eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
The dramatic one-thousand-year history of Jews in Spain comes to life in Exiles in Sepharad. Jeffrey Gorsky vividly relates this colorful period of Jewish history, from the era when Jewish culture was at its height in Muslim Spain to the horrors of the Inquisition and the Expulsion.
Twenty percent of Jews today are descended from Sephardic Jews, who created significant works in religion, literature, science, and philosophy. They flourished under both Muslim and Christian rule, enjoying prosperity and power unsurpassed in Europe. Their cultural contributions include important poets; the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides; and Moses de Leon, author of the Zohar, the core text of the Kabbalah.
But these Jews also endured considerable hardship. Fundamentalist Islamic tribes drove them from Muslim to Christian Spain. In 1391 thousands were killed and more than a third were forced to convert by anti-Jewish rioters. A century later the Spanish Inquisition began, accusing thousands of these converts of heresy. By the end of the fifteenth century Jews had been expelled from Spain and forcibly converted in Portugal and Navarre. After almost a millennium of harmonious existence, what had been the most populous and prosperous Jewish community in Europe ceased to exist on the Iberian Peninsula.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780827612396 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Jewish Publication Society |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 440 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Exiles in Sepharad
The Jewish Millennium in Spain
By Jeffrey Gorsky
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Jeffrey GorskyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8276-1251-8
CHAPTER 1
A Marriage of Convenience
The period in Spanish history beginning with the Muslim conquest in the eighth century is called by some the convivencia. The Spanish word literally means "living together." It is used to refer to a time in Spain when Christians, Muslims, and Jews coexisted in unparalleled harmony. For more than half a millennium, under either Muslim or Christian political control, the three cultures lived together, worked together, and explored new and old ideas together.
The convivencia was popularized—both as term and concept—by Américo Castro, a great Spanish historian of the twentieth century. Castro's work demonstrated the essential contributions of Muslims and Jews to Spanish culture, and he argued that these contributions played a pivotal role in forming the national character of Spain: "Between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries Spanish history was Christian-Islamic-Judaic; and during those centuries the definitive structure of Hispanic life was forged. It is not possible to break up this history into stagnant pools, or to divide it off into parallel, synchronous currents, because each one of the three groups was a part of the circumstances projected by the other two."
Castro's convivencia has inspired numerous descriptions of a multicultured Spain. In her recent book Ornament of the World, María Rosa Menocal describes the convivencia as a multicultural Eden, and religious intolerance was the apple that brought exile from this paradise. Islamic nationalists have cited the convivencia as proof that Islam is tolerant by nature, claiming that only Zionist distortions require Muslims to stray in self-defense from their natural tolerance of other faiths.
The convivencia provides a useful perspective on Jewish and Spanish history, highlighting the important contributions that Jews and Muslims in Spain made to Spanish and European culture. It also explains the basis for the great cultural accomplishments of the Spanish Jews and their economic and political achievements.
The exclusive focus on the convivencia and tolerance, however, distorts Jewish and Spanish history. While Jews participated in the Muslim and Christian kingdoms of Spain, they also largely lived apart from the other religious groups and maintained their autonomous culture. A focus exclusively on tolerance also makes it difficult to understand the bouts of anti-Jewish violence and repression that periodically erupted in both the Muslim and the Christian kingdoms.
In fact, Spaniards have traditionally presented the history of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim relations as a story of conflict, not cooperation. The convivencia was only popularized in the latter half of the twentieth century, by Américo Castro. Spaniards traditionally have focused instead on the reconquista, the lengthy war to reverse the Islamic invasion of Spain. This traditional Spanish narrative emphasizes devotion to Catholicism, a faith that led the Spanish to victory against the Muslim invaders, and which culminated in the Spanish expulsion of Jews and Moors from Spain. Jews, as well as Muslims, were foreign cultures that needed to be purged from Iberia to maintain Spanish Christian cultural purity.
