This article was downloaded by: [Ray, Jonathan] On: 21 September 2009 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 915131075] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t783064118 Images of the Jewish community in medieval Iberia Jonathan Ray a a Department of Theology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA Online Publication Date: 01 June 2009 To cite this Article Ray, Jonathan(2009)'Images of the Jewish community in medieval Iberia',Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies,1:2,195 — 211 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17546550903136132 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17546550903136132 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. 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The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies Vol. 1, No. 2, June 2009, 195–211 Images of the Jewish community in medieval Iberia Jonathan Ray* Department of Theology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 Journal 10.1080/17546550903136132 RIBS_A_413786.sgm 1754-6559 Original Taylor 1202009 JonathanRay jsr46@georgetown.edu 00000June and & ofArticle Francis Medieval (print)/1754-6567 Francis 2009 Iberian Studies (online) For medieval Jewish intellectuals, the term “Sephardi” denoted more than just a geographic association. It was meant to assert their membership in an elite cultural community distinguished from the rest of the Jewish world. Contrary to this notion of an identifiable and cohesive Sephardi society presented by medieval rabbinic literature, recent studies have yielded a competing image of the organization and boundaries of the Hispano-Jewish community. Archival sources reveal the Jews of Christian Iberia to have formed a highly ramified society in which individuals were as much motivated by their pursuit of power, social stature, and economic opportunities as by religious affiliation. This paper will attempt to bridge the gap between these disparate portraits of Hispano-Jewish society, and discuss the way in which Iberian Jews created a variety of communal rubrics, both real and imagined. Keywords: Sepharad; Sephardic studies; Jewish studies; imagined communities; aljamas; convivencia Recent scholarship on the heterodox nature of medieval society has sparked renewed interest in Iberia as a locus of cross-cultural interaction. As a happy consequence of this turn towards a more inclusive and nuanced approach to medieval history, the study of Iberian Jewry is also experiencing something of its own “Golden Age” of scholarly attention, one which would have surprised even such pioneering advocates as Américo Castro and Yitzhak Baer. Yet despite this sustained interest in the Jewish role in peninsular history, studies continue to rely on a very static and outdated image of Iberian Jewry, demonstrating an overriding tendency to view it as a unified and homogeneous community whose history is generally limited to its level of integration into its larger host society. This vision of Jewish communal cohesion works nicely in discussions of cultural interaction and convivencia, but remains simplistic and, ultimately, misleading. Far from representing a unified social and cultural unit, Iberian Jews developed a variety of communal rubrics and associations that ranged from highly conceptual to decidedly concrete. In an effort to add greater nuance to our view of both medieval Jewish and medieval Spanish history, the following essay discusses some of the ways in which medieval Jews conceived of their communities. Perhaps the most enduring model of Jewish communal organization from medieval Iberia is that of the “Sephardim,” a clearly recognizable if flexible entity whose existence is echoed throughout the rabbinic literature of the day. For these Jewish intellectuals, the term “Sephardic” denoted more than just a geographic association with the Iberian Peninsula. It was also meant to assert their membership in an elite *Email: jsr46@georgetown.edu ISSN 1754-6559 print/ISSN 1754-6567 online © 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17546550903136132 http://www.informaworld.com Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 196 J. Ray cultural community distinguished from the rest of the Jewish world. This notion of a culturally distinct Jewish society associated with the Iberian Peninsula began in Muslim al-Andalus during the ninth through the eleventh centuries.1 Thus conceived, Sepharad was quite clearly an “imagined community,” to use a term now common among scholars of national identity.2 Nonetheless, as with other national communities, Sepharad was an influential idea around which Iberian Jewry was able to organize itself. The identification of Sephardic Jewry with a community based on elite genealogy and cultural accomplishment, as much as geography, endured as an important and powerful image in rabbinic texts throughout the Middle Ages. To be sure, many among the final generation of Andalusi Jewish intellectuals saw themselves as living through the twilight of the Sephardic Age, arguing that Sephardic culture was fundamentally incompatible with the backward and boorish society of Christian Europe.3 Such laments notwithstanding, succeeding generations of Iberian Jewish authors continued to lay claim to the glittering cultural legacy of the “exiles of Jerusalem” who had settled in “the furthermost West.”4 Even Yitzhak Baer, who vigorously promoted the theme of decline as the great leitmotif of Jewish history in Christian Iberia, noted that the discontinuity depicted by poets like Moses ibn Ezra was more personal than universal.5 Against the image of the irreversible rupture of Sephardic society so favored by Jewish poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, stand the clear declarations made by other members of the rabbinic elite that the cultural values and outlook they had developed in al-Andalus continued to define their community under Christian rule. One of the outstanding spokesmen for Sephardic continuity was the twelfth-century philosopher, Abraham ibn Daud, a resident of Christian Toledo. In his twelfth-century chronicle, The Book of Tradition, ibn Daud restated Sephardic society’s claim to a privileged place within Jewish history, and then explicitly argued for the seamless transition of that society from Muslim to Christian sovereignty. His pioneering philosophical exposition of Judaism, The Exalted Faith, also stands as a testament to the endurance of Andalusi intellectual trends among the Jews of Christian Iberia. Ibn Daud’s Book of Tradition and the vision of Sepharad it proffered both remained important points of reference within Iberian Jewry for centuries. His chronicle was taken, almost verbatim, as the foundation for later Jewish works such as Abraham Zacuto’s Book of Genealogies, and Abraham Ardutiel’s own expanded version of The Book of Tradition.6 The popularity of Ibn Daud’s philosophical work was eclipsed by that of another Andalusi Jewish scholar, Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), whose vast intellectual oeuvre helped to solidify the legacy of Sephardic religious ideology in Christian 1Ibn Ezra, Shirat Yisrael; Idem., Sefer ha-’iyunim veha-diyunim. See also Gerber, “Reconsiderations of Sephardic History.”