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Beyond convivencia: critical reflections

on the historiography of interfaith
relations in Christian Spain
a
Maya Soifer
a
Introduction to the Humanities , Stanford University , Stanford,
CA, USA
Published online: 27 Feb 2009.

To cite this article: Maya Soifer (2009) Beyond convivencia: critical reflections on the
historiography of interfaith relations in Christian Spain, Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 1:1,
19-35, DOI: 10.1080/17546550802700335

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 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies
Vol. 1, No. 1, January 2009, 19–35

Beyond convivencia: critical reflections on the historiography of

interfaith relations in Christian Spain
Maya Soifer*

Introduction to the Humanities, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Journal
10.1080/17546550802700335
RIBS_A_370203.sgm
1754-6559
Original
Taylor
102009
msoifer@stanford.edu
MayaSoifer
00000January
and
&ofArticle
Francis
Medieval
(print)/1754-6567
Francis
2009
Ltd
Iberian Studies
(online)

While Américo Castro’s convivencia remains an influential concept in medieval

Iberian studies, its sway over the field has been lessening in recent years. Despite
scholars’ best efforts to rethink and redefine the concept, it has resisted all
attempts to transform it into a workable analytical tool. The article explores the
malaise affecting convivencia, and suggests that the idea has become more of an
Downloaded by [84.117.15.183] at 14:17 22 May 2014

impediment than a help to medieval Iberian studies. It argues that convivencia

retains some of its former influence because scholars insist on understanding it as
a distinctly Ibero-Islamic phenomenon. However, this article suggests that the
evidence for Islamic influence on interfaith coexistence in Christian Spain is
scarce. Instead of continuing to embrace the nationalist myth of Spain’s unique
status in medieval Europe, scholars need to acknowledge the basic similarities in
the Christian treatment of religious minorities north and south of the Pyrenees.
The article also explores other aspects of convivencia’s problematic legacy:
polarization of the field between “tolerance” and “persecution,” and the
inattention to the nuances of social and political power relations that affected
Jewish–Christian–Muslim coexistence in Christian Iberia.
Keywords: convivencia; toleration; Américo Castro; Jews; interfaith relations;
Islamic influence on medieval Europe

As Robert I. Burns once remarked, the frontier – “a heroic place to take one’s stand”
– is to any progressively minded person a Good Thing.1 So, one might presume, is
medieval convivencia, the putative “living together” of Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
Ever since Américo Castro put the concept into wide circulation in 1948, it has been
exerting steady influence on the field of medieval Iberian studies.2 It is easy to see
why. Like S.D. Goitein, who felt “quite at home” in the free-trade Mediterranean
world of the Geniza collection, professional and lay historians alike were often capti-
vated by the notion of medieval Spain’s religious toleration, which they often painted
in broad strokes as a prefiguration of the modern western ideal of inter-religious

*Email: msoifer@stanford.edu
1
Burns, “The Significance of the Frontier,” 307.
2
Originally published as España en su historia. Cristianos, moros y judíos (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Losada, 1948), it has been revised and reprinted numerous times. I use the 1971
English edition, The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History, translated by W. King and
S. Margaretten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), as well as a 2001 reprint of
the 1983 Spanish edition published by Editorial Crítica (Barcelona).

ISSN 1754-6559 print/ISSN 1754-6567 online

© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17546550802700335
http://www.informaworld.com
 20 M. Soifer

harmony.3 Convivencia has frequently seemed an attractive prospect – to medievalists

caught in the perennial battle against the libelous label of the “Dark Ages;” to Hispan-
ists who could administer it as an antidote for the scourge of Spain’s “Black Legend;”
and to some Jewish historians who visualized a “Golden Age” of Jewish culture in
medieval Sepharad.4 In addition to these redemptive uses, convivencia was of unques-
tionable utility in counteracting the historiographic approach critically described by
some historians as the “Castilianist” perspective on Spanish history. In this somber
and minimalist vision, most often associated with the towering figure of Claudio
Sánchez-Albornoz, Castile, uncontaminated by the Islamic invasion and by centuries
of interaction with the Jews, led Spain through the centuries-long Reconquista toward
the fulfillment of its manifest destiny of “reunification.” By postulating the existence
of a cultural symbiosis in medieval Iberia, convivencia problematized the pristine
image of homo hispanus and provided a much-needed corrective to the mythological
construct of “eternal Spain.”5
With convivencia appearing like a Good Thing to so many, why, in recent years,
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did the concept become the source of growing unease among the historians of medi-
eval Spain? This article will explore the malaise affecting convivencia and suggest
that the idea has become more of an impediment than a help to the field of medieval
Iberian studies. Indeed, convivencia’s continued popularity with some historians and
the general public notwithstanding, many scholars today treat it like a once sought-
after guest who has overstayed her welcome. David Nirenberg’s assertion, still cutting
edge in the early 1990s, that “convivencia is a central issue in the historiography of
religious minorities in the Iberian Peninsula” no longer holds true.6 Much more in
tune with the current trends in historiography is Robert I. Burns’ observation that
“Américo Castro’s convivencia … is not so often heard in the land.”7 As Thomas F.
Glick has pointed out in his insightful attempt to breathe new life into the concept,
some of the blame lay with the original definition. Castro’s convivencia was an ideal-
ist construct that aspired to describe mental processes taking place in the collective
consciousness of the three cultures, but was never meant to be tested against the social
and political realities of Jewish–Christian–Muslim interaction.8 Paradoxically, the
quotidian experience of living was missing from the concept usually translated into
English as “living together.” Detached from the conflict-prone affairs of the real
3“We do not wear turbans here; but, while reading many a Geniza document, one feels quite
at home” (Goitein, Mediterranean Society, ix). Recent attempts to draw moral and political
lessons from the medieval Spanish experience include Menocal, Ornament of the World, and
Lowney, Vanished World. See also Doubleday and Coleman, In the Light of Medieval Spain.
4On la leyenda negra, see, for example, Peters, Inquisition. A good example of a Jewish
historian embracing convivencia is Norman Roth. See his Jews, Visigoths, and Muslims.
5Sánchez-Albornoz, España: un enigma histórico; Pastor, “Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz,”
121–7. For a penetrating analysis of the competing visions of Spanish history, see Hillgarth,
“Spanish Historiography;” on the role of Reconquista in shaping Spanish historiography see
Tolan, “Using the Middle Ages.” Historians of Aragon-Catalonia are particularly irked by
Castilian-centered interpretations of Spanish history. Like J.N. Hillgarth, who takes issue with
Joseph O’Callaghan’s characterization of medieval Hispanic history as a “quest for unity,”
David Abulafia decries “modern Castilian triumphalism.” See his “‘Nam iudei servi regis
sunt,’” 99.
6David Nirenberg argued this in 1994, but his article “Religious and Sexual Boundaries in the
Medieval Crown of Aragon,” originally a conference paper presented at the University of
Notre Dame, did not appear until 2000.
7Burns, “Mudejar Parallel Societies,” 108.
8Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and Christian Spain, 347; “Convivencia,” 2.
 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 21