This is the history told by conservative intellectuals such as the influential nineteenth-century scholar Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, whose basic views have been summarized by the British historian Henry Kamen: "[Menéndez y Pelayo] maintained the view that since earliest times there had been a genuine nation called Spain that drew its strength from the eternal values of Catholicism alone. All other cultures, whether Jewish or Arabic, were passing phases that only contributed distortions (or 'heresies') of the true essence."
Castro's work contradicted the traditional focus of conservative Spanish historians on the purity of Catholic Spain, an image that also lay at the heart of Franco's nationalist ideology. As Isabelle Rohr notes in The Spanish Right and the Jews: "The myth of the Reconquista was not only central to Nationalist thinking [within Spain], it was also the lens through which [Nationalist Spain] perceived the external world. Thus, Hitler's anti-Semitic campaign was labeled a crusade to save Christian Europe." The victory of Franco's nationalists in 1939 forced Américo Castro, along with his liberal ideas, into exile.
Castro became extremely influential outside Spain, but Spanish scholars, at least during the Franco years, rejected the convivencia for the ideal of the reconquest and instead focused on religious conflict, not cooperation. For example, in his book Understanding Spain, the twentieth-century Spanish philosopher Julián Marías, who had supported the republic, at the end of the Franco period still criticized Castro and defended the idea of Catholic Spain: "To speak of 'Christians, Moors, and Jews' as homogenous and comparable elements means exercising very great violence on the reality of medieval Spain and disfiguring its structure; above all, its projective, that is to say, historical, character. What we understand by Spain ... is the Christian Spain that did not accept its Islamization and struggled against it, with more or less success, with enthusiasm or with apathy, from early in the eighth century to the end of the fifteenth, without a single interruption of that constitutive project."
Tolerance or Conflict?
Was the history of the Spanish Jews a story of religious tolerance or of religious conflict? From the Jewish perspective the period of the convivencia has a mixed legacy. It was, in some ways, a golden age. During this period Jews enjoyed over five hundred years of relative stability. During much of this period, up until the fourteenth century, more Jews lived in Spain than in all the European countries combined. And Jews prospered. Some Jews, rich and powerful, under both Muslim and Christian rulers even became governmental ministers. Intellectually, the period opened the Jews to new ideas: They tried to reconcile their religion with the Hellenistic ideas that they had struggled with since the Maccabean rebellion. They built on Muslim advances to become world leaders in philosophy, medicine, and science. They explored new forms of mystical spiritualism, creating the canon of religious works known collectively as the Kabbalah.
Yet even at the best of times, Jews never were fully safe and secure under the convivencia. This so-called golden age was marked by outbreaks of repression, including the murders of prominent Jews and pogroms targeting entire communities. The convivencia—first under Muslim, then Christian rule—ended in violence and repression that matched or exceeded anything else in Europe.
Many people are struck by these extremes. How could Spain go from being the most tolerant to the most intolerant society toward the Jews? How could Spain foster intolerance after it had prospered as a multicultural society?
These are natural questions to ask, but they are the wrong questions. What made Spain unusual was its level of tolerance, not its repression. There was nothing unusual about intolerance; repression of Jews was endemic in the Muslim and Catholic worlds. Jews had been expelled from England and France. Rumors of ritual killings and well poisonings, as well as fears that Jews had been fomenting the plague, were all common reasons for anti-Jewish persecution. The Crusades often became a vehicle for anti-Jewish violence. What happened in Spain was different only in degree, not in kind. The interesting question is not why Spain turned intolerant, but why Spanish Jews were granted so much freedom and access to power in the first place.
A Marriage of Convenience
Muslims and Christians showed Jews tolerance because specific circumstances made Jews valuable to the rulers of Muslim and Christian Spain. To the Muslims the Jews were allies they could use to bolster their minority rule over a majority Christian population. To the Christians Jews were important cultural and political envoys to the Muslim world. Jews under the Muslims learned administrative skills later needed by the Christian rulers trained in warfare, not governance. As skilled artisans, Jews dominated the productive sector of the economy and made up much of the tax base. The convivencia was a marriage of convenience.