. 2The idea that political and social bonds rest upon “imagined communities” and “invented traditions” became a major topic of discussion in the early 1980s. See Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition; Anderson, Imagined Communities; and Gellner, Nations and Nationalism. Geary has recently pushed this discussion of national communities back to the Middle Ages in The Myth of Nations. 3This view is echoed by Assis, “‘Sefarad:’ A Definition.” 4See Obadiah 1: 20, and the famous reference to being the “edge of the West” by Halevi: Carmi, Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, 347. On the continued identity of Jews in Christian Iberia with the older image of Sepharad see Ben Shalom, “Myths of Troy.” 5 Baer, History of the Jews, 1: 64. 6Zacuto, Sefer Yuhasin; Ardutiel, “Sefer Ha-Qabbalah.” Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 197 Iberia.7 Maimonides had fled Iberia with his family as a young man and produced nearly all of his work while living in Fostat, Egypt. Nevertheless, he continued to style himself as one of “the children of the Exile in Sepharad,” and his work was considered by those remaining in the Peninsula to be a digest and expansion of their own intellectual heritage.8 The acceptance of Maimonides’ commentaries, philosophical writing, and especially the popularity of his code of Jewish law among the Iberian Jews from the thirteenth century onward, is one of the strongest statements of a conscious bond between the Jewish intelligentsia of Christian Iberia and their Andalusi predecessors. Indeed, cultural factors such as lineage were as important to Castilian preachers like Joseph ibn Shem Tov in the fifteenth century as they had been for ibn Daud in the twelfth.9 With the passage of the majority of Iberian Jewry from Muslim to Christian lands over the course of the high Middle Ages, the region was increasingly brought within the intellectual orbit of northern European Jewry. During this process the identifiable “Sephardic” Jewish community adopted and adapted key intellectual postures of its northern, Ashkenazi counterpart.10 Facility in language, law and science (broadly construed) remained important features of the Sephardic curriculum, but to these older characteristics of intellectual culture were added a new set of subjects that mark the growing influence of Jewish centers in northern Europe. These included an increased interest in mysticism, pietism, and an appreciation of Talmudic argumentation that transcended the traditional Andalusi focus on Jewish law (halakha) and its codification.11 The recognition that this amplified curriculum formed part of the Sephardic cultural patrimony shared by Iberian and Provençal sages alike is illustrated by a responsum of the fifteenth-century Talmudist, Jacob Provençali. Writing at the close of the Middle Ages, Provençali summarized this combination of intellectual traits long valued by the Sephardim. He noted that “there are wise men who are not eloquent and eloquent men who are not wise,” and juxtaposes both ancient Greek authors and rabbinic luminaries who possessed great wisdom but lacked a certain facility of language and poetic expression with those who excelled in eloquence but fell short of their colleagues in mastery of knowledge.12 Like the more polemical writing of Profiat Duran, Provençali’s observation offers testimony to the survival of an intellectual community bound by a shared set of Sephardic ideals well into the later Middle Ages. The persistence of Sepharad as an organizing principle for Jewish intellectuals is particularly noteworthy when one considers that many of these same figures demonstrated a clear awareness and acceptance of competing rubrics of community elsewhere in their work. The same rabbis who, in their legal responsa, spoke of divisions 7Ibn Daud, Book of Tradition, English section, 99–100; The Exalted Faith. See also the comments of Gampel, “Wayward Teacher,” 405. 8See for example Maimonides, Teshuvot ha-Rambam, 2: 548. 9Gutwirth, “El gobernador judío ideal.” As Gutwirth and Ram Ben Shalom both note, fifteenth-century Jewish intellectuals appear to have been greatly influenced by the arguments of their Christian counterparts. However, this only meant that they were able to put older Sephardic ideals to use in new ways. Ben Shalom, “Myths of Troy.” 10Lawee, “Reception of Rashi’s Commentary.” 11 On the continued use of older themes by Hispano-Jewish poets see Carrete Parrondo, “Sefarad en las fuentes hebreas.” On the influence of intellectual trends from northern Europe see Grossman, “Spanish and Ashkenazi Jewry.” 12Provençali, “Responsum on the Matter of Studying the Sciences,” 70; partially translated in Einbinder, No Place of Rest, 34. Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 198 J. Ray between Castilian and Aragonese Jews and varying legal systems that predominated in the lands in which these groups lived, nonetheless continued to treat the majority of the Iberian Peninsula as a unified cultural entity.13 We can therefore observe that the Sephardic world imagined by these scholars was a conscious argument for community, but an argument and a reference point that retained a great deal of power and resonance over the course of the Middle Ages. The notion of Sepharad as a cultural community and the values that had come to define it were invoked at various points in the history of Iberian Jewry, and employed in very particular ways. In the wake of the attacks and mass conversions of 1391, the Catalan rabbi Profiat Duran referenced the longstanding tradition of Sephardic rationalism in Be Not Like unto Thy Fathers, his derisive polemic against his former friend, the converso David Bonet Bonjorn. Duran’s treatise juxtaposes Christianity as a religion wholly dependent on faith to Judaism, which he identifies as the product of rational thought. Though the titular “fathers” in Duran’s polemic are presented as all of the great sages of Judaism, the rationalist Judaism he comes to defend is more readily identified with the particular interpretation