Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
ALEX NOVIKOFF
University of Pennsylvania
ABSTRACT
The nature of what has been termed “tolerance” and “intolerance” in the histori-
ography of medieval Iberia has, while rarely defined, continued to provide much-
employed organizing categories for the field. This paper reviews one focus of that
historiography from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century: the relations among
Muslims, Jews, and Christians, with respect to tolerance/intolerance and related
categories (notably, convivencia). It analyzes, among other factors, the impact on this
historiography of the intellectual, cultural, and political movements which have
affected historians of medieval Iberia. It makes a case for the importance for spe-
cialists in the field to be keenly aware of these aspects of historiography at a time
when medieval Spain is seen as offering a unique opportunity for testing theories
of interfaith relations and social interaction
* An earlier version of this paper was delivered at a conference at Saint Louis University,
Madrid Campus: Los Conversos y la Historia de España de 1248 a 1700, 21-22 Mayo, 2004.
I would like to thank the organizers of and participants in that conference. I also record
my gratitude to Nancy Farriss, Edward Peters, Antonio Feros, Paul Freedman, and
Jonathan Steinberg, for reading and commenting on an earlier draft.
8 alex novikoff
1 María Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians
Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little Brown & Company, 2002).
2 Here I cite from the front flap of the book.
nization of the New World, see Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “The Inter-Atlantic Paradigm:
The failure of Spanish medieval colonization of the Canary and Caribbean Islands,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, 3 (1993), 515-543. Following the lead of Angus
McKay, Stevens-Arroyo argues that throughout the medieval Reconquista, the Spanish
used repopulation, not military force, as their principal weapon of domination. The colo-
nial experience on the islands, he concludes, provided a major stimulus to modify and
10 alex novikoff
change policies which had characterized the earlier encounters with Muslims and Jews,
thus boosting the development of a new imperial mode for later subjugating Mexico,
Peru, and much of the American continents. See also Angus McKay, Spain in the Middle
Ages; From Frontier to Empire, 1000-1500 (London: Macmillan, 1977), especially 67-78.
7 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages
made a forceful case for the medieval origins of widespread persecution in his The
Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1987).
9 Communities of Violence, chapters 2 and 3.
10 Communities of Violence, 89.
11 On the “neo-lachrymose” conception of Jewish-Arab history, and the alternative
“myth of interfaith utopia,” see also Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews
in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3-14.
12 Note, however, that Powers does not consider the role of Jews during the Reconquest.
13 See J. N. Hillgarth, “Historiography in Visigothic Spain,” La Storiografia altomedievale.
12 alex novikoff
14 Robert B. Tate, Ensayos sobre la historiografía peninsular del siglo XV (Madrid: Editorial
Gredos, 1970), 66-72. The medieval Spanish view of history is treated in an exhaustive
study by Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993).
15 There is a substantial literature on the writings of Quevedo. For his view of Spanish
history and tradition, see especially R. Seldon Rose, “The España defendida by Don
Francisco de Quevedo,” Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia 68 (1916), 515-639;
R. Lida, “Quevedo y su España antigua,” Romance Philology 17 (1963), 253-271; J. N. Hillgarth,
“Spanish Historiography and Iberian Reality,” History and Theory 24, 1 (1985), 30-31.
16 I am less concerned here with the “national” histories of Spain that made their
appearance in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since they have been the
object of considerable historiographical analysis. Emphasis is given to the works that, in
some form or another, pay particular attention to interfaith relations during the “coex-
istence” of Muslims, Jews, and Christians on the Iberian Peninsula.
17 José Antonio Conde, Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España, 3 vols. (Madrid:
Imprenta que fue de Garcia, 1820-21); Pascual de Gayangos, Escritores en prosa anteriores
al siglo XV, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 51 (Madrid: M. Rivadeneyra, 1884);
and idem, “Language and Literature of the Moriscos,” British and Foreign Review 8 (1839),
63-95; Washington Irving, The Alhambra: A Series of Tales and Sketches of the Moors and
Spaniards (Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1832).
18 José Antonio Conde, History of the Dominion of the Arabs in Spain, trans. Mrs. Jonathan
Foster, 3 vols. (London: H. G. Bohn, 1854-5). The historiographic context of the writ-
ings of Conde and Gayangos is provided in James T. Monroe, Islam and the Arabs in
Spanish Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 50-83.
