Images of the Jewish community in medieval Iberia

¹Ibn Ezra, Shirat Yisrael; Idem., Sefer ha‐’iyunim veha‐diyunim. See also Gerber, “Reconsiderations of Sephardic History.”.

²The idea that political and social bonds rest upon “imagined communities” and “invented traditions” became a major topic of discussion in the early 1980s. See Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition; Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. Geary has recently pushed this discussion of national communities back to the Middle Ages in The Myth of Nations.

³This view is echoed by Assis, “‘Sefarad:’ A Definition.”

⁴See Obadiah 1: 20, and the famous reference to being the “edge of the West” by Halevi: Carmi, Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, 347. On the continued identity of Jews in Christian Iberia with the older image of Sepharad see Ben Shalom, “Myths of Troy.”

⁵Baer, History of the Jews, 1: 64.

⁶Zacuto, Sefer Yuhasin; Ardutiel, “Sefer Ha‐Qabbalah.”

⁷Ibn Daud, Book of Tradition, English section, 99–100; The Exalted Faith. See also the comments of Gampel, “Wayward Teacher,” 405.

⁸See for example Maimonides, Teshuvot ha‐Rambam, 2: 548.

⁹Gutwirth, “El gobernador judío ideal.” As Gutwirth and Ram Ben Shalom both note, fifteenth‐century Jewish intellectuals appear to have been greatly influenced by the arguments of their Christian counterparts. However, this only meant that they were able to put older Sephardic ideals to use in new ways. Ben Shalom, “Myths of Troy.”

¹⁰Lawee, “Reception of Rashi’s Commentary.”

¹¹On the continued use of older themes by Hispano‐Jewish poets see Carrete Parrondo, “Sefarad en las fuentes hebreas.” On the influence of intellectual trends from northern Europe see Grossman, “Spanish and Ashkenazi Jewry.”

¹²Provençali, “Responsum on the Matter of Studying the Sciences,” 70; partially translated in Einbinder, No Place of Rest, 34.

¹³See for instance Gerondi, Responsa, no. 79; Ishbili, Responsa, nos. 131 and 180; Ben Asher, Zikhron Yehuda, nos. 45, 54, 94, and 100; and Ben Yehiel, Responsa, no. 55, part 9. Naturally, the assertion of a Sephardic cultural community was not exclusive with regard to other religious, cultural, or geographical rubrics. Jewish intellectuals participated in non‐Jewish culture in a variety of ways and expanded their identities accordingly.

¹⁴Ben Shalom “Myths of Troy.”

¹⁵Ayaso Martínez, “Antigüedad y excelencia,” 246. Interestingly, one measure of the “Jewishness” of the conversos after 1492 was the degree to which they laid claim to this Hispano‐Jewish cultural legacy. See Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto.

¹⁶On a similar effort to create a usable past, see Harris, From Muslim to Christian Granada.

¹⁷Septimus, Hispano‐Jewish Society in Transition; and Gampel, “Wayward Teacher.” Eduard Feliu’s argument that Cataluña did not form part of “Sepharad” is, I think, too narrow, in this regard. See Feliu, “Cataluña no era Sefarad.”

¹⁸See for instance Ray, Sephardic Frontier; Klein, Jews, Christian Society and Royal Power; Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance; Assis, Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry; and Gampel, Last Jews on Iberian Soil. Despite the absence of similar archival sources for the Muslim period, it is reasonable to conclude that Jewish communal associations during this period were every bit as local as they were in the later Middle Ages, particularly during the Taifa period.

¹⁹Definition of Sephardic society in terms of intellectual posture was picked up and re‐enforced by Baer in his magnum opus History of the Jews in Christian Spain. For Baer, Greco‐Arabic rationalism, or “Averoism,” was both the defining characteristic and the Achilles’ heel of medieval Sephardic culture.

²⁰Linehan, “Religion, Nationalism and National Identity;” O’Callaghan, “Ecclesiastical Estate;” Thompson, “Castile, Spain and the Monarchy;” Post, “‘Blessed Lady Spain.’”

²¹Pick, Conflict and Coexistence. Castile’s mythos of a unified Hispania contrasts with the general hostility to theories of political centralization found in the Crown of Aragon. Bisson, Medieval Crown of Aragon, 19–28.

²²This Sephardic mystique was given new life in the nineteenth century when it became a major focus of the German‐Jewish scholars who founded the modern field of Jewish studies. Schorsch, “Myth of Sephardic Supremacy.” On the promotion of Sephardic cultural superiority during the early modern period see Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 125–33 and 195–6.

²³Ben Meshulam Shevet, Hidushe ha‐Ramban, 2; Ben Naeh, Realm of the Sultans, 210–11. Supra‐communal organization of Jewish communities existed solely on an ad hoc basis, generally for the purpose of collecting government taxes. Assis, Golden Age, 163–78, and 195–6. Baer’s assertion that “the aljamas of Castile were federated on a country‐wide basis” is a gross overstatement based on the statutes drawn up by the leadership of Castilian Jewry in 1432. These takkanot were an attempt by the Jews to reorganize their communities after their precipitous decline following 1391, and should not be taken as indicative of communal organization in earlier periods. Furthermore, while these statutes envision a broad, supra‐communal system, there is little evidence that they were successfully implemented. Baer, History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 314–15.

²⁴Gampel, “‘Identity’ of Sephardim,” 134.

