These two volumes, an outstanding collection of essays on Iberian Jewish history and culture, circa 1100–1500, and a stimulating interpretation of Sephardic history after 1492, offer readers a superb overview of Sephardic history. Although the Jews of Muslim Spain are not the focus of either book, the model established by Andalusī intellectuals and courtiers looms in the background of both.
Jonathan Ray should be congratulated for bringing together a group of such fine scholars for The Jew in Medieval Iberia; their essays are not only lucid, up-to-date syntheses but often include original material and interpretations. One review cannot do justice to such a rich collection, and what seems particularly significant or exciting is determined by the reviewer's interests and limitations. Jonathan Decter's excellent essay on Jewish courtiers provides a framework for much of the volume, since the royal court and its culture influenced the lives and ideas of many of the Jews treated in the essays. In regard to the linguistic, literary, and intellectual skills that made the courtiers so useful to gentile rulers and to their own communities, Decter emphasizes the continuity between Muslim Spain and Christian Spain until perhaps the mid-fourteenth century. He focuses on the career of Abraham al-Fakhār, who served Alfonso VIII of Castile (r. 1158–1214) and whose knowledge of Arabic and Islamic culture made him an effective diplomat to Maghribian states. Decter perceives a shift in the function of Jewish courtiers in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a result of broader political and cultural changes: the courtiers were mainly financiers and tax-farmers; intellectual lights like Isaac Abravanel were unusual. Decter rightly departs from Yitzhak Baer's negative view of the courtier class, though it would be difficult not to take a dim view of the hubris of the subject of Jane Gerber's essay, Samuel Halevi Abulafia (d. 1360), servant of Alfonso XI and Pedro I of Castile. Gerber presents an insightful interpretation of the El Transito synagogue in Toledo that Halevi built (1357–60). She points out that Halevi's use of Arabic inscriptions along with the Hebrew ones defined him as “the quintessential courtier Jew” (43), and focuses on the decorative features that associated Halevi with the king and thereby symbolized his own almost princely power: the royal seal and coat of arms of Castile, and the mudéjar style used by King Pedro in the Alcazar in Seville and by Muhammad V in the Alhambra in Granada.
Mariano Gómez Aranda's essay on the “Jew as Scientist and Philosopher” is fortunately not a catalogue of Jewish scientific achievements but rather a thoughtful discussion of the interrelationship between the Jews' scientific endeavors and religion. For Gómez, science and religion were by no means antithetical; rather, scientific ideas pervaded all aspects of Sephardic learning. What made the scientific works of Spanish Jews original was how the Jews adapted current scientific theories to the requirements of their own faith. Gómez treats, for instance, Abraham Ibn Ezra's employment of astronomy, astrology, and mathematics in biblical exegesis, Maimonides's use of science to explain Jewish religious laws, and Abraham Zacut's prediction of the Messiah's advent on the basis of astrological calculations. Scientific studies were another way in which Jews acquired patronage and position at the royal court. Among such Jewish students of science were physicians, the topic of Maud Kozody's essay. Kozody notes the high percentage of Jewish physicians and surgeons in the Crown of Aragon in the fourteenth century (similar data for Castile is not extant), some of whom the municipalities hired on contract; others served the monarchy and were admired by their coreligionists for it. She covers licensing procedures and points out that Jewish physicians, denied access to universities, charged lower fees than their university-trained Christian counterparts. Jewish physicians' ability to work with Arabic medical texts placed them on the cutting edge of medical developments in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; in the later Middle Ages, however, the emphasis on the Judeo-Arabic medical tradition became somewhat of a liability, leaving Jews cut off from medical advances in Christian university faculties. Jews therefore turned to translating Latin medical texts into Hebrew; and in the Crown of Aragon especially, Jewish physicians evinced increasing interest in scholastic medicine. Like Gómez, Kozody shows how medical ideas and terminology pervaded elite Jewish culture.
Harvey Lachter's “Jews as Masters of Secrets” is an especially lucid treatment of Kabbalah in thirteenth-century Castile. He shows how kabbalists utilized their claims to esoteric knowledge to establish the authority of kabbalistic texts and ideas. He views the Alfonsine renaissance, in which Christian scholars associated with the court of Alfonso X pursued esoteric knowledge, as the context for the “proliferation of kabbalistic discourse” and the reconceptualization of Jewish identity through esotericism (293). Lachter explains how kabbalists privileged their esoteric tradition over literal biblical exegesis and philosophy, which they regarded as restricted by the limits of the human mind.