19 Conde, History, 4.
14 alex novikoff
Spanish history and culture did not have universal appeal. In his his-
tory of Spanish Mozarabs (or Christians living under Muslim rule),
Francisco Javier Simonet strongly rejected any Islamic influence on the
medieval Christian culture of Spain, instead placing heavy emphasis (no
doubt too much emphasis) on the role that Christians played in Andalusian
society and culture.20 Simonet even went so far as to deny the Andalusian
Arab historians any legitimacy in the representation of Islamic or Arab
culture, claiming that most of them, including such authors as Ibn
Hayyan and Ibn Hazm, were racially “Spaniards” (though Islamized)
and descended from Hispano-Romans.21 In Simonet’s account, the
Mozarabs were heroes who underwent persecution and martyrdom at
the hands of Muslim rulers and ultimately contributed to the “restora-
tion” of a “new Spain” (ibid., vii). Simonet, it would seem, was giving
the “Gothic” view of Spanish history fresh wind, making use of his lin-
guistic and archival skills to endorse the belief in an unbroken Spanish
history extending back through the entire Middle Ages.
If the history of Islamic Spain first garnered wide recognition among
nineteenth-century historians, so did the history of Spanish Jewry. In
1847 Adolfo de Castro published a short history of the Jews in Spain,
covering the period from the time of their settlement to the beginning
of the nineteenth century, devoting a considerable portion of the book
to comparing the Jews under Christian rulers to the Jews under Muslim
rulers. Like Conde, de Castro was also inspired by positivist ambitions:
“I write this history dispassionately and impartially—passion and par-
tiality belong not to me. I neither am a Jew, nor a descendent from
Judaizers [sic]. My sole aim is to stand up for the truth—a rule by
which every historian ought to be guided.”22 De Castro proceeded from
this declaration to offer a chronologically ambitious portrait of Spanish
Jewry, examining how Jews were successively treated (or mistreated)
under Roman, Visigothic, Muslim, and Catholic rulers. He unequivo-
cally placed the hardest times for the Jews within the periods when they
were under Catholic law. “While the Goths continued in the Arian faith,
the Jews lived free from oppression; but as soon as the former were
converted to Christianity, the unhappy Hebrews were cruelly persecuted
20 Although completed in the late 1860s, the history was first published only in 1897.
21 Francisco Javier Simonet, Historia de los Mozárabes de España deducida de los mejores y
más auténticos testimonios de los escritores Cristianos y Arabes (Amsterdam: Oriental Press, 1967
[1897]), vii, xxiv-xxv.
22 Alfonso de Castro, The History of the Jews in Spain, trans. Edward D. G. M. Kirwan
Springer, 1861-7).
27 José Amador de los Rios, Historia, I, xv.
16 alex novikoff
But this tolerance, Rios also pointed out, did not last, for the growing
success of the Christian Reconquest ushered in “an age of hatred and
intolerance,” during which the Jewish people received “a similar fate as
that suffered by the conquered Saracens” (ibid., 165). Indeed, persecu-
tion and eventual expulsion would befall both the Jews and the Muslims
of Iberia.
The last great historian of the nineteenth century to write on the
social relations between Christians and Jews was also the first great
American medievalist: Henry Charles Lea. His three-volume History of
the Inquisition in the Middle Ages (1888) and his four-volume History of the
Inquisition of Spain (1906-7) still stand as landmark achievements in the
field and have secured his reputation as “the greatest historian of nine-
teenth-century America and the most accomplished American medieval-
ist before Charles Homer Haskins.”29 Throughout his life, and in much
of his writings, Lea was concerned, seemingly obsessed, with the rise of
the Inquisition and the changing face of Christian-Jewish relations in
late medieval Spain. A short essay of his in the American Historical Review
(1896) captured the essence of what Rios had argued before him and
set the tone for a debate that has not yet subsided:
rendered the Inquisition inevitable, which expelled the Jews and Moors,
and which, by insisting on the absolute uniformity of belief, condemned
Spain to the intellectual and material lethargy that marked its period
of decadence.30
During the long struggle of the Reconquest, the social and religious
condition of Spain was strangely anomalous, presenting a mixture of
races and faiths whose relations, however antagonistic they might be
in principle, were, for the most part, dominated by temporal interests
exclusively. Mutual attrition, so far from inflaming prejudices, led to
mutual toleration, so that fanaticism became reduced to a minimum
precisely in that corner of Christendom [al-Andalus] where a priori
reasoners have been tempted to regard it as especially violent (ibid., 45).
