the Jewish community of Morvedre, a town located in the kingdom of Valencia, itself part of the federated Crown of Aragon. The story of the Jews of Morvedre begins in 1248, with Jewish settlers' convergence on the town in the wake of King Jaume I's conquest of the region from the Muslims. The story ends as do all histories of the Jews of medieval Spain: with the Jews abandoning their homes and departing for new lands in the summer of 1492, in compliance with the edict of expulsion. Morvedre's old Jewish quarter still stands in mute testimony to the Jews' previous existence and exile. The town itself, however, is no longer called Morvedre but Sagunto. In 1868 it reverted to a form of its old Roman name, Saguntum, as if to draw attention to its Roman antiquity at the expense of its medieval past, when the town was peopled by Muslims and Jews. Indeed, while the stark and magnificent Roman arena readily brings the town's ancient glories to mind, the rather ordinary architecture of the former Jewish quarter can almost make one forget that Jews ever lived there at all.
Yet for a historian intent on recovering theJews of medieval Morvedre from oblivion, the narrow streets of the Jewish quarter do resound with Jewish voices-or at least they can be made to do so through careful archival reconstruction and with a healthy dose of imagination. The Jewish voices and bodies must be, as it were, conjured, for in merely viewing the streets and houses of the Jewish quarter the visitor can hardly believe that in the century prior to 1492 it was the home and hub of a vital and flourishing Jewish community. The closed quarter with its narrow streets might suggest restriction and oppression, a harried and degrading Jewish existence for which the expulsion was the natural conclusion, the emphatic punctuation to decades of despair. Such an impression, however, would be far from the truth.
The architectural remains of present-day Sagunto belie the history of a Jewish community that runs against the grain of the master narrative of Sephardic history, a narrative mainly fashioned by Yitzhak Baer and perpetuated in more recent syntheses. According to this narrative, the Jews of the Christian realms of Castile and the Crown of Aragon experienced, from roughly the end of the twelfth century until the second quarter of the fourteenth, a kind of golden age, analogous to the one their ancestors had enjoyed in Muslim Spain prior to the Almohad persecutions. During this second golden age Christian monarchs were solicitous of their Jewish subjects, Jewish courtiers and officials were powerful and influential, Jewish communities were prosperous and contributed greatly to the economic development of the Christian kingdoms and to the treasuries of Christian kings, and Jewish intellectual and religious life remained vigorous and creative. The period following the golden age is presented as one of inexorable Jewish decline, right until the expulsion. Kings favored and protected the Jews less consistently, while the Christian masses, moved increasingly by religious zeal and agitated by plague, political upheaval, and economic dislocation, reacted with growing vehemence and violence against Jewish power, Jewish usury, and Jewish infidelity. Internally Jewish communities were racked by problems already evident in the golden age: social and political strife as well as ideological controversies between worldly, philosophically minded elites and upright pietists, conflicts that corroded the cohesion of the Jewish community and the commitment and identity of individual Jews. All this came to a head in the summer of 1391, when Christian mobs attacked Jewish communities throughout Castile and the Crown of Aragon, killing many Jews and forcibly baptizing thousands. The final century between 1391 and 1492 was, according to the master narrative, one of almost unmitigated Jewish despair; Jews, for the most part, simply endured. In this narrative the Jews themselves recede into the background, with the baptized Jews and their descendants-the conversos-taking center stage. The history of Spanish Jewry in the fifteenth century thus becomes largely a history of the conversos, the Spanish Inquisition, and the expulsion. The Jews return to center stage only when they are on their way out of Spain; for the entire previous century they are merely preparing for-or being prepared for-that last, painful journey.
For the Jews of Morvedre, however, the century between 1391 and 1492 was not simply a gloom-filled parenthesis; it was instead an era of remarkable resurgence. Yet the community's early history does not easily fit the golden age paradigm. During this period the kingdom of Valencia underwent rapid social, religious, and institutional changes that were as problematic for the Jews of Morvedre as the calamities of the fifteenth century. Despite the impression lent by much historical scholarship, and by all the "Jew-free" Jewish quarters in contemporary Spain, the Jewish experience in medieval Spain was not uniform, neither in the fifteenth century nor earlier. This is not to say that the history of the Jews in Christian Spain defies generalization, but that any revised master narrative, if such is a desideratum, must take into account the variety of Jewish experience. My research on the history of the Jews of Morvedre has resulted in the writing of a counternarrative, a narrative that challenges the prevailing master narrative. There is no reason to think that the historical experience of the Jews of Morvedre was a complete anomaly; whether it was can be determined only through additional local studies. Even if it was anomalous, it is still crucial to know why. But if Morvedre was not unique-and it probably was not-then the master narrative of Sephardic history, as well as that of Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations in medieval Spain, requires serious rethinking.