Richard Fletcher, a British historian who specializes in medieval Spain, describes the pragmatic basis for Spanish tolerance: "It is a myth of the modern imagination that medieval Islamic Spain was, in any sense that we should recognize today, a tolerant society. Much the same could be said of the fortunes of the Mudejars [Muslims] and Jews under Christian rule. They were reluctantly tolerated, not out of principle but out of pragmatism: because they could be useful."
Even Américo Castro recognized the practical motivations for embracing the tolerant practices known as the convivencia. "That the three religions coexisted is due less to tolerance than to vital weakness."
This marriage of convenience was maintained by the Muslim and the Christian rulers only with difficulty, in the face of strong, popular anti-Jewish pressures. In Muslim Spain the Jews suffered from the religious intolerance of fundamentalist Muslim sects. In Christian Spain motives for intolerance included resentment against the Jewish moneylenders and tax collectors for the Crown. The Jews came under almost constant attack from the church, particularly from the mendicant friars who had taken up the mission of converting the Jews.
This underlying antagonism to the Jewish presence created inevitable tensions even in the best of times in the Jews' relations with their Muslim and Christian neighbors. Strong, stable government could suppress anti-Jewish pressures. But when the government lacked the power or the will to protect the Jews, the result could be tragic—either for individuals or, on occasion, for entire communities. This happened repeatedly to Jews under both their Muslim and their Christian patrons. Significant anti-Jewish measures almost always came at periods of unusual political instability.
The expulsion decree of 1492 was an exception because it came at a time of both political stability and an exceptionally strong monarchy. But Ferdinand and Isabella could sign such a decree because, by 1492, the practical incentives for tolerance had largely disappeared. Converts from Judaism—controlled through the repressive apparatus of the Spanish Inquisition—could perform almost all the services that the Jews had provided in the past.
The end to the practical considerations that fostered tolerance in Spain would end the convivencia forever and lead to the eradication of Judaism from Iberia for nearly five hundred years.
CHAPTER 2The Visigoth Persecution of the Jews
It is not known when Jews first settled in Iberia. Medieval legends have it that the city of Toledo in central Spain was founded by Jews, following the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity. Some Sephardic families claimed descent from the time of King David. Jews may have joined early Phoenician or Carthaginian trading settlements. It is known that Jews had accompanied the Romans into the area and had joined settlements in the Roman provinces of Hispania and Lusitania. The oldest known synagogue remains that have been discovered, in Elche (near the Mediterranean), date from between the third and the fifth century.
But before the turn of the first millennium, the Visigoths almost brought an end to the Jewish presence in Iberia. The Visigoths were Germanic mercenaries who, after sacking Rome, wandered west to pick off the remains of the defunct empire. By the end of the fifth century, they controlled most of the Iberian Peninsula. Theirs was a weak kind of control, a series of unstable reigns rocked by wars of succession and local revolts. The original royal line died out in 507 AD. Only eight of the twenty-three Visigoth kings succeeded their fathers, some of them only very briefly. Religious differences stoked instability: the Visigoths initially were Arians, who believed that Jesus had an existence distinct from God, while most Iberians followed the Roman Catholic belief in the Trinity.
Culturally, the most prominent intellectual figure during the Visigoth period was Isidore of Seville, the archbishop of that city, who was later canonized by the Catholic Church. His Etymologiae was meant to be an exhaustive encyclopedia of all learning known to humankind. It demonstrated how much Greek and Roman knowledge was lost to Europe, and why, given this loss of classical learning, these years would be called the "Dark Ages." Isidore also wrote De fide catholica ex Veteriet Novo Testamento, contra Judaeos, which was to become one of the most popular anti-Jewish books of the Middle Ages.