30 Henry Charles Lea, “Ferrand Martinez and the Massacres of 1391,” American Historical
that the “times of intolerance passed, and it would be truly incorrect for the present
generation to look at the truly unequal facts in the same way.”
32 Henry Charles Lea, History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York: Macmillan, 1906-
7), I, 35.
18 alex novikoff
33 Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes del español; estado lingüístico de la Península ibérica hasta
el siglo XI (Madrid: Imprenta de la Libreria y casa editorial Hernando, 1929); Idem, “La
Lengua Española,” Hispania, 1, 1 (1918), 13.
34 María Eugenia Lacarra, “La utilización del Cid de Menéndez Pidal en la ideología
standing fascination with the poem and the figure of the Cid, culmi-
nating in his immensely popular La España del Cid (1929; abridged in
English as The Cid and His Spain, 1934), and second, his reaction to the
polemical debate between Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz,
discussed below, in which he sided with the latter. In The Cid and His
Spain, Pidal set out to restore the historical figure of Rodrigo Diaz (El
Cid) to Spanish history by offering a broad account of Spanish society
in eleventh-century Castile. He attacked the nineteenth-century Dutch
Arabist Reinhart Dozy for his portrayal of the Cid as a kind of noble
brigand and, instead, presented him as embodying the spirit of Castilian
and Leonese imperialism, a hero in the long struggle against Islam and
a model of feudal virtue. In the concluding remarks to the book (nearly
500 pages in its English abridgment), Pidal drew on his profound knowl-
edge of medieval Spain and engaged directly the existing perception of
Spain’s intolerant past: “It has been said the religious feeling of medieval
Spain was exacerbated by the struggle against Islam. But far from finding
in religion a spirit scorched by the hot winds of the African desert, we
see that it is precisely in the Middle Ages that it shed most of its racial
intolerance. . . . War was waged upon the Moors for the harm they did
and not for any religious motives.”35 And yet, just pages later, Pidal
highlights the importance of the religious nature of Reconquest, stress-
ing that it “should be considered, not from the peninsular point of view
alone, but in relation to the world struggle between Christendom and
Islam (ibid., 462).” Pidal may have wished to show the Middle Ages in
as sympathetic a light as possible, but a patriotic, Castilian-centered,
and ultimately Catholic vision of Spain’s medieval past was as strongly
embedded in his sense of Castilian history as it was in Simonet’s his-
tory of the Mozarabs. Nor would it diminish following the Spanish rev-
olution of 1937-39. Pidal’s historically-based political views, and particularly
his assertion of the existence of a popular nationalism in medieval Castile,
were repeated between 1944 and 1950 in a series of articles in the
Revista de Estudios Politicos, the ideological voice of the Franco regime,
where his vision of Castilian hegemony over other Spanish kingdoms
was quickly raised to the level of nationalist dogma.
The most heated, and now celebrated, debate over Spain’s multi-reli-
gious past erupted in mid-century between two Spanish exiles: Américo
Castro, active in the United States, and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz,
35Ramón Menéndez Pidal, The Cid and His Spain, trans. Harold Sunderland (London:
J. Murray, 1934), 456.
20 alex novikoff
36 The revised 1971 title included “Spaniards” rather than “Spanish” in order to
emphasize the personal, rather than national, aspect of this cultural interaction.
37 Castro did not single out the specific authors whose views he was criticizing. Some
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians who were influenced by the eter-
nal and unchangeable definition of Spanishness (i.e., the Spaniard as a stoic, sober,
courageous, individualistic man) include Ángel Ganivet, Miguel Unamuno, M. Criado
de Val and, to a lesser degree, R. Menéndez Pidal. This view, as we mentioned ear-
lier, harks back to the writings of medieval and early modern writers such as Jimenez
de Rada and Franzisco de Quevedo.