world, convivencia’s transition from an idealist to an idealizing notion was only too
logical.
Whether it could ever be a useful category of scholarly analysis is another ques-
tion. Thomas F. Glick has answered in the affirmative. All that convivencia needs to
acquire a new lease on life, he argues, is to be stripped of Castro’s obscurantist, ideal-
ist language and be placed in the framework of modern anthropological theory.
Castro’s findings on the existence of cultural symbiosis in medieval Spain are essen-
tially correct, he argues, but have to be re-moored to the study of mechanisms that
regulate cultural contact and acculturation. In Glick’s view, historians need to turn
their attention to investigating the factors – social, demographic, political, ecological
– that facilitated and, conversely, impeded the diffusion and adoption of ideas and
customs among Spain’s three religious groups, all the while retaining the concept of
Castro’s convivencia as the fundamental principle behind this complex social and
cultural dynamic.9 “Castro’s convivencia survives,” Glick asserts in his most recent
assessment of the legendary scholar’s legacy.10
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Judging from historians’ mixed reaction to Glick’s resuscitation efforts, convivencia

survives, but it remains on life support. Some have declared themselves unable to move
past convivencia’s romantic baggage and the picture of interfaith harmony that it invari-
ably conjures. Teofilo Ruiz, for instance, questions whether the concept can ever account
for the atmosphere of animosity and mistrust that characterized Jewish–Christian
relations in the kingdom of Castile.11 Even as the study of Jewish–Christian–Muslim
cross-cultural interactions in the mold envisioned by Glick has blossomed, few scholars
have found a meaningful place in it for convivencia. Indeed, why use a term weighed
down by ideological contentiousness and corrupted by generalizations and unprovable
assumptions, when one can employ neutral terms like acculturation or symbiosis, and
discuss diffusion, borrowing, infiltration, and adaptation without having to navigate a
historiographic minefield?12 While some historians have ditched the term altogether,
others have scaled it down to a very narrow, technical definition of mundane social
interaction between members of different religious groups.13
If convivencia survives, it is not because Glick has succeeded at giving it specific
or meaningful content. Rather the opposite is true. By tying it to the existing anthro-
pological concepts of acculturation and diffusion, he has once again proved conviven-
cia’s seemingly limitless susceptibility to manipulation and reinvention. Perhaps it is
this very quality of malleability that guarantees its phantom-like presence in Iberian
historiography. Having appeared under the guises of “peaceful coexistence,” “accul-
turation,” and “daily interaction,” convivencia has become a byword that one can
employ in any number of ways. Convivencia can be anything and everything: a rhetor-
ical flourish, a nostalgic nod to a rich historiographic tradition, as well as an ambitiously

9Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and Christian Spain, xix, 345; Glick and Pi-Sunyer,
“Acculturation,” 151–2.
10Glick and Pi-Sunyer, “Convivencia,” 7.
11Ruiz, “Trading with the ‘Other,’” 64.
12See, for example, Burns, Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
13This is the sense in which the term “convivencia” is employed by Jonathan Ray in his
recent book The Sephardic Frontier, 174; see also Catlos, The Victors and the Vanquished,
261, 295. Mary Halavais understands “convivencia” as a “shared experience of individuals
from three different religious traditions,” and extends it – rather uncritically – to the relations
between Old and New Christians. See her Like Wheat to the Miller, chap. II.
 22 M. Soifer