This book grows out of my ongoing concern to contribute to the understanding of the dynamics of Christian-Muslim-Jewish coexistence in medieval Christian Spain and of the social, religious, and political processes resulting in its breakdown. These are not minor, esoteric issues. The ethnic conflicts and "cleansings" plaguing the modern world compel one to try to make sense of how a country like Spain could have been transformed from a land of three religions into one wholly Catholic, at least superficially, by 1526, and to determine the impact of this transformation on individuals, families, communities, and kingdoms. In some regions, I am convinced, the transformation was not internally generated; it did not result from popular Christian pressure and local intergroup conflict. External movements, ideologies, and institutions were far more important for effecting dramatic socioreligious change.
In the case of the Jews, comprehension of the causes behind the violence of 1391 or the expulsion of 1492, especially the relation of these critical events to the previous decades of Jewish-Christian interaction in particular locales, can be achieved only through highly contextualized local or regional studies over the longue durée. Yet for the history of Spanish Jewry such studies have still not been undertaken. I propose to fill this historiographical lacuna with my work on the Jews of Morvedre. In this book and in a separate volume on the earlier period, I treat the entire history of the community from the time of its establishment, after the Christian conquest of the Valencian region from the Muslims, until the final expulsion. By taking the long view of the history of a particular Jewish community, one can trace with far greater clarity the changing position of the Jews within the shifting constellation of religious and social groups, and identify the factors-social, religious, economic, and political-shaping or sometimes distorting intergroup as well as intragroup relations. In such a history events become as important as social and economic structures, individual personalities and families at least as crucial as social classes or essentialized "Jews," "Christians," and "Muslims." The world thus recreated is particular to Morvedre and environs between 1248 and 1492 and yet is in certain respects more representative of Jewish life in medieval Iberia than any pan-community study.
The result of such a focus is, as suggested above, utterly at odds with the master narrative of Sephardic history. In the volume that deals with the 1248-1391 period, I locate the decisive downturn in the fortunes of the Jews of Morvedre between, roughly, 1280 and 1325, and so take much of the luster off the golden age. The Jews' difficulties resulted in part from the very success of a colonization process in which they themselves had played a vital role. The Christian rulers and subjects of the new kingdom relegated the Jews to a markedly inferior position. The Jews' seemingly inescapable dual function as royal fiscal serfs and primary purveyors of credit produced conflict within the Jewish community while poisoning relations with Christians. This early downturn, however, was not the beginning of an inexorable decline for the Jews. They effectively adapted to the changed conditions, weathered the violent upheavals of the mid-fourteenth century, and entered the 1390s with considerable vigor and optimism.
This book takes as its point of departure the horrific summer of 1391, when Christian violence irrevocably transformed the world of Spanish Jews. The ensuing century of Jewish life thus warrants serious consideration in itself. Instead of viewing it as simply a long prelude to the expulsion, I treat it as a period of adjustment, reorganization, and creativity for Jews, conversos, and Old Christians. I demonstrate why the Jews of Morvedre enjoyed a renaissance after a difficult period of transition (1391-1416). Favorable royal policies were, of course, crucial, as was the welcome extended to the Jews by the town fathers of Morvedre. But what emerges most strikingly, especially in light of the Jews' circumstances prior to 1391, is how the combination of a new royal fiscal regime and new credit mechanisms brought about a restructuring of the kingdom's credit markets; a significant modification, if not a complete reversal, of the credit relationship between Jews and Christians; a marked amelioration of Christian attitudes toward Jews; new investment strategies and greater economic diversification on the part of the Jews; and a reorientation of class relations and politics within the Jewish community. Besides these political and economic factors, and just as critical, was the Jews' sense of identity and commitment to the wider Jewish community, as evinced, perhaps surprisingly, in their spiritually rewarding relationship with the Judaizing conversos of Valencia.
