Based on a thorough analysis of a wide array of Jewish literature originating in tenth- to twelfth-century al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), Esperanza Alfonso discusses representations of Muslims and Islamic culture—by which she means literary, not material, culture. This book is a significant contribution to recently growing scholarship about Jewish constructions of cultural and religious otherness; I shall mention only the closest parallel, Ross Brann's Power in the Portrayal. Footnote ¹ Alfonso's study is, moreover, indicative of a growing interdisciplinary trend in the study of medieval Judaism, as it engages both Hebrew and Arabic literature and takes much inspiration from literary criticism and postcolonial theory. As the concepts of identity and otherness are by now widely recognized as reciprocal notions, Alfonso simultaneously examines the Jewish authors' constructions of their own identity through their expressed attitudes toward the Arabic language and toward literary genres imported from the Arabo-Islamic milieu. These subjects, in particular, are the topics of the first two chapters, on which I will focus. They constitute a major thematic unit within the book consisting of four lengthy chapters.

Andalusian Jews are known to have been fully fluent in the Arabic culture of which they were part. In the book's first chapter, Alfonso accordingly raises questions about the ways in which Andalusian Jewish authors perceived the dominant language and the extent to which the discourse on the use of Hebrew vis-à-vis Arabic shed light how Jewish identity was conceptualized. In other words, was language considered to be a means of self-definition? Did Jewish attitudes toward Arabic change over time, and if so, to what extent did these developments reflect the process of identity building?

Alfonso does not offer simplified answers to these questions but always reads her sources within their historical context and points to their complexities and ambiguities. Thereby, she follows a tendency in contemporary scholarship that increasingly understands identity as an ongoing process of construction, redefinition, and negotiation. Thus, by the tenth and early eleventh centuries, diverging trends were expressed in the linguistic dispute between Menahem ben Saruq and Dunash ibn Labrat, and their respective supporters. While the latter downplayed the otherness of Arabic because its knowledge had proven to be an indispensable tool for the understanding of Hebrew grammar and philology, the followers of the former not only resisted comparative linguistics but also rejected even the composition of Hebrew poetry in Arabic meters.

In the late eleventh and mid-twelfth centuries, incursions into Muslim Iberia by the North African Almoravids and Almohads set off waves of Jewish migration toward Christian-held areas of the peninsula, which resulted in redrawn cultural and linguistic maps. While Moses ibn ‘Ezra migrated north, he longingly looked back to what he regarded as the superior civilization of lost al-Andalus. Against this background, he (in his treatise on poetics) explained the similarities between Hebrew and Arabic as a consequence of the contact and intimacy between Jews and their Arabic-speaking neighbors. As Alfonso points out, Ibn ‘Ezra thereby includes Arabic features within the self-definition of a cultured Jew, an identity that, in his case, is not contrasted against Islam but against what he saw as the lower cultural standards of the Hispanic kingdoms and their Christian and Jewish populations. According to Alfonso, the most adversarial attitudes toward Arabic evolved in thirteenth-century Hebrew writings from the Christian-ruled parts of Iberia. She then raises the question of “to what extent this preoccupation with the status of Hebrew versus Arabic … is not a reflection of similar Christian polemical positions on Arabic, but rather mirrors Christian polemical positions toward the Jews, that would have been internalized” (27), an intriguing question, the discussion of which, however, would go beyond the book's scope.

In the second part of her study, Alfonso explores the traditional idea of a collective exile of the Jews versus the notion of a Jewish domicile in al-Andalus. As her sophisticated discourse demonstrates, these constructs are not mutually exclusive but frequently interplay in the corpus of texts under discussion—much as the Other and the Self are not static poles but are constantly being negotiated. Moreover, with the transition toward Christian Spain, “a sense of nostalgia surfaces among Andalusi Jewish authors forced to migrate” (74). As “exile” under the “nations” is expected to ultimately give way to redemption, the last chapter, then, turns to eschatological expectations and their impact on the discourse of religious otherness with regard to both Islam and Christianity.

The broad range of sources and topics in this meticulous study is most ambitious. While Alfonso includes a much wider array of Jewish literature from al-Andalus than Brann's Power in the Portrayal—which also explores Muslim representations of Jews—Islamic Culture through Jewish Eyes, at the same time, is more technical in character than the latter's work. In certain cases, Alfonso's source analyses seem to be too condensed to allow for a smooth reading (more frequent quotations might have helped in this respect). As is almost unavoidable in any study that dares to survey such a broad spectrum of literature, a few long-held assumptions that have been questioned lately are perpetuated (e.g., the “clear anti-philosophical tendency” of Judah Halevi's Kuzari, p. 44).Footnote ²

Occasionally, readers may wonder whether the rather abstract categories of the Other and the Self always offer keys to unlock multilayered texts. Indeed, Alfonso allows for the “fact that otherness did not constitute a dominant discourse in medieval Jewish sources” (111). In a similar vein, she notes that “[s]ome aspects related to the representation of language and the construction of Self and Other … overlap with religious polemics” (34)—polemics that were not necessarily directed against the external but oftentimes against the internal Other. Thus, the negative views (or dissatisfaction) voiced by certain Jewish authors about literary genres and disciplines (such as poetry, historiography, or philosophy) that were widely associated with Islamic culture find parallels in Muslim critiques of the same forms and topics (something Alfonso is aware of). Why did “opposition to a given discipline, a literary form, or a cultural practice surface” at some point in both Jewish and Muslim literature from Iberia? Is this phenomenon already “best understood as part of a shared tension between more or less conservative groups” (51) that similarly existed within the two communities? A topic for further exploration would be to study how external and internal polemics are related, and to what extent Jewish authors reciprocated tendencies found within their Ibero-Muslim (or Ibero-Christian) environment. However, despite these minor critical remarks, Esperanza Alfonso's book is a carefully argued and well-nuanced study of Jewish literature from al-Andalus on the background of the Arabo-Islamic milieu in which it emerged.