construed notion that aspires to summarize the entire range of religious minorities’
experiences in medieval Spain.
It is in this latter sense that the concept is enjoying its most recent revival. Expertly
employed in David Nirenberg’s original and penetrating study of Jews and Muslims
under the Crown of Aragon, this approach to convivencia might be called “dialectic,”
for it rests upon the notion that toleration was predicated on intolerance: that is, not
only were ritualized outbursts of inter-communal violence a normal and expected part
of coexistence, but also they made the continued toleration for non-Christian minori-
ties possible by delineating their place within the majority society.14 Nirenberg is not
the first scholar to apply anthropological theory to historical research in asserting that
violence could play a vital social function, but his argument puts convivencia into a
sharp new relief.15 At the very least, it has scraped the varnish of romanticism off the
old concept by showing that tension, violence, and conflict did not automatically
exclude the possibility of coexistence and could be its integral part without perma-
nently upsetting the overall equilibrium in interfaith relations.
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There are other historians besides Nirenberg who in recent years have rejected the
notion that violence and exclusion are necessarily antithetic to peaceful coexistence.
In its most general form, the argument goes something like this: the dominant society
in medieval Iberia had a mostly tolerant attitude toward religious minorities, allowing
them a degree of social, cultural, and economic interaction with each other and with
the ruling majority; however, the ever-present tensions could explode into violence
that threatened to tear apart the delicate fabric of interfaith relations. Benjamin
Gampel follows this line of thought in dismissing a simplistic understanding of
convivencia as a “total harmony” between religious groups, but envisioning a plural-
istic society, in which communities lived and worked side by side, while also facing
competition from each other that “occasionally turned to hatred.”16 Similarly, the
Spanish scholars María José Cano and Beatriz Molina have argued that in Muslim
Spain, the existence of conflicts and violence did not preclude the efflorescence of an
intercultural society that tolerated expressions of mutual respect, solidarity, and even
love.17
At first glance, there does not seem to be anything inherently problematic with
claiming that the coexistence of different religious groups in Spain involved a delicate
balancing act between cooperation and antagonism, interdependence and separation,
toleration and persecution. The popularity of this approach makes one wonder: has
convivencia been rehabilitated?18 It seems to me that it would be premature to answer
in the affirmative. While only time can test the durability of this particular reincarna-
tion of convivencia, at present its prospects do not look promising. In reality, scholars
remain locked within the parameters of the debate originated by Américo Castro and
Claudio Sánchez Albornoz. Indeed, John Tolan has questioned the applicability of the
categories of “tolerance, acceptance” and “exclusion, violence” to Iberian realities,
arguing that their modern connotations mistakenly suggest that medieval Christians
had contradictory attitudes toward religious minorities. In fact, to a Christian mind,
tolerance and intolerance were inseparable: the minorities’ religious inferiority
14Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 9.
15See Geary, “Living with Conflicts in Stateless
France: A Typology of Conflict Management
Mechanisms, 1050–1200” in his Living with the Dead, 125–60.
16Gampel, “Jews, Christians, and Muslims,” 11.
17Cano and Molina, “Judaísmo, Cristanismo e Islam en Sefarad.”
18Pick, Conflict and Coexistence, 1–3; Melechen, “Jews of Medieval Toledo,” 309.
 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 23

justified both repression and acceptance.19 Glenn Olsen has suggested that modern
historians have difficulty appreciating the subtlety of the medieval understanding of
tolerance, which was close to a grudging acceptance: “bearing with someone or some
thing that one cannot reasonably do much about.”20 The difficulty of disengaging
from the modern categories of thought is not the only reason scholars have not yet
found a workable alternative to this dualistic paradigm. They are heirs to a long histo-
riographic tradition that made the dueling visions of Spain’s supposed “tolerance” or
“intolerance” into the central problem of Iberian studies.21 As Nirenberg’s work
demonstrates, this shrill dichotomy dictates the terms of engagement even when a
scholar consciously tries to escape either extreme position.22 One cannot help but
wonder why historians are content to operate within the binary categories of a long-
outdated debate, even as they argue that these categories are too crude to capture the
intricacies of interfaith relations in medieval Iberia.
There are other reasons to challenge the viability of the “balancing act” approach.
From this perspective, the mechanism that enabled convivencia was largely self-
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correcting: even as everyday activities created a common sphere of interaction,

violence and symbolic statements of difference maintained the lines of separation. To
assert that it involved a balance between the positive and the negative aspects of
minority–majority relations sounds suspiciously like a statement of an obvious fact. If
there was no balance, historians would not be studying inter-religious coexistence in
the first place. While the unveiling of convivencia’s “dark side” was unquestionably
a constructive development in Iberian historiography, it has not made the concept into
a workable analytical tool. In a certain sense, the neo-convivencia is almost as imprac-
ticable and metaphysical as the original formulation. Castro’s convivencia at least
aspired to be present in the mental world of the medieval communities; the new
version is unequivocally a social scientist’s construct, which presumes the existence
of an indeterminate mechanism that infuses social reality with just the right amount of
antagonism and toleration, somehow keeping the whole system in check.23 What it
does not even attempt to answer is where the hostility and the need for cooperation
come from, and how the desirable balance is achieved.
It is for good reason, then, that a growing number of historians try to modify the
concept of convivencia or replace it with analytical categories that seem better
equipped for describing the untidy realities of Jewish–Christian–Muslim coexistence
in medieval Iberia. Some Spanish scholars prefer to speak of coexistencia in place of
convivencia, defining it as a physical coexistence of the three communities in the same
cities and neighborhoods, a coexistence, which, in their opinion, did not necessarily
lead to a social integration between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. This is the view
of H. Salvador Martínez, who argues that acculturation (he calls it “cultural conviven-
cia”) was a prerogative of a small minority of non-Christians able to frequent the royal

19Tolan, “Une ‘convivencia’ bien précaire,” 385, 386.