Vivian Mann's fascinating essay on “Unknown Jewish Artists” explores another area of Jewish-Christian intermingling. She considers the San Marco workshop in fourteenth-century Barcelona, which produced Latin and Hebrew manuscripts as well as altarpieces, and where Jewish scribes worked with Christian illuminators, in order to shed light on the stylistic relationship between the altarpieces and haggadot. Mann examines the role of Jewish artists in the production of carpet pages and as illuminators of Hebrew biblical manuscripts, and interestingly, of manuscripts for Christian patrons. Jewish painters even worked on altarpieces and thus had to be conversant with Christian iconography. Mann shows how the altarpieces disseminated anti-Jewish attitudes through depicting, for instance, Jews desecrating hosts, but how, through their representation of Jews, synagogues, and juderías, they also offer us a partial record of Jewish material life.
Yom Tov Assis and Gregory Milton consider different aspects of Jewish economic life. Focusing on the role of the Jews of Barcelona in maritime trade with Alexandria, and after the fall of Crusader Acre with Cyprus and Crete, Assis details Jewish investment in commerce through comanda contracts, Jewish partnership with and loans to Jewish and Christian merchants, and the ultimate success of Christian merchants in excluding Jews from the eastern trade. Milton deals with Jewish moneylending and offers new evidence from his study of the notarial registers of Santa Coloma de Queralt. He concludes that even though Jews made more direct loans than did Christians, Christians were nonetheless the dominant creditors since they made by far the most credit-sales. The rhetoric of the threat of Jewish usury to Christians, sometimes manipulated by the Jews' enemies, therefore had little basis in economic reality. In her essay on Jewish women, Renée Levine Melammed also notes that women, especially widows, were lenders. The essay further treats women's inheritance rights and sexuality, as well as (post-1391) the prominent role of conversas in Judaizing and in messianic movements.
Ram Ben-Shalom presents a masterly account of the efforts of Ḥasdai Crescas (ca. 1340–1412) to address the crisis of 1391, ranging from his negotiations with the monarchy to rebuild Jewish communities to his work as a halakhist and a polemicist. Ben-Shalom demonstrates, contra Baer, that Crescas rejected the messianic speculation that the events of 1391 generated and instead urged active repentance to help bring about the advent of the Messiah. He examines Crescas's halakhic method, which differed from that of Maimonides, whose Mishneh Torah he hoped to replace, and focuses on his innovative ruling that the victims of the 1391 violence were martyrs. Ben-Shalom tells us that Crescas wrote his polemical works in Catalan to aid the 'anusim who, when Jews prior to 1391, had not been able to read Hebrew, and suggests that Crescas was promoting a wider polemical program to rehabilitate Iberian Jewry: hence his encouragement of Profiat Duran. Duran in turn receives attention from Eric Lawee in his essay on “Sephardic Intellectuals” from 1391 to 1492. Lawee argues that we should not view this era as a “gloom-filled parenthesis” but that there was a gradual “restoration of a reasonably vibrant intellectual sphere” and some “novel achievements” (352). Exploring the writings of members of the Ibn Shem Tov clan, he shows that despite Crescas's anti-rationalism, philosophical learning persisted after 1391. Profiat Duran and Joseph Albo are treated in regard to their innovations in anti-Christian polemic and legal theory, respectively, and Isaac Canpanton is presented as a key figure in studies of the Talmud. Lawee points to the endeavor of some Jewish scholars “to renew Judaism on the basis of adaptations of Christian scholasticism” (371), and deems such Jewish openness remarkable, particularly in an era when one would presume Jewish hostility to anything Christian.
Esperanza Alfonso concludes the volume with an analysis of the intellectual genealogy of the Gavison family of Algiers based on comments on the family's history that members wrote between 1574 and 1748. The family had first emigrated from Seville to Granada in 1391 and then departed Granada for Algiers in 1492. Alfonso discusses the Gavisons' promotion of the Andalusī cultural ideal through their valorization of Arabic and the writing of poetry as well as through their support for secular studies. She cautions that she is not arguing for unbroken cultural continuity between twelfth-century Andalusī Jewry and early modern Algerian Jewry; rather, she sees the Gavisons' intellectual genealogy “as reflecting the construction of continuities and the existence of breaks in the collective consciousness of…North African Jews” (417).
Ray's boldly original and persuasive After Expulsion deals with this process of cultural and communal construction, or reconstruction, on a broader Mediterranean canvas. Ray argues that post-1492 Sephardic society was not simply continuous with its medieval past but resulted from a transformative process as Iberian Jews (and conversos), possessing particular cultural traits, interacted with their new surroundings in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean. The Sephardim's shared experience of cultural dislocation and their many encounters with indigenous Jewries combined to produce a specific Sephardi cultural identity.
