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Beyond convivencia: critical reflections on the historiography of

interfaith relations in Christian Spain
Maya Soifer a a Introduction to the Humanities, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Online Publication Date: 01 January 2009

Soifer, Maya(2009)'Beyond convivencia: critical reflections on the historiography of interfaith relations in Christian
Spain',Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies,1:1,19 — 35
10.1080/17546550802700335
http://dx.doi.org/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

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
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
D
o
scarce. Instead of continuing to embrace the nationalist myth of Spain's unique
w status in medieval Europe, scholars need to acknowledge the basic similarities in
n
l
the Christian treatment of religious minorities north and south of the Pyrenees. The
o article also explores other aspects of convivencia's problematic legacy:
a
d
polarization of the field between “tolerance” and “persecution,” and the inattention
e to the nuances of social and political power relations that affected Jewish-
d
A
Christian-Muslim coexistence in Christian Iberia.
t
: Keywords: convivencia; toleration; Américo Castro; Jews; interfaith relations; Islamic
2 influence on medieval Europe
2
:
1
0
1
As Robert I. Burns once remarked, the frontier - “a heroic place to take one's stand” - is to
0 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
3
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, did
the concept become the source of growing unease among the historians of medieval 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
D
o
overstayed her welcome. David Nirenberg's assertion, still cutting edge in the early 1990s,
w that “convivencia is a central issue in the historiography of religious minorities in the
n
l Iberian Peninsula” no longer holds true.6 Much more in tune with the current trends in
o
a
historiography is Robert I. Burns' observation that “Américo Castro's convivencia ... is not
d so often heard in the land.” 7 As Thomas F. Glick has pointed out in his insightful attempt
e
d to breathe new life into the concept, some of the blame lay with the original definition.
A
t Castro's convivencia was an ideal- ist construct that aspired to describe mental processes
:
2
taking place in the collective consciousness of the three cultures, but was never meant to
2 be tested against the social and political realities of Jewish-Christian-Muslim interaction. 8
:
1 Paradoxically, the quotidian experience of living was missing from the concept usually
0
1
translated into English as “living together.” Detached from the conflict-prone affairs of the
0 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.
4
On 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.
5
Sánchez-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.
6
David 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.
7
Burns, “Mudejar Parallel Societies,” 108.
8
Glick 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
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
D in the kingdom of Castile.11 Even as the study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim cross-cultural
o
w interactions in the mold envisioned by Glick has blossomed, few scholars have found a
n
l
meaningful place in it for convivencia. Indeed, why use a term weighed down by
o ideological contentiousness and corrupted by generalizations and unprovable assumptions,
a
d when one can employ neutral terms like acculturation or symbiosis, and discuss diffusion,
e
d
borrowing, infiltration, and adaptation without having to navigate a historiographic
A minefield?12 While some historians have ditched the term altogether, others have scaled it
t
: down to a very narrow, technical definition of mundane social 13 interaction between
2
2
members of different religious groups.13
: If convivencia survives, it is not because Glick has succeeded at giving it specific or
1
0 meaningful content. Rather the opposite is true. By tying it to the existing anthro-
1
0 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

9
Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and Christian Spain, xix, 345; Glick and Pi-Sunyer,
“Acculturation,” 151-2.
10
Glick and Pi-Sunyer, “Convivencia,” 7.
11
Ruiz, “Trading with the ‘Other,'” 64.
12
See, for example, Burns, Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
13
This 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.
 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 22 M. Soifer
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.
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
D
o
of different religious groups in Spain involved a delicate balancing act between cooperation and antagonism,
w
n
interdependence and separation, toleration and persecution. The popularity of this approach makes one wonder:
l
o
has convivencia been rehabilitated?18 It seems to me that it would be premature to answer in the affirmative.
a While only time can test the durability of this particular reincarna- tion of convivencia, at present its prospects do
d
e not look promising. In reality, scholars remain locked within the parameters of the debate originated by Américo
d
A Castro and Claudio Sánchez Albornoz. Indeed, John Tolan has questioned the applicability of the categories of
t
: “tolerance, acceptance” and “exclusion, violence” to Iberian realities, arguing that their modern connotations
2
2 mistakenly suggest that medieval Christians had contradictory attitudes toward religious minorities. In fact, to a
:
1 Christian mind, tolerance and intolerance were inseparable: the minorities' religious inferiority
0
1
0