20Olsen, “Middle Ages in the History of Toleration,” 11.
21Novikoff, “Between Tolerance and Intolerance,” 7–36.
22“The present work argues against both these positions, against a rose-tinted haven of
tolerance and a darkening valley of tears, but it also borrows from both” (Nirenberg,
Communities of Violence, 9).
23One may also call it an “etic construct” in the sense it is usually understood by cultural
anthropologists, i.e. as an analysis of human behavior from the perspective of an outside
observer, using epistemological categories of social science (as opposed to an “emic,” native
informant’s perspective).
 24 M. Soifer

court and participate in the king’s financial and artistic endeavors.24 Francisco García
Fitz differentiates between “political,” “cultural,” and “social” convivencia and
analyzes each of them in turn, only to conclude that convivencia is a modern myth that
finds no corroboration in medieval records.25 A Canadian scholar, Brian Catlos, cuts
through the Gordian knot of issues surrounding convivencia by rejecting it altogether.
In his view, acculturation and endemic violence were not what characterized the posi-
tion of religious minorities in the kingdom of Aragon. Instead, the fabric of interfaith
relations was held together by a system of overlapping reciprocal interests and nego-
tiated, utilitarian arrangement – conveniencia. In other words, religious coexistence
was not a romantic affair but a marriage of convenience predicated on the minorities’
utility to Christians, which could be (and was, eventually) torn asunder under the
double pressure of economic and social insecurity and growing competition.26
Convivencia is commonly understood as a distinctively Ibero-Islamic phenome-
non. This view dates back to Castro, the godfather of convivencia, who remarked
succinctly: “Spanish toleration was Islamic, and not Christian.”27 However, the
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evidence for the influence of the Islamic model on inter-religious coexistence in

Christian Spain is not clear. The proponents of this paradigm usually cite the role of
the dhimma system, which regulated the Muslim community’s relations with religious
minorities, in providing a model, or even more loosely, an “insistent example” for the
Christians to follow in their treatment of Jews and Muslims.28 However, the Islamic
model of toleration was not the only “example” available to the conquering Christian
armies in Spain. As Cary Nederman correctly points out, Christendom had its own
tradition of accepting at least one religious minority – the Jews – whose presence
among Christians was not only permissible but theologically required.29 According to
St Augustine, the Jews had to be preserved as witnesses to the truth of Christian faith
and a living testament to the antiquity of the Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, being essen-
tial for the fulfillment of the divine plan of salvation, the Jews were to be present at
the end of times.30 There is no reason why the expanding Iberian states could not have
devised their own model of toleration, inspired, in part, by the Augustinian principle
and the example of the Christian states to the north, and in part by the practical exigen-
cies that necessitated the extension of this toleration to the large Muslim population in
the newly conquered territories. The Christian and Muslim traditions of toleration had
many points of intersection, probably owing to their common origin in late Roman and
Byzantine legal practices.31 In northern Europe, as in Muslim Spain, the Jews were

24Salvador Martínez, La convivencia en la España del siglo XIII, 11–24.

25García Fitz, “Las minorías religiosas,” 13–56. Cf. Blasco Martínez, “A mi entender, la
convivencia idílica de las tres culturas que se nos ha querido vender, no es más que un mito”
(“Judíos de la España medieval,” 101).
26Catlos, “Contexto y conveniencia en la corona de Aragón;” The Victors and the
Vanquished, 407. The neologism has received a positive response from some scholars: see
Robinson and Rouhi, Under the Influence, 4–5.
27“La tolerancia española fue islámica y no cristiana” (Castro, España en su historia, 202).
28Burns, “Introduction to the Seventh Partida,” xxviii; Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and
Christian Spain, 187–8. Mark Meyerson asserts that “Christian rulers borrowed the dhimmah
model and adapted it to Christian norms,” although he also notes a “crucial difference”
between the two systems. See Meyerson, Muslims of Valencia, 3.
29Nederman, “Discourses and Contexts of Tolerance,” 20–1.
30On St Augustine’s doctrine of “witness” and especially on its place in medieval scholastic
theology, see Hood, Aquinas and the Jews, 10–15.
31Simon, “Jews in the Legal Corpus,” 89.
 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 25

allowed communal autonomy and freedom of worship, but faced discriminatory

prescriptions intended to ensure separation between them and the majority society.
For example, just as the so-called “Ordinances of ‘Umar” required non-Muslims
living under Islamic rule to maintain an outside appearance (in clothing and dress
accessories, footwear and hairstyle) that would distinguish them from the Muslim
conquerors,32 the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) stipulated that the
Jews were to wear distinctive clothing in order to minimize their social intercourse
with Christians.33 Thus, when scholars try to pinpoint the source of this requirement
in Alfonso X’s of Castile legislative masterpiece – Las Siete Partidas – it proves diffi-
cult for them to determine whether the monarch was bringing his kingdom into line
with the papal legislation, or adopting the dhimma arrangements for Christian use.34
In reality, the distinguishing dress requirement was often disregarded by Jews and
Christians living under Islamic rule, and remained a dead letter in most of Western
Christendom, where secular rulers resisted papal interference in the affairs of their
kingdoms.35 While the gap between theory and practice was a prominent feature of
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life for religious minorities under both Christian and Muslim rule, in Western
Christendom this disparity was further accentuated by the separation between secular
and religious powers. In an Islamic state, a ruler was expected to uphold the precepts
of the Holy Law – the sharia – and to honor the terms of the dhimma contract
enshrined in Scripture. This close entwining of religion and law made the Islamic
model of toleration fundamentally unsuitable for Christian imitation.36 A Christian
monarch may have been revered as a ruler anointed by God, but his exercise of power,
including his authority over religious minorities, was rooted not in the Christian
precepts, but in the king’s role as a lord of his territorial domain.37 He had no obliga-
tion to give Jews (or Muslims, for that matter) protection under the laws of his king-
dom; in fact, he could, and often did, expel them at will.38 In tying the Jews’ and
Muslims’ fortunes to the decisions of individual monarchs and subjecting religious
minorities to the shifting realities of secular laws, the Christian states in Iberia were
no different from their northern European counterparts.
Indeed, the royal charters (fueros) given to Jews and Muslims, which defined their
legal status in the kingdom and regulated their relationship with other groups of
settlers, had to be renewed by each successive ruler in order to retain their legal power
and applicability.39 The status these fueros accorded to Jews and Muslims flowed

32Noth, “Problems of Differentiation,” 115–18.

33Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 60–70.
34In fact, some scholars do not exclude either possibility. See Burns, “Introduction to the
Seventh Partida,” xxviii, xxxi; Simon “Jews in the Legal Corpus,” 86, 89.
35England, where the “Jewish badge” was immediately enforced, was an exception. See
Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 66; Lewis, Jews of Islam, 51.
36Edelby, “Legislative Autonomy of Christians,” 44.
37This is the principle behind Louis IX’s Ordinance of Melun (1230). See Jordan, French
Monarchy and the Jews, 132–3.
38Stow, Alienated Minority, 281–308; Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 54.
39Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and Christian Spain, 187–8; Meyerson, Muslims of Valencia,
3. On fueros, see Suárez Bilbao, Fuero judiego. Cf. Peters, Monotheists, 275: “The dhimma
concluded by the Muslims with their Christian and Jewish subjects was a religious pact,
guaranteed by God and sanctioned by the practice of the Prophet himself; as such it formed
part of the sharia, the canon law of Islam. The Christian statute, in contrast, was a political
agreement concluded by secular authorities as an affair of state. It could be abrogated by the
dictating party …”.
 26 M. Soifer

directly from the nature of royal power at the time, and not from any attempt to mimic
the dhimma model. At the end of the twelfth century, the fueros of Teruel (Aragon)
and Cuenca (Castile) proclaimed that the Jews were servi regis and a property of the
royal fisc (fisco).40 In practice, this meant that the king had the right to exercise sole
jurisdiction over the Jews (and, according to some fueros, Muslims as well) settled in
the royal domain, and that the taxes collected from the Jewish communities went
directly to the royal treasury and could not be alienated without the king’s explicit
permission. It would be highly misleading to interpret these taxes as the Christian
equivalent of the jizya – the poll tax imposed on the subjugated religious minorities
under Islam as a sign of their redemption from military duty.41 The royal claim of
possessory rights over a religious minority was a highly personalized form of lordship
that also surfaced in England, France, and Germany at about the same time, but that
found no parallel in the Muslim world. Indeed, Islamic law never asserted that Jews
and Christians belonged to a ruler’s treasury.42
These considerations should at least give pause to scholars who are advocating the
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idea of a major Islamic influence on the Christian model of interfaith coexistence in

Iberia. The evidence has been growing for trans-Pyrenean affinities in the Christian
treatment of religious minorities. One recent study that subtly undermines the thesis
of Spain’s distinctiveness from the north is Mark Meyerson’s examination of Jewish–
Christian coexistence in the Valencian town of Morvedre. Even though Meyerson
acknowledges that in certain ways the experience of the Jews in the Crown of Aragon
was unique, he contends that the kingdom’s Jewish minority was affected by the same
ideological and institutional pressures that dominated interfaith relations north of the
Pyrenees. Like their co-religionists in northern Europe, the Jews of Aragon were
considered royal property, or “serfs of the royal treasury,” whose condition of fiscal
servitude made them vulnerable to financial exploitation and inexorably drove them
to abandon other occupations and take up money lending in order to satisfy the
Crown’s growing appetite for taxes and loans.43 In the kingdom of Castile, mindful of
the link between the repayment of Christian debts to Jews and the financial health of
the royal treasury, kings even appointed special royal agents, entregadores, entrusting
them with the task of collecting outstanding loans from Christians who borrowed
money from Jewish moneylenders.44
The Castilian example is significant because it resembles the situation that existed
in late thirteenth-century England, where the Jewish Exchequer provided a mechanism
to assist the Jews in collecting the debts owed to them by Christians.45 The comparison
with England is not as far-fetched as it might first appear. While it is true that the

40Powers, Code of Cuenca, 165. See also Abulafia, “‘Nam iudei servi regis sunt’” and Catlos,
“‘Secundum suam zunam.’”
41Courbage and Fargues, Christians and Jews under Islam, 22–3. Robert Ignatius Burns
compares the jizya to the Aragonese besant in Medieval Colonialism, 79.
42Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 52. On the concept of servi regis in northern Europe see
Langmuir’s section on “‘Tanquam Servi’: The Change in Jewish Status in French Law about
1200,” in his Toward a Definition of Antisemitism, 167–94.
43Meyerson, Jews in the Iberian Frontier Kingdom, 8, 176. Meyerson argues that “the Jews
of Aragon suffered marked degradation and humiliation” in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries; however, their condition improved in the fifteenth century, and they experienced a
“renaissance” before the expulsion of 1492. See also his Jewish Renaissance.
44See Melechen, “Loans, Land, and Jewish–Christian Relations,” 203; Soifer, “Jews of the
‘Milky Way,’” 185–6, and chap. 6.
45Stacey, “Jewish Lending,” 93–7.
 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 27