38 Castro’s notion of the “realities” of Spanish history was emphasized in the title to
the revised Spanish version of España en su historia, which was published as La realidad
histórica de España (Mexico: Editorial Porrúa, 1954).
39 Castro, España en su historia: cristianos, moros y judíos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada,
and “Spaniards” are terms which, in their cultural sense, only acquire
meaning after the thirteenth century, when the political supremacy of
the Reconquest succeeded in uniting, if ultimately eliminating, the three
religious castes.
Castro’s search was for the origins of the Spanish people, which he
located amidst the convivencia of Christians, Muslims and Jews. But he
did not ignore the more familiar concept of tolerance. In fact, Castro
credited Islam with having introduced the “horizon of tolerance” to the
Spanish peninsula, its origins being in the character of the Koran, which
was, by virtue of its syncretism of Islamic beliefs with those of the Judeo-
Christian tradition, a monument of tolerance in itself.40 This had prac-
tical benefits too, for “religious tolerance and the harmonious life together
with Mohammedanism and other faiths facilitated the exploitation of
the conquered countries, and offered the Moslem the possibility of
expanding his interests in the changing aspects of life from the Euphrates
to the Ebro.” This benefit was compounded, Castro believed, by the
fact that “Moslem asceticism and mysticism (Sufism) were bound to
make tolerance (or indifference to dogma) the very center of their reli-
gious experience, and were based on the love of God, on the rapture
of the soul, and not on knowledge.”41 It was from this Islamic prece-
dent that a “medieval Spanish tolerance” emerged, “a connection that
must not be forgotten.” And if this tolerance persisted, it was not on
theological grounds, for one does not observe the same tolerance else-
where in the Middle Ages, but only as the result of a modus vivendi
specific to the Spanish experience. This paradigm of tolerance ceased,
Castro also explained, when the “totalitarianism” of belief (that is, the
absence of the distinction between the religious and the secular) even-
tually forced the Moors and the Jews to become fanatically intolerant.
Thus, “the Spaniards, molded in their structure by the historical impulse
of three beliefs, were tolerant because of the exigencies of politics, and
intolerant because of the totalitarianism, omnipresent character of their
belief.”42
1948), 17-45; Idem, The Structure of Spanish History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1954), vii-ix, 3-59; Idem, The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1971), 136-173.
40 España, 207; Structure, 221-2; Spaniards, 498-499.
41 España, 207; Structure, 222.
42 Structure, 229; Spaniards, 499-500. This passage was added to the later editions of
his work.
22 alex novikoff
The struggle against Spanish Islamites was not the undertaking of lordly
minorities as was, at the time, the majority of the wars in Western
Europe, but it was a national task in which the masses participated.
The fight was not for dynastic interests, desires or regional ambitions
or the familiar hatreds or furies as occurred on the other side of the
Pyrenees, but for the freedom of the kingdom of the Church.46
It was this struggle for religious unity, from the first victory at Covadonga
(722) to the final one at Granada (1492), which defined the Spanish Middle
Ages and likewise embodied the true character of the Spanish people.
43 Among the many critical responses aroused by Castro’s book, see especially Eugenio
Asenio, “La realidad histórico de España,” Modern Language Notes 81 (1966), 595-637; and
Idem, “La peculiaridad literaria de los conversos,” Anuario de Estudios Medievales 4 (1967),
327-351. For a defense of Castro’s views against Asenio’s criticisms, see A. A. Sicroff,
“Americo Castro and His Critics: Eugenio Asenio,” Hispanic Review 40, 1 (1972), 1-30.
44 Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Spain, A Historical Enigma, trans. C. J. Dees and D. S.
Reher (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1975), I, 20. This is from the trans-
lated preface to the second edition.
45 For a detailed critique of Sánchez-Albornoz’s view of medieval Spanish Jewry, see
24 alex novikoff
very heart of the debate. But if Sánchez-Albornoz was the most polem-
ical defender of a pure Spanish history and one in a long line of such
historians to do so, he was also the first to seriously question the mean-
ing and appropriateness of such terms as convivencia and tolerance.
Regrettably, his critique was born of a very nationalistic view of Spanish
history and a very polemical approach to writing history.