At first the Jews were treated under the Visigoths much as they had been under Roman rule. They were permitted to hold senatorial rank and were recruited to important fortresses for garrison duty. Jews were permitted their own courts and allowed to perform their religious observances. But the Visigoth king Reccared, who converted his people to the Roman faith in 589 to conform with Spanish practice, enacted a few laws unfavorable to the Jews. Serious troubles began with King Sisebut, who ascended to the throne in 612. He freed all Christian slaves owned by Jews and forbade Jews from hiring Christian workers. Violators had half of their property confiscated. Sisebut also instituted the death penalty for Jews convicted of proselytizing. Jews married to Christians had to convert or leave the kingdom, and Jews were prohibited from holding any office with power over Christians.
Either these laws proved ineffective, or King Sisebut lost patience with them. He subsequently instituted forced conversions, including the conversions of several prominent rabbis. Jews fled en masse into exile. Even Bishop Isidore, who had penned his great tract against the Jews, protested the severity of these measures.
Sisebut's far-reaching measures were the first in a series of cycles of repression and tolerance. Kings favorable toward the Jews alternated with others who passed ever more repressive—even genocidal—anti-Jewish laws. Ultimately, the Visigoths promulgated some of the most repressive anti-Jewish laws in European history. As noted by the historian Norman Roth: "The Visigothic period produced the most vile polemic and the harshest legislation against Jews encountered at any time in medieval Europe."
King Chintila, whose reign began in 636, required all Jews to convert or to leave the Visigoth territory. Any convert deemed insincere was subject to death by stoning. Reccesuinth, who reigned from 649 to 672, made the practice of Jewish rites a capital offense. Erwig, king after 680, promulgated twenty-eight anti-Jewish laws, including a penalty of death for refusal to eat pork. King Egica, Erwig's successor, copied King Reccesuinth's description of the Jews as a "contagious pestilence" by coining the Latin phrase judaeorum pestis, or the "Jewish plague." Under Egica Jews were stripped of all they possessed and ordered into slavery.
Politics—rather than religious fanaticism—seem the most likely cause for these actions. Repressive measures of kings from Chintila to Egica were often suspended by succeeding monarchs like Wamba and Witiza. These changes of policy might have reflected efforts by successive kings to appease their most powerful bases of support. Anti-Jewish laws pleased the Spanish bishops (who held considerable secular power beyond their religious authority), while the more tolerant kings traditionally looked to the Jews and their aristocratic allies for support.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Exiles in Sepharad by Jeffrey Gorsky. Copyright © 2015 Jeffrey Gorsky. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction: The Jewish Millennium in Spain
Part 1. La Convivencia
1. A Marriage of Convenience
2. The Visigoth Persecution of the Jews
3. Muslim Rule
4. Jews of Muslim Spain
5. Judah Halevi and The Kuzari
6. A Golden Age of Poetry
7. The End of the Caliphate
8. Maimonides
9. Christian Rule
10. Jews in Castile and Aragon
11. Book of Splendorand Kabbalah Mysticism
Part 2. The End of Tolerance
12. Toward 1391
13. Seeds of Destruction
14. The Conversion of the Jews
15. The Church Campaign against the Jews, Postconversion
Part 3. The Age of the Converts
16. New Christians
17. Converts and Castile
18. Anti- and Pro-Converso Writings
Part 4. The Spanish Inquisition
19. The Catholic Monarchy
20. Origins of the Inquisition
21. The Inquisition
22. Arrest, Trial, and Punishment
23. Inquisition Expansion
Part 5. The Last Iberian Jews
24. Spain and Expulsion
25. The Last Jews of Iberia
Part 6. After Expulsion
26. Purity of Blood
27. Jewish Blood, Black Blood
28. Conversos and the Beginnings of the Modern Novel
29. Coming to America
Conclusion: The Millennium in Spain, and After
Notes
Bibliography
Index