of Judaism preserved by Sephardic scholars than with their northern European counterpart, or with a more standard reading of rabbinic tradition. Duran’s use of Sephardic culture as a bludgeon against Christianity contrasts sharply with the work of a later generation of Sephardic scholars whose references to Sepharad highlight the affinities between Hispano-Christian and Hispano-Jewish history. During the fifteenth century, Christian authors began to use ancient Greek mythology as a means for arguing for the antiquity and importance of the foundation of Spain, particularly the kingdom of Castile. This discussion of Castilian origins prompted local Jewish authors to revisit and reformulate older Andalusi stories about the foundation of the Sephardic community.14 Even after the expulsion of the Jews in 1492, the image of Sepharad and cultural superiority it represented continued to be invoked in new ways, this time by the Spanish and Portuguese conversos. During the late medieval and early modern periods, converso writers seized upon the ideals of Hispano-Jewish communal purity and antiquity and altered them to fit their own agenda.15 The medieval vision of Sepharad was thus a particular vision of community that was created and maintained by the rabbinic elite. It was an image of a regional, cultural community, the persistence of which in Christian Spain during the later Middle Ages should be understood as an attempt to assert the cultural prominence of this intellectual class and their legitimacy as Jewish leaders through a connection with a glorious past.16 This imagined community should not, however, be taken to reflect social and political reality. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the cultural borders of the Sephardic world expanded and contracted owing to a number of factors independent of those that determined the political boundaries of the Iberian kingdoms in 13See for instance Gerondi, Responsa, no. 79; Ishbili, Responsa, nos. 131 and 180; Ben Asher, Zikhron Yehuda, nos. 45, 54, 94, and 100; and Ben Yehiel, Responsa, no. 55, part 9. Naturally, the assertion of a Sephardic cultural community was not exclusive with regard to other religious, cultural, or geographical rubrics. Jewish intellectuals participated in nonJewish culture in a variety of ways and expanded their identities accordingly. 14Ben Shalom “Myths of Troy.” 15Ayaso Martínez, “Antigüedad y excelencia,” 246. Interestingly, one measure of the “Jewishness” of the conversos after 1492 was the degree to which they laid claim to this Hispano-Jewish cultural legacy. See Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto. 16On a similar effort to create a usable past, see Harris, From Muslim to Christian Granada. Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 199 which they lived. At certain times, places outside Iberia (such as Provençe) could be considered within the Sephardic cultural sphere, while regions within Iberia (such as Portugal) were not. These boundaries were not tied to Castilian or Aragonese expansion, but rather the result of patterns of Jewish migration and settlement and the dissemination and acceptance of certain religious and cultural norms associated with Iberian Jewry.17 However, Sephardic religious and intellectual culture did not produce a corresponding set of social and political institutions that could mark it as distinct. In this regard, the various municipal communities of Jews throughout Iberia were principally shaped by Jewish custom and external political forces. Recent studies based on information drawn from royal and municipal archives have yielded an image of the organization and boundaries of the Hispano-Jewish community that challenge the notion of an identifiable and cohesive Sephardic society presented by medieval rabbinic literature.18 These archival sources reveal that the Jews of Christian Iberia had formed a highly ramified society in which individuals were as much motivated by their pursuit of power, social stature, and economic opportunities as by religious affiliation or cultural outlook.19 The image of Iberian Jewry that emerges from royal documents offers a noticeable contrast to the uniform image of “Sepharad” portrayed in literary texts. While the standard narrative of medieval Jewish history presumes that Sephardic society in Christian Iberia was essentially a continuation and extension of its Andalusi predecessor, sources such as the royal charters granted to individual Jewish communities indicate no such sense of shared communal identity among Iberian Jews. Rather, they reflect the dominance of the general religious category of “Jews” and the local socio-political categories of particular towns and municipalities (Toledo, Barcelona, etc.). The lack of references to a Sephardic community among Christian sources is all the more striking considering that some Christian authors possessed and actively promoted a parallel model of a unified, regional identity. In Castile, a longstanding tradition argued for the peninsular domination of Gothic kingship centered at Toledo, and the associated primacy of that city’s archbishopric. Throughout the Middle Ages, Castilian kings and leading prelates alike vigorously promoted the association of the Iberian Peninsula with “Hispania,” a unified and naturally Christian territory. Yet despite their promotion of the concept of Hispania, Castilian authorities never developed a related idea of a regionally defined Jewish community analogous to “Sepharad.” For them, all Jews were seen as part of an undifferentiated religious community. The only other categories of importance with regard to Jewish communal organization were municipal or regional – that is, defined by the political geography 17Septimus, Hispano-Jewish Society in Transition; and Gampel, “Wayward Teacher.” Eduard Feliu’s argument that Cataluña did not form part of “Sepharad” is, I think, too narrow, in this regard. See Feliu, “Cataluña no era Sefarad.” 18 See for instance Ray, Sephardic Frontier; Klein, Jews, Christian Society and Royal Power; Meyerson, Iberian Frontier Kingdom; Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance; Assis, Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry; and Gampel, Last Jews on Iberian Soil. Despite the absence of similar archival sources for the Muslim period, it is reasonable to conclude that Jewish communal associations during this period were every bit as local as they were in the later Middle Ages, particularly during the Taifa period. 19Definition of Sephardic society in terms of intellectual posture was picked up and reenforced by Baer in his magnum opus History of the Jews in Christian Spain. For Baer, Greco-Arabic rationalism, or “Averoism,” was both the defining characteristic and the Achilles’ heel of medieval Sephardic culture. Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 200 J. Ray of the Christian world.20 The various monarchs of each peninsular kingdom asserted control over all the Jews of their realm as an ancient and natural royal prerogative. Similarly, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, the Toledan archbishop who actively promoted the idea of “Hispania” under a unified, Castilian church, also argued for ecclesiastical sovereignty over the kingdom’s Jews. However, he built this argument on the general dominion of the church over all Jews, and did not form any concept of Castilian or Iberian Jewry as a cohesive unit.21 It is thus possible to identify two general constructs of the medieval Sephardic community: one based on a set of shared cultural values and promoted by members of the rabbinic elite, and the other derived from the legal and political contexts of the cities in which Jews lived. Both constructs had meaning for medieval Jews and both had an enduring impact on Jewish organizational structures of later periods. However, it was the latter concept of community, the one bound by the limitations of Jewish autonomy and heavily influenced by factors external to the Jewish world, which more accurately represents the popular consciousness of most Iberian Jews during the Middle Ages. Later, after their exile from the Peninsula, Jews of Iberian ancestry slowly forged socio-political communities based on a shared cultural legacy in cities throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Nonetheless, while the Sephardic mystique that informed the identities of these early modern communities built upon an idea of religious and cultural supremacy that can be traced back to medieval texts, there is no evidence that these medieval attitudes produced any tangible evidence of communal cohesion prior to 1492.22 In fact, most Jews living in medieval Iberia did not seem to view themselves as Sephardim, per se – that is, as inheritors of an ancient tradition of cultural superiority. Rather, they saw themselves as Jews, and as Toledans, Saragossans and occasionally as Castilians, Valencians, Aragonese, etc.23 Writing on medieval Sephardic identity, Benjamin Gampel has already pointed out that “Jewish culture cannot (or, if you will, can never) be conceived of as separate from that of the society in which they lived.”24 Gampel’s observation that many contributing factors “helped to fashion who these Jews actually were” is well taken. However, I am suggesting that, at least with regard to communal organization, 20Linehan, “Religion, Nationalism and National Identity;” O’Callaghan, “Ecclesiastical Estate;” Thompson, “Castile, Spain and the Monarchy;” Post, “‘Blessed Lady Spain.’” 21Pick, Conflict and Coexistence. Castile’s mythos of a unified Hispania contrasts with the general hostility to theories of political centralization found in the Crown of Aragon. Bisson, Medieval Crown of Aragon, 19–28. 22This Sephardic mystique was given new life in the nineteenth century when it became a major focus of the German-Jewish scholars who founded the modern field of Jewish studies. Schorsch, “Myth of Sephardic Supremacy.” On the promotion of Sephardic cultural superiority during the early modern period see Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, 125–33 and 195–6. 23Ben Meshulam Shevet, Hidushe ha-Ramban, 2; Ben Naeh, Realm of the Sultans, 210–11. Supra-communal organization of Jewish communities existed solely on an ad hoc basis, generally for the purpose of collecting government taxes. Assis, Golden Age, 163–78, and 195–6. Baer’s assertion that “the aljamas of Castile were federated on a country-wide basis” is a gross overstatement based on the statutes drawn up by the leadership of Castilian Jewry in 1432. These takkanot were an attempt by the Jews to reorganize their communities after their precipitous decline following 1391, and should not be taken as indicative of communal organization in earlier periods. Furthermore, while these statutes envision a broad, supracommunal system, there is little evidence that they were successfully implemented. Baer, History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 314–15. 24Gampel, “‘Identity’ of Sephardim,” 134. Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 201 Hispano-Jewish society was shaped by some factors more than others. To use Sepharad as a communal designation is also to make an intellectual and historiographic claim. The notion of Sepharad argues for the applicability of Jewish conceptual categories and for the validity of organizing the Jewish past into intellectual communities and social networks that they produced. In contrast to the received tradition that continues to drive the field of medieval Jewish studies, the most influential factors in the construction of both real and conceptual Jewish communal borders were not internal cultural or intellectual models. Rather, the greatest impact in this regard came from more prosaic and contextual sources such as the limits of Jewish political power, and the political divisions external to the Jewish world (kingdom, city, etc.). Though internal religious (Jewish) and cultural (Sephardic) traditions and characteristics would continue to assert an important influence on Jewish identity throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, so too would the external and contextual dynamics of medieval Iberian society. The general lack of social and political unity among Iberian Jews stemmed from a set of factors common throughout the medieval Jewish world. The primary obstacle to the formation of pan-peninsular or even regional political frameworks was the universal resistance of individual Jewish communities to any form of supra-communal organization. Scholarly emphasis on the standardization of rabbinic Judaism during this period has tended to downplay the highly atomized nature of Jewish political structures. Unifying trends within Jewish law such as the widespread acceptance of Maimonides’ legal code, the Mishneh Torah, should not obscure the independent nature of communal government or the continued importance of local Jewish custom.25 Moreover, the highly individualistic sensibilities that governed the relationship between Jewish settlements were also replicated within the individual communities themselves. The local (municipal) Jewish community, in Iberia and elsewhere, was beset by internal factionalism and a striking willingness of its members to contravene Jewish law and challenge the authority of their own elected