The first chapter treats the pre-1492 background. At some points Ray's description of Jewish society is inaccurate—for instance, the assertion that by the late fourteenth century Jews were increasingly confined to small-scale lending—which, judging from the notes, stems from unfamiliarity with some of the relevant scholarship. In order to make his cogent point that sixteenth-century Sephardic society was largely a new creation, he perhaps overemphasizes the divisiveness of Jewish society prior to 1492, for even though there certainly was internal conflict, Jews were competing within the framework of their own society in accordance with their own norms and they were able to display group solidarity in their relations with Christians.
The second chapter follows the peregrinations of the Jews in the years immediately following the expulsions. By considering the difficult experiences of the expelled Jews in the Maghreb, Ray reminds us that the dichotomy often drawn between persecuting European Christians and welcoming Muslims does not always work. The next chapter considers the “perpetual migration” of the Sephardim, a formative sixteenth-century experience that significantly contrasted with the seventeenth century, when the Sephardim separated into two more distinct branches in northern Europe and the Muslim world. Ray does an excellent job of tracing the patterns of Jewish migration: into and out of the frontier zones of the Iberian empires in response to their shifting policies and inquisitorial prosecution; into and out of Italian city-states under the shadow of harsher papal policies; and into, and in some cases, out of the Ottoman Empire in the quest for better economic opportunities after 1530.
In the chapter on community and self-government, Ray deals with two main issues: first, the development of a broader Sephardic identity over the course of two or three generations as the significance of the old regional distinctions (e.g., Castilians versus Catalans) diminished and as the second generation of Sephardic oligarchs admitted new members from any Jewish community who were willing to cooperate and adopt their cultural norms; and second, the conflict between the Jewish elite and the masses, usually over the perennial question of taxation. Fiscal problems, Ray observes, were both a result and a cause of Jewish migration. Throughout the book Ray effectively paints in broad brush strokes, but this chapter begs for more detail—more examples, in this case, of the nuts and bolts of communal politics.
The factiousness of community life, Ray shows in the next chapter, was partly offset by the existence of Mediterranean-wide familial, mercantile, and rabbinic networks among the Sephardim. Yet great mobility and the existence of converso members complicated the life of diaspora families, particularly when it came to the formation of marriage alliances. Ray's discussion of rabbinic networks is especially interesting. He points to the educational and marital ties that fostered the solidarity of Sephardic scholars and helped them to reestablish their prominence while upholding legal standards. Relations between rabbis and merchant oligarchs, however, were not always smooth. Many migrant scholars, moreover, could not easily find jobs, forcing them to assume posts in non-Sephardic communities, which inadvertently facilitated the dissemination of Sephardic legal traditions and rites.
Indeed, in the subsequent chapter on rabbinic and popular Judaism, Ray takes pains to counteract “the image of a Sephardic cultural wave washing over the Jewish communities of the Mediterranean” (134). He shows that many Iberian refugees adopted elements of the religious culture of the indigenous Jews (and sometimes Muslims) among whom they settled. Such Sephardic acculturation exacerbated the persisting disjunction between rabbinic ideals and the religion of the Jewish masses. Still, rabbis and lay leaders tolerated popular religious practices more easily than they could tolerate religious laxity; both worked to enforce religious observance among the masses. Legal questions concerning the many conversos who were arriving in Jewish communities further complicate the simplistic image of a “Sephardic cultural wave.” While rabbis largely agreed on the continued Jewishness of the conversos on legal grounds, the opinions of individual Jews and Jewish communities were more diverse: some were receptive to conversos on account of kinship ties or economic interest; others resented conversos and regarded them as opportunistic, a feeling complemented by the reticence of some conversos to integrate into their communities. Relations among Iberian Jews, conversos, and indigenous Mediterranean Jews, then, were more varied than is often thought and contingent on a wide range of factors.
In the final chapter, “Imagining Sepharad,” Ray argues that over the course of the sixteenth century the Sephardim fashioned a “Sephardic” identity on the basis of a “shared concept of Iberia as a common homeland” (135). He discusses the development of Judeo-Spanish as a lingua franca, the cultivation in families of memories of particular Iberian cities, the persistent wearing of Spanish clothing as a cultural marker, and a nostalgic idealization of life in Iberia among later generations of the Sephardim. Different sorts of Jews memorialized the exile in different ways: intellectuals tended to do so in eschatological or kabbalistic terms while others focused on more personal, family stories.
This is, in sum, a rich, scintillating history, a narrative that students will appreciate and that more experienced scholars will want to respond to through their own investigations. If the book is in parts a bit sketchier than this reviewer would have liked, one can only admire the author for taking the many threads of the sixteenth-century Sephardic experience and weaving them into a persuasive, compelling historical tapestry.