At the same time that the controversy between Castro and Sánchez-
Albornoz was playing out, two leading Jewish historians were at work
on multivolume histories of Spanish Jewry: Yitzak Baer (1888-1980) and
Eliyahu Ashtor (1914-1984).48 Baer devoted his life to studying the Jews
of Spain, a career that spanned two world wars and the first thirty-five
years of the state of Israel, where he lived and taught after his home
community of Halberstadt in Germany was destroyed during the Second
World War. Exhaustive research in the archives of Spain in the 1920’s
resulted in a two-volume compendium of documents relating to the Jews
in Christian Spain.49 It was mainly on the basis of this research, and
on the summation of documents compiled by Jean Régné and Ernesto
Martinez Ferrando,50 that Baer wrote his masterpiece, Toledot ha Yehudim
biSefarad ha Natzrit (1945, translated into English from the 1959 Hebrew
edition as A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2 vols., 1961 and 1966).
Covering the period from “the age of the Reconquest” to the expul-
sion in 1492, Baer offered far more than a mere narrative of the his-
tory of the Jews in Spain. His purpose was to provide a didactic account
of Jewish history and culture, drawn from the richest and most tragic
period in this history. Written in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s (a
first draft was already completed in 1938), Baer’s study might seem odd
in its turn toward the Iberian peninsula in order to capture and reveal
the essence of the Jewish people, but it was precisely because of the
long centuries of Jewish-Christian interaction in medieval Iberia that
Spain provided Baer with the ideal society to study. What was to be
48 A recent and penetrating essay by Patricia Skinner addresses the topic of medieval
Jewish historiography and offers another context in which to understand Baer, Ashtor
and Jewish historians’ handling of medieval Jewish-Christian relations. See Patricia Skinner,
“Viewpoint: Confronting the ‘Medieval’ in Medieval History: The Jewish Example,” Past
and Present 181 (2003): 219-247.
49 Fritz Baer, Die Juden im Christlich Spanien, 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie-verlag, 1929 and
1936).
50 Jean Régné, Catalogue des actes de Jaime I, Pedro III et Alfonso III, rois d’Aragon concer-
nant les Juifs (12-13-1291) (Paris: Durlacher, 1911); Ernesto Martinez Ferrando, Catálogo
de la documentación relativa al antiguo reino de Valencia, 2 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta Góngora,
1934).
found in Iberia was “not simply a history of the Jews in a specific coun-
try but a laboratory wherein Baer believed one could view the way in
which Jews faced the greatest challenge of their existence: the struggle
of Judaism vs. Christianity.”51 The result was an historical study that
has yet to be surpassed.
Tightly woven into the History of the Jews in Christian Spain are Baer’s
personal philosophy of Judaism and his perception of what medieval
Spain reveals about the Jewish people. For Baer, Judaism is mythical,
mystical and non-rational, its greatest enemy being rational scientific
thought. Messianism is the force that sets the Jews apart and is a ves-
tige of the glorious period of the Jews’ religio-national independence.
Judaism does possess an inner core that guides its fate, but this does
not prevent Jews from being distracted from their faith and corrupted
by outside influences. The Jews of medieval Spain provide the perfect
example. Under Muslim rule the Jews were indeed granted a relative
amount of social mobility, but this, Baer argued, ultimately exerted a
negative influence. “Political ambitions, the passions for erotic experi-
ence, the desire for rational understanding penetrated the Jewish com-
munity,” and this was contrary to the teachings of the Mishnah, even
though it refined Judaism’s religious and political ideologies.52 The Jewish
contact with the exotic tendencies of the courts of al-Andalus would
have a deep effect on the Jews of the later period. It was thus that “the
patterns of life developed in the small Moslem states laid the founda-
tions of Jewish existence in Spain under Christian rule” (ibid., 38).
Nevertheless, the transfer of Jewish culture from the princely courts of
the Muslim south to the more decentralized regions of the Christian
north (prompted by the invading armies of the Almohads and the
Almoravids) provided a change of environment that would in some ways
benefit the Jewish community. “No longer was the ideology of a small
aristocratic upper stratum to dominate” the Jewish community, for in
the Christian north the “unscrupulous politician [Baer’s image of the
Golden Age courtier] now met with the simple, sober townsman and
the superstitious villager as well as the pious ascetic and the rapt mys-
tic” (ibid., 187-189). Within the Christian orbit, because of less control
and fewer temptations, Jews were able to be true to their traditions.