Jewish communities in Spain were not dependent on money lending for their liveli-
hood to the extent characteristic of their counterparts in England, in both kingdoms
the Jews’ security and wellbeing were contingent on the needs and demands of the
royal treasury. The Ashkenazi communities of the north have generally been studied
in isolation from the Sephardic communities of Christian Spain. However, one would
do well not to conflate “have been” with “should.”46 Such rigid compartmentalization
has more to do with the traditional divisions in Jewish historiography than with the
realities of Jewish experiences in medieval Europe.47 Although culturally and linguis-
tically distinct, a Jew in thirteenth-century Toledo and a Jew in thirteenth-century
Tours lived under the dominion of Christian rulers and shared streets, neighborhoods,
and markets with Christian neighbors. As a tiny religious minority living in a society
that was overwhelmingly Christian, the Jewish communities of medieval France and
medieval Spain had more in common with each other than is often realized.
A critic might object that a denial of the Islamic roots of Christian toleration in
medieval Spain is tantamount to challenging Castro’s widely accepted theory that
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correctly identifies Islam as a major force for cultural change in Iberia. In fact, the
argument’s goals are much more modest. It does not question the importance of
contacts between Christians and Muslims or dispute the lasting impact of Islamic art,
architecture, literature, and thought on Spanish culture and society. Rather, it suggests
that when it comes to treatment of religious minorities, one cannot regard the Christian
north as a “blank slate.” Castro’s assertion that the notion of religious toleration could
come only from the direction of Islam is just as insupportable as his rival Sánchez-
Albornoz’s argument that cultural diffusion in Spain only flowed from the Christian
north to the reconquered south.48 Both positions propagate the highly problematic
claim of Spain’s uniqueness and self-sufficiency, with either Castro’s Arabs or
Sánchez-Albornoz’s Visigoths cast in the roles of formidable gatekeepers who protect
the unpolluted realms of the Peninsula against the “corrupting” European influences.49
Castro’s convivencia and Sánchez-Albornoz’s Castilianism are both firmly rooted in
the nationalist canon. Transcending this canon and the grand narratives of national
identity is a yet unfinished task that requires broad interdisciplinary participation.
Not surprisingly, some of Castro’s intellectual heirs, whose gaze was steadily
directed south, toward Islam and its military frontier with the Christian kingdoms, inad-
vertently perpetuated the nationalist myth of Spain’s unique status in medieval
Europe.50 At a time when the study of marginal and subaltern populations and their
treatment by the dominant society grew in popularity among the scholars of medieval
northern Europe, it was perhaps inevitable that the “multicultural society” of Iberia
would become something of a foil to the “persecuting society” of the north. However,
this distorted picture is being rectified by scholars who have moved beyond the
46“… this history [of Sephardic Jews] is a distinct one, as is history of medieval Spain as a
whole; it should be, and traditionally has been, treated as such” (Stow, Alienated Minority, 1).
47In a welcome development, Robert Chazan, in his recent history of the Jews in medieval
Europe, underplays the differences between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim. He still
refers to the “the unusual Iberian Jewish experience,” but at the same time notes some trans-
Pyrenean affinities, such as the introduction of Jewish specialization in money lending into
Spain in the thirteenth century. See his The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, 91, 98.
48Tolan, “Using the Middle Ages,” 345.
49“The confrontation of Spanish self-sufficiency and the implications of Spain’s membership
of the medieval European community is a recurrent feature both of the history of these
centuries and of the historians’ treatment of it” (Linehan, History and the Historians, 3).
50Hillgarth, “Spanish Historiography,” 34.
 28 M. Soifer

portrayals of northern European societies as seedbeds of intolerance and focused

instead on examples of successful coexistence between their culturally and religiously
diverse communities. Historians of the northern European Jewry, the Ashkenazim,
have been experimenting with convivencia-like models for years, as part of a revisionist
line of argumentation that disputed the post-Holocaust master narrative of continuous
anti-Jewish persecutions in northern Europe.
The challenge to the so-called lachrymose conception of medieval Jewish history
came in the wake of Robert Moore’s argument, in The Formation of a Persecuting
Society, that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a zeal for persecution emerged in
Europe that made Jews, lepers, and heretics the targets of segregation, expulsion and
violence.51 Moore’s critics have pointed out that even in England, France, and
Germany Jews and Christians forged a mode of interaction that enabled northern
Europe’s only licit religious minority to live in relative tranquility and prosperity
despite occasional outbursts of violence. As described by some scholars, this interfaith
coexistence bore strong resemblance to Spain’s model of religious toleration. The case
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in point is Ivan Marcus’ pathbreaking study of initiation rituals among the medieval
Ashkenaz. Relying heavily on anthropological research, Marcus rejects the assump-
tion that the northern European Jewry lived in virtually complete isolation from
Christian society. As if taking a cue from Glick’s reformulation of Castro’s conviven-
cia as a state of arrested fusion or incomplete assimilation, he draws a parallel between
the “Muslim Sephardic” and Ashkenazi acculturation, arguing that in both cases the
Jews maintained the boundaries of their cultural tradition while simultaneously adopt-
ing “reworked aspects of Christian culture, in the form of a social polemical denial,
into their Judaism.” He calls this process an “inward acculturation.”52 Even though
Marcus – wisely – does not make use of the concept of convivencia, his idea of medi-
eval Jewish acculturation, with its dialectical aspects of adaptation and “polemical
denial,” echoes the post-Castro view of Spanish convivencia as a coexistence charac-
terized by mutual influence and rivalry.
Marcus’ conclusions resonate beyond the immediate issue of the Ashkenazi Jews’
place in northern European society. They suggest that acculturation was not specifi-
cally a Sephardic or Ashkenazic, Islamic or Christian phenomenon, but that in one
form or another it had a ubiquitous presence in medieval Europe. There is little doubt
that the medieval European society could and did sustain a relatively high degree of
religious, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity.53 This was especially true about the
so-called “frontier societies,” where a recent conquest, settlement, or proximity of a
military frontier created propitious conditions for cross-cultural interaction. Undoubt-
edly, medieval Spain, with its ever-shifting border with Islam and militarized Christian
societies is a premier example of such a region.54 But Iberia certainly does not hold a
monopoly on European frontier experience. Half a century ago, Archibald Lewis char-
acterized the entire Western European history between the eleventh century and mid-
thirteenth century as “an almost classical frontier development.”55 As described by
Robert Bartlett in his study of Europe’s internal expansion, a series of conquests during
these pivotal centuries created a number of postcolonial environments that often

51Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society.

52Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 1–13.
53Nederman, “Discourses and Contexts of Tolerance,” 15, 18.
54Burns, Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, and Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
55Lewis, “Closing of the Mediaeval Frontier,” 475.
 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 29

proved favorable to assimilation and acculturation. Everywhere from Ireland to Prussia

to Andalusia to Hungary to Palestine, foreign conquerors and indigenous populations
faced the difficult task of reconciling their differing cultural and social worlds.56
So many frontier zones dotted the map of medieval Europe that one is tempted to
speak of multiple zones of acculturation, each unique in its own way but all character-
ized by a coexistence of two or more religiously, culturally, or linguistically distinct
communities. Further disproving the exceptionality of the Iberian case, many of these
composite societies counted Jews and Muslims among their members. Because of its
position on the military frontier of Western Christendom, Hungary perhaps bore the
closest resemblance to Spain. Nora Berend, who has studied the relations between
Christians, Jews, Muslims, and pagan Cumans in Hungary, freely applies the model
of Spanish coexistence to the kingdom’s four-partite religious structure.57 As Berend
shows, the influence of the surrounding Christian culture elicited a wide range of
responses from the three minority communities – from partial acculturation to
complete assimilation. Like Marcus’ Ashkenazi communities, medieval Hungarian
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Jews seem to have taken the path of “inward acculturation,” preserving their religious
identity while at the same time adopting elements from the Christian environment into
their everyday life and customs. A different fate awaited the kingdom’s Muslim
minority, whose numerical insignificance and isolation from the Muslim world
eventually doomed them to assimilation. The pagan Cumans, on the other hand, while
also facing strong pressure to abandon their tradition, did not become immediately
acculturated and integrated even after their conversion to Christianity by the fifteenth
century.58
The kingdoms of medieval Spain were thus part of a Christendom that for most of
the Middle Ages tolerated the coexistence of distinct groups.59 Across the English
Channel, another conquest generated an environment in which three communities
separated by religious and linguistic lines were thrust together to create a modus
vivendi. In the East Anglian town of Norwich, the effects of the Norman Conquest on
its political and social life were acutely felt well into the twelfth century. The town
was still divided into Anglo-Norman and English municipalities, with the French-
speaking Jewish community nestled in the heart of the Norman quarter.60 As Jeffrey
Cohen has argued, the gradual fusion of the two rival Christian communities of
Norwich into one civic and cultural whole came at the expense of the local religious
outsiders – the Jews – who in the 1140s were accused of crucifying a young Christian
boy from an English borough.61 Although never attacked as a consequence of the accu-
sation, Norwich’s Jews remained aloof to the surrounding Christian environment. Like
the rest of England’s Jewry, they tenaciously clung to their French language and
culture, even as by the middle of the thirteenth century English became the language
56Bartlett, The Making of Europe, and “Colonial Aristocracies;” Berend, At the Gate of
Christendom; MacEvitt, Crusades and the Christian World of the East.
57Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 3.
58Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 224–67.
59Robinson argues that for most of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the courts of
Muslim al-Andalus and Christian Provence belonged to the same “courtly love” culture that
spanned the Mediterranean regions of north-eastern Spain and southern France, with the taifa
courts providing literary modes for the Provencal troubadours to follow. See Robinson, In
Praise of Song.
60Lipman, Jews of Medieval Norwich, 14; Jessopp and James, Life and Miracles of St.
William of Norwich, xlvi–vii.
61Cohen, “The Flow of Blood,” 40–1.
 30 M. Soifer

predominantly spoken in the kingdom.62 Far from illustrating the northern Jewry’s
failure to integrate more fully with the Christian society, the English Jews’ loyalty to
their French heritage underscores the strength of their original acculturation in early
medieval France. Sylvia Tomasch, applying the kind of postcolonial approach
addressed elsewhere in this issue of JMIS by Nadia Altschul, has analyzed Geoffrey
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to propose that the pre-Expulsion English Jews should be
viewed as “internally colonized people,” whose expulsion from England did not put
an end to “England’s colonialist program,” but brought about efforts to construct a
“virtual Jew,” whose “otherness” helped define English Christian identity.63 The work
done by Tomasch and others prompts Altschul to suggest that medieval Iberia, with
its complex cultural and religious makeup, presents an ideal case for a similar appli-
cation of a postcolonial approach to the study of Jewish–Christian–Muslim interaction.
Postcolonial approaches address another major weakness that underlies Castro’s
original formulation of convivencia: the absence of any consideration to the uneven
distribution of power among the three religious communities. According to Thomas
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Glick’s insightful critique of Castro’s thought, in his vision, “relationships among