14
Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 9.
15
See Geary, “Living with Conflicts in Stateless France: A Typology of Conflict Management
Mechanisms, 1050-1200” in his Living with the Dead, 125-60.
16
Gampel, “Jews, Christians, and Muslims,” 11.
17
Cano and Molina, “Judaísmo, Cristanismo e Islam en Sefarad.”
18
Pick, 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-
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 mmority-majority
relations sounds suspiciously like a statement of an obvious fact. If there was no balance,
D historians would not be studying inter-religious coexistence in the first place. While the
o
w
unveiling of convivencia's “dark side” was unquestionably a constructive development in
n Iberian historiography, it has not made the concept into a workable analytical tool. In a
l
o certain sense, the neo-convivencia is almost as impracticable and metaphysical as the
a
d
original formulation. Castro's convivencia at least aspired to be present in the mental world
e of the medieval communities; the new version is unequivocally a social scientist's
d
A construct, which presumes the existence of an indeterminate mechanism that infuses social
t
: reality with just the right amount of
2 23
2 antagonism and toleration, somehow keeping the whole system in check. 23 What it does
:
1 not even attempt to answer is where the hostility and the need for cooperation come from,
0 and how the desirable balance is achieved.
1
0 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 convivencia”) was a
prerogative of a small minority of non-Christians able to frequent the royal

19
Tolan, “Une ‘convivencia' bien précaire,” 385, 386.
20
Olsen, “Middle Ages in the History of Toleration,” 11.
21
Novikoff, “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).
23
One 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

24 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 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
D
model, or even more loosely, an “insistent example” for the Christians to follow in their
o treatment of Jews and Muslims.28 However, the Islamic model of toleration was not the
w
n only “example” available to the conquering Christian armies in Spain. As Cary Nederman
l
o correctly points out, Christendom had its own tradition of accepting at least one religious
a
d
minority - the Jews - whose presence among Christians was not only permissible but
e theologically required.29 According to St Augustine, the Jews had to be preserved as
d
A witnesses to the truth of Christian faith and a living testament to the antiquity of the
t
:
Hebrew Scriptures. In fact, being essen- tial for the fulfillment of the divine plan of
2 salvation, the Jews were to be present at 30
2
: the end of times. 30 There is no reason why the expanding Iberian states could not have
1
0
devised their own model of toleration, inspired, in part, by the Augustinian principle and
1 the example of the Christian states to the north, and in part by the practical exigen- cies
0
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 31
Byzantine legal practices.31 In northern Europe, as in Muslim Spain, the Jews were

24
Salvador Martínez, La convivencia en la España del siglo XIII, 11-24.
25
García 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).
26
Catlos, “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).
28
Burns, “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.
29
Nederman, “Discourses and Contexts of Tolerance,” 20-1.
30
On St Augustine's doctrine of “witness” and especially on its place in medieval scholastic
theology, see Hood, Aquinas and the Jews, 10-15.
31
Simon, “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 32
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 33
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 35
kingdoms.35 While the gap between theory and practice was a prominent feature of 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
D entwining of religion and law made the Islamic model of toleration fundamentally
o unsuitable for Christian imitation.36 A Christian monarch may have been revered as a ruler
w
n anointed by God, but his exercise of power, including his authority over religious
l
o minorities, was rooted not in the Christian 37
a precepts, but in the king's role as a lord of his territorial domain. 37 He had no obliga- tion
d
e to give Jews (or Muslims, for that matter) protection under the laws of his king- 38
d
A
dom; in fact, he could, and often did, expel them at will. 38 In tying the Jews' and Muslims'
t fortunes to the decisions of individual monarchs and subjecting religious minorities to the
:
2 shifting realities of secular laws, the Christian states in Iberia were no different from their
2
:
northern European counterparts.
1 Indeed, the royal charters (fueros) given to Jews and Muslims, which defined their
0
1 legal status in the kingdom and regulated their relationship with other groups of settlers,
0 had to be renewed by each successive ruler in order to retain their legal power 39
and applicability.39 The status these fueros accorded to Jews and Muslims flowed