Baer may have preferred Jewish life under Christianity to that under
Spain, trans. Louis Schoffman (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992), I, xxiii.
52 A History of the Jews in Christian Spain, I, 37.
26 alex novikoff
53 The “Spanish Inquisition” has been one of the most discussed topics in European
28 alex novikoff
57 Eliyahu Ashtor, The Jews of Moslem Spain, trans. A. Klein and J. M. Klein (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 1992), I, 241.
58 Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages: Comparative
Perspectives on Social and Cultural Formation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 4.
59 James F. Powers, review of Islamic and Christian Spain . . . in Journal of Interdisciplinary
cle that also fleshes out the earlier historiography of cultural interaction. See Thomas
F. Glick and Oriol Pi-Sunyer, “Acculturation as an Explanatory Concept in Spanish
History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11, 2 (1969), 136-154.
30 alex novikoff
the two processes are not mutually exclusive at all, for they are part
and parcel of the “socio-cultural evolution” in which neighboring, and
in this case competing, societies inevitably interact with and learn from
one another. In merging traditional economic and social history with
some sociological models for cultural change, Glick’s approach can per-
haps best be described as “post-Castro and post-Sánchez-Albornoz,” that
is, steering clear of the quest for national origins, avoiding much of the
simple and often static terminology favored by so many other histori-
ans, and fusing the insights of anthropology and the history of science
in order to capture the “distinguishing features of Spanish culture” dur-
ing these seven hundred years of cultural contact.62 Relations between
Muslims and Christians are not considered in terms of tolerance and
intolerance (although a modified version of convivencia is endorsed),63 but
rather in terms of acculturation and socio-evolutionary change.
Beginning in the late 1960s, and especially since the 1970s, scholars
have come to recognize that Aragon, and especially Valencia, possesses
some of the richest archives for medieval, and especially Muslim, Spain.
Exploration of these sources has yielded a number of important stud-
ies pertaining to Muslims and Mudejars (Muslims living under Christian
rule)64 in the eastern and north-eastern territories of medieval Iberia, as
well as their relations with Christians and Jews.65 In this field, perhaps
no scholar has contributed as much as Robert I. Burns, S.J. His pio-
62 Islamic and Christian Spain, 299. Thomas Glick has returned once more to the longue
durée of cultural change in medieval Iberia in a more recent volume that incorporates
recent archaeological evidence as well: From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and
Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). The
term “post-Castro and post-Sánchez-Albornoz” was first suggested by Archibald R. Lewis
in a review of Islamic and Christian Spain in Speculum 55, 2 (1980), 365.
63 Cf. Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain, eds. V. Mann, T. Glick,
and J. Dodds (New York: G. Braziller, 1992), 1-9. The book was produced in con-
junction with an exhibition by the same title at the New York Jewish Museum.
64 There is some controversy over the use of the term Mudéjar and whether it implies
some form of marginalization, but these academic quarrels do not directly affect the
debates over interfaith contact. For a useful explication of the terminology used when
discussing the Muslim communities of medieval Spain, see L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain,
1250 to 1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1-5.
65 In chronological order these include, but are not limited to, Robert I. Burns, The
Each in his community shrank from the other, despised the insepara-
ble religio-cultural package the other represented, and actively resisted
assimilation. Tolerance, had he thought in terms of tolerance, might
well have meant to the Mudejar the retention of exclusionary factors
we most deplore: Arabic uni-language, community walls, dietary oblig-
ations, separate schools and courts, and everything that turned him
from the general Christian context and so by our standards oppressed
him.66
Bramon, Contra moros i jueus: formació i estratègia d’unes discriminacions al País Valencià (Barcelona:
E. Climent, 1981); R. I. Burns, Muslims, Christians and Jews in the Crusader Kingdom of
Valencia: Societies in Symbiosis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Maria Teresa
Ferrer I Mallol, Els sarraïns de la Corona catalano-aragonesa en el segle XIV: segregació i dis-
criminació (Barcelona: Consell Superior d’Investigacions Científiques, 1987); Idem, La fron-
tera amb l’Islam en el segle XIV: cristians i sarraïns al País Valencià (Barcelona: Consell Superior
d’Investigacions Científiques, 1988); Mark Meyerson, The Muslims of Valencia in the Age of
Ferdinand and Isabel: Between Coexistence and Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991); Isabel O’Connor, A Forgotten Community: The Mudéjar Alejama of Xàtiva, 1240-1327
(Leiden: Brill, 2003). In addition to these major studies, several important journals devoted
to Islamic/Mudéjar/Morisco studies in Spain were founded during the 1980’s: Sharq al-
Andalus, al-Quantara, and Awrãq.