officials. Though Jews were granted the right of judicial autonomy in cases between members of their own community, they had a difficult time in establishing their courts as the sole recourse for Jewish litigants. Both Christian and Jewish sources attest to widespread Jewish patronage of non-Jewish courts, often as a means of appealing the verdict handed down by local Jewish judges.26 Another common manifestation of the relative weakness of Jewish communal authority was the plague of Jewish informers who regularly threatened communal officers with blackmail. Rabbinic authorities inveighed against such behavior as inherently immoral, but to little avail.27 In contrast to the moral outrage of the rabbis, the reactions of Jewish communal officials to the problem of informers was more pragmatic and, perhaps, more instructive. Recognizing that non-Jewish lords and judges were the true arbiters in such matters, Jewish officials countered such denunciations with similar 25On the importance of local custom compared to halakha see Alfasi, Responsa, no. 13; and Ibn Adret, Responsa, vol. 2, no. 292; vol. 3, nos. 394 and 399; and vol. 5, no. 263. The general paucity of studies focusing on the tensions between minhag and halakha in medieval Iberian Jewry is particularly striking considering the extensive literature that has developed around similar trends within the Hispano-Christian legal tradition. 26Assis, “Jews of Spain in Gentile Courts,” Gutwirth, “Jews and Courts;” and Simonsohn, “Communal Boundaries Reconsidered.” 27 Gampel, “Jews, Muslims and Christians,” 24. On Jewish informers, see Lourie, “Mafiosi and Malsines.” Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 202 J. Ray threats, legal suits, and appeals to royal or baronial intervention. As a result, Jewish governing councils became dependent on external authorities to implement many of their own legal and political policies. This reliance on the intervention and political support of non-Jewish authorities bound Jewish communities to the general governing institutions of the cities and kingdoms in which they lived in ways that surpassed any religious or cultural associations. The degree to which these Jewish communities were embedded in the social and institutional framework of their cities is all too often overlooked. The local and regional nature of Hispano-Jewish identity persisted even after the rise of New Christian society in the fifteenth century. In the kingdom of Valencia, for instance, legislation meant to limit contact between Jews and New Christians indicates a basic tendency to think about Jews in both universal religious terms and local, sociopolitical terms, but not as part of a peninsular, “Sephardic” community. In the wake of the mass conversions of 1391, the parliamentary Corts of Valencia appear to have been primarily concerned with the influence of local Jewish residents, rather than with that of Jews passing through Valencia. The new, restrictive legislation targeted the former group since they were more likely to be relatives of local conversos, and therefore able to exert greater pressure to Judaize. As a result, laws such as the requirement for Jews to wear a distinguishing badge were not enforced against Jewish merchants from outside the region for fear that it would unnecessarily inhibit trade. Indeed, these “foreign” Jews were even granted permission to lodge with local converso families.28 Such laws suggest that religious community remained the preeminent, if now more contested, dividing line within Iberian society. Jews continued to view conversos as being within the realm of the broader Jewish community despite their new religious affiliation, and would often prefer to lodge with them than with so-called “old” Christians. In their demonstration of concern over such behavior, Christian authorities also acknowledged the importance of maintaining boundaries between religious communities. However, their pragmatic approach to this problem also gestures toward the categorization of Jews along regional lines. Despite the protests from various corners of the Christian community, the Corts were willing to allow such relations between local neophytes and visiting Jews to continue (at least for a time), in order to prevent the development of similar bonds between local members of these communities, which they saw to be more problematic. Such legislation served to maintain the longstanding regional divisions with the Jewish world by reinforcing the dividing line between local and “foreign” Jewish communities. At times, the Jewish conception of their coreligionists from other cities or regions within Iberia as belonging to fundamentally distinct communal organizations was made explicit. A document from 1481 records a complaint by the Jewish aljama of Teruel about the Jews of Morvedre and their monopoly on the trade of kosher wine in that city. The text of the official complaint distinguishes between the local Morvedre vendors and the “alien and foreign” Jewish buyers. Though part of the same federated realm, the Aragonese Jews of Teruel clearly saw themselves as separate from those of Valencian Morvedre. In such matters of business, at least, local identities mattered a great deal, and underscored the degree to which rabbinic image of 28Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 55. These and similar laws that were enacted throughout the Spanish kingdoms in the fifteenth century signal the complex and overlapping spheres of Jewish identity in the wake of 1391. See Baer, History of the Jews in Christian Spain, 2: 245–423. Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 203 Sepharad existed in tension with other paradigms of communal associations and categories of belonging.29 In addition to this strong tendency toward regionalism, Sephardic communities were also internally divided between various factions vying for political and social dominance. Jewish settlements were dominated by an oligarchic elite, some of whom succeeded in attaining even greater status by establishing close ties to the Crown or other barons. These wealthy Jews who rose to the rank of courtiers formed a distinct social stratum that possessed extensive powers that were potentially helpful to individual communities, but also potentially destabilizing. Tensions between courtiers and local communal councils already existed in Muslim al-Andalus.30 The fracturing of Andalusi political life that gave rise to the Taifa states in the eleventh century was a boon for Jewish courtiers, but offered relatively few special advantages for local communities.31 Jewish courtiers reprised their role in Christian Iberia, and remained a force to be reckoned