²⁵On the importance of local custom compared to halakha see Alfasi, Responsa, no. 13; and Ibn Adret, Responsa, vol. 2, no. 292; vol. 3, nos. 394 and 399; and vol. 5, no. 263. The general paucity of studies focusing on the tensions between minhag and halakha in medieval Iberian Jewry is particularly striking considering the extensive literature that has developed around similar trends within the Hispano‐Christian legal tradition.

²⁶Assis, “Jews of Spain in Gentile Courts,” Gutwirth, “Jews and Courts;” and Simonsohn, “Communal Boundaries Reconsidered.”

²⁷Gampel, “Jews, Muslims and Christians,” 24. On Jewish informers, see Lourie, “Mafiosi and Malsines.”

²⁸Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 55. These and similar laws that were enacted throughout the Spanish kingdoms in the fifteenth century signal the complex and overlapping spheres of Jewish identity in the wake of 1391. See Baer, History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2: 245–423.

²⁹“muchos strangeros e foranos judios, e senyaladamente por los de la aljama de la dicha ciudat de Teruel [Many alien and foreign Jews, especially from the Jewish community of Teruel].” ARV [Arxiu del Regne de València]: C 130: 16r‐v, cited in Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 117, and a similar reference on 34. Meyerson notes that the Jews referred to as “alien” (strangeros) were those who came from outside of the Crown of Aragon, most likely from North Africa. However, it should be noted that many of these North African Jews were, in fact, of Iberian provenance, having fled the Peninsula after the riots and forced conversions of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

³⁰Eleazar Gutwirth has argued against the idea of a Jewish aristocracy, and his point is well taken. However, the power of Jewish courtiers, and their difficult relationship with local Jewish kehalim, cannot be adequately described as simply that of an haute bourgeoisie. Gutwirth, “Widows, Artisans.”

³¹Ben Sasson, “Al‐Andalus.”

³²Gutwirth, “Jews and Courts,” 7.

³³The most elaborate system and perhaps the one that went the furthest toward realization was that of the kingdom of Portugal. Ray, “Royal Authority and the Jewish Community.”

³⁴Astruc, Minhat Qenā’ot, 98.

³⁵Ruiz, “Expansion et changement.”

³⁶Thompson, “Castile, Spain and the Monarchy,” 133.

³⁷Castro, Los españoles: como llegaron a serlo, 167. Though one can take issue with Castro’s goal of promoting medieval Spain as culturally harmonious, his suggestion that Jews owed much of their identity to non‐Jewish factors is nonetheless well taken.

³⁸This lack of conceptual integration is particularly remarkable for the territories under Christian control for which there exists a substantial collection of sources in Latin and its romance derivatives.

³⁹Septimus, Hispano‐Jewish Society; Lawee, “From Sepharad to Ashkenaz;” Galinsky, “Ashkenazim in Sefarad;” and Grossman, “Spanish and Ashkenazi Jewry.” Indeed, the central thesis of Yizhak Baer’s foundational History of the Jews in Christian Spain is that the ultimate decline and dissolution of Hispano‐Jewish society was due to the Averroist worldview of its elite.

⁴⁰On this issue, see Moshe Rosman’s provocative work How Jewish is Jewish History?, especially chapter 1. My point here is that there are conceptual territories that we have been unwilling to explore, and suggest that this built‐in reticence has an unavoidable impact on our findings.

⁴¹García Serrano, “Revisiting Castilian Identity,” 174.

⁴²Teo Ruiz has recently noted the problem of dealing with minority communities as distinct yet fully integrated facets of medieval Spanish history. Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 139.

⁴³See Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?, chap. 3. I suggest that hybridity need not encompass all of Jewish culture, but may be a useful way of understanding certain aspects of that culture, such as the functioning of Jewish communal organizations.

⁴⁴In addition to a profusion of international symposia, conferences, and colloquia that treat this subject, the concept of medieval Sepharad continues to flourish in several Spanish‐language journals including: Sefarad (Madrid), Miscelaná de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos (Granada), Helmantica (Salamanca), Maguen‐Escudo (Caracas) and Sefárdica (Buenos Aires).

⁴⁵The literature on this subject is extensive. See Scherer, “Judeo‐Spanish Folktales;” Yahalom, “Sephardic Traditions and Ottoman Influences;” Silva Tavim, “O castelo abandonado;” Schroeter, “Moroccan Jewish Identities;” Beckwith, “Al‐Andalus/Iberia/Sepharad;” Kaplan, An Alternative Path; and Coll‐Tellechea, “Remembering Sepharad.”

⁴⁶Goldberg, “From Sephardi to Mizrahi,” 169. For other examples of the Ashkenazic promotion of Sephardic cultural unity see the essays in Fontaine, Sepharad in Ashkenaz.

⁴⁷For the relationship between medieval “Sepharad” and the Sephardic Diaspora see Zohar, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry; Fontaine, Sepharad in Ashkenaz; Gerber, Jews of Spain; Gampel, Crisis and Creativity; Zucker, Sephardic Identity; Stillman and Stillman, From Iberia to Diaspora; Sloan, Sephardic Jews of Spain and Portugal; and Goldberg, Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries.

⁴⁸Dinur, Yisrael ba‐Golah, 1: 103 and 106–7.

⁴⁹Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?, 95.

⁵⁰Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, chap. 2.

⁵¹Thompson, “Castile, Spain and the Monarchy,” 125 and 127.