66 Burns, Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 22.
32 alex novikoff
67 Although Burns was carefully avoiding the polemic of the schools of Castro and
Sánchez-Albornoz, he was also reacting to some of his critics, mainly Islamists, who con-
tended that Islamic culture remained basically intact under Christian rule. For Burns,
the assimilation of the Mudejars and the erosion of their traditional institutions took
place with surprising rapidity.
68 Meyerson, The Muslims of Valencia, 3.
69 Within the category of popular violence, Meyerson distinguished between “system-
atic violence on the part of the mob directed against a specific group” and “random
violence,” the latter being committed either by “Christian hoodlums” or even, occa-
sionally, by Muslims. See op. cit., 219.
70 Mañuela Marín and Joseph Pérez, eds., Minorités religieuses dans l’Espagne médiévale
(Aix-en-Provence: Editions Edisud, 1993), see introduction. For those interested in a crit-
ical revision of the idea of convivencia, it is regrettable that Marin’s very illuminating
points are not taken up in the essays presented in the volume. Rather, the majority of
the articles deal with aspects of Mudéjar and Mozarabic communities.
71 Teofilo F. Ruiz, Spanish Society, 1400-1600 (Harlow, Eng.: Longman, 2001), 95-96.
72 In her evocative “story of tolerance, tyranny, and the expulsion of the Jews from
Spain,” Erna Paris describes a “rich, multicultural stew that bubbled and simmered over
the Iberian Peninsula for more than a thousand years, producing a unique, pluralistic
society” during which centuries of tolerance prevailed. Her purpose, voiced identically
a hundred years earlier by Lea, is to explain how it is that Spain was “for centuries,
the most tolerant nation in Europe, and subsequently became the most zealously intol-
erant” nation in Europe. The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny, and the Expulsion
of the Jews from Spain (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995), 19.
34 alex novikoff
or, most recently, Nirenberg and Menocal, have to do partly with the
historical evidence used and partly with each scholar’s own broader
interpretations of history. Without pursuing the interminable question
of what historians can and cannot do with the historical record, one
can nonetheless safely state that the concepts of tolerance and intoler-
ance provide historical categories employed from an early period in the
historiography of medieval Spain. It is troubling that these terms are
as frequently invoked as they are rarely defined. How exactly are we
to understand tolerance among three religions? Is tolerance the absence
of intolerance? Is intolerance the absence of tolerance? Are they to be
defined explicitly, with space between them, or is there some element
of overlap? Sánchez-Albornoz was one of the very few twentieth-cen-
tury historians to seriously challenge the use of these terms for medieval
Spain.73 Unfortunately, his criticisms were heavily anchored in his nation-
alistic view of Spanish history and identity, a flaw that has character-
ized a number of historians both before and after him. Some more
recent writers have openly stressed medieval Spain’s relevance to con-
temporary identity and society.74 But this also runs the risk of tilting
the complex historical past in favor of a more present-minded agenda.
At least one point seems certain: the ambiguous and largely undefined
categories of tolerance and intolerance have proved to be of little help
in explaining the complexities of a historical period that has, with some
justification, received such diverse appraisals from historians and liter-
ary scholars. Indeed, the contrasting images one is presented with in
the works of scholars like Menocal, Powers, and Nirenberg are them-
selves evidence of a world more varied, more changing, and more com-
plex than any overarching concept or generality can convey.
73 The term convivencia, however, has received more criticism and redefinition. See, for
example, Nirenberg, Communities of Violence, 245-6; and idem, “Violencia, memoria y con-
vivencia: los judíos en la Iberia Medieval,” Memoria y Civilización 2 (1999), 31-53.