The counternarrative I have fashioned is also at variance with a newer and largely uncontested narrative propounded by Spanish and non-Spanish scholars working outside the area of Jewish studies that emphasizes the persecution and exclusion of the religious minorities and firmly links the religious homogenization of Castile and the Crown of Aragon to the rise of the early modern state. For the non-Spanish scholars especially, the forced baptisms, inquisitorial persecutions, and expulsions appear as a kind of prelude to the evils perpetrated by Spaniards and other Europeans on the colonized peoples of America, Africa, and Asia. For the Spanish scholars, who are products of-and perhaps victims of-this very history of religious homogenization, it is difficult to imagine a medieval world in which the conquest, subordination, persecution, and elimination of Muslims and Jews were not, for good or ill, almost destined steps leading to the Spain they presently inhabit. Hence, they too, also with the best liberal intentions, have seized on this narrative of religious hatred, persecution, and colonialism.
The teleology inherent in this narrative has been cogently challenged by David Nirenberg. Nirenberg's work, however, stops in 1348 and therefore leaves unanswered many key questions concerning Spain's dramatic socioreligious transformation in subsequent decades. It obviously cannot contribute to any understanding of the complex converso issue, nor does it address the implications of the emergence of new state institutions and ideologies for the religious minorities. Yet, as this study will show, grappling with both questions is integral to a full comprehension of the somewhat paradoxical history of the Jews of Morvedre in the fifteenth century. On one hand, the institutions and officialdom of a stronger monarchical state protected Jews (and Muslims) more effectively and, as suggested above, helped create a context for improved Jewish-Christian relations-at least in the lands of the Crown of Aragon. On the other hand, the fate of the Jews of Morvedre was tied to that of the conversos of Valencia, for, in the end, the perceived necessity of resolving the religious and social problems surrounding the conversos determined the policies of Fernando and Isabel toward the Jews, and even the Muslims. The state, then, did ultimately intervene to effect the religious homogenization of both Castile and the Crown of Aragon, but for religious purposes that contradicted its concurrent political and economic objectives.
In constructing a narrative that runs against the grain of these two other dominant narratives I do not mean to imply that all other Jewish communities in the Crown of Aragon and Castile had the same experience in the fifteenth century as the Jews of Morvedre, or that those communities that also enjoyed stability and prosperity did so for the same reasons. By explaining why the Jews of Morvedre flourished after 1391 and by pinpointing the factors crucial for this community's success, I hope to move other scholars to raise similar questions with regard to other Jewish communities, to explore why they did or did not prosper in the fifteenth or earlier centuries. The historiographical problem, as I see it, is that such questions are rarely asked, much less answered, about the Jews of Spain in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Studies of Jewish communities, whether individually or in the aggregate, tend to be written from the perspective of 1492, as so many postmortems or as collections of data about what the Jews owned, where they lived, and so on before their expulsion. Furthermore, the chronological scope of such studies is often too limited to allow for any sense of how Jewish-Christian relations, Jewish economic strategies, or Jewish communal politics evolved. I am, in other words, making a strong methodological argument for reconstructing and rethinking the history of Christian-Jewish relations in medieval Spain on the basis of contextualized local and regional studies, through which patterns of interaction can be compared and analyzed and the direction of fundamental changes charted. Morvedre was not the only town, the kingdom of Valencia not the only region where Jews and Christians experienced the mob violence of 1391, the actions of the Castilian-run Spanish Inquisition, and the proclamation of the edict of expulsion as unexpected and unwanted disruptions of decades of fruitful interaction. The Valencian region clearly was not the same as New Castile or Andalucía, whence so much religious violence and momentous change seem to have originated, but it was not so different either. The distinctions are fine; they must be located and analyzed. Only then will it be possible to comprehend the meaning of the Jewish expulsion for local societies and for all of Spain.