with by rabbis and communal councils alike. They did not so much locate themselves physically at royal courts as they did place themselves in a social context of a group with ties to the court, and through this association forged an “imagined community” of their own.32 At times, the political aspirations of these courtiers to extend their power within the Jewish world coincided with similar goals of political consolidation held by the Christian kings they served. In an effort to centralize royal control over the Jews and (principally) Jewish taxes, some monarchs attempted to establish a hierarchical system through which the Jewish aljamas might be governed. If successful, these new structures would have brought about a great deal of political standardization within a given kingdom, but would have simultaneously inculcated a more regional character to Sephardic Jewry. Efforts to centralize Jewish communal organization in this way cannot be understood merely as a result of royal initiative, but must be seen as an agenda shared by the Crown and Jewish courtiers. Ultimately, the efforts were a failure on all fronts and Iberian Jewry retained its highly localized character up until 1492, and beyond. Nonetheless, the power wielded by Jewish courtiers endured, as did their strained relationship with local Jewish elites.33 The fact that powerful Jewish clans sought to control their local communal council (kahal), just as those councils sought independence from the coercive power of Jewish courtiers, is noteworthy. The volatility of these relationships raises two important and oft-overlooked points regarding nature of Hispano-Jewish society. First, it presents further argument against the idea of communal cohesion and supra-communal 29“muchos strangeros e foranos judios, e senyaladamente por los de la aljama de la dicha ciudat de Teruel [Many alien and foreign Jews, especially from the Jewish community of Teruel].” ARV [Arxiu del Regne de València]: C 130: 16r-v, cited in Meyerson, Jewish Renaissance, 117, and a similar reference on 34. Meyerson notes that the Jews referred to as “alien” (strangeros) were those who came from outside of the Crown of Aragon, most likely from North Africa. However, it should be noted that many of these North African Jews were, in fact, of Iberian provenance, having fled the Peninsula after the riots and forced conversions of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. 30Eleazar Gutwirth has argued against the idea of a Jewish aristocracy, and his point is well taken. However, the power of Jewish courtiers, and their difficult relationship with local Jewish kehalim, cannot be adequately described as simply that of an haute bourgeoisie. Gutwirth, “Widows, Artisans.” 31Ben Sasson, “Al-Andalus.” 32Gutwirth, “Jews and Courts,” 7. 33 The most elaborate system and perhaps the one that went the furthest toward realization was that of the kingdom of Portugal. Ray, “Royal Authority and the Jewish Community.” Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 204 J. Ray “Sephardic” identity with regard to social and political organization. Second, it signifies that the local Jewish community emerged as the principal rubric of Jewish social and political life in large part because of the limits of Jewish political power. Thus, in addition to internal legal traditions that favored local autonomy and the external political divisions that helped to shape Jewish attitudes of collective identity, medieval Jewish communities were also bound by the narrow horizons of their ruling elite. Even the most influential Jewish families were unable to extend their authority beyond the bounds of their own communities. While Sephardic intellectual culture was built upon a geographically broad network of like-minded scholars, the political authorities did not develop communal identities beyond their own aljamas because that was the effective limit of their control. Thus, while a leading rabbinic figure like Abraham ibn Adret could boast that he would gather the signatures of twenty Jewish communities “from Sepharad” in order to support a ban against philosophy, he was also clear that the power to instill the ban rested not with him but with the leaders of each community and region.34 In this regard, Jewish factionalism and the relatively circumscribed governing structures it helped to construct echoed the tensions between the aristocracy and the towns prevalent in Hispano-Christian society.35 Indeed, parallels between Jewish and Christian political organization during this period challenge not only the utility of “Sepharad” as a category of analysis, but the notion of medieval Iberia as a tripartite society as well. The less we consider the importance of religious and cultural categories promoted by Christian and rabbinic literature, the more the medieval Jewish community appears to be integrated into general Iberian society. Even as larger, more centralized kingdoms began to take shape during the later Middle Ages, antipathy between peninsular regions remained something of a “national” characteristic of Christian Iberia. For many foreign observers, to be Spanish was to be “at daggers drawn” among themselves.36 The problem of locating Jews in medieval Iberia has remained a central feature of contemporary historiography within both medieval and Jewish studies. For Hispanists, especially those working in Spain and North America, Jews have remained an example of Américo Castro’s vision of a culturally integrated Spain. Jewish intellectual production is thus claimed as part and parcel of the multifaceted Iberian heritage, a fundamental component of the golden triangle of the España de las tres culturas that is now vigorously promoted by Spain’s Ministry of Culture. Yet, the image of the Jews as an essentially Iberian community has made little progress outside the domain of intellectual and literary history. Nearly half a century has passed since Castro argued that the Sephardim felt themselves to be Spaniards as much as they did Jews.37 Nonetheless, studies of the social, political, and economic history of medieval Iberia continue to compartmentalize Jewish history as a subset of the general narrative.38 Thus, in order to imagine the Jewish place within the urban history of Castile or Aragon one must 34Astruc, Minhat Qen ’ot, 98. ā 35Ruiz, “Expansion et changement.” 36Thompson, “Castile, Spain and the Monarchy,” 133. 37Castro, Los españoles: como llegaron a serlo, 167. Though a[m ]acr one can take issue with Castro’s goal of promoting medieval Spain as culturally harmonious, his suggestion that Jews owed much of their identity to non-Jewish factors is nonetheless well taken. 