74 In addition to the many authors and works examined above, consider, for exam-
ple, the following remarks in the “afterword” to a volume of essays dealing with multi-
ethnic reflections of medieval Spain: “Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain is an
extraordinary undertaking. It seeks to understand an enigma that has baffled historians
and critics of culture for many years—that is, the curious sense of belonging of con-
temporary peoples to a land that long ago rejected them. . . . The essays, taken together,
point to a solution that has as much to do with symbols of contemporary identity as
with artifacts of a distant past. Far removed from the conditions that initially gave rise
to them in the Middle Ages, memories of medieval Spain—in literary [sic], business
practices, architecture, music, and so on—respond to contemporary needs for prescrip-
tive ideologies, for symbols, and even for propaganda.” Louise Mirrer, “Afterword” in
Charting Memory: Recalling Medieval Spain, ed. Stacy Beckwith (New York: Garland, 2000), 323.
But if tolerance and intolerance are terms that have long been used
for describing social relations in medieval Spain, they have not lost any
appeal over time. On the contrary, they circulate now among scholars
within a seeming obsession for locating such collective behavior in
medieval and early modern times more generally. Among some recent
studies, Michael Gervers and James Powell75 have approached social
conflict during the Crusades in terms of tolerance and intolerance; Cary
Nederman76 has examined medieval thought for some early discourses
of toleration; Gary Remer77 has focused attention on humanism’s rhetoric
of toleration, and Ole Peter Grell and Robert Scribner78 have approached
the question of tolerance and intolerance in the context of the European
Reformation. A conference in Toledo in 1997 organized by the Reineke
Society was devoted to the question of tolerance and intolerance in the
Middle Ages; in 1998 an international colloquium honoring the four
hundredth anniversary of the Edict of Nantes (1598) was devoted to the
question of tolerance in European history, and an international sym-
posium entitled, “Inquisición y Tolerancia” was held at the Universidad
Complutense de Madrid that same year.79 Also based in Spain is the
75 Michael Gervers and James Powell, eds., Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the
Age of the Crusades (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001). Chapter 4, by James
B. Brodman, deals with medieval Iberia.
76 Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration c. 1100-1550 (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). See also the two volumes edited by Nederman
and John Christian Laursen, Difference and Dissent: Theories of Tolerance in Medieval and Early
Modern Europe (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); and Beyond the Persecuting Society:
Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1998).
77 Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
Rémi Fabre, and Marcel Launay, eds., La Tolérance. Colloque international de Nantes (mai
1998) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1999). Included in the volume are
papers by Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala on the Christians of al-Andalus (363-370) and
John Tolan on the precarious “convivencia” of Jews and Muslims living in Christian
Spain during the Middle Ages (385-394). A summary of the Madrid conference is pro-
vided by Elena Martínez Barrios, “Tolerancia e inquisición,” Revista de la Inquisición 8
(1999), 101-111.
36 alex novikoff
80 In an important essay, Klaus Schreiner has analyzed the relationship between ideas
of tolerance and persecution in medieval Christianity, arguing that while early Christian
thinkers such as Cyprian viewed tolerantia as the basic foundation of Christian social
ethics, by the 12th century terror and persecution had become the standard Church
policy towards heretics: “ ‘Duldsamkeit’ (tolerantia) oder ‘Schrecken’ (terror),” in Religiöse
Devianz, ed. Dieter Simon (Frankfurt: Klosterman, 1990), 159-210. The development of
heresy and persecution during this period of the Middle Ages is, of course, the subject
of several classic works by R. I. Moore: The Origins of European Dissent (New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1977); and The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western
Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987). I thank Christopher Close for bring-
ing the Schreiner article to my attention.
81 For some English-language examples, see Glenn Tinder, Tolerance and Community
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995); John Horton and Peter Nicholson, eds.,
Toleration: Philosophy and Practice (Avebury, Eng.: Aldershot, 1992); Kirstie McClure,
“Difference, Diversity, and the Limits of Toleration,” Political Theory 18 (1990), 361-91;
Susan Mendus, Toleration and the Limits of Liberalism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press International, 1989); Susan Mendus, ed., Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical
perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Debates over the term toler-
ance are, of course, not completely new. Critiques of the concept can be traced back to
Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, Critique of Pure Tolerance
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), who insisted that toleration of the wrong sorts of people
and activities means complicity in repression.