My work on the Jews of Morvedre stands at the confluence of three overlapping historiographical traditions: the Jewish, the Spanish, and the local. It benefits greatly from all three-indeed it would have been impossible without them-but also departs from each to some degree. For the social historian aiming to produce a contextualized local study, the Jewish historiographical tradition has certain shortcomings in terms of both perspective and sources utilized. With regard to the latter, a history that privileges philosophical, theosophical, and polemical texts often overlooks crucial details of Jewish socioeconomic life and the complexities of Jewish coexistence and conflict with non-Jews. Non-Jews appear for the most part as essentialized "others" and the encounters between them and Jews often as the discussions or debates of clergymen, of so many talking heads. Even when scholars like Baer and Assis, drawing on archival as well as Hebrew literary sources, have striven for a "well-grounded historical perspective" and a contextualized treatment of Spanish Jews, they have not gone much beyond indicating the parallels between Jewish and Christian social and institutional structures while tracing the evolution of royal Jewish policy. Lacking in such work is a deep familiarity with Christian society and politics and attention to the social, economic, political, and religious changes affecting Christians in their daily lives and therefore sometimes shaping their interaction with the Jewish population.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain by Mark D. Meyerson Copyright © 2004 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
| Figures and Maps | ix | |
| Acknowledgments | xi | |
| Note on Names and Money | xiii | |
| Abbreviations | xv | |
| Introduction | 1 | |
| Chapter 1 | On the Edge of Desolation | 22 |
| Chapter 2 | Revival in the Shadow of Valencia | 65 |
| Chapter 3 | Wine, Money, and Mobility | 109 |
| Chapter 4 | Jews and Muslims | 143 |
| Chapter 5 | The Politics of Plenty | 157 |
| Chapter 6 | Converts and Kinsfolk | 184 |
| Chapter 7 | Chill Wind from Castile | 225 |
| Concluding Remarks | 240 | |
| Glossary | 247 | |
| Bibliography | 249 | |
| Index | 263 |
What People are Saying About This
This well-written book not only represents a solid contribution to medieval Iberian history and Jewish history but also speaks to modern pluralistic society. In reading about the problems that affected a single Jewish community—ethnic and religious identity preservation, socialization and state-building, the intertwinement of trade and economics with families and culture, and so forth—we are tempted to think: times have changed, things are different, this was the past. But then comes the nagging question: Is this really so? Or are Spain's early modern problems of seeking social cohesion despite social diversity with us still?
— Lawrence J. McCrank, Chicago State University, author of "Medieval Frontier History in New Catalonia"
This is a wonderful, brilliant book, rich in detail, painstakingly reconstructed from inquisition archives in Madrid, a variety of municipal and ecclesiastical archives in Valencia, and especially the Aragonese royal archives in Barcelona. It is certainly the most detailed and wide-ranging history to date of any Jewish community in the lands of the Crown of Aragon (i.e., Mediterranean Spain) and will take its place among the best histories of a particular Jewish community for all of medieval Europe. If genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains, I nominate Mark Meyerson's A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain as a work of genius.
— Larry J. Simon, Western Michigan University
"This is a wonderful, brilliant book, rich in detail, painstakingly reconstructed from inquisition archives in Madrid, a variety of municipal and ecclesiastical archives in Valencia, and especially the Aragonese royal archives in Barcelona. It is certainly the most detailed and wide-ranging history to date of any Jewish community in the lands of the Crown of Aragon (i.e., Mediterranean Spain) and will take its place among the best histories of a particular Jewish community for all of medieval Europe. If genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains, I nominate Mark Meyerson's A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain as a work of genius."—Larry J. Simon, Western Michigan University"This well-written book not only represents a solid contribution to medieval Iberian history and Jewish history but also speaks to modern pluralistic society. In reading about the problems that affected a single Jewish community—ethnic and religious identity preservation, socialization and state-building, the intertwinement of trade and economics with families and culture, and so forth—we are tempted to think: times have changed, things are different, this was the past. But then comes the nagging question: Is this really so? Or are Spain's early modern problems of seeking social cohesion despite social diversity with us still?"—Lawrence J. McCrank, Chicago State University, author of Medieval Frontier History in New Catalonia
Recipe
"This is a wonderful, brilliant book, rich in detail, painstakingly reconstructed from inquisition archives in Madrid, a variety of municipal and ecclesiastical archives in Valencia, and especially the Aragonese royal archives in Barcelona. It is certainly the most detailed and wide-ranging history to date of any Jewish community in the lands of the Crown of Aragon (i.e., Mediterranean Spain) and will take its place among the best histories of a particular Jewish community for all of medieval Europe. If genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains, I nominate Mark Meyerson's A Jewish Renaissance in Fifteenth-Century Spain as a work of genius."—Larry J. Simon, Western Michigan University
"This well-written book not only represents a solid contribution to medieval Iberian history and Jewish history but also speaks to modern pluralistic society. In reading about the problems that affected a single Jewish community—ethnic and religious identity preservation, socialization and state-building, the intertwinement of trade and economics with families and culture, and so forth—we are tempted to think: times have changed, things are different, this was the past. But then comes the nagging question: Is this really so? Or are Spain's early modern problems of seeking social cohesion despite social diversity with us still?"—Lawrence J. McCrank, Chicago State University, author of Medieval Frontier History in New Catalonia