38This lack of conceptual integration is particularly remarkable for the territories under Christian control for which there exists a substantial collection of sources in Latin and its romance derivatives. Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 205 still resort to reading general studies of a Toledo, Saragossa, etc. alongside specialized monographs of that city’s Jews, all the while bearing in mind that the Toledo of the Jews and the Toledo of the Christians is actually the same city. While scholars have begun to embrace Sephardic literary production as an exemplar of medieval Iberian culture, the practice of envisioning the Jew as townsmen, Castilian, or Iberian, has yet to gain similar acceptance among social historians. Those of us who approach the subject from the vantage of Jewish studies have acted as something of an obstacle to the reconceptualization of the Jew as Iberian. Jewish medievalists have been attuned to the presence of intellectual divisions and factions within Iberian Jewish society, tracing the development of ideological trends and the clashes among various intellectual camps over issues of grammar, literary style, philosophy, and mysticism.39 As a group, however, we have been much slower to recognize the equally important social and political divisions that divided this same society. While recent studies have done much to erode the classic regional distinction between medieval “Sepharad” and “Ashkenaz,” arguing for the need for greater nuance than these terms allow, there has been relatively little progress in the reassessment of social categories. This problem is not unique to scholars of medieval Jewry, but is bound up with the nature of Jewish Studies itself. To imagine that the very category that defines our field, Judaism, may not offer the most profitable avenue of investigation of Jewish history is an innovation that few of us have been ready to embrace.40 An example of this impact can be seen in the different historiographic approach to the concepts of Hispania and Sepharad mentioned above. Though in many ways related to one another in their medieval context, these terms have received radically different treatment by modern scholars. Medievalists have long since recognized that this image of a culturally coherent Hispania was less a historical reality than a projected ideal.41 Unfortunately, scholarship on Hispano-Jewish cultural unity has shown less interest in interrogating similar assertions. Now that many in our field have managed to transcend the lachrymose conception of Jewish history attacked by Salo Baron nearly a century ago, the question remains what sorts of organizing principles can be used in its place?42 The recent turn toward notions of hybridity by cultural historians has made relatively little impact on those working on the social history of medieval Sephardic Jewry.43 The publication of regional and local histories of Iberian Jewish communities has not managed to dislodge the notion of Sepharad from Jewish, and to some extent 39Septimus, Hispano-Jewish Society; Lawee, “From Sepharad to Ashkenaz;” Galinsky, “Ashkenazim in Sefarad;” and Grossman, “Spanish and Ashkenazi Jewry.” Indeed, the central thesis of Yizhak Baer’s foundational History of the Jews in Christian Spain is that the ultimate decline and dissolution of Hispano-Jewish society was due to the Averroist worldview of its elite. 40On this issue, see Moshe Rosman’s provocative work How Jewish is Jewish History?, especially chapter 1. My point here is that there are conceptual territories that we have been unwilling to explore, and suggest that this built-in reticence has an unavoidable impact on our findings. 41García Serrano, “Revisiting Castilian Identity,” 174. 42Teo Ruiz has recently noted the problem of dealing with minority communities as distinct yet fully integrated facets of medieval Spanish history. Ruiz, Spain’s Centuries of Crisis, 139. 43See Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?, chap. 3. I suggest that hybridity need not encompass all of Jewish culture, but may be a useful way of understanding certain aspects of that culture, such as the functioning of Jewish communal organizations. Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 206 J. Ray Iberian, historiography.44 Rather, such localized studies are seen as case studies that often assume the whole. A central factor in this discrepancy of approach to the Jews of medieval Iberia is the image of medieval “Sepharad” that has developed among Jews in Europe and the Middle East since 1492. During the early modern period Jews of Iberian heritage increasingly adopted and promoted the old rabbinic category of “Sephardi” as a central marker of their identity. Ethnic pride and nostalgia for a lost homeland remained important factors of Sephardic cultural solidarity throughout the modern period, and continue to enjoy revivals throughout the Sephardic Diaspora today.45 At the same time, cultural cohesiveness of the Sephardim was aided by their identification as a distinct group by other Jews. One illustrative example of this process is the wide-scale dissemination of the Shulhan Arukh, which became the standard legal code throughout much of the Jewish world following its appearance in the late sixteenth century. This broad-ranging compilation was envisioned by its author, the Toledan émigré Joseph Karo, as a fundamental religious text for all Jews. However, the form in which it eventually became most popular included the extensive glosses by the Polish Rabbi Mosses Isserles, which were distinguished from Karo’s text by a different typeface. The success of the Shulhan Arukh in its bifurcated format served to further emphasize Sephardic (and Ashkenazic) cultural unity by underscoring the difference between these two Jewish societies.46 Thus, while many specialists now eschew the use of Sepharad as a cultural category in favor of archival-based studies that highlight the local contexts of Hispano-Jewish identities, the association of medieval Iberia with a Jewish cultural unit continues to have resonance within the field of Jewish studies.47 The willingness to take medieval authors at their word and to view Iberian Jewry as forming an identifiable and cohesive community has been a longstanding tradition among modern scholars. Here, the tendency has been to imagine an ideal society that succeeded in marrying intellectual achievement to social and economic prosperity, producing a model for the modern Jewish world. Ben Zion Dinur, in his magisterial and influential work, Israel baGolah, argued that the Sephardic merchant-scholar of the Middle Ages represented a “new Jewish personality” a “new type of Jew.”48 More recent scholarship has, at least in most precincts, abandoned such utopian visions of Sepharad. However, we have not yet been able to articulate a new model, or set of models, to replace these older paradigms. It is my hope that this brief discussion of the nature of community and the 44In addition to a profusion of international symposia, conferences, and colloquia that treat this subject, the concept of medieval Sepharad continues to flourish in several Spanishlanguage journals including: Sefarad (Madrid), Miscelaná de Estudios Árabes y Hebraicos (Granada), Helmantica (Salamanca), Maguen-Escudo (Caracas) and Sefárdica (Buenos Aires). 