32
Noth, “Problems of Differentiation,” 115-18.
33
Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 60-70.
34
In 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.
35
England, where the “Jewish badge” was immediately enforced, was an exception. See
Grayzel, Church and the Jews, 66; Lewis, Jews of Islam, 51.
36
Edelby, “Legislative Autonomy of Christians,” 44.
37
This is the principle behind Louis IX's Ordinance of Melun (1230). See Jordan, French
Monarchy and the Jews, 132-3.
38
Stow, Alienated Minority, 281-308; Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 54.
39
Glick 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 ..
 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
26 a property
servi regis and M. Soiferof 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 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,
D
o
entregadores, entrusting them with the task of collecting outstanding loans from Christians who borrowed money
w from Jewish moneylenders.44
n
l The Castilian example is significant because it resembles the situation that existed in late thirteenth-century
o
a
England, where the Jewish Exchequer provided a mechanism to assist the Jews in collecting the debts owed to
d them by Christians.45 The comparison with England is not as far-fetched as it might first appear. While it is true
e
d that the
A
t
:
2
2
:
1
0
1
0

40
Powers, Code of Cuenca, 165. See also Abulafia, “‘Nam iudei servi regis sunt'” and Catlos,
“‘Secundum suam zunam.'”
41
Courbage and Fargues, Christians and Jews under Islam, 22-3. Robert Ignatius Burns
compares the jizya to the Aragonese besant in Medieval Colonialism, 79.
42
Cohen, 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.
43
Meyerson, 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.
44
See Melechen, “Loans, Land, and Jewish-Christian Relations,” 203; Soifer, “Jews of the
‘Milky Way,'” 185-6, and chap. 6.
45
Stacey, “Jewish Lending,” 93-7.
 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 Journalcommunities
of Medieval of
Iberian Studies
the north have27generally 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 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.
D
o
Not surprisingly, some of Castro's intellectual heirs, whose gaze was steadily directed south, toward Islam
w and its military frontier with the Christian kingdoms, inad- vertently perpetuated the nationalist myth of Spain's
n
l unique status in medieval Europe. 50 At a time when the study of marginal and subaltern populations and their
o
a
treatment by the dominant society grew in popularity among the scholars of medieval northern Europe, it was
d perhaps inevitable that the “multicultural society” of Iberia would become something of a foil to the “persecuting
e
d society” of the north. However, this distorted picture is being rectified by scholars who have moved beyond the
A
t
:
2
2
:
1
0
1
0

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).
47
In 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.
48
Tolan, “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).
50
Hillgarth, “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 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 convivencia as a state of arrested fusion or incomplete
D assimilation, he draws a parallel between the “Muslim Sephardic” and Ashkenazi
o
w acculturation, arguing that in both cases the Jews maintained the boundaries of their
n
l
cultural tradition while simultaneously adopt- ing “reworked aspects of Christian culture,
o in the form of a social polemical denial, into their Judaism.” He calls this process an
a
d “inward acculturation.”52 Even though Marcus - wisely - does not make use of the concept
e
d
of convivencia, his idea of medieval Jewish acculturation, with its dialectical aspects of
A adaptation and “polemical denial,” echoes the post-Castro view of Spanish convivencia as
t
: a coexistence charac- terized by mutual influence and rivalry.
2
2
Marcus' conclusions resonate beyond the immediate issue of the Ashkenazi Jews' place
:
1
in northern European society. They suggest that acculturation was not specifi- cally a
0 Sephardic or Ashkenazic, Islamic or Christian phenomenon, but that in one form or
1
0 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 53
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