persons of the three castes [i.e. Christians, Muslims, and Jews] were structured on a
basis of parity, as if these groups were of equal demographic weights, political and
military force, or cultural potency, and in complete disregard of the institutional or
legal mechanisms controlling access to power.”64 Sidestepping the issue of Christian
power in Castile and Aragon-Catalonia leads, at best, to an incomplete picture of
cross-cultural relations.65 Increasingly, scholars are becoming convinced that a colo-
nizing agenda informed cultural, artistic, and legal productions that until now have
been understood as clear manifestations of Christian tolerance and convivencia.66 Ana
Echevarría’s remarkable study of Alfonso el Sabio’s translation program, for instance,
is part of a movement that takes an aim at deconstructing the colonizing agenda of a
royal court and a reign that have long been emblematic of convivencia. As John Tolan
reminds us, Alfonso’s purported “tolerance” is better understood as yet another affir-
mation of his monarchical powers. The claim to the mantle of the king of three faiths
denied the legitimacy of Muslim rulers, while his patronage of Arabic learning high-
lighted his Muslim subjects’ subordination to the Castilian monarch.67 Even more
indicative of Alfonso’ colonizing ideology was his policy of castellanización
(Castilianization), examined in detail by David Rojinsky. According to Rojinsky’s
illuminating study, Alfonso’s policy of material castellanización – repopulation of
conquered lands, distribution of estates to his followers, granting of laws and privi-
leges – went hand in hand with the ideological Castilianization, which meant above
all the promotion of Castilian as the official written language of the government.
62Stacey, “Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century England,” 343–4.
63Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer,” 243–60.
64Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and Christian Spain, 347.
65See Jonathan Ray’s argument that the Jews in medieval Spain should be studied as
individuals able to get around both royal and Jewish communal control, in his “Beyond
Tolerance and Persecution.” However, I believe that Ray underestimates the ability and
willingness of Christian political power to delimit what he calls “the dynamism and fluidity of
Spanish society” (10).
66Echevarría argues that some of the works “translated” at Alfonso X’s court were in fact re-
translations of texts that originally had been written in Latin and were designed to provide
Christian polemicists with material that could further their goal of converting Muslims to
Christianity. See her “Eschatology or Biography,” 151.
67Tolan, “Une ‘convivencia’ bien précaire,” 390.
 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 31

Rojinsky sees the newly “consecrated” vernacular of the Siete Partidas as a valuable
tool in the king’s project of exerting “socio-juridical control over repopulated spaces
and peoples,” among them, Muslims and Jews.68
Whether as an interfaith utopia, or as a pale Christian imitation of the Islamic dhimma
model, or as a sign of Spain’s supposed exceptionality, convivencia has consistently
failed on empirical grounds. It is therefore ironic that the recent trend among historians
of Jewish–Christian relations in northern Europe to de-emphasize persecutions and
stress the peaceful aspects of interfaith coexistence has led to an embrace of the term.
In his recent upbeat assessment of Jewish–Christian relations in northern Europe,
Jonathan Elukin relies on the concept to describe what he calls the generally positive
Jewish experiences in medieval France, England, Germany, and Italy. In Elukin’s view,
occasional bouts of anti-Jewish persecutions did little to alter the fundamentally stable
nature of social relations between Jews and Christians. The endurance of these relations
in the face of growing anti-Judaism and impending expulsions prompts Elukin to
characterize Jewish–Christian relations in northern Europe as “convivencia in a minor
key.”69 One can laud Elukin’s intention to “eliminate or at least challenge the false
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dichotomy between the experiences of Jews in Spain … and of Jews in northern

European societies,” but his appropriation of a term loaded with a cacophony of prob-
lematic associations runs the danger of ruining the very enterprise to whose success
he hopes to contribute. Convivencia should not become the Trojan horse of northern
European Jewish history.70 While he is right in urging a corrective to the overly bleak
image of northern Europe as a persecuting society, an equally unbalanced picture of
Jewish–Christian relations that misses the distinctive features of anti-Jewish violence
or downplays the significance of the difficulties faced by the Jews living in Christian
kingdoms from the mid-thirteenth century and on would do just as much disservice to
the field. Elukin writes that “the fundamental truth or meaning of Jewish history in the
Middle Ages – if we are right to apply such a term as meaning – is the continuity of
relatively stable relations between Jews and Christians.”71 Perhaps the best way to elim-
inate artificial dichotomies in medieval studies is to end the habit of counteracting one
“meaning” of history – be it Jewish, Spanish, or any other “national” history – with
another, supposedly more “accurate” meaning. Scholars of medieval Spain need to press
on with their nuts-and-bolts explorations of interfaith coexistence. Paradoxically, the
practical arrangements that enabled the religious minorities’ existence within the host
societies remain poorly understood. There is yet much to be done in order to tease out
the social, political, and cultural conventions that made coexistence possible and that
eventually failed to prevent its collapse. Meanwhile, Iberianists should maintain
constant dialogue with historians of interfaith relations in northern Europe, even if it
means giving up the notion of Spain’s exclusivity and acknowledging the basic simi-
larities in the Christian treatment of religious minorities north and south of the Pyrenees.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of this article for their generous and
constructive criticism.

68Rojinsky, “Rule of Law and the Written Word.”

69Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart, 8–9, 136–7.
70Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart, 136–7.
71Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart, 9.
 32 M. Soifer

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