45The literature on this subject is extensive. See Scherer, “Judeo-Spanish Folktales;” Yahalom, “Sephardic Traditions and Ottoman Influences;” Silva Tavim, “O castelo abandonado;” Schroeter, “Moroccan Jewish Identities;” Beckwith, “Al-Andalus/Iberia/ Sepharad;” Kaplan, An Alternative Path; and Coll-Tellechea, “Remembering Sepharad.” 46Goldberg, “From Sephardi to Mizrahi,” 169. For other examples of the Ashkenazic promotion of Sephardic cultural unity see the essays in Fontaine, Sepharad in Ashkenaz. 47For the relationship between medieval “Sepharad” and the Sephardic Diaspora see Zohar, Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry; Fontaine, Sepharad in Ashkenaz; Gerber, Jews of Spain; Gampel, Crisis and Creativity; Zucker, Sephardic Identity; Stillman and Stillman, From Iberia to Diaspora; Sloan, Sephardic Jews of Spain and Portugal; and Goldberg, Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries. 48Dinur, Yisrael ba-Golah, 1: 103 and 106–7. Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 207 formulation of organizational structures within medieval Jewish society will help to open up new avenues for discussion on this topic. The fact that shared cultural tendencies among Iberian Jews did not produce similar social and political structures should give us pause in our assessment of the nature of medieval Jewish communities. First, it signals a need to distinguish between intellectual networks and the sorts of cultural communities that they produced from the social constructs and lived experience of the average Jew. The Jews of medieval Iberia defined themselves in terms of religion (as Jews), profession (merchants, artisans, etc.) and locale (Toledans, Saragossans, etc.). The prevalence of these categories in contrast to the broader notion of Sephardic society was echoed and reinforced by their Christian and Muslim neighbors. Second, the importance of non-religious and non-Jewish factors in the construction of Jewish social and communal identities underscores the limitations of categorizing medieval Jews in terms of otherness and difference.49 Once we highlight the Jewish preference to identify with particular towns and regions rather than a panpeninsular cultural community, our subject begins to look a lot less like a marginalized “other” than like a cohort of average Iberians. Part of the great convivencia tradition has been to draw parallels and underscore cross-cultural influence. In doing so, it has raised the question: to what degree did Iberian Jews represent a distinct subset of Iberian society? From the point of view of religion, of course, they were a distinct minority; Jews were constructed religiously as adherents to Judaism, and to some degree Iberian Jewry came to represent a particular “Sephardic” Judaism. Yet this vision of medieval Spain as a tripartite religious society (whether under the Muslim or Christian rule) emphasizes the importance of these categories to the exclusion of others. While I believe that this approach still has value for understanding Jewish intellectual culture, it is limited in what it can tell us about the identities of most Jews. To me, it is quite clear that the vast majority of Jews living in medieval Iberia were every bit as tied to Castilian, Catalan or Aragonese society as they were to Sephardic society, if not more so. Recent scholarship on the medieval Mediterranean has described the region as one that was culturally coherent yet not monolithic. In their landmark study, The Corrupting Sea, Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell argue for a loosely connected Mediterranean world in which unity arose out of small-scale and highly contextualized relationships, a world that was fragmented yet unified. I believe this is a useful way of thinking about the medieval Sephardic world.50 Writing on the slow and serpentine development of Spanish national identity in the early modern period, I.A.A. Thompson noted that: “The consciousness of a community is not, of course, singular. Communities coexist, in concentric layers, or in adjacent sectors, imposing different loyalties which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although they may ultimately be so.” Thompson went on to observe that even when, in the fifteenth century, the Castilian concept of patria was extended to include all of Spain, it did not eclipse or supersede provincial, local, or civic forms of patriotism.51 This image of medieval Spain as a society in which people maintained a strong sense of regional and local community even as they came to recognize broader categories of belonging is one that is as applicable to Jews as it is to Christians. My purpose here has not been to chide those who use the terms Sepharad and Sephardic in ways I see as inaccurate. Freighted terms such these have a life of their own and there is little use 49Rosman, How Jewish is Jewish History?, 95. 50Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, chap. 2. 51Thompson, “Castile, Spain and the Monarchy,” 125 and 127. 208 J. Ray in trying to curtail or control their trajectory in either academic or popular discourse. Rather, by juxtaposing the image of the Sephardic intellectual community derived from rabbinic literature with that of Jewish communal organizations depicted in archival sources, I hope to deepen the discussion about these categories, and the way we think about Jewish and Spanish identity. Downloaded By: [Ray, Jonathan] At: 16:17 21 September 2009 Bibliography Alfasi, Isaac Ben Jacob. She’elot u-teshuvot ha-Rif [Responsa]. Ed. Ya’akov Asher Rozman. Jerusalem: Mekhon Yerushalayim, 2007. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Ardutiel, Abraham Ben Solomon. “Sefer Ha-Qabbalah” [Book of Tradition]. In Mediaeval Jewish Chronicles and Chronological Notes, vol. 1, ed. Adolf Neubauer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887. Assis, Yom Tov. The Golden Age of Aragonese Jewry: Community and Society in the Crown of Aragon, 1213–1327. 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