51
Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society.
52
Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 1-13.
53
Nederman, “Discourses and Contexts of Tolerance,” 15, 18.
54
Burns, Crusader Kingdom of Valencia, and Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
55
Lewis, “Closing of the Mediaeval Frontier,” 475.
 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 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 29
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 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
D
o
municipalities, with the French- speaking Jewish community nestled in the heart of the Norman quarter. 60 As
w Jeffrey Cohen has argued, the gradual fusion of the two rival Christian communities of Norwich into one civic
n
l and cultural whole came at the expense of the local religious outsiders - the Jews - who in the 1140s were accused
o
a
of crucifying a young Christian boy from an English borough.61 Although never attacked as a consequence of the
d accu- sation, Norwich's Jews remained aloof to the surrounding Christian environment. Like the rest of England's
e
d Jewry, they tenaciously clung to their French language and culture, even as by the middle of the thirteenth
A
t
century English became the language
:
2
2
:
1
0
1
0

56
Bartlett, The Making of Europe, and “Colonial Aristocracies;” Berend, At the Gate of
Christendom; MacEvitt, Crusades and the Christian World of the East.
57
Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 3.
58
Berend, At the Gate of Christendom, 224-67.
59
Robinson 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.
60
Lipman, Jews of Medieval Norwich, 14; Jessopp and James, Life and Miracles of St. William
of Norwich, xlvi-vii.
61
Cohen, “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- catión 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
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
D controlling access to power.”64 Sidestepping the issue of Christian power in Castile and
o
w
Aragon-Catalonia leads, at best, to an incomplete picture of cross-cultural relations. 65
n Increasingly, scholars are becoming convinced that a colo- nizing agenda informed
l
o cultural, artistic, and legal productions that until now have been understood as clear
a
d
manifestations of Christian tolerance and convivencia.66 Ana Echevarría's remarkable study
e of Alfonso el Sabio's translation program, for instance, is part of a movement that takes an
d
A aim at deconstructing the colonizing agenda of a royal court and a reign that have long
t
: been emblematic of convivencia. As John Tolan reminds us, Alfonso's purported
2 “tolerance” is better understood as yet another affir- mation of his monarchical powers.
2
: The claim to the mantle of the king of three faiths denied the legitimacy of Muslim rulers,
1
0 while his patronage of Arabic learning high- lighted his Muslim subjects' subordination to
1
0
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.

62
Stacey, “Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century England,” 343-4.
63
Tomasch, “Postcolonial Chaucer,” 243-60.
64
Glick and Pi-Sunyer, Islamic and Christian Spain, 347.
65
See 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).
66
Echevarría 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.
67
Tolan, “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 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
D the Trojan horse of northern European Jewish history. 70 While he is right in urging a
o
w corrective to the overly bleak image of northern Europe as a persecuting society, an
n
l
equally unbalanced picture of Jewish-Christian relations that misses the distinctive features
o of anti-Jewish violence or downplays the significance of the difficulties faced by the Jews
a
d living in Christian kingdoms from the mid-thirteenth century and on would do just as much
e
d
disservice to the field. Elukin writes that “the fundamental truth or meaning of Jewish
A history in the Middle Ages - if we are right to apply such a term as meaning - is the
t
: continuity of relatively stable relations between Jews and Christians.” 71 Perhaps the best
2
2
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”
1
0 history - with another, supposedly more “accurate” meaning. Scholars of medieval Spain
1
0 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.

68
Rojinsky, “Rule of Law and the Written Word.”
69
Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart, 8-9, 136-7.
70
Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart, 136-7.
71
Elukin, Living Together, Living Apart, 9.
 32 M. Soifer

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